A Poor Wise Man - Mary Roberts Rinehart (good e books to read .txt) 📗
- Author: Mary Roberts Rinehart
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But Louis Akers was. He got his room number from a clerk and went up, still determinedly holding on to himself. Afterwards he had no clear recollection of any interval between the Benedict and the moment he found himself standing outside a door on an upper floor of the Saint Elmo. From that time on it was as clear as crystal, his own sudden calm, the overturning of a chair inside, a man’s voice, slightly raised, which he recognized, and then the thin crash of a wineglass dropped or thrown to the floor.
He opened the door and went in.
In the center of the sitting room a table was set, and on it the remains of a dinner for two. Akers was standing by the table, his chair overturned behind him, a splintered glass at his feet, staring angrily at the window. Even then Willy Cameron saw that he had had too much to drink, and that he was in an ugly mood. He was in dinner clothes, but with his bruised face and scowling brows he looked a sinister imitation of a gentleman.
By the window, her back to the room, was Lily.
Neither of them glanced at the door. Evidently the waiter had been moving in and out, and Akers considered him as little as he would a dog.
“Come and sit down,” he said angrily. “I’ve quit drinking, I tell you. Good God, just because I’ve had a little wine - and I had the hell of a time getting it - you won’t eat and won’t talk. Come here.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“Come here.”
“Stay where you are, Lily,” said Willy Cameron, from inside the closed door. “Or perhaps you’d better get your wraps. I came to take you home.”
Akers had wheeled at the voice, and now stood staring incredulously. First anger, and then a grin of triumph, showed in his face. Drink had made him not so much drunk as reckless. He had lost last night, but to-day he had won.
“Hello, Cameron,” he said.
Willy Cameron ignored him.
“Will you come?” he said to Lily.
“I can’t, Willy.”
“Listen, Lily dear,” he said gravely. “Your father is searching the city for you. Do you know what that means? Don’t you see that you must go home at once? You can’t dine here in a private suite, like this, and not expose yourself to all sorts of talk.”
“Go on,” said Akers, leering. “I like to hear you.”
“Especially,” continued Willy Cameron, “with a man like this.”
Akers took a step toward him, but he was not too sure of himself, and he knew now that the other man had a swing to his right arm like the driving rod of a locomotive. He retreated again to the table, and his hand closed over a knife there.
“Louis!” Lily said sharply.
He picked up the knife and smiled at her, his eyes cunning. “Not going to kill him, my dear,” he said. “Merely to give him a hint that I’m not as easy as I was last night.”
That was a slip, and he knew it. Lily had left the window and come forward, a stricken slip of a girl, and he turned to her angrily.
“Go into the other room and close the door,” he ordered. “When I’ve thrown this fellow out, you can come back.”
But Lily’s eyes were fixed on Willy Cameron’s face.
“It was you last night?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because,” Willy Cameron said steadily, “he had got a girl into trouble, and then insulted her. I wouldn’t tell you, but you’ve got to know the truth before it’s too late.”
Lily threw out both hands dizzily, as though catching for support. But she steadied herself. Neither man moved.
“It is too late, Willy,” she said. “I have just married him.”
At midnight Howard Cardew reached home again, a tired and broken man. Grace had been lying awake in her bedroom, puzzled by his unexplained absence, and brooding, as she now did continually, over Lily’s absence.
At half past eleven she heard Anthony Cardew come in and go upstairs, and for some time after that she heard him steadily pacing back and forth overhead. Sometimes Grace felt sorry for Anthony. He had made himself at such cost, and now when he was old, he had everything and yet nothing.
They had never understood women, these Cardews. Howard was gentle with them where Anthony was hard, but he did not understand, either. She herself, of other blood, got along by making few demands, but the Cardew women were as insistent in their demands as the men. Elinor, Lily - She formed a sudden resolution, and getting up, dressed feverishly. She had no plan in her mind, nothing but a desperate resolution to put Lily’s case before her grandfather, and to beg that she be brought home without conditions.
She was frightened as she went up the stairs. Never before had she permitted things to come to an issue between herself and Anthony. But now it must be done. She knocked at the door.
Anthony Cardew opened it. The room was dark, save for one lamp burning dimly on a great mahogany table, and Anthony’s erect figure was little more than a blur of black and white.
“I heard you walking about,” she said breathlessly. “May I come in and talk to you?”
“Come in,” he said, with a sort of grave heaviness. “Shall I light the other lamps?”
“Please don’t.”
“Will you sit down? No? Do you mind if I do? I am very tired. I suppose it is about Lily?”
“Yes. I can’t stand it any longer. I can’t.”
Sitting under the lamp she saw that he looked very old and very weary. A tired little old man, almost a broken one.
“She won’t come back?”
“Not under the conditions. But she must come back, father. To let her stay on there, in that house, after last night - “
She had never called him “father” before. It seemed to touch him.
“You’re a good woman, Grace,” he said, still heavily. “We Cardews all marry good women, but we don’t know how to treat them. Even Howard - ” His voice trailed off. “No, she can’t stay there,” he said, after a pause.
“But - I must tell you - she refuses to give up that man.”
“You are a woman, Grace. You ought to know something about girls. Does she actually care for him, or is it because he offers the liberty she thinks we fail to give her? Or” - he smiled faintly - “is it Cardew pig-headedness?”
Grace made a little gesture of despair.
“I don’t know. She wanted to come home. She begged - it was dreadful.” Grace hesitated. “Even that couldn’t be as bad as this, father,” she said. “We have all lived our own lives, you and Howard and myself, and now we won’t let her do it.”
“And a pretty mess we have made of them!” His tone was grim. “No, I can’t say that we offer her any felicitous examples. But the fellow’s plan is transparent enough. He is ambitious. He sees himself installed here, one of us. Mark my words, Grace, he may love the child, but his real actuating motive is that. He’s a Radical, because since he can’t climb up, he’ll pull down. But once let him get his foot on the Cardew ladder, and he’ll climb, over her, over all of us.”
He sat after that, his head dropped on his chest, his hands resting on the arms of his chair, in a brooding reverie. Grace waited.
“Better bring her home,” he said finally. “Tell her I surrender. I want her here. Let her bring that fellow here, too, if she has to see him. But for God’s sake, Grace,” he added, with a flash of his old fire, “show her some real men, too.”
Suddenly Grace bent over and kissed him. He put up his hand, and patted her on the shoulder.
“A good woman, Grace,” he said, “and a good daughter to me. I’m sorry. I’ll try to do better.”
As Grace straightened she heard the door close below, and Howard’s voice. Almost immediately she heard him coming up the staircase, and going out into the hall she called softly to him.
“Where are you?” he asked, looking up. “Is father there?”
“Yes.”
“I want you both to come down to the library, Grace.”
She heard him turn and go slowly down the stairs. His voice had been strained and unnatural. As she turned she found Anthony behind her.
“Something has happened!”
“I rather think so,” said old Anthony, slowly. They went together down the stairs.
In the library Lily was standing, facing the door, a quiet figure, listening and waiting. Howard had dropped into a chair and was staring ahead. And beyond the circle of lights was a shadowy figure, vaguely familiar, tall, thin, and watchful. Willy Cameron.
The discovery that Lily had left his house threw Jim Doyle into a frenzy. The very manner of her going filled him with dark suspicion. Either she had heard more that morning than he had thought, or - In his cunning mind for weeks there had been growing a smoldering suspicion of his wife. She was too quiet, too acquiescent. In the beginning, when Woslosky had brought the scheme to him, and had promised it financial support from Europe, he had taken a cruel and savage delight in outlining it to her, in seeing her cringe and go pale.
He had not feared her then. She had borne with so much, endured, tolerated, accepted, that he had not realized that she might have a breaking point.
The plan had appealed to his cynical soul from the first. It was the apotheosis of cynicism, this reducing of a world to its lowest level. And it had amused him to see his wife, a gentlewoman born, bewildered before the chaos he depicted.
“But-it is German!” she had said.
“I bow before intelligence. It is German. Also it is Russian. Also it is of all nations. All this talk now, of a League of Nations, a few dull diplomats acting as God over the peoples of the earth!” His eyes blazed. “While the true league, of the workers of the world, is already in effect!”
But he watched her after that, not that he was afraid of her, but because her reaction as a woman was important. He feared women in the movement. It had its disciples, fervent and eloquent, paid and unpaid women agitators, but he did not trust them. They were invariably women without home ties, women with nothing to protect, women with everything to gain and nothing to lose. The woman in the home was a natural anti-radical. Not the police, not even the army, but the woman in the home was the deadly enemy of the great plan.
He began to hate Elinor, not so much for herself, as for the women she represented. She became the embodiment of possible failure. She stood in his path, passively resistant, stubbornly brave.
She was not a clever woman, and she was slow in gathering the full significance of a nation-wide general strike, that with an end of all production the non-producing world would be beaten to its knees. And then she waited for a world movement, forgetting that a flame must start somewhere and then spread. But she listened and learned. There was a great deal of talk about class and mass. She learned that the mass, for instance, was hungry for a change. It would welcome any change. Woslosky had been in Russia when the Kerensky regime was overthrown, and had seen that strange three days when the submerged part of the city filled the streets, singing, smiling, endlessly walking, exalted and
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