The Best of Mary Roberts Rinehart

by Mary Roberts Rinehart

  Audrey listened, her hands clasped behind her head.

  "If other women can do that sort of thing, why can't I, Clay?"

  "Nonsense."

  "But why? I'm intelligent."

  "It's not work for a lady."

  "Lady! How old-fashioned you are! There are no ladies any more. Just women. And if we aren't measured by our usefulness instead of our general not-worth-a-damn-ness, well, we ought to be. Oh, I've had time to think, lately."

  He was hardly listening. Seeing her, after all those weeks, had brought him a wonderful feeling of peace. The little room, with its fire, was cozy and inviting. But he was quite sure, looking down at her, that he was not in danger of falling in love with her. There was no riot in him, no faint stirring of the emotions of that hour with the mauve book.

  There was no suspicion in him that the ways of love change with the years, that the passions of the forties, when they come, are to those of the early years as the deep sea to a shallow lake, less easily roused, infinitely more terrible.

  "This girl you spoke about, that was the business you mentioned?"

  "Yes." She hesitated. "I could have asked you that over the telephone, couldn't I? The plain truth is that I've had two bad months - never mind why, and Christmas was coming, and - I just wanted to see your perfectly sane and normal face again."

  "I wish you'd let me know sooner where you were."

  She evaded his eyes.

  "I was getting settled, and studying, and learning to knit, and - oh, I'm the most wretched knitter, Clay! I just stick at it doggedly. I say to myself that hands that can play golf, and use a pen, and shoot, and drive a car, have got to learn to knit. But look here!"

  She held up a forlorn looking sock to his amused gaze. "And I think I'm a clever woman."

  "You're a very brave woman, Audrey," he said. "You'll let me come back, won't you?"

  "Heavens, yes. Whenever you like. And I'm going to stop being a recluse. I just wanted to think over some things."

  On the way home he stopped at his florist's, and ordered a mass of American beauties for her on Christmas morning. She had sent her love to Natalie, so that night he told Natalie he had seen her, and such details of her life as he knew.

  "I'm glad she's coming to her senses," Natalie said. "Everything's been deadly dull without her. She always made things go - I don't know just how," she added, as if she had been turning her over in her mind. "What sort of business did she want to see you about?"

  "She has a girl she wants to get into the mill."

  "Good gracious, she must be changed," said Natalie. And proceeded - she was ready to go out to dinner - to one of her long and critical surveys of herself in the cheval mirror. Recently those surveys had been rather getting on Clayton's nerves. She customarily talked, not to him, but to his reflection over her shoulder, when, indeed, she took her eyes from herself.

  "I wonder," she said, fussing with a shoulder-strap, "who Audrey will marry if anything happens to Chris?"

  She saw his face and raised her eyebrows.

  "You needn't scowl like that. He's quite as likely as not never to come back, isn't he? And Audrey didn't care a pin for him."

  "We're talking rather lightly of a very terrible thing, aren't we?"

  "Oh, you're not," she retorted. "You think just the same things as I do, but you're not so open about them. That's all"

  CHAPTER XI

  Graham was engaged. He hardly knew himself how it had come about. His affair with Marion had been, up to the very moment of his blurted - out "I want you," as light-hearted as that of any of the assorted young couples who flirted and kissed behind the closed doors of that popular house.

  The crowd which frequented the Hayden home was gay, tolerant and occasionally nasty. It made ardent love semi-promiscuously, it drank rather more than it should, and its desire for a good time often brought it rather close to the danger line. It did not actually step over, but it hovered gayly on the brink.

  And Toots remained high-priestess of her little cult. The men liked her. The girls imitated her. And Graham, young as he was, seeing her popularity, was vastly gratified to find himself standing high in her favor.

  Marion was playing for the stake of the Spencer money. In her intimate circle every one knew it but Graham.

  "How's every little millionaire?" was Tommy Hale's usual greeting.

  She knew only one way to handle men, and with the stake of the Spencer money she tried every lure of her experience on Graham. It was always Marion who on cold nights sat huddled against him in the back seat of the Hayden's rather shabby car, her warm ungloved hand in his. It was Marion who taught him to mix the newest of cocktails, and who later praised his skill. It was Marion who insisted on his having a third, too, when the second had already set his ears drumming.

  The effect on the boy of her steady propinquity, of her constant caressing touches, of the general letting-down of the bars of restraint, was to rouse in him impulses of which he was only vaguely conscious, and his proposal of marriage, when it finally came, was by nature of a confession. He had kissed her, not for the first time, but this time she had let him hold her, and he had rained kisses on her face.

  "I want you," he had said, huskily.

  And even afterward, when the thing was done, and she had said she would marry him, she had to ask him if he loved her.

  "I - of course I do," he had said. And had drawn her back into his arms.

  He wanted to marry her at once. It was the strongest urge of his life, and put into his pleading an almost pathetic earnestness. But she was firm enough now.

  "I don't think your family will be crazy about this, you know."

  "What do we care for the family? They're not marrying you, are they?"

  "They will have to help to support me, won't they?"

  And he had felt a trifle chilled.

  It was not a part of Marion's program to enter the Spencer family unwelcomed. She had a furtive fear of Clayton Spencer, the fear of the indirect for the direct, of the designing woman for the essentially simple and open male. It was not on her cards to marry Graham and to try to live on his salary.

  So for a few weeks the engagement was concealed even from Mrs. Hayden, and Graham, who had received some stock from his father on his twenty-first birthday, secretly sold a few shares and bought the engagement ring. With that Marion breather easier. It was absolute evidence.

  Her methods were the methods of her kind and her time. To allure a man by every wile she knew, and having won him to keep him uncertain and uneasy, was her perfectly simple creed. So she reduced love to its cheapest terms, passion and jealousy, played on them both, and made Graham alternately happy and wretched.

  Once he found Rodney Page there, lounging about with the manner of a habitue. It seemed to Graham that he was always stumbling over Rodney those days, either at home, with drawings and color sketches spread out before him, or at the Hayden house.

  "What's he hanging around here for?" he demanded when Rodney, having bent over Marion's hand and kissed it, had gone away. "If he could see that bare spot on the top of his head he'd stop all that kow-towing."

  "You're being rather vulgar, aren't you?" Marion had said. "He's a very old friend and a very dear one."

  "Probably in love with you once, like all the rest?"

  He had expected denial from her, but she had held her cigaret up in the air, and reflectively regarded its small gilt tip.

  "I'm afraid he's rather unhappy. Poor Rod!"

  "About me?"

  "About me."

  "Look here, Toots," he burst out. "I'm playing square with you. I never go anywhere but here. I - I'm perfectly straight with you. But every time here I find some of your old guard hanging round. It makes me wild."

  "They've always come here, and as long as our engagement isn't known, I can't very well stop them."

  "Then let me go to father."

  "He'll turn you out, you know. I know men, dear old thing, and father is going to rai
se a merry little hell about us. He's the sort who wants to choose his son's wife for him. He'd like to play Providence." She watched him, smiling, but with slightly narrowed eyes. "I rather think he has somebody in mind for you now."

  "I don't believe it."

  "Of course you don't. But he has."

  "Who?"

  "Delight. She's exactly the sort he thinks you'll need. He still thinks you are a little boy, Graham, so he picks out a nice little girl for you. Such a nice little girl."

  The amused contempt in her voice made him angry - for Delight rather than himself. He was extremely grown-up and dignified the rest of the afternoon; he stood very tall and straight, and spoke in his deepest voice.

  It became rather an obsession in him to prove his manhood, and added to that was the effect of Marion's constant, insidious appeal to the surging blood of his youth. And, day after day, he was shut in his office with Anna Klein.

  He thought he was madly in love with Marion. He knew that he was not at all in love with Anna Klein. But she helped to relieve the office tedium.

  He was often aware, sitting at his desk, with Anna before him, notebook in hand, that while he read his letters her eyes were on him. More than once he met them, and there was something in them that healed his wounded vanity. He was a man to her. He was indeed almost a god, but that he did not know. In his present frame of mind, he would have accepted even that, however.

  Then, one day he kissed her. She was standing very close, and the impulse was quick and irresistible. She made no effort to leave his arms, and he kissed her again.

  "Like me a little, do you?" he had asked, smiling into her eyes.

  "Oh, I do, I do!" she had replied, hoarsely.

  It was almost an exact reversal of his relationship with Marion. There the huskiness was his, the triumphant smile was Marion's. And the feeling of being adored without stint or reservation warmed him.

  He released her then, but their relationship had taken on a new phase. He would stand against the outer door, to prevent its sudden opening. And she would walk toward him, frightened and helpless until his arms closed about her. It was entirely a game to him. There were days, when Marion was trying, or the work of his department was nagging him, when he scarcely noticed her at all. But again the mischief in him, the idler, the newly awakened hunting male, took him to her with arms outheld and the look of triumph in his eyes that she mistook for love.

  On one such occasion Joey came near to surprising a situation, so near that his sophisticated young mind guessed rather more than the truth. He went out, whistling.

  He waited until Graham had joined the office force in the mill lunchroom, and invented an errand back to Graham's office. Anna was there, powdering her nose with the aid of a mirror fastened inside her purse.

  Joey had adopted Clayton with a sort of fierce passion, hidden behind a pose of patronage.

  "He's all right," he would say to the boys gathered at noon in the mill yard. "He's kinda short-tempered sometimes, but me, I understand him. And there ain't many of these here money kings that would sit up in a hospital the way he did with me."

  The mill yard had had quite enough of that night in the hospital. It would fall on him in one of those half-playful, half-vicious attacks that are the humor of the street, and sometimes it was rather a battered Joey who returned to Clayton's handsome office, to assist him in running the mill.

  But it was a very cool and slightly scornful Joey who confronted Anna that noon hour. He lost no time in preliminaries.

  "What do you think you're doing, anyhow?" he demanded.

  "Powdering my nose, if you insist on knowing."

  They spoke the same language. Anna knew what was coming, and was on guard instantly.

  "You cut it out, that's all."

  "You cut out of this office. And that's all."

  Joey sat down on Graham's desk and folded his arms.

  "What are you going to get out of it, anyhow?" he said with a shift from bullying to argument.

  "Out of what?"

  "You know, all right."

  She whirled on him.

  "Now see here, Joey," she said. "You run out and play. I'll not have any little boys meddling in my affairs."

  Joey slid off the desk and surveyed her with an impish smile. "Your affairs!" he repeated. "What the hell do I care about your affairs? I'm thinking of the boss. It's up to him if he wants to keep German spies on the place. But it's up to some of us here to keep our eyes open, so that they don't do any harm."

  Sheer outrage made Anna's face pale. She had known for some time that the other girls kept away from her, and she had accepted it with the stolidity of her blood. She had no German sympathies; her sympathies in the war lay nowhere.

  But - she a spy!

  "You get out of here," she said furiously, "or I'll go to Mr. Spencer and complain about you. I'm no more a spy than you are. Not as much! - the way you come sneaking around listening and watching! Now you get out."

  And Joey had gone, slowly to show that the going was of his own free will, and whistling. He went out and closed the door. Then he opened it and stuck his head in.

  "You be good," he volunteered, "and when the little old U.S. gets to mixing up with the swine over there, I'll bring you a nice fat Hun as a present."

  CHAPTER XII

  Two days before Christmas Delight came out. There was an afternoon reception at the rectory, and the plain old house blossomed with the debutante's bouquets and baskets of flowers.

  For weeks before the house had been getting ready. The rector, looking about for his accustomed chair, had been told it was at the upholsterer's, or had found his beloved and ragged old books relegated to dark corners of the bookcases. There were always stepladders on the landings, and paper-hangers waiting until a man got out of bed in the morning. And once he put his ecclesiastical heel in a pail of varnish, and slid down an entire staircase, to the great imperilment of his kindly old soul.

  But he had consented without demur to the coming-out party, and he had taken, during all the morning of the great day, a most mundane interest in the boxes of flowers that came in every few minutes. He stood inside a window, under pretense of having no place to sit down, and called out regularly,

  "Six more coming, mother! And a boy with three ringing across the street. I think he's made a mistake. Yes, he has. He's coming over!"

  When all the stands and tables were overflowing, the bouquets were hung to the curtains in the windows. And Delight, taking a last survey, from the doorway, expressed her satisfaction.

  "It's heavenly," she said. "Imagine all those flowers for me. It looks" - she squinted up her eyes critically - "it looks precisely like a highly successful funeral."

  But a part of her satisfaction was pure pose, for the benefit of that kindly pair who loved her so. Alone in her room, dressed to go down-stairs, Delight drew a long breath and picked up her flowers which Clayton Spencer had sent. It had been his kindly custom for years to send to each little debutante, as she made her bow, a great armful of white lilacs and trailing tiny white rosebuds.

  "Fifty dollars, probably," Delight reflected. "And the Belgians needing flannels. It's dreadful."

  Her resentment against Graham was dying. After all, he was only a child in Toots Hayden's hands. And she made one of those curious "He-loves-me-he-loves-me-not" arrangements in her own mind. If Graham came that afternoon, she would take it as a sign that there was still some good in him, and she would try to save him from himself. She had been rather nasty to him. If he did not come -

  A great many came, mostly women, with a sprinkling of men. The rector, who loved people, was in his element. He was proud of Delight, proud of his home; he had never ceased being proud of his wife. He knew who exactly had sent each basket of flowers, each hanging bunch. "Your exquisite orchids," he would say; or, "that perfectly charming basket. It is there, just beside Mrs. Haverford."

  But when Natalie Spencer came in alone, splendid in Russian sables, he happened to
be looking at Delight, and he saw the light die out of her eyes.

  Natalie had tried to bring Graham with her. She had gone into his room that morning while he was dressing and asked him. To tell the truth, she was uneasy about Marion Hayden and his growing intimacy there.

  "You will, won't you, Graham, dear?"

  "Sorry, mother. I just can't. I'm taking a girl out."

  "I suppose it's Marion."

  Her tone caused him to turn and look at her.

  "Yes, it's Marion. What's wrong with that?"

  "It's so silly, Graham. She's older than you are. And she's not really nice, Graham. I don't mean anything horrid, but she's designing. She knows you are young and - well, she's just playing with you. I know girls, Graham. I - "

  She stopped, before his angry gaze.

  "She is nice enough for you to ask here," he said hastily.

  "She wants your money. That's all."

  He had laughed then, an ugly laugh.

  "There's a lot of it for her to want."

  And Natalie had gone away to shed tears of fury and resentment in her own room.

  She was really frightened. Bills for flowers sent to Marion were coming in, to lie unpaid on Graham's writing table. She had over-drawn once again to pay them, and other bills, for theater tickets, checks signed at restaurants, over-due club accounts.

  So she went to the Haverfords alone, and managed very effectually to snub Mrs. Hayden before the rector's very eyes.

  Mrs. Hayden thereupon followed an impulse.

  "If it were not for Natalie Spencer," she said, following that lady's sables with malevolent eyes, "I should be very happy in something I want to tell you. Can we find a corner somewhere?"