The Flower Brides (75 page)

There was a figure in the center foreground that suddenly she knew was him as she studied it. It was something about the pose of his tall splendid body, the heavy lock of dark hair that hung over his fine forehead—or was it his smile that flashed out even from those tiny graven lines that identified him?

He was bending at the back of a long sled, as if to kneel behind a load of girls and young men already seated on the sled at the top of the hill. One hand was on the shoulder of the girl just ahead of him, and she was smiling, as if at something he said.

Camilla’s heart gave another lurch, this time of envy. Oh, to be a girl on that sled, about to glide down that long white hill, that even a newspaper photo gave hint of its smooth, glittering whiteness and the joviality in the very atmosphere of the shining day. He was going down that hill behind that other laughing girl, and instinctively she knew the girl must feel safe and happy, because he was there looking after her.

Suddenly Camilla straightened up away from the paper, gave it a quick decided fold that hid the picture, and snapped out into the kitchen to prepare her mother’s broth. Fool! Here she was mooning again over other people’s happiness! It was in another world he walked, and God had given her a way to walk of her own. If He had chosen quiet ways of service and hard work instead of continual playtime, what need had she to complain? He had also given her a faith that upheld her and a hope that she would not surrender for all the world had to offer. And had He not given her back her precious mother from the edge of the grave? God knew best. Whatever He gave was right!

She smiled a tender little smile, and then she went about the kitchen singing:

The invalid in the other room heard her, and a smile of content grew softly on her lips, peace on her brow.

The nurse hovering about the patient said, as she patted the pillows into comfortable billows, “You’ve got a wonderful daughter, Mrs. Chrystie.”

And the mother, with another smile, answered, “Haven’t I?”

“Yes, there’s many a girl would be fretting over the everyday ills, but she’s taken worry like a soldier.” The nurse had reserve in her tone. She did not say that she knew how much personal deprivation Camilla had taken that she might provide the better for her mother. A nurse grows wise to see the inner workings of a family where she is employed and learns not to seem to see everything.

The next day Camilla went back to her job in the office.

It was the nurse who planned it.

“There’s no reason why you shouldn’t go back,” she said to Camilla. “I haven’t another case for two weeks, and unless an emergency comes in, I really haven’t any cause to go back to my boarding place. I’d just love to stay here with your mother without any pay until I’m called. She’s lovely, and I’d like to be near her. And there really isn’t much to be done for her anymore. In another day or two she’ll be going around as usual. All you want is somebody here to just watch her a little and see that she doesn’t overdo. So if you want to board me for being here with her till I have to go, I’d really like to do it. It’s kind of a solitary place where I board, and I’m sometimes lonesome. Besides, if I’m here I shan’t have to pay my board.”

Camilla compromised on half-salary to be paid in small installments, as she could, and went thankfully back to her job in the office.

When Jeffrey Wainwright got back to the city he came by almost immediately and was disappointed to find that Camilla was not at home.

“She’s gone back to her job,” explained Miss York, as if he would understand what a cause of thanksgiving that would be.

Wainwright looked perplexed.

“Job?” he said vaguely and then instantly recovered himself, remembering that to this nurse he was an old friend of Camilla’s who presumably knew all about her affairs. “Oh, yes, job,” he repeated. “Of course she would be expected to, wouldn’t she? I hadn’t realized that her mother was well enough for her to leave yet.”

“Oh, she had to,” the nurse explained, “or she would have lost it, of course, and in these times jobs aren’t so easy to replace, you know.”

He didn’t know. He had read about that in the papers, of course, but he didn’t really
know
, and he stared at her with his nice troubled eyes and floundered about in his thoughts like one who was beyond his depth.

“But Mrs. Chrystie is better,” went on Miss York, “much, much better. She doesn’t really need me anymore. I’m just staying here for company till I’m called to my next case. Wouldn’t you like to come in and see her? She spoke about you just this morning and wondered if you would ever come to see her again. She did appreciate those orchids so much that you sent her, and she said she never really half thanked you.”

So Wainwright went in and met Camilla’s mother, clothed now in a simple little gray housedress, silvery like her hair, and quite in her right mind. She was sitting by the window in the Morris chair where Wainwright had once spent the night, darning a tan silk stocking with delicate little stitches, and she welcomed him graciously and with as much poise as his own mother might have welcomed one of her own set.

So he sat down and talked with her, feeling at home with her at once, she looked so much like a mature Camilla. And Camilla’s mother sweetly and keenly proceeded to find out all about him without letting him know that she was doing so.

He followed her lead, telling her all about the winter sports and the hunting on the estate. He had brought with him a present of some venison, which he had shot himself, and this made a good opening for the conversation. So when Camilla came in a few minutes earlier than usual and the cross examination was over, Camilla’s mother had a fairly good picture in her mind of the snow-clad hills, the frozen lake, and the whole round of winter sports in which he had been indulging. She had, too, a fairly good idea of the log palace with its huge stone fireplaces, its rustic galleries, its large living room furnished with lavish simplicity, and its almost unlimited capacity for entertaining guests. With her own uncanny perception she had visualized Mrs. Wainwright loftily presiding over the bright throng she had gathered under her wide-spreading roof. A cold, hard, tyrannical, self-centered woman she judged her, just from the few sentences about her that had come from the lips of her son. She had even discovered the name of the great fashionable church with which the house of Wainwright had a vague affiliation, and she had almost as good an idea of Jeffrey Wainwright’s birth and breeding and the influences that had surrounded him during his childhood as if it had been carefully indexed and cataloged for her.

Camilla came in, all rosy and brisk from the crisp outside air. A few snowflakes were falling outside, and some had lingered on her little brown hat and had melted on her cheeks and taken away the pallor that he remembered before he went away.

She had let herself in with her key and came upon them before they were aware. She stood still in astonishment and, with a quick leap of her unconquered heart, saw him talking with her mother. Saw the wonderful smile she remembered so vividly and had tried so hard to forget during the past two weeks. Saw the nice curves of it around his pleasant mouth, the flash of his perfect teeth, the light in his eyes as he became aware of her presence. Something leaped within her that she could not control, a gladness and a thrill that frightened her, it was so adverse to her own careful self-control. This was his charm, the charm of the world. This was the kind of man that made one breathlessly happy just to have him here. And this was dangerous, dangerous to a girl who was a fool like herself, whose heart would make more of the occurrence than it had any right to make.

There was that in the touch of his hand, too, that took all her practical good sense away, and she had to steady herself to make herself quietly withdraw her hand in a reasonable time.

“I’m glad to see you again!” he said, and stood holding her hand until she withdrew it, looking down into her eyes.

She had to think hard to envision that pictured scene on the snowy hillside with the girl on the sled looking adoringly up into his eyes, to make her turn her own away. This was doubtless just his way, the way he spoke and looked at all girls, and he was just calling on a girl he had befriended to see if all was well with her. He was not of her world. She must keep remembering that.

There was a cool, clear, little edge on her voice as she responded, mindful of his exceeding kindness to a stranger in the street yet not presuming in the least upon the friendliness he had given so lavishly afterward.

She sat down a bit formally with a pleasant smile on her face and tried to look as impersonal as a cucumber, and all the while her heart was thumping in the most jubilant way and crying out until she thought he would hear her, “He has come back! He has come back!”

“You fool!” said her practical, sensible self. “They always come back until they are tired of it, don’t they? And anyway, even if he has come back, he does not belong to your world!”

But what was this he was saying?

“I wonder if I may take you out tomorrow evening?” he was asking. “You can spare her for a few hours now, can’t you, Mrs. Chrystie?” He gave Camilla’s mother a vivid look.

“Oh, that’s kind of you,” Camilla heard her own voice replying as her jubilant heart sunk low, “but I couldn’t possibly be spared. You see, Miss York is going away—”

“Not until the day after tomorrow!” broke in the diplomatic nurse, who had been delightedly hovering nearby. “You can go just as well as not, Miss Chrystie. It will do you good. You’ve been so tied down here and in the office, you need a bit of change.”

“But—I may have to work late at the office tomorrow night,” said Camilla in a frightened tone, turning appealing eyes to her mother. “I really don’t think I ought to promise. And I’m quite all right. I’m fine now that Mother is improving so fast.”

“But it won’t hurt you to have a change,” said the young man, studying her face with a puzzled expression. Had he been mistaken? Didn’t she really
want
to go with him? “I could pick you up at your office if you have to work late, you know, and then we’d go somewhere and have some dinner, and—well, I’m not just sure yet. I haven’t been back long enough in the city to look up the attractions.” He smiled with that clear, admiring, speculative look. He thought how different she was from Stephanie Varrell when she declined an invitation. And then it struck him that in some ways she resembled Stephanie. Somehow he didn’t like the thought, and he didn’t quite know why. He realized, too, that the idea would make Stephanie tremendously angry.

But Camilla was looking up with troubled eyes now.

“I really don’t think I should go,” she said, and she turned toward her mother as if to seek an excuse there.

“She means,” explained her mother gently, “that she hasn’t any festive garments for going out in the evening.”

Camilla’s cheeks were rosy red now, but she faced the young man bravely and tried to smile. It was as good an excuse as any, she thought, although it hadn’t occurred to her yet. Her mind had been filled with a deeper matter altogether.

Wainwright studied her with a dawning understanding in his eyes.

“She looks very nice now,” he said with a satisfied grin. “What’s the matter with what you are wearing now? Plenty of people wear street clothes in the evening.”

Camilla looked down at herself and considered. Then she looked up.

“You couldn’t possibly think I look all right this way.” She grinned back a challenge. “I’ve seen you in evening dress, you remember, and I’m positive you know better.”

His eyes sobered.

“No, really,” he said gravely, “I like you the way you are. It’s not clothes I want to take out, it’s you.” There was something in the way he looked at her, reverently almost, that made her catch her breath and took all excuses away. She felt all her resolutions slipping and turned her troubled eyes toward her mother again.

But her mother was smiling. “Well, if Mr. Wainwright doesn’t mind your being a bit shabby, why don’t you go, dear? I think you should. I’d like to have you have a little relaxation after the hard time you’ve been through. Yes, go, Camilla! It will please me.”

After that there seemed nothing more that Camilla could say, except to thank the young man, all the time aware of the flutter of joy in her heart.

“Well, just for this one time,” she told herself. “But don’t count on it. He’s not your kind, and you’ll probably find it out tomorrow night, so don’t
dare
be glad!”

“That’s great!” said Wainwright. “Then shall I call for you at the office? What time? Or do you have to come home first? I could stop for you any time you say and bring you home and then wait for you till you were ready?”

“Oh no,” said Camilla hastily, “I wouldn’t know just when I would be through. At least—well, it might happen I would be early, you know. I’d better just come home as usual. I’ll do my best not to be late.”

“Very well, then, shall we say half past seven, or would eight be better?” Camilla perceived that his ideas of dinner hours were different from her own, also. Eight o’clock for dinner! Somehow the whole occasion frightened her.

When he was gone her mother watched her silently as she went about putting her hat and coat away, watched her with puzzled eyes. She felt her mother’s eyes upon her now and then while they were eating dinner, the simple little dinner that Miss York had prepared.

A
fterward when the dishes were washed and put away and Miss York had gone out for a brisk evening walk, Camilla came into the living room where her mother sat.

“Why didn’t you want to go, Camilla?” she asked. “Was it just because of clothes?”