"It was not Delight," he said doggedly. "And I don't think we need to bring her into this at all. She's not in love with me. She wouldn't wipe her feet on me."
Which was unfortunate. Marion smiled slowly.
"Oh! But you are good enough for me to be engaged to! I wonder!"
He went to the window and stood for a moment looking out. Then he went slowly back to her.
"I'm not good enough for you to be engaged to, Marion," he said. "I - don't you want to call it a day?"
She was really terrified then. She went white and again, miserably, he mistook her agitation for something deeper.
"You want to break the engagement?"
"Not if you still want me. I only mean - I'm a pretty poor sort. You ought to have the best, and God help this country if I'm the best."
"Graham, you're in some sort of trouble?"
He drew himself up in boyish bravado. He could not tell her the truth. It opened up too hideous a vista. Even his consciousness of the fact that the affair with Anna was still innocent did not dull his full knowledge of whither it was trending. He was cold and wretched.
"It's nothing," he muttered.
"You can tell me. You can tell me anything. I know a lot, you see. I'm no silly kitten. If you're in a fix, I'll help you. I don't care what it is, I'll help you. I? I'm crazy about you, Graham."
Anna's words, too!
"Look here, Marion," he said, roughly, "you've got to do one of two things. Either marry me or let me go."
"Let you go! I like that. If that is how you feel?"
"Oh - don't." He threw up his arm. "I want you. You know that. Marry me - to-morrow."
"I will not. Do you think I'm going to come into this family and have you cut off? Don't you suppose I know that Clayton Spencer hates the very chair I sit on? He'll come and beg me to marry you, some day. Until then?"
"You won't do it?"
"To-morrow? Certainly not."
And again he felt desperately his powerlessness to loosen the coils that were closing round him, fetters forged of his own red blood, his own youth, the woman-urge.
She was watching him with her calculating glance.
"You must be in trouble," she said.
"If I am, it's you and mother who have driven me there."
He was alarmed then, and lapsed into dogged silence. His anxiety had forced into speech thoughts that had never before been articulate. He was astounded to hear himself uttering them, although with the very speaking he realized now that they were true.
"Sorry, Marion," he muttered. "I didn't mean all that. I'm excited. That's all."
When he sat down beside her again and tried to take her hand, she drew it away.
"You've been very cruel, Graham," she said. "I've been selfish. Every girl who is terribly in love is selfish. I am going to give you your ring, and leave you free to do whatever you want."
Her generosity overcame him. He was instantly ashamed, humbled.
"Don't!" he begged. "Don't let me go. I'll just go to the dogs. If you really care?"
"Care!" she said softly. And as he buried his head in her lap she stroked his hair softly. Her eyes, triumphant, surveyed the long room, with its satin-paneled walls, its French furniture, its long narrow gilt-framed mirrors softening the angles of the four corners.
Some day all this would be hers. For this she would exchange the untidy and imitation elegance of her present setting.
She stroked the boy's head absently.
Graham made an attempt to free himself the next day. He was about to move his office to the new plant, and he made a determination not to take Anna with him.
He broke it to her as gently as he could.
"Mr. Weaver is taking my place here," he said, avoiding her eyes.
"Yes, Graham."
"He'll - there ought to be some one here who knows the ropes."
"Do you mean me?"
"Well, you know them, don't you?" He had tried to smile at her.
"Do you mean that you are going to have another secretary at the plant?"
"Look here, Anna," he said impulsively. "You know things can't go on indefinitely, the way we are now. You know it, don't you."
She looked down and nodded.
"Well, don't you think I'd better leave you here?"
She fumbled nervously with her wrist-watch.
"I won't stay here if you go," she said finally. "I hate Mr. Weaver. I'm afraid of him. I - oh, don't leave me, Graham. Don't. I haven't anybody but you. I haven't any home - not a real home. You ought to see him these days." She always referred to her father as "him." "He's dreadful. I'm only happy when I'm here with you."
He was angry, out of sheer despair.
"I've told you," he said. "Things can't go on as they are. You know well enough what I mean. I'm older than you are, Anna. God knows I don't want any harm to come to you through me. But, if we continue to be together - "
"I'm not blaming you." She looked at him honestly. "I'd just rather have you care about me than marry anybody else."
He kissed her, with a curious mingling of exultation and despair. He left her there when he went away that afternoon, a rather downcast young figure, piling up records and card-indexes, and following him to the door with worshiping, anxious eyes. Later on in the afternoon Joey, wandering in from Clayton's office on one of his self-constituted observation tours, found her crying softly while she wiped her typewriter, preparatory to covering it for the night.
"Somebody been treatin' you rough?" he asked, more sympathetic than curious.
"What are you doing here, anyhow?" she demanded, angrily. "You're always hanging around, spying on me."
"Somebody's got to keep an eye on you."
"Well, you don't."
"Look here," he said, his young-old face twitching with anxiety. "You get out from under, kid. You take my advice, and get out from under. Something's going to fall."
"Just mind your own business, and stop worrying about me. That's all."
He turned and started out.
"Oh, very well," he said sharply. "But you might take a word of warning, anyhow. That cousin of yours has got an eye on you, all right. And we don't want any scandal about the place."
"We? Who are 'we'?"
"Me and Mr. Clayton Spencer," said Joey, smartly, and went out, banging the door cheerfully.
Anna climbed the hill that night wearily, but with a sense of relief that Rudolph had not been waiting for her at the yard gate. She was in no mood to thrust and parry with him. She wondered, rather dully, what mischief Rudolph was up to. He was gaining a tremendous ascendency over her father, she knew. Herman was spending more and more of his evenings away from home, creaking up the stairs late at night, shoes in hand, to undress in the cold darkness across the hall.
"Out?" she asked Katie, sitting by the fire with the evening paper. Conversation in the cottage was almost always laconic.
"Ate early," Katie returned. "Rudolph was here, too. I'm going to quit if I've got to cook for that sneak any longer. You'd think he had a meal ticket here. Your supper's on the stove."
"I'm not hungry." She ate her supper, however, and undressed by the fire. Then she went up-stairs and sat by her window in the gathering night. She was suffering acutely. Graham was tired of her. He wanted to get rid of her. Probably he had a girl somewhere else, a lady. Her idea of the life of such a girl had been gathered from novels.
"The sort that has her breakfast in bed," she muttered, "and has her clothes put on her by somebody. Her underclothes, too!"
The immodesty of the idea made her face burn with anger.
Late that night Herman came back.
Herman had been a difficult proposition for Rudolph to handle. His innate caution, his respect for law and, under his bullying exterior, a certain physical cowardice, made him slow to move in the direction Rudolph was urging. He was controversial. He liked to argue over the beer and schnitzel Rudolph bought. And Rudolph was growing impatient.
Rudolp
h himself was all eagerness and zeal. It was his very zeal that was his danger, although it brought him slavish followers. He was contemptuous, ill-tempered, and impatient, but, of limited intelligence himself, he understood for that very reason the mental processes of those he would lead. There was a certain simplicity even in his cunning. With Herman he was a ferret driving out of their hiding-places every evil instinct that lay dormant. Under his goading, Herman was becoming savage, sullen, and potentially violent.
He was confused, too. Rudolph's arguments always confused him.
He was confused that night, heavy with fatigue and with Rudolph's steady talk in his ear. He was tired of pondering great questions, tired of hearing about the Spencers and the money they were making.
Anna's clothing was scattered about the room, and he frowned at it. She spent too much money on her clothes. Always sewing at something -
He stooped down to gather up his shoes, and his ear thus brought close to the table was conscious in the silence of a faint rhythmical sound. He stood up and looked about. Then he moved the newspaper on the table. Underneath it, forgotten in her anxiety and trouble, lay the little gold watch.
He picked it up, still following his train of thought. It fitted into the evening's inflammable proceedings. So, with such trinkets as this, capital would silence the cry of labor for its just share in the products of its skill and strength! It would bribe, and cheaply. Ten dollars, perhaps, that ticking insult. For ten dollars -
He held it close to his spectacles. Ah, but it was not so cheap. It came from the best shop in the city. He weighed it carefully in his hand, and in so doing saw the monogram. A doubt crept into his mind, a cold and chilling fear. Since when had the Spencer plant taken to giving watches for Christmas? The hill girls who worked as stenographers in the plant; they came in often enough and he did not remember any watches, or any mention of watches. His mind, working slowly, recalled that never before had he seen the watch near at hand. And he went into a slow and painful calculation. Fifty dollars at least it had cost. A hundred stenographers - that would be five thousand dollars for watches.
Suddenly he knew that Anna had lied to him. One of two things, then: either she had spent money for it, unknown to him, or some one had given it to her. There was, in his mind, not much difference in degree between the two alternatives. Both were crimes of the first magnitude.
He picked the watch up between his broad thumb and forefinger, and then, his face a cold and dreadful mask, he mounted the stairs.
CHAPTER XXVII
Clayton Spencer was facing with characteristic honesty a situation that he felt was both hopeless and shameful.
He was hopelessly in love with Audrey. He knew now that he had known it for a long time. Here was no slender sentiment, no thin romance. With every fiber of him, heart and soul and body, he loved her and wanted her. There was no madness about it, save the fact itself, which was mad enough. It was not the single attraction of passion, although he recognized that element as fundamental in it. It was the craving of a strong man who had at last found his woman.
He knew that, as certainly as he knew anything. He did not even question that she cared for him. It was as though they both had passed through the doubting period without knowing it, and had arrived together at the same point, the crying need of each other.
He rather thought, looking back, that Audrey had known it sooner than he had. She had certainly known the night she learned of Chris's death. His terror when she fainted, the very way he had put her out of his arms when she opened her eyes - those had surely told her. Yet, had Chris's cynical spirit been watching, there had been nothing, even then.
There was, between them, nothing now. He had given way to the people who flocked to her with sympathy, had called her up now and then, had sent her a few books, some flowers. But the hopelessness of the situation held him away from her. Once or twice, at first, he had called her on the telephone and had waited, almost trembling, for her voice over the wire, only to ask her finally, in a voice chilled with repression, how she was feeling, or to offer a car for her to ride in the park. And her replies were equally perfunctory. She was well. She was still studying, but it was going badly. She was too stupid to learn all those pot-hooks.
Once she had said:
"Aren't you ever coming to see me, Clay?"
Her voice had been wistful, and it had been a moment before he had himself enough in hand to reply, formally:
"Thank you. I shall, very soon."
But he had not gone to the little fiat again.
Through Natalie he heard of her now and then.
"I saw Audrey to-day," she said once. "She is not wearing mourning. It's bad taste, I should say. When one remembers that she really drove Chris to his death - "
He had interrupted her, angrily.
"That is a cruel misstatement, Natalie. She did nothing of the sort."
"You needn't bite me, you know. He went, and had about as much interest in this war as - as - "
"As you have," he finished. And had gone out, leaving Natalie staring after him.
He was more careful after that, but the situation galled him. He was no hypocrite, but there was no need of wounding Natalie unnecessarily. And that, after all, was the crux of the whole situation. Natalie. It was not Natalie's fault that he had found the woman of his heart too late. He had no thought of blame for her. In decency, there was only one thing to do. He could not play the lover to her, but then he had not done that for a very long time. He could see, however, that she was not hurt.
Perhaps, in all her futile life, Natalie had, for all her complaining, never been so content in her husband as in those early spring months when she had completely lost him. He made no demands whatever. In the small attentions, which he had never neglected, he was even more assiduous. He paid her ever-increasing bills without comment. He submitted, in those tense days when every day made the national situation more precarious, to hours of discussion as to the country house, to complaints as to his own lack of social instinct, and to that new phase of her attitude toward Marion Hayden that left him baffled and perplexed.
Then, on the Sunday when he left Graham and Marion together at the house, he met Audrey quite by accident in the park. He was almost incredulous at first. She came like the answer to prayer, a little tired around the eyes, showing the strain of the past weeks, but with that same easy walk and unconscious elegance that marked her, always.
She was not alone. There was a tall blonde girl beside her, hideously dressed, but with a pleasant, shallow face. Just before they met Audrey stopped and held out her hand.
"Then you'll let me know, Clare?"
"Thank you. I will, indeed, Mrs. Valentine."
With a curious glance at Clayton the girl went on. Audrey smiled at him.
"Please don't run!" she said. "There are people looking. It would be so conspicuous."
"Run!" he replied. He stood looking down at her, and at something in his eyes her smile died.
"It's too wonderful, Clay."
For a moment he could not speak. After all those weeks of hunger for her there was no power in him to dissemble. He felt a mad, boyish impulse to hold out his arms to her, Malacca stick, gloves, and all!
"It's a bit of luck I hadn't expected, Audrey," he said, at last, unsteadily.
She turned about quite simply, and faced in the direction he was going.
"I shall walk with you," she said, with a flash of her old impertinence. "You have not asked me to, but I shall, anyhow. Only don't call this luck. It isn't at all. I walk here every Sunday, and every Sunday I say to myself - he will think he needs exercise. Then he will walk, and the likeliest place for him to go is the park. Good reasoning, isn't it?"
She glanced up at him, but his face was set and unsmiling. "Don't pay any attention to me, Clay. I'm a little mad, probably. You see" - she hesitated - "I need my friends just now. And when the very best of them all hides away from me?"
"Don't say that. I stayed away, becau
se - " He hesitated.
"I'm almost through. Don't worry! But I was walking along before I met Clare - I'll tell you about her presently - and I was saying to myself that I thought God owed me something. I didn't know just what. Happiness, maybe. I've been careless and all that, but I've never been wicked. And yet I can look back, and count the really happy days of my life on five fingers."
She held out one hand.
"Five fingers!" she repeated, "and I am twenty-eight. The percentage is pretty low, you know."
"Perhaps you and I ask too much?"
He was conscious of her quick, searching glance.
"Oh! You feel that way, too? I mean - as I do, that it's all hardly worth while? But you seem to have everything, Clay."
"You have one thing I lack. Youth."
"Youth! At twenty-eight!"
"You can still mold your life, Audrey dear. You have had a bad time, but - with all reverence to Chris's memory - his going out of it, under the circumstances, is a grief. But it doesn't spell shipwreck."
"Do you mean that I will marry again?" she asked, in a low tone.
"Don't you think you will, some time? Some nice young chap who will worship you all the days of his life? That - well, that is what I expect for you. It's at least possible, you know."
"Is it what you want for me?"
"Good God!" he burst out, his restraint suddenly gone. "What do you want me to say? What can I say, except that I want you to be happy? Don't you think I've gone over it all, over and over again? I'd give my life for the right to tell you the things I think, but - I haven't that right. Even this little time together is wrong, the way things are. It is all wrong."
"I'm sorry, Clay. I know. I am just reckless to-day. You know I am reckless. It's my vice. But sometimes - we'd better talk about the mill."
But he could not talk about the mill just then. They walked along in silence, and after a little he felt her touch his arm.
"Wouldn't it be better just to have it out?" she asked, wistfully. "That wouldn't hurt anybody, would it?"
The Best of Mary Roberts Rinehart Page 247
