Contrary Mary. Temple Bailey

CHAPTER III

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      In Which a Lonely Wayfarer Becomes Monarch of All He Surveys; and in Which One Who Might Have Been Presented as the Hero of This Tale is Forced, Through No Fault of His Own, to Take His Chances With the Rest.

      When Roger Poole came a week later to the big house on the hill, it was on a rainy day. He carried his own bag, and was let in at the lower door by Susan Jenks.

      Her smiling brown face gave him at once a sense of homeyness. She led the way through the wide hall and up the front stairs, crisp and competent in her big white apron and black gown.

      As he followed her, Roger was aware that the house had lost its effulgence. The flowers were gone, and the radiance, and the stairs that the silken ladies had once ascended showed, at closer range, certain signs of shabbiness. The carpet was old and mended. There was a chilliness about the atmosphere, as if the fire, too, needed mending.

      But when Susan Jenks opened the door of the Tower Room, he was met by warmth and brightness. Here was the light of leaping flames and of a low-shaded lamp. On the table beside the lamp was a pot of pink hyacinths, and their fragrance made the air sweet. The inner room was no longer a rosy bower, but a man's retreat, with its substantial furniture, its simplicity, its absence of non-essentials. In this room Roger set down his bag, and Susan Jenks, hanging big towels and little ones in the bathroom, drawing the curtains, and coaxing the fire, flitted cozily back and forth for a few minutes and then withdrew.

      It was then that Roger surveyed his domain. He was monarch of all of it. The big chair was his to rest in, the fire was his, the low lamp, all the old friends in the bookcases!

      He went again into the inner room. The glass candlesticks were gone and the photographs in their silver and ivory frames, but over the mantel there was a Corot print with forest vistas, and another above his little bedside table. On the table was a small electric lamp with a green shade, a new magazine, and a little old bulging Bible with a limp leather binding.

      As he stood looking down at the little table, he was thrilled by the sense of safety after a storm. Outside was the world with its harsh judgments. Outside was the rain and the beating wind. Within were these signs of a heart-warming hospitality. Here was no bleak cleanliness, no perfunctory arrangement, but a place prepared as for an honored guest.

      Down-stairs Mary was explaining to Aunt Isabelle. "I'll have Susan Jenks take some coffee to him. He's to get his dinners in town, and Susan will serve his breakfast in his room. But I thought the coffee to-night after the rain—might be comfortable."

      The two women were in the dining-room. The table had been set for three, but Barry had not come.

      The dinner had been a simple affair—an unfashionably nourishing soup, a broiled fish, a salad and now the coffee. Thus did Mary and Susan Jenks make income and expenses meet. Susan's good cooking, supplementing Mary's gastronomic discrimination, made a feast of the simple fare.

      "What's his business, my dear?"

      "Mr. Poole's? He's in the Treasury. But I think he's studying something. He seemed to be so eager for the books——"

      "Your father's books?"

      "Yes. I left them all up there. I even left father's old Bible. Somehow I felt that if any one was tired or lonely that the old Bible would open at the right page."

      "Your father was often lonely?"

      "Yes. After mother's death. And he worked too hard, and things went wrong with his business. I used to slip up to his bedroom sometimes in the last days, and there he'd be with the old Bible on his knee, and mother's picture in his hand." Mary's eyes were wet.

      "He loved your mother and missed her."

      "It was more than that. He was afraid of the future for Constance and me. He was afraid of the future for—Barry——"

      Susan Jenks, carrying a mahogany tray on which was a slender silver coffee-pot flanked by a dish of cheese and toasted biscuit, asked as she went through the room: "Shall I save any dinner for Mr. Barry?"

      "He'll be here," Mary said. "Porter Bigelow is taking us to the theater, and Barry's to make the fourth."

      Barry was often late, but to-night it was half-past seven when he came rushing in.

      "I don't want anything to eat," he said, stopping at the door of the dining-room where Mary and Aunt Isabelle still waited. "I had tea down-town with General Dick and Leila's crowd. And we danced. There was a girl from New York, and she was a little queen."

      Mary smiled at him. To Aunt Isabella's quick eyes it seemed to be a smile of relief. "Oh, then you were with the General and Leila," she said.

      "Yes. Where did you think I was?"

      "Nowhere," flushing.

      He started up-stairs and then came back. "I wish you'd give me credit for being able to keep a promise, Mary. You know what I told Con——"

      "It wasn't that I didn't believe——" Mary crossed the dining-room and stood in the door.

      "Yes, it was. You thought I was with the old crowd. I might as well go with them as to have you always thinking it."

      "I'm not always thinking it."

      "Yes, you are, too," hotly.

      "Barry—please——"

      He stood uneasily at the foot of the stairs. "You can't understand how I feel. If you were a boy——"

      She caught him up. "If I were a boy? Barry, if I were a boy I'd make the world move. Oh, you | men, you have things all your own way, and you let it stand still——"

      She had raised her voice, and her words floating up and up reached the ears of Roger Poole, who appeared at the top of the stairway.

      There was a moment's startled silence, then Mary spoke.

      "Barry, it is Mr. Poole. You don't know each other, do you?"

      The two men, one going up the stairway, the other coming down, met and shook hands. Then Barry muttered something about having to run away and dress, and Roger and Mary were left alone.

      It was the first time that they had seen each other, since the night of the wedding. They had arranged everything by telephone, and on the second short visit that Roger had made to his rooms, Susan Jenks had looked after him.

      It seemed to Roger now that, like the house, Mary had taken on a new and less radiant aspect.