The Strange Proposal (24 page)

Hesitantly they lingered at the doorway, Mary Elizabeth and her cousin Richie, anxious eyes fixed on the open door where they could dimly see the outlines of a white bed. The doctor and nurse and John Saxon had gone in there and were consulting.

Cousin Richie had dropped upon a straight chair by the door, alertly, as if he was ready for immediate action if it was needed. Mary Elizabeth gave him a grateful glance. It was as if he were an old friend of the family and understood. She noticed suddenly the dependable, dear look about Cousin Richie. Of course, he was a noted flier and had his name and picture in the papers all the time, and she was entirely familiar with his genial smile and his keen eyes and weathered face, but she hadn’t noticed before that dependable look, that tenderness about his lips that was usually masked in his merry smile. She was used to him, probably, and of course it must have been there all the time. That was why she had turned to him instinctively when she needed the plane. Sometime she would tell him how he had made her feel. But now she was just grateful. She felt as if this were a sacred moment, while she was looking about for the first time upon the home of her stranger-beloved.

Sam was standing out at the back door, having gone around the house to the pump he knew so well of old, to get himself a drink of “real water,” he told her afterward. But in reality, it was to recover from his own emotions and to get through the period of waiting for the doctor’s verdict, into the time of action that would be sure to come afterward. He stood there in front of a big banana tree, his profile outlined clearly against it, his eyes so grown up and serious, and his lips set in trembling determination, as if he had suddenly been required to take his place as a man and he wasn’t quite equal to it. As if this time of anxiety for his beloved friend were just too much for him.

Behind him, the great banana leaves rustled and flapped like softly rustling taffeta skirts. Beyond him, the long gray moss on a tall pine stirred slowly in the still air.

Mary Elizabeth, sitting in the same chair where John Saxon had dreamed of her but a few minutes before, felt the spicy air, heard the drone of the bees, and heard the marvelous stillness, such stillness as she had never experienced before, but kept her ears attuned to what might be going on in that inner room. Had they arrived too late, and was she already gone? It was strange that so many people could be in a room together and be so quiet about it. Her heart stood with fear.

Then after a long, long waiting, when it seemed as if even the moss on the pine out beyond the window did not move, nor the banana leaves in the hot morning, when Sam’s profile seemed a bronze statue and even the bees ceased humming, the nurse came forth from the room as silently as a moving picture might have done and stood before them looking at them uncertainly.

“She is still living, but she’s a very sick woman!” she said in her lowest professional tone, a tone that gave the words distinctly, yet left no sound over to echo beyond their own ears. “The doctor’s going to try to operate, I think. The difficulty is the lack of proper light, of course. But we’ve got to bring her husband out. He mustn’t be in there, of course. He’s very frail! I’ll get him into a dressing gown. He can walk with help. He just has a broken bone in his ankle. I wonder which chair we’d better put him in?” She gave the room a quick survey.

“I guess that’s my job,” said Cousin Richie, smiling. “You fix him up, and I’ll bring him out. How about this chair? And those cushions will help prop up the foot. I know. I’ve had a broken ankle. And I guess I can rig up a light. I have plenty of equipment in the plane.”

“Oh, that’s right,” said the nurse, relieved. “I’ll tell them.”

Then she paused before Mary Elizabeth, who was listening mutely for something she could do. She felt so utterly left out.

“I wonder if you could fix a tray for the old man? Can you make coffee?” She spoke as if she did not expect her to say she could. But Mary Elizabeth brightened.

“Oh, yes,” she answered. “I used to make it a great deal in college. I had a percolator with me.”

“There may not be any percolator!” remarked the nurse dryly. She had an idea that this daughter of a millionaire knew very little about real life. “Well, do your best. The doctor needs me. I must get some hot water going at once!”

Mary Elizabeth vanished softly through the door that obviously opened into the kitchen.

“Sam,” she called softly, taking pity on the boy’s dejected attitude, “come and help me, but don’t make any noise.”

The bronze statue came promptly and gratefully to life. He slipped off his shoes and entered the kitchen.

“What to do?” he asked alertly.

“We’re getting a tray for Mr. Saxon’s father. You’ll have to help me find things.”

“Okay!” said the boy. “I know where everything is. I been here a lot, ya know. Whatcha want?”

“Well, a coffee percolator, if there is one.”

“Sure there is. A toaster, too. They keep ’em here on this shelf.”

He swung open a door and produced an up-to-date electric percolator. Mary Elizabeth seized it eagerly. She was exceedingly doubtful of her ability to make good coffee in anything other than an electric percolator. To achieve a tray for that cold-eyed nurse to approve was another thing that troubled her.

But she was reckoning without the knowledge of what an experienced helper she had called to her aid. She did not realize that her young cousin Sam was a far more seasoned cook than herself.

“The coffee’s in that stone jar!” announced the assistant cook. “Ya put a heap ta each cup, dontcha? And one fer the pot. That’s what we did on the scout camp trip. The measuring spoon is in that drawer. There’s the tray on that shelf. Better make enough fer our Mr. Saxon, too, hadn’t we? He looked as if he needed it. Though it’s a gamble if he stops ta drink it, if there’s anything else he oughtta do.”

Mary Elizabeth’s cheeks flamed at the pronoun “our,” but she assented.

“The napkins and the silver are in the dresser drawer in the other room. I’ll get ’em!”

Sam dashed silently into the front room and returned with everything needful for a tray, and Mary Elizabeth’s opinion of her own ability shrank perceptibly. How her education had been neglected!

Sam got out the toaster, produced two slices of bread, also the eggs. He volunteered to poach an egg for Father Saxon.

Between them, in very short time, a tray was ready.

The nurse, coming in to see if her big kettles of water were hot, looked askance at the boy and then gave an admiring glance at the tray. She couldn’t have done it better herself, though she couldn’t conceive why the young woman let a kid like that bother around her in the kitchen at a time like this. But when Sam, keeping a weather eye out for affairs in the other room, came silently in with the tray, carrying it carefully as any woman could, her grim disapproval relaxed. Sam could be quiet even if he was a boy, and he could carry a tray without slopping coffee into the saucer. Neither was anything missing from that tray—salt, pepper, sugar, cream, spoons, butter, delicate toast. She gave up the idea of keeping half her mind in the kitchen during this campaign and put it on the operation. Perhaps this wasn’t going to be so bad after all.

So Mary Elizabeth remained in the kitchen, looking over her own possibilities and the supplies, with a view to getting more meals later when they should be needed. Of course it had been arranged that the guests should eat and sleep in the plane, so far as possible, but there would be individual meals here at times, and she was the obvious one to look after them. How she wished she knew more about cooking! She could make delectable fudge over a gas hot plate; could brew a cup of delicious chocolate, fluffy with whipped cream, or coffee of just the right shade of amber; and she could scramble eggs to perfection on an electric grill or mix a salad that a famous chef might have envied. But after that her culinary knowledge failed.

A glance into the bread box showed little more than half a loaf, and that of a texture that she judged to be homemade, for it looked wonderful, even if it was a trifle dry. Didn’t they have baker’s bread delivered daily out here? She stood there, aghast. How did people live far from civilization?

Suddenly she perceived another wide gulf of separation between herself and the man she had so unwittingly come to love. She simply did not know anything of the life in which he had always lived. Neither spiritually nor materially was she in the least fitted to be his mate. For dimly she perceived that a man like this would go anywhere, do anything, answer any call that Duty made, unhampered by the limits of civilization. Could she adjust herself to that way of life? Could she ever learn all the things she would need to know in order to be fitted for any environment? The idea appalled, yet intrigued her.

Quietly she went about planning some kind of lunch for whoever would eat lunch in the disorganized household. Investigation of the pantry showed several rows of cans—canned vegetables and soups. A large porous earthenware tureen, wrapped in a wet cloth and standing on a shelf in the open window, revealed a head of crisp lettuce, a few stalks of celery, a couple of ripe tomatoes, three green peppers, and a little nest of raspberries in a lettuce leaf. They were all fresh and crisp. Was this strange dish a sort of refrigerator? Three curious-looking objects, also attired in wet cloths and hanging from cords in the open windows, proved to be bottles of water, of milk, and of some kind of broth, probably for the invalid. And they were astonishingly cold! Could it be that people had to exist through hot days indefinitely without ice? Couldn’t they get any ice at this time of year?

She stood, appalled, and looked at the bottles as if they were some strange magic, taking in what it must have been to live in primitive times, and what all her forefathers and -mothers had gone through for mere existence. She was still looking thoughtfully at the bottles when Sam returned and explained them.

“Sure, that’s the way they keep things down here. Ice is awful expensive to haul way out here, even when they have ice, and of course they don’t have any even in the village this time of year. That’s evaporation, you know. You just havta wet the cloths every little while when they get dry. That useta be my job when I was out here visiting, that time when Jeff stayed here and worked.”

“Jeff?”

“Sure! Didn’t ya know Jeff came out here and helped Mr. Saxon in the grove all spring?”

“No,” said Mary Elizabeth thoughtfully, “I didn’t know it. I’m glad he did.” Then she turned away and looked out of the window at the flapping silken leaves of the bananas.

Sam presently brought her word of what was going on in the other part of the house. Cousin Richie was rigging up a big light with a reflector. The doctor was getting out his case of instruments. Mr. Saxon was hollowing out holes in four blocks of wood to put under the feet of the bed stand to lift it high enough for an operating table. The nurse came in with a grave face and took the pans of hot water she had been heating. Everything was carried on in silence. It filled Mary Elizabeth and Sam with the utmost apprehension.

“How about Mr. Saxon’s father?” whispered Mary Elizabeth to Sam in one of the awful intervals filled with silence.

“He’s okay!” answered the boy. “The doctor told him he could help in the operation by eating his breakfast, so he ate it like a good child, and he’s sitting there in the big chair now with his eyes shut and a smile on his lips. You oughtta see him. He’s a prince! I guess he’s praying! He’s awful keen, you know, on Mrs. Saxon. ‘Mother’ he calls her, just like that. And she’s a peach, too. Wait till you see her. Looks just like a piece of lace Mother has that she wears with a pearl pin. Her hair is white, and her eyes are, well, wait till you see her!”

Mary Elizabeth went on with hunting her condiments for the salad, her thoughts deeply occupied.

When the salad was finished, she put it in a covered dish from the closet, wet a napkin, and tucked it about and set it in the window, wondering if her crude arrangement would work as well as the other big tureen.

The nurse came out to put more water on to heat and told them that the operation was about to begin. Mary Elizabeth asked if there wasn’t something else she could do, and the nurse gave directions about heating more water.

So there she sat with her thoughts, and nothing to do but put on more water when it was needed. Sam went and sat on the back steps under a big lime tree, with the banana leaves rustling a melancholy tune. He had his elbows on his knees and his head bowed in his hands. She remembered his words about John Saxon’s father: “I guess he’s praying!” What an extraordinary thing to have got hold of Sam, the wild young boy. And all from John Saxon’s influence! Jeff, too! Jeff the easygoing, happy-hearted, merry youth! Herself, too!

And then Mary Elizabeth put her head down over her folded arms on the kitchen table. Perhaps she, too, was praying!

M
eantime Mrs. Robert Wainwright had gone on the warpath.

She called up her home first, hoping that by this time her youngest son had returned from the shore and that she might be able to speak to him. She knew her power over him when she could get him to himself without his fond father by to alter her authority.

It was Rebecca, one of the oldest and most faithful of the Wainwright servants, who answered the telephone.

“Is Sam there, Rebecca?” asked Sam’s mother.

“No ma’am. He hasn’t got back yet.”

“You don’t mean he’s still down at Seacrest with his cousin, Rebecca?”

“Why, I couldn’t say, ma’am,” answered Rebecca with some hesitation.

Now Rebecca was one of the most honest of persons and never had been known to tell an out-and-out lie, but she had figured it out with her conscience, or what she used for a conscience, long ago, that when she was asked a question that loyalty forbade her to answer and she replied, “I couldn’t say,” she did not mean that she didn’t know and therefore was unable to state; she meant that loyalty, or wisdom, made it impossible to give an answer. In this case, of course, there was loyalty demanded on either side of the question, for she knew quite well where young Master Sam was, but the old master had told her not to let anyone know where he was gone, especially his mother, and particularly how he was gone. And in a case like this, Rebecca’s conscience always dictated that she should be loyal to the one whom she liked best to please. Rebecca’s loyalty, without question, was first to Mr. Wainwright, for not only did he appeal to her as the one of the two most likely to be right and just to everyone in everything, but also he was the one who paid the servants and who slipped them a little extra sometimes when there had been a special quest of some kind, such as was now the case. Therefore Rebecca answered firmly a second time.