A Poor Wise Man - Mary Roberts Rinehart (good e books to read .txt) 📗
- Author: Mary Roberts Rinehart
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Mrs. Boyd complied. She was a small, thin woman in her early fifties, who had set out to conquer life and had been conquered by it. The hopeless drab of her days stretched behind her, broken only by the incident of her widowhood, and stretched ahead hopelessly. She had accepted Dan’s going to France resignedly, with neither protest nor undue anxiety. She had never been very close to Dan, although she loved him more than she did Edith. She was the sort of woman who has no fundamental knowledge of men. They had to be fed and mended for, and they had strange physical wants that made a great deal of trouble in the world. But mostly they ate and slept and went to work in the morning, and came home at night smelling of sweat and beer.
There had been one little rift in the gray fog of her daily life, however. And through it she had seen Edith well married, with perhaps a girl to do the house work, and a room where Edith’s mother could fold her hands and sit in the long silences without thought that were her sanctuary against life.
“Is that the place, mother?”
“Yes.” Edith’s unwonted solicitude gave her courage.
“Edie, I want to ask you something.”
“Well?” But the girl stiffened.
“Lou hasn’t been round, lately.”
“That’s all over, mother.”
“You mean you’ve quarreled? Oh, Edie, and me planning you’d have a nice home and everything.”
“He never meant to marry me, if that’s what you mean.”
Mrs. Boyd turned on her back impatiently.
“You could have had him. He was crazy about you. Trouble is with you, you think you’ve got a fellow hard and fast, and you begin acting up. Then, first thing you know - “
Some of that strange new tolerance persisted in the girl. “Listen, mother,” she said. “I give you my word, Lou’d run a mile if he thought any girl wanted to marry him. I know him better than you do. If any one ever does rope him in, he’ll stick about three months, and then beat it.”
“I don’t know why we have to have men, anyhow. Put out the gas, Edie. No, don’t open the window. The night air makes me cough.”
Edith started downstairs and set to work in the kitchen. Something would have to be done about the house. Dan was taking to staying out at nights, because the untidy rooms repelled him. And there was the question of food. Her mother had never learned to cook, and recently more and more of the food had been something warmed out of a tin. If only they could keep a girl, one who would scrub and wash dishes. There was a room on the third floor, an attic, full now of her mother’s untidy harborings of years, that might be used for a servant. Or she could move up there, and they could get a roomer. The rent would pay a woman to come in now and then to clean up.
She had played with that thought before, and the roomer she had had in mind was Willy Cameron. But the knowledge that he knew the Cardews had somehow changed all that. She couldn’t picture him going from this sordid house to the Cardew mansion, and worse still, returning to it afterwards. She saw him there, at the Cardews, surrounded by bowing flunkies - a picture of wealth gained from the movies - and by women who moved indolently, trailing through long vistas of ball room and conservatory in low gowns without sleeves, and draped with ropes of pearls. Women who smoked cigarettes after dinner and played bridge for money.
She hated the Cardews.
On her way to her room she paused at her mother’s door.
“Asleep yet, mother?”
“No. Feel like I’m not going to sleep at all.”
“Mother,” she said, with a desperate catch in her voice, “we’ve got to change things around here. It isn’t fair to Dan, for one thing. We’ve got to get a girl to do the work. And to do that we’ll have to rent a room.”
She heard the thin figure twist impatiently.
“I’ve never yet been reduced to taking roomers, and I’m not going to let the neighbors begin looking down on me now.
“Now, listen, mother - “
“Go on away, Edie.”
“But suppose we could get a young man, a gentleman, who would be out all but three evenings a week. I don’t know, but Mr. Cameron at the store isn’t satisfied where he is. He’s got a dog, and they haven’t any yard. We’ve got a yard.”
“I won’t be bothered with any dog,” said the querulous voice, from the darkness.
With a gesture of despair the girl turned away. What was the use, anyhow? Let them go on, then, her mother and Dan. Only let them let her go on, too. She had tried her best to change herself, the house, the whole rotten mess. But they wouldn’t let her.
Her mood of disgust continued the next morning. When, at eleven o’clock, Louis Akers sauntered in for the first time in days, she looked at him somberly but without disdain. Lou or somebody else, what did it matter? So long as something took her for a little while away from the sordidness of home, its stale odors, its untidiness, its querulous inmates.
“What’s got into you lately, Edith?” he inquired, lowering his voice. “You used to be the best little pal ever. Now the other day, when I called up - “
“Had the headache,” she said laconically. “Well?”
“Want to play around this evening?”
She hesitated. Then she remembered where Willy Cameron would be that night, and her face hardened. Had any one told Edith that she was beginning to care for the lame young man in the rear room, with his exaggerated chivalry toward women, his belief in home, and his sentimental whistling, she would have laughed. But he gave her something that the other men she knew robbed her of, a sort of self-respect. It was perhaps not so much that she cared for him, as that he enabled her to care more for herself.
But he was going to dinner with Lily Cardew.
“I might, depending on what you’ve got to offer.”
“I’ve got a car now, Edith. I’m not joking. There was a lot of outside work, and the organization came over. I’ve been after it for six months. We can have a ride, and supper somewhere. How’s the young man with the wooden leg?”
“If you want to know I’ll call him out and let him tell you.”
“Quick, aren’t you?” He smiled down at where she stood, firmly entrenched behind a show case. “Well, don’t fall in love with him. That’s all. I’m a bad man when I’m jealous.”
He sauntered out, leaving Edith gazing thoughtfully after him. He did not know, nor would have cared had he known, that her acceptance of his invitation was a complex of disgust of home, of the call of youth, and of the fact that Willy Cameron was dining at the Cardews that night.
Howard Cardew was in his dressing room, sitting before the fire. His man had put out his dinner clothes and retired, and Howard was sifting before the fire rather listlessly.
In Grace’s room, adjoining, he could hear movements and low voices. Before Lily’s return, now and then when he was tired Grace and he had dined by the fire in her boudoir. It had been very restful. He was still in love with his wife, although, as in most marriages, there was one who gave more than the other. In this case it was Grace who gave, and Howard who received. But he loved her. He never thought of other women. Only his father had never let him forget her weaknesses.
Sometimes he was afraid that he was looking at Grace with his father’s eyes, rather than his own.
He had put up a hard fight with his father. Not about Grace. That was over and done with, although it had been bad while it lasted. But his real struggle had been to preserve himself, to keep his faiths and his ideals, and even his personality. In the inessentials he had yielded easily, and so bought peace. Or perhaps a truce, of a sort. But for the essentials he was standing with a sort of dogged conviction that if he lowered his flag it would precipitate a crisis. He was not brilliant, but he was intelligent, progressive and kindly. He knew that his father considered him both stupid and obstinate.
There was going to be a strike. The quarrel now was between Anthony’s curt “Let them strike,” and his own conviction that a strike at this time might lead to even worse things. ‘The men’s demands were exorbitant. No business, no matter how big, could concede them and live. But Howard was debating another phase of the situation.
Not all the mills would go down. A careful canvass of some of the other independent concerns had shown the men eighty, ninety, even one hundred per cent, loyal. Those were the smaller plants, where there had always been a reciprocal good feeling between the owners and the men; there the men knew the owners, and the owners knew the men, who had been with them for years.
But the Cardew Mills would go down. There had been no liaison between the Cardews and the workmen. The very magnitude of the business forbade that. And for many years, too, the Cardews had shown a gross callousness to the welfare of the laborers. Long ago he had urged on his father the progressive attitude of other steel men, but Anthony had jeered, and when Howard had forced the issue and gained concessions, it was too late. The old grievances remained in too many minds. To hate the Cardews bad become a habit. Their past sins would damn them now. The strike was wrong, a wicked thing. It was without reason and without aim. The men were knocking a hole in the boat that floated them. But-There was a tap at his door, and he called “Come in.” From her babyhood Lily had had her own peculiar method of signaling that she stood without, a delicate rapid tattoo of finger nails on the panel. He watched smilingly for her entrance.
“Well!” she said. “Thank goodness you haven’t started to dress. I tried to get here earlier, but my hair wouldn’t go up, I want to make a good impression to-night.”
“Is there a dinner on? TI didn’t know it.”
“Not a dinner. A young man. I came to see what you are going to wear.”
“Really! Well, I haven’t a great variety. The ordinary dinner dress of a gentleman doesn’t lend itself to any extraordinary ornamentation. If you like, I’ll pin on that medal from the Iron and Steel - Who’s coming, Lily?”
“Grayson says grandfather’s dining out.”
“I believe so.”
“What a piece of luck! I mean - you know what he’d say if I asked him not to dress for dinner.”
“Am I to gather that you are asking me?”
“You wouldn’t mind, would you? He hasn’t any evening clothes.”
“Look here, Lily,” said her father, sitting upright. “Who is coming here to-night? And why should he upset the habits of the entire family?”
“Willy Cameron. You know, father. And he has the queerest ideas about us. Honestly. And I want him to like us, and it’s such a good chance, with grandfather out.”
He ignored that.
“How about our liking him?”
“Oh, you’ll like him. Everybody does. You will try to make a good impression, won’t you, father?”
He got up, and resting his hands on her shoulders, smiled down into her
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