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

had gone to Cuba in ‘98, and had almost died of typhoid fever there, contracted in the marshes of Florida.

Yes, they had been a fighting family. And now -

Her mother was determinedly gay. There were flowers in the dark old hall, and Grayson, the butler, evidently waiting inside the door, greeted her with the familiarity of the old servant who had slipped her sweets from the pantry after dinner parties in her little-girl years.

“Welcome home, Miss Lily,” he said.

Mademoiselle was lurking on the stairway, in a new lace collar over her old black dress. Lily recognized in the collar a great occasion, for Mademoiselle was French and thrifty. Suddenly a wave of warmth and gladness flooded her. This was home. Dear, familiar home. She had come back. She was the only young thing in the house. She would bring them gladness and youth. She would try to make them happy. Always before she had taken, but now she meant to give.

Not that she formulated such a thought. It was an emotion, rather. She ran up the stairs and hugged Mademoiselle wildly.

“You darling old thing!” she cried. She lapsed into French. “I saw the collar at once. And think, it is over! It is finished. And all your nice French relatives are sitting on the boulevards in the sun, and sipping their little glasses of wine, and rising and bowing when a pretty girl passes. Is it not so?”

“It is so, God and the saints be praised!” said Mademoiselle, huskily.

Grace Cardew followed them up the staircase. Her French was negligible, and she felt again, as in days gone by, shut from the little world of two which held her daughter and governess. Old Anthony’s doing, that. He had never forgiven his son his plebeian marriage, and an early conversation returned to her. It was on Lily’s first birthday and he had made one of his rare visits to the nursery. He had brought with him a pearl in a velvet case.

“All our women have their own pearls,” he had said. “She will have her grandmother’s also when she marries. I shall give her one the first year, two the second, and so on.” He had stood looking down at the child critically. “She’s a Cardew,” he said at last. “Which means that she will be obstinate and self-willed.” He had paused there, but Grace had not refuted the statement. He had grinned. “As you know,” he added. “Is she talking yet?”

“A word or two,” Grace had said, with no more warmth in her tone than was in his.

“Very well. Get her a French governess. She ought to speak French before she does English. It is one of the accomplishments of a lady. Get a good woman, and for heaven’s sake arrange to serve her breakfast in her room. I don’t want to have to be pleasant to any chattering French woman at eight in the morning.”

“No, you wouldn’t,” Grace had said.

Anthony had stamped out, but in the hall he smiled grimly. He did not like Howard’s wife, but she was not afraid of him. He respected her for that. He took good care to see that the Frenchwoman was found, and at dinner, the only meal he took with the family, he would now and then send for the governess and Lily to come in for dessert. That, of course, was later on, when the child was nearly ten. Then would follow a three-cornered conversation in rapid French, Howard and Anthony and Lily, with Mademoiselle joining in timidly, and with Grace, at the side of the table, pretending to eat and feeling cut off, in a middle-class world of her own, at the side of the table. Anthony Cardew had retained the head of his table, and he had never asked her to take his dead wife’s place.

After a time Grace realized the consummate cruelty of those hours, the fact that Lily was sent for, not only because the old man cared to see her, but to make Grace feel the outsider that she was. She made desperate efforts to conquer the hated language, but her accent was atrocious. Anthony would correct her suavely, and Lily would laugh in childish, unthinking mirth. She gave it up at last.

She never told Howard about it. He had his own difficulties with his father, and she would not add to them. She managed the house, checked over the bills and sent them to the office, put up a cheerful and courageous front, and after a time sheathed herself in an armor of smiling indifference. But she thanked heaven when the time came to send Lily away to school. The effort of concealing the armed neutrality between Anthony and herself was growing more wearing. The girl was observant. And Anthony had been right, she was a Cardew. She would have fought her grandfather out on it, defied him, accused him, hated him. And Grace wanted peace.

Once again as she followed Lily and Mademoiselle up the stairs she felt the barrier of language, and back of it the Cardew pride and traditions that somehow cut her off.

But in Lily’s rooms she was her sane and cheerful self again. Inside the doorway the girl was standing, her eyes traveling over her little domain ecstatically.

“How lovely of you not to change a thing, mother!” she said. “I was so afraid - I know how you hate my stuff. But I might have known you wouldn’t. All the time I’ve been away, sleeping in a dormitory, and taking turns at the bath, I have thought of my own little place.” She wandered around, touching her familiar possessions with caressing hands. “I’ve a good notion,” she declared, “to go to bed immediately, just for the pleasure of lying in linen sheets again.” Suddenly she turned to her mother. “I’m afraid you’ll find I’ve made some queer friends, mother.”

“What do you mean by ‘queer’?”

“People no proper Cardew would care to know.” She smiled. “Where’s Ellen? I want to tell her I met somebody she knows out there, the nicest sort of a boy.” She went to the doorway and called lustily: “Ellen! Ellen!” The rustling of starched skirts answered her from down the corridor.

“I wish you wouldn’t call, dear.” Grace looked anxious. “You know how your grandfather - there’s a bell for Ellen.”

“What we need around here,” said Lily, cheerfully, “is a little more calling. And if grandfather thinks it is unbefitting the family dignity he can put cotton in his ears. Come in, Ellen. Ellen, do you know that I met Willy Cameron in the camp?”

“Willy!” squealed Ellen. “You met Willy? Isn’t he a fine boy, Miss Lily?”

“He’s wonderful,” said Lily. “I went to the movies with him every Friday night.” She turned to her mother. “You would like him, mother. He couldn’t get into the army. He is a little bit lame. And - ” she surveyed Grace with amused eyes, “you needn’t think what you are thinking. He is tall and thin and not at all good-looking. Is he, Ellen?”

“He is a very fine young man,” Ellen said rather stiffly. “He’s very highly thought of in the town I come from. His father was a doctor, and his buggy used to go around day, and night. When he found they wouldn’t take him as a soldier he was like to break his heart.”

“Lame?” Grace repeated, ignoring Ellen.

“Just a little. You forget all about it when you know him. Don’t you, Ellen?”

But at Grace’s tone Ellen had remembered. She stiffened, and became again a housemaid in the Anthony Cardew house, a self-effacing, rubber-heeled, pink-uniformed lower servant. She glanced at Mrs. Cardew, whose eyebrows were slightly raised.

“Thank you, miss,” she said. And went out, leaving Lily rather chilled and openly perplexed.

“Well!” she said. Then she glanced at her mother. “I do believe you are a little shocked, mother, because Ellen and I have a mutual friend in Mr. William Wallace Cameron! Well, if you want the exact truth, he hadn’t an atom of use for me until he heard about Ellen.” She put an arm around Grace’s shoulders. “Brace up, dear,” she said, smilingly. “Don’t you cry. I’ll be a Cardew bye-and-bye.”

“Did you really go to the moving pictures with him?” Grace asked, rather unhappily. She had never been inside a moving picture theater. To her they meant something a step above the corner saloon, and a degree below the burlesque houses. They were constituted of bad air and unchaperoned young women accompanied by youths who dangled cigarettes from a lower lip, all obviously of the lower class, including the cigarette; and of other women, sometimes drab, dragged of breast and carrying children who should have been in bed hours before; or still others, wandering in pairs, young, painted and predatory. She was not imaginative, or she could not have lived so long in Anthony Cardew’s house. She never saw, in the long line waiting outside even the meanest of the little theaters that had invaded the once sacred vicinity of the Cardew house, the cry of every human heart for escape from the sordid, the lure of romance, the call of adventure and the open road.

“I can’t believe it,” she added.

Lily made a little gesture of half-amused despair.

“Dearest,” she said, “I did. And I liked it. Mother, things have changed a lot in twenty years. Sometimes I think that here, in this house, you don’t realize that - ” she struggled for a phrase - “that things have changed,” she ended, lamely. “The social order, and that sort of thing. You know. Caste.” She hesitated. She was young and inarticulate, and when she saw Grace’s face, somewhat frightened. But she was not old Anthony’s granddaughter for nothing. “This idea of being a Cardew,” she went on, “that’s ridiculous, you know. I’m only half Cardew, anyhow. The rest is you, dear, and it’s got being a Cardew beaten by quite a lot.”

Mademoiselle was deftly opening the girl’s dressing case, but she paused now and turned. It was to Grace that she spoke, however.

“They come home like that, all of them,” she said. “In France also. But in time they see the wisdom of the old order, and return. It is one of the fruits of war.”

Grace hardly heard her.

“Lily,” she asked, “you are not in love with this Cameron person, are you?”

But Lily’s easy laugh reassured her.

“No, indeed,” she said. “I am not. I shall probably marry beneath me, as you would call it, but not William Wallace Cameron. For one thing, he wouldn’t have grandfather in his family.”

Some time later Mademoiselle tapped at Grace’s door, and entered. Grace was reclining on a chaise longue, towels tucked about her neck and over her pillows, while Castle, her elderly English maid, was applying ice in a soft cloth to her face. Grace sat up. The towel, pinned around her hair like a coif, gave a placid, almost nun-like appearance to her still lovely face.

“Well?” she demanded. “Go out for a minute, Castle.”

Mademoiselle waited until the maid had gone.

“I have spoken to Ellen,” she said, her voice cautious. “A young man who does not care for women, a clerk in a country pharmacy. What is that, Mrs. Cardew?”

“It would be so dreadful, Mademoiselle. Her grandfather - “

“But not handsome,” insisted Mademoiselle, “and lame! Also, I know the child. She is not in love. When that comes to her we shall know it.”

Grace lay back, relieved, but not entirely comforted.

“She is changed, isn’t she, Mademoiselle?”

Mademoiselle shrugged her shoulders.

“A phase,” she said. She had got the word from old Anthony, who regarded any mental attitude that did not conform with his own as a condition that would pass. “A phase, only. Now that she