“HELP ME TO BE A GOOD WOMAN”
When Wayne returned to the office after luncheon he looked in upon his
father, who, having cleared his desk with his habitual easy dispatch,
was addressing himself to the consideration of new business. Roger
Craighill’s desk was never littered; a few sheets of figures lay before
him as he glanced over his glasses at Wayne.
“Sit down a moment. You may remember that I have wanted, for several
years, to get out of the jobbing business. Now I have an offer for it
that it seems best to accept. Walsh wishes to buy it.”
“Walsh!” exclaimed Wayne.
“I was surprised that he should want to leave us,” Colonel Craighill
continued.
“I’m rather more surprised that he should be able to!” said Wayne, who
saw nothing heinous in Walsh’s wish to leave the office if he could do
better elsewhere. It was, however, quite like his father to express
amazement that a valued subordinate should desert his standard. Within
a fortnight Wayne’s attitude toward his father had unconsciously
hardened; what once had been fitful rebellion was now stubborn revolt.
In his heart, Wayne felt that his father had never appreciated Walsh,
and he hoped now, that if the silent lieutenant left, the loss would
precipitate the breaking down of this complacency, this perfect
self-confidence.
“Walsh has made a fair offer. He knows the business well--as well,
practically, as I myself. His offer is based on the last invoice to
which he adds one hundred thousand dollars for the name and good will
of the house. The capitalization is just as your grandfather left it.
Walsh has owned, for a number of years you remember, ten shares of the
capital stock. You and I together own the rest. The few shares held by
men in the office to complete the organization are all assigned to us.
You have, if you remember----”
“Twenty shares,” said Wayne promptly, irritated that his father was
assuming that he would not know.
“Quite right. You own twenty; I hold sixty-five; and that leaves five
shares held by the clerks that are practically mine. I take it for
granted that you will wish to sell your holding if I dispose of the
controlling interest.”
“No; I hardly think I shall,” replied Wayne. “The earnings are better
than they ever were, and I shouldn’t know where to do so well.
Besides,” he added in a tone that caused his father to wince, “the
business was started by Grandfather Wayne and I have always felt that
I owed it to mother to keep my interest there. I suppose the corporate
name will not be changed?”
“I had assumed it would not be,” replied Colonel Craighill smiling. “It
is a part of the assets!”
“Certainly, the Wayne-Craighill Company! As I am both a Wayne and a
Craighill I prefer to stay in; I assume you don’t care one way or
another.”
“On the other hand, I am glad to see that you have a mind of your own
in the matter, and your feeling about your grandfather, the founder of
the house, does you great credit, my son. It pleases me more than I can
say. I should not be retiring myself if this were not in line with my
plans of several years for concentrating my interests. I can use this
money to better advantage elsewhere.”
He did not explain how he proposed to re-invest the money derived
from the sale of the jobbing business, and Wayne asked no questions.
A number of men were waiting, as usual, to see Colonel Craighill, who
presently took up several cards from his desk and rang for the office
boy to begin admitting the callers.
Wayne had ordered Joe to bring down his runabout at four o’clock and
for half an hour he idled as he waited in his own office. He came and
went as he liked by the hall door in his room so that the clerks in the
outer office never knew whether he was in or not.
“Home, Joe!” and he sat silently pondering until the car drew up at
his father’s door. As he hung up his coat he was conscious of a new
expectation, a new exhilaration. His heart beat fast as he stood,
listening intently, like one who is startled by an obscure sound in a
lonely house and waits for its recurrence. He had gone home to see his
father’s wife; he had gone expecting to find her alone, and he peered
into the dim drawing room guardedly as though fearful of detection. A
clock on the stair struck the half-hour and its chime, familiar from
childhood, beat upon his ears jarringly, and sent confused alarms
bounding through his pulses. He turned into the library and there the
thronging hosts of memory that the scene summoned, steadied and sobered
him as he stood within the portières. Then, as he swung round into the
hall, he heard a light laugh above, and Mrs. Craighill came running
down to meet him. Her step on the stair was noiseless; his pictorial
sense was alive to the grace of her swift descent.
“Home so soon!”
She put out her hand and waited at the foot of the stair. A
rose-coloured house-gown, whose half-sleeves disclosed her arms from
the elbow, seemed to diffuse a glow about her. He stood staring and
unsmiling where her laugh had first arrested him until she spoke again.
“I didn’t know I was so forbidding as all that!” she said and walked
past him into the library. She found a seat and he threw himself into
a chair a little distance away from her. They looked at each other
intently, he grave and sullen, she smiling.
“Well, you did it!” he said presently.
“Please!”
She turned with her lips pouting prettily and glanced over her
shoulder. “Please be nice to me!”
“You haven’t changed your tricks; you don’t have to beg admiration, so
cut it all out. What if I had stopped it?”
“Well, you didn’t--though I gave you your chance.”
“You needn’t give me credit for too much generosity. I was on a spree
and didn’t get your letter until the trap was well sprung, and,
besides, the name threw me off. It was only when the Colonel showed me
your photograph, carried sacredly in his pocket, that I knew who you
were. How’s your dear mama?”
“For once in her life I think she’s satisfied; she’s gone abroad, thank
heaven!”
“Now that you’re fixed I suppose she will do something on her own
account. She’s a wonder, that mother of yours.”
“Mama has her ambitions,” Mrs. Craighill observed pensively.
“Her greed, you mean. How did you get on with Fanny this morning?”
“Your sister’s a dear! I’m quite in love with her; she was perfectly
lovely to me--kind as could be and anxious to be helpful. I’m already
very fond of her.”
“I dare say your affections will include the whole family before you
get through with us.”
This meeting was not to his taste. He had taken advantage of the first
opportunity to be alone with his father’s wife, and now that they were
together he was failing to give the right tone to the interview. It
was proving disagreeable and he did not know how to change its key.
It irritated him to find that Mrs. Craighill was calmly giving it
direction.
“Wayne, dear,” she said, her arm thrown over the back of her low chair,
“you came home to see me and now you are not a bit nice.”
“I came home because it’s home,” he replied doggedly.
“But you haven’t been home at this hour within the memory of anybody on
the place. I asked the maids--very discreetly--what time Mr. Wayne came
home and they were embarrassed. You cut the Club for me this afternoon;
I’m not going to have it any other way.”
He rose and walked the length of the room, and when he had gained the
bay window he looked back at her. She did not move and her head, the
pretty arch of her neck, the graceful lines of her figure brought him
quickly to her side. He took her hands roughly and drew her to her feet.
“Yes, I came home when I did to see you alone,” he cried eagerly. “You
knew I would come; you counted on it; you were sure of it!”
“What a mind-reader you are!” she laughed, looking languidly up at him.
He clasped her hands in both his own, and peered into her face. Her
eyes questioned him long; they held him away from her as though by
physical force. Then the colour surged suddenly in her face and throat
as he bent toward her lips and she cried out softly and freed herself.
“No! No! Not like that!”
“There is no other way. You didn’t think you could come here and begin
all over again and live under the same roof with me and have me forget!
I tell you I am not brass or wood! No woman was ever so much to any man
as you are to me. If I had not been a fool you would have belonged to
me; and now, now you are here and we cannot be less to each other than
we were once. You know that; I know it!”
She was looking at him questioningly, with a wide-eyed gravity, and
she was very white. She lifted her head slightly, as though by the act
summoning her own courage, and took a step that brought her close to
him; she laid her hands on his shoulders.
“Wayne, I want you to help me--I want you to help me to be a good
woman.”
Her pallor had deepened; her lips trembled; the tears shone in her eyes.
“Why did you come here? If you wanted my help you took a strange way of
getting it. It strikes me that the reason you came is something that we
had better not go into.”
“That is not like you, Wayne. I suppose--I suppose--it would not occur
to you that I admire and love your father; that, after the life I have
led, the shelter of such a home as this and the protection of such a
man mean more than I know how to describe. I haven’t the words to tell
you what it means!” she ended with a little moan, and then: “It was
only chance that threw me again in your way.”
“I’m not so sure of that,” he replied harshly. “I think your mother
must have chuckled to herself at finding that she could catch the
father if she couldn’t land the more sophisticated son. She thought
she was taking revenge on me. Those are nice things you have”--his
eye swept her gown--“and if your mother has gone abroad it’s a fair
assumption that she tapped the Craighill till pretty soon after the
wedding--if not just before!”
“You have no right to make such insinuations. It’s infamous. I don’t
intend that you shall insult me under this roof.”
“Under this roof!” he mocked.
“Oh, I understand that it’s yours; that when your father dies it will
belong to you; but while he lives it’s my shelter, it’s my home; the
first, Wayne, that I ever had.”
He studied her with a puzzled look in his eyes. He had thought he knew
her; that out of his earlier knowledge he could readily establish a new
tie. The thought of this had filled his mind from the moment he had
recognized her photograph at his father’s table.
“What I ask you for, Wayne, what I beg you to give me, is my chance. I
have never had it yet. I have been hawked about and offered in a good
many markets. I might have been married to you if mama had not counted
too little on your sanity and tried to get money out of you before
she had you well hooked. It is possible that I was a little--just a
little slow at the game. I let you escape--I could have held you if I
had wanted to--and I suffered for it afterward. You may be sure she
punished me for that.”
“I dare say she did,” he muttered, watching her.
“If it hadn’t been that I really cared for you, Wayne, I think I should
have gone ahead. You thought you were eluding me; the fact is that I
precipitated that row myself to give you your chance to get away. The
mater wanted to follow you into the courts; I stopped that by burning
your letters and declining to give any aid.”
“Ha! my benefactress, you are discovered!”
“No, that is not the tone for you to take with me, Wayne. I have no
intention of asking favours. I think,” and she pondered gravely as
though anxious to be exact, “I believe I realize the enormity of what
I have done perfectly, and I ask forgiveness, mercy, kindness. I have
bought my freedom, and I want to be sure I shall have it--and peace.
Oh, peace, decency; to stop being a vagabond, flung in the eyes of
every man suspected of having money! That mother of mine didn’t sell me
at the last; I made the bargain. And now that I bear your father’s name
I am not going to dishonour it; I am not going to bring any cloud upon
his old age, no disgrace and no shame. There is no nobler man in the
world than he is, and as far as I can, with my poor, miserable, hideous
past, and my poor wits, I am going to try to live up to him. There is
just that one prayer in my heart--after all these temptations, and
heartache, heartache, heartache!--that I may be a good woman--a good
woman, Wayne! What a wonderful thing it would be if I could--goodness,
with peace!”
Her voice was low and failed wholly now and then and he found himself
watching her lips to read the words that his ears lost. He had been
rejoicing in the thought that his father was the victim of a vulgar
connivance between an avaricious and designing woman and a willing and
not too scrupulous daughter; and the situation was one which he had
counted upon playing with in his own fashion. The gossamer web of this
hope now fluttered broken on the wind. In the silence that followed
he saw for an instant the ignoble and shameful aspect of the thing
that had been in his heart. Then a new idea flashed upon him; it was
base, base enough to satisfy even this stubborn mood in which Mrs.
Craighill’s appeal had left him. He felt a joy in his cunning; his
heart warmed as the anger and resentment against his father took form
again. The conquest was not to be so easy as he had imagined, but it
would be all the sweeter for delay. Vengeance for wrongs and injustices
might yet be secured. He experienced a thrill of gratification that
his mind had responded to this need in defeat. His imagination built
up a new tower of possibilities upon a fresh foundation: it was this
new wife who had been deceived in the marriage, not his father! He
would gain in the end what he sought and the blow at his father should
lose nothing of its force when strengthened by her disappointment
and humiliation. It was inconceivable that Roger Craighill would ever
treat the woman as an equal; that there could ever be any real sympathy
between them. With all the zest of youth in her, and with her love of
life, she was sure to seek escape from the bleak zone he, as Roger
Craighill’s son, knew well, but whose far-lying levels she now saw rosy
with promise.
Mrs. Craighill had not looked at Wayne through the latter part of her
recital and appeal; but she rose now and turned to him smilingly. She
wore an air, indeed, of having defined an unassailable position; of
having fully mastered its defense, with her own soul supreme in the
citadel. Her confidence revealed itself in her voice as she addressed
him; he was piqued to find that she apparently dismissed him a little
condescendingly, as though their future relations were established
on a basis determined by herself and that there was no question of
maintaining them there.
“Good-bye, Wayne, I must run along now to dress for dinner. You dine
with Fanny, don’t you? Please tell your sister how much I appreciate
her kindness this morning; and I am grateful for yours, too, Wayne!”
He rose as she put out her hand. He looked at her fixedly as though her
identity were suddenly in question. Then he laughed softly.
“Good-bye, Addie!”
He followed her into the hall. She did not look back at him, but went
slowly up the stair with a dignity that was new in her. It was as
though she wore her new wifehood as a protecting shield and cloak.
When he heard her door close he went up to his own room.