CHAPTER XIII
Wally stayed for lunch, looking sheepish at first for having been caught dancing with Helen. But he soon recovered and became his charming self. Miss Cordelia and Miss Patty always made him particularly welcome, listening with approval to his chatter of Boston society, and feeling themselves refreshed as at some Hebian spring at hearing the broad a's and the brilliant names he uttered.
"If I were you, Helen," said Mary when lunch was over, "I think I'd go on teaching Wally that dance." Which may have shown that it rankled a little, even if she were unconscious that it did. "I have some papers that I want to look over and I don't feel very trippy this afternoon."
She went to Josiah's old study, but had hardly untied the papers when she heard the knock of penitence on the door.
"Come in!" she smiled.
The door opened and in came Master Wally, looking ready to weep.
"Wally! Don't!" she laughed. "You'll give yourself the blues!"
"Not when I hear you laugh like that. I know I'm forgiven." He drew a chair to the fire and sat down with an air of luxury. "I can almost imagine that we're an old married couple, sitting in here like this—can't you?"
"No; I can't. And you've got to be quiet and let me work, or I shall send you back to Helen."
"She asked me to dance with her—of course, you know that—or I never would have done it—"
"Oh, fie, for shame," said Mary absently, "blaming the woman. You know you liked to do it."
"Mary—!"
"Hush!"
He watched her for a time and, in truth, she was worth it. He looked at the colour of her cheeks, her dreamy eyes like pools of mystery, the crease in her chin (which he always wanted to kiss), the rise and fall of the pendant on her breast. He looked until he could look no longer and then he arose and leaned over the desk.
"Mary—!" he breathed, taking her hand.
"Now, please don't start that, Wally. We'll shake hands if you want to…
There! How are you? Now go back to your chair and be good."
"'Be good!'" he savagely echoed.
"Why, you want to be good; don't you?" she asked in surprise.
"I want you to love me. Mary; tell me you love me just a little bit; won't you?"
"I like you a whole lot—but when it comes to love—the way you mean—"
"It's the only thing in life that's worth a hang," he eagerly interrupted her. "The trouble is: you won't try it. You won't allow yourself to let go. I was like that once—thought it was nothing. But after I met you—! Oh, girl, it's all roses and lilies—the only thing in the world, and don't you forget it! Come on in and give it a try!"
"It's not the only thing in the world," said Mary, shaking her head. "That's the reason I don't want to come in: When a man marries, he goes right on with his life as though nothing had happened. That shows it's not the only thing with him. But when a woman marries—well, she simply surrenders her future and her independence. It may be right that she should, too, for all I know—but I'm going to try the other way first. I'm going right on with my life, the same as a man does—and see what I get by it."
"How long are you going to try it, do you think?"
"Until I've found out whether love is the only thing in a woman's life. If I find that I can't do anything else—if I find that a girl can only be as bright as a man until she reaches the marrying age, and then she just naturally stands still while he just naturally goes forward—why, then, I'll put an advertisement in the paper 'Husband Wanted. Mary Spencer. Please apply.'"
"They'll apply over my dead body."
"You're a dear, good boy to say it. No, please, Wally, don't or I shall go upstairs. Now sit by the fire again—that's better—and smoke if you want to, and let me finish these papers."
They were for the greater part the odds and ends which accumulate in every desk. There were receipted bills, old insurance policies, letters that had once seemed worth prizing, catalogues of things that had never been bought, prospectuses, newspaper clippings, copies of old contracts. And yet they had an interest, too—an interest partly historical, partly personal.
This merry letter, for instance, which Mary read and smiled over—who was the "Jack" who had written it? "Dead, perhaps, like dad," thought Mary. Yes, dead perhaps, and all his fun and drollery suddenly fallen into silence and buried with him.
"Isn't life queer!" she thought. "Now why did he save this clipping?"
She read the clipping and enjoyed it. Wally, watching from his chair, saw the smile which passed over her face.
"She'll warm up some day," he confidently told himself, with that bluntness of thought which comes to us all at times. "See how she flared up because I danced with Helen. Maybe if I made her jealous…"
At the desk Mary picked up another paper—an old cable. She read it, re-read it, and quietly folded it again; but for all her calmness the colour slowly mounted to her cheeks, as the recollection of odd words and phrases arose to her mind.
"Wally," she said in her quietest voice, "I'm going to ask you a question, but first you must promise to answer me truly."
"Cross my heart and hope to die!"
"Are you ready?"
"Quite ready."
"Then did you ever hear of any one in our family named Paul?"
"Y-yes—"
"Who was he?"
It was some time before he told the story, but trust a girl to make a man speak when she wishes it! He softened the recital in every possible way, but trust a girl again to read between the lines when she wants to!
"And didn't he ever come back?" she asked.
"No; you see he couldn't very well. There was an accident out West—somebody killed—anyhow, he was blamed for it. Queer, isn't it?" he broke off, trying to relieve the subject. "The Kaiser can start a war and kill millions. That's glory. But if some poor devil loses his head—"
Mary wasn't through yet.
"You say he's dead!" she asked.
"Oh, yes, years ago. He must have been dead—oh, let me see—about fifteen or twenty years, I guess."
"Poor dad!" thought Mary that night. "What he must have gone through! I'll bet he didn't think that love was the only thing in life. And—that other one," she hesitated, "who was 'wild after the girls,' Wally says, and finally ran off with one—I'll bet he didn't think so, either—before he got through—to say nothing of the poor thing who went with him. But dead fifteen or twenty years—that's the queerest part."
She found the cable again. It was dated Rio Janeiro—
"Gods sake cable two hundred dollars wife children sick desperate next week too late."
It was signed "Paul" and—the point to which Mary's attention was constantly returning—it wasn't fifteen or twenty years ago that this appeal had been received by her father.
The date of the cable was scarcely three years old.