The Best of Mary Roberts Rinehart

by Mary Roberts Rinehart

  Then one night Edith heard Willy's voice below, and indicated that she wanted to see him. He came in, stooping under the sheet which Mrs. Boyd had heard belonged in the doorway of diphtheria, and stood looking down at her. His heart ached. He sat down on the bed beside her and stroked her hand.

  "Poor little girl," he said. "We've got to make things very happy for her, to make up for all this!"

  But Edith freed her hand, and reaching out for paper and pencil stub, wrote something and gave it to Ellen.

  Ellen read it.

  "Tell him."

  "I don't want to, Edith. You wait and do it yourself."

  But Edith made an insistent gesture, and Ellen, flushed and wretched, had to tell. He made no sign, but sat stroking Edith's hand, only he stared rather fixedly at the wall, conscious that the girl's eyes were watching him for a single gesture of surprise or anger. He felt no anger, only a great perplexity and sadness, an older-brother grief.

  "I'm sorry, little sister," he said, and did the kindest thing he could think of, bent over and kissed her on the forehead. "Of course I know how you feel, but it is a big thing to bear a child, isn't it? It is the only miracle we have these days."

  "A child with no father," said Ellen, stonily.

  "Even then," he persisted, "it's a big thing. We would have this one come under happier circumstances if we could, but we will welcome and take care of it, anyhow. A child's a child, and mighty valuable. And," he added—"I appreciate your wanting me to know, Edith."

  He stayed a little while after that, but he read aloud, choosing a humorous story and laughing very hard at all the proper places. In the end he brought a faint smile to Edith's blistered lips, and a small lift to the cloud that hung over her now, day and night.

  He made a speech that night, and into it he put all of his aching, anxious soul; Edith and Dan and Lily were behind it. Akers and Doyle. It was at a meeting in the hall over the city market, and the audience a new men's non-partisan association.

  "Sometimes," he said, "I am asked what it is that we want, we men who are standing behind Hendricks as an independent candidate." He was supposed to bring Mr. Hendricks' name in as often as possible. "I answer that we want honest government, law and order, an end to this conviction that the country is owned by the unions and the capitalists, a fair deal for the plain people, which is you and I, my friends. But I answer still further, we want one thing more, a greater thing, and that thing we shall have. All through this great country to-night are groups of men hoping and planning for an incredible thing. They are not great in numbers; they are, however, organized, competent, intelligent and deadly. They plow the land with discord to sow the seeds of sedition. And the thing they want is civil war.

  "And against them, what? The people like you and me; the men with homes they love; the men with little businesses they have fought and labored to secure; the clerks; the preachers; the doctors, the honest laborers, the God-fearing rich. I tell you, we are the people, and it is time we knew our power.

  "And this is the thing we want, we the people; the greater thing, the thing we shall have; that this government, this country which we love, which has three times been saved at such cost of blood, shall survive."

  It was after that speech that he met Pink Denslow for the first time. A square, solidly built young man edged his way through the crowd, and shook hands with him.

  "Name's Denslow," said Pink. "Liked what you said. Have you time to run over to my club with me and have a high-ball and a talk?"

  "I've got all the rest of the night."

  "Right-o!" said Pink, who had brought back a phrase or two from the British.

  It was not until they were in the car that Pink said:

  "I think you're a friend of Miss Cardew's, aren't you?"

  "I know Miss Cardew," said Willy Cameron, guardedly. And they were both rather silent for a time.

  That night proved to be a significant one for them both, as it happened. They struck up a curious sort of friendship, based on a humble admiration on Pink's part, and with Willy Cameron on sheer hunger for the society of his kind. He had been suffering a real mental starvation. He had been constantly giving out and getting nothing in return.

  Pink developed a habit of dropping into the pharmacy when he happened to be nearby. He was rather wistfully envious of that year in the camp, when Lily Cardew and Cameron had been together, and at first it was the bond of Lily that sent him to the shop. In the beginning the shop irritated him, because it seemed an incongruous background for the fiery young orator. But later on he joined the small open forum in the back room, and perhaps for the first time in his idle years he began to think. He had made the sacrifice of his luxurious young life to go to war, had slept in mud and risked his body and been hungry and cold and often frightfully homesick. And now it appeared that a lot of madmen were going to try to undo all that he had helped to do. He was surprised and highly indignant. Even a handful of agitators, it seemed, could do incredible harm.

  One night he and Willy Cameron slipped into a meeting of a Russian Society, wearing old clothes, which with Willy was not difficult, and shuffling up dirty stairs without molestation. They came away thoughtful.

  "Looks like it's more than talk," Pink said, after a time.

  "They're not dangerous," Willy Cameron said. "That's talk. But it shows a state of mind. The real incendiaries don't show their hand like that."

  "You think it's real, then?"

  "Some boils don't come to a head. But most do."

  It was after a mob of foreigners had tried to capture the town of Donesson, near Pittsburgh, and had been turned back by a hastily armed body of its citizens, doctors, lawyers and shop-keepers, that a nebulous plan began to form in Willy Cameron's active mind.

  If one could unite the plain people politically, or against a foreign war, why could they not be united against an enemy at home? The South had had a similar problem, and the result was the Ku Klux Klan.

  The Chief of Police was convinced that a plan was being formulated to repeat the Seattle experiment against the city. The Mayor was dubious. He was not a strong man; he had a conviction that because a thing never had happened it never could happen.

  "The mob has done it before," urged the Chief of Police one day. "They took Paris, and it was damned disagreeable."

  The Mayor was a trifle weak in history.

  "Maybe they did," he agreed. "But this is different. This is America."

  He was rather uneasy after that. It had occurred to him that the Chief might have referred to Paris, Illinois.

  Now and then Pink coaxed Willy Cameron to his club, and for those rare occasions he provided always a little group of men like themselves, young, eager, loyal, and struggling with the new problems of the day. In this environment Willy Cameron received as well as gave.

  Most of the men had been in the army, and he found in them an eager anxiety to face the coming situation and combat it. In the end the nucleus of the new Vigilance Committee was formed there.

  Not immediately. The idea was of slow growth even with its originator, and it only reached the point of speech when Mr. Hendricks stopped in one day at the pharmacy and brought a bundle which he slapped down on the prescription desk.

  "Read that dynamite," he said, his face flushed and lowering. "A man I know got it translated for me. Read it and then tell me whether I'm an alarmist and a plain fool, or if it means trouble around here."

  There was no question in Willy Cameron's mind as to which it meant.

  Louis Akers had by that time announced his candidacy for Mayor, and organized labor was behind him to an alarming extent. When Willy Cameron went with Pink to the club that afternoon, he found Akers under discussion, and he heard some facts about that gentleman's private life which left him silent and morose. Pink knew nothing of Lily's friendship with Akers. Indeed, Pink did not know that Lily was in the city, and Willy Cameron had not undeceived him. It had pleased Anthony Cardew to announce in the press that Lily was making a roun
d of visits, and the secret was not his to divulge. But the question which was always in his mind rose again. What did she see in the man? How could she have thrown away her home and her family for a fellow who was so obviously what Pink would have called "a wrong one"?

  He roused, however, at a question.

  "He may," he said; "with three candidates we're splitting the vote three ways, and it's hard to predict. Mr. Cardew can't be elected, but he weakens Hendricks. One thing's sure. Where's my pipe?" Silence while Mr. Cameron searched for his pipe, and took his own time to divulge the sure thing. "If Hendricks is elected he'll clear out the entire bunch of anarchists. The present man's afraid. But if Akers can hypnotize labor into voting for him, and he gets it, it will be up to the city to protect itself, for he won't. He'll let them hold their infamous meetings and spread their damnable doctrine, and—you know what they've tried to do in other places." He explained what he had in mind then, finding them expectant and eager. There ought to be some sort of citizen organization, to supplement the state and city forces. Nothing spectacular; indeed, the least said about it the better. He harked back then to his idea of the plain people, with homes to protect.

  "That needn't keep you fellows out," he said, with his whimsical smile. "But the rank and file will have to constitute the big end. We don't want a lot of busybodies, pussy-footing around with guns and looking for trouble. We had enough of that during the war. We would want some men who would answer a riot call if they were needed. That's all."

  He had some of the translations Hendricks had brought him in his pocket, and they circulated around the group.

  "Do you think they mean to attack the city?"

  "That looks like it, doesn't it? And they are getting that sort of stuff all the time. There are a hundred thousand of them in this end of the state."

  "Would you make it a secret organization?"

  "Yes. I like doing things in the open myself, but you've got to fight a rat in his hole, if he won't come out."

  "Would you hold office?" Pink asked.

  Willy Cameron smiled.

  "I'm a good bit like the boy who dug post holes in the daytime and took in washing at night to support the family. But I'll work, if that's what you mean."

  "We'd better have a constitution and all that, don't you think?" Pink asked. "We can draw up a tentative one, and then fix it up at the first meeting. This is going to be a big thing. It'll go like a fire."

  But Willy Cameron overruled that.

  "We don't need that sort of stuff," he said, "and if we begin that we might as well put it in the newspapers. We want men who can keep their mouths shut, and who will sign some sort of a card agreeing to stand by the government and to preserve law and order. Then an office and a filing case, and their addresses, so we can get at them in a hurry if we need them. Get me a piece of paper, somebody."

  Then and there, in twenty words, Willy Cameron wrote the now historic oath of the new Vigilance Committee, on the back of an old envelope. It was a promise, an agreement rather than an oath. There was a little hush as the paper passed from hand to hand. Not a man there but felt a certain solemnity in the occasion. To preserve the Union and the flag, to fight all sedition, to love their country and support it; the very simplicity of the words was impressive. And the mere putting of it into visible form crystallized their hitherto vague anxieties, pointed to a real enemy and a real danger. Yet, as Willy Cameron pointed out, they might never be needed.

  "Our job," he said, "is only as a last resort. Only for real trouble. Until the state troops can get here, for instance, and if the constabulary is greatly outnumbered. It's their work up to a certain point. We'll fight if they need us. That's all."

  It was very surprising to him to find the enterprise financed immediately. Pink offered an office in the bank building. Some one agreed to pay a clerk who should belong to the committee. It was practical, businesslike, and—done. And, although he had protested, he found himself made the head of the organization.

  "—without title and without pay," he stipulated. "If you wish a title on me, I'll resign."

  He went home that night very exalted and very humble.

  CHAPTER XXI

  For a time Lily remained hidden in the house on Cardew Way, walking out after nightfall with Louis occasionally, but shrinkingly keeping to quiet back streets. She had a horror of meeting some one she knew, of explanations and of gossip. But after a time the desire to see her mother became overwhelming. She took to making little flying visits home at an hour when her grandfather was certain to be away, going in a taxicab, and reaching the house somewhat breathless and excited. She was driven by an impulse toward the old familiar things; she was homesick for them all, for her mother, for Mademoiselle, for her own rooms, for her little toilet table, for her bed and her reading lamp. For the old house itself.

  She was still an alien where she was. Elinor Doyle was a perpetual enigma to her; now and then she thought she had penetrated behind the gentle mask that was Elinor's face, only to find beyond it something inscrutable. There was a dead line in Elinor's life across which Lily never stepped. Whatever Elinor's battles were, she fought them alone, and Lily had begun to realize that there were battles.

  The atmosphere of the little house had changed. Sometimes, after she had gone to bed, she heard Doyle's voice from the room across the hall, raised angrily. He was nervous and impatient; at times he dropped the unctuousness of his manner toward her, and she found herself looking into a pair of cold blue eyes which terrified her.

  The brilliant little dinners had entirely ceased, with her coming. A sort of early summer lethargy had apparently settled on the house. Doyle wrote for hours, shut in the room with the desk; the group of intellectuals, as he had dubbed them, had dispersed on summer vacations. But she discovered that there were other conferences being held in the house, generally late at night.

  She learned to know the nights when those meetings were to occur. On those evenings Elinor always made an early move toward bed, and Lily would repair to her hot low-ceiled room, to sit in the darkness by the window and think long, painful thoughts.

  That was how she learned of the conferences. She had no curiosity about them at first. They had something to do with the strike, she considered, and with that her interest died. Strikes were a symptom, and ultimately, through great thinkers like Mr. Doyle, they would discover the cure for the disease that caused them. She was quite content to wait for that time.

  Then, one night, she went downstairs for a glass of ice water, and found the lower floor dark, and subdued voices coming from the study. The kitchen door was standing open, and she closed and locked it, placing the key, as was Elinor's custom, in a table drawer. The door was partly glass, and Elinor had a fear of the glass being broken and thus the key turned in the lock by some intruder.

  On toward morning there came a violent hammering at her bedroom door, and Doyle's voice outside, a savage voice that she scarcely recognized. When she had thrown on her dressing gown and opened the door he had instantly caught her by the shoulder, and she bore the imprints of his fingers for days.

  "Did you lock the kitchen door?" he demanded, his tones thick with fury.

  "Yes. Why not?" She tried to shake off his hand, but failed.

  "None of your business why not," he said, and gave her an angry shake. "Hereafter, when you find that door open, you leave it that way. That's all."

  "Take your hands off me!" She was rather like her grandfather at that moment, and his lost caution came back. He freed her at once and laughed a little.

  "Sorry!" he said. "I get a bit emphatic at times. But there are times when a locked door becomes a mighty serious matter."

  The next day he removed the key from the door, and substituted a bolt. Elinor made no protest.

  Another night Elinor was taken ill, and Lilly had been forced to knock at the study door and call Doyle. She had an instant's impression of the room crowded with strange figures. The heavy odors of sweating bodies, of tobacco,
and of stale beer came through the half-open door and revolted her. And Doyle had refused to go upstairs.

  She began to feel that she could not remain there very long. The atmosphere was variable. It was either cynical or sinister, and she hated them both. She had a curious feeling, too, that Doyle both wanted her there and did not want her, and that he was changing his attitude toward her Aunt Elinor. Sometimes she saw him watching Elinor from under half-closed eyelids.

  But she could not fill her days with anxieties and suspicions, and she turned to Louis Akers as a flower to the open day. He at least was what he appeared to be. There was nothing mysterious about him.

  He came in daily, big, dominant and demonstrative, filling the house with his presence, and demanding her in a loud, urgent voice. Hardly had the door slammed before he would call:

  "Lily! Where are you?"

  Sometimes he lifted her off her feet and held her to him.

  "You little whiffet!" he would say. "I could crush you to death in my arms."

  Had his wooing all been violent she might have tired sooner, because those phases of his passion for her tired her. But there were times when he put her into a chair and sat on the floor at her feet, his handsome face uplifted to hers in a sort of humble adoration, his arms across her knees. It was not altogether studied. He was a born wooer, but he had his hours of humility, of vague aspirations. His insistent body was always greater than his soul, but now and then, when he was physically weary, he had a spiritual moment.

  "I love you, little girl," he would say.

  It was in one of those moments that she extracted a promise from him. He had been, from his position on the floor, telling her about the campaign.

  "I don't like your running against my father, Louis."

  "He couldn't have got it, anyhow. And he doesn't want it. I do, honey. I need it in my business. When the election's over you're going to marry me."