When Molly reflected dubiously that it did seem as if conscience didn’t pay, Jennings puzzled her by asserting: “It doesn’t—unless you can’t help it. Peter couldn’t, and so he is dying over there in that hole with his sharp little eyes unsatisfied. Simeon could, and so he sails to Europe for a poultice that will heal the abrasions we have made on his sensorium.”
Miss Parker learned much from pondering on this case of Peter Erard. He was such a confirmed sceptic, she found, that she hesitated to proffer her simple religious panacea. Jennings seemed to her sceptical also, when he insisted that Peter’s sacrifice was quite irrational. To her insistent why, he answered dreamily,—“‘Why, why,’—you can’t answer whys. Why do we hate and love, and why do we live? The Master wills it; it is idle to talk back.”
This was a vague reason, yet wonderfully comforting to Molly, chiefly on account of the authority the propounder had with her. If he were content with this mystery, she must be. So she continued to visit the Erards, and formed plans of using Adela’s purse to help the old man. For it was but just that Mrs. Wilbur should pay some of Simeon Erard’s bills to society. When Jennings urged that Mrs. Wilbur could probably force Erard to make Peter’s last days happy in other ways than with money, Miss Parker shook her head.
“Adela can be as hard as a rock.”
“Perhaps she has never been tapped the right way.”
Yet to her suggestion that he should try tapping the rock, he answered lightly, “I guess I’m not her Moses.”
It disturbed the equable Molly to realize how much interest he took in Mrs. Wilbur. For “Adela spoils everything,” she declared sententiously.
Jennings had it in mind to approach Mrs. Wilbur, at the first good chance, in behalf of the Erards. He had seen little of her since the fall season; intangible influences kept them apart. Late in June, however, he spent a Sunday in one of the northern suburbs at Mrs. Stevans’s “place,” and when he arrived from the city in the evening, he discovered Mrs. Wilbur sitting alone on the cool, silent veranda above the lake. The other guests had gone off for a drive along the bluffs. She greeted him with frank surprise.
“I didn’t expect to see you here.”
“They don’t seem quite my crowd,” he admitted cheerily. “But Mrs. Stevans is a sort of cousin, and she has done her best for me. She has found me a hard case; her good deeds have come to asking me over for Sunday.”