From the hopelessness of his expression she deduced that eating wasn’t being done this month in the village. Or — eyes narrowed, she regarded him speculatively — was he trying to keep her here?
He scratched an ear, jiggled the tools in his hand. He was stalling. What would she better do? Insist upon driving out, leaky tank or no leaky tank?
“Let me think — Car just stopped outside. Excuse me, Miss; can’t afford to lose a sale.”
He hurried away wiping oily hands on oilier waste. Pamela heroically turned her back on the sandwiches. Even if she did suspect the man of double-crossing her, it would be like stabbing him in the back to snitch any part of his supper. She looked at the clock. Getting late. She was strong for adventure but this one lacked a sense of timeliness.
Was the tank really leaking? She doubled like a jackknife in an attempt to look under the car. Her hat fell off. She caught it before it reached the floor. Gas would be dripping if the leak were as serious as the man had intimated. She couldn’t see a drop, there was no puddle visible. He had tricked her —
“To get the proper perspective you should be flat on your back.”
“Scott!”
Pamela straightened. The suddenly right-side-up shop whirled. She backed against the bumper of her car, clenched her hands behind her.
“I’m not going back! I am not going back!”
Mallory’s face, which had been a ghostly blur, took on form and color, dark color. He caught her shoulder.
“Come away from that dirty car! You will spoil your clothes.” He drew her forward. “I am not here to drag you back. The mechanic says it will take time to find the leak. If you want to go on tonight you’d better come with me.”
“When did he tell you that?”
“When he was filling up for me. Said he had a job inside which might take a couple of hours.”
“Oh, he did! What communicative souls men are. Babbling brooks have nothing on them. I suspect he is trying to put something across.”
“Mike Shaughnessy wouldn’t do that!”
“Mike? You know him then?”
“I — I usually stop here on my way back and forth. Remember I told you I went to the parsonage across the street once with a wedding party? Mike and I got rather fratty then so I buy gas here on my way up and down.”
Pamela listened with her ears, not with her mind. She remembered his story on the way home from Boston about the eloping couple. She had been half asleep which fact accounted for the dreamlike quality of the church and dove-gray house when she had passed it a while ago.
“Pam!” Mallory’s voice, the grip of his hands on hers shocked her back to the present. “What has come between us? You know that I love you, don’t you? You know that yarn of Phil Carr’s about Hilda Crane and me was straight fiction, don’t you?”
She kept her eyes on his hands. She hadn’t known that a gassy, oily garage could seem so like heaven. She lingered outside the gates.
“Why should I know?” She steadied her traitorous voice. “I am not a mind-reader. You came to the village often, but not to the Silver Moon.”
His grip tightened. His voice was husky from repression.
“The day I went to warn Carnation Carr to keep his hands off my client, he showed me the risk if I tried your case, said that I would be vulnerable because — because I loved you. He’s a prince! He advised that I keep away from you until after the trial. I had told him about meeting Cecile in New York and of her evident suspicion. My calls upon Hilda were a smoke-screen — I couldn’t hurt her heart, she hasn’t any — an excuse for being in the village to consult with him.”
He tilted her chin. “Look at me, Pam. You believe me, don’t you?”
Her eyes met his. “Yes, I —” He pressed his lips hard on hers. Her hands clung tight about his neck, he loosened his arms only to crush her close again.
“Say, Mr. Mallory —”
Scott held Pamela as in a vise when she would have slipped away.
“I will be out in a minute, Shaughnessy. Put — put in a quart of oil — and — and see if the tires need air.”
“I get you!”
The mechanic’s words were curiously choked. Was he laughing as he bolted from the shop? Pamela looked accusingly at the man who still held her as if he never would let her go.
“Scott!”
“I know what you are going to say. Guilty! Terrence phoned Mike to keep you here until I came. We knew that my roadster would cover the ground in half the time it would take the sedan.”
“Suppose I hadn’t stopped?”
“Your brother knew the amount of gas in the tank, figured from your hasty departure that you wouldn’t stop until you had to.”
She tilted her head back against his shoulder.
“Scott, are you sure I am not dreaming?” Her laugh was shaky as she laid her hand on the face swooping to hers. “You needn’t kiss me again to make me realize that you — and — I are not a dream. I meant about Father. Is it possible that a collection of stamps can mean so much money?”
“Several years ago one sold for a million and a half. Count Ferrary’s netted three million.”
“Not dollars!”
“Dollars. Your father’s must be tremendously valuable. When you first told me that he was interested in stamps, I wondered. His insistence that his new wife should not be told of his hobby was suspicious. I began to investigate. I knew that you would not listen to me if I told you that I loved you, while you felt you must make a home for him. Right, wasn’t I?”
She nodded. “I suspected before that you were a mind-reader.”
“I didn’t dare trust myself with you — much — it tore me to pieces to be with you and not tell you that I loved you — have you in my arms. Nothing for me to do but find a fortune for him. I found it. He was furiously angry, but, he got over it. Brown was shaking with eagerness when he paid over those two cheques. I doubt if what he bought made much of a dent in one of the most famous collections in the world.”
“How did you persuade him to pay Terrence and me?”
“I didn’t have to do much persuading. As he improved in health his conscience began to prick. I just encouraged him to make good. I was bound to protect your interests. You were my first Leigh client, you retained me to fire S. Linsky before I talked with your father about his bills.”
“Father is right. You are an unflinching person.”
He drew her hands to his lips.
“I mean to be now, then never again with you. Marry me tonight, will you — Gorgeous?”
“Scott! Are you mad?”
“Come back! I can argue more eloquently when I have you in my arms. By your own admission you don’t care for a wedding splurge. You say that you won’t return to the Silver Moon while your stepmother is there — from Hitty’s account it looks as if she intended to stay for a while, till she gets that allowance — at least. I must be in New York tomorrow night for a conference with clients from the Argentine, will be there two weeks. After that — well, I have an option on a penthouse for the winter. You may have it all silver walls and eggshell lacquer if you like.”
“That is a shameless bribe.” In spite of the turmoil within her, Pamela smiled at him. He kissed her.
“Don’t do that again. I — I can’t think.”
“Why think?”
His shaken whisper drew her heart to her throat. She struggled for composure, mocked gaily:
“One can’t get married without a license, can one?”
He tapped his breast pocket. “What do you think I was doing while Terrence sneaked in the back door of the Silver Moon — with the almost ex-married close together in a secluded corner of the porch — and packed your suitcase and picked up your top-coat? I was at the house of the town clerk getting a special license.”
“Did Terry know that — that —”
“We were to be married? He did. When I told him, he grinned that one-sided smile of his and said, like the soldier he is:
> “‘Tell Pam that it will be a relief to me to have her away from that cook-stove at the Silver Moon. Tell her to think of me in the stilly night practising my curve with the prize Plymouth Rock eggs.’”
Pamela brushed her eyes against a blue serge breast to clear them of tears. Was that Scott’s heart pounding?
Mallory gently smoothed back her hair. “Carnation Carr helped me get that special license.”
“Scotty I had a premonition the night I met Mr. Carr in his Ship Room, that he would change the pattern of my life.”
“Your departure from that same room this afternoon was a smash. Philip started after you. His father caught his arm. Said with a tenderness of which I did not believe that juggernaut of an advocate capable:
“‘That is Mallory’s job, Phil.’”
“How did he know?”
“Know! He knew in our first interview. Everyone knew I was mad about you.”
“I didn’t.”
“Your mistake.” He laid his cheek on her hair. “Coming with me?”
“To New York?”
“To the parsonage across the street first. Your senior counsel attended to that bit of business for me too. Great things, telephones.”
She regarded him with mock gravity. “Do you know, Scott, it is being borne in upon me how terribly afraid Carnation Carr was that I would marry his only child.”
“Don’t get him wrong. He would have adored you for a daughter, but — you won’t like this — he said that the first time you mentioned my name, he knew you loved me. His assurance was all that kept me going, these last interminable weeks.”
His eyes darkened. Pamela was beginning to know that look.
“Coming?”
“Yes.”
He raised her hand to his lips. Slipped a ring on her finger, a blazing planet of a diamond set in a twinkling constellation of lesser stars. “I came prepared to make you wear this the moment the trial was over. It will have to serve for a wedding ring too. Like it?”
She looked at him in answer.
Perhaps in time, the haze, behind which lurked the past fifteen minutes, might lift and she would remember clearly the sequence of events, Pamela thought as she followed the stepping-stones from the parsonage door to the shining roadster. She had only a confused sense of a kindly white-haired clergyman with a book; of a placid woman with a mammoth cameo pin at her lace collar; of an amber-haired school-girl; Scott’s eyes glowing through the fog; the pressure of his hand, the uneven richness of his voice answering,
“I do.”
Mallory pulled her coat from the car. “Better put this on.” He drew it about her shoulders with disturbing care. He observed casually as he started the roadster:
“Mike Shaughnessy will take the sedan back to Terrence.”
“Was there really a leak in the gas-tank, Scott?”
A note in his laugh set her pulses rioting. “He seems like an honest man.”
Moonlight softly blurred the world. Silver dews shimmered on the meadows. The roadster skirted a produce-laden wagon; the lumbering farm horses pricked dejected ears, shuffled hairy fetlocks and relapsed into a plod.
“We’ll have a fine day for the trip tomorrow.”
Fair tomorrow! Terrifying and disillusioning much of the year behind her; but fair tomorrow and all the tomorrows so long as she and Scott were together, Pamela told herself passionately.
Down the road the lights of a long building twinkled invitingly. Mallory drove more slowly as he asked:
“Hungry?”
“Starving. I had just realized when you crashed into the garage, that I had eaten nothing since breakfast.”
“We will stop somewhere for supper at once.” He threw a newly possessive arm about her shoulders. “Suppose we stay at that inn ahead tonight? It is a good one.”
Pamela kept her eyes on her locked fingers. “You mean — stop here and — and go on to New York tomorrow?”
“Yes. Don’t you intend ever again to look at the man you have married — Mrs. Mallory?”
Pamela’s lashes swept up. The unguarded, passionate light in Scott Mallory’s eyes softened.
“Sweet child!” he whispered tenderly and kissed her gently on the lips.
At the hospitably open door of the inn he caught her hand, drew her into the shadow.
“Happy, dear?”
The hint of remorseful anxiety in his low voice, the husky break in the last word, gave wings to her heart. After all, it was Scott, who, since the day he had stepped into the green and white kitchen had been unfailingly tender; Scott, who loved her, with whom she was crossing this strange threshold. Her radiant eyes confirmed the lilt in her voice as she answered:
“Happy? Top of the world!”
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Fair Tomorrow Page 23
