Читать книгу Jericho's Daughters - Paul Iselin Wellman - Страница 23

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❧ Wistart Wedge came downtown that cold January morning somewhat earlier than usual. He had been surprised when his wife wired him the day before that she had changed her mind about staying in Los Angeles and would return at once to Jericho; and he had hoped from this that she was interested in his problems and was coming home to discuss them with him. But she was wearied from two successive nights on planes and she was so chillingly sharp when he met her at the airport shortly after midnight that he did not then dare broach the subject that most deeply concerned him.

This morning Mary Agnes was sleeping late. Even under ordinary circumstances she made it her practice, taking breakfast and sometimes doing some telephoning to her friends before arising, so that often she did not appear downstairs until almost noon.

Wistart, barred by long custom from his wife’s room, found himself awake early and could not return to slumber. He rose, had breakfast, read the Morning Sentinel, estimated with a sickly bitterness how much greater its advertising linage was than that of his own Clarion of the evening before, and at last told Suey, his Negro butler-chauffeur, to bring the small car around to the front. He would drive downtown alone. He felt he could not contain himself if he waited until noon for Mary Agnes. Too much depended on her mood; and the long wait, spent in wondering what frame of mind she would be in this morning, was too much like a convicted prisoner’s long wait for his sentence to be declared.

As he drove down from Tower Hill, his gaze was vague, his mind deeply preoccupied with its own inner problem. He parked his car in the newspaper’s small parking lot and took the private, self-operating elevator up to his office.

“Good morning, Mr. Wedge,” said Miss Finch, his secretary, as he entered the reception room.

She was a waspish, thin-faced, elderly woman with thick-lensed glasses whom he had inherited from his mother, the late Mrs. Algeria Wedge; and she had greeted him in exactly that same voice, without the slightest change of inflection, every day in all the years she had worked for him.

He merely nodded and went into his inner office, where he seated himself at the large carved desk with its dull glow of polished rosewood, its various table ornaments, and its pile of letters, already slit open and neatly arranged for his perusal by the efficient Miss Finch. Going through the mail usually was his first business, but today he did not touch the correspondence. Instead, he took from a humidor of hand-tooled leather a fine cigar, lit it, and for a few minutes puffed on it silently.

Opposite him, on the paneled wall, hung a portrait: his father, the late Senator Tucker Wedge. Painted nearly thirty years before, when the senator was enjoying his first and only term in the upper house of Congress, it pictured a bald, paunchy man with a strong jaw and a harsh black eye.

Force was inherent in the attitude and expression of the man portrayed; but the force that was in the father was not discernible in the son who sat at the carved desk. Wistart Wedge was thirty-seven years old, although he hardly looked it with his round boyish face and fair complexion. His expression was kind, almost gentle, rather than aggressive; his eyes were light blue with pale lashes, and his hair, blond and silky, was becoming rather thin on top. Plump without being actually corpulent, he appeared to be easygoing, even somewhat placid ordinarily; but his look this morning was withdrawn and worried without being determined.

For a time he puffed the excellent cigar, debating whether he should call in Miss Finch for the morning’s dictation. But he felt an aversion to the task; and he found that the cigar did not taste as well to him as usual, so presently he discarded it and rose from his chair.

Should he telephone his home and find if Mary Agnes had risen yet? He glanced at his wrist watch. It was only a little after ten o’clock. No, on second thought he decided it would be unwise to awaken her if she was still sleeping—today of all days, in particular.

So he took a turn or two across the room, his eyes hardly seeing the rich leather-covered furniture, or the shelves of books, or the framed photographs on the walls picturing occasions more or less important in which he had been a participant, or his father’s portrait, or the beautiful velvet rug which covered the floor. The office had been designed by a skillful decorator for peace, contemplation, and tempered decisions. But the man who paced restlessly back and forth in it was far from peaceful, and unable to arrive at a decision, tempered or otherwise. He was wrestling with a problem that vexed him nearly beyond himself.