The Fifth Wheel (Prouty)/Chapter 28
CHAPTER XXVIII
A CALL FROM BOB JENNINGS
ONE day, however, I realized that I hadn't walked around Tom. I really hadn't circumvented, by persistence and determination, the obstacles that lay in the way to triumph. Some one, like a fairy godmother from Grimm's, had waved a wand and wished the obstacles away. Virginia told me about it. I learned that except for Mrs. Sewall I might still be delivering bandboxes. The searchlight following me about wherever I went for the last six months, making my way bright and easy, came not from heaven. It came instead from a lady in black who chose to conceal her good offices beneath an unforgiving manner, as she hid the five hundred dollars inside a trivial bag.
Mrs. Sewall called one day at the shop. She asked for Miss Van de Vere. She was contemplating redecorating a bed-chamber, it seemed. Virginia came to me in the workshop, and told me about it.
"Your old lady is out there," she said. "You'd better take her order."
"My old lady?"
"Yes, Mrs. Sewall, who landed you in our midst, my dear."
I stared at Virginia.
"Certainly, and pays a portion of your ridiculous salary, baby-mine." She went on pinching my cheek playfully. She delights in patronizing me. "You're an expensive asset, my dear—not but what I am glad. I always urged somebody of your sort to relieve me. Mrs. Scot-Williams never saw it that way, however, until the old lady Sewall came along and crammed you down our throats. I wasn't to tell you, but I see no harm in it. Go on in, and whatever the tiff's about make it up with the old veteran. She's not a bad sort."
I went upstairs. My heart was bursting with gratitude. I had vexed, displeased, cruelly hurt my benefactress—she had likened me to a steel knife—and yet she had bestowed upon me my greatest desire. Much in the same way as I had rescued the little bug, buffeted by winds, Mrs. Sewall had picked me up and placed me at the zenith of my hopes. But for her, no Mrs. Scot-Williams, no Van de Vere's, no trade of my own, no precious business to work for, and make succeed!
"Mrs. Sewall," I began eagerly (I found her alone in the living-room), "Mrs. Sewall" and then I stopped. There was no encouragement in her expression.
"Ah, Miss Vars," she remarked frostily.
"Mrs. Sewall—please," I begged, "please let me"
"My time is limited this morning," she cut in. "Doubtless Miss Van de Vere has sent you to me to attend to my order. If so, let us hasten with it. I am hunting for a cretonne with a peacock design for a bed-chamber. I should like to see what you have."
"But Mrs. Sewall"
"My time is limited," she repeated.
"I know, but I simply must speak."
She raised her hand. "I hope," she said, "that you are not going to make me ill again, Miss Vars."
I surrendered at that. "No, no," I assured her. "No, I'm not. I'm thoughtless. I think only of myself. I'll go and call Miss Van de Vere."
"That will not be necessary," said Mrs. Sewall. "You may show me the cretonne, now that you are here."
For half an hour we hunted for peacocks. I had the samples brought down to the living-room, piled on a chair near-by, and then dismissed the attendant. Mrs. Sewall appeared only slightly interested. In fact, I think we both were observing each other more closely than the cretonnes. They acted simply as a screen, through the cracks of which we might surreptitiously gaze.
I noted all the familiar points—the superb string of pearls about Mrs. Sewall's neck; the wealth of diamonds on her slender fingers when she drew off her glove; the band of black on the lower edge of the veil, setting off her small features in a heavy frame. I noted, too, the increased pallor beneath the veil. There was a sort of emaciated appearance just behind the ears, which neither carefully-set earring nor cleverly arranged coiffure could conceal. The veins on Mrs. Sewall's hands, moreover, were prominent and blue.
But for a tangle in the chain of Mrs. Sewall's glasses she would have left me with no sign of friendliness. It was when I passed her a small sample in a book, and she attempted to put on her glasses, that I observed the fine platinum cord was in a knot. I offered my services. I didn't suppose she would accept them. I was surprised at her cool, "Yes, if you will."
Mrs. Sewall was sitting down. I had to kneel to my task. The chain proved to be in a complicated snarl. My fingers trembled. I was very clumsy. I was afraid Mrs. Sewall would become exasperated. "Just a moment," I said, and looked up. Our eyes met. I was so close I could see the tiny network of wrinkles in the face above me. I could see the sudden tenderness in the eyes.
"It seems to be a particularly difficult snarl," I quavered, then bent my head and worked in silence for a moment. We were so near, we could hear each other breathe.
Suddenly in a low voice, almost a whisper, Mrs. Sewall asked, "Are you happy here?"
"Oh, so happy," I replied.
"Are you better? Are you well?" she pursued.
I dropped my hands in her lap, looked up, and nodded. I could not trust myself to speak. I knelt there in silence for a moment.
Finally I said, "Are you happy? Are you better? Are you well, dear Mrs. Sewall?"
"What does it matter? I am an old woman," she replied, in that disparaging little way of hers.
Our old intimacy shone clear and bright in that stolen moment. We were like two lovers forbidden to each other, whispering there together, when the lights suddenly go out, and they are enfolded in the protecting dark. "You are not too old to have created great happiness!" I exclaimed softly.
She shrugged and smiled.
It was a rare moment. I did not mean to spoil it. I ought to have been content. My eagerness was at fault.
"Oh!" I burst out crudely, "if you knew how sorry I am to have done anything to you, of all people, that displeased. If" She recoiled; she drew back. I had ventured where angels feared to tread. The chain was not yet untangled, but she would not let me kneel there any longer. She rose; I too.
"My time is limited, as I said," she reminded me; "I am here on business. Let us endeavor to complete it, Miss Vars."
"Yes," I said, blushing scarlet, "let us, by all means. I'm sorry, excuse me, I'll go upstairs and see what else we have."
····· When Bob finally called at Van de Vere's I hadn't seen him for over a year. While I had been working so hard to establish myself in my new venture, Bob had been starting a brand-new law firm of his own, in a little town I had never heard of in the Middle West. He had severed all connections with the University when his mother had died. I knew as well as if he had told me that when he broke loose from any sort of steady salary he had abandoned all hope of persuading me to come and grow in his green-house, as he had once put it. It had been our original plan that Bob would work gradually into a law firm in Boston, at the same time retaining some small salaried position at the University enabling us to be married before he became established as a lawyer. Bob had been able to lay little by. His mother had required specialists and trained nurses. When I first realized that Bob had gone West and set about planning his life without reference to me I felt peculiarly free and unhampered. When he as much as told me that it was easier for him not to hear from me at all, than in the impersonal way I insisted upon, I was glad. I cared for Bob too much not to feel a little pang in my breast every time I saw my name and address written by his hand. And I wanted nothing to swerve me away from the goal I had my eyes set on—the goal of an acknowledged success as an independent, self-supporting human being.
When Bob first dropped in at Van de Vere's I hardly recognized him as the romantic figure who had wandered over brown hillsides with me, a volume of poetry stuffed into his overcoat pocket. No one would have guessed from this man's enthusiastic interest in the progressive spirit of the West that he had been born on Beacon Hill behind violet-shaded panes of glass. No one would have guessed, when he talked about cleaning out a disreputable school-board by means of the women's vote, that he had once opposed parades for equal suffrage in Massachusetts. When Bob shook hands with me, firmly, shortly, as if scarcely seeing me at all, I wondered if it might have slipped his mind that I was the girl he had once been engaged to marry.
He explained that he was in town on business, leaving the same evening. He could give me only an hour. There was a man he had to meet at his hotel at five. Bob was all nerves and energy that day. He talked about himself a good deal. They wanted to get him into politics out there in that wonderful little city of his. He'd been there only fourteen months, but it was a great place, full of promise—politics in a rather rotten condition—needed cleaning and fumigating. He'd a good mind to get into the job himself—in fact, he might as well confess he was in it to some extent. He was meeting the governor in Chicago the next night, or else he'd stay over and ask me to go to the theater with him.
I don't suppose Bob would have referred to the old days if I hadn't. It was I, who, when at last a lull occurred, said something about that time when he had found me struggling in a mire that threatened to drown, and I had grasped his good, strong arm.
"Wasn't it better, Bob," I asked, "that I should learn to swim myself, and keep my head above water by my own efforts?"
"It certainly seems to be what women are determined to do," he dodged.
"Well, isn't it better?" I insisted.
"I'll say this, Ruth," he generously conceded. "I think there would be less men dragged down if all women learned a few strokes in self-support."
"Oh, Bob!" I exclaimed. "Do you really think that? So do I. Why, so do I! We agree! Women would not lose their heads so quickly in times of catastrophe, would they? You see it, too! Women would help carry some of the burden. All they'd need would be one hand on a man's shoulder, while they swam with the other and made progress."
He laughed a little sadly. "Ruth," he said, for the first time becoming the Bob I had known, "I fear you would not need even one hand on a shoulder. It looks to me," he added, as he gazed about the luxuriously furnished living-room of Van de Vere's, "that you can reach the shore quite well alone."