Mistress Anne Part 29

"You won't. You are too sensible."

"Am I?"

"Of course."

She sighed a little. "I am not half as sensible as you think."

When they reached home, they found Aunt Maude before them. She had been unswathed from her veil and her cloak, released from her black velvet, and was comfortable before her sitting-room fire in a padded wisteria robe and a boudoir cap with satin bow. Underneath the cap there were no flat gray curls. These were whisked mysteriously away each night by Hannah, the maid, to be returned in the morning, fresh from their pins with no hurt to Aunt Maude's old head.

She greeted Richard cordially. "I sent Hannah down when I heard you. Eve didn't let me know you were here; she never lets me know. And now tell me about your poor mother."

"Why poor, dear lady? You know she loves Crossroads."

"How anybody can---- I'd die of loneliness. Now to-night--so many people of my own kind----"

"Everybody in black velvet or brocade, everybody with badges, everybody with blue blood," Eve interrupted flippantly; "n.o.body with ideas, n.o.body with enthusiasms, n.o.body with an ounce of originality--ugh!"

"My dear----!"

"d.i.c.ky, Aunt Maude's idea of Heaven is a place where everybody wears coronets instead of halos, and where the angel chorus is a Dutch version of 'G.o.d save the King.'"

"My idea of Heaven," Aunt Maude retorted, "is a place where young girls have ladylike manners."

Richard roared. It had been long since he had tasted this atmosphere of salt and spice. Aunt Maude and her sprightly niece were as good as a play.

"How long shall you be in town, Richard?"

"Three or four days. It depends on the condition of our patient. It may be necessary to operate again, and Austin wants me to be here."

"Aunt Maude, d.i.c.ky may come back to New York to live."

"He should never have left. What does your mother think of it?"

"I haven't told her of Austin's offer. I shall write to-night."

"If she has a grain of sense, she'll make you take it."

Eve was restless. "Come on down, d.i.c.ky. It is time that Aunt Maude was in bed."

"I never go until you do, Eve, and in my day young men went home before morning."

"Dearest, d.i.c.ky shall leave in ten minutes. I'll send him."

But when they were once more in the great drawing-room, she forgot the time limit. "Don't let your mother settle things for you, d.i.c.ky. Think of yourself and your future. Of your--manhood, d.i.c.ky--please."

She was very lovely as she stood before him, with her hands on his shoulders. "I want you to be the biggest of them--all," she said, and her laugh was tremulous.

"I know. Eve, I want to stay."

"Oh, d.i.c.ky--really?"

"Really, Eve."

Their hands came together in a warm clasp.

She let him go after that. There had been nothing more than brotherly warmth in his manner, but it was enough that in the days to come she was to have him near her.

Richard, writing to his mother, told her something of his state of mind.

"I'll admit that it tempts me. It is a big thing, a very big thing, to work with a man like that. Yet knowing how you feel about it, I dare not decide. We shall have to face one thing, however. The Crossroads practice will never be a money-making practice. I know how little money means to you, but the lack of it will mean that I shall be tied to rather small things as the years go on. I should like to be one of the Big Men, mother. You see I am being very frank. I'll admit that I dreamed with you--of bringing all my talents to the uplift of a small community, of reviving at Crossroads the dignity of other days. But--perhaps we have dreamed too much--the world doesn't wait for the dreamers--the only way is to join the procession."

In the day which intervened between his letter and his mother's answer, he had breakfast with Eve in the room with the flame-colored fishes and the parrot and the green-eyed cat. He motored with Eve out to Westchester, and they had lunch at an inn on the side of a hill which overlooked the Hudson; later they went to a matinee, to tea in a special little corner of a down-town hotel for the sake of old days, then back again to dress for dinner at Eve's, with Aunt Maude at the head of the table, and Tony and Winifred and Pip completing the party. Then another play, another supper, another ride home with Eve, and in the morning in quiet contrast to all this, his mother's letter.

"Dear Boy," she said, "I am glad you spoke to me frankly of what you feel. I want no secrets between us, no reservations, no sacrifices which in the end may mean a barrier between us.

"Our sojourn at Crossroads has been an experiment. And it has failed. I had hoped that as the days went on, you might find happiness. Indeed, I had been deceiving myself with the thought that you were happy. But now I know that you are not, and I know, too, what it must mean to you to feel that from among all the others you have been chosen to help a great man like Dr. Austin, who was the friend of my father, and my friend through everything.

"But Richard, I can't go back. I literally crawled to Crossroads, after my years in New York, as a wounded animal seeks its lair. And I have a morbid shrinking from it all, unworthy of me, perhaps, but none the less impossible to overcome. I feel that the very stones of the streets would speak of the tragedy and dishonor of the past: houses would stare at me, the crowds would shun me.

"And now I have this to propose. That I stay here at Crossroads, keeping the old house open for you. David is near me, and any one of Cousin Mary Tyson's daughters would be glad to come to me. And you shall run down at week-ends, and tell me all about it, and I shall live in your letters and in the things which you have to tell. We can be one in spirit, even though there are miles between us. This is the only solution which seems possible to me at this moment. I cannot hold you back from what may be your destiny. I can only pray here in my old home for the happiness and success that must come to you--my boy--my little--boy----"

The letter broke off there. Richard, high up in the room of the big hotel, found himself pacing the floor. Back of the carefully penned lines of his mother's letter he could see her slender tense figure, the whiteness of her face, the shadow in her eyes. How often he had seen it when a boy, how often he had sworn that when he was the master of the house he would make her happy.

The telephone rang. It was Eve. "I was afraid you might have left for the hospital."

"I am leaving in a few minutes."

"Can you go for a ride with me?"

"In the afternoon. There's to be another operation--it may be very late before I am through."

"Not too late for dinner out of town somewhere and a ride under the May moon." Her voice rang high and happy.

For the rest of the morning he had no time to think of his own affairs.

The operation was extremely rare and interesting, and Austin's skill was superb. Richard felt as if he were taking part in a play, in which the actors were the white clad and competent doctors and nurses, and the stage was the surgical room.

Eve coming for him, found him tired and taciturn. She respected his mood, and said little, and they rode out and out from the town and up and up into the Westchester hills, dotted with dogwood, pink and white like huge nosegays. As the night came on there was the fragrance of the gardens, the lights of the little towns; then once more the shadows as they swept again into the country.

"We will go as far as we dare," Eve said. "I know an adorable place to dine."

She tried more than once to bring him to speak of Austin, but he put her off. "I am dead tired, dear girl; you talk until we have something to eat."

"Oh," Eve surveyed him scornfully, "oh, men and their appet.i.tes!"

But she had a thousand things to tell him, and her light chatter carried him away from somber thoughts, so that when they reached at last the quaint hostelry toward which their trip had tended, he was ready to meet Eve's mood half-way, and enter with some zest upon their gay adventure.

She chose a little table on a side porch, where they were screened from observation, and which overlooked the river, and there took off her hat and powdered her nose, and gave her attention to the selection of the dinner.

"A clear soup, d.i.c.ky Boy, and Maryland chicken, hot asparagus, a Russian dressing for our lettuce, and at the end red raspberries with little cakes. They are sponge cakes, d.i.c.ky, filled with cream, and they are food for the G.o.ds."

He was hungry and tired and he wanted to eat. He was glad when the food came on.