Romance Classics (37 page)

“Smell that?” she demanded, and Ruth laughed. “That’s fresh air — country fresh and untainted! What a shame it can’t be bottled and sold in cities that are smog-bound!”

“Maybe some day it will be,” Ruth laughed at the absurdity, as the car came to a halt at the edge of the drive and she got out. “Coming with me?”

A sudden and utterly absurd shyness came over Lynn, and she avoided her mother’s eyes as she answered with an attempt at lightness, “Oh, it’s too perfect a day to waste inside those grim gray walls. I’m going to wander in the garden. It smells like fifty-dollar-an-ounce perfume, even from here.”

Ruth nodded, smiled and went up the steps, and the door opened and closed behind her. Lynn studied the grim gray facade of the house for a moment, and then she walked across the drive and around to the wide, shallow stone steps that led down to the garden.

It was an enchanting place for a hot summer afternoon. The roses were giving up their stored sweetness, and their massed colors were a glory in the golden sunlight. Green hedges divided the various beds, and all the graveled paths, swept neat and clean, led to a huge and very old sundial that was like the center of a wheel, with all the paths converging upon it.

There were beds of stock banked about it, and the path on the left held an enormous and very colorful bed of snapdragons. But the roses, of every imaginable variety from the masses of climbing roses that framed the walls at the far end to the finest and rarest of patented roses, dominated the garden.

Wandering, pausing now and then to touch a fragile, fragrant petal, Lynn came to the sundial with its inevitable motto: “I COUNT ONLY THE SUNNY HOURS.”

“Don’t be so smug about it,” she cautioned the sundial, half under her breath. “If it weren’t for the gray rainy hours you’d have no garden to hide in.”

She turned sharply at the sound of a footstep on the graveled path behind her, and color rushed into her face as she met Wayde’s startled, delighted eyes.

For a moment they stood quite still and merely looked at each other.

Cautiously, after what seemed to her an age, Wayde spoke. “Well, hello. This is a delightful surprise.”

“I drove Mother over to visit Mrs. Spencer,” she said hurriedly, “and it was such a nice day I decided to wait for her in the garden.”

“Shall I go away?”

“Goodness, why should you? After all, it’s your garden.”

“I only meant if you’d prefer to be alone …”

“I don’t! How silly! I mean — oh, isn’t the garden lovely? Those roses! I have to touch them to believe they are real. They’re so fantastically perfect.”

She was stammering, and her face was hot, and she was wondering how she had let herself get into such a state. It was silly! It was ridiculous! Poise, they had taught her at the secretarial charm school, was of the utmost importance in any and all circumstances.

Wayde studied her for a moment, then turned his head and looked at the terraces of roses almost as though he had never seen them before.

“I’d never realized how beautiful they are until now,” he admitted.

“I really came to apologize,” Lynn heard herself saying, without having had the slightest intention of saying anything of the sort.

Wayde looked swiftly at her, frowning.

“Apologize? What have you to apologize for, to me of all people?”

“Thanks, that’s kind of you,” Lynn said soberly. “For being such an ill-mannered brat, of course. I
am
sorry.”

“I’m the one to offer apologies, Lynn.”

“But you did, remember? And I refused to accept them. That’s why I’ve come to offer mine, and then you can even the score by refusing to accept them, and we can start all over again.”

Wayde chuckled, and the warmth in his eyes told her how pleased he was that she was here.

“Oh, no we won’t!” he told her firmly. “We’re not going through that again. From the first moment I set eyes on you at the Junction you’ve been smacking me down and turning your delightful nose up at me! If we accept mutual apologies, we’ll go on from there, not from the beginning.”

“Maybe that would be best,” Lynn smiled at him.

For a long moment he studied her, his brows drawn together in a puzzled frown. And then, speaking so quietly, so earnestly, that it was her turn to be startled, he asked, “Why have you come, Lynn?”

Lynn hesitated, and then she told him the truth.

“Because Steve told me it was unfair to dislike you so much without actually knowing you,” she admitted.

“Oh,” some of the warmth went out of his eyes and out of his voice, “so it’s Steve to whom I owe the honor of your visit. I’m deeply touched.”

“Steve’s very smart and shrewd and intelligent,” she told him swiftly. “His advice is usually sound. I thought perhaps he might be right when he said I was being unfair to you, because I’ve always disliked the thought of your calling your annual visits here a ‘prison sentence.’ ”

“Was that the only reason you disliked me so much?” he asked.

“Well, of course,” she answered quite honestly. “It was really the only thing I knew about you. We never saw you in Oakville, and you seemed to despise us all.”

Wayde said quietly, “Look at the house, Lynn. Can you honestly expect anybody to accept a compulsory three months’ stay in it as anything less than a sentence?”

Lynn studied the big, ugly old house.

“Poor house!” said Lynn. “Do you know what’s really wrong with it?”

“I could make you a list, but it would take days.”

“No what’s wrong with it is that it’s unloved, uncherished, unwanted, and it doesn’t feel any need to reach for something it knows it won’t get.”

She knew it was crazily sentimental, but she had been unable to restrain the words. Wayde smiled at her.

“Could we do something about making it more attractive?” he suggested.

“Oh, no, we don’t! We’re not going to start that again! That redecorating business! Remember what happened?”

“Then you haven’t forgiven me.”

“I don’t want a similar situation to arise.”

Wayde nodded. “I see what you mean.”

His tone held a measure of disappointment that surprised her.

“I’m sure you can get professional decorators who could do a much better job.”

“Not a better job, Lynn. But I can’t ask you to take the time when you’re really on vacation,” Wayde cut in briskly. “Matter of fact, now that I’ve decided to spend the summer here …”

“Oh, you’re not!” she gasped, wide-eyed.

“Didn’t you know?”

“But you only need stay a few more weeks to comply with the terms of your grandfather’s will …”

“Funny, Lynn, but since I’ve been here this time, I’ve realized that there must be something about Oakville to have made the other McCullers love it so much,” he admitted slowly, frowning thoughtfully as he tried to dredge up words that would explain the way he felt “Maybe, too, it’s that as I get older, I have the feeling I should stop being the ‘perennial bachelor,’ foot-loose and rootless, and settle down somewhere. And what better place than in the ancestral home?”

There was a moment of silence while Lynn digested that, and then she asked uneasily, “You’re planning to be married?”

“Doesn’t everybody, sometime or other?” he asked reasonably. “I’ve been thinking since the last batch of house guests departed. Thinking of some of the elderly bachelors I know — how crotchety and cantankerous they are, cultivated by people who hope to wangle money from them and don’t care a darn about them otherwise. I don’t want to be like that, Lynn. I want a home, a family, something to live for.”

Lynn drew a deep, hard breath.

“I couldn’t be more surprised,” she admitted frankly.

Wayde grinned at her, the grin dissipating the thoughtful expression that he had previously worn.

“You see, maybe Steve was right. You don’t know me very well after all, do you?” he asked her, a twinkle in his eyes.

“I don’t know
this
you at all!” she confessed.

“And do you like ‘this’ me any better than the one you thought you knew?” he probed.

She met his eyes, saw the anxiety in them, and suddenly smiled a warm, friendly smile.

“Steve was right,” she said lightly. “I didn’t know you at all.”

His expression altered slightly, and some of the warmth went out of his eyes.

‘Oh, yes, Steve. He’s quite a fellow,” he said curtly.

“I think so,” Lynn said cheerfully. “And I’m really glad you have decided to give Oakville a chance to show you that it can be a really wonderful place.”

Wayde nodded. “I got that impression yesterday at church,” he told her, and added ruefully, “But I did get something of a jolt when I got home. A call from the sheriff, no less.”

“Sheriff Tait?” Lynn asked swiftly, frowning. “What in the world did he want?”

“To find out if I’d given some youngster permission to drive my car,” Wayde answered lightly.

“And of course you hadn’t!”

“Of course not. I’d never set eyes on the boy. He slipped the car from the drive and was on his way with a bunch of his pals for a high old time when Sheriff Tait stopped them.”

“Who was the boy?”

“A kid named Holland, I think. The sheriff said his father ran a tavern just across the county line from Rivertown. Do you know him?”

“Larry Holland,” Lynn nodded. “Steve told me that he and Dad have had some bother with the boy, trying to keep him out of reform school. Stealing your car will finish him.”

“I refused to press charges against the youngster,” Wayde told her.

“Oh,” said Lynn eagerly, “that was kind of you!”

“Oh, Sheriff Tait said your father was interested in the boy, and I felt that I could go along with Judge Carter,” Wayde answered. “He’s quite a gentleman, Judge Carter.”

“I
like
him,” Lynn said happily, laughing at the understatement.

“You haven’t answered my question,” Wayde reminded her.

Prettily puzzled, she frowned, her eyes dancing.

“Your question, sir?” she mocked lightly.

“Whether, now that you are beginning to know me a little better, you still hate me.”

“Oh, that!” She was gay, airy about it.

“Well?”

“Of course I don’t hate you,” she said swiftly, and added impulsively, “I don’t honestly believe I ever did. Hate’s a pretty violent emotion.”

Wayde was studying her curiously.

“It is, at that,” he agreed. “There’s only one other as violent. Shall I tell you what that one is?”

“Oh,” Lynn answered hurriedly, looking away from him; “you needn’t bother. Steve told me about that.”

“Naturally, Steve would.” Wayde looked grim. “Somehow, I’m beginning not to like Steve as much as I thought I did.”

Lynn laughed. “Oh, that’s because you don’t really know him. Steve’s a pretty wonderful person.”

“Obviously you and Stella both think so.” Wayde sounded a trifle grumpy.

“Oh, Mother and Dad think so, too,” Lynn assured him, an imp of amusement dancing in her eyes. “In fact, the people in Oakville all seem to agree with them. They all love Dad, but when Dad gets ready to retire and slips the reins over to Steve, I don’t think anybody in town will really mind. They have great confidence in Steve.”

“Well, three cheers and a loud huzza for Steve!” Wayde’s tone plainly said he couldn’t care less.

Lynn looked up across the terraced garden toward the house and said lightly, “I’d better be going. Mother and Mrs. Spencer must surely be finished with their chat by now.”

“Yes, maybe if we go in very meekly Mrs. Spencer will agree to share a cup of tea with us, as long as you are with me to lend me an air of respectability.”

“Oh, that’s one of the reasons Mother came this afternoon,” Lynn explained as they strolled back across the terrace and up the wide, flat steps toward the house. “She decided Mrs. S. wasn’t treating you fairly, so she came to give her a piece of her mind. And Mrs. S. will be meek as Moses from now on!”

Wayde’s eyebrows went way up and there was a vast skepticism in his eyes.

“That I’d like to see,” he said dryly. “But I doubt I shall live long enough.”

“Oh, you’ll see,” Lynn assured him, laughing. “Mother looks as mild as new milk, but when she gets her fighting clothes on, people step to her bidding!”

As they came across the last terrace, where wide French doors stood open, the cheerful tinkle of teacups and spoons and women’s voices reached them, and Wayde stood stock-still, staring down at Lynn.

“If it wasn’t the most ridiculous thought in the world, I’d swear I heard Mrs. Spencer laugh!” he gasped.

“Oh, you did,” Lynn answered, smiling.

“I didn’t know she could!”

“I told you Mother would make her behave!”

As they came into the long, dreary drawing room, Mrs. Spencer looked up from the tea table, smiled a wintry smile at Wayde, a warmer one at Lynn and said cordially, in the tone of a hostess welcoming unexpected but welcome guests, “Oh, there you are. I was just about to send Fitch to look for you before the tea got cold.”

Before they could speak, she flicked Wayde with the sort of disparaging glance she was accustomed to give him, and added, “I suppose you will be wanting your usual highball. Or is it Scotch on the rocks you prefer?”

Ruth said sweetly, “Oh, I’m sure at this time of the afternoon, Wayde would much prefer tea. You make a marvelous cup of tea, Mamie. Doesn’t she, Wayde?”

“Mrs. Spencer does everything superlatively,” Wayde said politely, and warily accepted the fragile cup of amber tea that Mrs. Spencer had poured for him.

Lynn dropped down on a divan and smiled up at him, as he gave her the cup and offered her the silver salver of finger sandwiches.

Ruth went on being pleasant and friendly, and Mrs. Spencer, evidently relishing her position of importance behind the massive silver tea service, was every inch the great lady entertaining in her own home.

Later, as Wayde walked with Lynn and Ruth out to their car, he looked down at Ruth with a gratitude that touched her deeply.

“I don’t know what you did to her, but thanks!” he said quietly. “Of course, I don’t think it will last once you’re out of sight. But at least it’s nice to know that once I was allowed to enter the house without a black look and a nasty word from her.”