The Magpies Nest

by Isabel Paterson

  Evidently Comerford understood presently, and Edgerton rang off and called his lawyer.

  ". . . I'm leaving to-morrow. . . . Organise a new company on that Kenatchee Falls deal . . . say, come and see me to-morrow morning at eight. I'll explain in detail. . . . Hell, no; don't get Shane; his crowd is out of it . . . business is business." He was not conscious of any irony. "To-morrow at eight. Good night."

  So Tony's house of cards came down, blown upon by his own breath. And the irony of it was that he would never know the truth of how it happened.

  CHAPTER XV

  THERE was a foreign atmosphere about the familiar rooms; Mary put her hand to her forehead with a gesture of fatigue, and looked about her, almost petulantly, endeavouring to name the impression she had received. "It looks empty; yes, deserted," she thought. "Poor Hope seems able to have made a wilderness merely by thinking one. But I don't believe she calls it peace!" Mary would jest to her grave. But the rooms did look forlorn. There were things missing. She went into the bedroom and snapped on the light. Hope's brushes and mirror were gone! And in the sitting-room the drawing-board had been cleared; that was what she had felt. Mary turned about slowly, as if orienting herself, and went straight to the wardrobe. A battered leather suit-case should have been there. It also was gone!

  Mary went back to the sitting-room and dropped limply into a chair, with a mental jerk at her clogged and distrait mind. She had been very busy all day; she had congratulated herself on being rid of a great deal of pressing business, and had come home to rest, to relapse temporarily into nothingness. Edgerton had taken himself off to the West; that was one relief. He had left death and destruction behind him, in a sense; Mary had seen him calmly tear down all the hopes of the men who had built on the Kenatchee Falls transaction, and had gathered from his manner that he felt a certain satisfaction in it. His demeanour had not invited comment, but they had just once exchanged a glance that said enough. And Mary had shrugged her shoulders, and gone to work on the new company organisation.

  Emily also had gone, eastward. Mary made a wry face at the recollection of that luncheon party, deferred a day, where Hope had actually appeared, with a spot of colour on each cheek and a devil in her eye She had not spoken much, but there was something oddly different about her; she was abnormally self-possessed, ate nothing, and watched Emily with a look of impish humour. She was witty, too, with a kind of mad and topsy-turvy gaiety. She had left early. And then Mary, in the half-hour remaining, had done what she had to do. When she ended, there was no more Tony. They left the debris of him on the luncheon table, with the cold coffee cups.

  It was cleverly done; neither Emily nor Tony ever knew what had really happened. His epitaph wrote him a small-town Lothario; the flowers Emily handed to the Pullman porter when her train drew out. And Mrs. Shane had sent her some of them! The rest Mary brought, a conscious tribute to her own work. Part of them were devoted mentally to the other hapless victims of her prowess, for Tony went down unhonourably in the wreck of a dozen local characters. She was far from wishing to fix him in Emily's mind by singling him out or bidding for a confidence. It was well done indeed.

  And she deserved a breathing space, and now Hope, for whose sake she had laboured... Where was Hope? When she found her she would—she would beat her! Ruefully Mary admitted it would do herself good, whether it helped Hope or not.

  Panic fell on her suddenly, like the unexpected contact of icy water; her lethargy departed.

  So Mrs. Hamilton found her, gazing about the room with a look of bewilderment and alarm, as if she thought to discover someone concealed under the sofa.

  "I've been looking for you, Mary," said Mrs. Hamilton, who was always calm, as a mother of four must be if she would escape shrewishness. "My, you look done up; you've been working late again."

  "No, I've been dining with Mrs. Shane," said Mary. "Worse. Where is Hope?"

  "She went out, with a suit-case, at seven o'clock. Just in time for the West train. Mary, I don't think that child looks well lately, and she ought not to be running around so. No sleep this week; out with that Kirby boy last night, and sitting up half the night before with a book. Don't say I said so; I know you girls can manage your own affairs. But I didn't like to see her going off that way without any dinner. I was bringing her some, but she'd gone. You get her to rest up." Probably she said more, but Mary did not hear.

  Once Mary opened her mouth to say: "But Allen Kirby left days ago."

  "I will beat her," she remarked instead. "She should have waited for me. That train's a local; it only goes to Banff. Mrs. Hamilton, be a darling, and help me pack. I've got to catch the Limited."

  No doubt, Mary reflected afterwards, she made other explanation, but she could not remember what. Mrs. Hamilton never asked questions. She did not even look a question, but, thanks to her, Mary found herself aboard the Limited with the half of a split second to spare.

  She had three hours to reassure herself that there had been no other train than the Banff local for Hope to take. As a side issue, she could reflect on the fact that Edgerton might be in Banff, rather than Laggan, where he had said he was going. And all the world goes to Banff. It is to Canada—to America almost—what Port Said is to the East. Wait there long enough and tout le monde comes to you. So all the world might already be apprised of what Mary hoped to avert. Of course none would guess except her own little world —but there it was. Everyone from their own town spent week-ends at Banff. Though eighty miles distant, it amounted to a suburb. It was their one playground.

  Edgerton was in Laggan, however. There was nothing for Hope to do but wait for the Limited, anathematising her own stupidity. She was eager to go on. Simply, she had to do something, the nearest thing, anything, but immediately. If she stopped she would want to die; that is, if she stopped to consider doing nothing at all. The three hours did not go so slowly. All the time her mind projected itself ahead, fixed itself still on doing something. The small, brightly lighted, lonely station, the smell of the pines, the feeling of the great calm mountains shrouding themselves in the neighbouring dark, became afterward a component part of her wild thoughts. Around the shoulder of the foot-hill was a little town, and great hive-like hotels, but she could not realise them. They meant people, and certainly she could not realise people just then, only Edgerton and herself. Fellow-travellers passed her, waiting in the station, or pacing the platform like herself. Some of them recognised her. She did not recognise them. They were isolated from her in that strange air of impermanence with which her mood invested time and place. When the Limited drew in, with a great discord of bells and whistles, and the platform filled with yet more and more people, coming or going, these were still unreal. Then Mary came towards her out of the crowd, vividly alive among all these ghosts, and she saw and seized on Hope with a sort of angry affection and a great relief.

  "Where have you been?" she demanded absurdly.

  "You—you... Oh, I was distracted! But I've found you."

  "I'm going away," said Hope determinedly, bracing her shoulders with an air of one refusing discussion.

  "You're going back on the next train," announced Mary. "I'll see to that."

  "Oh, Mary, please don't bother me," said Hope, with an unexpected pleading note. "I'll go mad if ever I have to see that town again. I want to go."

  "Now, see here," began Mary, vehemence overcoming clarity of speech, as she dragged Hope off toward a wooden bench out of the swirl of traffic. People were elbowing them politely; a few stared for a moment in passing.

  "But I must catch the train."

  "Wait, wait a minute!" She sought for a tactful beginning, and then flung herself at the heart of the matter; there was no time for tact. "You're going on to meet Edgerton, aren't you?" Hope merely looked at her, like an obstinate child which will not say it is sorry. "Well, what has he ever done to you?"

  "I like him," said Hope, which again was not what Mary expected.

  "Very well, you like him! And you're going to
make him miserable the rest of his life to prove it!" Trusting to blind feeling, Mary knew it was useless to ask Hope to consider prudence and her own side of the case. "What'll he do with you? What will you do with him? You've got what he wants, but you can't give it to him. He'd give you what you want, but he hasn't got it. His life is made for him; he has made it himself; you'll be taking him away from everything he's used to. He isn't your age; he'll get tired of everlastingly 'yearning beyond the skyline, where the strange ships go down.' He'll want his work, and the men he knows. He hasn't your tastes; he'll be bored. After awhile he'll see you growing up, and away from him. And you'll be no nearer anything else. You'll always be on the outer edge of things, outside of the game; you won't have conformed to the rules. And by and by you'll leave him, find yourself—and he'll be sorry all his life." She paused for breath.

  Hope stared at her searchingly, with a little strange laugh.

  "Well," she said. "Really! Oughtn't he to know what he's doing? Why—why—what about me?"

  "Settle that with yourself," said Mary gravely. "You'll have to anyway. But don't take out your unhappiness—your spite—on someone who never hurt you. What about me? Haven't I been fond of you? Why do you want to leave me to face what you've done? Do you think your friends will be spared?"

  "My gracious," said Hope inadequately, "whose business is it but mine? Leave me alone, please, please. No one cares."

  "That's what you thought about you and Tony," said Mary inexorably. "Nobody plays a lone hand."

  "Oh," said Hope disdainfully, "you mean that someone is always looking over your shoulder and telling you how to play. But you pay your own losses. Oh, Mary, I want to go! And who on earth would know?"

  "Everyone," insisted Mary. "His wife might learn, and spread it all over the country in the newspapers. Or she might exact half his fortune to keep silent. You'd be the flaw in his armour; you might cost him all he has spent his life building up. Then, if you did marry..."

  "I don't want to marry him, or anyone," said Hope, goaded into utter frankness.

  "Well," said Mary, "then you'll take a great deal and give nothing. After all, a man's got his name, too. Hope, what if your own people should hear?"

  "Would you tell them?" asked Hope stormily. "Well, I'll go back. Please be quiet, Mary." She dropped to the bench, and leaned her head against the station wall, closing her eyes. The purpose went out of her face; she looked spent again. "I can't do anything," she muttered. "But I must, I must."

  The thought that obsessed her was that if she failed to do something, and that quickly, some spring of life in her would fail. A creeping drowsiness threatened her, which it would pain her to fight off, as one feels when the air supply is short. Some necessary element had been taken from her in her great disillusionment. She knew she needed action in the same way that one nearly drowned must be tided through by forced breathing and involuntary motion.

  "Come to the hotel and rest till the next train," said Mary gently. "And get something to eat."

  "No. I must explain to him. I will go back if you will go on up and tell him why I didn't come. He's looking for me on this train. Here's my ticket; you use it," said Hope practically. "And give him this." She went into the telegraph room, wrote and sealed a message. "Hurry, the train is starting; I won't go unless you do."

  Mary began to protest, thought better of it, kissed Hope and ran. Perhaps Hope needed to be alone. And, in spite of all her arguments, Mary was sorry for Edgerton. Hope went back to her bench, sat down listlessly, and felt herself going, very far away, to the poppy fields of her childhood—but now the poppies were black. She did not want to live. Her idol was very completely broken, and its pitiful clay feet forbade her weeping over the wreckage. Her tears, she reflected sardonically, would reduce it to the utmost of absurdity. So she sat, gazing into the dark And when Ned Angell stopped before her, he had to speak twice before she seemed to hear.

  "What?" she said at last, impolitely, and turned a blank stare on him. "Good evening, Ned." If she had shouted, "Go away," it could have been no plainer. "What are you doing here?"

  "I've been up for the week-end," he said. "Hope, you look like a ghost. You're ill; for Heaven's sake, let me get you something. I have some brandy in my suit-case. What are you doing here?"

  "Eloping," she retorted. It was the nearest she could come to shrieking, or hurling a brick at him. It served. He was unintelligible for several minutes, and she watched him stonily. She had come to a point where her own despair was no longer tragic to her, and in that was tragedy beyond words. In her mind cause and effect were ranged side by side in grotesque disproportion, grinning at her. She was as one mortally wounded by a stiletto thrust, who looks at the tiny wound with horrified unbelief, knowing that insignificant aperture for a gateway to eternity. She forgot Edgerton for the moment; Mary had rudely torn him out of the foreground of possibilities, thrust her back upon her own ridiculous catastrophe. And Ned was the last straw. He was offering her brandy That reminded her, Edgerton had offered her the world. Probably Mary had it now; he might have been glad to be rid of it. "No, I really don't want any brandy," she said almost patiently, having produced her effect. "Yes, I was eloping, but I'm not. I changed my mind. Mary changed my mind. She's gone on."

  "Who?"

  "Mary Dark—oh, the man? I shan't tell you, Neddy. If any of your friends happen along, they'll think it's you."

  "I wish it was," he said, and the bare simplicity of his speech struck some chord in her that resolved her again into a merely pitiful girl, aware of another's hurt, and sorry for it.

  "Why, Ned, not you; it isn't possible."

  "But it is—Hope, I can't talk to you here." Again Hope was aware of people regarding them with vague curiosity; they were at the further end of the platform, a little isolated, but scarcely invisible; they regarded each other dramatically, uncertainly, with tense white faces and the hint of outflung hands, their eyes challenging and defensive; it was not strange if people stared. Ned knew it also, but he could not stop; he could only urge her: "You're tired; you are ill. The train won't be in for another hour or more; it's late Have you had any supper? Come up to the hotel and rest a little."

  Anywhere, she thought, to be rid of his immediate importunities. But the problem he presented she was grappling with ineffectually. It seemed she must be hopelessly imbecile. People were always surprising her now, turning to her unexpected surfaces, presenting her with new and incredible problems. Nothing was simple any more; it was all beyond her, amazing past conception. Everything that had seemed so plain and straightforward, all her everyday relations, took on a complexity that appalled her. Ned was not a harlequin, an incident; he was alive too; if one pricked him he bled. That much he was showing her, with all the fervour of a vain and mercurial nature, as they walked slowly in the green-dark obscurity of a bypath beside the road to the hotel.

  "You must have guessed it," he insisted.

  "No, I didn't," she sighed. "Why should I? I don't think you ever said anything, did you?" She groped in her memory. Perhaps he had spoken; she so seldom listened to him closely. Mostly she had laughed at him, or put him aside as one does a troublesome child.

  "Why do you suppose I was always coming?"

  He was almost angry; in the heat of his new passion it seemed to him that he had always cared so much. Now that she had so nearly gone from him forever, she was all that was desirable and dear. He had for long past known her heart was turned from him towards another man; he had guessed it to be Tony Yorke. Certainty had been impossible; she had her dignity, and had placed him unmistakably, sometimes pointedly, outside her confidence. And slowly her inacessibility had wrought on him. To-night, with the fine unreason of a new lover, he saw the whole world of men striving to tear her from him. That was the result of her challenge.

  They were both rather mad, and it was night, and spring.

  "Oh, I don't know," she said. "After all, you were always about some other girl, too. You were always at Mrs. Patten
's, for the matter of that." Her hand was on his arm, and she felt him start. "You don't really care so much, do you, Ned? Not now, anyway, when I tell you Tony jilted me, and I came so near to running away with—another man?"

  "Oh, Hope, I do, I do! There's only you. I don't care about whoever else it was... Do you care so much for Yorke?"

  "No," she said slowly, "I don't care for anyone. It's all gone. But I'm tired." Presently she was weeping on his shoulder. "So tired. I haven't anything to give you."

  He told her fervently that nothing was enough, if he might only hope. In some sense his chivalry was touched. It is hardly a quality to build on, in a sentimentalist, but in the clash and chaos of old illusions fallen about her ears it seemed as solid as anything. But he only won when he put forward his own need as a plea. He wanted her! He did want her; he ached for her; she felt it dimly—she had got into his blood.

  To her, who had wanted so much and whose hands were so empty, it seemed unbearable that such a plea should go unanswered. Two people wretched were too many.

  She wished only to see someone else happy, to remind herself that there was such a thing as joy in the world. Out of her enormous inexperience she was assured that her life was lived. And here was a way to end it neatly. Again her early training asserted itself, disastrous as any good rule is applied at the wrong moment. He was urging her to marry him. Marriage meant the end of the old order, a beginning of new things. It was a solution to hand; and it answered Mary's requirements; it would be according to the rules of the game. And it would make Ned happy! In fact, it was a sacrifice on the altar of happiness; it was neither for herself nor for Ned, but for the sake of happiness itself. She hovered fearfully on the brink, delayed putting her hand to the bond with idle questions that in themselves committed her.