Kerry (32 page)

“Well, dear me! Why quarrel!” yawned Isobel, “I’m tired to death and hungry, too. Don’t they have any service in this sordid place? Can’t you ring and have a nice little supper sent up?”

“No,” said Kerry sadly, “I can’t! There isn’t any service and there isn’t any bell to ring, nor anybody to answer it. If you are rested enough we can go out to a restaurant and get supper, or if you are too tired for that I’ll go out and buy some sandwiches and a bottle of milk and some ice cream. How would you like that?”

“What? Eat in this little room? Why, you haven’t any table, nor dishes. Mercy, Kerry! You remind me of the horrible days in those dreary hotels in London. I couldn’t think of it. Come, we’ll go to a good restaurant or a roof garden and have one really good time to celebrate being together again. You call a taxi and we’ll go at once. I’m simply starved.”

“Mother, dear. I’m afraid I can’t afford a roof garden, and anyway I’m not dressed for such a place, and we would feel out of place.”

“Not a bit of it!” said the mother cheerily. “We’re going. Slip on your best evening things and come on. It won’t matter if you haven’t evening things. Tourists go to those places in their ordinary garments, just to look on. And as for affording it, I’ve got plenty of money with me. I’ll pay for it.”

“Mother, look here!” said Kerry sternly. “I meant what I said. I will not go anywhere, nor do anything on money that you got from Mr. Morgan. If I can’t afford things I’ll go without them, but I will not be beholden to him. If you want to spend his money on yourself I can’t prevent you. You married him. But if you mean what you said about leaving him, I should think you would not want to touch a penny of his. I shouldn’t in your place.”

“No, you wouldn’t!” said her mother with a sneer of contempt. “You’re that way. You’d rather your mother went around in rags and slept on a hard bed and ate fourth-rate cooking and got sick. Well, my lady, you can just understand that I won’t!”

It began to look as if they would not get any dinner that night, until at once Kerry heard steps on the stairs and a tap at the door and there was Mrs. Scott with a dainty tray on which was a tempting array. Fried chicken, little broilers, hot biscuits light as feathers, homemade currant jelly, a pot of tea and heaping dishes of luscious red strawberries.

“I thought your mother might be tired, darlin’,” she said in a low tone, and Kerry thanked her gratefully, and could have thrown her arms around her neck and cried on her shoulder.

“Oh, you are very good, Mrs. Scott.”
But Isobel had heard the “darlin’.”

“What impudence! Attempting to be friendly with you! ‘Darlin’.’ You shouldn’t allow it!”

“Mother!” said Kerry, her eyes blazing indignation. “She will hear you. Listen, Mother, she has been wonderful to me. She is a real lady if there ever was one. And when I was in trouble and had no one she did everything for me—!”

“Well, it was your own fault that you were in trouble! If you had stayed with me you would have had plenty and so would I. Think of it, Kerry, each of us a whole apartment to ourselves and everything imaginable into the bargain. Sam would have been content enough if you had come. He says he just longs for young life, and he has to have it. Why, Kerry! I thought you said you didn’t have service. This chicken looks really very tempting, and those biscuits. They’re almost like the beaten biscuits that Sam’s cook in the south made yesterday for me. Suppose you ring—oh, I mean go down and tell her I wish she would send up a nice fruit cup to begin with. I always like an appetizer. It won’t take her long to prepare it, and she can take the chicken down and keep it hot till we’ve eaten the fruit cup. What do you suppose she has for dessert?”

“Mother,” said Kerry gently, locking her door firmly and coming over to stand beside Isobel, “you don’t understand. Mrs. Scott owns this house, and only rents out her rooms. She does not take boarders, nor serve meals. She is only doing this to be kind because she loves me and she knows I love her, and she wants to please my mother.”

“Oh, I suppose she thinks I’ll take a room here, too, does she? Well, she’s much mistaken. I wouldn’t live in a sordid place like this for anything. It’s unspeakable! We’ll find another place the first thing in the morning.”

Kerry set her lips firmly, and sitting down opposite her mother with the tray on the desk between them, began to serve the chicken.

Isobel ate hungrily, and seemed in better humor afterward. “It’s really very good for such a place as this,” she commented. “Now, have you spoken to her for accommodations for the night? I suppose it’s too late to go anywhere else now. What other rooms has she got?”

“There are no vacant rooms here, Mother, every one is taken. You will have to stay here with me tonight.”

“But Kerry, you know how I hate rooming with anyone. You know I must get my rest.”

“I’m sorry, Mother, there isn’t any other way,” said Kerry sadly. Life was getting more and more complicated.

They went to bed at last, and Kerry crept to the far edge of the bed and held herself rigid until she knew by her mother’s steady breathing that she was asleep. Hour after hour she lay there and faced facts.

Here was her mother, dependent upon her. Not for an instant would she give in to that idea of her mother living on alimony, not if she meant to live with her. Never would she be under obligation to the man who had wrought trouble between them. It was all too evident that the marriage had not been a happy one. Castles and yachts and diamonds could not bring happiness. Kerry’s duty loomed large.

At last she came around to the place that had been hurting her all the evening. McNair. She could not marry McNair and put the burden of a silly mother-in-law like that upon his life. She would not. She must send him on his way. She must give him up!

For hours she wrestled with herself, and the tears poured down and wet her pillow. Was God like this, demanding of her all she had? At last, toward morning she began to pray, “Oh, Father, God, I’ve been very rebellious. Please, please forgive me. I’ll do what You say. I hand over my life to You entirely, to do what You will with me. If this wonderful lover is not for me, please give me strength to give him up. Please bear me up and help me to do the right thing.” And finally she slept.

Isobel was not awake when Kerry left for her work in the morning. She left a note for her mother suggesting a restaurant nearby where she might get lunch, and saying she would be home as early as possible, and they would go out for dinner together.

Kerry went to her office sadly, with blue shadows under her eyes. The lilt was gone out of her voice, but there was a sweetness and a gentleness about her that all her associates noticed and remarked upon. And when she smiled her face lit up with an inner light of the spirit.

But Kerry found an irate Isobel when she got home at night.

“Leaving me all alone in a strange city when I came on purpose just to see you!” she reproached.

“But Mother, you knew I had a position. I have to work for my living, you know, and now it will have to be for both our livings, so I shall have to be twice as careful to keep my job.”

“Your job! The idea! The perfect idea of a girl educated as you have been, with a father like yours, talking about a job like any common workman’s daughter. Why, I thought your father left you that book, and I thought he always said it was going to make us rich!”

“Mother dear, there will be an income from the book by and by, a royalty, but nothing now before it is published. And it will not make us rich. Not what you count riches. But we can get along.”

“Well, that’s just what I always supposed,” sneered Isobel, “that the great book would turn out to be a very small matter indeed! And you are just like your father, wanting to keep me down to the grindstone, scrimping and turning to keep alive. I never saw such an ungrateful daughter!”

There followed days of agony for Kerry. Days in which her mother searched for apartments, and dragged her to see them at night, only to find they were away beyond all possibility in the matter of price. Days in which Kerry carried around with her the consciousness that she had sent her letter of renunciation to California, and that soon McNair would know the worst, and it would all be over between them. Nights in which Isobel cried herself to sleep, and Kerry tossed and turned until near morning, and then slept fitfully and got up to drag through the heat of the office again.

Several times during that awful period Harrington Holbrook came up to the city and begged Kerry to come out to the house and get cooled off. And when she told him her mother was with her he urged that her mother come, too. But Kerry declined almost fiercely.

All too well she knew that Isobel would take to life at the Holbrooks, would preen herself and demand attention, and put them both under obligation. But though she declined and did not even tell her mother of the invitation, she thanked the boy gratefully, and sent him on his way feeling that at least one girl had not succumbed to the lure of money.

There came a day when Kerry knew that her letter must have reached California. It came on the top of an evening in which she and her mother had had a stormy debate about apartments. Isobel had found one just to her taste away up town where the best abodes were to be expected, and the price was simply out of sight.

Once for all Kerry told her, “Mother, I am willing to give up my life trying to make you happy, but I cannot and will not take a place that I cannot pay for. If you and I stay together it has got to be with the understanding that we live within our means. I have told you what I can pay, and I am sure from what I know of prices and locations that nothing as good as this room can be found for the money. For the present even with your own income, which father gave you, this seems the best place to stay. When the book begins to bring in royalty, or I get a raise perhaps, we’ll talk about something better, but not before.”

Isobel cried all night that night, or thought she did, which answered the same purpose, and Kerry went to her work ill prepared for the day, and praying constantly for strength and guidance. Strength, more strength to bear what might come from California in a few days, or worse still what might not come, for silence would be even worse than pleading.

About half past eleven o’clock a messenger boy arrived in the office with a telegram, asking for Miss K. Kavanaugh.

Kerry’s hands were trembling so that she could scarcely sign for the message. He had sent it to the office so that she would get it as soon as possible! He had been so kind and thoughtful. Her heart thrilled with appreciation of his thoughtfulness.

She tried to read the telegram quite casually for she could see furtive interested glances among her fellow workers, but the words leaped at her from the paper like old friends come to cheer her.

Kerry went to the reference library and took down the Bible, turning to the Book of Ruth. As she read the old, wonderful words a look of exultation came into her face.

“Intreat me not to leave thee, or to refrain from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people—”

She closed the book and went back to her work, her eyes full of a misty sweetness, and her heart answering with the last phrase of the verse:

“And thy God my God!”

T
he week dragged by in much the same way that the last ten days had gone, except that Kerry was no longer utterly beaten. In spite of the heat and her mother’s complaints, in spite of her perplexity and doubt, there was a lilt in her heart that crept into her voice again and all day long whenever she had a quiet minute by herself, her heart was crying out: “Oh Father—God. You’re going to let me see him again! You didn’t take him away without that! Oh, I thank You! I thank You!”

Saturday she was almost happy, as she dressed quietly not to waken her mother.

She longed to make herself fresh and suitable with a new garment for this occasion, but reminded herself that it would not do. Isobel would think her inconsistent in her talk about money if she spent even five or seven dollars on a little bargain dress. So she did her best with her old dark blue crêpe de Chine, and a freshly washed collar and cuffs of cheap lace, which she had carefully dipped in coffee grounds and ironed down in Mrs. Scott’s kitchen the night before.

She had not told Mrs. Scott of her lover’s coming. It seemed too sacred to speak of even to her who loved him. And besides, she could not tell her all—not yet anyway.

But Mrs. Scott was canny. She knew all that went on around her. She knew the child was passing through her chastening victoriously. She knew that some kind of struggle was going on within her, and that some light had come in her trouble. She knew that lilt when she heard it.

“What time do you get out from that horrible grind on Saturdays?” questioned Isobel from the bed suddenly, as Kerry was tiptoeing around just about to leave the room, supposing her mother was sound asleep. “Can’t we go somewhere and have a little pleasure this afternoon?”

There was something pitiful in the voice. Kerry turned a guilty, frightened gaze toward the bed. Was even this joy of meeting her lover for the last time to be denied her?

“I might get home by—four o’clock perhaps,” she said, hesitating. “It might be later,” she added honestly. “But perhaps—this evening!”

“The very idea!” said Kerry’s mother indignantly. “Keeping you working all the afternoon on Saturday, no half holiday! I never heard of anything so mean! And at such a paltry salary, too. I shall go down and speak to that Mr. Holbrook myself this afternoon about it. It’s a perfect imposition.”

“Mr. Holbrook won’t be there this afternoon, Mother, and besides,” said Kerry in a troubled voice, “I’m not always busy Saturday. I’ll probably be free next week, and we’ll go off somewhere and have a real picnic. Perhaps we’ll take a little boat trip somewhere. They don’t cost much.”