The Magpies Nest (23 page)

"Oh, now, Gracie," he began deprecatingly, his eyes twinkling. "What do you want—grey hair, or to see me tottering around on crutches?"

What did she want? Her hand dropped; she turned away, her movements gracefully deliberate, and went to the window, a curiously general trick of anyone who has need of concealment.

"You are a fool, Nick," she said sharply, "but not so much as that. I made the mistake of being really interested in—in your welfare; you will pardon me. If you do not care, there is no reason why I should. '

Sometimes he thought Grace was growing a bit shrewish, she disapproved of him so often and so candidly. But he was used to it; he put it down to her one great disappointment-—the one of which he knew. Women, anyway, he thought, were rather inclined to worry a chap. They were always scolding him, at least, and it was not that he was ever anything but nice to them. And good old Grace was really fond of him, he felt sure; comfortably sure, just as he was of his own fondness for her.

"I'm getting on your nerves," he remarked resignedly. "I'm off."

"Nonsense," she said brusquely. "Aren't you going to stay and see the babies? Maddie will absolutely howl the roof down if she finds you've been here and gone."

"All right, if you can stand me a little longer." She smiled at that; he put his hat down. "They ought to be back soon." Madeline was an imp and a darling, and he was more than fond of her. That she reciprocated with enthusiasm was evident when a moment later her nurse brought her in, bright-eyed and rosy, with flying curls, fresh from a walk.

"Oh, Micky," she screamed in a delighted treble, hurling herself at his legs, "tackling low," as he put it. "Here is me. What've you dot for me?"

"Little pig," he said, tossing her to his shoulder. "Got a kiss—tied with a pink ribbon. Hello, sonny; how's tricks?"

Grace's boy, who was two years older than Madeline, came forward more gravely, but even so rather boisterously. They swanned over him, ruffling his hair, going through his pockets, and getting their hands gently slapped for it, whereat Madeline pouted and looked at him with a roguish side-glance. Mrs. Sturtevant, watching him carry Madeline on one strong arm to a sofa, was silent, her face singularly immobile. She had always been a trifle afraid to classify her emotions when she saw him with her children—another man's children—in his arms.

"You spoil them, Nick," she said at last, still a little sharply.

"Get out! I spank them more than you do," he retorted, with some truth. "You spoil 'em; you simply send them out of your sight when they misbehave, and then they go on misbehaving where you can't see them. Maddie, isn't your mummy a naughty girl?"

"I
love
my mummy," said Madeline, with sudden grave loyalty.
"I
am a naughty girl. Yesterday, I stealed a little cake." She looked so pensively proud of her own wickedness that even Mrs. Sturtevant laughed.

"Then," said Carter, "I shall have to bring you a little cake, so you won't need to steal one. Now I must go." Madeline threatened tears, but was pacified with promises of an early return.

"You won't stay to dinner?" said Mrs. Sturtevant.

"I've an engagement for dinner," answered Carter, and hoped that later that might happen to be true.

Mrs. Sturtevant shrugged her slim shoulders.

"Very well. Au 'voir."

He was gone. Maddie came and climbed up on her lap, unnoticed, and presently put her arms about her mother's neck.

"Mummy sick?" she asked sorrowfully.

Mrs. Sturtevant started.

"Yes, dear," she said, as if with an effort. "Mummy's head aches. Run away to nursie."

So, left quite alone, she sat very straight and still, trying to question herself closely, looking at her own heart, out of a certain natural pride in her honesty with herself. How long had she cared for Nick like this? But she could not positively remember; not even when she had been aware of it first, for it seemed to her now that she must have cared for him longer than she had known. Having always schooled herself to exquisite restraint, kept her emotions far below the surface, such unawareness had not been difficult. It was a family tradition with her people, the Camberwells, to be "sensible." And another family tradition, that of loyalty, unconsciously translated by Grace into a feeling of personal ownership, had helped to blind her. Jealousy had been needed to bring the truth home to her. Once he had been reported engaged to another woman, a false report, but before she knew it false she had hated that other woman utterly. And then she knew, though very slowly had she acknowledged it.

But he would never know. Unless he sought the knowledge. She set her teeth on that; pretty, rather sharp-looking, small teeth.

There was something hopeless about not even being able to remember when it had begun. It made the end look equally uncertain.

She went to the old, dim gilt-framed mirror at the far end of the drawing-room, and studied herself for a long time, and turned away with a bitter pride in the fact that nothing in her face betrayed her. And a wistful wonder—was that face not fair? Other men had thought so. There is no woman who is not beautiful to her own eyes in the light of the one man's praise; nor one who is not despoiled of all the usufruct of beauty if he prove blind.

In the meantime her cousin was ringing Hope's door-bell—or at least her landlady's door-bell—in a pitiable state of incertitude as to what he should say if he found Hope at home. By the time the door opened he quite hoped she would not be at home.

CHAPTER XXI

SHE was at home, taking down her hair—it was a fancy of hers that she could think better with her hair in a braid—and speculating on the vanity of life. New York she thought was worse than a merry-go-round, in which no one could stop a moment without losing his mount and falling out of the procession. And the procession apparently went in a circle. In a month she had not made even one acquaintance, except Evelyn Curtis, and Evelyn Curtis had gone home to Kansas City or Indianapolis or wherever it was, to stay probably the rest of the winter.

In short, Hope was lonely, and there was no companionship in sight unless she talked to Mrs. Hassard, her new landlady; and Hope had always said she could bore herself much better than anyone else could. Mrs. Hassard, like every other New York landlady, had seen better days—so had Hope, as it was raining vilely—and was not reticent about the fact. Fortunately, Hope had some work to do. She was rather troubled about her work, and unsure whether she was living up to her editor's hopes, if he had even cherished any. Her drawings were neither silly enough nor good enough, she felt in the depths of her candid soul.

It would be nice to have someone to talk to. Evidently Mrs. Hassard had; Hope heard the bell ring, and then voices in the passage, approaching her door.

"I'm sure she's in," Mrs. Hassard was saying, "and it will be nice for her to have company; but wait and I'll see if she's going out again." The door, which was not latched, swung open. "Oh, Mrs. Angell, there's a gentleman to see you."

"Why, I—I haven't..." any place to see him, she was about to say, and then observed the gentleman himself, having got his wish, looking at her appealingly over Mrs. Hassard's shoulder.

"You're not going out, are you?" that lady inquired.

"How do you do, Mr. Carter? No, I'm not going out..."

Then it was too late to make any further protest; Mrs. Hassard shooed him into the room and departed, smiling and a trifle fluttered. It subtly flatters any woman's vanity, somehow, to see a man suing for the favour of even another woman. Besides, people usually did smile at Norris Carter.

"How do you do?" said Hope again, and offered him a handful of hairpins. "Will you sit down? I—really, I didn't know I could have anyone here; but I suppose in New York you can do anything. I have seen landladies who would curl up and die at the idea..."

Then it occurred to her that she might be making him feel an intruder, and added, with a spontaneous laugh, "but I am excessively glad to see you, and how on earth did you find me?"

"I tracked you by your footprints," he told her, and looked around the room with an odd, quick glance. He was looking for signs of a husband! "Mrs. Angell, have you had dinner?"

"I had tea," she said, sitting down and jabbing the hairpins into her hastily coiled tresses at random. With amazement Carter noticed that she did not look in the mirror. "So it is all right; you are not
de trop.
Usually I dine late, at that white marble palace of Mr. Childs's across the street. We can talk awhile; I am bursting with conversation. I have a month of it bottled up in me. Put on your life preserver."

"Put on your hat instead," he returned, her chatter having restored him to his native well-bred audacity, "and we will go out and find some place, perhaps not so palatial, but quieter than Mr. Childs's. I came to take you to dinner."

"It is not possible," she gasped, in mock astonishment. "People do everything else in New York; they give you cocktails and good advice and theatre tickets, but they do not eat. I—I—wait one moment; I'm afraid you'll get away." She seized her hat and put it on with burlesqued haste. Then she smiled at him rather coaxingly, and took it off again. "Mayn't we talk a little while first?" she asked. "Are you
very
hungry?"

What could he answer to that? It was half-past nine when they finally went to dinner, and much too late to go to a theatre afterwards, as he had planned.

"Would you believe it," she said, leaning across the small table to make her voice heard above the din of the orchestra, "this is the first time I've been in one of these far-famed gilded caravansaries? If this is a sample, I believe they're overrated. I can't think here, can you?"

"People don't come here to think," he assured her "But haven't you really seen anything of New York?"

"Not if this is New York," she said. He felt quite unreasonably glad. "I've seen the Metropolitan Museum," she added in extenuation. "And—and—the Elevated! I have a lovely view of it from my window And—there was something else I saw, but I forget what. Probably Central Park."

"Haven't you any friends here?"

"Not a friend," she said calmly, spearing a small oyster with a tiny silver fork and looking at it dubiously. Being an inlander, she was not thoroughly acclimated to oysters, but he had ordered them, and she felt obliged to eat them.

"And your husband isn't here either?" He felt rude and presumptuous, but he wanted to know.

"I have no husband," she said deliberately. And ate the oyster.

Three years before she had closed her mind and her lips upon that subject, and she saw no reason for rescinding her resolution now. She hated women who paraded their woes, anyway.

"Mrs. Angell," said Carter slowly, "will you let me be your friend?"

"By all means," she said amiably, with a smiling lift of her brows. "Why not?" Could one say less to a young man whose dinner one was even at the moment consuming?

"No, but truly," he persisted, "I do want to be your friend. Won't you think of me as one?"

But he was in earnest! She looked at him with undisguised astonishment, and yet recollected it was thus almost all her friendships had begun, suddenly. Only no one else had ever been so insistent about the definition of his status. Unless Edgerton, who had wanted to help her, at once. Her heart felt warm at the recollection, and at this young
man's
candid haste. But she said thoughtfully:

"One doesn't have many friends, you know. I should think six a liberal allowance for life. And you don't know anything about me." It did not occur to her that she knew less of him. "But if you wish to try, I am sure it would be very nice—for me." She smiled at him, thinking him rather naïve, but liking him none the less for it.

Once when she was about eighteen, and still a pupil at Normal School, she had for a brief while known a boy, little more than her own age, a real boy, just blundering into manhood, full of the high and hopeless and perhaps rather foolish ideals that rightly belong to that troublous time; and he and she had talked of friendship, feeling themselves immensely original and treating the subject with a kind of tremulous solemnity which they felt due to themselves as pioneers in a new and vast field. He had been a more than usually handsome youth—Hope had the healthiest of pagan instincts in that respect—and she was sorry when he went away to an Eastern college and their lives permanently divided. Sometimes since she laughed over it all, but she liked it, too, as a memory. It had been very brief, and perhaps the better for that.

She wondered how old Carter might be. Twenty-nine, she guessed. He was thirty-two. But the sheen of his thick yellow hair—close cropped as it was—the clearness of his wide-open blue eyes and brown skin, still a shade darker than his hair, and the cleft in his chin that was hardly more than a dimple, took from his years deceptively. A touch of cynicism crept into her thoughts. Did he really believe himself?

Then she thought of what she had said to Mary, about no longer casting nets for love, and wondered if she had spoken more truly than she knew. It might be possible—all sorts of things were possible, to which her life stood witness. And it was less trouble to believe than not, since it could not matter to her if he lied. What object could he have? She shrugged her shoulders. Amusement, perhaps—but she needed amusement too.

Thought runs quickly; all that had come and gone while he was saying, still seriously:

"Thank you."

"Don't," she said, shaking her head, "you will find I give nothing for nothing. I am warning you, I will get the best of the bargain."

"And I should like to show you New York," he went on.

"You prove my contention," she smiled. "I should like that very much. But not anymore to-night; I have some work to do."

So she went straight home, and insisted on walking, though the pavements were still glistening with rain. Carter could see that her thin slippers were soaked, and when she coughed slightly he almost remonstrated angrily.

"Oh, pshaw," she said, "I've been wet for the last three years, and I promise I'll change as soon as I get in. Will that do you?"