Two Flights Up Read Online Free PDF Page B

plans for you—gone.”
    “Don’t worry about me just now, Mother. When is he coming?”
    “In a month, maybe. I don’t know. I don’t care.”
    Then suddenly Mrs. Bayne broke down. She sobbed out all her troubles, her thwarted hopes for Holly, Margaret’s marriage, their poverty, the old disgrace, and now this new trouble. All of life had let her down, everybody, everything. She wanted to die. She couldn’t go on any longer.
    It was not new to Holly. She had heard it all before. But now there was a difference; there was an underlying current of reproach for her. She could help if she would; at least she could save herself out of the wreckage. She knew well enough that such salvage was to save her mother as well, to reinstate her, but she shut her mind to that.
    By the time Mrs. Bayne ceased and wiped her eyes, she had made up her mind. After all, what did it matter? What were dreams against this stark reality?
    “If you think marrying Furness would help,” she said slowly, “I will do it.” She hesitated. “It doesn’t seem entirely fair to him, but if he understands that I don’t care very much, one way or the other—”
    “You wouldn’t dare to tell him that!” protested Mrs. Bayne.
    “Don’t you think I ought to? I can’t pretend. I never could.”
    And to do her credit, Holly did tell Furness. Not precisely in those words, but he understood her well enough.
    “I don’t feel the way you—seem to feel about it,” she said honestly. “I don’t know many people, and of course I—” she smiled faintly—“I don’t know anything at all about love. Only I thought it would be different.”
    He was not a bad sort, and that touched him.
    “Give me a little time,” he said. “Let me teach you a bit. Naturally you don’t know about love, dearest. How could you, shut away like this?”
    It was speedily evident, however, that time was the last thing in Mrs. Bayne’s mind. The essence of the contract, to her, was haste; to get it settled and announced before Tom Bayne came back, to commit Brooks beyond withdrawal. And Furness Brooks, not without his own trepidations, played her game for her.
    Howard Warrington came home one day to find a limousine at the door, with two men in livery, and a Pekingese looking out through its plate-glass windows, and in the drawing room Mrs. Bayne was entertaining a caller.
    Holly, in a new frock, was listlessly sitting near by, but there was nothing listless about Mrs. Bayne.
    “Personally,” she was saying, “I prefer a church. I was married in St. Andrews, and it would be only right for Holly. Holly darling, you run out and bring in the toast. Hilda is so frightfully slow.”
    Mrs. Willoughby-Jones was not listening, however. She was gazing at the large young man absorbedly picking up his mail in the hall. She watched him drop a letter, ignore it, and dazedly gather up his evening papers and disappear. But she had seen his face in the mirror, and he had certainly looked very odd.
    She wanted to ask Mrs. Bayne who he was, but to Mrs. Bayne there had been no young man in the hall. So far as Mrs. Willoughby-Jones was concerned, it was clearly Mrs. Bayne’s attitude that the front door had not closed and that nobody had passed by.
    But he had passed by. What is more, he knew his way about now, and he did not go up the stairs. He went straight back to the kitchen, closing the door carefully, and faced Holly, who was making toast with a sort of grim expertness in an otherwise empty kitchen.
    She looked up at him and went a little pale.
    “So!” he said violently. “Hilda’s slow making the toast. Hilda! Hilda! You know darned well that there isn’t any Hilda.”
    “That’s my affair, Mr. Warrington,” said Holly.
    “Not by a damned sight,” he said loudly. “I don’t get it. It makes me sick. It’s hypocrisy. It’s worse than that, even. It’s—”
    His own fury shocked him. She was staring at him in bewilderment, and he got out a handkerchief and