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When a Man Marries
by Mary Roberts Rinehart
March, 1999 [Etext #1671]
Project Gutenberg Etext of When a Man Marries, by Mary Rinehart
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WHEN A MAN MARRIES
by Mary Roberts Rinehart
Contents
I At Least I Meant Well
II The Way It Began
III I Might Have Known It
IV The Door Was Closed
V From The Tree Of Love
VI A Mighty Poor Joke
VII We Make An Omelet
VIII Correspondents' Department
IX Flannigan's Find
X On The Stairs
XI I Make A Discovery
XII The Roof Garden
XIII He Does Not Deny It
XIV Almost, But Not Quite
XV Suspicion and Discord
XVI I Face Flannigan
XVII A Clash and A Kiss
XVIII It's All My Fault
XIX The Harbison Man
XX Breaking Out In A New Place
XXI A Bar of Soap
XXII It Was A Delirium
XXIII Coming
Needles and pins
Needles and pins,
When a man marries
His trouble begins.
Chapter I. AT LEAST I MEANT WELL
When the dreadful thing occurred that night, every one turned on
me. The injustice of it hurt me most. They said I got up the
dinner, that I asked them to give up other engagements and come,
that I promised all kinds of jollification, if they would come;
and then when they did come and got in the papers and every
one--but ourselves--laughed himself black in the face, they
turned on ME! I, who suffered ten times to their one! I shall
never forget what Dallas Brown said to me, standing with a coal
shovel in one hand and a--well, perhaps it would be better to
tell it all in the order it happened.
It began with Jimmy Wilson and a conspiracy, was helped on by a
foot-square piece of yellow paper and a Japanese butler, and it
enmeshed and mixed up generally ten respectable members of
society and a policeman. Incidentally, it involved a pearl collar
and a box of soap, which sounds incongruous, doesn't it?
It is a great misfortune to be stout, especially for a man. Jim
was rotund and looked shorter than he really was, and as all the
lines of his face, or what should have been lines, were really
dimples, his face was about as flexible and full of expression as
a pillow in a tight cover. The angrier he got the funnier he
looked, and when he was raging, and his neck swelled up over his
collar and got red, he was entrancing. And everybody liked him,
and borrowed money from him, and laughed at his pictures (he has
one in the Hargrave gallery in London now, so people buy them
instead), and smoked his cigarettes, and tried to steal his Jap.
The whole story hinges on the Jap.
The trouble was, I think, that no one took Jim seriously. His
ambition in life was to be taken seriously, but people steadily
refused to. His art was a huge joke--except to himself. If he
asked people to dinner, every one expected a frolic. When he
married Bella Knowles, people chuckled at the wedding, and
considered it the wildest prank of Jimmy's career, although Jim
himself seemed to take it awfully hard.
We had all known them both for years. I went to Farmington with
Bella, and Anne Brown was her matron of honor when she married
Jim. My first winter out, Jimmy had paid me a lot of attention.
He painted my portrait in oils and had a studio tea to exhibit
it. It was a very nice picture, but it did not look like me, so I
stayed away from the exhibition. Jim asked me to. He said he was
not a photographer, and that anyhow the rest of my features
called for the nose he had given me, and that all the Greuze
women have long necks. I have not.
After I had refused Jim twice he met Bella at a camp in the
Adirondacks and when he came back he came at once to see me. He
seemed to think I would be sorry to lose him, and he blundered
over the telling for twenty minutes. Of course, no woman likes to
lose a lover, no matter what she may say about it, but Jim had
been getting on my nerves for some time, and I was much calmer
than he expected me to be.
"If you mean," I said finally in desperation, "that you and Bella
are--are in love, why don't you say so, Jim? I think you will
find that I stand it wonderfully."
He brightened perceptibly.
"I didn't know how you would take it, Kit," he said, "and I hope
we will always be bully friends. You are absolutely sure you
don't care a whoop for me?"
"Absolutely," I replied, and we shook hands on it. Then he began
about Bella; it was very tiresome.
Bella is a nice girl, but I had roomed with her at school, and I
was under no illusions. When Jim raved about Bella and her banjo,
and Bella and her guitar, I had painful moments when I recalled
Bella, learning her two songs on each instrument, and the old
English ballad she had learned to play on the harp. When he said
she was too good for him, I never batted an eye. And I shook
hands solemnly across the tea-table again, and wished him
happiness--which was sincere enough, but hopeless--and said we
had only been playing a game, but that it was time to stop
playing. Jim kissed my hand, and it was really very touching.
We had been the best of friends ever since. Two days before the
wedding he came around from his tailor's, and we burned all his
letters to me. He would read one and say: "Here's a crackerjack,
Kit," and pass it to me. And after I had read it we would lay it
on the firelog, and Jim would say, "I am not worthy of her, Kit.
I wonder if I can make her happy?" Or--"Did you know that the
Duke of Belford proposed to her in London last winter?"
Of course, one has to take the woman's word about a thing like
that, but the Duke of Belford had been mad about Maude Richard
all that winter.
You can see that the burning of the letters, which was meant to
be reminiscently sentimental, a sort of
how-silly-we-were-but-it-is-all-over-now occasion, became
actually a two hours' eulogy of Bella. And just when I was bored
to death, the Mercer girls dropped in and heard Jim begin to read
one commencing "dearest Kit." And the next day after the
rehearsal dinner, they told Bella!
There was very nearly no wedding at all. Bella came to see me in
a frenzy the next morning and threw Jim and his two-hundred odd
pounds in my face, and although I explained it all over and over,
she never quite forgave me. That was what made it so hard
later--the situation would have been bad enough without that
complication.
They went abroad on their wedding journey, and stayed several
months. And when Jim came back he was fatter than ever. Everybody
noticed it. Bella had a gymnasium fitted up in a corner of the
studio, but he would not use it. He smoked a pipe and painted all
day, and drank beer and WOULD eat starches or whatever it is that
is fattening. But he adored Bella, and he was madly jealous of
her. At dinners he used to glare at the man who took her in,
although it did not make him thin. Bella was flirting, too, and
by the time they had been married a year, people hitched their
chairs together and dropped their voices when they were
mentioned.
Well, on the anniversary of the day Bella left him--oh yes, she
left him finally. She was intense enough about some things, and
she said it got on her nerves to have everybody chuckle when they
asked for her husband. They would say, "Hello, Bella! How's
Bubbles? Still banting?" And Bella would try to laugh and say,
"He swears his tailor says his waist is smaller, but if it is he
must be growing hollow in the back."
But she got tired of it at last. Well, on the second anniversary
of Bella's departure, Jimmy was feeling pretty glum, and as I
say, I am very fond of Jim. The divorce had just gone through and
Bella had taken her maiden name again and had had an operation
for appendicitis. We heard afterward that they didn't find an
appendix, and that the one they showed her in a glass jar WAS NOT
HERS! But if Bella ever suspected, she didn't say. Whether the
appendix was anonymous or not, she got box after box of flowers
that were, and of course every one knew that it was Jim who sent
them.
To go back to the anniversary, I went to Rothberg's to see the
collection of antique furniture--mother was looking for a
sideboard for father's birthday in March--and I met Jimmy there,
boring into a worm-hole in a seventeenth-century bedpost with the
end of a match, and looking his nearest to sad. When he saw me
he came over.
"I'm blue today, Kit," he said, after we had shaken hands. "Come
and help me dig bait, and then let's go fishing. If there's a
worm in every hole in that bedpost, we could go into the fish
business. It's a good business."
"Better than painting?" I asked. But he ignored my gibe and
swelled up alarmingly in order to sigh.
"This is the worst day of the year for me," he affirmed, staring
straight ahead, "and the longest. Look at that crazy clock over
there. If you want to see your life passing away, if you want to
see the steps by which you are marching to eternity, watch that
clock marking the time. Look at that infernal hand staying quiet
for sixty seconds and then jumping forward to catch up with the
procession. Ugh!"
"See here, Jim," I said, leaning forward, "you're not well. You
can't go through the rest of the day like this. I know what
you'll do; you'll go home to play Grieg on the pianola, and you
won't eat any dinner." He looked guilty.
"Not Grieg," he protested feebly. "Beethoven."
"You're not going to do either," I said with firmness. "You are
going right home to unpack those new draperies that Harry Bayles
sent you from Shanghai, and you are going to order dinner for
eight--that will be two tables of bridge. And you are not going
to touch the pianola."
He did not seem enthusiastic, but he rose and picked up his hat,
and stood looking down at me where I sat on an old horse-hair
covered sofa.
"I wish to thunder I had married you!" he said savagely. "You're
the finest girl I know, Kit, WITHOUT EXCEPTION, and you are going
to throw yourself away on Jack Manning, or Max, or some other--"
"Nothing of the sort," I said coldly, "and the fact that you
didn't marry me does not give you the privilege of abusing my
friends. Anyhow, I don't like you when you speak like that."
Jim took me to the door and stopped there to sigh.
"I haven't been well," he said heavily. "Don't eat, don't sleep.
Wouldn't you think I'd lose flesh? Kit"--he lowered his voice
solemnly--"I have gained two pounds!"
I said he didn't look it, which appeared to comfort him somewhat,
and, because we were old friends, I asked him where Bella was. He
said he thought she was in Europe, and that he had heard she was
going to marry Reggie Wolfe. Then he signed again, muttered
something about ordering the funeral baked meats to be prepared
and left me.
That was my entire share in the affair. I was the victim, both of
circumstances and of their plot, which was mad on the face of it.
During the entire time they never once let me forget that I got
up the dinner, that I telephoned around for them. They asked me
why I couldn't cook--when not one of them knew one side of a
range from the other. And for Anne Brown to talk the way she
did--saying I had always been crazy about Jim, and that she
believed I had known all along that his aunt was coming--for Anne
to talk like that was sheer idiocy. Yes, there was an aunt. The
Japanese butler started the trouble, and Aunt Selina carried it
along.
Chapter II. THE WAY IT BEGAN
It makes me angry every time I think how I tried to make that
dinner a success. I canceled a theater engagement, and I took the
Mercer girls in the electric brougham father had given me for
Christmas. Their chauffeur had been gone for hours with their
machine, and they had telephoned all the police stations without
success. They were afraid that there had been an awful smash;
they could easily have replaced Bartlett, as Lollie said, but it
takes so long to get new parts for those foreign cars.
Jim had a house well up-town, and it stood just enough apart from
the other houses to be entirely maddening later. It was a
three-story affair, with a basement kitchen and servants' dining
room. Then, of course, there were cellars, as we found out
afterward. On the first floor there was a large square hall, a
formal reception room, behind it a big living room that was also
a library, then a den, and back of all a Georgian dining room,
with windows high above the ground. On the top floor Jim had a
studio, like every other one I ever saw--perhaps a little
mussier. Jim was really a grind at his painting, and there were
cigarette ashes and palette knives and buffalo rugs and shields
everywhere. It is strange, but when I think of that terrible
house, I always see the halls, enormous, covered with heavy rugs,
and stairs that would have taken six housemaids to keep in proper
condition. I dream about those stairs, stretching above me in a
Jacob's ladder of shining wood and Persian carpets, going up, up,
clear to the roof.
The Dallas Browns walked; they lived in the next block. And they
brought with them a man named Harbison, that no one knew. Anne
said he would be great sport, because he was terribly serious,
and had the most exaggerated ideas of society, and loathed
extravagance, and built bridges or something. She had put away
her cigarettes since he had been with them--he and Dallas had
been college friends--and the only chance she had to smoke was
when she was getting her hair done. And she had singed off quite
a lot--a burnt offering, she called it.
"My dear," she said over the telephone, when I invited her, "I
want you to know him. He'll be crazy about you. That type of man,
big and deadly earnest, always falls in love with your type of
girl, the appealing sort, you know. And he has been too busy, up
to now, to know what love is. But mind, don't hurt him; he's a
dear boy. I'm half in love with him myself, and Dallas trots
around at his heels like a poodle."
But all Anne's geese are swans, so I thought little of the
Harbison man except to hope that he played respectable bridge,
and wouldn't mark the cards with a steel spring under his finger
nail, as one of her "finds" had done.
We all arrived about the same time, and Anne and I went upstairs
together to take off our wraps in what had been Bella's dressing
room. It was Anne who noticed the violets.
"Look at that!" she nudged me, when the maid was examining her
wrap before she laid it down. "What did I tell you, Kit? He's
still quite mad about her."
Jim had painted Bella's portrait while they were going up the
Nile on their wedding trip. It looked quite like her, if you
stood well off in the middle of the room and if the light came
from the right. And just beneath it, in a silver vase, was a
bunch of violets. It was really touching, and violets were
fabulous. It made me want to cry, and to shake Bella soundly, and
to go down and pat Jim on his generous shoulder, and tell him
what a good fellow I thought him, and that Bella wasn't worth the
dust under his feet. I don't know much about psychology, but it
would be interesting to know just what effect those violets and
my sympathy for Jim had in influencing my decision a half hour
later. It is not surprising, under the circumstances, that for
some time after the odor of violets made me ill.
We all met downstairs in the living room, quite informally, and
Dallas was banging away at the pianola, tramping the pedals with
the delicacy and feeling of a football center rush kicking a
goal. Mr. Harbison was standing near the fire, a little away from
the others, and he was all that Anne had said and more in
appearance. He was tall--not too tall, and very straight. And
after one got past the oddity of his face being bronze-colored
above his white collar, and of his brown hair being sun-bleached
on top until it was almost yellow, one realized that he was very
handsome. He had what one might call a resolute nose and chin,
and a pleasant, rather humorous, mouth. And he had blue eyes that
were, at that moment, wandering with interest over the lot of us.
Somebody shouted his name to me above the Tristan and Isolde
music, and I held out my hand.
Instantly I had the feeling one sometimes has, of having done
just that same thing, with the same surroundings, in the same
place, years before, I was looking up at him, and he was staring
down at me and holding my hand. And then the music stopped and he
was saying:
"Where was it?"
"Where was what?" I asked. The feeling was stronger than ever
with his voice.
"I beg your pardon," he said, and let my hand drop. "Just for a
second I had an idea that we had met before somewhere, a long
time ago. I suppose--no, it couldn't have happened, or I should
remember." He was smiling, half at himself.
"No," I smiled back at him. "It didn't happen, I'm afraid--unless
we dreamed it."
"We?"
"I felt that way, too, for a moment."
"The Brushwood Boy!" he said with conviction. "Perhaps we will
find a common dream life, where we knew each other. You remember
the Brushwood Boy loved the girl for years before they really
met." But this was a little too rapid, even for me.
"Nothing so sentimental, I'm afraid," I retorted. "I have had
exactly the same sensation sometimes when I have sneezed."
Betty Mercer captured him then and took him off to see Jim's
newest picture. Anne pounced on me at once.
"Isn't he delicious?" she demanded. "Did you ever see such
shoulders? And such a nose? And he thinks we are parasites,
cumberers of the earth, Heaven knows what. He says every woman
ought to know how to earn her living, in case of necessity! I
said I could make enough at bridge, and he thought I was joking!
He's a dear!" Anne was enthusiastic.
I looked after him. Oddly enough the feeling that we had met
before stuck to me. Which was ridiculous, of course, for we
learned afterward that the nearest we ever came to meeting was
that our mothers had been school friends! Just then I saw Jim
beckoning to me crazily from the den. He looked quite yellow, and
he had been running his fingers through his hair.
"For Heaven's sake, come in, Kit!" he said. "I need a cool head.
Didn't I tell you this is my calamity day?"
"Cook gone?" I asked with interest. I was starving.
He closed the door and took up a tragic attitude in front of the
fire. "Did you ever hear of Aunt Selina?" he demanded.
"I knew there WAS one," I ventured, mindful of certain gossip as
to whence Jimmy derived the Wilson income.
Jim himself was too worried to be cautious. He waved a brazen
hand at the snug room, at the Japanese prints on the walls, at
the rugs, at the teakwood cabinets and the screen inlaid with
pearl and ivory.
"All this," he said comprehensively, "every bite I eat, clothes I
wear, drinks I drink--you needn't look like that; I don't drink
so darned much--everything comes from Aunt Selina--buttons," he
finished with a groan.
"Selina Buttons," I said reflectively. "I don't remember ever
having known any one named Buttons, although I had a cat once--"
"Damn the cat!" he said rudely. "Her name isn't Buttons. Her name
is Caruthers, my Aunt Selina Caruthers, and the money comes from
buttons."
"Oh!" feebly.
"It's an old business," he went on, with something of proprietary
pride. "My grandfather founded it in 1775. Made buttons for the
Continental Army."
"Oh, yes," I said. "They melted the buttons to make bullets,
didn't they? Or they melted bullets to make buttons? Which was
it?"
But again he interrupted.
"It's like this," he went on hurriedly. "Aunt Selina believes in
me. She likes pictures, and she wanted me to paint, if I could.
I'd have given up long ago--oh, I know what you think of my
work--but for Aunt Selina. She has encouraged me, and she's done
more than that; she's paid the bills."
"Dear Aunt Selina," I breathed.
"When I got married," Jim persisted, "Aunt Selina doubled my
allowance. I always expected to sell something, and begin to make
money, and in the meantime what she advanced I considered as a
loan." He was eyeing me defiantly, but I was growing serious. It
was evident from the preamble that something was coming.
"To understand, Kit," he went on dubiously, "you would have to
know her. She won't stand for divorce. She thinks it is a crime."
"What!" I sat up. I have always regarded divorce as essentially
disagreeable, like castor oil, but necessary.
"Oh, you know well enough what I'm driving at," he burst out
savagely. "She doesn't know Bella has gone. She thinks I am
living in a little domestic heaven, and--she is coming tonight to
hear me flap my wings."
"Tonight!"
I don't think Jimmy had known that Dallas Brown had come in and
was listening. I am sure I had not. Hearing his chuckle at the
doorway brought us up with a jerk.
"Where has Aunt Selina been for the last two or three years?" he
asked easily.
Jim turned, and his face brightened.
"Europe. Look here, Dal, you're a smart chap. She'll only be here
about four hours. Can't you think of some way to get me out of
this? I want to let her down easy, too. I'm mighty fond of Aunt
Selina. Can't we--can't I say Bella has a headache?"
"Rotten!" laconically.
"Gone out of town?" Jim was desperate.
"And you with a houseful of dinner guests! Try again, Jim."
"I have it," Jim said suddenly. "Dallas, ask Anne if she won't
play hostess for tonight. Be Mrs. Wilson pro tem. Anne would love
it. Aunt Selina never saw Bella. Then, afterward, next year, when
I'm hung in the Academy and can stand on my feet"--("Not if
you're hung," Dallas interjected.)--I'll break the truth to her."
But Dallas was not enthusiastic.
"Anne wouldn't do at all," he declared. "She'd be talking about
the kids before she knew it, and patting me on the head." He said
it complacently; Anne flirts, but they are really devoted.
"One of the Mercer girls?" I suggested, but Jimmy raised a
horrified hand.
"You don't know Aunt Selina," he protested. "I couldn't offer
Leila in the gown she's got on, unless she wore a shawl, and
Betty is too fair."
Anne came in just then, and the whole story had to be told again
to her. She was ecstatic. She said it was good enough for a play,
and that of course she would be Mrs. Jimmy for that length of
time.
"You know," she finished, "if it were not for Dal, I would be
Mrs. Jimmy for ANY length of time. I have been devoted to you for
years, Billiken."
But Dallas refused peremptorily.
"I'm not jealous," he explained, straightening and throwing out
his chest, "but--well, you don't look the part Anne. You're--you
are growing matronly, not but what you suit ME all right. And
then I'd forget and call you 'mammy,' which would require
explanation. I think it's up to you, Kit."
"I shall do nothing of the sort!" I snapped. "It's ridiculous!"
"I dare you!" said Dallas.
I refused. I stood like a rock while the storm surged around me
and beat over me. I must say for Jim that he was merely pathetic.
He said that my happiness was first; that he would not give me an
uncomfortable minute for anything on earth; and that Bella had
been perfectly right to leave him, because he was a sinking ship,
and deserved to be turned out penniless into the world. After
which mixed figure, he poured himself something to drink, and his
hands were shaking.
Dal and Anne stood on each side of him and patted him on the
shoulders and glared across at me. I felt that if I was a rock,
Jim's ship had struck on me and was sinking, as he said, because
of me. I began to crumble.
"What--what time does she leave?" I asked, wavering.
"Ten: nine; KIT, are you going to do it?"
"No!" I gave a last clutch at my resolution. "People who do that
kind of thing always get into trouble. She might miss her train.
She's almost certain to miss her train."
"You're temporizing," Dallas said sternly. "We won't let her miss
her train; you can be sure of that."
"Jim," Anne broke in suddenly, "hasn't she a picture of Bella?
There's not the faintest resemblance between Bella and Kit."
Jim became downcast again. "I sent her a miniature of Bella a
couple of years ago," he said despondently. "Did it myself."
But Dal said he remembered the miniature, and it looked more like
me than Bella, anyhow. So we were just where we started. And down
inside of me I had a premonition that I was going to do just what
they wanted me to do, and get into all sorts of trouble, and not
be thanked for it after all. Which was entirely correct. And then
Leila Mercer came and banged at the door and said that dinner had
been announced ages ago and that everybody was famishing. With
the hurry and stress, and poor Jim's distracted face, I weakened.
"I feel like a cross between an idiot and a criminal," I said
shortly, "and I don't know particularly why every one thinks I
should be the victim for the sacrifice. But if you will promise
to get her off early to her train, and if you will stand by me
and not leave me alone with her, I--I might try it."
"Of course, we'll stand by you!" they said in chorus. "We won't
let you stick!" And Dal said, "You're the right sort of girl,
Kit. And after it's all over, you'll realize that it's the
biggest kind of lark. Think how you are saving the old lady's
feeling! When you are an elderly person yourself, Kit, you will
appreciate what you are doing tonight."
Yes, they said they would stand by me, and that I was a heroine
and the only person there clever enough to act the part, and that
they wouldn't let me stick! I am not bitter now, but that is what
they promised. Oh, I am not defending myself; I suppose I
deserved everything that happened. But they told me that she
would be there only between trains, and that she was deaf, and
that I had an opportunity to save a fellow-being from ruin. So in
the end I capitulated.
When they opened the door into the living room, Max Reed had
arrived and was helping to hide a decanter and glasses, and
somebody said a cab was at the door.
And that was the way it began.
Chapter III. I MIGHT HAVE KNOWN IT
The minute I had consented I regretted it. After all, what were
Jimmy's troubles to me? Why should I help him impose on an
unsuspecting elderly woman? And it was only putting off discovery
anyhow. Sooner or later, she would learn of the divorce,
and--Just at that instant my eyes fell on Mr. Harbison--Tom
Harbison, as Anne called him. He was looking on with an amused,
half-puzzled smile, while people were rushing around hiding the
roulette wheel and things of which Miss Caruthers might
disapprove, and Betty Mercer was on her knees winding up a toy
bear that Max had brought her. What would he think? It was
evident that he thought badly of us already--that he was
contemptuously amused, and then to have to ask him to lend
himself to the deception!
With a gasp I hurled myself after Jimmy, only to hear a strange
voice in the hall and to know that I was too late. I was in for
it, whatever was coming. It was Aunt Selina who was coming--along
the hall, followed by Jim, who was mopping his face and trying
not to notice the paralyzed silence in the library.
Aunt Selina met me in the doorway. To my frantic eyes she seemed
to tower above us by at least a foot, and beside her Jimmy was a
red, perspiring cherub.
"Here she is," Jimmy said, from behind a temporary eclipse of
black cloak and traveling bag. He was on top of the situation
now, and he was mendaciously cheerful. He had NOT said, "Here is
my wife." That would have been a lie. No, Jimmy merely said,
"Here she is." If Aunt Selina chose to think me Bella, was it not
her responsibility? And if I chose to accept the situation, was
it not mine? Dallas Brown came forward gravely as Aunt Selina
folded over and kissed me, and surreptitiously patted me with one
hand while he held out the other to Miss Caruthers. I loathed
him!
"We always expect something unusual from James, Miss Caruthers,"
he said, with his best manner, "but THIS--this is beyond our
wildest dreams."
Well, it's too awful to linger over. Anne took her upstairs and
into Bella's bedroom. It was a fancy of Jim's to leave that room
just as Bella had left it, dusty dance cards and favors hanging
around and a pair of discarded slippers under the bed. I don't
think it had been swept since Bella left it. I believe in
sentiment, but I like it brushed and dusted and the cobwebs off
of it, and when Aunt Selina put down her bonnet, it stirred up a
gray-white cloud that made her cough. She did not say anything,
but she looked around the room grimly, and I saw her run her
finger over the back of a chair before she let Hannah, the maid,
put her cloak on it.
Anne looked frightened. She ran into Bella's bath and wet the end
of a towel and when Hannah was changing Aunt Selina's collar--her
concession to evening dress--Anne wiped off the obvious places on
the furniture. She did it stealthily, but Aunt Selina saw her in
the glass.
"What's that young woman's name?" she asked me sharply, when Anne
had taken the towel out to hide it.
"Anne Brown, Mrs. Dallas Brown," I replied meekly. Every one
replied meekly to Aunt Selina.
"Does she live here?"
"Oh, no," I said airily. "They are here to dinner, she and her
husband. They are old friends of Jim's--and mine."
"Seems to have a good eye for dirt," said Aunt Selina and went on
fastening her brooch. When she was finally ready, she took a bead
purse from somewhere about her waist and took out a half dollar.
She held it up before Hannah's eyes.
"Tomorrow morning," she said sternly, "You take off that white
cap and that fol-de-rol apron and that black henrietta cloth, and
put on a calico wrapper. And when you've got this room aired and
swept, Mrs. Wilson will give you this."
Hannah took two steps back and caught hold of a chair; she stared
helplessly from Aunt Selina to the half dollar, and then at me.
Anne was trying not to catch my eye.
"And another thing," Aunt Selina said, from the head of the
stairs, "I sent those towels over from Ireland. Tell her to wash
and bleach the one Mrs. What's-her-name Brown used as a duster."
Anne was quite crushed as we went down the stairs. I turned once,
half-way down, and her face was a curious mixture of guilt and
hopeless wrath. Over her shoulder, I could see Hannah, wide-eyed
and puzzled, staring after us.
Jim presented everybody, and then he went into the den and closed
the door and we heard him unlock the cellarette. Aunt Selina
looked at Leila's bare shoulders and said she guessed she didn't
take cold easily, and conversation rather languished. Max Reed
was looking like a thundercloud, and he came over to me with a
lowering expression that I had learned to dread in him.
"What fool nonsense is this?" he demanded. "What in the world
possessed you, Kit, to put yourself in such an equivocal
position? Unless"--he stopped and turned a little white--"unless
you are going to marry Jim."
I am sorry for Max. He is such a nice boy, and good looking, too,
if only he were not so fierce, and did not want to make love to
me. No matter what I do, Max always disapproves of it. I have
always had a deeply rooted conviction that if I should ever in a
weak moment marry Max, he would disapprove of that, too, before I
had done it very long.
"Are you?" he demanded, narrowing his eyes--a sign of unusually
bad humor.
"Am I what?"
"Going to marry him?"
"If you mean Jim," I said with dignity, "I haven't made up my
mind yet. Besides, he hasn't asked me."
Aunt Selina had been talking Woman's Suffrage in front of the
fireplace, but now she turned to me.
"Is this the vase Cousin Jane Whitcomb sent you as a wedding
present?" she demanded, indicating a hideous urn-shaped affair on
the mantel. It came to me as an inspiration that Jim had once
said it was an ancestral urn, so I said without hesitation that
it was. And because there was a pause and every one was looking
at us, I added that it was a beautiful thing.
Aunt Selina sniffed.
"Hideous!" she said. "It looks like Cousin Jane, shape and
coloring."
Then she looked at it more closely, pounced on it, turned it
upside down and shook it. A card fell out, which Dallas picked up
and gave her with a bow. Jim had come out of the den and was
dancing wildly around and beckoning to me. By the time I had made
out that that was NOT the vase Cousin Jane had sent us as a
wedding present, Aunt Selina had examined the card. Then she
glared across at me and, stooping, put the card in the fire. I
did not understand at all, but I knew I had in some way done the
unforgivable thing. Later, Dal told me it was HER card, and that
she had sent the vase to Jim at Christmas, with a generous check
inside. When she straightened from the fireplace, it was to a new
theme, which she attacked with her usual vigor. The vase incident
was over, but she never forgot it. She proved that she never did
when she sent me two urn-shaped vases with Paul and Virginia on
them, when I--that is, later on.
"The Cause in England has made great strides," she announced from
the fireplace. "Soon the hand that rocks the cradle will be the
hand that actually rules the world." Here she looked at me.
"I'm not up on such things," Max said blandly, having recovered
some of his good humor, "but--isn't it usually a foot that rocks
the cradle?"
Aunt Selina turned on him and Mr. Harbison, who were standing
together, with a snort.
"What have you, or YOU, ever done for the independence of woman?"
she demanded.
Mr. Harbison smiled. He had been looking rather grave until then.
"We have at least remained unmarried," he retorted. And then
dinner was again announced.
He was to take me out, and he came across the room to where I sat
collapsed in a chair, and bent over me.
"Do you know," he said, looking down at me with his clear,
disconcerting gaze, "do you know that I have just grasped the
situation? There was such a noise that I did not hear your name,
and I am only realizing now that you are my hostess! I don't know
why I got the impression that this was a bachelor establishment,
but I did. Odd, wasn't it?"
I positively couldn't look away from him. My features seemed
frozen, and my eyes were glued to his. As for telling him the
truth--well, my tongue refused to move. I intended to tell him
during dinner if I had an opportunity; I honestly did. But the
more I looked at him and saw how candid his eyes were, and how
stern his mouth might be, the more I shivered at the plunge. And,
of course, as everybody knows now, I didn't tell him at all. And
every moment I expected that awful old woman to ask me what I
paid my cook, and when I had changed the color of my
hair--Bella's being black.
Dinner was a half hour late when we finally went out, Jimmy
leading off with Aunt Selina, and I, as hostess, trailing behind
the procession with Mr. Harbison. Dallas took in the two Mercer
girls, for we were one man short, and Max took Anne. Leila Mercer
was so excited that she wriggled, and as for me, the candles and
the orchids--everything--danced around in a circle, and I just
seemed to catch the back of my chair as it flew past. Jim had
ordered away the wines and brought out some weak and cheap
Chianti. Dallas looked gloomy at the change, but Jim explained in
an undertone that Aunt Selina didn't approve of expensive
vintages. Naturally, the meal was glum enough.
Aunt Selina had had her dinner on the train, so she spent her
time in asking me questions the length of the table, and in
getting acquainted with me. She had brought a bottle of some sort
of medicine downstairs with her, and she took a claret-glassful,
while she talked. The stuff was called Pomona; shall I ever
forget it?
It was Mr. Harbison who first noticed Takahiro. Jimmy's Jap had
been the only thing in the menage that Bella declared she had
hated to leave. But he was doing the strangest things: his
little black eyes shifted nervously, and he looked queer.
"What's wrong with him?" Mr. Harbison asked me finally, when he
saw that I noticed. "Is he ill?"
Then Aunt Selina's voice from the other end of the table:
"Bella," she called, in a high shrill tone, "do you let James eat
cucumbers?"
"I think he must be," I said hurriedly aside to Mr. Harbison.
"See how his hands shake!" But Selina would not be ignored.
"Cucumbers and strawberries," she repeated impressively. "I was
saying, Bella, that cucumbers have always given James the most
fearful indigestion. And yet I see you serve them at your table.
Do you remember what I wrote you to give him when he has his
dreadful spells?"
I was quite speechless; every one was looking, and no one could
help. It was clear Jim was racking his brain, and we sat staring
desperately at each other across the candles. Everything I had
ever known faded from me, eight pairs of eyes bored into me, Mr.
Harbison's politely amused.
"I don't remember," I said at last. "Really, I don't believe--"
Aunt Selina smiled in a superior way.
"Now, don't you recall it?" she insisted. "I said:'Baking soda in
water taken internally for cucumbers; baking soda and water
externally, rubbed on, when he gets that dreadful, itching
strawberry rash.'"
I believe the dinner went on. Somebody asked Aunt Selina how much
over-charge she had paid in foreign hotels, and after that she
was as harmless as a dove.
Then half way through the dinner we heard a crash in Takahiro's
pantry, and when he did not appear again, Jim got up and went out
to investigate. He was gone quite a little while, and when he
came back he looked worried.
"Sick," he replied to our inquiring glances. "One of the maids
will come in. They have sent for a doctor."
Aunt Selina was for going out at once and "fixing him up," as she
put it, but Dallas gently interfered.
"I wouldn't, Miss Caruthers," he said, in the deferential manner
he had adopted toward her. "You don't know what it may be. He's
been looking spotty all evening."
"It might be scarlet fever," Max broke in cheerfully. "I say,
scarlet fever on a Mongolian--what color would he be, Jimmy? What
do yellow and red make? Green?"
"Orange," Jim said shortly. "I wish you people would remember
that we are trying to eat."
The fact was, however, that no one was really eating, except Mr.
Harbison who had given up trying to understand us, considering,
no doubt, our subdued excitement as our normal condition. Ages
afterward I learned that he thought my face almost tragic that
night, and that he supposed from the way I glared across the
table, that I had quarreled with my husband!
"I am afraid you are not well," he said at last, noticing my food
untouched on my plate. "We should not have come, any of us."
"I am perfectly well,:" I replied feverishly. "I am never ill.
I--I ate a late luncheon."
He glanced at me keenly. "Don't let them stay and play bridge
tonight," he urged. "Miss Caruthers can be an excuse, can she
not? And you are really fagged. You look it."
"I think it is only ill humor," I said, looking directly at him.
"I am angry at myself. I have done something silly, and I hate to
be silly."
Max would have said "Impossible," or something else trite. The
Harbison man looked at me with interested, serious eyes.
"Is it too late to undo it?" he asked.
And then and there I determined that he should never know the
truth. He could go back to South America and build bridges and
make love to the Spanish girls (or are they Spanish down there?)
and think of me always as a married woman, married to a
dilettante artist, inclined to be stout--the artist, not I--and
with an Aunt Selina Caruthers who made buttons and believed in
the Cause. But never, NEVER should he think of me as a silly
little fool who pretended that she was the other man's wife and
had a lump in her throat because when a really nice man came
along, a man who knew something more than polo and motors, she
had to carry on the deception to keep his respect, and be sedate
and matronly, and see him change from perfect open admiration at
first to a hands-off-she-is-my-host's-wife attitude at last.
"It can never be undone," I said soberly.
Well, that's the picture as nearly as I can draw it: a round
table with a low centerpiece of orchids in lavenders and pink,
old silver candlesticks with filigree shades against the somber
wainscoting; nine people, two of them unhappy--Jim and I; one of
them complacent--Aunt Selina; one puzzled--Mr. Harbison; and the
rest hysterically mirthful. Add one sick Japanese butler and
grind in the mills of the gods.
Every one promptly forgot Takahiro in the excitement of the game
we were all playing. Finally, however, Aunt Selina, who seemed to
have Takahiro on her mind, looked up from her plate.
"That Jap was speckled," she asserted. "I wouldn't be surprised
if it's measles. Has he been sniffling, James?"
"Has he been sniffling?" Jim threw across at me.
"I hadn't noticed it," I said meekly, while the others choked.
Max came to the rescue. "She refused to eat it," he explained,
distinctly and to everybody, apropos absolutely of nothing. "It
said on the box,'ready cooked and predigested.' She declared she
didn't care who cooked it, but she wanted to know who predigested
it."
As every one wanted to laugh, every one did it then, and under
cover of the noise I caught Anne's eye, and we left the dining
room. The men stayed, and by the very firmness with which the
door closed behind us, I knew that Dallas and Max were bringing
out the bottles that Takahiro had hidden. I was seething. When
Aunt Selina indicated a desire to go over the house (it was
natural that she should want to; it was her house, in a way) I
excused myself for a minute and flew back to the dining room.
It was as I had expected. Jim hadn't cheered perceptibly, and the
rest were patting him on the back, and pouring things out for
him, and saying, "Poor old Jim" in the most maddening way. And
the Harbison man was looking more and more puzzled, and not at
all hilarious.
I descended on them like a thunderbolt.
"That's it,:" I cried shrewishly, with my back against the door.
"Leave her to me, all of you, and pat each other on the back, and
say it's gone splendidly! Oh, I know you, every one!" Mr.
Harbison got up and pulled out a chair, but I couldn't sit; I
folded my arms on the back. "After a while, I suppose, you'll
slip upstairs, the four of you, and have your game." They looked
guilty. "But I will block that right now. I am going to
stay--here. If Aunt Selina wants me, she can find me--here!"
The first indication those men had that Mr. Harbison didn't know
the state of affairs was when he turned and faced them.
"Mrs. Wilson is quite right," he said gravely. "We're a selfish
lot. If Miss Caruthers is a responsibility, let us share her."
"To arms!" Jim said, with an affectation of lightness, as they
put their glasses down, and threw open the door. Dal's retort,
"Whose?" was lost in the confusion, and we went into the library.
On the way Dallas managed to speak to me.
"If Harbison doesn't know, don't tell him," he said in an
undertone. "He's a queer duck, in some ways; he mightn't think it
funny."
"Funny," I choked. "It's the least funny thing I ever
experienced. Deceiving that Harbison man isn't so bad--he thinks
me crazy, anyhow. He's been staring his eyes out at me--"
"I don't wonder. You're really lovely tonight, Kit, and you look
like a vixen."
"But to deceive that harmless old lady--well, thank goodness,
it's nine, and she leaves in an hour or so."
But she didn't and that's the story.
Chapter IV. THE DOOR WAS CLOSED
It was infuriating to see how much enjoyment every one but Jim
and myself got out of the situation. They howled with mirth over
the feeblest jokes, and when Max told a story without any point
whatever, they all had hysteria. Immediately after dinner Aunt
Selina had begun on the family connection again, and after two
bad breaks on my part, Jim offered to show her the house. The
Mercer girls trailed along, unwilling to lose any of the
possibilities. They said afterward that it was terrible: she went
into all the closets, and ran her hand over the tops of doors and
kept getting grimmer and grimmer. In the studio they came across
a life study Jim was doing and she shut her eyes and made the
girls go out while he covered it with a drapery. Lollie! Who did
the Bacchante dance at three benefits last winter and was
learning a new one called "Eve"!
When they heard Aunt Selina on the second floor, Anne, Dal and
Max sneaked up to the studio for cigarettes, which left Mr.
Harbison to me. I was in the den, sitting in a low chair by the
wood fire when he came in. He hesitated in the doorway.
"Would you prefer being alone, or may I come in?" he asked.
"Don't mind being frank. I know you are tired."
"I have a headache, and I am sulking," I said unpleasantly, "but
at least I am not actively venomous. Come in."
So he came in and sat down across the hearth from me, and neither
of us said anything. The firelight flickered over the room,
bringing out the faded hues of the old Japanese prints on the
walls, gleaming in the mother-of-pearl eyes of the dragon on the
screen, setting a grotesque god on a cabinet to nodding. And it
threw into relief the strong profile of the man across from me,
as he stared at the fire.
"I am afraid I am not very interesting," I said at last, when he
showed no sign of breaking the silence. "The--the illness of the
butler and--Miss Caruthers' arrival, have been upsetting."
He suddenly roused with a start from a brown reverie.
"I beg your pardon," he said, "I--oh, of course not! I was
wondering if I--if you were offended at what I said earlier in
the evening; the--Brushwood Boy, you know, and all that."
"Offended?" I repeated, puzzled.
"You see, I have been living out of the world so long, and never
seeing any women but Indian squaws"--so there were no Spanish
girls!--"that I'm afraid I say what comes into my mind without
circumlocution. And then--I did not know you were married."
"No, oh, no," I said hastily. "But, of course, the more a woman
is married--I mean, you can not say too many nice things to
married women. They--need them, you know."
I had floundered miserably, with his eyes on me, and I half
expected him to be shocked, or to say that married women should
be satisfied with the nice things their husbands say to them. But
he merely remarked apropos of nothing, or following a line of
thought he had not voiced, that it was trite but true that a good
many men owed their success in life to their wives.
"And a good many owe their wives to their success in life," I
retorted cynically. At which he stared at me again.
It was then that the real complexity of the situation began to
develop. Some one had rung the bell and been admitted to the
library and a maid came to the door of the den. When she saw us
she stopped uncertainly. Even then it struck me that she looked
odd, and she was not in uniform. However, I was not informed at
that time about bachelor establishments, and the first thing she
said, when she had asked to speak to me in the hall, knocked her
and her clothes clear out of my head. Evidently she knew me.
"Miss McNair," she said in a low tone. "There is a lady in the
drawing room, a veiled person, and she is asking for Mr. Wilson."
"Can you not find him?" I asked. "He is in the house, probably in
the studio."
The girl hesitated.
"Excuse me, miss, but Miss Caruthers--"
Then I saw the situation.
"Never mind," I said. "Close the door into the drawing room, and
I will tell Mr. Wilson."
But as the girl turned toward the doorway, the person in question
appeared in it, and raised her veil. I was perfectly paralyzed.
It was Bella! Bella in a fur coat and a veil, with the most
tragic eyes I ever saw and entirely white except for a dab of
rouge in the middle of each cheek. We stared at each other
without speech. The maid turned and went down the hall, and with
that Bella came over to me and clutched me by the arm.
"Who was being carried out into that ambulance?" she demanded,
glaring at me with the most awful intensity.
"I'm sure I don't know, Bella," I said, wriggling away from her
fingers. "What in the world are you doing here? I thought you
were in Europe."
"You are hiding something from me!" she accused. "It is Jim! I
see it in your face."
"Well, it isn't," I snapped. "It seems to me, really, Bella, that
you and Jim ought to be able to manage your own affairs, without
dragging me in." It was not pleasant, but if she was suffering,
so was I. "Jim is as well as he ever was. He's upstairs
somewhere. I'll send for him."
She gripped me again, and held on while her color came back.
"You'll do nothing of the kind," she said, and she had quite got
hold of herself again. "I do not want to see him: I hope you
don't think, Kit, that I came here to see James Wilson. Why, I
have forgotten that there IS such a person, and you know it."
Somebody upstairs laughed, and I was growing nervous. What if
Aunt Selina should come down, or Mr. Harbison come out of the
den?
"Why DID you come, then, Bella?" I inquired. "He may come in."
"I was passing in the motor," she said, and I honestly think she
hoped I would believe her, "and I saw that am--" She stopped and
began again. "I thought Jim was out of town, and I came to see
Takahiro," she said brazenly. "He was devoted to me, and Evans is
going to leave. I'll tell you what to do, Kit. I'll go back to
the dining room, and you send Taka there. If any one comes, I can
slip into the pantry."
"It's immoral," I protested. "It's immoral to steal your--"
"My own butler!" she broke in impatiently. "You're not usually so
scrupulous, Kit. Hurry! I hear that hateful Anne Brown."
So we slid back along the hall, and I rang for Takahiro. But no
one came.
"I think I ought to tell you, Bella," I said as we waited, and
Bella was staring around the room--"I think you ought to know
that Miss Caruthers is here."
Bella shrugged her shoulders.
"Well, thank goodness," she said, "I don't have to see her. The
only pleasant thing I remember about my year of married life is
that I did NOT meet Aunt Selina."
I rang again, but still there was no answer. And then it occurred
to me that the stillness below stairs was almost oppressive.
Bella was noticing things, too, for she began to fasten her veil
again with a malicious little smile.
"One of the things I remember my late husband saying," she
observed, "was that HE could manage this house, and had done it
for years, with flawless service. Stand on the bell, Kit."
I did. We stood there, with the table, just as it had been left,
between us, and waited for a response. Bella was growing
impatient. She raised her eyebrows (she is very handsome, Bella
is) and flung out her chin as if she had begun to enjoy the
horrible situation.
I thought I heard a rattle of silver from the pantry just then,
and I hurried to the door in a rage. But the pantry was empty of
servants and full of dishes, and all the lights were out but one,
which was burning dimly. I could have sworn that I saw one of the
servants duck into the stairway to the basement, but when I got
there the stairs were empty, and something was burning in the
kitchen below.
Bella had followed me and was peering over my shoulder curiously.
"There isn't a servant in the house," she said triumphantly. And
when we went down to the kitchen, she seemed to be right. It was
in disgraceful order, and one of the bottles of wine that had ben
banished from the dining room sat half empty on the floor.
"Drunk!" Bella said with conviction. But I didn't think so. There
had not been time enough, for one thing. Suddenly I remembered
the ambulance that had been the cause of Bella's appearance--for
no one could believe her silly story about Takahiro. I didn't
wait to voice my suspicion to her; I simply left her there,
staring helplessly at the confusion, and ran upstairs again:
through the dining room, past Jimmy and Aunt Selina, past Leila
Mercer and Max, who were flirting on the stairs, up, up to the
servants' bedrooms, and there my suspicions were verified. There
was every evidence of a hasty flight; in three bedrooms five
trunks stood locked and ominous, and the closets yawned with open
doors, empty. Bella had been right; there was not a servant in
the house.
As I emerged from the untidy emptiness of the servants' wing, I
met Mr. Harbison coming out of the studio.
"I wish you would let me do some of this running about for you,
Mrs. Wilson," he said gravely. "You are not well, and I can't
think of anything worse for a headache. Has the butler's illness
clogged the household machinery?"
"Worse," I replied, trying not to breathe in gasps. "I wouldn't
be running around--like this--but there is not a servant in the
house! They have gone, the entire lot."
"That's odd," he said slowly. "Gone! Are you sure?"
In reply I pointed to the servants' wing. "Trunks packed," I said
tragically, "rooms empty, kitchen and pantries, full of dishes.
Did you ever hear of anything like it?"
"Never," he asserted. "It makes me suspect--" What he suspected
he did not say; instead he turned on his heel, without a word of
explanation, and ran down the stairs. I stood staring after him,
wondering if every one in the place had gone crazy. Then I heard
Betty Mercer scream and the rest talking loud and laughing, and
Mr. Harbison came up the stairs again two at a time.
"How long has that Jap been ailing, Mrs. Wilson?" he asked.
"I--I don't know," I replied helplessly. "What is the trouble,
anyhow?"
"I think he probably has something contagious," he said, "and it
has scared the servants away. As Mr. Brown said, he looked
spotty. I suggested to your husband that it might be as well to
get the house emptied--in case we are correct."
"Oh, yes, by all means," I said eagerly. I couldn't get away too
soon. "I'll go and get my--" Then I stopped. Why, the man
wouldn't expect me to leave; I would have to play out the
wretched farce to the end!
"I'll go down and see them off," I finished lamely, and we went
together down the stairs.
Just for the moment I forgot Bella altogether. I found Aunt
Selina bonneted and cloaked, taking a stirrup cup of Pomona for
her nerves, and the rest throwing on their wraps in a hurry.
Downstairs Max was telephoning for his car, which wasn't due for
an hour, and Jim was walking up and down, swearing under his
breath. With the prospect of getting rid of them all, and, of
going home comfortably to try to forget the whole wretched
affair, I cheered up quite a lot. I even played up my part of
hostess, and Dallas told me, aside, that I was a brick.
Just then Jim threw open the front door.
There was a man on the top step, with his mouth full of tacks,
and he was nailing something to the door, just below Jim's
Florentine bronze knocker, and standing back with his head on one
side to see if it was straight.
"What are you doing?" Jim demanded fiercely, but the man only
drove another tack. It was Mr. Harbison who stepped outside and
read the card.
It said "Smallpox."
"Smallpox," Mr. Harbison read, as if he couldn't believe it. Then
he turned to us, huddled in the hall.
"It seems it wasn't measles, after all," he said cheerfully. "I
move we get into Mr. Reed's automobile out there, and have a
vaccination party. I suppose even you blase society folk have not
exhausted that kind of diversion."
But the man on the step spat his tacks in his hand and spoke for
the first time.
"No, you don't," he said. "Not on your life. Just step back ,
please, and close the door. This house is quarantined."
Chapter V. FROM THE TREE OF LOVE
There is hardly any use trying to describe what followed. Anne
Brown began to cry, and talk about the children. (She went to
Europe once and stayed until they all got over the whooping
cough.) And Dallas said he had a pull, because his mill
controlled I forget how many votes, and the thing to do was to be
quiet and comfortable and we would get out in the morning. Max
took it as a huge joke, and somebody found him at the telephone,
calling up his club. The Mercer girls were hysterically giggling,
and Aunt Selina sat on a stiff-backed chair and took aromatic
spirits of ammonia. As for Jim, he had collapsed on the lowest
step of the stairs, and sat there with his head in his hands.
When he did look up, he didn't dare to look at me.
The Harbison man was arguing with the impassive individual on the
top step outside, and I saw him get out his pocketbook and offer
a crisp bundle of bills. But the man from the board of health
only smiled and tacked at his offensive sign. After a while Mr.
Harbison came in and closed the door, and we stared at one
another.
"I know what I'm going to do," I said, swallowing a lump in my
throat. "I'm going to get out through a basement window at the
back. I'm going home."
"Home!" Aunt Selina gasped, jumping up and almost dropping her
ammonia bottle. "My dear Bella! Home?"
Jimmy groaned at the foot of the stairs, but Anne Brown was
getting over her tears and now she turned on me in a temper.
"It's all your fault," she said. "I was going to stay at home
and get a little sleep--"
"Well, you can sleep now," Dallas broke in. "There'll be nothing
to do but sleep."
"I think you haven't grasped the situation, Dal," I said icily.
"There will be plenty to do. There isn't a servant in the house!"
"No servants!" everybody cried at once. The Mercer girls stopped
giggling.
"Holy cats!" Max stopped in the act of hanging up his overcoat.
"Do you mean--why, I can't shave myself! I'll cut my head off."
"You'll do more than that," I retorted grimly. "You will carry
coal and tend fires and empty ash pans, and when you are not
doing any of those things there will be pots and pans to wash and
beds to make."
Then there WAS a row. We had worked back to the den now, and I
stood in front of the fireplace and let the storm beat around me,
and tried to look perfectly cold and indifferent, and not to see
Mr. Harbison's shocked face. No wonder he thought them a lot of
savages, browbeating their hostess the way they did.
"It's a fool thing anyhow," Max Reed wound up, "to celebrate the
anniversary of a divorce--especially " Here he caught Jim's eye
and stopped. But I had suddenly remembered. BELLA DOWN IN THE
BASEMENT!
Could anything have been worse? And of course she would have
hysteria and then turn on me and blame me for it all. It all came
over me at once and overwhelmed me, while Anne was crying and
saying she wouldn't cook if she starved for it, and Aunt Selina
was taking off her wraps. I felt queer all over, and I sat down
suddenly. Mr. Harbison was looking at me, and he brought me a
glass of wine.
"It won't be so bad as you fear," he said comfortingly. "There
will be no danger once we are vaccinated, and many hands make
light work. They are pretty raw now, because the thing is new to
them, but by morning they will be reconciled."
"It isn't the work; it is something entirely different," I said.
And it was. Bella and work could hardly be spoken in the same
breath.
If I had only turned her out as she deserved to be, when she
first came, instead of allowing her to carry through the wretched
farce about seeing Takahiro! Or if I had only run to the basement
the moment the house was quarantined, and got her out the areaway
or the coal hole! And now time was flying, and Aunt Selina had me
by the arm, and any moment I expected Bella to pounce on us
through the doorway and the whole situation to explode with a
bang.
It was after eleven before they were rational enough to discuss
ways and means, and, of course, the first thing suggested was
that we all adjourn below stairs and clean up after dinner. I
could have slain Max Reed for the notion, and the Mercer girls
for taking him up.
"Of course we will," they said in a duet. "What a lark!" And they
actually began to pin up their dinner gowns. It was Jim who
stopped that.
"Oh, look here, you people," he objected, "I'm not going to let
you do that. We'll get some servants in tomorrow. I'll go down
and put out the lights. There will be enough clean dishes for
breakfast."
It was lucky for me that they started a new discussion then and
there about who would get the breakfast. In the midst of the
excitement I slipped away to carry the news to Bella. She was
where I had left her, and she had made herself a cup of tea, and
was very much at home, which was natural.
"Do you know," she said ominously, "that you have been away for
two hours; and that I have gone through agonies of nervousness
for fear Jim Wilson would come down and think I came here to see
him?"
"No one would think that, Bella," I soothed her. "Everybody knows
you loathe him--Jim, too." She looked at me over the edge of her
cup.
"I'll run along now," she said, "since Takahiro isn't here. And
if Jim has any sense at all, he will clear out every maid in the
house. I never saw such a kitchen in all my life. Well, lead the
way, Kit. I suppose they are deep in bridge, or roulette, or
something."
She was fixing her veil, and I saw I would have to tell her.
Personally, I would much rather have told her the house was on
fire.
"Wait a minute, Bella," I said. "You see, something queer has
happened. You know this is the anniversary--well, you know what
it is--and Jim was awfully glum. So we thought we would come--"
"What are you driving at?" she demanded. "You are sea-green, Kit.
What's the matter? You needn't think I mind because Jim has a
jollification to celebrate his divorce."
"It--it was Takahiro--in the ambulance," I blurted. "Smallpox.
We--Bella, we are shut in, quarantined."
She didn't faint. She just sat down and stared at me, and I
stared back at her. Then a miserable alarm clock on the table
suddenly went off like an explosion, and Bella began to laugh. I
knew what that was--hysteria. She always had attacks like that
when things went wrong. I was quite despairing by that time; I
hoped they would all hear her and come downstairs and take her up
and put her to bed like a Christian, so she could giggle her soul
out. But after a bit she quieted down and began to cry softly,
and I knew the worst was over. I gave her a shake, and she was so
angry that she got over it altogether.
"Kit, you are horrid," she choked. "Don't you see what a position
I am in? I am not going upstairs to face Anne and the rest of
them. You can just put me in the coal cellar."
"Isn't there a window you could get through?" I asked
desperately. "Locking the door doesn't shut up a whole house."
Bella's courage revived at that, and she said yes, there were
windows, plenty of them, only she didn't see how she could get
out. And I said she would HAVE to get out, because I was playing
Bella in the performance, and I didn't care to have an
understudy. Then the situation dawned on her, and she sat down
and laughed herself weak in the knees. Of course she wanted to
stay, then, and see the fun out. But I was firm; she would have
to go, and I told her so. Things were complicated enough without
her.
Well, we looked funny, no doubt, Bella in a Russian pony
automobile coat over the black satin she had worn at the
Clevelands' dinner, and I in cream lace, the skirt gathered up
from the kitchen floor, with Bella's ermine pelerine around my
bare shoulders, and dishes and overturned chairs everywhere.
Bella knew more about the lower regions of her ex-home than I
would have thought. She opened a door in a corner and led the way
through a narrow hall past the refrigerating room, to a huge,
cemented cellar, with a furnace in the center, and a half-dozen
electric lights making it really brilliant.
"Get a chair," Bella said over her shoulder, excitedly. "I can
get out easily here, through the coal hole. Imagine my--"
But it was my turn to grip Bella. From behind the furnace were
coming the most terrible sounds, rasping noises that fairly
frayed the silk of my nerves. We stood petrified for an instant.
Then Bella laughed. "They are not all gone,:" she said carefully.
"Some one is asleep there."
We tiptoed to where we could see around the furnace, and, sure
enough, some one WAS asleep there. Only, it was not one of the
servants; it was a portly policeman, with a newspaper and an
empty plate on the floor on one side, and a champagne bottle on
the other. He had slid down in his chair, with his chin on his
brass buttons, and his helmet had rolled a dozen feet away. Bella
had to clap her hand over her mouth.
"Fairly caught!" she whispered. "Sartor Resartus, the arrester
arrested. Oh, Jim and his flawless service!"
But after we got over our surprise, we saw the situation was
serious. The policeman was threatening to awaken. Once he stopped
snoring to yawn noisily, and we beat a hasty retreat. Bella
switched off the lights in a hurry and locked the door behind us.
We hardly breathed until we were back in the kitchen again, and
everything quiet. And then Jimmy called my name from up above
somewheres.
"I am going to call him down, Bella," I said firmly. "Let him
help you out. I'm sure I don't see why I should have all this
when the two of you--"
"Oh, no, no! Surely, Kit, you wouldn't be so cruel!" she
whispered pleadingly. "You know what he would think. He--oh, Kit,
let them all get settled for the night, and then come down, like
a dear, and help me out. I know loads of ways--honestly I do."
"If I leave you here," I debated, "what about the policeman?"
"Never mind him"--frantically. "Listen! There's Jim up in the
pantry. Run, for the sake of Heaven!"
So--I ran. At the top of the stairs I met Jimmy, very crumpled as
to shirt-front and dejected as to face.
"I've been hunting everywhere for you," he said dismally. "I
thought you had added to the general merriment by falling
downstairs and breaking your neck."
I went past him with my chin up. Now that I had time to think
about it, I was furiously angry with him.
"Kit!" he called after me appealingly, but I would not hear. Then
he adopted different tactics. He took advantage of my catching my
foot in the lace of my gown to pass me, and to stand with his
back against the door.
"You're not going until you hear me, Kit," he declared miserably.
"In the first place, for all you are down on me, is it my fault?
Honestly, now IS IT MY FAULT?"
I refused to speak.
"I was coming home to be miserable alone," he went on, "and--oh,
I know you meant well, Kit; but YOU asked all these crazy people
here."
"Perhaps you will give me credit for some things," I said
wearily. "I did NOT give Takahiro smallpox, for instance, and--if
you will permit me to mention the fact--Aunt Selina is not MY
Aunt Selina."
"That's what I wanted to speak to you about," Jimmy went on
wretchedly, trying not to look at me. "You see, when they were
rowing so about who would get the breakfast--I never saw such a
lot of people; half of them never touch breakfast, but of course
now they want all kinds of things--when they were talking, Aunt
Selina said she knew YOU would get it, being the hostess, and
responsible, besides knowing where things are kept." He had fixed
his eyes on the orchids, and he looked shrunken, actually
shrunken. "I thought," he finished, "you might give me a few
pointers now, and I could come down in the morning, and--and fuss
up something, coffee and so on. I would say you did it! Oh, hang
it all, Kit, why don't you say something?"
"What do you want me to say?" I demanded. "That I love to cook,
and of course I'll fix trays and carry them up in the morning to
Anne Brown and Leila Mercer and the rest; and that I will have
the shaving water ready--"
"I know what I'm going to do," Jimmy said, with a sudden
resolution. "Aunt Selina and her money can go to blazes. I am
going right upstairs and tell her the truth, tell her who you
are, what I am, and all the rest of it." He opened the door.
"You'll do nothing of the kind," I gasped, catching him in time.
"Don't you dare, Jimmy Wilson! Why, what would they think of me?
After letting her call me Bella, and him--Jim, if Mr. Harbison
ever learns the truth--I--I will take poison. If we are going to
be shut up here together, we will have to carry it on. I couldn't
stand the disgrace."
In spite of an heroic effort, Jim looked relieved. "They have
been hunting for the linen closet," he said, more cheerfully,
"and there will be room enough, I think. Harbison and I will hang
out in the studio; there are two couches there. I'm afraid you'll
have to take Aunt Selina, Kit."
"Certainly," I said coldly. That was the way it was all along.
Whenever there was something to do that no one else would
undertake--any unpleasant responsibility--that entire mongrel
household turned with one gesture and pointed its finger at me!
Well, it is over now, and I ought not to be bitter, considering
everything.
It was quite characteristic of that memorable evening (that is
quite novelesque, I think) that my interview with Jimmy should
have a sensational ending. He was terribly down, of course, and
as I was trying to pass him to get to the door, he caught my
hand.
"You're a girl in a thousand, Kit," he said forlornly. "If I were
not so damnably, hopelessly, idiotically in love with--somebody
else, I should be crazy about you."
"Don't be maudlin," I retorted. "Would you mind letting my hand
go?" I felt sure Bella could hear.
"Oh, come now, Kit," he implored, "we've always got along so
well. It's a shame to let a thing like this make us bad friends.
Aren't you ever going to forgive me?"
"Never," I said promptly. "When I once get away, I don't want
ever to see you again. I was never so humiliated in my life. I
loathe you!"
Then I turned around, and, of course, there was Aunt Selina with
her eyes protruding until you could have knocked them off with a
stick, and beside her, very red and uncomfortable, Mr. Harbison!
"Bella!" she said in a shocked voice, "is that the way you speak
to your husband! It is high time I came here, I think, and took a
hand in this affair."
"Oh, never mind, Aunt Selina," Jim said, with a sheepish grin.
"Kit--Bella is tired and nervous. This is a h--deuce of a
situation. No--er--servants, and all that."
But Aunt Selina did mind, and showed it. She pulled the unlucky
Harbison man through the door and closed it, and then stood
glaring at both of us.
"Every little quarrel is an apple knocked from the tree of love,"
she announced oratorically.
"This was a very little quarrel," Jim said, edging toward the
door; "a--a green apple, Aunt Selina, a colicky little green
apple." But she was not to be diverted.
"Bella," she said severely, "you said you loathed him. You didn't
mean that."
"But I do!" I cried hysterically. "There isn't any word to tell
how I--how I detest him."
Then I swept past them all and flew to Bella's dressing room and
locked myself in. Aunt Selina knocked until she was tired, then
gave up and went to bed.
That was the night Anne Brown's pearl collar was stolen!
Chapter VI. A MIGHTY POOR JOKE
Of course, one knows that there are people who in a different
grade of society would be shoplifters and pickpockets. When they
are restrained by obligation or environment they become a little
overkeen at bridge, or take the wrong sables, or stuff a
gold-backed brush into a muff at a reception. You remember the
ivory dressing set that Theodora Bucknell had, fastened with fine
gold chains? And the sensation it caused at the Bucknell
cotillion when Mrs. Van Zire went sweeping to her carriage with
two feet of gold chain hanging from the front of her wrap?
But Anne's pearl collar was different. In the first place,
instead of three or four hundred people, the suspicion had to be
divided among ten. And of those ten, at least eight of us were
friends, and the other two had been vouched for by the Browns and
Jimmy. It was a horrible mix-up. For the necklace was gone--there
couldn't be any doubt of that--and although, as Dallas said, it
couldn't get out of the house, still, there were plenty of places
to hide the thing.
The worst of our trouble really originated with Max Reed, after
all. For it was Max who made the silly wager over the telephone,
with Dick Bagley. He bet five hundred even that one of us, at
least, would break quarantine within the next twenty-four hours,
and, of course, that settled it. Dick told it around the club as
a joke, and a man who owns a newspaper heard him and called up
the paper. Then the paper called up the health office, after
setting up a flaming scare-head, "Will Money Free Them? Board of
Health versus Millionaire."
It was almost three when the house settled down--nobody had any
night clothes, although finally, through Dallas, who gave them to
Anne, who gave them to the rest, we got some things of
Jimmy's--and I was still dressed. The house was perfectly quiet,
and, after listening carefully, I went slowly down the stairs.
There was a light in the hall, and another back in the dining
room, and I got along without any trouble. But the pantry, where
the stairs led down, was dark, and the wretched swinging door
would not stay open.
I caught my skirt in the door as I went through, and I had to
stop to loosen it. And in that awful minute I heard some one
breathing just beside me. I had stooped to my gown, and I turned
my head without straightening--I couldn't have raised myself to
an erect posture, for my knees were giving way under me--and just
at my feet lay the still glowing end of a match!
I had to swallow twice before I could speak. Then I said sharply:
"Who's there?"
The man was so close it is a wonder I had not walked into him;
his voice was right at my ear.
"I am sorry I startled you," he said quietly. "I was afraid to
speak suddenly, or move, for fear I would do--what I have done."
It was Mr. Harbison.
"I--I thought you were--it is very late," I managed to say, with
dry lips. "Do you know where the electric switch is?"
"Mrs. Wilson!" It was clear he had not known me before. "Why, no;
don't you?"
"I am all confused," I muttered, and beat a retreat into the
dining room. There, in the friendly light, we could at least see
each other, and I think he was as much impressed by the fact that
I had not undressed as I was by the fact that he HAD, partly. He
wore a hideous dressing gown of Jimmy's, much too small, and his
hair, parted and plastered down in the early evening, stood up in
a sort of brown brush all over his head. He was trying to flatten
it with his hands.
"It must be three o'clock," he said, with polite surprise, "and
the house is like a barn. You ought not to be running around with
your arms uncovered, Mrs. Wilson. Surely you could have called
some of us."
"I didn't wish to disturb any one," I said, with distinct truth.
"I suppose you are like me," he said. "The novelty of the
situation--and everything. I got to thinking things over, and
then I realized the studio was getting cold, so I thought I would
come down and take a look at the furnace. I didn't suppose any
one else would think of it. But I lost myself in that pantry,
stumbled against a half-open drawer, and nearly went down the
dumb-waiter." And, as if in judgment on me, at that instant came
two rather terrific thumps from somewhere below, and inarticulate
words, shouted rather than spoken. It was uncanny, of course,
coming as it did through the register at our feet. Mr. Harbison
looked startled.
"Oh, by the way," I said, as carelessly as I could. "In the
excitement, I forgot to mention it. There is a policeman asleep
in the furnace room. I--I suppose we will have to keep him now,"
I finished as airily as possible.
"Oh, a policeman--in the cellar," he repeated, staring at me, and
he moved toward the pantry door.
"You needn't go down," I said feverishly, with visions of Bella
Knowles sitting on the kitchen table, surrounded by soiled dishes
and all the cheerless aftermath of a dinner party. "Please don't
go down. I--it's one of my rules--never to let a stranger go down
to the kitchen. I--I'm peculiar--that way--and besides,
it's--it's mussy."
Bang! Crash! through the register pipe, and some language quite
articulate. Then silence.
"Look here, Mrs. Wilson," he said resolutely. "What do I care
about the kitchen? I'm going down and arrest that policeman for
disturbing the peace. He will have the pipes down."
"You must not go," I said with desperate firmness. "He--he is
probably in a very dangerous state just now. We--I--locked him
in."
The Harbison man grinned and then became serious.
"Why don't you tell me the whole thing?" he demanded. "You've
been in trouble all evening, and--you can trust me, you know,
because I am a stranger; because the minute this crazy quarantine
is raised I am off to the Argentine Republic," (perhaps he said
Chili) "and because I don't know anything at all about you. You
see, I have to believe what you tell me, having no personal
knowledge of any of you to go on. Now tell me--whom have you
hidden in the cellar, besides the policeman?"
There was no use trying to deceive him; he was looking straight
into my eyes. So I decided to make the best of a bad thing.
Anyhow, it was going to require strength to get Bella through the
coal hole with one arm and restrain the policeman with the other.
"Come," I said, making a sudden resolution, and led the way down
the stairs.
He said nothing when he saw Bella, for which I was grateful. She
was sitting at the table, with her arms in front of her, and her
head buried in them. And then I saw she was asleep. Her hat and
veil laid beside her, and she had taken off her coat and draped
it around her. She had rummaged out a cold pheasant and some
salad, and had evidently had a little supper. Supper and a nap,
while I worried myself gray-headed about her!
"She--she came in unexpectedly--something about the butler," I
explained under my breath. "And--she doesn't want to stay. She is
on bad terms with--with some of the people upstairs. You can see
how impossible the situation is."
"I doubt if we can get her out," he said, as if the situation
were quite ordinary. "However, we can try. She seems very
comfortable. It's a pity to rouse her."
Here the prisoner in the furnace room broke out afresh. It
sounded as though he had taken a lump of coal and was attacking
the lock. Mr. Harbison followed the noise, and I could hear him
arguing, not gently.
"Another sound,: he finished, "and you won't get out of here at
all, unless you crawl up the furnace pipe!"
When he came back, Bella was rousing. She lifted her head with
her eyes shut and then opened them one at a time, blinked, and
sat up. She didn't see him at first.
"You wretch!" she said ungratefully, after she had yawned. "Do
you know what time it is? And that--" Then she saw Mr. Harbison
and sat staring at him.
"This is Mr. Harbison," I said to her hastily. "He--he came with
Anne and Dal and--he is shut in, too."
By that time Bella had seen how handsome he was, and she took a
hair pin out of her mouth, and arched her eyebrows, which was
always Bella's best pose.
"I am Miss Knowles," she said sweetly (of course, the court had
given her back her name),"and I stopped in tonight, thinking the
house was empty, to see about a--a butler. Unfortunately, the
house was quarantined just at that time, and--here I am. Surely
there can not be any harm in helping me to get out?" (Pleading
tone.) "I have not been exposed to any contagion, and in the
exhausted state of my health the confinement would be positively
dangerous."
She rolled her eyes at him, and I could see she was making an
impression. Of course she was free. She had a perfect right to
marry again, but I will say this: Bella is a lot better looking
by electric light than she is the next morning.
The upshot of it was that the gentleman who built bridges and
looked down on society from a lofty, lonely pinnacle agreed to
help one of the most gleaming members of the aforesaid society to
outwit the law.
It took about fifteen minutes to quiet the policeman. Nobody ever
knew what Mr. Harbison did to him, but for twenty-four hours he
was quite tractable. He changed after that, but that comes later
in the story. Anyhow, the Harbison man went upstairs and came
down with a Bagdad curtain and a cushion to match, and took them
into the furnace room, and came out and locked the door behind
him, and then we were ready for Bella's escape.
But there were four special officers and three reporters watching
the house, as a result of Max Reed's idiocy. Once, after trying
all the other windows and finding them guarded, we discovered a
little bit of a hole in an out-of-the-way corner that looked like
a ventilator and was covered with a heavy wire screen. No
prisoners ever dug their way out of a dungeon with more energy
than that with which we attached that screen, hacking at it with
kitchen knives, whispering like conspirators, being scratched
with the ragged edges of the wire, frozen with the cold air one
minute and boiling with excitement the next. And when the wire
was cut, and Bella had rolled her coat up and thrust it through
and was standing on a chair ready to follow, something outside
that had looked like a barrel moved, and said, "Oh, I wouldn't do
that if I were you. It would be certain to be undignified, and
probably it would be unpleasant--later."
We coaxed and pleaded and tried to bribe, and that happened, as
it turned out, to be one of the worst things we had to endure.
For the whole conversation came out the next afternoon in the
paper, with the most awful drawings, and the reporter said it was
the flashing of the jewels we wore that first attracted his
attention. And that brings me back to the robbery.
For when we had crept back to the kitchen, and Bella was fumbling
for her handkerchief to cry into and the Harbison man was trying
to apologize for the language he had used to the reporter, and I
was on the verge of a nervous chill--well, it was then that Bella
forgot all about crying and jumped and held out her arm.
"My diamond bracelet!" she screeched. "Look, I've lost it."
Well, we went over every inch of that basement, until I knew
every crack in the flooring, every spot on the cement. And Bella
was nasty, and said that she had never seen that part of the
house in such condition, and that if I had acted like a sane
person and put her out, when she had no business there at all,
she would have had her freedom and her bracelet, and that if we
were playing a joke on her (as if we felt like joking!) we would
please give her the bracelet and let her go and die in a corner;
she felt very queer.
At half-past four o'clock we gave up.
"It's gone," I said. "I don't believe you wore it here. No one
could have taken it. There wasn't a soul in this part of the
house, except the policeman and he's locked in."
At five o'clock we put her to sleep in the den. She was in a
fearful temper, and I was glad enough to be able to shut the door
on her. Tom Harbison--that was his name--helped me to creep
upstairs, and wanted to get me a glass of ale to make me sleep.
But I said it would be of no use, as I had to get up and get the
breakfast. The last thing he said was that the policeman seemed
above the average in intelligence, and perhaps we could train him
to do plain cooking and dishwashing.
I did not go to sleep at once. I lay on the chintz-covered divan
in Bella's dressing room and stared at the picture of her with
the violets underneath. I couldn't see what there was about Bella
to inspire such undying devotion, but I had to admit that she had
looked handsome that night, and that the Harbison man had
certainly been impressed.
At seven o'clock Jimmy Wilson pounded at my door, and I could
have choked him joyfully. I dragged myself to the door and opened
it, and then I heard excited voices. Everybody seemed to be up
but Aunt Selina, and they were all talking at once.
Anne Brown was in the corner of the group, waving her hands,
while Dallas was trying to hook the back of her gown with one
hand and hold a blanket around himself with the other. No one was
dressed except Anne, and she had been up for an hour, looking in
shoes and under the corners of rugs and around the bed clothing
for her jeweled collar. When she saw me she began all over again.
"I had it on when I went into my room," she declared, "and I put
it on the dressing table when I undressed. I meant to put it
under my pillow, but I forgot. And I didn't sleep well; I was
awake half the night. Wasn't I, Dal? Then, when the clock
downstairs in the hall was chiming five, something roused me, and
I sat up in bed. It was still dark, but I pinched Dal and said
there was somebody in the room. You remember that, don't you,
Dal?"
"I thought you had nightmare,:" he said sheepishly.
"I lay still for ages, it seemed to me, and then--the door into
the hall closed. I heard the catch click. I turned on the light
over the bed then, and the room was empty. I thought of my
collar, and although it seemed ridiculous, with the house sealed
as it is, and all of us friends for years--well, I got up and
looked, and it was gone!"
No one spoke for an instant. It WAS a queer situation, for the
collar was gone; Anne's red eyes showed it was true. And there we
stood, every one of us a miserable picture of guilt, and tried to
look innocent and debonair and unsuspicious. Finally Jim held up
his hand and signified that he wanted to say something.
"It's like this," he said, "until this thing is cleared up, for
Heaven's sake, let's try to be sane! If every fellow thinks the
other fellow did it, this house will be a nice little hell to
live in. And if anybody"--here he glared around--"if anybody has
got funny and is hiding those jewels, I want to say that he'd
better speak up now. Later, it won't be so easy for him. It's a
mighty poor joke."
But nobody spoke.
Chapter VII. WE MAKE AN OMELET
It was Betty Mercer who said she was hungry, and got us switched
from the delicate subject of which was the thief to the quite as
pressing subject of which was to be cook. Aunt Selina had slept
quietly through the whole thing--we learned afterward that she
customarily slept on her left side, which was on her good ear. We
gathered in the Dallas Browns' room, and Jimmy proposed a plan.
"We can have anything sent in that we want," he suggested
speciously, "and if Dal doesn't make good with the city fathers,
you girls can get some clothes anyhow. Then, we can have dinner
sent from one of the hotels."
"Why not all the meals?" Max suggested. "I hope you're not going
to be small about things, Jimmy."
"It ought to be easy," Jim persisted, ignoring the remark, "for
nine reasonably intelligent people to boil eggs and make coffee,
which is all we need for breakfast, with some fruit."
"Nine of us!" Dallas said wickedly, looking at Tom Harbison, who
was out of earshot, "Why nine of us? I thought Kit here,
otherwise known as Bella, was going to show off her housewifely
skill."
It ended, however, with Mr. Harbison writing out a lot of slips,
cook, scullery-maid, chamber-maid, parlor-maid, furnace-man, and
butler, and as that left two people over--we didn't count Aunt
Selina--he added another furnace-man and a trained nurse. Betty
Mercer drew the trained nurse slip, and, of course, she was
delighted. It seems funny now to look back and think what a
dreadful time she really had, for Aunt Selina took the grippe,
you know, that very day.
It was fate that I should go back to that awful kitchen, for of
course my slip said "cook." Mr. Harbison was butler, and Max and
Dal got the furnace, although neither of them had ever been
nearer to a bucket of coal than the coupons on mining stock. Anne
got the bedrooms, and Leila was parlor-maid. It was Jimmy who got
the scullery work, but he was quite crushed by this time, and did
not protest at all.
Max was in a very bad temper; I suppose he had not had enough
sleep--no one had. But he came over while the lottery was going
on and stood over me and demanded unpleasantly, in a whisper,
that I stop masquerading as another man's wife and generally
making a fool of myself--which is the way he put it. And I knew
in my heart that he was right, and I hated him for it.
"Why don't you go and tell him--them?" I asked nastily. No one
was paying any attention to us. "Tell them that, to be obliging,
I have nearly drowned in a sea of lies; tell them that I am not
only not married, but that I never intend to marry; tell them
that we are a lot of idiots with nothing better to do than to
trifle with strangers within our gates, people who build--I mean,
people that are worth two to our one! Run and tell them."
He looked at me for a minute, then he turned on his heel and left
me. It looked as though Max might be going to be difficult.
While I was improvising an apron out of a towel, and Anne was
pinning a sheet into a kimono, so she could take off her dinner
gown and still be proper, Dallas harked back to the robbery.
"Ann put the collar on the table there," he said. "There's no
mistake about that. I watched her do it, for I remember thinking
it was the sole reminder I had that Consolidated Traction ever
went above thirty-nine."
Max was looking around the room, examining the window locks and
whistling between his teeth. He was in disgrace with every one,
for by that time it was light enough to see three reporters with
cameras across the street waiting for enough sun to snap the
house, and everybody knew that it was Max and his idiotic wager
that had done it. He had made two or three conciliatory remarks,
but no one would speak to him. His antics were so queer, however,
that we were all watching him, and when he had felt over the rug
with his hands, and raised the edges, and tried to lift out the
chair seats, and had shaken out Dal's shoes (he said people often
hid things and then forgot about it), he made a proposition.
"If you will take that infernal furnace from around my neck, I'll
undertake either to find the jewels or to show up the thief," he
said quietly. And of course, with all the people in the house
under suspicion, every one had to hail the suggestion with joy,
and to offer his assistance, and Jimmy had to take Max's share of
the furnace. So they took the scullery slip downstairs to the
policeman, and gave Jim Max's share of the furnace. (Yes, I had
broken the policeman to them gently. Of course, Anne said at once
that he was the thief, but they found him tucked in and sound
asleep with his back against the furnace.)
"In the first place," Max said, standing importantly in the
middle of the room, "we retired between two and three--nearer
three. So the theft occurred between three and five, when Anne
woke up. Was your door locked, Dal?"
"No. The door into the hall was, but the door into the dressing
room was open, and we found the door from there into the hall
open this morning."
"From three until five," Max repeated. "Was any one out of his
room during that time?"
"I was," said Tom Harbison promptly, from the foot of the bed. "I
was prowling all around somewhere about four, searching"--he
glanced at me--"for a drink of water. But as I don't know a pearl
from a glass bead, I hope you exonerate me."
Everybody laughed and said, "Of course," and "Sure, old man," and
changed the subject quickly.
While that excitement was on, I got Jim to one side and told him
about Bella. His good-natured face was radiant at first.
"I suppose she DID come to see Takahiro, eh, Kit?" he asked
delicately. "She didn't say anything about me?"
"Nothing good. She said the house was in a disgraceful
condition," I said heartlessly. "And her diamond bracelet was
stolen while she took a nap on the kitchen table"--he
groaned--"and--oh, Jim, you are such a goose! If I could only
manage my own affairs the way I could my friends'! She's too sure
of you, Jimmy. She knows you adore her, and--how brutal could you
be, Jim?"
"Fair," he said. "I may have undiscovered depths of brutality
that I have never had occasion to use. However, I might try.
Why?"
"Listen, Jim," I urged. "It was always Bella who did things here;
she managed the house, she tyrannized over her friends, and she
bullied you. Yes, she did. Now she's here, without your
invitation, and she has to stay. It's your turn to bully, to
dictate terms, to be coldly civil or politely rude. Make her
furious at you. If she is jealous, so much the better."
"How far would you sacrifice yourself on the altar of
friendship?" he asked.
"You may pay me all the attention you like, in public," I
replied, and after we shook hands we went together to Bella.
There was an ominous pause when we went into the den. Bella was
sitting by the register, with her furs on, and after one glance
over her shoulder at us, she looked away again without speaking.
"Bella," Jim said appealingly. And then I pinched his arm, and he
drew himself up and looked properly outraged.
"Bella," he said, coldly this time, "I can't imagine why you have
put yourself in this ridiculous position, but since you have--"
She turned on him in a fury.
"Put MYSELF in this position!"
She was frantic. "It's a plot, a wretched trick of yours, this
quarantine, to keep me here."
Jim gasped, but I gave him a warning glance, and he swallowed
hard.
"On the contrary," he said, with maddening quiet, "I would be the
last person in the world to wish to perpetuate an indiscretion of
yours. For it was hardly discreet, was it, to visit a bachelor
establishment alone at ten o'clock at night? As far as my
plotting to keep you here is concerned, I assure you that nothing
could be further from my mind. Our paths were to be two parallel
lines that never touch." He looked at me for approval, and Bella
was choking.
"You are worse that I ever thought you," she stormed. "I thought
you were only a--a fool. Now I know you--for a brute!"
Well, it ended by Jim's graciously permitting Bella to
remain--there being nothing else to do--and by his magnanimously
agreeing to keep her real identity from Aunt Selina and Mr.
Harbison, and to break the news of her presence to Anne and the
rest. It created a sensation beside which Anne's pearls faded
away, although they came to the front again soon enough.
Jim broke the news at once, gathering everybody but Harbison and
Aunt Selina in the upper hall. He was palpitatingly nervous, but
he tried to carry it off with a high hand.
"It's unfortunate," he said, looking around the circle of faces,
each one frozen with amazement, and just a suspicion, perhaps of
incredulity. "It's particularly unfortunate for her. You all know
how high-strung she is, and if the papers should get hold of
it--well, we'll all have to make it as easy as we can for her."
With Jim's eyes on them, they all swallowed the butler story
without a gulp. But Anne was indignant.
"It's like Bella," she snapped. "Well, she has made her bed and
she can lie on it. I'm sure I shan't make it for her. But if you
want to know my opinion, Mr. Harbison may be a fool, but you
can't ram two Bellas, both NEE Knowles, down Miss Caruthers'
throat with a stick."
We had not thought of that before and every one looked blank.
Finally, however, Jim said Bella's middle name was Constantia,
and we decided to call her that. But it turned out afterward that
nobody could remember it in a hurry, and generally when we wanted
to attract her attention, we walked across the room and touched
her on the shoulder. It was quicker and safer.
The name decided, we went downstairs in a line to welcome Bella,
to try to make her feel at home, and to forget her deplorable
situation. Leila had worked herself into a really sympathetic
frame of mind.
"Poor dear," she said, on the way down. "Now don't grin, anybody,
just be cordial and glad to see her. I hope she doesn't cry; you
know the spells she takes."
We stopped outside the door, and everybody tried to look cheerful
and sympathetic, and not grinny--which was as hard as looking as
if we had had a cup of tea--and then Jim threw the door open and
we filed in.
Bella was comfortably reading by the fire. She had her feet up on
a stool and a pillow behind her head. She did not even look at us
for a minute; then she merely glanced up as she turned a page.
"Dear me," she said mockingly, "what a lot of frumps you all are!
I had hoped it was some one with my breakfast."
Then she went on reading. As Leila said afterward, that kind of
person OUGHT to be divorced.
Aunt Selina came down just then and I left everybody trying to
explain Bella's presence to her, and fled to the kitchen. The
Harbison man appeared while I was sitting hopelessly in front of
the gas range, and showed me about it.
"I don't know that I ever saw one," he said cheerfully, "but I
know the theory. Likewise, by the same token, this tea kettle,
set on the flame, will boil. That is not theory, however, that is
early knowledge. 'Polly, put the kettle on; we'll all take tea.'
Look at that, Mrs. Wilson. I didn't fight bacilli with boiled
water at Chickamauga for nothing."
And then he let out the policeman and brought him into the
kitchen. He was a large man, and his face was a curious mixture
of amazement, alarm and dignity. No doubt we did look queer,
still in parts of our evening clothes and I in the white silk and
lace petticoat that belonged under my gown, with a yellow and
black pajama coat of Jimmy's as a sort of breakfast jacket.
"This is Officer Flannigan," Mr. Harbison said. "I explained our
unfortunate position earlier in the morning, and he is prepared
to accept our hospitality. Flannigan, every person in this house
has got to work, as I also explained to you. You are appointed
dishwasher and scullery maid."
The policeman looked dazed. Then, slowly, like dawn over a
sleeping lake, a light of comprehension grew in his face.
"Sure," he said, laying his helmet on the table. "I'll be glad to
be doing anything I can to help. Me and Mrs. Wilson--we used to
be friends. It's many the time I've opened the carriage door for
her, and she with her head in the air, and for all that, the
pleasant smile. When any one around her was having a party and
wanted a special officer, it was Mrs. Wilson that always said,
Get Flannigan, Officer Timothy Flannigan. He's your man.'"
My heart had been going lower and lower. So he knew Bella, and he
knew I was not Bella, although he had not grasped the fact that I
was usurping her place. The odious Harbison man sat on the table
and swung his feet.
"I wonder if you know," he said, looking around him, "how good it
is to see a white woman so perfectly at home in a civilized
kitchen again, after two years of food cooked by a filthy Indian
squaw over a portable sheet-iron stove!"
SO PERFECTLY AT HOME? I stood in the middle of the room and
stared around at the copper things hanging up and the rows of
blue and white crockery, and the dozens and hundreds of
complicated-looking utensils, whose names I had never even heard,
and I was dazed. I tried with some show of authority to instruct
Flannigan about gathering up the soiled things, and, after
listening in puzzled silence for a minute, he stripped off his
blue coat with a tolerant smile.
"Lave em to me, miss," he said. The "miss" passed unnoticed. "I
mayn't give em a Turkish bath, which is what you are describin',
but I'll get the grease off all right. I always clean up while
the missus is in bed with a young un."
He rolled up his sleeves, found a brown checked gingham apron
behind the door, and tied it around his neck with the ease of
practice. Then he cleared off the plates, eating what appealed to
him as he did so, and stopping now and again for a deep-throated
chuckle.
"I'm thinkin'," he said once, stopping with a dish in the air,
"what a deuce of a noise there will be when the vaccination
doctor comes around this mornin'. In a week every one of us will
be nursin' a sore arm or walkin' on one leg, beggin' your pardon,
miss. The last time the force was vaccinated, I asked to be done
behind me ear; I needed me legs and I needed me arms, but didn't
need me head much!"
He threw his head back and laughed. Mr. Harbison laughed. Oh, we
were very cheerful! And that awful stove stared at me, and the
kettle began to hum, and Aunt Selina sent down word that she was
not well, and would like some omelet on her tray. Omelet!
I knew that it was made of eggs, but that was the extent of my
knowledge. I muttered an excuse and ran upstairs to Anne, but she
was still sniffling over her necklace, and said she didn't know
anything about omelets and didn't care. Food would choke her.
Neither of the Mercer girls knew either, and Bella, who was still
reading in the den, absolutely declined to help.
"I don't know, and I wouldn't tell you if I did. You can get
yourself out, as you got yourself in," she said nastily. "The
simplest thing, if you don't mind my suggesting it, is to poison
the coffee and kill the lot of us. Only, if you decide to do it,
let me know; I want to live just long enough to see Jimmy Wilson
WRITHE!"
Bella is the kind of person who gets on one's nerves. She finds a
grievance and hugs it; she does ridiculous things and blames
other people. And she flirts.
I went downstairs despondently, and found that Mr. Harbison had
discovered some eggs and was standing helplessly staring at them.
"Omelet--eggs. Eggs--omelet. That's the extent of my knowledge,"
he said, when I entered. "You'll have to come to my assistance."
It was then that I saw the cook book. It was lying on a shelf
beside the clock, and while Mr. Harbison had his back turned I
got it down. It was quite clear that the domestic type of woman
was his ideal, and I did not care to outrage his belief in me. So
I took the cook book into the pantry and read the recipe over
three times. When I came back I knew it by heart, although I did
not understand it.
"I will tell you how," I said with a great deal of dignity, "and
since you want to help, you may make it yourself."
He was delighted.
"Fine!" he said. "Suppose you give me the idea first. Then we'll
go over it slowly, bit by bit. We'll make a big fluffy omelet,
and if the others aren't around, we'll eat it ourselves."
"Well," I said, trying to remember exactly, "you take two eggs--"
"Two!" he repeated. "Two eggs for ten people!"
"Don't interrupt me," I said irritably. "If--if two isn't enough
we can make several omelets, one after the other."
He looked at me with admiration.
"Who else but you would have thought of that!" he remarked.
"Well, here are two eggs. What next?"
"Separate them," I said easily. No, I didn't know what it meant.
I hoped he would; I said it as casually as I could, and I did not
look at him. I knew he was staring at me, puzzled.
"Separate them!" he said. "Why, they aren't fastened together!"
Then he laughed. "Oh, yes, of course!" When I looked he had put
one at each end of the table. "Afraid they'll quarrel, I
suppose," he said. "Well, now they're separated."
"Then beat."
"First separate, then beat!" he repeated. "The author of that
cook book must have had a mean disposition. What's next? Hang
them?" He looked up at me with his boyish smile.
"Separate and beat," I repeated. If I lost a word of that recipe
I was gone. It was like saying the alphabet; I had to go to the
beginning every time mentally.
"Well," he reflected, "you can't beat an egg, no matter how cruel
you may be, unless you break it first." He picked up an egg and
looked at it. "Separate!" he reflected. "Ah--the white from
the--whatever you cooking experts call it--the yellow part."
"Exactly!" I exclaimed, light breaking on me. "Of course. I KNEW
you would find it out." Then back to the recipe--"beat until well
mixed; then fold in the whites."
"Fold?" he questioned. "It looks pretty thin to fold, doesn't it?
I--upon my word, I never heard of folding an egg. Are you--but of
course you know. Please come and show me how."
"Just fold them in," I said desperately. "It isn't difficult."
And because I was so transparent a fraud and knew he must find me
out then, I said something about butter, and went into the
pantry. That's the trouble with a lie; somebody asks you to tell
one as a favor to somebody else, and the first thing you know,
you are having to tell a thousand, and trying to remember the
ones you have told so you won't contradict yourself, and the very
person you have tried to help turns on you and reproaches you for
being untruthful! I leaned my elbows despondently on the shelf of
the kitchen pantry, with the feet of a guard visible through the
high window over my head, and waited for Mr. Harbison to come in
and demand that I fold a raw egg, and discover that I didn't know
anything about cooking, and was just as useless as all the
others.
He came. He held the bowl out to me and waved a fork in triumph.
"I have solved it," he said. "Or, rather, Flannigan and I have
solved it. The mixture awaits the magic touch of the cook."
I honestly thought I could do the rest. It was only to be put in
a pan and browned, and then in the oven three minutes. And I did
it properly, but for two things: I should have greased the pan
(but this was the book's fault; it didn't say) and I should have
lighted the oven. The latter, however, was Mr. Harbison's fault
as much as mine, and I had wit enough to lay it to absent-
mindedness on the part of both of us.
After that, Aunt Selina or no Aunt Selina, we decided to have
boiled eggs, and Mr. Harbison knew how to cook them. He put them
in the tea kettle and then went to look at the furnace. And
Officer Timothy Flannigan ground