Minnie got up.
"I'll unpin your veil for you," she offered, obligingly. "You've got time to lie down about ten minutes. Mrs. Morgan said she's got to have her ears treated."
"I hope she doesn't sit and talk for an hour."
"She'll talk, all right," Minnie observed, her mouth full of pins. "She'd be talking to me yet if I'd stood there. She's got her nerve, too, that woman."
"I don't like to hear you speak so of the patients who come to the house, Minnie."
"Well, I don't like their asking me questions about the family either," said Minnie, truculently. "She wanted to know who was Doctor Dick's mother. Said she had had a woman here from Wyoming, and she thought she'd known his people."
Mrs. Crosby stood very still.
"I think she should bring her questions to the family," she said, after a silence. "Thank you, Minnie."
Bonnet in hand, she moved toward the stairs, climbed them and went into her room. Recently life had been growing increasingly calm and less beset with doubts. For the first time, with Dick's coming to live with them ten years before, a boy of twenty-two, she had found a vicarious maternity and gloried in it. Recently she had been very happy. The war was over and he was safely back; again she could sew on his buttons and darn his socks, and turn down his bed at night. He filled the old house with cheer and with vitality. And, as David gave up more and more of the work, he took it on his broad shoulders, efficient, tireless, and increasingly popular.
She put her bonnet away in its box, and suddenly there rose in her frail old body a fierce and unexpected resentment against David. He had chosen a course and abided by it. He had even now no doubt or falterings. Just as in the first anxious days there had been no doubt in him as to the essential rightness of what he was doing. And now--This was what came of taking a life and moulding it in accordance with a predetermined plan. That was for God to do, not man.
She sat down near her window and rocked slowly, to calm herself. Outside the Sunday movement of the little suburban town went by: the older Wheeler girl, Nina, who had recently married Leslie Ward, in her smart little car; Harrison Miller, the cynical bachelor who lived next door, on his way to the station news stand for the New York papers; young couples taking small babies for the air in a perambulator; younger couples, their eyes on each other and on the future.
That, too, she reflected bitterly! Dick was in love. She had not watched him for that very thing for so long without being fairly sure now. She had caught, as simple David with his celibate heart could never have caught, the tone in Dick's voice when he mentioned the Wheelers. She had watched him for the past few months in church on Sunday mornings, and she knew that as she watched him, so he looked at Elizabeth.
And David was so sure! So sure.
The office door closed and Mrs. Morgan went out, a knitted scarf wrapping her ears against the wind, and following her exit came the slow ascent of David as he climbed the stairs to wash for dinner.
She stopped rocking.
"David!" she called sharply.
He opened the door and came in, a bulky figure, still faintly aromatic of drugs, cheerful and serene.
"D'you call me?" he inquired.
"Yes. Shut the door and come in. I want to talk to you." He closed the door and went to the hearth-rug. There was a photograph of Dick on the mantel, taken in his uniform, and he looked at it for a moment. Then he turned. "All right, my dear. Let's have it."
"Did Mrs. Morgan have anything to say?" He stared at her.
"She usually has," he said. "I never knew you considered it worth repeating. No. Nothing in particular."
The very fact that Mrs. Morgan had limited her inquiry to Minnie confirmed her suspicions. But somehow, face to face with David, she could not see his contentment turned to anxiety.
"I want to talk to you about Dick."
"Yes?"
"I think he's in love, David."
David's heavy body straightened, but his face remained serene.
"We had to expect that, Lucy. Is it Elizabeth Wheeler, do you think?"
"Yes."
For a moment there was silence. The canary in its cage hopped about, a beady inquisitive eye now on one, now on the other of them.
"She's a good girl, Lucy."
"That's not the point, is it?"
"Do you think she cares for him?"
"I don't know. There's some talk of Wallie Sayre. He's there a good bit."
"Wallie Sayre!" snorted David. "He's never done a day's work in his life and never will." He reflected on that with growing indignation. "He doesn't hold a candle to Dick. Of course, if the girl's a fool--"
Hands thrust deep into his pockets David took a turn about the room. Lucy watched him. At last:
"You're evading the real issue, David, aren't you?"
"Perhaps I am," he admitted. "I'd better talk to him. I think he's got an idea he shouldn't marry. That's nonsense."
"I don't mean that, exactly," Lucy persisted. "I mean, won't he want a good many things cleared up before he marries? Isn't he likely to want to go back to Norada?"
Some of the ruddy color left David's face. He stood still, staring at her and silent.
"You know he meant to go three years ago, but the war came, and--"
Her voice trailed off. She could not even now easily recall those days when Dick was drilling on the golf links, and that later period of separation.
"If he does go back--"
"Donaldson is dead," David broke in, almost roughly.
"Maggie Donaldson is still living."
"What if she is? She's loyal to the core, in the first place. In the second, she's criminally liable. As liable as I am."
"There is one thing, David, I ought to know. What has become of the Carlysle girl?"
"She left the stage. There was a sort of general conviction she was implicated and--I don't know, Lucy. Sometimes I think she was." He sighed. "I read something about her coming back, some months ago, in 'The Valley.' That was the thing she was playing the spring before it happened." He turned on her. "Don't get that in your head with the rest."
"I wonder, sometimes."
"I know it."
Outside the slamming of an automobile door announced Dick's return, and almost immediately Minnie rang the old fashioned gong which hung in the lower hall. Mrs. Crosby got up and placed a leaf of lettuce between the bars of the bird cage.
"Dinner time, Caruso," she said absently. Caruso was the name Dick had given the bird. And to David: "She must be in her thirties now."
"Probably." Then his anger and anxiety burst out. "What difference can it make about her? About Donaldson's wife? About any hang-over from that rotten time? They're gone, all of them. He's here. He's safe and happy. He's strong and fine. That's gone."
In the lower hall Dick was taking off his overcoat.
"Smell's like chicken, Minnie," he said, into the dining room.
"Chicken and biscuits, Mr. Dick."
"Hi, up there!" he called lustily. "Come and feed a starving man. I'm going to muffle the door-bell!"
He stood smiling up at them, very tidy in his Sunday suit, very boyish, for all his thirty-two years. His face, smilingly tender as he watched them, was strong rather than handsome, quietly dependable and faintly humorous.
"In the language of our great ally," he said, "Madame et Monsieur, le diner est servi."
In his eyes there was not only tenderness but a somewhat emphasized affection, as though he meant to demonstrate, not only to them but to himself, that this new thing that had come to him did not touch their old relationship. For the new thing had come. He was still slightly dazed with the knowledge of it, and considerably anxious. Because he had just taken a glance at himself in the mirror of the walnut hat-rack, and had seen nothing there particularly to inspire --well, to inspire what he wanted to inspire.
At the foot of the stairs he drew Lucy's arm through his, and held her hand. She seemed very small and frail beside him.
"Some day,"
he said, "a strong wind will come along and carry off Mrs. Lucy Crosby, and the Doctors Livingstone will be obliged hurriedly to rent aeroplanes, and to search for her at various elevations!"
David sat down and picked up the old fashioned carving knife.
"Get the clubs?" he inquired.
Dick looked almost stricken.
"I forgot them, David," he said guiltily. "Jim Wheeler went out to look them up, and I--I'll go back after dinner."
It was sometime later in the meal that Dick looked up from his plate and said:
"I'd like to cut office hours on Wednesday night, David. I've asked Elizabeth Wheeler to go into town to the theater."
"What about the baby at the Homer place?"
"Not due until Sunday. I'll leave my seat number at the box office, anyhow."
"What are you going to see, Dick?" Mrs. Crosby asked. "Will you have some dumplings?"
"I will, but David shouldn't. Too much starch. Why, it's 'The Valley,' I think. An actress named Carlysle, Beverly Carlysle, is starring in it."
He ate on, his mind not on his food, but back in the white house on Palmer Lane, and a girl. Lucy Crosby, fork in air, stared at him, and then glanced at David.
But David did not look up from his plate.
III
The Wheeler house was good, modern and commonplace. Walter Wheeler and his wife were like the house. Just as here and there among the furniture there was a fine thing, an antique highboy, a Sheraton sideboard or some old cut glass, so they had, with a certain mediocrity their own outstanding virtues. They liked music, believed in the home as the unit of the nation, put happiness before undue ambition, and had devoted their lives to their children.
For many years their lives had centered about the children. For years they had held anxious conclave about whooping cough, about small early disobediences, later about Sunday tennis. They stood united to protect the children against disease, trouble and eternity.
Now that the children were no longer children, they were sometimes lonely and still apprehensive. They feared motor car accidents, and Walter Wheeler had withstood the appeals of Jim for a half dozen years. They feared trains for them, and journeys, and unhappy marriages, and hid their fears from each other. Their nightly prayers were "to keep them safe and happy."
But they saw life reaching out and taking them, one by one. They saw them still as children, but as children determined to bear their own burdens. Jim stayed out late sometimes, and considered his manhood in question if interrogated. Nina was married and out of the home, but there loomed before them the possibility of maternity and its dangers for her. There remained only Elizabeth, and on her they lavished the care formerly divided among the three.
It was their intention and determination that she should never know trouble. She was tenderer than the others, more docile and gentle. They saw her, not as a healthy, normal girl, but as something fragile and very precious.
Nina was different. They had always worried a little about Nina, although they had never put their anxiety to each other. Nina had always overrun her dress allowance, although she had never failed to be sweetly penitent about it, and Nina had always placed an undue emphasis on things. Her bedroom before her marriage was cluttered with odds and ends, cotillion favors and photographs, college pennants and small unwise purchases--trophies of the gayety and conquest which were her life.
And Nina had "come out." It had cost a great deal, and it was not so much to introduce her to society as to put a family recognition on a fact already accomplished, for Nina had brought herself out unofficially at sixteen. There had been the club ballroom, and a great many flowers which withered before they could be got to the hospital; and new clothing for all the family, and a caterer and orchestra. After that, for a cold and tumultuous winter Mrs. Wheeler had sat up with the dowagers night after night until all hours, and the next morning had let Nina sleep, while she went about her household duties. She had aged, rather, and her determined smile had grown a little fixed.
She was a good woman, and she wanted her children's happiness more than anything in the world, but she had a faint and sternly repressed feeling of relief when Nina announced her engagement. Nina did it with characteristic sangfroid, at dinner one night.
"Don't ring for Annie for a minute, mother," she said. "I want to tell you all something. I'm going to marry Leslie Ward."
There had been a momentary pause. Then her father said:
"Just a minute. Is that Will Ward's boy?"
"Yes. He's not a boy."
"Well, he'll come around to see me before there's any engagement. Has that occurred to either of you?"
"Oh, he'll be around. He'd have come to-night, but Howard Moore is having his bachelor dinner. I hope he doesn't look shot to pieces to-morrow. These bachelor things--! We'd better have a dinner or something, mother, and announce it."
There had been the dinner, with a silver loving cup bought for the occasion, and thereafter to sit out its useless days on the Sheraton sideboard. And there had been a trousseau and a wedding so expensive that a small frown of anxiety had developed between Walter Wheeler's eyebrows and stayed there.
For Nina's passion for things was inherent, persisting after her marriage. She discounted her birthday and Christmases in advance, coming around to his office a couple of months before the winter holidays and needing something badly.
"It's like this, daddy," she would say. "You're going to give me a check for Christmas anyhow, aren't you? And it would do me more good now. I simply can't go to another ball."
"Where's your trousseau?"
"It's worn out-danced to rags. And out of date, too."
"I don't understand it, Nina. You and Leslie have a good income. Your mother and I--"
"You didn't have any social demands. And wedding presents! If one more friend of mine is married--"
He would get out his checkbook and write a check slowly and thoughtfully. And tearing it off would say:
"Now remember, Nina, this is for Christmas. Don't feel aggrieved when the time comes and you have no gift from us."
But he knew that when the time came Margaret, his wife, would hold out almost to the end, and then slip into a jeweler's and buy Nina something she simply couldn't do without.
It wasn't quite fair, he felt. It wasn't fair to Jim or to Elizabeth. Particularly to Elizabeth.
Sometimes he looked at Elizabeth with a little prayer in his heart, never articulate, that life would be good to her; that she might keep her illusions and her dreams; that the soundness and wholesomeness of her might keep her from unhappiness. Sometimes, as she sat reading or sewing, with the light behind her shining through her soft hair, he saw in her a purity that was almost radiant.
He was in arms at once a night or two before Dick had invited Elizabeth to go to the theater when Margaret Wheeler said:
"The house was gayer when Nina was at home."
"Yes. And you were pretty sick of it. Full of roistering young idiots. Piano and phonograph going at once, pairs of gigglers in the pantry at the refrigerator, pairs on the stairs and on the verandah, cigar-ashes--my cigars--and cigarettes over everything, and more infernal spooning going on than I've ever seen in my life."
He had resumed his newspaper, to put it down almost at once.
"What's that Sayre boy hanging around for?"
"I think he's in love with her, Walter."
"Love? Any of the Sayre tribe? Jim Sayre drank himself to death, and this boy is like him. And Jim Sayre wasn't faithful to his wife. This boy is--well, he's an heir. That's why he was begotten."
Margaret Wheeler stared at him.
"Why, Walter!" she said. "He's a nice boy, and he's a gentleman."
"Why? Because he gets up when you come into the room? Why in heaven's name don't you encourage real men to come here? There's Dick Livingstone. He's a man."
Margaret hesitated.
"Walter, have you ever thought there was anything queer about Dick Livingstone's coming here?"
/> "Darned good for the town that he did come."
"But--nobody ever dreamed that David and Lucy had a nephew. Then he turns up, and they send him to medical college, and all that."
"I've got some relations I haven't notified the town I possess," he said grimly.
"Well, there's something odd. I don't believe Henry Livingstone, the Wyoming brother, ever had a son."
"What possible foundation have you for a statement like that?"
"Mrs. Cook Morgan's sister-in-law has been visiting her lately. She says she knew Henry Livingstone well years ago in the West, and she never heard he was married. She says positively he was not married."
"And trust the Morgan woman to spread the good news," he said with angry sarcasm. "Well, suppose that's true? Suppose Dick is an illegitimate child? That's the worst that's implied, I daresay. That's nothing against Dick himself. I'll tell the world there's good blood on the Livingstone side, anyhow."
"You were very particular about Wallie Sayre's heredity, Walter."
"That's different," he retorted, and retired into gloomy silence behind his newspaper. Drat these women anyhow. It was like some fool female to come there and rake up some old and defunct scandal. He'd stand up for Dick, if it ever came to a show-down. He liked Dick. What the devil did his mother matter, anyhow? If this town hadn't had enough evidence of Dick Livingstone's quality the last few years he'd better go elsewhere. He--
He got up and whistled for the dog.
"I'm going to take a walk," he said briefly, and went out. He always took a walk when things disturbed him.
On the Sunday afternoon after Dick had gone Elizabeth was alone in her room upstairs. On the bed lay the sort of gown Nina would have called a dinner dress, and to which Elizabeth referred as her dark blue. Seen thus, in the room which was her own expression, there was a certain nobility about her very simplicity, a steadiness about her eyes that was almost disconcerting.
"She's the saintly-looking sort that would go on the rocks for some man," Nina had said once, rather flippantly, "and never know she was shipwrecked. No man in the world could do that to me."
The Best of Mary Roberts Rinehart Page 323
