Poor, Dear Margaret Kirby and others Part 23

But you see Richie Carter lives right next do' to the Arch'balds,"--Mamma's natural Southern accent was gaining strength every day now,--"and it might be awkward, meetin' him, don't you know?"

"Awkward?" Mary echoed, frowning.

"Well, you see, Ma'y, love, some years ago I was intimate with his wife," her mother proceeded with some little embarra.s.sment, "and so when I met him at the Springs last year, I confided in him about--laws!

I forget what it was exactly, some bills I didn't want to bother Georgie about, anyway. And he was perfectly charmin' about it I"

"Oh, Mamma!" Mary said in distress, "not Richard Carter of the Carter Construction Company? Oh, Mamma, you know how George hates that whole crowd! You didn't borrow money of him!"

"Not that he'd ever speak of it--he'd die first!" Mrs. Honeywell said hastily.

"I'll have to ask George for it," Mary said after a long pause, "and he'll be furious." To which Mamma, who was on the point of departure, agreed, adding thoughtfully, "I'm always glad not to be here if Georgie's going to fly into a rage."

George did fly into a rage at this piece of news, and said some scathing things of Mamma, even while he wrote out a check for two hundred dollars.

"Here, you send it to her," he said bitterly to Mary, folding the paper with a frown. "I don't feel as if I ever wanted to see her again. I tell you, Mary, I warn you, my dear, that things can't go on this way much longer. I never refused her money that I know of, and yet she turns to this fellow Carter!" He interrupted himself with an exasperated shrug, and began to walk about the room. "She turns to Carter," he burst out again angrily, "a man who could hurt me irreparably by letting it get about that my mother-in-law had to ask him for a petty loan!"

Mary, with a troubled face, was slowly, silently setting up a game of chess. She took the check, feeling like Becky Sharp, and tucked it into her blouse.

"Come on, George, dear," she said, after an uneasy silence. She pushed a white p.a.w.n forward. George somewhat unwillingly took his seat opposite her, but could not easily capture the spirit of the game. He made a hasty move or two, scowled up at the lights, scowled at the windows that were already wide open to the sultry night, loosened his collar with two impatient fingers.

"I'd give a good deal to understand your mother, Mary," he burst out suddenly. "I'd give a GREAT deal! Her love of pleasure I can understand--her utter lack of any possible vestige of business sense I can understand, although my own mother was a woman who conducted an immense business with absolute scrupulousness and integrity--"

"Georgie, dear! What has your mother's business ability to do with poor Mamma!" Mary said patiently, s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g the separated halves of a knight firmly together.

"It has this to do with it," George said with sudden heat, "that my mother's principles gave me a pretty clear idea of what a lady does and does not do! And my mother would have starved before she turned to a comparative stranger for a personal loan."

"But neither one of her sons could bear to live with her, she was so cold-blooded," Mary thought, but with heroic self-control she kept silent. She answered only by the masterly advance of a bishop.

"Queen," she said calmly.

"Queen nothing!" George said, suddenly attentive.

"Give me a piece then," Mary chanted. George gave a fully aroused attention to the game, and saving it, saved the evening for Mary.

"But please keep Mamma quiet now for a while!" she prayed fervently in her evening devotions a few hours later. "I can't keep this up--we'll have serious trouble here. Please make her stay where she is for a year at least."

Two weeks, three weeks, went peaceably by. The Venables spent a happy week-end or two with their children. Between these visits they were as light-hearted as children themselves, in the quiet roominess of the New York home. Mamma's letters were regular and cheerful, she showed no inclination to return, and Mary, relieved for the first time since her childhood of pressing responsibility, bloomed like a rose.

Sometimes she reflected uneasily that Mamma's affairs were only temporarily settled, after all, and sometimes George made her heart sink with uncompromising statements regarding the future, but for the most part Mary's natural sunniness kept her cheerful and unapprehensive.

Almost unexpectedly, therefore, the crash came. It came on a very hot day, which, following a week of delightfully cool weather, was like a last flaming hand-clasp from the departing summer. It was a Monday, and had started wrong with a burned omelette at breakfast, and unripe melons. And the one suit George had particularly asked to have cleaned and pressed had somehow escaped Mary's vigilance, and still hung creased and limp in the closet. So George went off, feeling a little abused, and Mary, feeling cross, too, went slowly about her morning tasks. Another annoyance was when the telephones had been cut off; a man with a small black bag mysteriously appearing to disconnect them, and as mysteriously vanishing when once their separated parts lay useless on the floor. Mary, idly reading, and comfortably stretched on a couch in her own room at eleven o'clock, was disturbed by the frantic and incessant ringing of the front doorbell.

"Lizzie went in to Broadway, I suppose," she reflected uneasily. "But I oughtn't to go down this way! Let him try again."

"He"--whoever he was--did try again so forcibly and so many times that Mary, after going to the head of the kitchen stairs to call Lizzie, with no result, finally ran down the main stairway herself, and gathering the loose frills of her morning wrapper about her, warily unbolted the door.

She admitted George, whose face was dark with heat, and whose voice rasped.

"Where's Lizzie?" he asked, eying Mary's negligee.

"Oh, dearie--and I've been keeping you waiting!" Mary lamented. "Come into the dining-room, it's cooler. She's marketing."

George dropped into a chair and mopped his forehead.

"No one to answer the telephone?" he pursued, frowning.

"It's disconnected, dear. Georgie, what is it?--you look sick."

"Well, I am, just about!" George said sternly. Then, irrelevantly, he demanded: "Mary, did you know your mother had disposed of her Sunbright shares?"

"Sold her copper stock!" Mary e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed, aghast For Mamma's entire income was drawn from this eminently safe and sane investment, and Mary and George had never ceased to congratulate themselves upon her good fortune in getting it at all.

"Two months ago," said George, with a shrewdly observant eye.

Mary interpreted his expression.

"Certainly I didn't know it!" she said with spirit.

"Didn't, eh? She SAYS you did," George said.

"Mamma does?" Mary was astounded.

"Read that!" Her husband flung a letter on the table.

Mary caught it up, ran through it hastily. It was from Mamma: She was ending her visit at Rock Bar, the Archibalds were going South rather early, they had begged her to go, but she didn't want to, and Mary could look for her any day now. And she was writing to Georgie because she was afraid she'd have to tell him that she had done an awfully silly thing: she had sold her Sunbright shares to an awfully attractive young fellow whom Mr. Pierce had sent to her--and so on and so on.

Mary's eye leaped several lines to her own name. "Mary agreed with me that the Potter electric light stock was just as safe and they offered seven per cent," wrote Mamma.

"I DO remember now her saying something about the Potter," Mary said, raising honest, distressed eyes from the letter, "but with no possible idea that she meditated anything like this!"

George had been walking up and down the room.

"She's lost every cent!" he said savagely. And he flung both hands out with an air of frenzy before beginning his angry march again.

Mary sat in stony despair.

"Have you heard from her today?" he flung out.

His wife shook her head.

"Well, she's in town," George presently resumed, "because Bates told me she telephoned the office while I was out this morning. Now, listen, Mary. I've done all I'm going to do for your mother! And she's not to enter this house again--do you understand?"

"George!" said Mary.

"She is not going to ENTER MY HOUSE," reiterated George. "I have often wondered what led to estrangements in families, but by the Lord, I think there's some excuse in this case! She lies to me, she sets my judgment at naught, she does the things with my children that I've expressly asked her not to do, she cultivates the people I loathe, she works you into a state of nervous collapse--it's too much! Now she's thrown her income away,--thrown it away! Now I tell you, Mary, I'll support her, if that's what she expects--"

"Really, George, you are--you are--Be careful!" Mary exclaimed, roused in her turn. "You forget to whom you are speaking. I admit that Mamma is annoying, I admit that you have some cause for complaint,--but you forget to whom you are speaking! I love my mother," said Mary, her feeling rising with every word. "I won't have her so spoken of! Not have her enter the house again? Why, do you suppose I am going to meet her in the street, and send her clothes after her as if she were a discharged servant?"

"She may come here for her clothes," George conceded, "but she shall not spend another night under my roof. Let her try taking care of herself for a change!"