"I am afraid that Sister Letitia discovered that I had taken some of the pearls. But--half of them were mine, from our mother, and although I had wanted a pearl ring all my life, I have never had one. I am going to buy me a hat, instead of a bonnet, and clothes, and pretty things underneath, and a switch; Margery, I have wanted a switch for thirty years.
"I suppose Letitia will never want me back. Perhaps I shall not want to come. I tried to write to her when I was leaving, but I had cut my hand in the attic, where I had hidden away my clothes, and it bled on the paper. I have been worried since for fear your Aunt Letitia would find the paper in the basket, and be alarmed at the stains. I wanted to leave things in order--please tell Letitia--but I was so nervous, and in such a hurry. I walked three miles to Wynton and took a street-car. I just made up my mind I was going to do it. I am sixty-five, and it is time I have a chance to do the things I like.
"I came in on the car, and came directly here. I got in with the second key on your key-ring. Did you miss it? And I did the strangest thing at Bellwood. I got down the stairs very quietly and out on to the porch. I set down my empty traveling bag--I was going to buy everything new in the city--to close the door behind me. Then I was sure I heard some one at the side of the house, and I picked it up and ran down the path in the dark.
"You can imagine my surprise when I opened the bag this morning to find I had picked up Harry's. I am emptying it and taking it with me, for he has mine.
"If you find this right away, please don't tell Sister Letitia for a day or two. You know how firm your Aunt Letitia is. I shall send her a present from Boston to pacify her, and perhaps when I come back in three or four months, she will be over the worst.
"I am not quite comfortable about your father, Margery. He is not like himself. The last time I saw him he gave me a little piece of paper with a number on it and he said they followed him everywhere, and were driving him crazy. Try to have him see a doctor. And I left a bottle of complexion cream in the little closet over my mantel, where I had hidden my hat and shoes that I wore. Please destroy it before your Aunt Letitia sees it.
"Good-by, my dear niece. I suppose I am growing frivolous in my old age, but I am going to have silk linings in my clothes before I die.
"YOUR LOVING AUNT JANE."
When Margery stopped reading, there was an amazed silence. Then we all three burst into relieved, uncontrolled mirth. The dear, little, old lady with her new independence and her sixty-five-year-old, romantic, starved heart!
Then we opened the packet, which was a sadder business, for it had represented Allan Fleming's last clutch at his waning public credit.
Edith ran to the telephone with the news for Fred, and for the first time that day Margery and I were alone. She was standing with one hand on the library table; in the other she held Aunt Jane's letter, half tremulous, wholly tender. I put my hand over hers, on the table.
"Margery!" I said. She did not stir.
"Margery, I want my answer, dear. I love you--love you; it isn't possible to tell you how much. There isn't enough time in all existence to tell you. You are mine, Margery--mine. You can't get away from that."
She turned, very slowly, and looked at me with her level eyes. "Yours!" she replied softly, and I took her in my arms.
Edith was still at the telephone.
"I don't know," she was saying. "Just wait until I see."
As she came toward the door, Margery squirmed, but I held her tight. In the doorway Edith stopped and stared; then she went swiftly back to the telephone.
"Yes, dear," she said sweetly. "They are, this minute."
THE END
* * *
CONTENTS
WHEN A MAN MARRIES
By Mary Roberts Rinehart
Needles and pins
Needles and pins,
When a man marries
His trouble begins.
Chapter I. AT LEAST I MEANT WELL
When the dreadful thing occurred that night, every one turned on me. The injustice of it hurt me most. They said I got up the dinner, that I asked them to give up other engagements and come, that I promised all kinds of jollification, if they would come; and then when they did come and got in the papers and every one—but ourselves—laughed himself black in the face, they turned on ME! I, who suffered ten times to their one! I shall never forget what Dallas Brown said to me, standing with a coal shovel in one hand and a—well, perhaps it would be better to tell it all in the order it happened.
It began with Jimmy Wilson and a conspiracy, was helped on by a foot-square piece of yellow paper and a Japanese butler, and it enmeshed and mixed up generally ten respectable members of society and a policeman. Incidentally, it involved a pearl collar and a box of soap, which sounds incongruous, doesn't it?
It is a great misfortune to be stout, especially for a man. Jim was rotund and looked shorter than he really was, and as all the lines of his face, or what should have been lines, were really dimples, his face was about as flexible and full of expression as a pillow in a tight cover. The angrier he got the funnier he looked, and when he was raging, and his neck swelled up over his collar and got red, he was entrancing. And everybody liked him, and borrowed money from him, and laughed at his pictures (he has one in the Hargrave gallery in London now, so people buy them instead), and smoked his cigarettes, and tried to steal his Jap. The whole story hinges on the Jap.
The trouble was, I think, that no one took Jim seriously. His ambition in life was to be taken seriously, but people steadily refused to. His art was a huge joke—except to himself. If he asked people to dinner, every one expected a frolic. When he married Bella Knowles, people chuckled at the wedding, and considered it the wildest prank of Jimmy's career, although Jim himself seemed to take it awfully hard.
We had all known them both for years. I went to Farmington with Bella, and Anne Brown was her matron of honor when she married Jim. My first winter out, Jimmy had paid me a lot of attention. He painted my portrait in oils and had a studio tea to exhibit it. It was a very nice picture, but it did not look like me, so I stayed away from the exhibition. Jim asked me to. He said he was not a photographer, and that anyhow the rest of my features called for the nose he had given me, and that all the Greuze women have long necks. I have not.
After I had refused Jim twice he met Bella at a camp in the Adirondacks and when he came back he came at once to see me. He seemed to think I would be sorry to lose him, and he blundered over the telling for twenty minutes. Of course, no woman likes to lose a lover, no matter what she may say about it, but Jim had been getting on my nerves for some time, and I was much calmer than he expected me to be.
"If you mean," I said finally in desperation, "that you and Bella are—are in love, why don't you say so, Jim? I think you will find that I stand it wonderfully."
He brightened perceptibly.
"I didn't know how you would take it, Kit," he said, "and I hope we will always be bully friends. You are absolutely sure you don't care a whoop for me?"
"Absolutely," I replied, and we shook hands on it. Then he began about Bella; it was very tiresome.
Bella is a nice girl, but I had roomed with her at school, and I was under no illusions. When Jim raved about Bella and her banjo, and Bella and her guitar, I had painful moments when I recalled Bella, learning her two songs on each instrument, and the old English ballad she had learned to play on the harp. When he said she was too good for him, I never batted an eye. And I shook hands solemnly across the tea-table again, and wished him happiness—which was sincere enough, but hopeless—and said we had only been playing a game, but that it was time to stop playing. Jim kissed my hand, and it was really very touching.
We had been the best of friends ever since. Two days before the wedding he came around from his tailor's, and we burned all his letters to me. He would read one and say: "Here's a crackerjack, Kit," and pass it to me. And after I had read it we would lay it on the firelog, and Jim would say, "I am not worthy of her, Kit. I w
onder if I can make her happy?" Or—"Did you know that the Duke of Belford proposed to her in London last winter?"
Of course, one has to take the woman's word about a thing like that, but the Duke of Belford had been mad about Maude Richard all that winter.
You can see that the burning of the letters, which was meant to be reminiscently sentimental, a sort of how-silly-we-were-but-it-is all-over-now occasion, became actually a two hours' eulogy of Bella. And just when I was bored to death, the Mercer girls dropped in and heard Jim begin to read one commencing "dearest Kit." And the next day after the rehearsal dinner, they told Bella!
There was very nearly no wedding at all. Bella came to see me in a frenzy the next morning and threw Jim and his two-hundred odd pounds in my face, and although I explained it all over and over, she never quite forgave me. That was what made it so hard later—the situation would have been bad enough without that complication.
They went abroad on their wedding journey, and stayed several months. And when Jim came back he was fatter than ever. Everybody noticed it. Bella had a gymnasium fitted up in a corner of the studio, but he would not use it. He smoked a pipe and painted all day, and drank beer and WOULD eat starches or whatever it is that is fattening. But he adored Bella, and he was madly jealous of her. At dinners he used to glare at the man who took her in, although it did not make him thin. Bella was flirting, too, and by the time they had been married a year, people hitched their chairs together and dropped their voices when they were mentioned.
Well, on the anniversary of the day Bella left him—oh yes, she left him finally. She was intense enough about some things, and she said it got on her nerves to have everybody chuckle when they asked for her husband. They would say, "Hello, Bella! How's Bubbles? Still banting?" And Bella would try to laugh and say, "He swears his tailor says his waist is smaller, but if it is he must be growing hollow in the back."
But she got tired of it at last. Well, on the second anniversary of Bella's departure, Jimmy was feeling pretty glum, and as I say, I am very fond of Jim. The divorce had just gone through and Bella had taken her maiden name again and had had an operation for appendicitis. We heard afterward that they didn't find an appendix, and that the one they showed her in a glass jar WAS NOT HERS! But if Bella ever suspected, she didn't say. Whether the appendix was anonymous or not, she got box after box of flowers that were, and of course every one knew that it was Jim who sent them.
To go back to the anniversary, I went to Rothberg's to see the collection of antique furniture—mother was looking for a sideboard for father's birthday in March—and I met Jimmy there, boring into a worm-hole in a seventeenth-century bedpost with the end of a match, and looking his nearest to sad. When he saw me he came over.
"I'm blue today, Kit," he said, after we had shaken hands. "Come and help me dig bait, and then let's go fishing. If there's a worm in every hole in that bedpost, we could go into the fish business. It's a good business."
"Better than painting?" I asked. But he ignored my gibe and swelled up alarmingly in order to sigh.
"This is the worst day of the year for me," he affirmed, staring straight ahead, "and the longest. Look at that crazy clock over there. If you want to see your life passing away, if you want to see the steps by which you are marching to eternity, watch that clock marking the time. Look at that infernal hand staying quiet for sixty seconds and then jumping forward to catch up with the procession. Ugh!"
"See here, Jim," I said, leaning forward, "you're not well. You can't go through the rest of the day like this. I know what you'll do; you'll go home to play Grieg on the pianola, and you won't eat any dinner." He looked guilty.
"Not Grieg," he protested feebly. "Beethoven."
"You're not going to do either," I said with firmness. "You are going right home to unpack those new draperies that Harry Bayles sent you from Shanghai, and you are going to order dinner for eight—that will be two tables of bridge. And you are not going to touch the pianola."
He did not seem enthusiastic, but he rose and picked up his hat, and stood looking down at me where I sat on an old horse-hair covered sofa.
"I wish to thunder I had married you!" he said savagely. "You're the finest girl I know, Kit, WITHOUT EXCEPTION, and you are going to throw yourself away on Jack Manning, or Max, or some other—"
"Nothing of the sort," I said coldly, "and the fact that you didn't marry me does not give you the privilege of abusing my friends. Anyhow, I don't like you when you speak like that."
Jim took me to the door and stopped there to sigh.
"I haven't been well," he said heavily. "Don't eat, don't sleep. Wouldn't you think I'd lose flesh? Kit"—he lowered his voice solemnly—"I have gained two pounds!"
I said he didn't look it, which appeared to comfort him somewhat, and, because we were old friends, I asked him where Bella was. He said he thought she was in Europe, and that he had heard she was going to marry Reggie Wolfe. Then he signed again, muttered something about ordering the funeral baked meats to be prepared and left me.
That was my entire share in the affair. I was the victim, both of circumstances and of their plot, which was mad on the face of it.
During the entire time they never once let me forget that I got up the dinner, that I telephoned around for them. They asked me why I couldn't cook—when not one of them knew one side of a range from the other. And for Anne Brown to talk the way she did—saying I had always been crazy about Jim, and that she believed I had known all along that his aunt was coming—for Anne to talk like that was sheer idiocy. Yes, there was an aunt. The Japanese butler started the trouble, and Aunt Selina carried it along.
Chapter II. THE WAY IT BEGAN
It makes me angry every time I think how I tried to make that dinner a success. I canceled a theater engagement, and I took the Mercer girls in the electric brougham father had given me for Christmas. Their chauffeur had been gone for hours with their machine, and they had telephoned all the police stations without success. They were afraid that there had been an awful smash; they could easily have replaced Bartlett, as Lollie said, but it takes so long to get new parts for those foreign cars.
Jim had a house well up-town, and it stood just enough apart from the other houses to be entirely maddening later. It was a three-story affair, with a basement kitchen and servants' dining room. Then, of course, there were cellars, as we found out afterward. On the first floor there was a large square hall, a formal reception room, behind it a big living room that was also a library, then a den, and back of all a Georgian dining room, with windows high above the ground. On the top floor Jim had a studio, like every other one I ever saw—perhaps a little mussier. Jim was really a grind at his painting, and there were cigarette ashes and palette knives and buffalo rugs and shields everywhere. It is strange, but when I think of that terrible house, I always see the halls, enormous, covered with heavy rugs, and stairs that would have taken six housemaids to keep in proper condition. I dream about those stairs, stretching above me in a Jacob's ladder of shining wood and Persian carpets, going up, up, clear to the roof.
The Dallas Browns walked; they lived in the next block. And they brought with them a man named Harbison, that no one knew. Anne said he would be great sport, because he was terribly serious, and had the most exaggerated ideas of society, and loathed extravagance, and built bridges or something. She had put away her cigarettes since he had been with them—he and Dallas had been college friends—and the only chance she had to smoke was when she was getting her hair done. And she had singed off quite a lot—a burnt offering, she called it.
"My dear," she said over the telephone, when I invited her, "I want you to know him. He'll be crazy about you. That type of man, big and deadly earnest, always falls in love with your type of girl, the appealing sort, you know. And he has been too busy, up to now, to know what love is. But mind, don't hurt him; he's a dear boy. I'm half in love with him myself, and Dallas trots around at his heels like a poodle."
But all Anne's g
eese are swans, so I thought little of the Harbison man except to hope that he played respectable bridge, and wouldn't mark the cards with a steel spring under his finger nail, as one of her "finds" had done.
We all arrived about the same time, and Anne and I went upstairs together to take off our wraps in what had been Bella's dressing room. It was Anne who noticed the violets.
"Look at that!" she nudged me, when the maid was examining her wrap before she laid it down. "What did I tell you, Kit? He's still quite mad about her."
Jim had painted Bella's portrait while they were going up the Nile on their wedding trip. It looked quite like her, if you stood well off in the middle of the room and if the light came from the right. And just beneath it, in a silver vase, was a bunch of violets. It was really touching, and violets were fabulous. It made me want to cry, and to shake Bella soundly, and to go down and pat Jim on his generous shoulder, and tell him what a good fellow I thought him, and that Bella wasn't worth the dust under his feet. I don't know much about psychology, but it would be interesting to know just what effect those violets and my sympathy for Jim had in influencing my decision a half hour later. It is not surprising, under the circumstances, that for some time after the odor of violets made me ill.
We all met downstairs in the living room, quite informally, and Dallas was banging away at the pianola, tramping the pedals with the delicacy and feeling of a football center rush kicking a goal. Mr. Harbison was standing near the fire, a little away from the others, and he was all that Anne had said and more in appearance. He was tall—not too tall, and very straight. And after one got past the oddity of his face being bronze-colored above his white collar, and of his brown hair being sun-bleached on top until it was almost yellow, one realized that he was very handsome. He had what one might call a resolute nose and chin, and a pleasant, rather humorous, mouth. And he had blue eyes that were, at that moment, wandering with interest over the lot of us. Somebody shouted his name to me above the Tristan and Isolde music, and I held out my hand.
The Best of Mary Roberts Rinehart Page 41