II
Grace turned to a waiting customer with a kindlier feeling for all the world. She was uncertain whether in like circumstances she would have been capable of the kindness and generosity Evelyn had manifested. It pleased her to believe that her education in the ways of the changing, baffling world was progressing.
Evelyn Cummings was evidently a young woman without illusions; she knew exactly how to manage a temperamental husband. Marriage, as Grace viewed it with the three different illustrations afforded by Kemp, Trenton and Cummings, was of the realm of insubstantial things. Even the spectacle offered in her own home by her father and mother, between whom disappointment and adversity had reared a wall no less grim because of their steadfast loyalty, was hardly convincing on the other side of the picture. Stephen Durland and his wife were held together by habit, by a deeply implanted sense of duty to their children. Grace could not remember when her father had kissed her mother, or in any way manifested any affection for her. And yet in the beginning they must have loved each other. She wondered whether it was always like that!
She had given up all hope of hearing again from Trenton when on the tenth day she received a note postmarked New York, that set her heart fluttering.
My Dear Little Girl:
What must you think of me! I think pretty poorly of myself, I can tell you. Picked up a cold on my way East. Pretended it didn’t amount to anything; motored down into New Jersey for a week-end with some old friends. Got chilled on the drive; pneumonia almost. My host was afraid I’d die on his hands and made a frightful row—couple of doctors, nurse and all the other frills.... I had no way of letting you know. Found your letter when I came into town this morning. I’m away behind on my jobs.... The great thing is that I want to see you and look into those dear, dark eyes again.... One day at twilight down there in the country, I thought of you so intently that I really brought you into the room! The nurse was sitting beside the bed, then suddenly you were there, your dark head clearly outlined in the dusk. You lifted your hand to touch your hair—that’s a pretty trick you have! You have so many dear ways—and you smiled—another sweet way you have!—the smile coming slowly, like a dawn, until it brightened all the world. The illusion was so perfect that it wasn’t an illusion at all, but really you! I was terribly indignant at the nurse when she turned on the light and I lost you.... The doctor says I may travel in three or four days and my thoughts carry me in only one direction. You haven’t sent me the telegram I hoped for; never mind about that. Please wire me that you are well. And if you put in a word to say that you want to see me I shall be the happiest man alive. Be assured of my love always.
He hadn’t forgotten her; he really cared! She moved with a quicker step; her work had never gone so smoothly. While she had been doubting him, trying to put him out of her heart he had been ill. She was unsparing in self-accusation for what now seemed the basest disloyalty. She tried to picture the room to which his longing had summoned her. Those lines in his letter moved her deeply and set her to speculating whether such a thing might not be possible in the case of two beings who loved each other greatly.
There was no intimation in the letter that his wife had been with him in his illness. Grace grew bitter as she thought of Mrs. Trenton, who was probably roaming the world preaching a new social order to the neglect of her husband. In countenancing Trenton as a lover Grace found Mrs. Trenton’s conduct her most consoling justification. It came down to this, that if Ward Trenton’s wife failed in her marital obligations there was no justice in forbidding him to seek happiness elsewhere.
This view was in fact advanced in Mary Graham Trenton’s “Clues to a New Social Order.” It seemed a fair assumption that Mrs. Trenton wouldn’t advocate ideas for all mankind that she wouldn’t tolerate in her own husband.
At her lunch hour Grace went to the telegraph office and sent this message:
“Greatly troubled by your illness. Please take good care of yourself. You may be sure I shall be glad to see you.”
“Straight telegram, paid,” the clerk repeated perfunctorily, and swept the message under the counter. The sending of the telegram gave Grace a gratifying sense of kinship with the larger world which Trenton’s love had revealed to her. She found happiness all the afternoon in wondering just what he would be doing and how he would look when the message reached him. She wrote that night the longest letter she had yet written him. She thought often of what Irene had said about wanting to be loved. To be loved, in the great way that Miss Reynolds had said was the only way that counted,—this had become the great desire of her heart. Old restraints and inherited moral inhibitions still resisted her impulse to fashion her life and give herself as she pleased. She meant to be very sure of Trenton and even more sure of her own heart before committing herself further. She was not, she kept assuring herself, an ordinary or common type. She dropped into her letter several literary allusions and a few French phrases with a school girl’s pride in her erudition. There were times when Grace was very young!
Trenton’s next letter reported his complete recovery. He was working hard to make up for lost time, but would leave for the West as soon as possible and hoped to spend Christmas in Indianapolis. Incidentally he had business there in which she might be able to assist him. This was further explained in a typewritten enclosure which he asked her to deliver to her father. He warned her that the inquiry might lead to nothing, but there were certain patents held in Stephen Durland’s name which he wished to investigate.
“The name Durland,” he wrote, “gave me a distinctly pleasant shock when the memorandum turned up on my desk in the routine of the office. There may be a place where I can use some of your father’s ideas; but in this business we’re all pessimists. I appoint you my agent and representative on the spot. Don’t let your father dispose of any of the patents described in my letter till we can have an interview.”
She made the noon hour the occasion for one of her picnic lunches with her father in his work shop.
He looked up from a model he was tinkering and greeted her with his usual, “That you, Grace?”
“Very much Grace!” she answered, tossing her packages on the bench. “What are you on today—perpetual motion or a scheme for harnessing the sun?”
“A fool thing a man left here the other day; wanted me to tell him why it didn’t work. It doesn’t work because there’s no sense in it.”
As he began to explain why the device was impracticable she snatched off his hat and flinging it aside with a dramatic flourish handed him a sandwich.
“Don’t waste your time on such foolishness; we’re only interested in machines that work!”
She sprang upon the bench and produced Trenton’s letter.
“Let your eye roam over that, old top! And don’t tell me you’ve let somebody take those things away from you.”
Durland pondered the letter, lifting the business sheet closer to his eyes as he examined Trenton’s small neat signature. He walked to a closet and extracted some papers from the confused mass within.
“Well, daddy, what’s the answer?”
“I got those patents all right; they cover my improvements on my old gas engine Cummings is making. There’s already been a fellow nosing round asking about ’em; from Cummings I guess. I got something now that’s going to interest everybody that’s making motors; something I been working at two or three years. Cummings can’t have ’em. He hasn’t got any right to ’em!”
His eyes flashed as his hatred of Cummings for the moment possessed him. Grace had never taken seriously her father’s hints that Cummings might have got rid of him too soon. She had never before seen him so agitated. He paced the floor, reiterating that his former associate should never profit by his improvements on any of the old Cummings-Durland devices. He paused, picked up an apple and bit into it savagely.
“Now, daddy,” said Grace, “it isn’t at all like you to flare up that way. Mr. Trenton hasn’t a thing to do with Cummings; I happen to know that. But he’s a business adviser and particular friend of Kemp.”
“Kemp!” Durland repeated, lifting his head with a jerk. “You think maybe Kemp’s interested? Kemp could use these patents; there isn’t a thing in these improvements that wouldn’t fit right into Kemp’s motor!”
“That’s perfectly grand! Now that you’ve got your patents, what you want to do is to sit back and wait. There must be something pretty good in your ideas or Mr. Trenton wouldn’t be interested. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the dollars would begin to roll in?”
“I’ve been fooled a lot of times, Grace,” he answered, picking up his hat, staring at it as though it were an unfamiliar thing and clapping it on his head. “I guess you better not say anything about this at home. If it doesn’t come to anything I don’t want your mother disappointed.”
“Of course not; it’s our big secret, daddy. I just love having secrets with you. After the row at home the other night about Mr. Trenton’s niece we’d better never mention him.”
“What was that all about, Grace?” he asked frowning. “I didn’t get what Ethel was drivin’ at.”
“Just making herself disagreeable, that’s all. I told a fib, but Ethel had no business to attack me that way before guests.”
“Ethel’s kind o’ different somehow,” he said, drawing the back of his hand across his mouth. “I guess she means all right. Funny, you children ain’t any of you alike,” he went on ruminatively. “I don’t ever seem to get much out o’ Ethel and Roy.”
“Roy and Ethel are both fond of you, daddy. And you know I adore you; I’m simply crazy about you!”
She pounced upon him and threw her arms about his neck, laughing at his struggles to avoid the kisses she distributed over such parts of his face as were free of grime.
“You’re a mighty fine girl, Grace. There mustn’t anything happen to you,” he said, freeing himself.
“Oh, you needn’t be afraid, you dear angel! Nothing’s going to happen to me! Here’s where I skip—vamoose—disappear! I’m going to take you to a show tonight—yes, I am! You be awfully surprised when I spring it at supper.”