AN INTERVENTION
Mary could not have described the thing there was about old Nat's manner
of going by her door that led her to halt him and inquire what he was up
to. One sees, sometimes, one of his children gliding very innocently
along toward the nearest way out with an effect of held breath that
prompts investigation. In this sixty-year old child, upon whom the terror
of John Wollaston's desperate illness lay more visibly than on any other
member of the household, this look of gusto was especially striking.
Mary's question was prompted by no more serious an impulse than to share
with him a momentary escape from the all-enveloping misery.
But she found old Nat unwilling to share his source of satisfaction with
her. He protested, indeed, with an air of deeply aggrieved innocence,
that nothing of the sort existed. A man was waiting now in the lower hall
who had come to make the customary inquiries. Nat had conveyed them to
Paula and was returning with her answer. This was so flagrantly
disingenuous that Mary smiled.
"Who is the man?" she asked.
The old servant shuffled his feet. "It's that good-for-nothing piano
tuner, Miss Mary," he told her reluctantly. "I reckon you don't know much
about him. He's been coming around a lot since you've been away. He's
been sticking to Miss Paula like a leech, right up to the day your father
got sick. Then he didn't come any more and I thought we were done with
him. But he came back to-day and asked me if Miss Paula was up in the
music room. He'd have gone right straight up to that room where Doctor
John is fighting for his life if I hadn't stopped him."
"Did you tell him father was ill?" she asked, and was astonished at the
flare of passion this evoked from him.
"It ain't no business of his, Miss Mary," he said grimly. "Nothing about
this family is any business of his." Then as if anxious to prevent the
significance of that from reaching her, he hurried on. "He was so sure
Miss Paula wanted to see him, I told him if he'd wait, I'd inform her
that he was here. I've done told her and she said he was to go away. She
couldn't be bothered with him. And then she said to me with tears in her
eyes, 'I wish I'd never seen him, Nat.' Those were her words, Miss Mary.
'I wish my eyes had never beheld him!' That's what she said to me not a
minute ago. I'm going down to fix him so she'll never see him again."
"You needn't go down," Mary said decisively. "I'll see him myself."
She had got home that morning summoned by a telegram, one of those
carefully composed encouraging telegrams that are a simple distillate of
despair. During the three days it had taken to accomplish her journey
from the ranch, she had gradually relinquished all hope of finding her
father alive. Rush, who met the train, had reassured her. It was a bad
case of double pneumonia. They were expecting the crisis within
twenty-four hours. The doctors gave him an even chance, but the boy was
more confident. "They don't know dad," he said. "He isn't going to die."
On the way back to the house he had outlined the facts for her. His
father had driven out to the farm in his open roadster a week ago Sunday
to see how he and Graham were getting on--driven out alone, though he had
spoken the night before, over the telephone, of bringing Paula with him.
For some reason that hadn't come off. Dad had seemed well enough, then,
though rather tired and dispirited. The day had begun as if it meant to
be fine, for a change, but it had turned off cold again and begun to rain
while they were walking over the place. His father, he was afraid, had
got pretty wet. When they got back to the farm-house they found a
telephone message urgently summoning him to town, and he had driven away,
in the open car, without changing.
Rush had meant to telephone but had neglected this--they were terribly
busy, of course, trying to get things done without any labor to do them
with. He had come home Wednesday, on a promise to Graham's kid sister
that he would attend a school dance of hers. He had dressed at home but
not dined there and had seen nothing of his father until very late, about
two o'clock in the morning, when he noticed a light in his room as he
passed on the way to his own.
"I don't know why I stopped," he said. "He was talking and his voice
didn't sound natural, not as if he was telephoning nor talking to any
one in the room, either. He was trying to telephone--to the hospital to
send an ambulance for him. He hadn't any breath at all, even then, and
the thermometer he'd been taking his temperature with read a hundred
and four."
"But--the _hospital_?"
"I know," Rush agreed. "It's pretty rum. He stuck to it. Wanted to be got
straight out of the house without rousing anybody. He was a little bit
delirious, of course. I agreed to it to pacify him, but I telephoned
straight to Doctor Darby and he told me not to do anything till he got
around. It wasn't more than ten minutes before he came. Paula had roused
by that time, and she persuaded Darby against the hospital. She suggested
the music room herself and as soon as he saw it he said it was just the
place. They've got a regular hospital rigged up for him there and two men
nurses. But the main person on the job is Paula herself. The two men keep
watch and watch, but she's there practically all the time. They say she
hasn't slept in more than half-hour snatches since that first night. She
won't let any of us come near him--and Darby backs her up. The doctors
are all crazy about her. Say it'll be her doing if dad pulls through.
Well--she'd better make it!"
There wasn't time to explore the meaning of that last remark for they
were then pulling up at the door. She laid it aside for future reference,
however. She was so fortunate as to meet Doctor Darby on the stairs and
so to get at once the latest and most authoritative report.
He brightened at the sight of her but she thought he didn't look very
hopeful. He said though, that he believed her father was going to get
well. "Medically, he hasn't more than an even chance. He hasn't much
fight in him somehow. But that stepmother of yours means to pull him
through. She doesn't mean to be beaten and I don't believe she will be.
I've never seen the equal of her. It shows they're born, not made. She's
never had, your aunt assures me, any nursing experience whatever."
Mary thought she detected a twinkle in Darby's eye over this mention of
Aunt Lucile, but it was gone before she could make sure.
"You're to go up and see him for five minutes," he went on. "Paula's
keeping a look-out for you. He mustn't be allowed to talk, of course, but
she wants him to know you're back. She has an idea, and she's probably
right, that he is worrying about you."
"What is there that I can do?" she asked. "To help, I mean."
"Hope," he told her bluntly. "Pray if you can. Cheer up your aunt a bit,
if possible; she's in despair. Only don't try to take away any of her
occupations. That's about all."
"In other words, nothing," she commented.
"Well, none of us can do much more than that," he said, "excepting
always, Paula."
It was not until she had spent that heart-tearing five minutes at her
father's bedside, while she talked cheerful little encouraging futilities
in a voice dry with the effort she had to make to keep it from breaking,
that she saw her aunt--and felt grateful for Doctor Darby's warning. Mary
had never thought of Lucile before as an old woman, but she seemed more
than that now,--broken and, literally, in despair--of her brother's life.
And beyond this there was a bitterness which Mary could not, at first,
account for.
"Paula, I hear, has allowed you to see him. For five minutes! Well, that
is more than she has allowed me. Or any of us. It was a chance for
showing off, I suppose, that was more than she could resist."
"I was a little afraid it might be that," Mary admitted. "Afraid of
finding her--carefully costumed for the part, you know. But she wasn't.
She didn't come into the room with me at all; just told me not to show I
was shocked by the way he looked and not to let him talk. And she seemed
glad I was back; not for me but because it might help him. It seems a
miracle that he's still alive, after almost a week of that, and I guess
it is she who has done it. They all say so."
"Men!" the old woman cried fiercely. "All men! The two nurses as well.
There's something about her that makes idiots of all of them. She knows
it. And she revels in it. It's the breath of life to her. She has played
fast and loose with your father's happiness for it. And now she's playing
with his life as well. And feeling, all the while, that it is a very
noble repentance!"
"Repentance for what?" Mary asked. "Rush said something like that. I
thought, before I went away, that father was getting reconciled to the
Ravinia idea. Do you think it was worrying about ..."
"No, I don't," Lucile interrupted shortly. "Your father was exposed,
soaking wet, to a cold north wind, while he was driving forty miles in an
open car. That's the reason he took pneumonia. And it's the only reason.
I don't know what Rush may have been saying to you, but I've known your
father ever since he was born, and I can tell you that Paula might have
gone on making a fool of herself to the end of time without his dying of
it. He was--fond of her, I will admit. But he had a life of his own that
she knows nothing about. He was too proud to tell her about it, and she
hadn't wit enough to see it for herself. That's the truth, and this
emotional sprawl she's indulging in now doesn't change it.--Meanwhile,
she is adding to her collection five new men!"
"I don't believe," said Mary quietly, "that there is one of them she
knows exists. Or wouldn't poison," she added with a smile, "to improve
father's chance of getting well."
This won a nod of grim assent. "There are plenty of them. She could
replace them easily enough. But her hunger for their worship is
insatiable. For a while your father's--infatuation satisfied her. She may
have tried to pull herself up to his level. I dare say she did. But even
at that time she could not abide Wallace Hood, though he was kindness
itself to her, simply because he kept his head. Unfortunately, this poor
young musician was not able to keep his."
It seemed to Mary, even when allowance was made for the bitterness of the
desperate old woman, who then went on for the better part of an hour with
her bill of particulars, that this must be true. Paula must have lost her
head, at any rate. What Mary herself had seen the beginning of, must
have gone on at an accelerated speed until it was beyond all bounds.
There had been few hours when March might not come to the house and none
to which he did not stay. There were whole days when Paula was hardly out
of his company. She took him about with her to people's houses. She
talked about him when she went alone. Those who had at first not known
what to think, at last had come to believe that there was only one thing
they could.
"I tried to suggest to her, quite early, before it had gone so far, that
she was in danger of being misunderstood. It only made her furious. And
John was hardly less so when I mentioned to him that I had spoken to her.
He would see nothing; kept a face of granite through it all."
"Aunt Lucile," Mary asked, after a little silence, "do you think she has
really been--unfaithful to father?"
Miss Wollaston hesitated. "Should you consider the conduct I have
described, to be an example of fidelity?"
"I mean, in the divorce court sense," Mary persisted.
"That," her aunt said, more nearly in her old manner than anything that
Mary had yet seen--"that is a matter upon which I have no opinion."
It was a possibility that Mary had contemplated as early as that first
night of all, when Paula, having sung his song, had come herself to
find him in Annie's old bedroom where she had him hidden and with a
broken laugh had pulled him up in her arms and kissed him, unaware that
she was not alone with him. One kiss, as an isolated phenomenon, didn't
mean much, Mary allowed, but when a man and a woman who were going to
be left alone together a lot, started off that way, they were likely
to--get somewhere. And where the man was the composer of that love song
and the woman the singer of it, it was almost a foregone conclusion
that they would.
But this was not the conclusion that she had come to when she stopped
old Nat on his way down-stairs to turn March out of the house. The
evidence, Rush's and Aunt Lucile's, might seem to point that way but it
didn't, somehow, make a convincing picture. I think, though, that in any
case, she would have gone down to see him.
He had found himself a seat on a black oak settee in the hall around the
corner of the stairs and his attitude, when she came upon him, was very
like what it had been the other time, bent forward a little, his hands
between his knees, as if he were braced for something.
"Mrs. Wollaston won't be able to see you to-day," she said. He sprang to
his feet and she added instantly, "I'm her stepdaughter, Mary Wollaston.
Won't you come in?" Without waiting for an answer, she turned and led the
way into the drawing-room.
So far it had been rehearsed, on her way down-stairs, even to the chair
in the bow window which she indicated, having seated herself, for him to
sit down in. She had up to that point an extraordinarily buoyant sense of
self-possession. This left her for one panicky instant when she felt him
looking at her a little incredulously as if, once more, he wondered
whether she were really there.
"I think, perhaps, you haven't heard of father's illness," she began--not
just as she had expected to. "Or did you come to ask about him?"
"No," he said. "I hadn't heard. Is it--yes, of course it must
be--serious. I'm sorry."
She was struck by the instantaneous change in his manner. From being,
part of him, anyhow, a little remote--wool-gathering would have been Aunt
Lucile's term--he was, vividly, here. It wasn't possible to doubt the
reality of his concern. As a consequence, when she began informing him of
the state of things she found herself pulled away, more and more, from
the impersonal phraseology of a medical bulletin. She told how the attack
had come on; how they had put up a bed for him in the music room, where
there was the most air, and begun what it was evident from the first
would be a life-and-death struggle; she quoted what Rush had told her
when he met the train. "I agree with Rush," she concluded. "They let me
see him, for a few minutes, this morning, just so he'd know that I had
come back. Yet it isn't possible not to believe that he will get well."
When she had squeezed away the tears that had dimmed her eyes, she saw
that his own were bright with them. "He's more than just a great man," he
said gravely. Then, after a moment's silence, "If there's anything I can
do... It would be a great privilege to be of service to him. As errand
boy, any sort of helper. I had some hospital experience at Bordeaux."
It was, on the face of it, just such an offer as any kindly disposed
inquirer would have made. Such as Wallace Hood, for example, had, in
fact, made, only rather more eloquently less than an hour ago. But Mary's
impulse was not to answer as she had answered Wallace with a mere polite
acknowledgment of helpless good intentions. In fact, she could find, for
the moment, no words in which to answer him at all.
He said then, "I mustn't keep you."
Even in response to that she made no movement of release. "There's
nothing, even for me to do," she said, and felt from the look this drew
from him that he must, incredibly, have caught from her some inkling of
what her admission really meant.
He did not repeat his move to go, nor speak, and there was silence
between them for, perhaps, the better part of a minute. It was
terminated, startlingly, for her, by her brother's appearance in the
doorway. He had on his raincoat and carried his hat and an umbrella in
his hands.
"Mary, I'm just going out" ... he began, then broke off short, stared,
and came on into the room. March rose, but Mary, after one glance at
Rush's face, sat back a little more deeply in her seat. Rush ignored her
altogether.
"My sister has been away during the last few weeks," he said to March. It
had, oddly, the effect of a set speech. "If she had not been, I'm sure
she would have told you, as I do now ..." He stumbled there, evidently
from the sudden blighting sense that he was talking like an actor--or an
ass. "This isn't the time for you to come here," he went on. "This house
isn't the place for you to come. When my father's well enough to take
matters into his own hands again, he'll do as he sees fit. For the
present you will have to consider that I'm acting for him."
Mary's eyes during the whole of that speech never wavered from March's
face. There was nothing in it at all at first but clear astonishment, but
presently there came a look of troubled concern that gave her an impulse
to smile. Evidently it disconcerted her brother heavily for at the end of
an appalling silence, not long enough however, to allow March to get his
wits together for a reply, Rush turned about abruptly and strode from the
room. A moment later they heard the house door close behind him.
The two in the drawing-room were left looking at each other. Then,
"Please sit down again," she said.