A Poor Wise Man

by Mary Roberts Rinehart

  CHAPTER IV

  While Grace rested that afternoon of Lily's return, Lily ranged overthe house. In twenty odd years the neighborhood had changed, and onlya handful of the old families remained. Many of the other large houseswere prostituted to base uses. Dingy curtains hung at their windows,dingy because of the smoke from the great furnaces and railroads. Theold Osgood residence, nearby, had been turned into apartments, withbottles of milk and paper bags on its fire-escapes, and a pharmacy onthe street floor. The Methodist Church, following its congregation tothe vicinity of old Anthony's farm, which was now cut up into city lots,had abandoned the building, and it had become a garage. The penitentiaryhad been moved outside the city limits, and near its old site was asmall cement-lined lake, the cheerful rendezvous in summer of bathingchildren and thirsty dogs.

  Lily was idle, for the first time in months. She wandered about, evenpenetrating to those upper rooms sacred to her grandfather, to which hehad retired on Howard's marriage. How strangely commonplace they werenow, in the full light of day, and yet, when he was in them, the doorsclosed and only Burton, his valet, in attendance, how mysterious theybecame!

  Increasingly, in later years, Lily had felt and resented the dominationof the old man. She resented her father's acquiescence in thatdomination, her mother's good-humored tolerance of it. She herself hadaccepted it, although unwillingly, but she knew, rather vaguely, thatthe Lily Cardew who had gone away to the camp and the Lily Cardew whostood that day before her grandfather's throne-like chair under itslamp, were two entirely different people.

  She was uneasy rather than defiant. She meant to keep the peace. Shehad been brought up to the theory that no price was too great to pay forpeace. But she wondered, as she stood there, if that were entirely true.She remembered something Willy Cameron had said about that very thing.

  "What's wrong with your grandfather," he had said, truculently, andwaving his pipe, "is that everybody gets down and lets him walk on them.If everybody lets a man use them as doormats, you can't blame him forwiping his feet on them. Tell him that sometime, and see what happens."

  "Tell him yourself!" said Lily.

  He had smiled cheerfully. He had an engaging sort of smile.

  "Maybe I will," he said. "I am a rising young man, and my voice may someday be heard in the land. Sometimes I feel the elements of greatness inme, sweet child. You haven't happened to notice it yourself, have you?"

  He had gazed at her with solemn anxiety through the smoke of his pipe,and had grinned when she remained silent.

  Lily drew a long breath. All that delightful fooling was over; the hardwork was over. The nights were gone when they would wander like childrenacross the parade grounds, or past the bayonet school, with its rows oftripods upholding imitation enemies made of sacks stuffed with hay, andshowing signs of mortal injury with their greasy entrails protruding.Gone, too, were the hours when Willy sank into the lowest abyss ofdepression over his failure to be a fighting man.

  "But you are doing your best for your country," she would say.

  "I'm not fighting for it, or getting smashed up for it. I don't wantto be a hero, but I'd like to have had one good bang at them before Iquit."

  Once she had found him in the hut, with his head on a table. He said hehad a toothache.

  Well, that was all over. She was back in her grandfather's house, and--

  "He'll get me too, probably," she reflected, as she went down thestairs, "just as he's got all the others."

  Mademoiselle was in Lily's small sitting room, while Castle wasunpacking under her supervision. The sight of her uniforms made Lilysuddenly restless.

  "How you could wear these things!" cried Mademoiselle. "You, who havealways dressed like a princess!"

  "I liked them," said Lily, briefly. "Mademoiselle, what am I going to dowith myself, now?"

  "Do?" Mademoiselle smiled. "Play, as you deserve, Cherie. Dance, andmeet nice young men. You are to make your debut this fall. Then a verycharming young man, and marriage."

  "Oh!" said Lily, rather blankly. "I've got to come out, have I? I'dforgotten people did such things. Please run along and do somethingelse, Castle. I'll unpack."

  "That is very bad for discipline," Mademoiselle objected when themaid had gone. "And it is not necessary for Mr. Anthony Cardew'sgranddaughter."

  "It's awfully necessary for her," Lily observed, cheerfully. "I've beenbuttoning my own shoes for some time, and I haven't developed a spinalcurvature yet." She kissed Mademoiselle's perplexed face lightly. "Don'tget to worrying about me," she added. "I'll shake down in time, and bejust as useless as ever. But I wish you'd lend me your sewing basket."

  "Why?" asked Mademoiselle, suspiciously.

  "Because I am possessed with a mad desire to sew on some buttons."

  A little later Lily looked up from her rather awkward but industriouslabors with a needle, and fixed her keen young eyes on Mademoiselle.

  "Is there any news about Aunt Elinor?" she asked.

  "She is with him," said Mademoiselle, shortly. "They are here now, inthe city. How he dared to come back!"

  "Does mother see her?"

  "No. Certainly not."

  "Why 'certainly' not? He is Aunt Elinor's husband. She isn't doinganything wicked."

  "A woman who would leave a home like this," said Mademoiselle, "and adistinguished family. Position. Wealth. For a brute who beats her. Anddesert her child also!"

  "Does he really beat her? I don't quite believe that, Mademoiselle."

  "It is not a subject for a young girl."

  "Because really," Lily went on, "there is something awfully big about awoman who will stick to one man like that. I am quite sure I would bitea man who struck me, but--suppose I loved him terribly--" her voicetrailed off. "You see, dear, I have seen a lot of brutality lately. Anarmy camp isn't a Sunday school picnic. And I like strong men, even ifthey are brutal sometimes."

  Mademoiselle carefully cut a thread.

  "This--you were speaking to Ellen of a young man. Is he a--what you termbrutal?"

  Suddenly Lily laughed.

  "You poor dear!" she said. "And mother, too, of course! You're afraidI'm in love with Willy Cameron. Don't you know that if I were, I'dprobably never even mention his name?"

  "But is he brutal?" persisted Mademoiselle.

  "I'll tell you about him. He is a thin, blond young man, tall and a bitlame. He has curly hair, and he puts pomade on it to take the curl out.He is frightfully sensitive about not getting in the army, and he isperfectly sweet and kind, and as brutal as a June breeze. You'd bettertell mother. And you can tell her he isn't in love with me, or I withhim. You see, I represent what he would call the monied aristocracy ofAmerica, and he has the most fearful ideas about us."

  "An anarchist, then?" asked. Mademoiselle, extremely comforted.

  "Not at all. He says he belongs to the plain people. The people inbetween. He is rather oratorical about them. He calls them the backboneof the country."

  Mademoiselle relaxed. She had been too long in old Anthony's houseto consider very seriously the plain people. Her world, like AnthonyCardew's, consisted of the financial aristocracy, which invested moneyin industries and drew out rich returns, while providing employment forthe many; and of the employees of the magnates, who had recently shownstrong tendencies toward upsetting the peace of the land, and had givenold Anthony one or two attacks of irritability when it was better to goup a rear staircase if he were coming down the main one.

  "Wait a moment," said Lily, suddenly. "I have a picture of himsomewhere."

  She disappeared, and Mademoiselle heard her rummaging through thedrawers of her dressing table. She came back with a small photograph inher hand.

  It showed a young man, in a large apron over a Red Cross uniform,bending over a low field range with a long-handled fork in his hand.

  "Frying doughnuts," Lily explained. "I was in this hut at first, and Imixed them and cut them, and he fried them. We made thousands of them.We used to talk about opening a shop somew
here, Cardew and Cameron. Hesaid my name would be fine for business. He'd fry them in the window,and I'd sell them. And a coffee machine--coffee and doughnuts, youknow."

  "Not--seriously?"

  At the expression on Mademoiselle's face Lily laughed joyously.

  "Why not?" she demanded. "And you could be the cashier, like the ones inFrance, and sit behind a high desk and count money all day. I'd ratherdo that than come out," she added.

  "You are going to be a good girl, Lily, aren't you?"

  "If that means letting grandfather use me for a doormat, I don't know."

  "Lily!"

  "He's old, and I intend to be careful. But he doesn't own me, body andsoul. And it may be hard to make him understand that."

  Many times in the next few months Mademoiselle was to remember thatconversation, and turn it over in her shrewd, troubled mind. Was thereanything she could have done, outside of warning old Anthony himself?Suppose she had gone to Mr. Howard Cardew?

  "And how," said Mademoiselle, trying to smile, "do you propose to assertthis new independence of spirit?"

  "I am going to see Aunt Elinor," observed Lily. "There, that's elevenbuttons on, and I feel I've earned my dinner. And I'm going to ask WillyCameron to come here to see me. To dinner. And as he is sure not to haveany evening clothes, for one night in their lives the Cardew men aregoing to dine in mufti. Which is military, you dear old thing, forthe everyday clothing that the plain people eat in, without apparentsuffering!"

  Mademoiselle got up. She felt that Grace should be warned at once. Andthere was a look in Lily's face when she mentioned this Cameron creaturethat made Mademoiselle nervous.

  "I thought he lived in the country."

  "Then prepare yourself for a blow," said Lily Cardew, cheerfully. "Heis here in the city, earning twenty-five dollars a week in the EaglePharmacy, and serving the plain people perfectly preposterous patentpotions--which is his own alliteration, and pretty good, I say."

  Mademoiselle went out into the hall. Over the house, always silent,there had come a death-like hush. In the lower hall the footman washanging up his master's hat and overcoat. Anthony Cardew had come homefor dinner.