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

have her old domain hers again, while Ellen nursed; to make again her flavorless desserts, her mounds of rubberlike gelatine, her pies. She brewed broths daily, and when Edith could swallow she sent up the results of hours of cooking which Ellen cooled, skimmed the crust of grease from the top, and heated again over the gas flame.

She never guessed the conspiracy against her.

Between Ellen and Edith there was no real liking. Ellen did her duty, and more; got up at night; was gentle with rather heavy hands; bathed the girl and brushed and braided her long hair. But there were hours during that simulated quarantine when a brooding silence held in the sick-room, and when Ellen, turning suddenly, would find Edith’s eyes on her, full of angry distrust. At those times Ellen was glad that Edith could not speak.

For at the end of a few days Ellen knew, and Edith knew she knew.

Edith could not speak. She wrote her wants with a stub of pencil, or made signs. One day she motioned toward a mirror and Ellen took it to her.

“You needn’t be frightened,” she said. “When those scabs come off the doctor says you’ll hardly be marked at all.”

But Edith only glanced at herself, and threw the mirror aside.

Another time she wrote: “Willy?”

“He’s all right. They’ve got a girl at the store to take your place, but I guess you can go back if you want to.” Then, seeing the hunger in the girl’s eyes: “He’s out a good bit these nights. He’s making speeches for that Mr. Hendricks. As if he could be elected against Mr. Cardew!”

The confinement told on Ellen. She would sit for hours, wondering what had become of Lily. Had she gone back home? Was she seeing that other man? Perhaps her valiant loyalty to Lily faded somewhat during those days, because she began to guess Willy Cameron’s secret. If a girl had no eyes in her head, and couldn’t see that Willy Cameron was the finest gentleman who ever stepped in shoe leather, that girl had something wrong about her.

Then, sometimes, she wondered how Edith’s condition was going to be kept from her mother. She had measured Mrs. Boyd’s pride by that time, her almost terrible respectability. She rather hoped that the sick woman would die some night, easily and painlessly in her sleep, because death was easier than some things. She liked Mrs. Boyd; she felt a slightly contemptuous but real affection for her.

Then one night Edith heard Willy’s voice below, and indicated that she wanted to see him. He came in, stooping under the sheet which Mrs. Boyd had heard belonged in the doorway of diphtheria, and stood looking down at her. His heart ached. He sat down on the bed beside her and stroked her hand.

“Poor little girl,” he said. “We’ve got to make things very happy for her, to make up for all this!”

But Edith freed her hand, and reaching out for paper and pencil stub, wrote something and gave it to Ellen.

Ellen read it.

“Tell him.”

“I don’t want to, Edith. You wait and do it yourself.”

But Edith made an insistent gesture, and Ellen, flushed and wretched, had to tell. He made no sign, but sat stroking Edith’s hand, only he stared rather fixedly at the wall, conscious that the girl’s eyes were watching him for a single gesture of surprise or anger. He felt no anger, only a great perplexity and sadness, an older-brother grief.

“I’m sorry, little sister,” he said, and did the kindest thing he could think of, bent over and kissed her on the forehead. “Of course I know how you feel, but it is a big thing to bear a child, isn’t it? It is the only miracle we have these days.”

“A child with no father,” said Ellen, stonily.

“Even then,” he persisted, “it’s a big thing. We would have this one come under happier circumstances if we could, but we will welcome and take care of it, anyhow. A child’s a child, and mighty valuable. And,” he added - “I appreciate your wanting me to know, Edith.”

He stayed a little while after that, but he read aloud, choosing a humorous story and laughing very hard at all the proper places. In the end he brought a faint smile to Edith’s blistered lips, and a small lift to the cloud that hung over her now, day and night.

He made a speech that night, and into it he put all of his aching, anxious soul; Edith and Dan and Lily were behind it. Akers and Doyle. It was at a meeting in the hall over the city market, and the audience a new men’s non-partisan association.

“Sometimes,” he said, “I am asked what it is that we want, we men who are standing behind Hendricks as an independent candidate.” He was supposed to bring Mr. Hendricks’ name in as often as possible. “I answer that we want honest government, law and order, an end to this conviction that the country is owned by the unions and the capitalists, a fair deal for the plain people, which is you and I, my friends. But I answer still further, we want one thing more, a greater thing, and that thing we shall have. All through this great country to-night are groups of men hoping and planning for an incredible thing. They are not great in numbers; they are, however, organized, competent, intelligent and deadly. They plow the land with discord to sow the seeds of sedition. And the thing they want is civil war.

“And against them, what? The people like you and me; the men with homes they love; the men with little businesses they have fought and labored to secure; the clerks; the preachers; the doctors, the honest laborers, the God-fearing rich. I tell you, we are the people, and it is time we knew our power.

“And this is the thing we want, we the people; the greater thing, the thing we shall have; that this government, this country which we love, which has three times been saved at such cost of blood, shall survive.”

It was after that speech that he met Pink Denslow for the first time. A square, solidly built young man edged his way through the crowd, and shook hands with him.

“Name’s Denslow,” said Pink. “Liked what you said. Have you time to run over to my club with me and have a highball and a talk?”

“I’ve got all the rest of the night.”

“Right-o!” said Pink, who had brought back a phrase or two from the British.

It was not until they were in the car that Pink said:

“I think you’re a friend of Miss Cardew’s, aren’t you?”

“I know Miss Cardew,” said Willy Cameron, guardedly. And they were both rather silent for a time.

That night proved to be a significant one for them both, as it happened. They struck up a curious sort of friendship, based on a humble admiration on Pink’s part, and with Willy Cameron on sheer hunger for the society of his kind. He had been suffering a real mental starvation. He had been constantly giving out and getting nothing in return.

Pink developed a habit of dropping into the pharmacy when he happened to be nearby. He was rather wistfully envious of that year in the camp, when Lily Cardew and Cameron had been together, and at first it was the bond of Lily that sent him to the shop. In the beginning the shop irritated him, because it seemed an incongruous background for the fiery young orator. But later on he joined the small open forum in the back room, and perhaps for the first time in his idle years he began to think. He had made the sacrifice of his luxurious young life to go to war, had slept in mud and risked his body and been hungry and cold and often frightfully homesick. And now it appeared that a lot of madmen were going to try to undo all that he had helped to do. He was surprised and highly indignant. Even a handful of agitators, it seemed, could do incredible harm.

One night he and Willy Cameron slipped into a meeting of a Russian Society, wearing old clothes, which with Willy was not difficult, and shuffling up dirty stairs without molestation. They came away thoughtful.

“Looks like it’s more than talk,” Pink said, after a time.

“They’re not dangerous,” Willy Cameron said. “That’s talk. But it shows a state of mind. The real incendiaries don’t show their hand like that.”

“You think it’s real, then?”

“Some boils don’t come to a head. But most do.”

It was after a mob of foreigners had tried to capture the town of Donesson, near Pittsburgh, and had been turned back by a hastily armed body of its citizens, doctors, lawyers and shop-keepers, that a nebulous plan began to form in Willy Cameron’s active mind.

If one could unite the plain people politically, or against a foreign war, why could they not be united against an enemy at home? The South had had a similar problem, and the result was the Ku Klux Klan.

The Chief of Police was convinced that a plan was being formulated to repeat the Seattle experiment against the city. The Mayor was dubious. He was not a strong man; he had a conviction that because a thing never had happened it never could happen.

“The mob has done it before,” urged the Chief of Police one day. “They took Paris, and it was damned disagreeable.”

The Mayor was a trifle weak in history.

“Maybe they did,” he agreed. “But this is different. This is America.”

He was rather uneasy after that. It had occurred to him that the Chief might have referred to Paris, Illinois.

Now and then Pink coaxed Willy Cameron to his club, and for those rare occasions he provided always a little group of men like themselves, young, eager, loyal, and struggling with the new problems of the day. In this environment Willy Cameron received as well as gave.

Most of the men had been in the army, and he found in them an eager anxiety to face the coming situation and combat it. In the end the nucleus of the new Vigilance Committee was formed there.

Not immediately. The idea was of slow growth even with its originator, and it only reached the point of speech when Mr. Hendricks stopped in one day at the pharmacy and brought a bundle which he slapped down on the prescription desk.

“Read that dynamite,” he said, his face flushed and lowering. “A man I know got it translated for me. Read it and then tell me whether I’m an alarmist and a plain fool, or if it means trouble around here.”

There was no question in Willy Cameron’s mind as to which it meant.

Louis Akers had by that time announced his candidacy for Mayor, and organized labor was behind him to an alarming extent. When Willy Cameron went with Pink to the club that afternoon, he found Akers under discussion, and he heard some facts about that gentleman’s private life which left him silent and morose. Pink knew nothing of Lily’s friendship with Akers. Indeed, Pink did not know that Lily was in the city, and Willy Cameron had not undeceived him. It had pleased Anthony Cardew to announce in the press that Lily was making a round of visits, and the secret was not his to divulge. But the question which was always in his mind rose again. What did she see in the man? How could she have thrown away her home and her family for a fellow who was so obviously what Pink would have called “a wrong one”?

He roused, however, at a question.

“He may,” he said; “with three