moaning," she said. "I don't get half enough sleep, and the result is
that when I get in from my work I'm so dead tired I tumble into bed,
instead of coming over here as I'm longing to do. The housekeeper says
she's a student of some kind, and that she's really ill enough to need
a physician, although she goes to her school or work each morning.
I've only caught glimpses of her, but she strikes me as being rather
a stunning-looking creature. I wish she'd moan in the daytime, though.
Some night I'm going in there and give her a sleeping powder. Joking
aside, I'm rather anxious about her. Whatever is the matter with her,
physical or mental, it's a real trouble, and I wish I could help her."
The real Katherine Sonnot spoke in the last sentence. Like many
nurses, she had a superficial lightness of manner, behind which she
often concealed the wonderful sympathy with and understanding for
suffering which was hers. I knew that if the poor unknown sufferer
needed aid or friendship, she would receive both from Katherine.
It was shortly after this talk that I noticed the extraordinary
intimacy which seemed to have sprung up between Katherine and Lillian.
I seemed to be quite set aside, almost forgotten, when Katherine came
to the apartment. And there was such an air of mystery about their
conversation! If they were talking together, and I came within
hearing, they either abruptly stopped speaking, or shifted the
subject.
I was just childish and weak enough from my illness to be a trifle
chagrined at being so left out, and I am afraid my chagrin amounted
almost to sulkiness sometimes. Lillian and Katherine, however,
appeared to notice nothing, and their mysterious conferences increased
in number as the days went on.
There came a day at last when my morbidness had increased to such an
extent that I felt there was nothing more in the world for me, and
that there was no one to care what became of me. I was huddled in
one of Lillian's big chairs before the fireplace in the living room,
drearily watching the flames, through eyes almost too dim with tears
to see them. I could hear the murmur of voices in the hall, where
Katherine and Lillian had been standing ever since Katherine's
arrival, a few minutes before. Then the voices grew louder, there was
a rush of feet to the door, a "Hush!" from Lillian, and then, pale,
emaciated, showing the effects of the terrible ordeal through which he
had gone, my brother-cousin, Jack Bickett, who, until Katherine came
home, I had thought was dead, stood before me.
"Oh! Jack, Jack. Thank God! Thank God!"
As I saw my brother-cousin, Jack Bickett, whom I had so long mourned
as dead, coming toward me in Lillian Underwood's living room, I
stumbled to my feet, and, with no thought of spectators, or of
anything save the fact that the best friend I had ever known had come
back to me, I rushed into his arms, and clung to him wildly, sobbing
out all the heartache and terror that had been mine since Dicky had
left me in so cruel and mysterious a manner.
I felt as a little child might that had been lost and suddenly caught
sight of its father or mother. The awful burden that had been mine
lifted at the very sight of Jack's pale face smiling down at me. I
knew that someway, somehow, Jack would straighten everything out for
me.
"There, there, Margaret." Jack's well-remembered tones, huskier,
weaker by far than when I had last heard them, soothed me, calmed me.
"Everything's going to come out all right. I'll see to it all. Sit
down, and let me hear all about it."
There was an indefinable air of embarrassment about him which I could
not understand at first. Then I saw beyond him the lovely flushed
face of Katharine Sonnot, and in her eyes there was a faintly troubled
look.
I read it all in a flash. Jack was embarrassed because I had so
impetuously embraced him before Katherine. I withdrew myself from his
embrace abruptly, and drew a chair for him near my own.
"Are you sure you are fully recovered?" I asked, and I saw Jack look
wonderingly at the touch of formality in my tone.
"No, I cannot say that," he returned gravely, "but I am so much better
off than so many of the other poor chaps who survived, that I have no
right to complain. Mine was a body wound, and while I shall feel its
effects on my general health for years, perhaps all my life, yet I am
not crippled."
His tone was full of thankfulness, and all my pettiness vanished at
the sudden, swift vision of what he must have endured. The next moment
he had turned my thoughts into a new channel.
"Margaret," he said gravely, "I am terribly distressed to hear from
Katherine that your husband has gone away in such a strange manner."
So she had already told him! The little pang of unworthy jealousy came
back, but I banished it.
"Now, there must be no more time lost," he went on. "You have had no
man to look after things for you, but remember now, your old brother,
Jack, is on the job. First, I must know everything that occurred on
that last day. Did you notice anything extraordinary in his demeanor
on that last morning you saw him?"
This was the old Jack, going directly to the root of the matter,
wasting no time on his own affairs or feelings, when he saw a duty
before him. I felt the old sway of his personality upon me, and
answered his questions as meekly as a child might have done.
"He was just the same as he had been every morning since my accident,"
I returned.
"H-m." Jack thought a long minute, then began again.
"Tell me everything that happened that day, every visitor you had;
don't omit the most trifling thing," he commanded.
He listened attentively as I recalled Harry Underwood's visit, and
Robert Gordon's. At my revelation that Robert Gordon had said he was
my father, his calm, judicial manner broke into excitement.
"Your father!" he exclaimed, and then, after a pause; "I always knew
he would come back some day. But go on. What happened when he told you
he was your father?"
I went on with the story of my struggle with my own rancor against my
father, of my conviction that I had heard my mother's voice urging my
reconciliation with him, of my father's first embrace and kisses, even
of the queer smothered sound like a groan and the slamming of a door
which I had heard. Then I told him of my father's gift of money to me,
which I had not yet touched, but I noticed that toward the last of my
narrative Jack seemed preoccupied.
"Did your husband come home to Marvin at all that day?" he asked.
"No, he never came back from the city after he had once gone in, until
evening."
"But are you sure that this day he did not return to Marvin?" he
persisted. "How do you know?"
"Because no one saw him," I returned, "and he could hardly have come
back without someone in the house seeing him."
He said no more, as Lillian and Katherine came up just then, and the
conversation became general.
To my great surprise, I did not see him again after that first visit.
Katherine explained to me that he had been called out of town on
urgent business, but the explanation seemed to me to savor of the
mysterious excitement that seemed to possess everybody around me.
Finally one morning, Lillian came to me, her face shining.
"I want you to prepare to be very brave, Madge," she said. "There is
some one coming whom I fear it will tax all your strength to meet."
"Dicky!" I faltered, beginning to tremble.
"No, child, not yet," she said, her voice filled with pity, "but
someone who has done you a great wrong, Grace Draper."
XLIII
"TAKE ME HOME"
"Grace Draper coming to see me!"
My echo of Lillian's words was but a trembling stammer. The prospect
of facing the girl the thread of whose sinister personality had so
marred the fabric of my marital happiness terrified me. Her message
to me, posted in San Francisco, where Dicky was, flaunted its insolent
triumph again before my eyes:
"She laughs best who laughs last."
That she had intended me to believe she was with Dicky, I knew,
whether her boast were true or not. But how was it that she was coming
to see me? Lillian put a reassuring hand upon my shoulder as she saw
my face.
"Pull yourself together, Madge," she admonished me sharply. "Let me
make this clear to you. Grace Draper is not in San Francisco now.
Whether she has been, or what she knows about Dicky she has refused so
far to say. She has finally consented to see you, however."
"But, how?" I murmured, bewildered.
"Do you remember the girl of whom Katherine spoke when she first came,
the girl who moaned at night in the room next hers?"
"Oh, yes! And she was--?"
"Grace Draper. I do not know what made me think of the Draper when
Katherine spoke of the girl, but I did, although I said nothing about
it at the time. A little later, however, when the girl became really
ill and Katherine was caring for her as a mother or a sister would
have done, I told our little friend of my suspicion. Of course,
Katherine watched her mysterious patient very carefully after that,
and when she became ill enough to require a physician's services,
Katharine managed it so that Dr. Pettit was called, and he recognized
the girl at once.
"Ever since then, Katherine has been working on the substitute for
honor and conscience which the Draper carries around with her--but
she was hard as nails for a long time. She is terribly grateful to
Katherine, however, as fond of her as she can be of anyone, and she
has finally consented to come here. Don't anger her if you can help
it."
When, a little later, Grace Draper and I faced each other, it was pity
instead of anger that stirred my heart. The girl was inexpressibly
wan, her beauty only a worn shadow of its former glory. But there was
the old flash of defiant hatred in her eyes as she looked at me.
"Please don't flatter yourself that I have come here for your sake,"
she said, with her old smooth insolence. "But this girl here"--she
indicated Katherine--"took care of me before she knew who I was. She
just about saved my life and reason, too, when there was nobody else
to care a whit whether I lived or died. Even my sister's gone back on
me. So when I saw how much it meant to her to find out the truth about
your precious husband, I promised her I'd come and tell you the little
I knew."
She drew a long breath, and went on.
"In the first place, I didn't go to San Francisco with Dicky Graham,
although I'm glad if my little trick made you think so for awhile. I
didn't go anywhere with him except into a café for a few minutes, the
day he left New York. It was just after he got back from Marvin, and
he was pouring drinks into himself so fast that he was pretty hazy
about what had happened, but I made a pretty shrewd guess as to his
trouble."
She turned to me, and I saw with amazement that contempt for me was
written on her face.
"You!" she snarled, "with your innocent face, and your high and mighty
airs, you must have been up to something pretty disgraceful, to
have your husband feel the way he did that day he started for San
Francisco! He had to go out to Marvin unexpectedly that morning,
almost as soon as he had arrived in the city. What or who he found
there, you know best."
"Stop!" said Lillian authoritatively, and for a long minute the two
women faced each other, Grace Draper defiant, Lillian, with all the
compelling, almost hypnotic power that is hers when she chooses to
exercise it.
The accusation which the girl had hurled at me stunned me as
effectually as an actual missile from her hand would have done. What
did she mean? And then, before my dazed brain could work itself back
through the mazes of memory, there came the whir of a taxi in the
street, an imperative ring of the bell, a tramp of masculine footsteps
in the hall, and then--my husband's arms were around me, his lips
murmuring disjointed, incoherent sentences against my cheek.
"Madge! Madge! little sweetheart!--no right to ask
forgiveness--deserve to lose you forever for my doubt of you--been
through a thousand hells since I left--"
Over Dicky's shoulder I saw Jack's dear face smiling tenderly,
triumphantly, at me, realized that he must have started after Dicky
as soon as he had heard my story of my husband's inexplicable
departure--and the light for which I had been groping suddenly
illuminated Grace Draper's words.
"So you saw my father embrace me that day!" I exclaimed, and at the
words the face of the girl who had caused me so much suffering grew
whiter, if possible, and she sank into a chair, as if unable to stand.
"Yes." A wave of shamed color swept my husband's face, his words were
low and hurried. "But you must believe this one thing,--I had made
up my mind to come back and beg your forgiveness, indeed, I was just
ready to start for New York, when your cousin found me and brought me
the true explanation of things.
"I--I--couldn't stand it any longer without you, Madge. I must have
been mad to go away like that. You won't shut me out altogether, will
you, sweetheart?"
I had thought that if Dicky ever came back me I should make him suffer
a little of what he had compelled me to endure. But, as I looked
from the white, drawn face of the girl, who I was sure still counted
Dicky's love as a stake for which no wager was too high, to the
anxious faces of the dear friends who had helped to bring him back to
me, I could do nothing but yield myself rapturously to the clasp of my
husband's arms.
"I couldn't have stood it much longer without you, Dicky," I
whispered, and then, forgetting everything else in the world but
our happiness, my husband's lips met mine in a long kiss of
reconciliation.
A half choked little cry startled me, and I saw Grace Draper get
to her feet unsteadily and start for the door, with her hands
outstretched gropingly before her, almost as if she were blind.
Katherine Sonnot hurried to her, and then Jack spoke to me for the
first time since he had brought Dicky into the room.
"Good-by, Margaret, until I see you again," he said hurriedly.
"Good-by, Dicky, I must go to Katherine."
"Good-by, old chap," Dicky returned heartily, and in his tone I read
the blessed knowledge that my cherished dream had come true, that my
husband and my brother-cousin were friends at last. And from the look
upon Jack's face as his eyes met Katharine's, I knew that he, too, had
found happiness.
I saw the trio go out of the room, the girl who had wronged me, and
the friends who had helped me. Then my eyes turned to the truest, most
loyal friend of all, Lillian, who stood near us, frankly weeping with
joy. I put out my hand to her, and drew her also into Dicky's embrace.
How long a cry it had been since the days when I was wildly jealous of
her old friendship with Dicky!
"Will you come away with me for a new honeymoon, sweetheart?" Dicky
asked, tenderly, after awhile, when Lillian had softly slipped away
and left us alone together.
Into my brain there flashed a sudden picture of the homely living room
in the Brennan house at Marvin, with the leaping fire, which I
knew Jim would have for us whenever we came, with Katie's impetuous
welcome. I turned to Dicky with a passionate little plea.
"Oh! Dicky," I said earnestly, "take me home."