The Best of Mary Roberts Rinehart

by Mary Roberts Rinehart

  Natalie's room was dark when he went in. He hesitated. Then he heard her in bed, sobbing quietly. He was angry at himself for his impatience at the sound. He stood beside the bed, and forced a gentleness he did not feel.

  "Can I get you anything?" he asked.

  "No, thank you." And he moved toward the lamp. "Don't turn the light on. I look dreadful."

  "Shall I ring for Madeleine?"

  "No. Graham is bringing me a sleeping-powder."

  "If you are not sleepy, may I talk to you about some things?"

  "I'm sick, Clay. My head is bursting."

  "Sometimes it helps to talk out our worries, dear." He was still determinedly gentle.

  He heard her turning her pillow, and settling herself more comfortably.

  "Not to you. You've made up your mind. What's the use?"

  "Made up my mind to what?"

  "To sending Graham to be killed."

  "That's hardly worthy of you, Natalie," he said gravely. "He is my son, too. I love him at least as much as you do. I don't think this is really up to us, anyhow. It is up to him. If he wants to go?"

  She sat up, suddenly, her voice thin and high.

  "How does he know what he wants?" she demanded. "He's too young. He doesn't know what war is; you say so yourself. You say he is too young to have a position worth while at the plant, but of course he's old enough to go to war and have a leg shot off, or to be blinded, or something." Her voice broke.

  He sat down on the bed and felt around until he found her hand. But she jerked it from him.

  "You promised me once to let him make his own decision if the time came."

  "When did I promise that?"

  "In the fall, when I came home from England."

  "I never made such a promise."

  "Will you make it now?"

  "No!"

  He rose, more nearly despairing than he had ever been. He could not argue with a hysterical woman. He hated cowardice, but far deeper than that was his conviction that she had already exacted some sort of promise. And the boy was not like her in that respect. He regarded a promise as almost in the nature of an oath. He himself had taught him that in the creed of a gentleman a promise was a thing of his honor, to be kept at any cost.

  "You are compelling me to do a strange and hateful thing," he said. "If you intend to use your influence to keep him out, I shall have to offset it by urging him to go. That is putting a very terrible responsibility on me."

  He heard her draw her breath sharply.

  "If you do that I shall leave you," she said, in a frozen voice.

  Suddenly he felt sorry for her. She was so weak, so childish, so cowardly. And this was the nearest they had come to a complete break.

  "You're tired and nervous," he said. "We have come a long way from what I started out to say. And a long way from - the way things used to be between us. If this thing, to-night, does not bring two people together - "

  "Together!" she cried shrilly. "When have we been together? Not in years. You have been married to your business. I am only your housekeeper, and Graham's mother. And even Graham you are trying to take away from me. Oh, go away and let me alone."

  Down-stairs, thoughts that were almost great had formulated themselves in his mind; that to die that others might live might be better than to live oneself; that he loved his country, although he had been shamefaced about it; that America was really the melting-pot of the world, and that, perhaps, only the white flame of war would fuse it into a great nation.

  But Natalie made all these thoughts tawdry. She cheapened them. She found in him nothing fine; therefore there was probably nothing fine in him. He went away, to lie awake most of the night.

  CHAPTER XXIII

  But, with the breaking off of diplomatic relations, matters remained for a time at a standstill. Natalie dried her eyes and ordered some new clothes, and saw rather more of Rodney Page than was good for her.

  With the beginning of February the country house was far enough under way for it to be promised for June, and Natalie, the fundamentals of its decoration arranged for, began to haunt old-furniture shops, accompanied always by Rodney.

  "Not that your taste is not right, Natalie," he explained. "It is exquisite. But these fellows are liars and cheats, some of them. Besides, I like trailing along, if you don't mind."

  Trailing along was a fairly accurate phrase. There was scarcely a day now when Natalie's shining car, with its two men in livery, did not draw up before Rodney's office building, or stand, as unostentatiously as a fire engine, not too near the entrance of his club. Clayton, going in, had seen it there once or twice, and had smiled rather grimly. He considered its presence there in questionable taste, but he felt no uneasiness. Determined as he was to give Natalie such happiness as was still in him to give, he never mentioned these instances.

  But a day came, early in February, which was to mark a change in the relationship between Natalie and Rodney.

  It started simply enough. They had lunched together at a down-town hotel, and then went to look at rugs. Rodney had found her rather obdurate as to old rugs. They were still arguing the matter in the limousine.

  "I just don't like to think of all sorts of dirty Turks and Arabs having used them," she protested. "Slept on them, walked on them, spilled things on the - ? ugh!"

  "But the colors, Natalie dear! The old faded 'copper-tones, the dull-blues, the dead-rose! There is a beauty about age, you know. Lovely as you are, you'll be even lovelier as an old woman."

  "I'm getting there rather rapidly."

  He turned and looked at her critically. No slightest aid that she had given her beauty missed his eyes, the delicate artificial lights in her hair, her eyebrows drawn to a hair's breadth and carefully arched, the touch of rouge under her eyes and on the lobes of her ears. But she was beautiful, no matter what art had augmented her real prettiness. She was a charming, finished product, from her veil and hat to her narrowly shod feet. He liked finished things, well done. He liked the glaze on a porcelain; he liked the perfect lacquering on the Chinese screen he had persuaded Natalie to buy; he preferred wood carved into the fine lines of Sheraton to the trees that grow in the Park, for instance, through which they were driving.

  A Sheraton sideboard was art. Even certain forms of Colonial mahogany were art, although he was not fond of them. And Natalie was - art. Even if she represented the creative instincts of her dressmaker and her milliner, and not her own - he did not like a Louis XV sofa the less that it had not carved itself.

  Possibly Natalie appealed then to his collective instinct, he had not analyzed it. He only knew that he liked being with her, and he was not annoyed, certainly, by the fact that he knew their constant proximity was arousing a certain amount of comment.

  So:

  "You are very beautiful," he said with his appraising glance full on her. "You are quite the loveliest woman I know."

  "Still? With a grown son?"

  "I am not a boy myself, you know."

  "What has that to do with it?"

  He hesitated, then laughed a little.

  "I don't know," he said. "I didn't mean to say that, exactly. Of course, that fact is that I'm rather glad you are not a debutante. You would be giving me odds and ends of dances if you were, you know, and shifting me as fast as possible. As it is - "

  The coquetry which is a shallow woman's substitute for passion stirred in her.

  "Well? I'm awfully interested."

  He turned and faced her.

  "I wonder if you are!"

  "Go on, Roddie. As it is??"

  "As it is," he said, rather rapidly, "you give me a great deal of happiness. I can't say all I would like to, but just being with you - Natalie, I wonder if you know how much it means to me to see you every day."

  "I like it, or I wouldn't do it."

  "But - I wonder if it means anything to you?"

  Curiously enough, with the mere putting it into words, his feeling for her seemed to grow. He was even somewha
t excited. He bent toward her, his eyes on her face, and caught one of her gloved hands. He was no longer flirting with a pretty woman. He was in real earnest. But Natalie was still flirting.

  "Do you want to know why I like to be with you? Because of course I do, or I shouldn't be."

  "Does a famishing man want water?"

  "Because you are sane and sensible. You believe, as I do, in going on as normally as possible. All these people who go around glooming because there is a war across the Atlantic! They are so tiresome. Good heavens, the hysterical attitude of some women! And Clay!"

  He released her hand.

  "So you like me because I'm sensible! Thanks."

  "That's a good reason, isn't it?"

  "Good God, Natalie, I'm only sensible because I have to be. Not about the war. I'm not talking about that. About you."

  "What have I got to do with your being sensible and sane?"

  "Just think about things, and you'll know."

  She was greatly thrilled and quite untouched. It was a pleasant little game, and she held all the winning cards. So she said, very softly:

  "We mustn't go on like this, you know. We mustn't spoil things."

  And by her very "we" let him understand that the plight was not his but theirs. They were to suffer on, she implied, in a mutual, unacknowledged passion. He flushed deeply.

  But although he was profoundly affected, his infatuation was as spurious as her pretense of one. He was a dilettante in love, as he was in art. His aesthetic sense, which would have died of an honest passion, fattened on the very hopelessness of his beginning an affair with Natalie. Confronted just then with the privilege of marrying her, he would have drawn back in dismay.

  Since no such privilege was to be his, however, he found a deep satisfaction in considering himself hopelessly in love with her. He was profoundly sorry for himself. He saw himself a tragic figure, hopeless and wretched. He longed for the unattainable; he held up empty hands to the stars, and by so mimicking the gesture of youth, he regained youth.

  "You won't cut me out of your life, Natalie?" he asked wistfully.

  And Natalie, who would not have sacrificed this new thrill for anything real in the world, replied:

  "It would be better, wouldn't it?"

  There was real earnestness in his voice when he spoke. He had dramatized himself by that time.

  "Don't take away the only thing that makes life worth living, dear!"

  Which Natalie, after a proper hesitation, duly promised not to do.

  There were other conversations after that. About marriage, for instance, which Rodney broadly characterized as the failure of the world; he liked treading on dangerous ground.

  "When a man has married, and had children, he has fulfilled his duty to the State. That's all marriage is - duty to the State. After that he follows his normal instincts, of course."

  "If you are defending unfaithfulness?"

  "Not at all. I admire faithfulness. It's rare enough for admiration. No. I'm recognizing facts. Don't you suppose even dear old Clay likes a pretty woman? Of course he does. It's a total difference of view-point, Natalie. What is an incident to a man is a crime to a woman."

  Or:

  "All this economic freedom of women is going to lead to other freedoms, you know."

  "What freedoms?"

  "The right to live wherever they please. One liberty brings another, you know. Women used to marry for a home, for some one to keep them. Now they needn't, but - they have to live just the same."

  "I wish you wouldn't, Rodney. It's so - cheap."

  It was cheap. It was the old game of talking around conversational corners, of whispering behind mental doors. It was insidious, dangerous, and tantalizing. It made between them a bond of lowered voices, of being on the edge of things. Their danger was as spurious as their passion, but Natalie, without humor and without imagination, found the sense of insecurity vaguely attractive.

  Fundamentally cold, she liked the idea of playing with fire;

  CHAPTER XXIV

  When war was not immediately declared the rector, who on the Sunday following that eventful Saturday of the President's speech to Congress had preached a rousing call to arms, began to feel a bit sheepish about it.

  "War or no war, my dear," he said to Delight, "it made them think for as much as an hour. And I can change it somewhat, and use it again, if the time really comes."

  "Second-hand stuff!" she scoffed. "You with your old sermons, and Mother with my old dresses! But it was a good sermon," she added. "I have hardly been civil to that German laundress since."

  "Good gracious, Delight. Can't you remember that we must love our enemies?"

  "Do you love them? You know perfectly well that the moment you get on the other side, if you do, you'll be jerking the cross off your collar and bullying some wretched soldier to give you his gun."

  He had a guilty feeling that she was right.

  It was February then, and they were sitting in the parish house. Delight had been filling out Sunday-school reports to parents, an innovation she detested. For a little while there was only the scratching of her pen to be heard and an occasional squeal from the church proper, where the organ was being repaired. The rector sat back in his chair, his fingertips together, and whistled noiselessly, a habit of his when he was disturbed. Now and then he glanced at Delight's bent head.

  "My dear," he commented finally.

  "Just a minute. That wretched little Simonton girl has been absent three Sundays out of four. And on the fourth one she said she had a toothache and sat outside on the steps. Well, daddy?"

  "Do you see anything of Graham Spencer now?"

  "Very little." She looked at him with frank eyes. "He has changed somehow, daddy. When we do meet he is queer. I sometimes think he avoids me."

  He fell back on his noiseless whistling. And Delight, who knew his every mood, got up and perched herself on the arm of his chair.

  "Don't you get to thinking things," she said. And slipped an arm around his neck.

  "I did think, in the winter - "

  "I'll tell you about that," she broke in, bravely. "I suppose, if he'd cared for me at all, I'd have been crazy about him. It isn't because he's good looking. I - well, I don't know why. I just know, as long as I can remember, I - however, that's not important. He thinks I'm a nice little thing and lets it go at that. It's a good bit worse, of course, than having him hate me."

  "Sometimes I think you are not very happy."

  "I'm happier than I would be trying to make him fall in love with me. Oh, you needn't be shocked. It can be done. Lots of girls do it. It isn't any moral sense that keeps me from it, either. It's just pride."

  "My dear!"

  "And there's another angle to it. I wouldn't marry a man who hasn't got a mind of his own. Even if I had the chance, which I haven't. That silly mother of his - she is silly, daddy, and selfish - Do you know what she is doing now?"

  "We ought not to discuss her. She - "

  "Fiddlesticks. You love gossip and you know it."

  Her tone was light, but the rector felt that arm around his neck tighten. He surmised a depth of feeling that made him anxious.

  "She is trying to marry him to Marion Hayden."

  The rector sat up, almost guiltily.

  "But - are you sure she is doing that?"

  "Everybody says so. She thinks that if he is married, and there is a war, he won't want to go if he has a wife." She was silent for a moment. "Marion will drive him straight to the devil, daddy."

  The rector reached up and took her hand. She cared more than she would admit, he saw. She had thought the thing out, perhaps in the long night - when he slept placidly. Thought and suffered, he surmised. And again he remembered his worldly plans for her, and felt justly punished.

  "I suppose it is hard for a father to understand how any one can know his little girl and not love her. Or be the better for it."

  She kissed him and slid off the arm of his chair.

&nb
sp; "Don't you worry," she said cheerfully. "I had to make an ideal for myself about somebody. Every girl does. Sometimes it's the plumber. It doesn't really matter who it is, so you can pin your dreams to him. The only thing that hurts is that Graham wasn't worth while."

  She went back to her little cards, but some ten minutes later the rector, lost in thought, heard the scratching of her pen cease.

  "Did you ever think, daddy," she said, "of the influence women have over men? Look at the Spencers. Mrs. Spencer spoiling Graham, and making her husband desperately unhappy. And - "

  "Unhappy? What makes you think that?"

  "He looks unhappy."

  The rector was startled. He had an instant vision of Clayton Spencer, tall, composed, handsome, impeccably clothed. He saw him in the setting that suited him best, the quiet elegance of his home. Clayton unhappy! Nonsense. But he was uneasy, too. That very gravity which he had noticed lately, that was certainly not the gravity of an entirely happy man. Clayton had changed, somehow. Was there trouble there? And if there were, why?

  The rector, who reduced most wretchedness to terms of dollars and cents, of impending bills and small deprivations found himself at a loss.

  "I am sure you are wrong," he objected, rather feebly.

  Delight eyed him with the scorn of nineteen for fifty.

  "I wonder what you would do," she observed, "if mother just lay around all day, and had her hair done, and got new clothes, and never thought a thought of her own, and just used you as a sort of walking bank-account?"

  "My dear, I really can not - "

  "I'll tell you what you'd do," she persisted. "You'd fall in love with somebody else, probably. Or else you'd just naturally dry up and be made a bishop."

  He was extremely shocked at that, and a little hurt. It took her some time to establish cheerful relations again, and a very humble apology. But her words stuck in the rector's mind. He made a note for a sermon, with the text: "Her children arise up, and call her blessed; her husband also, and he praiseth her."

  He went quietly into the great stone building and sat down. The organist was practicing the Introit anthem, and half way up the church a woman was sitting quietly.

  The rector leaned back, and listened to the music. He often did that when he had a sermon in his mind. It was peaceful and quiet. Hard to believe, in that peace of great arches and swelling music, that across the sea at that moment men were violating that fundamental law of the church, "Thou shalt not kill."