Mary Wollaston Part 43

"I happened to turn up instead. And she's perfectly all right, to-day."

Her eyes filled with tears. She turned forlornly away from him and dropped down upon a settee. "You hate me, too, now, I suppose. As well as he."

He sat down beside her and laid a hand upon her shoulder. "My dear," he said--and his own voice had a break of tenderness in it,--"I couldn't hate any one to-day if I wanted to. And I never could want to hate you.

If there's anything I can do to help with John Wollaston.... But you see, if you want to keep your grievance you don't need any help. n.o.body can take it away from you. It's only if you want to get rid of it--because it's making you beastly unhappy, no matter how valid it is--that you need any help from me or any one else. If that's what you want, I'll take a shot at writing you a prescription."

"Go crawling back to him on my knees, I suppose," she said in a tone not quite so genuinely resentful as she felt it ought to be. "And ask him to forgive me. What's the good of that when he doesn't love me?--Oh, of course I know he does--in a way."

His hand dropped absently from her shoulder. After a thoughtful moment he sprang up and took a turn of the room. "Do you know," he said, halting before her, "'in a way' is the only way there is. The only way any two people ever do love each other. That's what makes half the trouble, I believe. Trying to define it as if it were a standard thing. Like sterling silver; so many and so many hundredths per cent. pure. Love's whatever the personal emotion is that draws two people together. It may be anything. It may make them kind to each other, or it may make them nag each other into the mad-house, or it may make them shoot each other dead.

It's probably never exactly the same thing between any two pairs of people..."

"Don't talk nonsense," she said petulantly.

"I'm not a bit sure it's nonsense," he persisted. "I only just thought of it, but I believe I've got on to something. Well, if I'm right, then the problem is to adjust that emotion to your life, or your life to that emotion, in such a way that the thing will work. There aren't any rules.

There can't be any. It's a matter of--well, that's the word--adjustment."

She could not see that this was helping her much. It was not at all the line she'd projected for him. Yet she was finding it hard not to feel less tragic. She had even caught herself, just now, upon the brink of being amused. "Wait till you've tried to adjust something, as you say, with John, and have had him tell you what you think until you believe you do. When he's really being perfectly unreasonable all the while."

"Of course," March observed with the air of one making a material concession, "he is a good bit of a prima donna himself."

"What do you mean by that?" she demanded. And then, petulantly, she accused him of laughing at her, of refusing to take her seriously, of trying to be clever like the Wollastons.

"Look here, Paula," he said, and he put so much edge into his tone that she did, "have you ever spent five minutes out of the last five years trying to think what John was, besides your husband? I don't believe it.

When I spoke of him to you, months ago, as a famous person you didn't know what I was talking about. He is. He's got a better chance--say to get into the next edition of the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_, than you have. He's got a career. He had it long before he knew you existed.--How old was he when he came to Vienna? About fifty, wasn't he?"

"Forty-nine," she said with the air of one making a serious contradiction; but her, "Oh, well,--" and a little laugh that followed it conceded that it was not.

"He'd had a career then for a long time," March went on. "He was established. He had things about as he wanted them. And then, out of nowhere, an irresistible thing like you came along and torpedoed him. He must have realized that he had gone clean out of his head about you. A man of that age doesn't fall in love unconsciously, nor easily either. He must have had frightful misgivings about persuading you to marry him. On your account as well as his own. Because he is that, you know.

Conscientious, I mean. Almost to a morbid degree."

"Oh, yes," she conceded, "they're both like that. They spend half their time working things out trying to be fair."

He gave her a quick look, then came and sat down beside her again.

"Well, then," he said, "we're on the right track. Just follow it along.

You're the one big refractory thing in his life. The thing that constantly wants reconciling with something else,--at the same time that you're the delight of it, and the center and core of it. And while he's trying to deal with those problems justly, you know, he's taking on all of yours, too. He's trying to see things with your eyes, feeling them with your nerves, and since he's got a kind of uncanny penetration, I'd be willing to bet that he can tell you, half the time, what you're thinking about better than you could yourself. No wonder, between his conscience and his desire--your mutual desire--he's unreasonable. And since he's too old to be reformed out of his conscience that leaves the adjustment up to you."

"I don't know what more I can do," she said. "I've offered to give up everything."

"Yes," he said with a grunt, "that's it. I don't wonder he flew at you.

_That's_ the thing you'll have to give up!"

He rose and stood over her and thumped home, his point with one fist in the palm of the other hand. "Why, you've got to give up the n.o.bility," he said. "The self-sacrificial att.i.tude. You've got to chuck the heroine's role altogether, Paula. That's what you've been playing, naturally enough. It makes good drama for you, but look where it leaves him! First you give up your career for him, and then you give him up for the career you've undertaken for his sake. You've contrived to put him in the wrong both ways. Oh, not meaning to, I know; just by instinct. Well, give that up. Give up the renunciatory gesture. Go to him and tell him the truth.

That you want, in a perfectly human selfish way, all you can get, both of him and of a career. They aren't mutually exclusive really. It ought to be possible to have quite a lot of each."

"You think you know such a lot," she protested rebelliously, "but there's only one thing I want, just the same, and that's John, himself."

"No doubt that's true this afternoon," he admitted. "You sang _Thais_ last night and several thousand people, according to this morning's paper, cheered you at the end of the second act. But I believe I can tell you your day-dream. It's to be the greatest dramatic soprano in the world--home for a vacation. With John and perhaps one or two small children of the affectionate age around you."

Her face flamed at that. "John _has_ been talking about me this morning!"

she cried.

He shook his head. "It was only a chance shot," he told her. "I'm sorry if it came close enough home to hurt. But there couldn't be a better day-dream than that and there's no reason I can see why it shouldn't come reasonably true, if you'll honestly try for as much of it as you can get.

That's the prescription, anyhow. Give up n.o.bility and all the heroic poses that go with it and practise a little enlightened selfishness instead. Perhaps by force of example you may persuade John Wollaston to abandon about half of his conscience. Then you _would_ be settled."

With that he went back to his score and by no protest or expostulation could she provoke another word out of him. She fidgeted about the room for a quarter of an hour or so. Then with the announcement that she was going to dress, left it and went up-stairs.

When she came down a while later in street things and a hat she presented him with a new perplexity.

"I've been trying everywhere I can think of to get a car," she said, "and there simply isn't one to be had. I even tried to borrow one."

He asked her what she wanted of a car. Where she wanted to go.

"Oh, can't you see!" she cried, "I don't want to send for John again to come to me. I want to go to him. It's too maddening!"

"Well," he said, with a grin, "if you really want--desperately--to go to him, of course there's the trolley."

She stared at him for a moment and then perceiving, or thinking she perceived, something allegorical about the suggestion, she gave a laugh, swooped down and kissed him and went.

CHAPTER XXVIII

THE KALEIDOSCOPE

It was the next Sunday morning that Miss Wollaston, who had decided to stay in town even though the emergency she had been summoned to meet was found mysteriously to have evanesced when she arrived, asked Wallace Hood, walking home with her from church, to come in to lunch.

"I haven't the least idea," she said, "whether we shall be quite by ourselves or whether the entire family, including the latest addition to it, will come straggling in before we've finished."

She would not have considered it quite delicate to have owned to him how very clearly she hoped to have him, for an hour or two, all to herself.

He would be found, she was confident, not to have gone through the looking-gla.s.s into the world of topsy-turvey that all the rest of them seemed to be inhabiting, these days. It would be comforting to talk with somebody who was still capable of regarding things right side to.

She was much too penetrating a person not to have been perfectly aware from the first that, astonis.h.i.+ng as were the facts John had communicated to her, upon her arrival from Hickory Hill a week ago, other facts of major importance were being suppressed.

She had found her brother apparently occupied in the normal Sunday morning manner with his newspaper, and he had answered her rather breathless inquiries about Mary by saying that she was all right. She was finis.h.i.+ng off her night's sleep but would, he supposed, be down by and by. There was nothing the matter. Rush had been unnecessarily alarmed, lacking the fact which explained the case. And then he sprang his mine, informing her that Mary was engaged to marry Anthony March.

When, after a speechless interval, she had asked him, feebly, whether he didn't mean Graham Stannard, he had been very short with her indeed. The engagement to March was an accomplished fact, and the sooner we took it for granted the better. He showed a great reluctance to go further into detail about the matter and he flinched impatiently from the innocent question;--when had he himself been informed of this astounding state of things. Well, naturally, since in the train of his answer the fact had been elicited that he hadn't come to town until this morning and that Mary had spent another night alone. And it was not Mary but March who had, already this morning, told him about it.

Beyond that John couldn't be driven to go. He concluded by putting a categorical injunction upon her. She wasn't to expostulate with Mary nor to attempt to examine either into her reasons for this step nor into her state of mind in making it. He was satisfied that the girl knew what she was doing and that it represented her real wishes. His sister's satisfaction on these points would have to be vicarious.

The surmise had formed itself irresistibly in Lucile's mind that John himself was involved in this decision of Mary's. Had she done this thing--involved herself in the beginnings of it, anyhow,--as a desperate measure to bring her father and his wife together again? By removing a temptation that Paula was still in danger of yielding to? She didn't put it to herself quite as crudely as that to be sure.

Certainly she had no intention of asking Wallace Hood what he thought about it. But perhaps he might have some other explanation of her niece's sacrifice. It must have been a sacrifice to something. An answer to some fancied call of duty. Unless it were a freak of sheer perversity.

But this was dangerous ground for Lucile.

The queerest thing about it all was the way it seemed--magically--to be producing such beneficent results. John and Paula were reconciled by it,--or at least as soon as it happened. Paula had come down from Ravinia that very day, had had some sort of scene with her husband, and the two had been almost annoyingly at one upon every conceivable subject since.

Something had happened also during the week to Rush, which lightened the gloom that had been hanging on him so long,--some utterly surprising interview with Graham Stannard's father. Pure coincidence one must suppose this to be, of course. Mary's engagement couldn't have anything to do with it. And then Mary herself! The girl was a new person.

Absolutely radiant. Orthodox conduct of course for a just engaged girl--but in the circ.u.mstances one would think...