Paddy The Next Best Thing Part 60

"What does it matter?--what does anything matter? I used not to care, and I will be the same again. I have been a fool to let myself get set upon anything--" He got up, and pushed his chair aside roughly. "I am going away to-morrow! I don't know where, except that I shall go to London first--afterward, to the devil, as I said before."

He turned to the door, and she could not but follow.

"You needn't worry any more to-night. I won't touch the whisky again, and I won't shoot myself," and without waiting for her, he strode off up the stairs.

CHAPTER FORTY FOUR.

"I CANNOT COME."

For a whole week Lawrence knocked about London, and it was just as well for their peace of mind that none of those who cared for him saw him.

One Sunday afternoon he suddenly called a taxi and drove off to Shepherd's Bush.

On asking for Miss Adair he was ushered in and led to the dingy, old-fas.h.i.+oned drawing-room. It was some time before a step approached, and then the doctor, with a keen look in his kindly eyes, entered alone.

Lawrence was watching the door with a fixed intentness that scarcely gave when the unexpected comer entered.

"My niece has a very bad headache," the doctor said simply, as he shook hands. "She does not feel equal to seeing any one to-day. I am sorry you should have had this long drive for nothing."

"Is she ill?" Lawrence asked bluntly.

"Oh, no, only ailing a little. The weather has been very trying the last week."

The doctor studied the visitor carefully. Paddy's hurried return had caused him much food for anxious thought, coupled with her evident low spirits and loss of appet.i.te. He shot a bow at a venture.

"I think you come from Omeath?" he said.

Lawrence a.s.sented, but seemed lost in thought.

"Wouldn't she see me just for a few minutes?" he asked. "I don't want to worry her, but I have come from Omeath, and she might like to hear about them all at home."

The doctor went away, but came back again alone.

"She is not well enough to-day," he repeated. "She thanks you for calling and is sorry she cannot see you."

And Lawrence was obliged to call a cab again and drive away. As he went down the steps he met a slim youth who regarded him somewhat fixedly, but Lawrence never even saw him. He would have been a little amused, perhaps, had he known that the same youth shook his fist threateningly after him from behind the safe shelter of the doctor's front door.

"If you're the cuss who's worrying Paddy's life out of her," he mentally apostrophised Lawrence's back, "I'd uncommonly like to have you in the dissecting-room," which blood-curdling threat Basil was fortunately quite unable to carry out.

Lawrence went back to his club and wrote a letter to Paddy.

It was a beautiful letter. Nature had, of a truth, been erratic with this one of her children, for it seemed impossible that the writer of this letter and the man who could speak to his mother in a way that made her really ill for days could be one and the same.

It distressed Paddy beyond words. In spite of everything she might say, his suffering tore her heart. Yet her will held firm, and she would not tell him to come. She wrote him a little letter, however, in which he perceived that she no longer pretended to be repulsed by him, and that absence might be serving him better than a meeting just then. He held the letter long in his hand, and was conscious of a sudden swift regret.

"If there were more girls like her," was his thought, "how much better it would be for us men and for all the world. If I had only loved her sooner, or some one like her, I should have been a different man to-day."

Ah, that eternal "if--if." And meanwhile all things march on the same.

The girls will not see, so the men do not heed, and there is folly and wrong and weakness where there might be strength and rich content.

Where there is a great man there was a great woman before; and so it would seem Nature is always trying to point out to us that, though the Men have the strength, the Women have the power, and where they are strong and true all things are possible--for the fireside, the household, the sphere of influence at hand, the greatness of the nation itself. Be smart, be comely, be gay--why not?--only ring true also, and the men who admire you for your comeliness, will wors.h.i.+p you for your goodness.

Lawrence kept his letter and read it often, but he did not go away. He liked feeling that he was there in the same city, breathing the same air, although she remained inexorable about seeing him. Often, in fits of despair, he thought he would go away, but always in the end he decided to remain.

He bought a racing motor, and seemed to find some relief in flying madly over the county at a terrible pace. Three times he was had up for furious driving, and the third time his fine was the heaviest ever exacted for a like cause, and he received a strong reprimand as well and a threat that a fourth offence would be even more strenuously dealt with.

He left the court laughing, and his friends began to wonder anxiously where his recklessness would end.

Gwen returned to town about the time of the third offence, and remonstrated forcibly with him, but made no visible effect.

"Have you seen Paddy again?" she asked him.

"She will not see me."

Gwen knit her forehead in perplexity.

"I have written, and she has not answered," she said. "I don't know what to make of her. I must go and see her."

"Not yet," he said, and she looked up in surprise. His face, however, expressed nothing.

"I wrote to her, and she answered it," he continued, "and I do not want her to be worried about me for the present. Stay away for a little while, Gwen. I think she would rather you did."

So Gwen possessed her soul in patience for three weeks, to please Lawrence, and then went upon an unexpected errand.

Paddy was roaming about restlessly that dreary winter afternoon at the beginning of February when Gwen came. She had been out in the morning, and she kept trying to make up her mind to go out again for something to do, but instead she continued to roam about with that odd feeling of unrest, quite unable to settle down to anything.

Eileen and her mother had come back to London again now, but only until the spring quarter, when, the lease of their house was up, and they hoped to have done with London for good.

The wedding was to take place in April, there was nothing to wait for, and several hearts eager enough to see it happily become a fact.

The Ghan House was being renovated throughout, and Eileen was busy with her trousseau--no time to spare between January and April.

Paddy helped a great deal. She did not like plain sewing--indeed, she very much disliked it, always contriving to p.r.i.c.k herself badly and leave little danger signals, so to speak, where she had st.i.tched. She might have been said to be preparing Eileen's trousseau with her heart's blood, only not with the meaning this phrase, beloved of serial writers, is generally intended to convey.

She had her own views as to quant.i.ties, which, however, as they did not at all fit in with her mother's and Eileen's, she wisely kept to herself. No use warring against the majority, and little matter either way. If the others thought dozens of everything necessary Paddy supposed it was all right, but, for her part, she wondered how so many clothes could possibly ever get worn, and where Eileen was going to keep them all when she was not wearing them.

"We might be making clothes for Jack as well," she remarked once, surveying the growing piles; and when they told her laughingly Jack was getting his own dozens and half-dozens, she fairly gasped.

Nothing much had been said about that speedy flight of hers at Christmas. Both Eileen and the mother had attempted to win her confidence, but Paddy would not speak. Eileen had finally guessed.

"It is Lawrence, Paddy, isn't it?" she asked.

Paddy, driven in a corner, consented, but would not go on.

Eileen had then fidgeted a little, and, blus.h.i.+ng painfully, stammered:

"You would not let anything in reference to me two years ago influence you, I hope, Paddy."

Paddy made no reply.

"Because, as it happened, you see, it was such a good thing. I could never have been as happy with any one else as I am with Jack. Tell me, Paddy?" looking hard into her sister's eyes.