The Magpies Nest (11 page)

"What magpie's nest?" inquired Hope, round-eyed again.

"A
façon de parler,
dear; the French say happiness is to be found in a magpie's nest. Because the magpie always builds out of reach!"

Hope smiled to herself, with deep assurance.

"But I forgot to ask you," she said, "what
does
Mr. Edgerton want?"

Mary, in silent despair, refused to answer.

CHAPTER X

GOSSIP that builds up slowly, like accretions to a coral reef, is more dangerous and difficult than a rumour that runs like sudden flame in dry grass. That will burn itself out, and new grass grow. But the other remains, fetters its hapless object; unless it concerns one of unusual mental and spiritual stature, who can calmly rise clear and use it as a footing. And that takes time.

These tiny, ever-increasing tributes of idleness and malice Mary dreaded for Hope, saw them piling about her, and was helpless. Warn her? It would not help. The girl might struggle to amend, but wanted experience to perceive her error. She would be simply overwhelmed, frightened and sickened of the unprovoked baseness it would seem to show her in human nature. She had never injured anyone; lacking the flavour of reprisal, the attack would seem merely wanton. Hope still had that terrible sense of poetic justice discernible in young, and, unhappily, inarticulate children. She would see herself punished for an unintended fault. She would not know how to recover herself and strike back, and the wound would be poisoned thereby.

There was nothing to be done. And perhaps luck would incline the other way. If there was such a thing as fool's luck—well, Hope deserved it. She juggled her own fortunes as carelessly as if they were ivory instead of crystal.

Emily Edgerton's visit, though delayed, had materialised. She was much lunched and refreshed with vast quantities of tea by the local ladies, but Hope had met her first. Emily was just eighteen, but tall and well-grown, attractive with health and good nature and her father's millions. She was brown, and rather pretty; brown eyes, brown hair, a few golden freckles, and a figure rounded from tennis and dancing. She was armed
point-de-vise
with that knowledge of security which is the portion of daughters of the rich. Hope wondered and envied. Mary understood, and wished Hope might have a few years of the same ease, to put her on her feet.

This was at tea, and they were planning some way to pass the evening without boredom—a difficult thing in that city. Nothing offered but a second-rate theatrical performance; it would undoubtedly be second-rate, since none others came so far from the centres of civilisation. But Edgerton and Emily professed themselves quite willing to take what chance there might be of a smile, and while he was thinking whom he might ask to complete the party—"I'd feel altogether too greedy, with three pretty women to myself," he said—Tony Yorke was observed on the veranda. He was brought in, like the wedding guests who were gathered in the hedges and by-ways; and the party was declared filled, for their box would not possibly hold more than five.

So they sat very splendidly in the stage box; there were only four boxes and they were all stage boxes. One could not see all that went on on the stage, but Mary said the audience was much more amusing anyway. From the other side of the house, Mrs. Shane nodded to Mary, scrutinised Hope through an opera-glass and smiled at Tony.

Tony and Mary tossed the ball between them at first. She knew him, heart and soul, reading him, perhaps, through another she had once known. But she had grown clever now: so that he could not guess how clever she was. "A silly muddle," she was saying to herself before the evening was well begun, looking at Hope, slim and shrinking in her black gown, with drooped lids, so that Mary's eyes outshone her, and the rose of Emily Edgerton's cheek. With a little pang at heart Mary saw that Edgerton still turned to her. After all, he was twice the man Tony was; it had never been her surface that had caught him. For all his simplicity, he phrased himself very neatly, apropos of what Mary did not catch.

"I can see through a ladder when there's a lantern on the other side."

"Well, daddy, I always told you I wasn't a ladder," remarked Emily cheerfully, and pinched his arm. That was about the depth of the conversation.

"Aren't you?" murmured Hope idiotically, and they laughed until Mrs. Shane heard them.

"Are you?" asked Tony very seriously, addressing Hope.

She rallied.

"Yes, I am," she declared. "Anyone can see through me, or put a foot on me." Her eyes acknowledged that he at least could.

"Your vocation," said Mary, "is evidently marriage."

"Marriage isn't a vocation," returned Hope lightly, swimming on the tide of her own frivolity; "it's an accident. And accidents never happen to me; I'm always on the verge of them, right under the chariot wheels, you may say, but some rude person always rescues me."

She avoided Tony's glance as she spoke, Another woman would have looked at him with coquettish denial of her words. Mary saw Hope's attitude in advance; what hurt and shocked her despite herself was that Tony too looked deliberately preoccupied and gay. Ah, he should have been possessive, given himself away. He left his rightful part to Edgerton—who accepted it. It was a muddle, indeed.

"Oh, you'll marry," said Edgerton rather gloomily.

She shook her head, contradicting, with a little lift of her eyelashes at him.

"Why do you think so?"

But he did not seem able to say. Tony had fallen into a low-toned conversation with Emily Edgerton; Mary, smiling dreamily out over the orchestra, felt like an exceedingly exclusive audience. Tony had got Emily's fan, and they retreated behind it, and Emily dimpled and smiled—she was really rather charming, and Tony's eyes had not forgotten their old trick "The next day?" Mary heard him ask. "Perhaps," said Emily. "Shall we all go?" She looked at the others. "If you like," said Tony gallantly.

Later, he confessed to himself that the idea of squiring a nursery chit for a whole afternoon's ride out to the big dam was rather boring—since she had
not
included the others, despite her query—but, hang it, she had been openly expectant of his pursuing the acquaintance. It was plain she had taken Tony's inclusion in the party as for her special benefit: Mary and Hope were her father's friends, and he was her sop, tribute of custom to the debutante, a man for her
vis-à-vis.
At eighteen, Emily had been practically "out" for a year, and knew her social dues. She thought it rather good of the other two women to leave Tony to her so unreservedly. Especially since he was so—well, so "nice." Her
summum
cum
laude
of masculine perfection was to he "nice." She was herself very nice indeed; and, if her world was all surfaces, she had some of her father's own qualities latent in her. Stirred by some singular prescience, toward the end of the evening Mary drew her out dropped a metaphorical noose over her—and had her ready to bring to hand later if she should need. What the need might be, she did not know yet.

Well, the evening was over. In the lobby Mrs. Shane captured them, pressed them to supper, all of them. It was Edgerton who did not want to go, and it was Mary who, having learned to read his Long Primer print very easily in her elbow-to-elbow working hours with him, made their excuses. It was Mary too, who heard Tony promising that he might be there later. She grimaced, hiding it under her hood. Was a man so avid of the moment's distraction worth luring? But that was for Hope to settle, not her.

"We'll get enough of the Shanes to-morrow," said Edgerton bluntly to Mary. "We've got to dine with them."

Mary nodded. Shane was involved in Edgerton's latest deal, for the power rights on the Kenatchee Falls.

Dine they did, and Tony was at that dinner, too. He had been of the theatre party by accident; he was always at Mrs. Shane's dinners—Cora Shane said to all concerned that she needed him to mix the cocktails—and thereafter, because of the sheep instinct in people, he was everywhere asked where Emily Edgerton was asked, which was everywhere, merely because people knew of the two initial occasions.

If he had wished just such a development in the first instance, it was by no means on account of Emily herself. He needed the financial backing of Edgerton; he had staked all his own money, and some he had got from his mother, not an enormous sum, on the Kenatchee Falls deal, and without Edgerton's help, he might just as well have set it sailing down the Bow River in paper boats. Shane's backing could do no more than get him a hearing and give him a little local prestige, for Shane, though growing rich as a small city counts riches, had many irons in the fire and needed all his loose capital for himself. But a word, a scratch of the pen, from Edgerton would unlock the vaults of any of the powerful banks; he could command money enough to dam the Bow with silver if he chose. He had more than money, he had credit; he was a man who never lost.

By sheer tenacity, the ability to play a waiting game, Edgerton had recouped himself time and again in deals where one less long-sighted would have given up and admitted defeat. And there were not a dozen men in the Northwest of whom so much could be said. Boom times do not breed shrewdness. Edgerton had not floated in on the tide of any boom; he had made his start a dollar at a time, and never forgot what a dollar cost in actual effort. He was the one man Tony Yorke wanted.

But it had to be soon. The franchise was already granted, passed but a few weeks before by a gratified Assembly at Edmonton. A provincial election impended within another twelvemonth, with a threat of an overturned government. The fear of that undesirable consummation had forced even the secret shareholders of the company, who sat in the Assembly, to assent to an obnoxious rider to the bill calling for certain work upon the power plant to be completed within the year—expensive work. There were ways, certainly, to obtain a postponement, but they were also somewhat expensive. They would be doubly so with a new provincial cabinet, hungry from enforced abstinence, to appease.

"With me," Shane told Tony frankly, "it's a gamble; and I'll have to pass up the next raise. I've reached my limit. But if we can get Edgerton—why, we'll just be taking over the bank, that's all. We'll have the percentage on our side.
I
hope we can get him. But he's a singed cat for caution. And it's no use crowding him."

That was very well for Shane; he played within his means. But Tony had put all he had on the table; he
had
to win.

Pennington Yorke—that was his full name, though he had nearly forgotten it himself—had begun his financial education at the wrong end: he had learned how to spend money before he knew anything about making it. In four dizzy years at college he had dispersed the nucleus of a comfortable fortune. Thereafter he had been in the position of the Chinaman who went tobogganing, as he explained once to Hope: "Whizz-z-z—go down like helle—walk back six miles!" The walk was long, and he would dawdle by the way and follow side-paths that attracted him. And tactically he had made a mistake in coming West, lured by the fabulous tales of equally fabulous wealth to be picked up over night.

All his personal assets here were valueless: connections, charm, social polish he found quite useless in a place where the social order was just emerging from a pastoral democracy. Energy was wanted, for these people were laying foundations, not adding the last touches and decorations; he was as little needed as a mural painter would be when only the framework of a house is built, and his rewards were commensurate. True, he had friends; and from them he got friendship of a sort—just what he gave, in fact, which was just what he did not need. At home he could if he had chosen to be a little patient have come into his own; but he had no patience, and the West looked to him like an industrial faro game, where everything might be won on a single turn of the wheel—and nothing lost, if one had nothing to lose.

He had, certainly, got Shane's countenance and support. Mrs. Shane saw to that. She was bored a good deal; she and Tony had in common a million trifles and a large selfishness. Shane liked Tony too, but if Cora had disliked him, she would have seen to it that her husband shared her feelings. As it was, Tony told her all his affairs, or, at least, all his financial affairs, and she sympathised with him. Nothing is easier, when one does not have to suffer through those affairs. She had even tried to help him with Edgerton; it was one of her notable failures, and it stung, rather. She did not forget it, though she had the wit to leave alone the further conduct of the business end of matters.

Bred to the current social code, her smouldering resentment did not prevent her being entirely amiable and gracious toward Emily Edgerton. After the dinner, she contrived that Emily should pay her duty call without her father; no hard matter. Mrs. Shane lived in one of the streets of trees; her house, though small, had an inviting porch covered with vines. Within, the furnishings had the charm of comfort and taste in daily use. The three rooms stretching across the front were practically in one, and gave the needed setting for a grand piano at one end, a carved oak sideboard at the other, and deep soft chairs everywhere. There were flowers, great pink roses, nodding to their own reflection on (he polished surface of the piano top. A darning basket, filled with silk stockings, beside them, in some curious way added the last touch necessary to express the mistress of the house. To Emily it looked elegantly Bohemian, and she was thrilled by Mrs. Shane's cigarette, tossed aside when she came in, but flagrantly burning, sending up delicate little blue spirals in betrayal.

Mrs. Shane rallied the girl, not too obliquely, about Tony Yorke, pumped her dry of all relevant and irrelevant information, filled up the vacancy with the pleasantest of impressions, and produced Tony, finally, as a conjurer brings a rabbit out of a hat. Tony himself had not at all expected to see Emily, but he supported the encounter with equanimity. Her quick blush at his entrance was not unflattering; naturally, he could not know what Cora had said not more than five minutes before. But they had had the pleasantest of rides, as Emily admitted by merely mentioning it: what a woman remembers is a good index to what she likes. On the whole, that sapient observation is no less true of men.