THE SUBSTITUTE
It was a good guess of Mary's that Paula had gone to borrow the twenty
thousand dollars but it was to Wallace Hood, not to Martin Whitney, that
she went for it; and thereby illustrated once more how much more
effective instinct is than intelligence.
Martin, rich and generous as he was, originator as he was of the edict
that Paula must go to work, would never have been stampeded as Wallace
was in a talk that lasted less than half an hour, into producing
securities to the amount that Paula needed and offering them up in escrow
for the life of Maxfield Ware's contract.
Wallace was only moderately well off and he was by nature, cautious. His
investments were always of the most conservative sort. This from habit
as well as nature because his job--the only one he had ever had--was
that of estate agent. But Paula's instinct told her that he wouldn't
find it possible to refuse. I think it told her too, though this was a
voice that did not make itself fairly heard to her conscious ear, that
he would be made very fluttered and unhappy by it whether he granted her
request or not.
What he would hate, she perceived, was the suddenness of the demand and
the irrevocable committal to those five years; the blow it was to those
domesticities and proprieties he loved so much. The fact that he would be
made sponsor for those unchartered excursions to Mexico, to South
America, and so on, under the direction of a libidinous looking
cosmopolite like Maxfield Ware.
Why she wanted to put Wallace into the flutters she couldn't have told.
She was, as I say, not quite aware that she did. But he had been running
up a score in very minute items that was all of five years old. The fact
that all these items went by the name of services, helpful little acts of
kindness, made the irritation they caused her all the more acute.
I don't agree with Lucile Wollaston's diagnosis, that Paula could not
abide Wallace merely because he refused to lose his head over her, but
there was a grain of truth in it. What she unconsciously resented was the
fundamental unreality of his attitude to her. Actually, he did not like
her, but the relation he had selected as appropriate to the first Mrs.
Wollaston's successor was one of innocent devotion and he stuck,
indefatigably, to the pose. So the chance to put his serviceability to
the proof in consternating circumstances like these, afforded her a
subtle satisfaction. He'd brought it upon himself, hadn't he? At least it
was he and no other who had put Mary up to the part she had played.
None of this, of course, came to the surface at all in the scene between
them. She was gentler than was her wont with him, very appealing, subdued
nearer to his own scale of manners than he had ever seen her before. But
she did not, for a fact, allow him much time to think.
He asked her, with a touch of embarrassment, whether John was fully in
her confidence concerning this startling project, and if she had won his
assent to it.
"He knows all about it," she said--and with no consciousness of a
_suppressio veri_ here. "We hardly talked of anything else all last
night. I didn't get to sleep till four. He doesn't like it, but then you
couldn't expect he would. For that matter neither do I. Oh, you don't
know how I hate it! But I think he sees it has to be. Anyhow, he didn't
try very hard to keep me from going on with it--And Mary, of course, is
perfectly satisfied."
Even his not very alert ear caught something equivocal in those last
sentences, and he looked at her sharply.
"Oh, I'm worn to ribbons over it!" she exclaimed, and this touch of
apology served for the tearing edge there had been in her voice. "I
couldn't let him see how I feel about it. It would be a sort of relief to
have it settled. That's why I came straight to you to-day."
He tried, but rather feebly, to temporize. We mustn't let haste drive us
farther than we really wanted to go. The matter of drawing the formal
contract, for instance, must be attended with all possible legal
safe-guards, especially when we were dealing with a person whose honor
was perhaps dubitable.
"I thought we might go round to see Rodney Aldrich about it, now," she
said. "He's about the best there is in that line, isn't he? Why don't you
telephone to his office and find out if he's there."
This seemed as good a straw as any to clutch at. The chance of catching
as busy a man as Aldrich with a leisure half hour was very slim. The
recording angel who guarded his wicket gate would probably give them an
appointment for some day next week, and this would leave time for a
confirmatory talk with John. But, unluckily, Rodney was there and would
be glad to see Mrs. Wollaston as soon as she could be brought round.
"Then, that's all right," Paula said with a sigh of relief. "So if you
really believe I'll keep my word and don't mind putting up the money for
me, it's as good as settled."
There was one more question on his tongue. "Does John know that you have
come to me for it?" But this, somehow, he could not force himself to ask.
Implicitly she had already answered it--hadn't she?
"Of course I believe, in you, in everything, my dear Paula. And I'm very
much--touched, that you should have come to me. And my only hope is that
it may turn out to have been altogether for the best."
And there was that.
It was not until late that night that his misgivings as to the part Mary
might have played in this drama really awoke, but when they did he
marveled that they had not occurred to him earlier. He recalled that Mary
had prophesied during their talk at the Saddle and Cycle that Paula would
attribute to her the suggestion--whoever might make it--that an operatic
career for John's wife was desirable and necessary for financial reasons.
She had said too, in that serious measured way of hers, "If Paula ever
saw me coming between her and father, whether it was my doing or not, she
would hate me with her whole heart."
Had that prediction been justified? There were half a dozen phrases that
Paula had allowed herself to use this afternoon, which added up to a
reasonable certainty that it was altogether justified. It was not easy
for him to admit to himself that he didn't like Paula; that he knew her
and had long known her for a person incapable of following any lead save
that of her own primitive straightforward desires.
His self-communings reached down deeper into him than they had done for
many a long year. He convicted himself, before his vigil was over, of
flagrant cowardice in having allowed Mary to undertake the burden of that
revelation. What harm would it have done any one, even himself, beyond an
hour's discomfort, to have drawn down Paula's lightnings on his own head?
Her enmity, even though it were permanent, could not seriously have
changed the tenor of his ways.
But to Mary, such a thing could easily be a first-class disaster. Could
John be relied upon to come whole-heartedly to her defense. No, he could
not. Indeed--this was the thought that made Wallace gasp as from a dash
of cold water in the face--John's anger at this interference with his
affairs and at the innocent agent of it was likely to be as hot as his
wife's. Momentarily anyhow. What a perfectly horrible situation to have
forced the girl into;--that fragile sensitive young thing!
And now above all other times, when, for some reason not fully known to
him, she was finding her own life an almost impossibly difficult thing to
manage. He remembered the day she had come back from New York; how she
had flushed and gone pale and asked him in a moment of suddenly tense
emotion if he couldn't find her a job. It had been that very night,
hadn't it?--when Paula had given that recital of Anthony March's
songs--that she had disappeared out of the midst of things and never come
back during the whole evening. When one considered her courage a flight
like that told a good deal.
Then there had been that something a little short of an engagement with
Graham Stannard, which must have distressed her horribly;--any one with a
spirit as candid as hers and with as honest a hatred of all that was
equivocal. The family had seemed to think that it would all come out
right in the end somehow, yet the last time she had talked with him she
had said, cutting straight through the disguise his thought had hidden
itself behind, "I know I can't ever marry Graham."
And it was a young girl harassed with perplexities like these, whom he
had permitted in his stead to beard the lioness. Well, if there was
anything in the world, any conceivable thing, that he could do to repair
the consequences of his fault, he would do it. If that lovers'
misunderstanding with Graham could, after all, be cleared away it would
be the happy, the completely desirable solution of the problem. But if it
could not ... A day-dream that it was he who stood in Graham Stannard's
shoes, offering her harbor and rest and a life-long loyalty, formed the
bridge over which he finally fell asleep.
She called him to the telephone the next morning while he was at
breakfast; just to tell him she was in town, she said, and to ask him if
he had heard anything from his sister in Omaha as to whether she wanted a
nursery governess. He had to admit, of course, that he had not even
written to her, and felt guiltier and more miserable than ever.
"Do write to-day, though, won't you?" she urged. "And give me the best
character you can. Because I am going to get some sort of job just as
soon as possible."
In reply to the inarticulate noise of protest he made at this she went
on, "Our family has simply exploded. I fled for my life last night. So
you see I'm really in earnest about going to work now."
"I want to come and see you at once," he said. "Where are you?"
"At home," she answered, "but I'm going out this minute for the day. If
you'd like a picnic tea here at half past five, though, come and I'll
tell you what I've been doing."
He asked if this meant that she was staying all by herself in the
Dearborn Avenue house without even a servant, and at his lively horror
over this she laughed with an amusement which sounded genuine enough to
reassure him somewhat. She ended the conversation by telling him that she
had left her father with the impression that she was going straight to
Hickory Hill. She was writing Aunt Lucile a note saying she meant to stay
in town for a few days. "But if you get any frantic telephone calls in
the meantime, tell them I'm all right."
He wondered a good deal, as his hours marched past in their accustomed
uneventful manner, what she could be doing with hers. It was an odd
locution for her to have employed that she was "going out for the day."
He couldn't square it with any sort of social activity. The thing that
kept plaguing his mind despite his impatient attempts to dismiss it as
nonsense, was the possibility that she was actually looking for that job
she'd talked about. Answering advertisements!
Toward four, when he had stopped trying to do anything but wait for his
appointment with her, Rush and Graham came in, precipitately, and asked
for a private talk with him. He took them into his inner office, relieved
a little at the arrival of reenforcements but disappointed too.
"If you're anxious about Mary," he began by saying, "I can assure you
that she is all right. She's at the Dearborn Avenue house, or was last
night and will be again later this afternoon. I talked to her on the
phone this morning."
"Thank God!" said Rush.
Graham dropped into a chair with a gesture of relief even more
expressive.
Rush explained the cause of their alarm. Old Pete had driven in to
Hickory Hill around two o'clock with a letter, addressed to Mary, from
Paula, and on being asked to explain offered the disquieting information
that she had left Ravinia for the farm, the afternoon before. They had
driven straight to town and to Wallace as the likeliest source of
information.
In the emotional back-lash from his profound disquiet about his sister,
suddenly reassured that there was nothing--well, tragic to be
apprehended, Rush allowed himself an outburst of brotherly indignation.
He'd like to know what the devil Mary meant by giving them a fright like
that. Why hadn't she telephoned last night? Nothing was easier than
that. Or more to the point still, why hadn't she come straight out to
the farm as she had told her father she meant to do, instead of spending
the night in town?
Wallace would have let him go on, since it gave him a little time he
wanted for deciding what line to take. But Graham, it seemed,
couldn't stand it.
"Shut up, Rush!" he commanded. (You are to remember that he was three
years his partner's senior.) "Mary never did an--inconsiderate thing in
her life. If she seems to have forgotten about us, you can be dead sure
there's a reason."
"I agree with Stannard," Wallace put in, "that she wants to be dealt
with--gently. She must have been having a rather rotten time."
He hadn't yet made up his mind how far to take them into his confidence
as to what he knew and guessed, but Rush made an end of his hesitation.
"Tell us, for heaven's sake, what it's all about.--Oh, you needn't
mind Graham. He's as much in it as any of us. I suppose you know how
he stands."
Wallace was conscious of an acute wish that they had not turned up until
he'd had a chance to see Mary, but somehow he felt he couldn't go behind
an assurance like that. So he told them what he had pieced together.
Rush grunted and blushed and said he'd be damned, but it was not a
theme--this contention between his father and his stepmother--that he
could dwell upon. He got hold at last of something that he could be
articulate about, and demanded to know why, in these circumstances, Mary
hadn't come straight to them at Hickory Hill instead of camping out, for
the night, all by herself in the Dearborn Avenue house.
"She has an idea she must find a job for herself," Wallace said, feeling
awkwardly guilty as if he had betrayed her; but the way Rush leaped upon
him, demanding in one breath what the deuce he meant and what sort of job
he was talking about, made it impossible to pull up.
He recounted the request Mary had made of him, concerning his sister in
Omaha, and, last of all, stated his own misgiving--nothing but the merest
guess of course--that she had been putting in this day answering
advertisements. "She said she'd give me a picnic tea at five-thirty and
tell me what she'd been doing."
"Well, it'll be no picnic for her," Rush exploded angrily. "I'll see her
at five-thirty myself. She must be plumb out of her head if she thinks
she'll be allowed to do a thing like that."
Once more, before Wallace could speak, it was Graham who intervened. "I
want you to leave this to me," he said gravely. "I don't know whether I
can settle it or not, but I'd like to try." He turned to Wallace.
"Would you mind, sir, letting me go to tea with her at half past five
in your place?"
It is possible that, but for Wallace's day-dream of himself offering
Mary the shelter and the care she so obviously needed, he might have
persisted in seeing her first and assuring her that he was to be
regarded as an ally whatever she decided to do. Her voice as she had
said, "I know I can never marry Graham" echoed forlornly in his mind's
ear. But a doubt faint and vague as it was, of his own disinterestedness
held him back. Graham was young; he was in love with her. That gave him
right of way, didn't it?
So he assented. It was agreed that Rush should dine with Wallace at his
apartment. Graham, if he had any news for them should communicate it by
telephone. Instantly!