The Flower Brides (74 page)

So he lingered and watched the glow in the girl’s happy face when she came tiptoeing back to the kitchen with her tray and reported that Mother took all the broth, and seemed to like it, and that she had dropped to sleep again.

When he finally tore himself away, he promised that he would return that night about the time the doctor usually arrived and be on hand to run any possible errands and see what report the doctor gave of his patient. He drove home happily, thinking about a basket of fruit that he would take with him when he went back, planning what it should contain.

At home there was a note on his desk in his valet’s handwriting. Miss Varrell had called him three times during his absence, and the telephone was ringing madly even as he read the note. This was doubtless Stephanie again. With a frown he took down the receiver and answered. Now there would be a long argument, and he hated arguments. Stephanie was not attractive when she was angry.

A
bout that time, down in the barbershop of one of the more exclusive hotels of the city, Myles Meredith, in the hands of his own special attendant whom he always demanded when he was in the city, was being polished off for the day and gathering items of news especially interesting to him. Jean knew his man, always kept choice bits of gossip for his ears, and produced them tactfully at the right moment. He was a man who made it his business to know all about his customers and produce what they wanted in the most casual and discreet manner.

Jean had skillfully succeeded in discovering where his customer had been dining the evening before, had made his little joke about the lateness of the morning hour in connection with the revelries of last night, and then, just as if it were an afterthought and not a carefully thought-out plan, he remarked, “Monsieur Jeffrey Wainwright did not dine with Monsieur and the Mademoiselle Stephanie Varrell last evening.”

Meredith gave him a quick furtive glance.

“And what makes you say that, Jean?” he asked suspiciously. Meredith accepted all confidences and gave none. Jean understood his man perfectly.

“Oh, I just happened to see him halting under a traffic light, headed out of the city, with a very attractive lady by his side.”

Meredith gave the man another keen glance and his voice took on a shade of interest—but not too much interest.

“A lady?” said Meredith. “Who was it? Not the platinum star from the Lyric last night?”

“No, no!” said Jean, selecting a bottle from his array of beautifiers and giving it a professional shake. “No, no, quite different to little Madame Shirley. It was a—what shall I say?—more patrician face. Veri delicate. Veri lovely. Veri aristocratic!” Jean’s tone waxed eloquent. “Monsieur Wainwright seemed most interested, the brief glimpse I got. I wondered! He was always so—what shall I say?—devoted to Mademoiselle Varrell. But all things change,
n’est-ce pas
? But I wonder—!”

“Yes, all things change, Jean, including fair ladies. Isn’t that true, Jean?” said Meredith, with a sinister gleam in his half-closed eyes. “What other news have you, Jean?”

A few minutes later Meredith betook himself to a telephone booth and called up his hostess of the night before. “That you, Stef? Morning, baby! How about taking lunch with me this noon? What’s that? Where? Oh, your choice this time. And by the way, I happened on some news of your missing guest last night. He wasn’t eating his heart out as you fondly supposed. His technique is rather sudden, it appears. He attached a most attractive lady, I understand, and went off in her company instead of coming to your party. Now will you believe what I tell you next time?”

Back in the shabby old Chrystie house happiness was returning fast. Although Camilla had had to ask time off from her job and knew she was being docked on her salary for every day she took; although the nurse’s salary was mounting up minute by minute and Camilla didn’t see how she was ever going to pay it; even though the coal in the cellar was almost gone and last month’s bill had not been paid yet; even though the tiny bank account was all but overdrawn, she felt a song in her heart. For was not her mother growing better moment by moment? And her car was as by a miracle being repaired without charge! Oh, there were many things to be thankful for.

There were a few bruises from her accident last night that were developing, but they were trifles, just enough to make her realize how she had been saved from death, or crippling, which might have been worse than death. So her heart sang softly as she went about the little apartment putting everything in as lovely order as it was possible to do with an invalid and a trained nurse to be considered.

When, at the earnest command of the nurse, she finally lay down in the late afternoon to rest, her mind dwelt on the kind friend who had been sent to help her out in her trouble, and she breathed a little thankful prayer for him, too, and began to try to think of ways she might show him her gratitude.

The white orchids were in a lovely crystal bowl now, a relic of the prosperous past, and filled the little front room with their distinctive grandeur and loveliness. Camilla gave a thought of wonder to the one for whom they had been originally intended. Was she a girl he loved? Or a woman he honored? His mother, perhaps?

No, it would not have been his mother. He distinctly said the occasion for the flowers had passed and he didn’t know what to do with them. Mothers were always there, if they were there at all. If his mother was away he would have sent them from the florist’s. No, these flowers had been for a girl. They must have been for a girl, and he had been going to take them to her, take her out somewhere perhaps, or maybe just call upon her.

Camilla worked it all out carefully in her mind, and looking at the stately flowers, her intuition warned her that she must not let her thoughts get fastened upon this interesting stranger, for he surely must belong to someone else in a world that was not hers.

Yet those lovely white blossoms haunted her thoughts and tormented her conscience so that she finally got up softly so the nurse would not be disturbed from her nap and moved them into her mother’s room where she could see them if she wakened. They were her orchids, anyway.

Then she went back to her couch and resolutely put out of her mind all thought of the stranger. He was a dream. She must not think about him.

It was the next morning while Camilla was carefully giving her mother spoonfuls of orange juice that her mother’s eyes suddenly fastened upon the orchids.

“Camilla!” she said with a startled note in her feeble voice. “Where did those come from? You didn’t
buy
them—did you?”

“Oh, no,” said Camilla, trying to hide her confusion with a low laugh. Fool that she was! Why hadn’t she known her mother would question her about them, and how was she to explain without alarming her? The whole story of the accident and her wild evening ride were wrapped up in the innocent presence of those flowers. White orchids did not bloom on every corner around that shabby little brick house, and, of course, her mother would be keen enough to think it all out and wonder why! Camilla’s mother was a great one to scent alarm.

“Oh, no, I didn’t buy them,” laughed Camilla, draining the last drop of orange juice from the glass into the spoon. “Imagine me getting reckless enough to spend money on white orchids, of all flowers, this season of the year. No, Mother dear, they were sent to you.”

“Sent—to
me
!” said the mother in wonder. “Who would—who that I know,
could
?” She turned large, troubled eyes on her daughter. It was not easy to put anything over on even a sick mother of Camilla.

Camilla had been thinking fast.

“Yes,” she said cheerily, “but you don’t know him. That’s the fun of it. Not yet, that is. Maybe he’ll come around again someday, though, and you can thank him. He is the man who went after the medicine the doctor needed the night you were sick. His name is Wainwright.”

“Is he one of the men in your office?”

“Oh, no!” said Camilla with relief. “I don’t really know much about him myself, but he’s very nice and kind. He brought the flowers in from his car after he had been on an errand for the doctor and said perhaps you could enjoy them when you began to get better.”

Mrs. Chrystie’s face relaxed into a smile.

“How kind! A stranger!” she said, and she turned and looked at the lovely flowers.

Then, when Camilla leaned over to kiss her forehead, she smiled again and said, “Dear child! I’ve always wanted things like that—for you!”

Camilla’s answer was another kiss, and she hurried out of the room. She didn’t want her mother to see her face. She would ask more questions, perhaps, that would be hard to answer, and the daughter felt she would rather wait until her mother was really strong again before she was interrogated about the strange young man who had taken her to a lonely suburb and gone with her into an empty house. All that would be quite against her mother’s code for a respectable girl, and, of course, her mother would not understand how very sick she had been and what the necessity was.

But the very next day Wainwright arrived in the late afternoon with a luscious basket of fruit.

Mrs. Chrystie was decidedly better and feeling quite bright. Her ear was keen, and she asked the nurse if that was the young man who had sent her the orchids. The nurse replied that it was.

“I want to see him!” she demanded with a gleam of real interest in her eyes.

“I’m afraid it will tire you,” said the nurse hesitantly.

“Oh, I won’t talk except to thank him. He needn’t stay but a minute!”

So the nurse stepped into the hall where Camilla was talking to Wainwright in low tones and announced that the invalid wanted to see him for just a second.

Wainwright eagerly followed her into the sickroom. Camilla, in trepidation, lingered in the doorway, afraid for what he might say.

But she needn’t have worried. Wainwright knew his way around the world exceedingly well. He gave her mother one of his pleasant grins, said a few graceful phrases, declared he was coming to see her again when she was well enough to talk longer, and took himself away from the house. He seemed to have a fine inner sense that if he lingered around in the kitchen with Camilla, now that her mother was alive to the world again, it might excite her wonder and perhaps make trouble for Camilla.

Camilla watched him wistfully as he took his leave. What a fine, kindly, friendly person he was! What would it be to have a real friend like him! In spite of the sentinels of caution she had set about her heart to watch her every thought, his brief call had left a warm, happy feeling.

He called up the next day to say that he was going to be away for a few days and he wanted to ask how Mrs. Chrystie was before he left.

“Mother has invited some friends to our place up in the mountains, and she seems to think I’ve got to go and help her out,” he explained. “I’m not especially keen on it, though the winter sports are always interesting, but I guess it’s got to be done. Mother sort of depends on me to look after things.”

Camilla thanked him for calling and felt a flow of pleasure that he had cared to inquire for her mother, reflecting how few of the young men she knew would have taken the trouble, when they had so many other delightful interests, to call up and find out about an elderly woman who was practically a stranger. But she discovered that the world seemed lonelier when she had hung up the receiver, just because she knew he could not be expected to run in anymore.

“Yes,” she told herself, standing by the tiny kitchen window and looking out on the neighbor’s ash cans where shabby little sparrows fluttered noisily about trying to find a peck or two of crumbs among the trash. “Yes, you’re a fool! Just like other girls! Just because a man has been kind for a few days you let yourself get interested in him! Just because he has an engaging smile. He doesn’t care a pin for you beyond a passing interest, and it wouldn’t do you a smidgen of good if he did, because he is not of your world. You know that, and yet you let yourself miss him. Well, it’s a good thing he’s gone, if you’ve got to be a fool!”

Nevertheless, when the nurse went out a few days later and brought in the evening paper, Camilla’s eye caught at once among the illustrations on the last page, a large picture of a glorified log cabin flanked by stately pines, looking out over a snowy hillside where young people in smart sports attire were enjoying themselves, some on snowshoes, some on skis, and some skating around the glittering frozen lake in the distance. The caption beneath the picture stated that the Wainwrights were giving a house party at “The Antlers,” their winter estate, and described the various sports available to their guests. Her heart gave a little lurch and her eyes grew wistful as she studied the picture. What fun it would be to be included in such a party! That was his world! He belonged there! Playtime and leisure and plenty of money to carry out whatever whim came into his head. His kindness to her and her mother had only been the carrying out of a very lovely one of his whims, of course, and she certainly had no need to quarrel with that. What might have happened to her mother and herself if he had not been there and been disposed to help?