Chapter XXII

The next afternoon while Gloria was dressing to meet Wayburn and go riding with him, the telephone buzzed.

It was Stan himself.

"Our drive's called off," he said.

Gloria's heart, that had been soaring like a lark, sank.

"Why?" she asked. Was he going somewhere with Myra Gail?

"Because you're coming here instead," Stan answered. "To my li'l ol' family hotel. Suite 208. And hurry along!"

"Well, I like that!" Gloria said to herself indignantly, after she had hung up the receiver.

"Calls me up and tells me what I'm to do! What I'm not to do! Who does he think he is ... the kaiser?"

The little family hotel where Wayburn lived was old and shabby.

There was a musty smell in the halls as Gloria walked through them to Stan's suite ... a smell of dusty carpet, boiled cabbage and cheap perfume.

She tapped on the painted panels of his door....

He opened it with a flourish.

"'Will you walk into my parlor, said the spider to the fly,'" he quoted. His voice was curiously thick.

"Stan, have you been drinking?" Gloria asked.

"You should ask! You who only last night presented me with the most wunnerful bottle o' brandy ever drunk!" he said cheerfully.

Her eyes searched the room. There were several bottles and a plate of dry, hard sandwiches on a table in the center of it.

"Been drowning all my troubles," Stan explained weakly.

"If you drank all that, you must have a million troubles," she answered.

Stan shook his head.

"Only one," he said. "Only one trouble in the whole wide world!"

Gloria was sure that he meant her ... that she was the one thing that troubled him.

"And what is that?" she asked demurely. "What is your trouble, Stan?"

She gave him her hands and sat down beside the table with its bottles and glasses.

"Money!" Wayburn said unexpectedly. "Money!"

Gloria was silent.

"Here I am out of a job," the actor went on, dejectedly. "No prospect of getting another one, very soon! Fur overcoat in pawn! Watch in pawn! Landlady raising old Harry about not getting her rent.... I sure am in one tight place!"

He took his silver cigarette case from his pocket and held it out to her.

"Smoke?" he asked.

"No, thanks." Gloria shook her head. "But look here, Stan, let me lend you some money on this cigarette case! We're old friends, you and I."

Wayburn did not look at her while she took two $10 bills ... all the money she happened to have ... from her bag and laid them under the sandwich plate on the table.

Then he put his cigarette case back into his coat pocket.

"Gloria," he said finally, "you shame me with your kindness."

Wayburn filled two glasses and gave one to Gloria.

"Here's how!" he said.

She did not look at him. Her eyes traveled slowly around the garish walls of Wayburn's sitting-room.

There were dozens of women's photographs on them ... women who looked like actresses. Women who did not look like actresses. Pretty women. Women who smiled. Women who pouted adorably ... All of them hateful to her, because they had cared for Wayburn!

And she, herself? Was she just one more pretty girl for Wayburn's collection?

Suddenly Gloria felt as if she were not in the room alone with Wayburn. She felt as if all of these women were there, too, looking at her ... as Bluebeard's dead wives looked down at the living one who came to the Chamber of Horrors!

And she felt ashamed ... ashamed of visiting Wayburn in his rooms! Secretly!

Love shouldn't be like this! Hidden, furtive, and ashamed!

Why, love should be like the sunrise!

She stood up.

"I'm going," she cried. And before the befuddled Wayburn knew what she was doing, she had slammed the door behind her and was gone.

She began to sob as she drove home through the early spring twilight.

She made up her mind never to see Stanley Wayburn again, so long as she lived! She would forget him! ... Let some other woman have him ... some one of the women whose faces plastered the walls of his room! How she hated and loathed those women!

Ranghild met her at the door of the house, with a frightened face.

"Mr. Gregory came home, sick, about an hour ago. His secretary brought him in a cab," she whispered.

Gloria ran upstairs.

Dick was stretched out on his bed, fully dressed.

His wife touched his closed eyelids and his forehead with her hand. They were burning hot.

His breath came in short, quick gasps.

"Dick!" Gloria cried. She was filled with a sudden fear.

Sickness had always terrified her. She had never forgotten one night in her early childhood, when her only brother had died a few hours after his birth. She could still remember her mother's terrible cries, heard through the thin walls of the little house....

"Dick!" she called again. This time he moved, but he did not open his eyes.

In a panic she ran downstairs to the hall. Ranghild stood there wringing her hands in her apron.

"Now, don't get excited," Gloria said with a shaking voice. She was so excited herself that she could hardly take the telephone receiver from its hook.

She called to Dr. John, and asked him to come to Dick at once.

Then she turned to Ranghild with narrowed eyes.

"You said Miss Briggs brought Mr. Gregory home," she asked. "Did she help you get him upstairs, or did she leave right away?"

Gloria was furious with Miss Briggs for bringing Dick home.

He could have come alone in his taxi just as well as not! ... But no, she must be a Ministering Angel to Dick! That was her pose, Gloria thought angrily.

... Why couldn't these secretaries realize that their jobs began and ended in the office? Gloria, herself, had never been interested in her employers when she had worked, except as employers. She was sure of that!

"Miss Briggs didn't come into the house," Ranghild said. "She paid the taxi driver, and went away. He and I got Mr. Gregory upstairs, and put him on his bed ... Oh, ma'am, what do you think is the matter with him?"

Ranghild was almost in tears.

"Oh, nothing much, but the flu," Gloria answered. "He's had it twice this winter ... and he gets right over it. He'll be all right in a day or two."

"I tried to telephone you all over town," the maid went on. "I phoned Mrs. Seymour, and Mrs. Gail, and Mrs. Hough, and Mr. Gregory's mother...."

"Don't ever do it again!" Gloria cried sharply "I'm usually down town shopping, so it's no use trying to get me by phone, anyway.... Let's go up and try to get Mr. Gregory into bed before the doctor comes."

They were unlacing Dick's shoes when Dr. John arrived.

Deftly as a nurse, he undressed Dick and put him into bed. He took out his stethoscope and listened to Dick's back and chest. Then he gravely nodded his head as he timed Dick's pulse.

"Just what I told him he'd have if he didn't take better care of himself," he remarked dryly. "It's pneumonia. I think I'd better telephone Mrs. O'Hara right away. She's the best pneumonia nurse in this town."

Gloria stood like a statue in the middle of the room. In a dream ... a nightmare ... she heard Dr. John call Mrs. O'Hara, and send a taxicab for her.

She listened to him ordering things from the drug store ... camphorated oil, cotton, brandy.

And all at once, it was brought home to Gloria why it was that Dr. John couldn't go with May to all the parties and dances.... People needed him, as Dick needed him now! Their very lives depended on his not going to parties with his fun-loving wife ... on his sticking to his job!

Gloria had never thought of it in just that way before. She had always pitied May, because she was a doctor's wife. Well, she still pitied her, and yet—

"Now, then, Gloria, the best thing you can do is to move all your things out of this room! And I want you to stay put, yourself!" Dr. John said briskly.

Gloria gave a nervous little laugh.

"No need to ask me to stay out of this room," she said. "I'm frightened to death of sick people."

Her eyes were wide with fear.

"What makes him breathe like that?" she asked. She had been watching the quick rise and fall of Dick's chest under the bed clothes. He breathed as if he had been running a long way and was utterly exhausted.

"Fever and the disease, both," Dr. John said shortly.

Gloria gathered together her belongings ... her clothes, her perfumes and powders, all the silver things from her dressing table ... and took them into the guest room.

She stood looking out of the window. A taxicab was coming down the street. It slowed up before the house and stopped.

Gloria opened the door for the woman who descended from it and came up the walk toward the house.

The woman's face was vaguely familiar. And when she spoke, her voice was, too. Gloria was sure she had met her somewhere, before.

"How do you do? I'm Mrs. O'Hara," she said, as she came up the front steps. "I feel almost as if I know you, Mrs. Gregory. My sister, Sue Briggs, has worked for your husband for a good many years."

Miss Briggs' sister! This woman!

... That was why she had looked so familiar to Gloria! She had the same shadowy blue eyes and delicate features. Her voice was as low and sweet as Miss Briggs' own lovely voice.

"Will you go right upstairs?" Gloria asked with cold politeness. "Dr. Seymour is waiting for you."

Without another word, the nurse disappeared around the turn at the stair-landing.

Gloria went out into the bright kitchen. Ranghild, in her black dress, stood at the sink washing lettuce leaves in a colander.

"Will we have dinner at the usual time?" she asked chokily. Her eyes were red-rimmed.

Without warning she began to cry, covering her face with her wet, red hands. Gloria stared at her.

"What in the world is the matter with you?" she asked. "You've just got to get hold of yourself, Ranghild! Mr. Gregory's not dead, yet, you know!"

"Oh, I know that pneumonia! My man, he died of it five winters ago in Sweden..." Ranghild sobbed. She took a handkerchief from her apron pocket and wiped her swollen eyelids.

"That's how I happened to come to this country. I couldn't bear to stay at home without my Henrik. Everything made me think of him ... the pine woods where we went for picnics, the light from the blast furnace where he worked.... Shall we have the potatoes baked or mashed for dinner, to-night, Mrs. Gregory?" Ranghild asked, with a mighty effort for self-control. She could see that Mrs. Gregory was not interested in her story.

"I didn't know you were a widow, Ranghild," Gloria said. "And bake the potatoes, please."

She went back into the living-room and picked up a fashion magazine.