“Hey, you two,” Doris said, “there are swimming trunks in the men’s dressing room, first door on the right of the rumpus room. Why don’t you try the pool?”
Dr. Fletcher shook his head regretfully. “I wish I could. But I’ve two more sick youngsters to see before my office hours.” He patted Jane’s hand. “You don’t need to worry any more, Mrs. Williams.”
“You’ve been wonderful,” she assured him. “Such a comfort to me, Doctor. Won’t you drop in whenever you are free to try the pool? Or—don’t you ever come to the Country Club dances? Perhaps you can join my table there for dinner tonight.”
“That would be delightful.”
“Dinner at eight at the clubhouse, then. Black tie.”
With a lingering pressure of her hand the doctor hurried off.
“How about you, Mr. Shaw?” Doris asked. “Don’t you want a cooling dip in the pool?”
“Another time, if I may,” he said.
“Hey, what are you waiting for?” Paul called and, the two girls ran to the pool. Doris, as usual, sat on the edge, dangling her feet to test the temperature of the water. Leslie climbed the ladder and walked out on the diving board, calling a greeting to the swimmers in the pool. She bounced once and made a flawless jackknife, entering the water almost without a ripple.
She came up at the far end, laughing. “It’s perfect, Doris. Come on in.” For a moment she held herself up with her hands on the edge of the pool, looking toward the terrace. Donald Shaw was lying at Jane’s feet and Jane was looking down at him with an expression of sick revulsion. In a moment she got up and ran, stumbling, into the house. A few seconds later, Shaw, too, rose to his feet and went quietly around the house. Leslie heard the roar of his motorcycle as he started off.
“I must get home,” she said.
“Will you be at the club dance tonight?” Doris asked.
“Not tonight. I’m going to catch up on sleep.”
* * *
It seemed like a good program at the time but things did not work out that way. Leslie had not been home ten minutes before she knew that something was wrong. Agatha, clipping deadheads from rose bushes, had said very little about her stepdaughter’s long absence, except to inquire about Jack’s recovery. Even then, she barely made a pretense of listening to Leslie’s reply. There were dark shadows under her eyes, as though she had not been sleeping well. She even refrained from telling Leslie what to do. There was a kind of settled apathy about her.
“Where’s Dad, Aunt Agatha? Playing golf?”
“No, he’s been shut up in his study all day.”
“He ought to be out enjoying this wonderful sunshine.”
“Maybe you can persuade him,” Agatha said. “He won’t listen to me. I tried to tell him—” She made a helpless gesture.
“Is something wrong?” Leslie asked quietly. “Is something worrying Dad?”
“I don’t know what it is. Your father is terribly disturbed but he won’t discuss it with me. Just shuts himself away. It can’t be money. I told him I had my own money and he could have whatever he wanted.”
“Oh, no!” Leslie cried involuntarily.
Agatha turned to face her. “That’s exactly what Corliss said. Sometimes I think I don’t understand either of you.”
“I—sorry, Aunt Agatha.”
“Where are you going?”
“Up to the studio for a few minutes. I just want to take a look at my sculpture. The maids kept it damp, didn’t they?”
“Of course. I checked with them every day. Leslie—can’t it wait?”
Something in her stepmother’s voice, a curiously lost, forlorn quality, struck Leslie. “Why, of course it can.”
They stood looking at each other, the large handsome woman and the slender girl with the vivid face.
“What is it that you and Corliss expect of me?” Agatha asked unexpectedly. “How do I fail you? I try; there’s nothing I’ve ever really wanted except to make your father happy; and you, too, of course. And I fail, time after time. What is wrong? You know I’ve wanted you both to have whatever you would like. I’ve been willing, glad, to use my own money for—” The big bovine eyes quickened. “Is that it? Is it my money? You’ve minded about my having my own money?”
“It’s not that,” Leslie said slowly. “Of course we haven’t minded. But, somehow, it always comes up: ‘My own money.’ As though—as though you thought it could buy anything. I don’t mean to be rude, to hurt you, Aunt Agatha. Honestly. It’s not that you aren’t generous with it. But we can’t ever forget it. You won’t let us.”
“But you see,” Agatha Blake said, “it is all I ever had to give either of you. My money. So I wanted it to be important to you, to make up—”
“Make up?”
Agatha concluded with difficulty. “Make up for the love that neither of you could ever give me.”
Leslie caught her breath, feeling the older woman’s pain, aware of her as she had never been before. The idea that Agatha Blake, below that placid surface, had depths of emotion had never crossed her mind. How blind, how self-absorbed she must have been all these years!
“Do you know how I happened to marry your father?” Agatha asked. “He adored your mother. She and I were friends. In a way, she was the only close friend I ever had. I don’t seem to have the capacity to make friends, though I’ve tried so hard. They were married when we met. I always loved Corliss, but, of course, he didn’t know. He wouldn’t have been interested anyhow; he was so absorbed in your mother. I don’t blame him and I wouldn’t have had it otherwise. You mustn’t misunderstand that. She was the loveliest person I ever knew.”
For the first time, Leslie looked at her stepmother with an awakening of understanding and sympathy. There was no self-pity in Agatha, only a kind of bewilderment.
“All the time she was ill I was there to look after her; then after she died and Corliss lost almost all interest in life for a time, I looked after you. I got to be a sort of habit. He knew I’d be good to you and he had no love to give to any other woman. I understood that. But at least—he was there. He has always been very kind,” she went on flatly, “but I made a mistake, didn’t I?”
Leslie blinked back tears. “Neither of us could get along without you,” she declared.
Agatha’s face warmed. “You mean that?”
Leslie nodded. “It will be all right, Aunt Agatha.” The dimple flashed in her chin. “Why don’t you try Jane Williams’s trick? It’s devastating with men. Don’t attempt to help Dad. Let him help you. Some people can get their happiness only by giving. And don’t offer him a cent, even if you see him selling apples from a pushcart on the street.”
To their mutual surprise, Agatha began to laugh. “Not a cent,” she agreed. She looked at her watch. “Will you be home for dinner?”
“Home for keeps,” Leslie told her.
“I’m glad,” Agatha said simply.
* * *
It was not until he appeared for dinner that Leslie noticed the change in her father. He had welcomed her home, said she looked tired and he hoped she’d get some rest, and then he fell silent, brooding over his meal, eating very little. Once Agatha opened her lips to urge him to eat, and then closed them firmly. Leslie winked at her. None the less, something was wrong.
He would have his coffee in his study, he decided. He had some work to do.
“Dad,” Leslie said when he started to leave the room.
He turned to smile at her. “Nice to have you home again, dear. I’ve missed you.” He went quickly into his study and closed the door to forestall any questions.
When Leslie opened the door a few minutes later, she found him sitting at his desk, a letter spread out before him, his eyes fixed unseeingly on the window. She curled up at his feet, her head resting against his knee. She did not speak. After a few minutes of silence he stretched out his hand to stroke her soft copper curls.
“Is it anything you can tell me?” she asked at length.
“Company business,”
he said. “You wouldn’t understand. Anyhow, I don’t want you to worry.”
She tipped back her head to smile at him. “But we’re family,” she reminded him.
“So was the Company,” he said in a tired voice, “or at least I tried to make it so. A team working happily together.”
“And you’ve succeeded, Dad. Everyone says that.”
“I thought so, too. But it looks as though I’d been mistaken. Somewhere, Leslie, I’ve made a bad mistake. Perhaps an irrevocable mistake.”
She waited quietly for him to go on. He picked up the letter, read it in silence, handed it to her. It was from the Gypton people of whom she had heard, making an offer for the new formula the Clayton Textile Company was developing. Unaccustomed as she was to business phraseology, Leslie was aware that it was an oddly phrased letter.
She read it twice. “You’re right, Dad. I don’t understand. What’s wrong with it?”
He took back the letter. “To begin with, the offer they make is preposterous. It’s so inadequate that it is ludicrous, insulting.”
“But, after all, you don’t need to sell to them, do you?”
“This is a very cagily worded letter, Leslie. They probably had their lawyer go over every single word. A very tricky letter, a threatening letter. What they are saying between the lines is that they will pay this token price—or else; that they already have most of the data about the formula and they can get the rest without any difficulty.”
“But how can they get it?” Leslie asked.
“Somewhere,” her father told her grimly, “we have a traitor in the Company. That’s the only possible explanation.”
“Dad!” Leslie sat bolt upright, staring at him in disbelief and horror.
“That’s why I said I had made a mistake. There is only one newcomer working in the research laboratory and that is Shaw. He was my choice. And yet, I’d have staked anything on the man’s integrity.” He laughed without amusement. “In a sense I did stake everything. I don’t know chemistry, but I thought I knew men.”
His fist crashed on the desk, startling her. “I don’t see how my judgment could have been so completely at fault. And yet from the beginning Harrison has disliked and distrusted the man.” He crushed the letter into a ball, smoothed it out again. “Well,” he said heavily, “if Gypton gets the formula I’ll resign from the Company. I’m not fit to be in charge. Harrison can step into my shoes, and I suspect that he has been waiting for that.”
He rested his hand lightly on Leslie’s shoulder. “In a way, that might be best for the Company, anyhow. I’ve tried to handle it as Douglas Clayton wanted it handled but it has never been a congenial task.”
“What would you have preferred to do if you hadn’t had to earn a living and had not inherited his estate?”
“I’d like to work for world peace. That seems to me the most important, the most vital and pressing job a man could do. But, of course, if I feel I must resign from the Company, I couldn’t in honor keep Clayton’s money and his property. You see that? So I’d have to begin earning a living in a different way. I’ve been thinking that, if worst comes to worst, I can go back to my old job.”
“You were a good architect, Dad.”
“But times change, you know. The firm I was with devotes all its time at present to big housing developments, bidding for contracts—making deals, more often than not. It’s not the way it was a few years ago, when we were designing small private homes for individuals. And on my own—I’m not a young man. Heaven knows how long it would be before I could support you and Agatha decently.”
“That’s not important,” Leslie assured him eagerly. “There’s no place in this busy world for idle women any more. There are lots of jobs and, so far as I’m concerned, I’d be interested in the challenge of seeing what I can do.”
“I’m proud of my daughter,” he said huskily.
She leaned her arms on his knee, smiling up at him. “I’m proud of my father. Deeply proud. But, Dad, before you do anything drastic you’ll make very sure, won’t you?”
“Sure of what?”
“Sure that you know beyond doubt that there is a traitor in the Company and that you know who he is.”
“But the only—”
“Dad, I don’t believe Donald Shaw is dishonest. I think you were right about him in the first place. There must be someone else.”
“You can’t judge, dear. You barely know him.”
“There must be someone else,” she insisted. “There simply has to be.”
He looked down at her intently, saw the color that flushed her cheeks while her eyes met his steadily.
“You—like him,” he said with an effort. “Is that it?”
“I love him,” she said simply. “I just this minute realized it.”
“Oh, Leslie.” His arm drew her closer to him. He looked over her head with troubled eyes. “Poor baby.”
After a long time he said, “Before I met your mother I fell in love with a girl who came to visit in town one summer. She was unlike any girl I’d ever known. Pretty, sophisticated—and mysterious. That was the charm. No one really knew anything about her, what she was or where she came from. I mooned around her for months, making a complete fool of myself, and when she finally eloped with a married man twice her age I thought my life was ruined.”
He chuckled. “There’s something about mystery that is irresistible. But it won’t do for everyday living. In the long run we don’t thrive on moonlight; we need bread and butter.”
“Was my mother bread and butter?”
Corliss Blake was silent for a moment. “No,” he said slowly, “she wasn’t bread and butter, but she wasn’t moonlight either. She was the sun shining on the Garden of Eden.”
He stood up, drawing his daughter in the circle of his arm. They stood looking across the lawn to the river. A canoe went silently by in the dusk.
“Jim Mason,” Leslie said. She laughed softly. “Jack Williams thinks he’s a pirate spying out the land.”
“Mason,” her father repeated, a note of startled alertness in his voice. “Mason.”
“What about him?”
“It just occurred to me. He’s another fairly recent employee. Perhaps—”
“Dad, do you think he could possibly be the one?”
“We’ll see. There must be no more mistakes. This time I must be very sure. Now you had better get to bed and rest after your nursing. I’ll tell Rosie not to disturb you in the morning. Good night, dear.”
“Good night.” Leslie kissed him and yawned widely.
Before getting into bed she stood for a minute at her window. It was almost dark, but a darker shadow moved noiselessly along the river. Jim Mason was returning, drops of water glistening in the moonlight as he lifted his paddle.
10
Donald Shaw, too, was thinking about Jim Mason. In the two weeks he had worked for the Clayton Textile Company he had scarcely been aware of the shy young clerk from the accounting department beyond seeing him occasionally in the Company restaurant. There had been too much to occupy his thoughts.
In the first place, he had plunged at once into work in the research laboratory. It had taken only a few days to make clear how revolutionary the next textile would be. Its effect on almost all the standard fabrics on the market would be enormous. If the formula proved to be satisfactory. If it could be marketed properly. If the secret could be retained by the Company.
Those were sobering ifs. The chances that the new textile could be produced and distributed satisfactorily often seemed remote. The weight, the power of the Gypton organization were such that it had long dominated the field.
None the less, there was an enthusiasm and faith among the research chemists, a daily excitement about the work they were doing, that sometimes made Shaw believe that sheer loyalty and wholehearted devotion to the job could achieve what unscrupulous power could not do.
There was only one weak spot in the laboratory. That was the attitude of the me
n toward Oliver Harrison, the head chemist. There wasn’t, as far as Shaw could see, a single chemist who really liked him. His arrogance, his offensive manner of issuing orders, his immoderate vanity and unbridled ambition, which made him try to assume full personal credit for the work of the group, all this caused constant tension and irritation.
On the other hand, Harrison was a fine chemist. No one could deny that, though the initial research had not been his; indeed, the formula had been taking final shape, as the result of the work of a chemist now dead, before Harrison ever entered the Company, less than a year before. Even so, his energy and determination to see it succeed had provided a great stimulus.
For all his dislike and distrust of the man, Shaw was forced in honesty to respect his abilities. Their own relationship was a strange one. Harrison made no attempt to conceal his dislike of Shaw and his determination to grasp the first excuse to fire him. But never since the night of the Blakes’ buffet had either man referred to the papers that Harrison had concealed and ordered Shaw to find.
In some ways, Shaw thought the situation had its ridiculous aspects. There were times when he was tempted to say, “Look here, what were you trying to accomplish by that silly performance?” Something kept him silent. He would bide his time. And yet he had an uncomfortable feeling that time was running out. Rumors of the formula were widespread throughout the industry. Somewhere in the Company was an employee who was slipping out information. But who?
Because of his dislike for Harrison, Shaw would have liked to believe him the guilty man, but there were other factors. Harrison was ambitious but not, Shaw thought, for money alone. What he wanted was power; he wanted to head the Clayton Company. In that case, he would be the last man to betray it.
Only a few days earlier, Shaw had been eating lunch with one of the laboratory chemists. Harrison had entered the Company restaurant and moved toward a choice corner table by the window. At the same time Jim Mason had approached it. Harrison had brushed past him, almost shoving him out of the way, and pulled out a chair. For a moment the sandy-haired accountant had stood stock still, looking at him, such naked hatred in his green eyes that Shaw was startled. Then Mason had turned away and pulled out a chair at another table.
A Candle in Her Heart Page 9