Where There\'s A Will

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WHERE THERE'S A WILL

By Mary Roberts Rinehart



CONTENTS

I I HAVE A WARNING
II MISS PATTY ARRIVES
III A WILL
IV AND A WAY
V WANTED--AN OWNER
VI THE CONSPIRACY
VII MR. PIERCE ACQUIRES A WIFE
VII AND MR. MOODY INDIGESTION
IX DOLLY, HOW COULD YOU
X ANOTHER COMPLICATION
XI MISS PATTY'S PRINCE
XII WE GET A DOCTOR
XIII THE PRINCE--PRINCIPALLY
XIV PIERCE DISAPPROVES
XV THE PRINCE, WITH APOLOGIES
XVI STOP, THIEF!
XVII A BUNCH OF LETTERS
XVIII MISS COBB'S BURGLAR
XIX NO MARRIAGE IN HEAVEN
XX EVERY DOG HAS HIS DAY
XXI THE MUTINY
XXII HOME TO ROOST
XXIII BACK TO NATURE
XIV LIKE DUCKS TO WATER
XXV THE FIRST FRUITS
XXVI OVER THE FENCE IS OUT
XXVII A CUPBOARD FULL OF RYE
XXVIII LOVE, LOVE, LOVE
XXIX A BIG NIGHT TO-NIGHT
XXX LET GOOD DIGESTION




WHERE THERE'S A WILL





CHAPTER I

I HAVE A WARNING

When it was all over Mr. Sam came out to the spring-house to say good-by
to me before he and Mrs. Sam left. I hated to see him go, after all we
had been through together, and I suppose he saw it in my face, for he
came over close and stood looking down at me, and smiling. "You saved
us, Minnie," he said, "and I needn't tell you we're grateful; but do
you know what I think?" he asked, pointing his long forefinger at me.
"I think you've enjoyed it even when you were suffering most. Red-haired
women are born to intrigue, as the sparks fly upward."

"Enjoyed it!" I snapped. "I'm an old woman before my time, Mr. Sam. What
with trailing back and forward through the snow to the shelter-house,
and not getting to bed at all some nights, and my heart going by fits
and starts, as you may say, and half the time my spinal marrow fairly
chilled--not to mention putting on my overshoes every morning from force
of habit and having to take them off again, I'm about all in."

"It's been the making of you, Minnie," he said, eying me, with his hands
in his pockets. "Look at your cheeks! Look at your disposition! I don't
believe you'd stab anybody in the back now!"

(Which was a joke, of course; I never stabbed anybody in the back.)

He sauntered over and dropped a quarter into the slot-machine by the
door, but the thing was frozen up and refused to work. I've seen the
time when Mr. Sam would have kicked it, but he merely looked at it and
then at me.

"Turned virtuous, like everything else around the place. Not that I
don't approve of virtue, Minnie, but I haven't got used to putting my
foot on the brass rail of the bar and ordering a nut sundae. Hook
the money out with a hairpin, Minnie, and buy some shredded wheat in
remembrance of me."

He opened the door and a blast of February wind rattled the
window-frames. Mr. Sam threw out his chest under his sweater and waved
me another good-by.

"Well, I'm off, Minnie," he said. "Take care of yourself and don't sit
too tight on the job; learn to rise a bit in the saddle."

"Good-by, Mr. Sam!" I called, putting down Miss Patty's doily and
following him to the door; "good-by; better have something before you
start to keep you warm."

He turned at the corner of the path and grinned back at me.

"All right," he called. "I'll go down to the bar and get a lettuce
sandwich!"

Then he was gone, and happy as I was, I knew I would miss him terribly.
I got a wire hairpin and went over to the slot-machine, but when I had
finally dug out the money I could hardly see it for tears.

It began when the old doctor died. I suppose you have heard of Hope
Sanatorium and the mineral spring that made it famous. Perhaps you
have seen the blotter we got out, with a flash-light interior of the
spring-house on it, and me handing the old doctor a glass of mineral
water, and wearing the embroidered linen waist that Miss Patty Jennings
gave me that winter. The blotters were a great success. Below the
picture it said, "Yours for health," and in the body of the blotter,
in red lettering, "Your system absorbs the health-giving drugs in Hope
Springs water as this blotter soaks up ink."

The "Yours for health" was my idea.

I have been spring-house girl at Hope Springs Sanatorium for fourteen
years. My father had the position before me, but he took rheumatism, and
as the old doctor said, it was bad business policy to spend thousands
of dollars in advertising that Hope Springs water cured rheumatism, and
then have father creaking like a rusty hinge every time he bent over to
fill a glass with it.

Father gave me one piece of advice the day he turned the spring-house
over to me.

"It's a difficult situation, my girl," he said. "Lots of people think
it's simply a matter of filling a glass with water and handing it over
the railing. Why, I tell you a barkeeper's a high-priced man mostly, and
his job's a snap to this. I'd like to know how a barkeeper would make
out if his customers came back only once a year and he had to remember
whether they wanted their drinks cold or hot or 'chill off'. And another
thing: if a chap comes in with a tale of woe, does the barkeeper have
to ask him what he's doing for it, and listen while he tells how much
weight he lost in a blanket sweat? No, sir; he pushes him a bottle and
lets it go at that."

Father passed away the following winter. He'd been a little bit
delirious, and his last words were: "Yes, sir; hot, with a pinch of
salt, sir?" Poor father! The spring had been his career, you may
say, and I like to think that perhaps even now he is sitting by some
everlasting spring measuring out water with a golden goblet instead of
the old tin dipper. I said that to Mr. Sam once, and he said he felt
quite sure that I was right, and that where father was the water would
be appreciated. He had heard of father.

Well, for the first year or so I nearly went crazy. Then I found things
were coming my way. I've got the kind of mind that never forgets a name
or face and can combine them properly, which isn't common. And when
folks came back I could call them at once. It would do your heart good
to see some politician, coming up to rest his stomach from the free
bar in the state house at the capital, enter the spring-house where
everybody is playing cards and drinking water and not caring a rap
whether he's the man that cleans the windows or the secretary of the
navy. If he's been there before, in sixty seconds I have his name on my
tongue and a glass of water in his hand, and have asked him about
the rheumatism in his right knee and how the children are. And in ten
minutes he's sitting in a bridge game and trotting to the spring to have
his glass refilled during his dummy hand, as if he'd grown up in
the place. The old doctor used to say my memory was an asset to the
sanatorium.

He depended on me a good bit--the old doctor did--and that winter he was
pretty feeble. (He was only seventy, but he'd got in the habit of making
it eighty to show that the mineral water kept him young. Finally he got
to BEING eighty, from thinking it, and he died of senility in the end.)

He was in the habit of coming to the spring-house every day to get his
morning glass of water and read the papers. For a good many years it had
been his custom to sit there, in the winter by the wood fire and in the
summer just inside the open door, and to read off the headings aloud
while I cleaned around the spring and polished glasses.

"I see the president is going fishing, Minnie," he'd say, or "Airbrake
is up to 133; I wish I'd bought it that time I dreamed about it. It was
you who persuaded me not to, Minnie."

And all that winter, with the papers full of rumors that Miss
Patty Jennings was going to marry a prince, we'd followed it by the
spring-house fire, the old doctor and I, getting angry at the Austrian
emperor for opposing it when we knew how much too good Miss Patty was
for any foreigner, and then getting nervous and fussed when we read that
the prince's mother was in favor of the match and it might go through.
Miss Patty and her father came every winter to Hope Springs and I
couldn't have been more anxious about it if she had been my own sister.

Well, as I say, it all began the very day the old doctor died. He
stamped out to the spring-house with the morning paper about nine
o'clock, and the wedding seemed to be all off. The paper said the
emperor had definitely refused his consent and had sent the prince, who
was his cousin, for a Japanese cruise, while the Jennings family was
going to Mexico in their private car. The old doctor was indignant, and
I remember how he tramped up and down the spring-house, muttering that
the girl had had a lucky escape, and what did the emperor expect if
beauty and youth and wealth weren't enough. But he calmed down, and soon
he was reading that the papers were predicting an early spring, and he
said we'd better begin to increase our sulphur percentage in the water.

I hadn't noticed anything strange in his manner, although we'd all
noticed how feeble he was growing, but when he got up to go back to
the sanatorium and I reached him his cane, it seemed to me he avoided
looking at me. He went to the door and then turned and spoke to me over
his shoulder.

"By the way," he remarked, "Mr. Richard will be along in a day or so,
Minnie. You'd better break it to Mrs. Wiggins."

Since the summer before we'd had to break Mr. Dick's coming to Mrs.
Wiggins the housekeeper, owing to his finding her false front where it
had blown out of a window, having been hung up to dry, and his wearing
it to luncheon as whiskers. Mr. Dick was the old doctor's grandson.

"Humph!" I said, and he turned around and looked square at me.

"He's a good boy at heart, Minnie," he said. "We've had our troubles
with him, you and I, but everything has been quiet lately."

When I didn't say anything he looked discouraged, but he had a fine way
of keeping on until he gained his point, had the old doctor.

"It HAS been quiet, hasn't it?" he demanded.

"I don't know," I said; "I have been deaf since the last explosion!" And
I went down the steps to the spring. I heard the tap of his cane as he
came across the floor, and I knew he was angry.

"Confound you, Minnie," he exclaimed, "if I could get along without you
I'd discharge you this minute."

"And if I paid any attention to your discharging me I'd have been gone
a dozen times in the last year," I retorted. "I'm not objecting to Mr.
Dick coming here, am I? Only don't expect me to burst into song about
it. Shut the door behind you when you go out."

But he didn't go at once. He stood watching me polish glasses and get
the card-tables ready, and I knew he still had something on his mind.

"Minnie," he said at last, "you're a shrewd young woman--maybe more head
than heart, but that's well enough. And with your temper under control,
you're a CAPABLE young woman."

"What has Mr. Dick been up to now?" I asked, growing suspicious.

"Nothing. But I'm an old man, Minnie, a very old man."

"Stuff and nonsense," I exclaimed, alarmed. "You're only seventy. That's
what comes of saying in the advertising that you are eighty--to show
what the springs have done for you. It's enough to make a man die of
senility to have ten years tacked to his age."

"And if," he went on, "if anything happens to me, Minnie, I'm counting
on you to do what you can for the old place. You've been here a good
many years, Minnie."

"Fourteen years I have been ladling out water at this spring," I said,
trying to keep my lips from trembling. "I wouldn't be at home any place
else, unless it would be in an aquarium. But don't ask me to stay here
and help Mr. Dick sell the old place for a summer hotel. For that's what
he'll do."

"He won't sell it," declared the old doctor grimly. "All I want is for
you to promise to stay."

"Oh, I'll stay," I said. "I won't promise to be agreeable, but I'll
stay. Somebody'll have to look after the spring; I reckon Mr. Dick
thinks it comes out of the earth just as we sell it, with the whole
pharmacopoeia in it."

Well, it made the old doctor happier, and I'm not sorry I promised, but
I've got a joint on my right foot that throbs when it is going to rain
or I am going to have bad luck, and it gave a jump then. I might have
known there was trouble ahead.






CHAPTER II

MISS PATTY ARRIVES

It was pretty quiet in the spring-house that day after the old doctor
left. It had started to snow and only the regulars came out. What with
the old doctor talking about dying, and Miss Patty Jennings gone to
Mexico, when I'd been looking forward to her and her cantankerous old
father coming to Hope Springs for February, as they mostly did, I was
depressed all day. I got to the point where Mr. Moody feeding nickels
into the slot-machine with one hand and eating zwieback with the other
made me nervous. After a while he went to sleep over it, and when he
had slipped a nickel in his mouth and tried to put the zwieback in the
machine he muttered something and went up to the house.

I was glad to be alone. I drew a chair in front of the fire and wondered
what I would do if the old doctor died, and what a fool I'd been not to
be a school-teacher, which is what I studied for.

I was thinking to myself bitterly that all that my experience in the
spring fitted me for was to be a mermaid, when I heard something running
down the path, and it turned out to be Tillie, the diet cook.

She slammed the door behind her and threw the Finleyville evening paper
at me.

"There!" she said, "I've won a cake of toilet soap from Bath-house Mike.
The emperor's consented."

"Nonsense!" I snapped, and snatched the paper. Tillie was right; the
emperor HAD! I sat down and read it through, and there was Miss Patty's
picture in an oval and the prince's in another, with a turned-up
mustache and his hand on the handle of his sword, and between them both
was the Austrian emperor. Tillie came and looked over my shoulder.

"I'm not keen on the mustache," she said, "but the sword's
beautiful--and, oh, Minnie, isn't he aristocratic? Look at his nose!"

But I'm not one to make up my mind in a hurry, and I'd heard enough talk
about foreign marriages in the years I'd been dipping out mineral water
to make me a skeptic, so to speak.

"I'm not so sure," I said slowly. "You can't tell anything by that kind
of a picture. If he was even standing beside a chair I could get a line
on him. He may be only four feet high."

"Then Miss Jennings wouldn't love him," declared Tillie. "How do you
reckon he makes his mustache point up like that?"

"What's love got to do with it?" I demanded. "Don't be a fool, Tillie.
It takes more than two people's pictures in a newspaper with a red heart
around them and an overweight cupid above to make a love-match. Love's a
word that's used to cover a good many sins and to excuse them all."

"She isn't that kind," said Tillie. "She's--she's as sweet as she's
beautiful, and you're as excited as I am, Minnie Waters, and if you're
not, what have you got the drinking glass she used last winter put on
the top shelf out of reach for?" She went to the door and slammed it
open. "Thank heaven I'm not a dried-up old maid," she called back over
her shoulder, "and when you're through hugging that paper you can send
it up to the house."

Well, I sat there and thought it over, Miss Patty, or Miss Patricia,
being, so to speak, a friend of mine. They'd come to the Springs every
winter for years. Many a time she'd slipped away from her governess and
come down to the spring-house for a chat with me, and we'd make pop-corn
together by my open fire, and talk about love and clothes, and even the
tariff, Miss Patty being for protection, which was natural, seeing that
was the way her father made his money, and I for free trade, especially
in the winter when my tips fall off considerable.

And when she was younger she would sit back from the fire, with the
corn-popper on her lap and her cheeks as red as cranberries, and say: "I
DON'T know why I tell you all these things, Minnie, but Aunt Honoria's
funny, and I can't talk to Dorothy; she's too young, you know. Well, HE
said--" only every winter it was a different "he."

In my wash-stand drawer I'd kept all the clippings about her coming out
and the winter she spent in Washington and was supposed to be engaged to
the president's son, and the magazine article that told how Mr. Jennings
had got his money by robbing widows and orphans, and showed the little
frame house where Miss Patty was born--as if she's had anything to do
with it. And so now I was cutting out the picture of her and the prince
and the article underneath which told how many castles she'd have, and I
don't mind saying I was sniffling a little bit, for I couldn't get used
to the idea. And suddenly the door closed softly and there was a rustle
behind me. When I turned it was Miss Patty herself. She saw the clipping
immediately, and stopped just inside the door.

"YOU, TOO," she said. "And we've come all this distance to get away from
just that."

"Well, I shan't talk about it," I replied, not holding out my hand, for
with her, so to speak, next door to being a princess--but she leaned
right over and kissed me. I could hardly believe it.

"Why won't you talk about it?" she insisted, catching me by the
shoulders and holding me off. "Minnie, your eyes are as red as your
hair!"

"I don't approve of it," I said. "You might as well know it now as
later, Miss Patty. I don't believe in mixed marriages. I had a cousin
that married a Jew, and what with him making the children promise to be
good on the Talmud and her trying to raise them with the Bible, the poor
things is that mixed up that it's pitiful."

She got a little red at that, but she sat down and took up the clipping.

"He's much better looking than that, Minnie," she said soberly, "and
he's a good Catholic. But if that's the way you feel we'll not talk
about it. I've had enough trouble at home as it is."

"I guess from that your father isn't crazy about it," I remarked,
getting her a glass of spring water. The papers had been full of how Mr.
Jennings had forbidden the prince the house when he had been in America
the summer before.

"Certainly he's crazy about it--almost insane!" she said, and smiled at
me in her old way over the top of the glass. Then she put down the glass
and came over to me. "Minnie, Minnie," she said, "if you only knew how
I've wanted to get away from the newspapers and the gossips and come to
this smelly little spring-house and talk things over with a red-haired,
sharp-tongued, mean-dispositioned spring-house girl--!"

And with that I began to blubber, and she came into my arms like a baby.

"You're all I've got," I declared, over and over, "and you're going to
live in a country where they harness women with dogs, and you'll never
hear an English word from morning to night."

"Stuff!" She gave me a little shake. "He speaks as good English as I
do. And now we're going to stop talking about him--you're worse than the
newspapers." She took off her things and going into my closet began to
rummage for the pop-corn. "Oh, how glad I am to get away," she sang
out to me. "We're supposed to have gone to Mexico; even Dorothy doesn't
know. Where's the pop-corner or the corn-popper or whatever you call
it?"

She was as happy to have escaped the reporters and the people she knew
as a child, and she sat down on the floor in front of the fire and began
to shell the corn into the popper, as if she'd done it only the day
before.

"I guess you're safe enough here," I said. "It's always slack in
January--only a few chronics and the Saturday-to-Monday husbands, except
a drummer now and then who drives up from Finleyville. It's too early
for drooping society buds, and the chronic livers don't get around until
late March, after the banquet season closes. It will be pretty quiet for
a while."

And at that minute the door was flung open, and Bath-house Mike
staggered in.

"The old doctor!" he gasped. "He's dead, Miss Minnie--died just now in
the hot room in the bathhouse! One minute he was givin' me the divil for
something or other, and the next--I thought he was asleep."

Something that had been heavy in my breast all afternoon suddenly seemed
to burst and made me feel faint all over. But I didn't lose my head.

"Does anybody know yet?" I asked quickly. He shook his head.

"Then he didn't die in the bath-house, Mike," I said firmly. "He died
in his bed, and you know it. If it gets out that he died in the hot room
I'll have the coroner on you."

Miss Patty was standing by the railing of the spring. I got my shawl and
started out after Mike, and she followed.

"If the guests ever get hold of this they'll stampede. Start any
excitement in a sanatorium," I said, "and one and all they'll dip their
thermometers in hot water and swear they've got fever!"

And we hurried to the house together.





CHAPTER III

A WILL

Well, we got the poor old doctor moved back to his room, and had one of
the chambermaids find him there, and I wired to Mrs. Van Alstyne, who
was Mr. Dicky Carter's sister, and who was on her honeymoon in South
Carolina. The Van Alstynes came back at once, in very bad tempers, and
we had the funeral from the preacher's house in Finleyville so as not to
harrow up the sanatorium people any more than necessary. Even as it was
a few left, but about twenty of the chronics stayed, and it looked as if
we might be able to keep going.

Miss Patty sent to town for a black veil for me, and even went to the
funeral. It helped to take my mind off my troubles to think who it was
that was holding my hand and comforting me, and when, toward the end
of the service, she got out her handkerchief and wiped her eyes I was
almost overcome, she being, so to speak, in the very shadow of a throne.

After it was all over the relatives gathered in the sun parlor of the
sanatorium to hear the will--Mr. Van Alstyne and his wife and about
twenty more who had come up from the city for the funeral and stayed
over--on the house.

Well, the old doctor left me the buttons for his full dress waistcoat
and his favorite copy of Gray's Anatomy. I couldn't exactly set up
housekeeping with my share of the estate, but when the lawyer read that
part of the will aloud and a grin went around the room I flounced out of
my chair.

"Maybe you think I'm disappointed," I said, looking hard at the family,
who weren't making any particular pretense at grief, and at the house
people standing around the door. "Maybe you think it's funny to see an
unmarried woman get a set of waistcoat buttons and a medical book. Well,
that set of buttons was the set he bought in London on his wedding trip,
and the book's the one he read himself to sleep with every night for
twenty years. I'm proud to get them."

Mr. Van Alstyne touched me on the arm.

"Everybody knows how loyal you've been, Minnie," he assured me. "Now sit
down like a good girl and listen to the rest of the will."

"While I'm up I might as well get something else off my mind," I said.
"I know what's in that will, but I hadn't anything to do with it, Mr.
Van Alstyne. He took advantage of my being laid up with influenza last
spring."

They thought that was funny, but a few minutes later they weren't so
cheerful. You see the sanatorium was a mighty fine piece of property,
with a deer park and golf links. We'd had plenty of offers to sell it
for a summer hotel, but we'd both been dead against it. That was one of
the reasons for the will.

The whole estate was left to Dicky Carter, who hadn't been able to come,
owing to his being laid up with an attack of mumps. The family sat up
and nodded at one another, or held up its hands, but when they heard
there was a condition they breathed easier.

Beginning with one week after the reading of the will--and not a day
later--Mr. Dick was to take charge of the sanatorium and to stay there
for two months without a day off. If at the end of that time the place
was being successfully conducted and could show that it hadn't lost
money, the entire property became his for keeps. If he failed it was to
be sold and the money given to charity.

You would have to know Richard Carter to understand the excitement the
will caused. Most of us, I reckon, like the sort of person we've never
dared to be ourselves. The old doctor had gone to bed at ten o'clock all
his life and got up at seven, and so he had a sneaking fondness for the
one particular grandson who often didn't go to bed at all. Twice to
my knowledge when he was in his teens did Dicky Carter run away from
school, and twice his grandfather kept him for a week hidden in the
shelter-house on the golf links. Naturally when Mr. Van Alstyne and I
had to hide him again, which is further on in the story, he went to the
old shelter-house like a dog to its kennel, only this time--but that's
ahead, too.

Well, the family went back to town in a buzz of indignation, and I
carried my waistcoat buttons and my Anatomy out to the spring-house
and had a good cry. There was a man named Thoburn who was crazy for the
property as a summer hotel, and every time I shut my eyes I could see
"Thoburn House" over the veranda and children sailing paper boats in the
mineral spring.