A Poor Wise Man by Mary Roberts Rinehart (popular books of all time TXT) 📖

she would laugh. “Oh, Pink, how dear and funny and masculine you are! I have a perfectly uncontrollable desire to kiss you.”

Which she did, to his amazement and consternation. Nothing she could have done would more effectually have shown him the hopelessness of his situation than that sisterly impulse.

“Good Lord,” he gasped, “Grayson’s in the hall.”

“If he comes in I shall probably do it again. Pink, you darling child, you are still the little boy at Mrs. Van Buren’s and if you would only purse your lips and count one - two - three - Are you staying to luncheon?”

He was suffering terribly. Also he felt strangely empty inside, because something that he had carried around with him for a long time seemed to have suddenly moved out and left a vacancy.

“Thanks. I think not, Lily; I’ve got a lot to do to-day.”

She sat very still. She had had to do it, had had to show him, somehow, that she loved him without loving him as he wanted her to. She had acted on impulse, on an impulse born of intention, but she had hurt him. It was in every line of his rigid body and set face.

“You’re not angry, Pink dear?”

“There’s nothing to be angry about,” he said, stolidly. “Things have been going on, with me, and staying where they’ve always been, with you. That’s all. I’m not very keen, you know, and I used to think - Your people like me. I mean, they wouldn’t - “

“Everybody likes you, Pink.”

“Well, I’ll trot along.” He moved a step, hesitated. “Is there anybody else, Lily?”

“Nobody.”

“You won’t mind if I hang around a bit, then? You can always send me off when you are sick of me. Which you couldn’t if you were fool enough to marry me.”

“Whoever does marry you, dear, will be a lucky woman.”

In the end he stayed to luncheon, and managed to eat a very fair one. But he had little lapses into silence, and Grace Cardew drew her own shrewd conclusions.

“He’s such a nice boy, Lily,” she said, after he had gone. “And your grandfather would like it. In a way I think he expects it.”

“I’m not going to marry to please him, mother.”

“But you are fond of Alston.”

“I want to marry a man, mother. Pink is a boy. He will always be a boy. He doesn’t think; he just feels. He is fine and loyal and honest, but I would loathe him in a month.”

“I wish,” said Grace Cardew unhappily, “I wish you had never gone to that camp.”

All afternoon Lily and Grace shopped. Lily was fitted into shining evening gowns, into bright little afternoon frocks, into Paris wraps. The Cardew name was whispered through the shops, and great piles of exotic things were brought in for Grace’s critical eye. Lily’s own attitude was joyously carefree. Long lines of models walked by, draped in furs, in satins and velvet and chiffon, tall girls, most of them, with hair carefully dressed, faces delicately tinted and that curious forward thrust at the waist and slight advancement of one shoulder that gave them an air of languorous indifference.

“The only way I could get that twist,” Lily confided to her mother, “would be to stand that way and be done up in plaster of paris. It is the most abandoned thing I ever saw.”

Grace was shocked, and said so.

Sometimes, during the few hours since her arrival, Lily had wondered if her year’s experiences had coarsened her. There were so many times when her mother raised her eyebrows. She knew that she had changed, that the granddaughter of old Anthony Cardew who had come back from the war was not the girl who had gone away. She had gone away amazingly ignorant; what little she had known of life she had learned away at school. But even there she had not realized the possibility of wickedness and vice in the world. One of the girls had run away with a music master who was married, and her name was forbidden to be mentioned. That was wickedness, like blasphemy, and a crime against the Holy Ghost.

She had never heard of prostitution. Near the camp there was a district with a bad name, and the girls of her organization were forbidden to so much as walk in that direction. It took her a long time to understand, and she suffered horribly when she did. There were depths of wickedness, then, and of abasement like that in the world. It was a bad world, a cruel, sordid world. She did not want to live in it.

She had had to reorganize all her ideas of life after that. At first she was flamingly indignant. God had made His world clean and beautiful, and covered it with flowers and trees that grew, cleanly begotten, from the earth. Why had He not stopped there? Why had He soiled it with passion and lust?

It was a little Red Cross nurse who helped her, finally.

“Very well,” she said. “I see what you mean. But trees and flowers are not God’s most beautiful gift to the world.”

“I think they are.”

“No. It is love.”

“I am not talking about love,” said Lily, flushing.

“Oh, yes, you are. You have never loved, have you? You are talking of one of the many things that go to make up love, and out of that one phase of love comes the most wonderful thing in the world. He gives us the child.”

And again:

“All bodies are not whole, and not all souls. It is wrong to judge life by its exceptions, or love by its perversions, Lily.”

It had been the little nurse finally who cured her, for she secured Lily’s removal to that shady house on a by-street, where the tragedies of unwise love and youth sought sanctuary. There were prayers there, morning and evening. They knelt, those girls, in front of their little wooden chairs, and by far the great majority of them quite simply laid their burdens before God, and with an equal simplicity, felt that He would help them out.

“We have erred, and strayed from Thy ways like lost sheep. We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts. We have offended against Thy holy laws…. Restore Thou those who are penitent, according to Thy promises…. And grant, Oh most merciful Father, that we may hereafter live a godly, righteous and sober life.”

After a time Lily learned something that helped her. The soul was greater and stronger than the body and than the mind. The body failed. It sinned, but that did not touch the unassailable purity and simplicity of the soul. The soul, which lived on, was always clean. For that reason there was no hell.

Lily rose and buttoned her coat. Grace was fastening her sables, and making a delayed decision in satins.

“Mother, I’ve been thinking it over. I am going to see Aunt Elinor.”

Grace waited until the saleswoman had moved away.

“I don’t like it, Lily.”

“I was thinking, while we were ordering all that stuff. She is a Cardew, mother. She ought to be having that sort of thing. And just because grandfather hates her husband, she hasn’t anything.”

“That is rather silly, dear. They are not in want. I believe he is quite flourishing.”

“She is father’s sister. And she is a good woman. We treat her like a leper.”

Grace was weakening. “If you take the car, your grandfather may hear of it.”

“I’ll take a taxi.”

Grace followed her with uneasy eyes. For years she paid a price for peace, and not a small price. She had placed her pride on the domestic altar, and had counted it a worthy sacrifice for Howard’s sake. And she had succeeded. She knew Anthony Cardew had never forgiven her and would never like her, but he gave her, now and then, the tribute of a grudging admiration.

And now Lily had come home, a new and different Lily, with her father’s lovableness and his father’s obstinacy. Already Grace saw in the girl the beginning of a passionate protest against things as they were. Perhaps, had Grace given to Lily the great love of her life, instead of to Howard, she might have understood her less clearly. As it was, she shivered slightly as she got into the limousine.