"Oh, the whole thing," said Paula. "What he's been harping on for the last week.--He _is_ a loathsome sort of beast," she conceded after a little pause. "But he's right about this. Absolutely."

Was her father ever fretted, Mary wondered, by this sort of thing? Did his nerves draw tight, and his muscles, too, waiting for the idea behind these perambulations to emerge?

"I can imagine a lot of things that Mr. Maxfield Ware would be right about," she observed. "Which one is this?"

"About me," said Paula. "About what I'd have to do if I wanted to get anywhere. He thinks I've a good chance to get into the very first cla.s.s, along with Garden and Farrar and so on. And unless I can do that, there's no good going on. I'd never be happy as a second rater. Well, that's true. And my only chance of getting to the top, he says, is in being managed just right. I guess that's true, too. He says that if I take this Metropolitan contract that LaChaise has been talking about, go down to New York as one of their 'promising young American sopranos' to sing on off-nights and fill in and make myself generally useful, I simply won't have a chance. They wouldn't get excited about me whatever happened.

They'd go on patronizing me and yawning in my face no matter how good I was. I'd do just as well, he says, so far as my career is concerned, to stay right here in Chicago and get Campanini to give me two or three appearances a season;--make a sort of amateur night of it for the gold coast to buzz about. I'd have a lot easier time that way and it would come to the same thing in the end. And he says that unless I want to go in for his scheme, that's what I'd better do. Well, and he's right. I can see that, plainly enough."

Mary refrained from asking what Max's scheme was. She'd learn, no doubt, in her stepmother's own good time. She nodded a tentative a.s.sent to Max's general premises and waited.

"He certainly was frank enough," Paula went on after a while. "He wants to make a real killing he says. Something he's never quite brought off before. He says the reason he's always failed before is that he's had to go and mix a love-affair up with it somehow. He's either fallen in love with the woman or she with him or if it was a man he was managing, they both went mad over the same woman. Something always happened anyhow to make a mess of it. But he says he isn't interested in me in the least in that way and that he can see plainly enough that I'm not in him. But imagine five years with him!"

She broke off with a shudder, not a real shudder though. The sort one makes over a purely imaginary prospect. Some expression of her feeling must have betrayed itself in Mary's face, for Paula, happening to look at her just then, sat up abruptly.

"Oh, I know," she said. "It's all very well, but that's the sort of person you have to go in with and that's the sort of scheme you have to go into if you're going to get anywhere. Something of the sort anyhow,--I never heard of one exactly like this. But this is what he proposes: we're each to put up twenty thousand dollars. That's easy enough as far as I'm concerned because what I put up isn't to be spent at all. It's just to be turned over to somebody--some banker like Martin Whitney--as a guarantee that I won't break my contract. He says he wouldn't take on anybody in my position without a guarantee like that. He's to spend the money he puts up for publicity and other things but he's to get paid back out of what I earn. He's to be my manager absolutely. I'm to go wherever he says; carry out any contracts he makes for me. He's to pay my expenses and guarantee me ten thousand a year beyond that. If he doesn't pay me that much, then it's he that breaks the contract. And of course, he can't make me do anything that would ruin my voice or my health. He says he's going to work me like a dog. That's what he thinks I need. He says he can get me in with the Chicago company for their road tour before their regular season opens here. He won't let me sing either in Chicago or New York until I've landed, but he wants me to go to New York this winter and coach with Scotti, if we can get him. Then go to Mexico City in the spring and then down to Buenos Aires for their winter season there.

That's July and August, of course, when it's summer up here. By that time he thinks we'll be ready for Europe; London or Paris. He's rather in favor of London. He knows all the ropes and he'll buy the people that have to be bought and square the people that have to be squared and work the publicity. He says he's the best publicity man in the world and I guess he knows. Then after a year or two over there, he thinks we'll be ready to come back to the Metropolitan and clean up."

"And what," asked Mary, "is his share of the clean-up to be?"

"Oh, a half," said Paula; "we'd be equal partners. That's fair enough, I suppose. I sat there all through lunch while he was talking, hating him; hating his big blue chin, and his necktie and his great shiny finger-nails and the way he ate, and feeling, of course, perfectly frightfully unhappy. I told him I'd let him know what I would do sometime before to-morrow noon, and as soon as I could I got rid of him. And then I came up here and cried and cried. And that's something I haven't done for a long while. I felt as if he was a big spider that had been running about all over me tying me up in his web. And as if I was a fly and couldn't get out. There is something spidery about him, you know. The way he goes back and forth and the way he's so patient and indirect about it all. It seemed like the end of the world to me before he finished, as if I never was going to see John again. Oh, I cried my eyes out. Well, and then about an hour ago I came to. I realized that I hadn't signed his horrible contract and that I needn't. And that when this beastly season was over,--and it isn't going to last much longer, thank goodness,--I could go home to John and lock up the piano and never look at a score again. It was like coming out of a nightmare."

Mary dared not stop to think. She took the plunge.

"There's something about father you've got to be told. I promised Wallace Hood weeks ago that I'd tell you. I guess he and Martin Whitney think you know about it by now."

"Something I've got to be told about John?" Paula echoed incredulously.

"Why, I was talking with him over the telephone not ten minutes before you came in."

"Oh, I know. It's nothing like that," Mary said. "But they say he has tuberculosis. Not desperately, not so that he can't get well if he takes care of it. If he lives out-of-doors and doesn't worry or try to work.

But if he takes up his practise again this fall, they say,--Doctor Steinmetz says,--that it will be--committing suicide. That's one thing.

And the other is that he's practically bankrupt. Anyhow, that for a year or two, until he can get back into practise, he'll need help. That's why Wallace and Mr. Whitney wanted you told about it."

There hadn't been a movement nor a sound from Paula. Mary, at the end of that speech was breathless and rather frightened.

Finally Paula asked, "Does he know about it?--his health I mean."

"He's been told," Mary answered, "but he doesn't believe it. They nearly always are skeptical, Doctor Steinmetz says."

"He's probably right to be. He's a better doctor than six of Steinmetz will ever be."

Another pause; then, once more from Paula, "Did he tell you about the other thing,--about his money troubles,--when you were down in North Carolina with him?"

Mary flushed at the hostile ring there was to that. "He told me a little," she said, "but not much more, I thought, than he had already told you."

"Told me?" Paula swung herself off the bed and on to her feet in one movement. "He told me nothing."

"He urged you to carry out your Ravinia contract, didn't he?" Mary asked, as steadily as she could.

Paula stood over her staring. "Oh," she exclaimed, and, a moment later she repeated the e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n in a drier tone and with a downward inflection. She added presently, "I'm not clever the way you are at taking hints. That's the thing it will be just as well for you both to remember." She began bruskly putting on her dressing-gown. "I'm going down-stairs to telephone to Max," she explained. "He's got the paper all drawn up, not the final contract but an agreement to sign one of the sort I told you about. I'm going to tell him that if he will bring it back with him now, I'll sign it."

Mary stood between her and the door. "Don't you think it would be--fairer to wait?" she asked; "before you signed a thing like that. Until at least, you were no longer angry with me for having told you too much or with father because he had told you too little."

Paula pulled up at that and stood looking at her stepdaughter with a thoughtful expression that was almost a smile. "I am angry," she admitted, "or I was, and just exactly about that. It's queer the way you Wollastons, you and your father, anyhow, are always--getting through to things like that. What you say is fair enough. I guess you're always fair. Can't help being, somehow. But I can't put off telephoning to Max.

You see I called up John at Hickory Hill an hour ago. I told him I had made up my mind to stop singing. I told him I didn't want any career.

That I just wanted to--belong to him. And I asked him to come to me as fast as he could. He's on the way now. So it's important, you see, that Max should get here first."

CHAPTER XX

TWO WOMEN AND JOHN

Paula seemed calm enough after that one explosion but she moved along toward the accomplishment of her purpose, to get herself thoroughly committed to Max before John's arrival, with the momentum of a liner leaving its pier. Mary made two or three more attempts at dissuasion but their manifest futility kept her from getting any real power into them.

She was, to tell the truth, in a panic over the prospect of that evening;--her father arriving triumphant in Paula's supposed surrender to find Maxfield Ware with his five years' contract in his pocket. And the responsibility for the disaster would be attributed to herself; was indeed so attributable with a kind of theatrical completeness seldom, to be found in life. It didn't often happen that any one was as entirely to blame for a calamity to some one else as Mary was for this _volte-face_ of Paula's.

She did not run away altogether. Paula, indeed, didn't know that she had fled at all, for Maxfield Ware's tardiness about coming back the second time supplied her with a pretext.

It was nearly eight o'clock before he came and Paula, who was momentarily expecting John's arrival by then, was in an agony of impatience to sign his papers and get him out of the house again. Ware may have divined her wish and loitered out of mischievous curiosity as to the cause of it. Or he may, merely, have been prolonging an experience which he found agreeable. Anyhow, he wouldn't be hurried and he wouldn't go. But Paula finally turned a look of despairing appeal upon Mary who thereupon announced her intention of going to to-night's performance in the park.

She would drive, of course, and would be glad to take Mr. Ware along.

Or, for that matter, she would set him down first wherever he might want to go. He smiled upon her with the fatuous smile of one who finds he has made an unexpected conquest and said he would be delighted to accompany Miss Wollaston anywhere.

She took him, driving pretty fast, to the Moraine Hotel and was glad the distance was not greater, for after various heavy-handed and unquenchable preliminaries he kissed her as nearly on the mouth as possible, clinging to a half-lit cigar the while, just before she whipped around into the hotel drive. She avoided a collision with one of the stone posts narrowly enough to startle him into releasing her,--he hadn't realized the turn was so close--and stopped at the lighted carriage door with a jerk that left him no option but to get out at once.

She nodded a curt good night and drove back to the park; went to one of the dressing-rooms and washed her face. Then she came around in front to hear Edith Mason sing _Romeo and Juliet_. She didn't get just the effect she antic.i.p.ated from this lovely performance because Polacco, who is Miss Mason's husband, came and sat down beside her--there was nothing spidery about him, thank goodness--and in a running and vivacious commentary expressed his lively contempt for this opera of Gounod's. At its best it was bad _Faust_. Its least intolerable melodies were quotations from _Faust_,--an a.s.sertion which he proved from time to time by singing, and not very softly either, the original themes to the wrath of all who sat within a twenty-five foot radius of them.

Mary felt grateful to him for giving her something that was not maddening to think about and after the performance went with him and his wife to supper so that it was well after midnight before she returned to the cottage.

It was an ineffable relief to find it dark. Her habit on warm nights was to sleep on the gloucester swing in the screened veranda and she made it her bed to-night, though beyond a short uneasy doze of two, she didn't sleep at all.

At half past eight or so, just after she had sat down to breakfast, she heard her father coming down the stairs. She tried to call to him but could command no voice and so waited, frozen, until he appeared in the doorway.

"I thought I heard you stirring down here and that it perhaps meant breakfast. Paula won't be down, I suppose, for hours. She fell asleep about four o'clock and has been sleeping quietly ever since."

This was exactly like Paula, of course. She was the vortex of the whole tempest, but when she had thoroughly exhausted the emotional possibilities of it she sank into peaceful slumber like a baby after a hard cry.

No wonder she was too much for these two Wollastons who sat now with dry throats and tremulous hands over the mockery of breakfast! Mary, although she knew, asked her father whether he wanted his coffee clear or with cream in it and having thus broken the spell, went on with a gasp:

"I'm glad Paula isn't coming down. It gives you a better chance to tell me just how you feel about my having interfered. I did run away last night. You guessed that, I suppose. But it wasn't to evade it altogether.

My--whipping, you know."

It had an odd effect on both of them, this reference to her childhood; her hand moved round the table rim and covered his which rested on the edge of it.

"Did your mother ever punish you?" he asked. "Corporeally? It's my recollection that she did not. I was always the executioner. I doubt now if that was quite fair."

"Perhaps not," she a.s.serted dubiously. "In general it isn't fair of course. It probably wasn't in the case of Rush. But with me,--I don't think I could have borne it to have mother beat me. It would have seemed an insufferable affront. I'd have hated her for it. But there was a sort of satisfaction in having you do it."