Part 32 (2/2)

THE SUBSt.i.tUTE

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 ill.u.s.trated 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 att.i.tude 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 circ.u.mstances 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 embarra.s.sment, whether John was fully in her confidence concerning this startling project, and if she had won his a.s.sent 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.

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