Part 9

Simpson, intent only on the proper illumination of his carefully laid cloth, but unwittingly conspiring with the elder gods (Fate and Destiny and the like), had turned on the night lamp and set it on the corner of the table next to Mollie June, and its radiance fell full on her slender, erect figure, now arrayed in--Merriam had not the slightest idea what kind of fabric it was, but it was creamy white, and at her waist was one of the red roses he had helped to freshen. The circle of bright light extended up to her white throat. Occasionally when she leaned forward her face dipped into it, but for the most part showed only dimly in the fainter glow that came through the shade of the lamp. He could see her eyes, however, and not infrequently they rested on him. His, it is to be feared, were on her most of the time.

When at length the luncheon was finished and Merriam had expressed himself as disinclined for cigarettes and Simpson had removed his dishes and his table and finally himself, Alicia, who was really a most good-natured person--a pearl among chaperons,--yawned and announced that she had a novel which she desired to finish, and that, if they didn't mind, she proposed to retire to the sitting room to prosecute that literary occupation.

"You can amuse him for a while, Mrs. Norman," she said, with a humorous smile; Merriam did not venture to question what more subtle thoughts that smile might veil. "He's your guest more than mine, seeing it's your husband he's impersonating. If he gets too boring, you can come for me and I'll spell you."

Neither Mollie June nor Merriam replied, but Alicia, still with that amused smile, rose and calmly departed. She left the door open, of course, between the two rooms.

Upon the two young people, thus abruptly left alone together, there descended an embarrassed silence. For a minute or so they heard Alicia moving about in the sitting room and then the small sounds which one makes in adjusting one's self comfortably in an armchair with a footstool and a book, ending in a pleasurable sigh.

Merriam was overwhelmed by the necessity of finding talk. He could not lie there in bed and stare at Mollie June, however beatitudinous it might have been to do so. Several seconds of prodigious intellectual labour brought forth this polite question:

"Do you hear often from the girls in Riceville?"

"Not very often," said Mollie June.

We can hardly describe this reply as helpful.

Again he struggled mightily, with the banal kind of result that usually follows such paroxysms conversational topic-hunting:

"You must find your life here and in Washington wonderful."

"It seemed so, at first," said Mollie June.

"But it didn't last?"

Merriam was conscious of danger on this tack but he must have a moment's rest before he could wrestle with the void again.

"No," said Mollie June.

Merriam waited, not shirking his responsibilities but conscious that she meant to continue. She was always deliberate of speech--a fact which gave a piquant significance to her simplest words.

"You see," she said, "I didn't really care very much for George. I thought I did at first, but I didn't. Papa really made me marry him. And you know he is untrue to me."

Merriam could have gasped. He felt himself falling through the thin ice of mere "conversation," on which he had tried so hard to skate, into the depths of real talk. But it was good to be in the depths. And after his first breathlessness he was filled with love and pity. How much the brief, girlish sentences portrayed of disillusionment and tragedy!

"You know about that then?" he asked gently.

"Of course," said Mollie June, almost scornfully. "Before company Aunt Mary and Alicia and Mr. Rockwell keep up the pretence that I can know nothing about such things. I keep it up too! But Aunt Mary knows all about them. George never can conceal anything from her. And I make her tell me everything. Everything!"

Merriam, I suspect, hardly sensed the amount of intellect and character which Mollie June's last statement betrayed--I use the word advisedly, for, of course, intellect and character detract from a young girl's charm, and if she desires to be pretty and alluring she should, and usually does, carefully conceal whatever of such attributes she may be handicapped with. But to "make" Aunt Mary disclose things she wished not to disclose was no small achievement.

"You know about this Jennie Higgins?" Merriam asked.

"Yes. I've seen her and talked with her."

"How?" was Merriam's startled question.

"She's a manicurist, you know. She's employed at ----" Mollie June mentioned a well-known establishment on Michigan Avenue, the name of which for obvious reasons I suppress. "When I found that out, I went there to have my nails done. I just asked for--Madame Couteau, and waited till she was free. She didn't know me, of course. She's pretty," said Mollie June, with judicial coldness.

After a moment she added, "And sweet and--warm."

"But how any man can leave you----" cried Merriam, treading recklessly on several kinds of dynamite.

"You haven't seen her," said Mollie June.

Merriam was silenced. It was true he had not seen her. And he remembered with confusion that he had talked with her over a wire and, as Rockwell put it, had not "needed much prompting."

He stole a glance at Mollie June. The purity of her white-clad figure, its brave erectness, and the impassive sadness so out of place on her young face caught at his heart.

"How can you stand it?" he cried, and would have put out his hand to her had he not remembered that he was in bed and that his arm was clad only in the sleeve of a suit of pajamas.

Mollie June looked at him.

"I don't know," she said. "What else can I do?"

Merriam lay still, now openly staring at her. Of all intolerable things of which he had ever heard it seemed to him the worst that Mollie June--"the prettiest girl,"--with all her loveliness and sweetness and courage and youthful joy in life, should be so slighted and wronged and saddened and degraded. It was like seeing a rose trampled under foot. (Merriam's mental simile was not very original perhaps, but to him it was intensely poignant.)

For a moment she met his gaze, then looked away. In the subdued light Merriam could not be sure, but he thought there was a new brightness of tears in her eyes, released perhaps by his very apparent though inexpressive sympathy.

Presently the thought which had inevitably come to him forced itself almost against his will to expression:

"You could divorce him."

"I've thought of that." (Somehow this shocked Merriam.) "But it would be too horrible. Have you read the divorce trials in the papers? With a Senator they would make the most of it. And Aunt Mary won't let me do that. It would ruin him politically, she says."

"Well, what if it did? How about you?"

"Oh, she loves him, you know. She thinks he can be brought to change his ways. She believes in him still."

"Do you?"

"No," said Mollie June, with the clear-eyed cruel simplicity of youth.

"He may die," was the thought in Merriam's mind, but this could not be said.

Full of pity, he gazed at her again, and something in the profile of her averted face overcame him. He started up on his elbow--all this time he had lain with his head on his arm on the pillow.

"Mollie June!" he cried, his voice softly raised.

She did not look at him.

"Dear Mollie June! You must know I love you. I loved you three years ago in Riceville. There's nothing wrong about that. When you're in such trouble I must tell you. It can't do you any good. There's nothing we can do. But--I do love you!"

She turned her eyes upon him.

"Why didn't you tell me that--in Riceville?"

"Oh!" he cried.

Mollie June rose and came to the bedside.

"I know," she said with womanly gentleness. "You couldn't, of course. Because you were so poor. I ought to have waited--John!"

For a moment her hand hovered above his head as if she would have stroked his ruffled hair. But it descended to her side again.

"We mustn't talk like this. I must go. I'll tell Alicia we are--bored!"

There were tears not only in her eyes but on her cheeks now. Undisguisedly she wiped them away and carefully dried her eyes with a small handkerchief.

"I shall see you at dinner," she said with a brave smile, and, turning, walked quickly out of the room.

*CHAPTER XV*

*COUNCIL OF WAR*

It was some time before Alicia, with something more, if possible, than her usual aplomb, covering, let us hope, a guilty conscience, entered the bedroom, presumably to "spell" Mollie June in amusing the supposed invalid.

Alicia made some remark which hardly penetrated the invalid's consciousness, but scarcely had she sat down in Mollie June's chair before a quick knock sounded at the hall door of the sitting room, almost immediately followed by the sound of the opening of that door, and Alicia sprang up again and hurried away, to be before Mollie June in receiving the newcomers. It began to irritate Merriam to perceive how they all treated her as a little girl, when as he now thrillingly realised she was very much a woman in spite of the youthfulness of her face and figure.

The arrivals in the other room proved to be Rockwell and Aunt Mary returned. Recognising their voices, Merriam glanced at his watch under his pillow and was amazed to find that it was nearly four o'clock.

Rockwell appeared in the doorway.

"Come into this other room," he said. "We must hold a council of war."

"Shall I dress?" asked Merriam, gladly getting out of bed.

"No, no," said Rockwell impatiently. "Just put on your bath robe and slippers."

Having followed this instruction, Merriam stepped to the glass and with a few quick strokes of the brush smoothed his hair, Rockwell watching him without comment. Then they went into the sitting room.

Merriam blankly perceived that the sitting room was empty--of Mollie June.

"She has a slight headache," said Alicia kindly--suffering still, we may hope, from pangs of conscience.

Aunt Mary was sitting in the senatorial armchair, which had been turned about to face the rest of the room. She looked long and hard at Merriam--an intensification of that close scrutiny with which, it seemed to him, she had always distinguished him. Merriam, in his bath robe, sustained it awkwardly but manfully. Alicia and Rockwell were standing. The silence was rather portentous.

"Sit down, all of you," said Aunt Mary suddenly.

The three younger persons present--even Rockwell seemed youthful beside Aunt Mary in her dominant mood--rather hurriedly found seats.

"Is the door locked, Philip?"

Rockwell rose, went to the hall door, turned the key, and returned to his chair.

"Tell him," said Aunt Mary.

Rockwell's budget of news was certainly considerable and important.

In the first place, George Norman was "better." Rockwell and Aunt Mary had gone to see him at Jennie's after the Reform League luncheon. That was why they were so late. He undoubtedly had a touch of bronchitis, with some fever and a cough, but seemed to be improving. He could be brought back to the hotel that evening. Aunt Mary had sat down by his bed and told him briefly but plainly of the happenings at the hotel the previous evening, and had extorted a feeble, amazed acquiescence in the astonishing turn which had been given to his career--an acquiescence which she had immediately communicated by telephone from Jennie's to Mayor Black.

In the second place, the story of Norman's evening at Reiberg's was all over the city--not among the populace, of course, but among the politicians and business men and clubmen--the men who know things. Not only the story in _Tidbits_, which everybody seemed to have read and to have assigned unhesitatingly to Norman, but the further fact that from Reiberg's he had gone in the taxi to "a certain little flat"--that seemed to be the approved phrase,--and had spent the night there, and was still there. The simple truth, in short, was known. Rockwell had taken his cue perforce from Merriam's impulsive denial to Thompson and had flatly contradicted the whole story. Senator Norman had spent the evening, after his interviews with Mr. Crockett and with Mayor Black, at the hotel with his wife, and was there now, slightly indisposed with a severe cold which had threatened to turn into bronchitis. His downright assertions had, Rockwell believed, shaken the confident rumours and would probably delay any further publication of them for at least a day. But it was necessary to produce evidence.

"We shall have to use you again to-night," he said to Merriam. "I have invited the Mayor and Mr. Wayward to dine with you here at the hotel--downstairs in the Peacock Cabaret."

"Shall I have to play the Senator there?" gasped Merriam--"in public!"

"Semi-public," said Rockwell. "I have reserved a table in an alcove. We shall put you in the corner. All the rest of us will be between you and the general gaze. Oh, we shall get away with it. It's much less dangerous than trying to impose at close range in a private interview on some one who really knows the Senator--as you did on Thompson this morning."

"Does Mr. Wayward know?" asked Merriam.

"Of the impersonation? Not yet. But Alicia shall prepare him in advance."

Alicia nodded. "That's all right," she said. "Daddy will enjoy it. He'll think it's a huge joke."

"Moreover," continued Rockwell, with rather apprehensive eyes on Merriam, "I have accepted an invitation for Senator Gorman to speak at the Reform League luncheon to-morrow."

"Do they have luncheons and speeches every day?" asked Merriam, sparring for time, for of course he saw what was coming.

"Not usually, but they've been having a series. To-morrow is the last one. It's the perfect opportunity for Norman to come out openly for the League. When the invitation came, I simply had to accept it."

"But if George Norman isn't able to speak?" queried Alicia, fearlessly coming to the point.

"Then you'll have to make the speech!" said Rockwell bluntly to Merriam.

"But how can I?"

"You were a debater in college."

"Yes, but the speech itself----"

"Oh, Aunt Mary will fix you up with a speech."

Merriam turned to that silent mistress of the situation, sitting calmly in the senatorial armchair.

"George is so very busy that I often write his speeches for him," she said, as if it were the most natural arrangement in the world. "I have several sketched out now. We can make a choice among them. I will write it out in full and you can learn it, or I will turn over the outline to you and you can work it up in your own words--if you have to make it."

"You probably won't," Rockwell hastened to say. "Norman is really much better. After a comfortable night here at the hotel he will be all right. If he's a little hoarse, we can't help it. But you must stay over, you see," he added determinedly,--"to make sure. That speech must be made."

"But my school!" cried Merriam.

"You'll have to send another telegram," said Aunt Mary.

"What's a day or two of school?" asked Rockwell impatiently, with a layman's insensibility to the pedagogical dogmas of absolute regularity and punctuality. "Besides, if you really were sick," he added more tactfully, "they would have to get along without you, wouldn't they?"

"So much is at stake," said Aunt Mary. "George's future, and all that that may mean to the State and Nation. If we can bring him to throw the weight of his popularity and leadership on the right side!"

"You can't desert us now, Mr. Merriam," cried Alicia. "When it means so much to Aunt Mary and Philip and Mollie June!"

Crafty Alicia! Her guile was, of course, clearly apparent to Merriam. But it is perfectly possible to perceive that an influence is being deliberately brought to bear on one without being able to resist that influence.

"Very well. I'll telegraph again," he said.

"Better do it now," said Rockwell, promptly clinching this decision. He rose, went to the writing table, got out a telegraph form, and sat down.

"What shall I write?"

Merriam collected himself as best he could under Alicia's admiring, expectant eyes and Aunt Mary's steady regard.

"Better," he dictated, "but doctor won't let me leave to-night. Expect to be down to-morrow night."

"That's good," said Aunt Mary, in a tone of quiet approval which gratified Merriam more probably than he realised.

Rockwell finished writing and turned in his chair.

"I'll be going down in a few minutes. I'll send it then. Now you'll need to dress for dinner--Senator! Pack up your things too. After dinner you and I will leave the hotel together in a taxi. We shall drive over to the University Club. There we shall simply go up to the Library for a few minutes and then come down again, walk up Michigan Avenue for a block or two and catch another taxi and drive to the Nestor House. There you can register under your own name. Simpson will send your things over. I shall go on and get Norman and bring him back here. You see? Senator Norman leaves the hotel about nine o'clock with his new manager--me. Within an hour or so he returns, still in my company, and goes to his room. If he's all right, you can go down to Riceville on the morning train if you like. I'll come to see you before you go."

"We'll _all_ go over to see you," said Alicia, with an unmistakable emphasis on the "all." "We shall have so much to thank you for!"

Merriam did not reply to this cordial remark.

"Why do we go to the University Club?" he asked.

"And not directly to the other hotel?" said Rockwell. "Well, I'm afraid we may be rather closely watched. To tell the truth, I suspect that the driver of the taxi we take here may be questioned afterwards as to where he set us down. The University Club will tell them nothing."

To Merriam's excited mood this explanation, with its hint of powerful hidden enemies intently watching every move which he and his friends could make, added a touch of piquancy to the situation that was nothing short of delightful.

He could not well express this, however, and Rockwell, who was all business with no such romantic nonsense in his head, immediately sent them about their several parts. He himself was first to take Alicia to her waiting limousine.

When Alicia and Rockwell had departed Merriam sought to return to his--the Senator's--bedroom. But Aunt Mary detained him.

"Sit down, Mr. Merriam," she said, kindly enough but in a manner that demanded unquestioning obedience.

Then she rose and entered Mollie June's bedroom but immediately returned.

"Mollie June is dressing for dinner," she said. An instant's pause. Then, looking hard at Merriam, "She's a lovely child."

Both the look and the final word provoked Merriam to a sort of resentment.

"I don't believe she's as much of a child as you think," he said boldly.

"It depends on the point of view, no doubt," said Aunt Mary drily.

Then she began to ask him about himself, his family, his own life, on the farm of his boyhood, at college, and at Riceville--all those facts which Alicia had so much more tactfully elicited in the private dining room off the Peacock Cabaret the night before and some others in which Alicia had not been interested. Merriam had nothing to be ashamed of and spoke up promptly and manfully in his replies, wondering in the back of his mind the while what inscrutable thought or purpose prompted Aunt Mary in her catechising. He little dreamt that the whole course and happiness of his life turned on the showing he was able to make in this odd examination.

There is no doubt that Aunt Mary--whatever her idea may have been--was satisfied. When at length she had no more questions to ask the expression of her eyes, though they still rested on him, was almost one of absence. She drew a deeper breath than was her wont--suggestive, at least, of a sigh.

"You give a good account of yourself," she said. "You are worthy of the Norman blood."

Greater praise than that no man could have from Aunt Mary, as Merriam dimly realised.

"I wish George were more like you."

Immediately she added, with a conscious return to dominating briskness:

"You must dress. So must I."

And she rose and without looking again at Merriam went into Mollie June's bedroom.

*CHAPTER XVI*

*THE SENATORIAL DINNER*

At last, at twenty-five minutes after six, Merriam sank, exhausted but immaculate, into an easy chair and lit a cigarette, in an effort to compose his nerves and regain the _sang froid_ he needed for his imminent role of a particularly debonair senator of the United States acting as host to a brilliant dinner party.

At half past six precisely, Aunt Mary knocked on his door and he opened that door and announced himself ready.

Aunt Mary wore another black evening gown, very similar, in masculine eyes, to the one in which she had appeared the night before, except that it was less conspicuously burdened with jet. Tall and erect, with her gray hair plainly but carefully dressed, she looked every inch a senator's sister and--this would have pleased her--a Norman.

Advancing into the sitting room, Merriam encountered Mollie June, standing again beside the bowl of roses. She was in pink--tulle over satin, though Merriam could not have described it so. But the vivid colour and the dainty softness of the fabric he could appreciate quite well enough, at least in their contiguity to the slender figure, white throat and shoulders, and charming complexion of Mollie June. There is no doubt that he looked a moment longer than he should. The debonair senatorial outside of him was moved to say, "How lovely you are!" But the Ricevillian pedagogue underneath blocked the utterance. Perhaps his eyes said it plainly enough to satisfy Mollie June, for she evinced no disappointment.

"We must go right down, mustn't we?" she said, raising her eyes from the roses.

"Yes," said Aunt Mary, in a tone of jarring briskness.

A male figure which Merriam had not perceived stepped out of the background, moved to the hall door, and opened it. Merriam saw that it was Dr. Hobart, quite as point-device as himself and rather more at ease but not nearly so handsome (though of this, I assure you, Merriam never thought at all).

Aunt Mary and Mollie June passed through the door.

"Come along, Senator," said Dr. Hobart, in excellent spirits, and Merriam mechanically followed and mechanically paused and waited while the physician closed and locked the door.

"This must be great fun for you," said Dr. Hobart as they went down the hall towards the elevators.

"Yes," returned Merriam without conviction, his eyes on a girlish figure in pink that moved ahead of him. "Fun" did not strike him as exactly the word.

Fortunately at this point a small incident occurred which served to bring Merriam out of the brown study--or perhaps we may say the roseate study--into which he had fallen.

As they approached the elevator lobby he became aware of the pretty floor clerk who on the previous evening had been wearing Senator Norman's violets. He was, of course, entirely unmindful of the fact that on his way to Norman's rooms that morning he had passed her rudely by without a glance, but he did notice that this evening she wore no flowers and that she studiously avoided seeing him and smiled her best smile upon Dr. Hobart instead. That gentleman, with a shade too much alacrity, stepped aside so as to pass close to her desk and, leaning down, spoke to her. The pretty floor clerk, from the toss of her head and the pleased smile on Hobart's face, had said something saucy in reply.

"Good enough," thought Merriam, as they all stepped into the elevator. "I'm glad she has more interests than one," and thought no more of the incident at the time.

In a moment or two more they had reached the basement floor, which was their destination.