Young People's Pride (Harper's Bazar serial)/Part 4
NANCY ELLICOTT had formed, while in New York, what it pleased her mother's friends to call an “unfortunate attachment” with Louis Crowe. To the parties directly concerned it was a most glorious engagement—that is—for the first four or five months.
“Why it's Louis,” squealed Jane Ellen, “and he's kissing Aunt Nancy.”
The story up to this point:
However, when Louis did not get his raise—when his cherished novel did not sell—and when Nancy had been obliged to return to St. Louis and there had been only letters for months and months—the situation had undoubtedly become strained.
At this time, Nancy has an opportunity to work for a New York fashion magazine and eventually be transferred to Paris. Her mother, who has always distrusted Louis, urges her to accept.
Nancy sends for Louis, tells him what she is considering and asks his advice. He is not only hurt that she would go to Paris and leave him in America, but that she is striding ahead of him in her work. They quarrel and pride prevents both of them from making any sort of explanation.
Sick at heart, Louis returns to New York, fires himself from his job, and decides that the only worthy aim in his existence right now will be to see that the romance between Ted Billett, his best friend, and Elinor Piper goes through.
In the meantime, Ted has drifted into the precarious position of being in love with one girl and drawn against his will into a serious entanglement with another. Elinor Piper is the daughter of a prominent financier and her money and very definite social position cause him to hesitate in telling her of his love. Not only that, but there are disturbing memories of the war and Paris. The third of this triangle, the mysterious Rose Severance, is playing a double game. For although she had promised to break connections with New York and disappear with “Mr. Severance,” the source of all her luxury, she is about to throw her last cards to win the heart of Ted Billett.
The night of the Pipers' costume dance at Southampton is the zero hour for Ted. He has decided to propose to Elinor. So behold them, a parti-colored harlequin and a very adorable Chinese lady in blue silk, seated in a secluded corner of the moonlit Italian garden.
Everything should have been perfect, but it wasn't—chiefly for the reason that Ted's New England conscience insists that he refer to certain incidents in Paris, and the Chinese lady, knowing nothing at all of what he means, becomes frightened and escapes to the house.
The next morning sees Ted on the way to New York on an “unexpected business call,” while Louis is left to patch things up with Elinor.
A carefully arranged tea à deux, a cleverly manipulated conversation, and Louis realizes that Elinor is heart-broken because she and Ted misunderstand.
With a precious note from Elinor to “Mr. Theodore Billett,” he drives wildly to town—and instinctively to Rose Severance on Riverside Drive.
The door is opened by Mrs. Severance, her fact flushed with anger at being disturbed. The note is delivered, and as he watches Ted read it Louis realizes with joy that they will go back to Southampton that night together in the roadster.
In the midst of hurried adieux, a key is heard in the door and Rose, sensing a trap, pushes the two boys through the apartment into the kitchen.
Nancy Ellicott has by this time returned to New York. Will she and Louis find each other? What will be the outcome of a very tense situation at the Severance apartment?
Mr. Benét has inserted an extraordinary number of very real thrills in the last instalment of this fascinating story.
Conclusion
MRS. SEVERANCE, her whole weight against the door, felt it push at her fiercely without opening, and, even in the midst of her turmoil, smiled. Severance had never been exactly what one would call an athlete—
She slackened her pressure, little by anxious little. Her hand crept down to the knob, then she jerked it sharply and stood back and Mr. Piper came stumbling into the room, a little too fast for dignity.
“I tried—I tried—I t-tried to s-shoot you, Rose,” came from the damp little heap on the floor.
He had to catch at her to save himself from falling, but as soon as he had recovered his balance he jerked his hands away from her as if they had taken hold of something that hurt him, and when he stood up she saw that his face was gray all over and that his breath came in little hard sniffs through his nose.
“Sorry, Sargent,” she said easily. “I heard your key, but that silly old door is sticking again. You didn't hurt yourself, did you?”
For an instant she thought that everything was going to be perfectly simple—his face had changed so, with an intensity of relief almost childish, at the sound of her accustomed voice. Then the grayness came back.
“Do you mind—introducing me—Rose—to the gentleman—you are dining with to-night?” he said with a difficulty of speech, as if actual words were not things he was accustomed to using. “I merely—called—to be quite sure.”
She managed to look as puzzled as possible.
“The gentleman?”
“Oh, yes, the gentleman.” He seemed neither to be particularly disgusted nor murderously angry—only so utterly tired in body and spirit that she thought oddly that it seemed almost as if any sudden gesture or movement might crumble him into pieces of fine gray paper at her feet.
“Oh, there isn't any use in pretending, Rose—any more. I have my information.”
“Yes? From whom?”
“What on earth does it matter? Elizabeth—since you choose to know.”
“Elizabeth,” said Mrs. Severance softly. She could not imagine how time, even when successfully played for and gained, could help the situation very much—but that was the only thing she could think of doing, and she did it, therefore, with every trick of deliberation she knew, as if any instant saved before he went into the dining-room might bring salvation.
“Do you know, I was always a little doubtful about Elizabeth. She was a little too beautifully incurious about everything to be quite real—and a little too well satisfied with her place, even on what we paid her. But, of course, if she has been supplementing her salary with private detective work for you—”
She shrugged her shoulders.
“I suppose you were foolish enough to give her one of your private numbers,” she said a trifle acidly. “Which will mean that you will be paying her a modest blackmail all the rest of your life, and you'll probably have to provide for her in your will. Oh, I know Elizabeth! She'll be perfectly secret—if she's paid for it—she'll never make you willing to risk the scandal by asking for more than just enough. But if this is the way you carry on all your confidential investigations, Sargent—well, it's fortunate you have large means—”
“She doesn't know who I am.”
“Oh, Sargent, Sargent! When all she has to do is to subscribe to Town and Country. Or call up the number you gave her, sometime, and ask where it is.”
“There are the strictest orders about nobody but myself ever answering the telephones in my private office.”
“And servants are always perfectly obedient—and there are no stupid ones—and accidents never happen. Sargent, really—”
“That doesn't matter. I didn't come here to talk about Elizabeth.”
“Really? I should think you might have. I could have given you all the information you required a good deal less expensively and now, I suppose, I'll have to think up some way of getting rid of Elizabeth as well. I can't pay her off with one of my new dresses this time—”
“Who is he?”
“Suppose we start talking about it from the beginning, Sargent—?”
“Where is he?”
“In the dining-room, I imagine. It wouldn't be very well bred of any one, would it, to come out and be introduced in the middle of this very loud, very vulgar quarrel that you are making with me—”
“I'm going to see.”
“No, Sargent.”
“Let me pass, Rose!”
“I will not. Sargent, I will not let you make an absolute fool of yourself before my friends until you give me a chance to explain—”
“I will, I tell you! I will! Let me go!”
THEY were struggling undignifiedly in the center of the room, her firm, strong hands tight over his wrists as he pawed at her, trying to wrench himself away. Mr. Piper was a gentleman no longer—nor a business man—nor a figure of nation-wide importance—he was only a small, furious figure with a face as gray and distorted as a fighting ape's, who was clutching at the woman in front of him as if he would like to tear her with his hands. A red, swimming cloth had fallen over his eyes—all he knew was that the woman-person in front of him had fooled him more bitterly and commonly than any one had been fooled since Adam—and that if he could not get loose he would burst into disgusting tears. Grammar, manners and sense had gone from him as completely as if he had never possessed them.
“Lemme go! Oh, damn you, damn you you woman—lemme go!”
“Be quiet, Sargent! Oh, shut up, you fool, shut up!”
A noise came from the kitchen—a noise like the sound of a man falling over boxes. Mr. Piper struggled furiously—Paris was crawling out of the window—Paris, the sleek, sly chamberer, the gay, hateful cuckoo of his private nest was getting away! Mrs. Severance turned her head toward the noise a second. Mr. Piper fought like a crippled wrestler.
“Grr—ah! Ah, would you, would you?”
He had wrenched one hand free for an instant—it went to his pocket and came out of it with something that shone and was hard, like a new metal toy.
“Now will you lemme go?”
But Mrs. Severance tried to grab for the hand with the revolver in it instead, and succeeded only in striking the barrel a little aside. There was a noise that sounded like a cannon-cracker bursting in Mr. Piper's face—it was so near—and then he was standing up, shaking all over, but free and a man ready to explain a number of very painful things to Paris as soon as he caught him. He took one step toward the dining-room, sheer rage tugging at his body as high wind tugs at a bough. Now that woman was out of the way—
And then he saw that she was out of the way indeed. She could not have fallen without his hearing her fall—how could she?—but she was lying on the floor in a crumple of clothes and one of her arms was thrown queerly out from her side as if it did not belong to her body any longer. He stood looking at her for what seemed one long, endless wave of uncounted time and that firecracker noise he had heard kept echoing and echoing through his head like the sound of loud steps along a long and empty corridor. Then he suddenly dropped the pistol and knelt clumsily beside her
“Rose! Rose!” he started calling huskily, his hands feeling with frantic awkwardness for her pulse and her heart, as Louis Crowe ran into the room through the curtains.
LOUIS thought that he had never been quite so sure of anything as he was that he must be insane. He was insane. Very shortly some heavy person in uniform would walk into the tidy kitchen where he and Ted were crouching like moving-picture husbands and remark with a kind smile that the Ahkoond of Whilom was giving a tea-party in the Mountains of the Moon that afternoon and that unless Louis—or, as he was probably better known, St. Louis—came back at once in the nice private car with the wire netting over its windows everybody from God the Father Almighty to Carrie Chapman Catt would be highly displeased. For a moment Louis thought of lunatic asylums almost lovingly—they had such fine high walls and smooth, green lawns and you were so perfect!y safe there from anything ever happening that was real. Then he jumped—that must be Mrs. Severance opening the door.
“What the Moses are we going to do?” he said to Ted in a fierce whisper.
Ted looked at him stupidly.
“Do? When I don't know whether I'm on my feet or my head?” he said. His drugged passiveness showed Louis with desolating clarity that anything that could be done would have to be done by himself, He crept over toward the window.
“Look! Fire-escape!”
“What?”
“Fire-escape!”
“All right. You take it.”
Louis had been sliding the window up all the while, cursing softly and horribly at each damnatory creak. Yes—there it was—and people thought fire-escapes ugly. Personally, Louis had seldom seen anything in his life which combined so ideally concrete utility with abstract beauty as that little flight of iron steps leading down from the entry outside the window into blackness.
“You first, Ted!”
“Can't.” The word seemed to come despairingly out of the bottom of his stomach.
“Came here. Own accord. Got to see it through. Take my medicine.”
“You fool, she doesn't want you here! Think of Elinor!”
For a moment Louis thought Ted was going to blaze into mere blind rage. Then he checked himself.
“I am. But listen to that.”
THE voices that came to them from the living-room were certainly excited—and the second that Louis heard one of them he knew that all his most preposterous suppositions on the drive down from Southampton had come preposterously and rather ghastlily true.
“Well, listen to it! Do you know who the man is now? And will you get out on this fire-escape, you fool?”
Ted listened intently for the space of a dozen seconds. Then, “Oh, my God!” he said, and his head went into his hands. Louis crept over to him.
“Ted, listen—oh, listen, damn you! What's the use of acting the chivalrous fool, now? Don't you see? Don't you understand? Don't you get it that if you leave she can explain it some way or other—that all you're doing by staying is ruining yourself and Elinor for a point of honor that hasn't any honor to it?”
“Oh, sure. Sure. But listen to him—why, great God, Louis, if he has a gun he may kill her—probably will. Don't you see it's just because I hate the whole business now—and her—and myself—that I've got to stick it out? You go, Caw, its none of your business—”
“You go. You blessed idiot, there's no use of both of us smashing. If anybody's got to stay—I can bluff it out a good deal better than you can—trust me—”
“Oh, rats! Not that it isn't very decent of you, Caw, it is—and you'd do it—but I wouldn't even be a person to let you—”
They were both on their feet, talking in jerks, ears strained for every sound from that other room.
It's perfectly simple—nobody's going to pull any gun-play—good Lord, imagine poor, old Mr. Piper—” said Louis uncertainly, and then as noises came to them that meant more than just talking, “Get down that fire-escape!”
“I can't. Let go of me, Caw. I mustn't. Listen—something's up—something bad! Get out of the way there, Louis, I've got to go in! It isn't your funeral!”
“Well, it isn't going to be yours!” said Louis through his teeth—Ted's last remark had somehow been a little too irritating. He thought savagely that there was only one way of dealing with completely honorable fools—Ted shouldn't, by the Lord!—Louis had gone to just a little too much trouble in the last seven hours to build Ted a happy home to let any of Ted's personal wishes in the matter interrupt him now. He stepped back with a gesture of defeat, but his feet gripped at the floor like a boxer's and his eyes fixed burningly on the point of Ted's jaw. Wait a split-second—he wasn't near enough—now—there!
His fist landed exactly where he had meant it to and for an instant he felt as if he had broken all the bones in his hand. Ted was back against the wall, his mouth dropping open, his whole face frozen like a face caught in a snapshot unawares to a sudden glare of immense and ludicrous astonishment. Then he began to give at the knees like a man who has been smitten with pie in a custard comedy and Louis recovered from his surprise at both of them sufficiently to step in and catch him as he slumped, face forward.
He laid him carefully down on the floor, trying feverishly to remember how long a knockout lasted. Not nearly long enough, anyway. Ropes. A gag. His eyes roved frantically about the kitchen. Towels.
He was filling Ted's mouth with clean dish-rag and thinking dully that it was just like handling a man in the last stages of alcohol—the body had the same limp refractory heaviness all over—when he heard something that sounded like the bursting of a large blown-up paper bag from the other room. He accepted the fact with neither surprise nor curiosity. Mr. Piper had shot Mrs. Severance. Or Mrs. Severance had shot Mr. Piper. That was all.
AS soon as he had safely disposed of Ted for an eery moment he had actually considered stowing him away in a drawer of the kitchen-cabinet—it might be well to go in and investigate the murder. And then either Mrs. Severance or Mr. Piper—whichever it was of the two that remained alive—might very well shoot him unless he or she had shot himself or herself first.
He did not relish the idea of being left alone in a perfectly strange apartment with two corpses and one gagged, bound and unconscious best friend—but he liked still less the picture of himself trying to make explanations to either his hostess or Mr. Piper when, in either case, the other party to the argument would be in possession of a revolver. He hoped that if Mrs. Severance were the survivor she had had a sufficiently western upbringing at least to know how to shoot. He had no particular wish to die—but anything was better than being mangled—and a reminiscence of Hedda Gabler's technique with firearms caused his stomach to contract quite painfully as he tightened the knots around Ted's ankles. Ted was the devil and all to get out on the fire-escape—and then you had to tie him so that he wouldn't roll off.
He crawled back through the window, dusted his trousers, and settled his neck-tie as carefully as if he were going to be married. Married! And he had hoped, he thought rather pitiably, that even though Nancy had so firmly decided to blight him forever, she might have a few pleasant memories of their engagement at least. Instead—well, he could see the headlines now. “Big Financier, Youth and Mystery Woman Die in Triple Slaying.” “Dead—Louis Crowe, Yale, 1917, of Scarsdale, N. Y.”
It hadn't been his job, damn it, it hadn't been his job at all. It was now, though, with Ted perfectly helpless on the fire-escape where any crazy person could take pot-shots at him as if he were a plaster pipe in a shooting gallery. The idea of escape had somehow never seriously occurred to him—what had happened in the evening already had impressed him so with a sense of inane fatality that he could not even conceive of the possibility of anything's coming right. In any event Ted, tied up the way he was, was too heavy and clumsy to carry down even the most ordinary flight of stairs—and if he was going to be shot, he somehow preferred to gasp his last breaths out on a comfortably carpeted floor rather than clinging like a disreputable spider to the iron web of a fire-escape.
Louis sighed—Nancy's firmness had admittedly quite ruined all the better things of life—but even the merest sort of mere existence had got to be, at times, a rather pleasant convention—how pleasant, he felt he had never quite realized somehow until just now. Then with a vague idea of getting whatever was to happen over with as quickly and decently as possible, he settled his tie once more and trotted meekly through the dining-room and beyond the curtains.
“WHY, Mr. Piper!” was Louis's first and wholly inane remark.
It was not what he had intended to say at all—something rather more dramatic and on the lines of “Shoot if you must this old gray head, but if you will only listen to a reasonable explanation—” had been uppermost in his mind. But the sight of Peter's father crouched over what must be Mrs. Severance's body, his weak hands fumbling for her wrist and heart, his voice thin with a senile sorrow as if he had been stricken at once and in an instant with a palsy of incurable age, brought the whole world of Southampton and house-parties and reality that Louis thought he had lost touch with forever back to him so vividly that all he could do was gape at the tableau on the floor.
Mr. Piper looked up and for a second of relief Louis thought that the staring eyes had not recognized him at all. Then he realized from the look in them that who or what he was made singularly little difference now to Mr. Piper.
“Water!” croaked Mr. Piper. “Water! I've shot her. Oh, poor Rose, poor Rose!” and he was plucking at her dress again with absorbed, incapable fingers.
Louis looked around him. The gun. There must have been a gun. Where? Oh, there—and as Louis picked it up from under a chair he did so with much inward reverence in spite of the haste he took to it, for he felt as if it were all the next forty years of his lite made into something cold and small that he was lifting like a doll from the floor.
“Water,” said Mr. Piper again and quite horribly. “Water for Rose.”
It was only when Louis had gone back to the kitchen and started looking for glasses that he realized that Mrs. Severance might very possibly be dying out there in the other room. When he did, though, he hurried bunglingly, in spite of a nervous flash in which, after accidentally touching the revolver in his pocket, he almost threw it through the pane of the nearest window before he considered. A moment, though, and he was back with a spilling tumbler.
“Water,” said Mr. Piper with querulous satisfaction. “Give her water.”
Louis hesitated. “Where's she shot?” he said sharply.
“I don't know. Oh, I don't know. But I shot her. I shot her. Poor Rose.”
IT was certainly odd, there being no blood about, thought Louis detachedly. Internal wounds? Possibly, but even so. He dipped his fingers in the glass of water, bent over Mrs. Severance and sprinkled the drops as near her closed eyelids as possible. No sound came from her and not a muscle of her body moved, but the delicate skin of the eyelids shivered momentarily. Louis drew a long breath and stepped back.
“She's dead,” said Mr. Piper. “She's dead.” And he began to weep, very quietly with a mouselike sound and the slow horrible tears of age.
“No use trying water on her,” said Louis loudly, and again he thought he saw the skin of the eyelids twitch a little. “Is there any brandy here—anything like that, Mr. Piper?”
“K-kitchen,” said Mr. Piper with a sniff, and one of his hands came away from Mrs. Severance to fumble for a key.
“I'll go get it,” said Louis, still rather loudly. and took one step away. Then he bent down again swiftly and poured the whole contents of the tumbler he was holding into the little hollow of Mrs. 5everance's throat just above the collar-bone.
“Oh!” said the dead Mrs. Severance, in the tone of one who has turned on the cold in a shower unexpectedly, and opened her eyes.
“Rose!” said Mr. Piper snifflingly. “You aren't dead? You aren't dead, dear? Rose! Rose!”
“Oh!” said Mrs. Severance again, but this time tinily and with a flavor of third acts about her, and she started to relax rather beautifully into a Dying Gladiator pose.
“I'll get some more water, Mr. Piper,” said Louis briskly, and Mrs. Severance began to sit up again.
“I—fainted—silly of me,” she said with a consummate dazedness. “Somebody was firing revolvers—”
“I tried—I tried—I—t-tried to s-shoot you, Rose,” came from the damp little heap on the floor that was Mr. Piper.
“Really, Sargent—” said Mrs, Severance comfortably. Then she turned her head and made what Louis was always to consider her most perfect remark. “You must think us very queer people indeed, Mr. Crowe?” she said, smiling questioningly up at him.
LOUIS'S smile in answer held relief beyond words. It wasn't the ordinary cosmos again—quite yet—but at least from now on he felt perfectly sure that no matter how irregular any one's actions might become, in speech at least, every last least one of the social conventions would be scrupulously observed.
“I think—if you could help me, Sargent—” said Mrs. Severance delicately.
“Oh, yes, yes, yes,” from Mr. Piper very eagerly and with Louis's and his assistance Mrs. Severance's invalid form was aided into a deep chair.
“And I think, now,” she went on, “that if I could have just a little—” She let the implication float in the air like a pretty bubble. “Perhaps—it might help us all—”
“Oh, certainly, dear,' from Mr. Piper. “I—”
“In the kitchen, you said, Mr. Piper. And you must let me,” from Louis with complete decision.
He hadn't bargained for that. Mr. Piper might not notice Ted on the fire-escape—but then again he might—and if he did he would certainly investigate—mute bound bodies were not ordinary or normal adjuncts of even the most illegal of Riverside Drive apartments. And then—Louis's hand went down over the revolver in his pocket—if necessary he stood perfectly ready to hold Mr. Piper up at the point of his own pistol to preserve the inviolability of that kitchen.
But Mrs. Severance saved him the bother.
“If you would be so kind?” she said simply. “It's in the small cupboard—the brown one—Sargent, you have the key?”
“Oh, yes, Rose.” Mr. Piper was looking, Louis thought, rather more embarrassed than it was fair for any man to have to look and live. His eyes kept going pitifully and always to Mrs. Severance and then creeping away. He produced the key, however, and gave it to Louis silently.
Louis carefully stayed in the kitchen fifteen minutes—devoting most of the time to a cautious examination of Ted, who seemed to be gradually recovering consciousness. At least he stirred a little when poked by Louis's foot.
“Sleeps just like a baby—oh, the sweet little fellow—the dear little fellow—” hummed Louis wildly as he made a few last additions to the curious network of string and towels with which he had wound Ted into the fire-escape as if he had been making him a cocoon. “Well—well—well—what a night we're having! What a night we're having and what will we have next?”
Then he remembered the reason for his journey and removed a bottle of brandy from the brown cupboard, found appropriate glasses and, in the ice-chest, club soda and ginger ale. He poured himself a drink reminiscent of Paris—gathered the bottles tenderly in his arms like small glass babies and went back to the living-room.
AND this time he was forced to pay internal high compliment to Mr. Piper as well as to Mrs. Severance. The pitiful gray image, its knees rumpled from the floor, its features streaked like a cheap paper mask with ludicrous dreadful tears, had turned back into the President of the Commercial Bank with branches in Bombay and Melbourne and all the business capitals of the world. Not that Mr. Piper was at ease again, exactly—to be at ease under the circumstances would merely have proved him brightly inhuman—but he looked as Louis thought he might have on one of the “Street's” Black Mondays when only complete firmness and complete audacity in one could keep even the Commercial afloat at a time when the Stock Exchange had turned into a floorful of well-dressed maniacs, and houses that every one had thought as solid as granite went to pieces like sand-castles in the shrieking flaws of financial panic.
Louis set down the bottles and opened them with a feeling both that he had never known Mr. Piper at all before, only Peter's father, and, spookily, that neither Peter's father nor the terrible old man who had wept on the floor beside Mrs. Severance could have any real existence—this was such a complete and unemotional Mr. Piper he had before him, a Mr. Piper, too, in spite of all the oddities of the present situation, so obviously at home in his own house.
None of them said anything in particular until the mixture in the glasses had sunk about half-way down. Then Mr. Piper remarked in a pleasant voice, “I don't often permit myself—seldom even before the country adopted prohibition—but the present circumstances seem to be—er—unusual enough—to warrant—” smiled cheerfully and lifted his glass again. When he had set it down he looked at Mrs. Severance, then at Louis, and then started to speak.
Louis listened with some tenseness, knowing only that, whatever he might possibly have imagined might happen, what would happen, to judge from the previous events of the evening, would be undoubtedly so entirely different that prophecy was no use at all, But, even so, he was not entirely prepared for the unexpectedness of Mr. Piper's first sentence.
“I feel that I owe you very considerable apologies, Louis,” the President of the Commercial began with a good deal of stateliness. “In fact, I really owe you so many that it leaves me at rather a loss as to just how to begin.”
He smiled a little shyly.
“Rose has explained everything,” he said, and Louis looked at Mrs. Severance with stupefied wonder—how?
“But even so, there remains the difficulty—of my putting myself into words.”
“Silly boy,” said Mrs. Severance easily, and Louis noted with fresh amazement that the term seemed to come from her as naturally and almost conventionally as if she had every legal and American right to use it. “Let me, dear.” And Louis felt his head begin to go round like a pinwheel.
BUT then—but she really couldn't be married to Mr. Piper—and yet somehow she seemed so much more married to him than Mrs. Piper ever had been—Louis's thoughts played fantastically for an instant over the proposition that she and Mr. Piper had been secretly converted to Mohammedanism together, and he looked at Mr. Piper's gray head almost as if he expected to see a large red fez suddenly drop down upon it from the ceiling.
“No, Rose,” and again Mr. Piper's voice was stately. “This is my—difficulty. No matter how hard it may be.”
“Of course I did not understand—how could I?—that Rose—was such a very good friend of your sister's and all your family's. Rose had told me something about it, I believe—but I was so—foolishly disturbed—when I came in—that really, I—well, I must admit that even if I had seen you when I first came in, that would hardly have been the thought uppermost in my mind at the time.” He spoke in the same tone of kindly reproof toward himself that he would have used if business worries had made him commit a small but definite act of inhospitality toward one of his guests.
“And naturally—you will think me very ignorant indeed of my son's affairs—and those of his friends—but while I had heard from Peter—of the breaking of your engagement—you will pardon me, I hope, if I touch upon a subject that must be so painful to you—I had no idea of the fact that you were—intending to leave the country—and knowing Rose, thought that with her present position on Mode—” he paused.
“It was very kind, indeed, of Mrs. Severance to offer to do what she could for me,” said Louis non-committally. He thought he got the drift of the story now—a sheer one enough but with Mr. Piper's present reaction toward abasement and his obvious wish to believe whatever he could, it had evidently sufficed.
“I know it was silly of me having Louis to dinner here alone—” said Mrs. Severance with the air of one ready to apologize for a very minor impropriety. “Silly and wrong—but Anne was coming, too, until she telephoned about Jane Ellen's little upset—and I thought we could have such fun getting supper together with Elizabeth away. I get a little tired of always entertaining my friends in restaurants, Sargent, especially when I want to talk to them without having to shout. And really I never imagined—”
She looked steadily at Mr. Piper and he seemed to shrink a little under her gaze.
“As for Elizabeth,” he said with hurried vindictiveness, “Elizabeth shall leave to-morrow morning. She—”
“Oh, we might as well keep her, Sargent,” said Mrs. Severance placidly. “You will have to pay her blackmail, of course but, after all, that's really your fault a little, isn't it?—and it seems as if that was more or less what you had to do with any kind of passable servant nowadays. And Elizabeth is perfection—as a servant. As police—” she smiled a little cruelly. “Well, we sha'n't go into that, but I think it would be so much better to keep her. Then we'll be getting something out of her in return for our blackmail, don't you see?”
“Perhaps. Still we have no need of discussing that now. I can only say that if Elizabeth is to stay, she will have to—”
Then he stopped.
“You were saying, Sargent?” said Mrs. Severance implacably.
“I was. Well, I—” he began, and then, “You—” and stopped, and then he began again.
“I said that it would be—difficult—for me to explain matters to you fully, Louis; I find it to be—even more difficult than I had supposed. I—it is rather hard for a man of my age to defend his manner of life to one of your age, even when he himself is wholly convinced that that manner is not—unrighteous. And in this particular case, to one of his son's best friends.”
He twisted his fingers around the rim of his glass. Louis started to speak, but Mr. Piper put up his hand. “No—please—it will be so much easier if I finish what I have to say first,” he said rather pleadingly.
“Well—the situation here between Rose and myself—must be plain to you now.” Louis nodded, he hoped in not too knowing a way. “Plain. How that situation arose—is another matter. And a matter that would take a good deal too long to tell. Except that, given the premises from which we set forth—what followed was perhaps as inevitable as most things are in life.
“That—situation has been known to no other person on earth but ourselves—all these years. And now it is known. Well, Louis, there you have it. And you happen to have us also—entirely in your hands. Because of a spying, greedy servant—and my own stupidity and distrust—we have been completely found out. And by one of my son's best friends.
“I wish that I could apologize for—all the scene before this. Better. I hope that you will believe that I am trying to do so now. But I seldom make apologies, Louis, even when I am evidently in the wrong— and this hasn't been one of my easiest to make. And now.”
HE sat back and waited, his fingers curled round his glass. And, as he looked at him, Louis felt a little sickish, for, on the whole, he respected Mr. Piper a good deal more than his irreverent habit of mind permitted him to respect most older people, and at the same time felt pitifully sorry for him. And yet the only thing Louis could do was to take the largest advantage possible of his very humiliation and straightforwardness. The truth could still do nothing at all but wreck everybody concerned.
“I give you my word of honor, Mr. Piper, to keep everything I know entirely and completely secret,” said Louis, slowly, trying to make the large words seem as little magniloquent as possible. “That's all I can say, I guess—but it's true—you can really depend on it.”
“Thank you,” said Mr. Piper quite simply. “I believe you, Louis,' and again Louis felt that little burn of shame in his mind
Thank you,” said Mrs. Severance, copying.
Mr. Piper finished his drink and rose.
“And now, I do not wish you to misunderstand me,” he said. “I have not come to my age without realizing that there are certain services that can not paid for. But you have done me a very great service, Louis—a service for which I should have been glad to give nearly everything material that I possess. I merely wish you to know that in case you should ever need assistance—from an older man—in any way—that is clumsily put, but I can think of no other suitable word at the moment—I am entirely at your disposal. Entirely so.”
“Thank you, sir,” said Louis a little stiffly. Mr. Piper was certainly heaping coals of fire. Then he wondered for an instant just what Mrs. Ellicott would think if she could have heard the President of the Commercial say that to him—
MR. PIPER was moving slowly toward the door, and the politeness that had been his at the beginning of the conversation was nothing to his supreme politeness now
“And now,” he said, as if he were asking everybody's pardon for an entirely unintentional intrusion, “I really must be getting back to Southampton—and you and Rose, I imagine, have still quite a bit to talk over—'
“But—” said Louis clumsily, “but, Mr. Piper—”
“Must you really, dear?” said Mrs. Severance in the softest tones of wifely reproach.
“No,” said Mr. Piper perfectly. “I insist. You certainly could not have finished your discussion before I came, and for the present—well—it seems to me that I have intruded quite long enough. I wish it,” he added, and Louis understood.
“You are staying with us, over to-morrow, Louis, are you not?” said Mr. Piper calmly, and Louis assented. “I suppose we shall see each other at breakfast, then?”
“Oh, yes, sir.” And then Louis tried to rise to Mr. Piper's magnificence of conventionality in remark. “By the way, sir, I'm driving back in Peter's car—as soon as Mrs. Severance and I have finished our talk—I couldn't pick you up anywhere, sir, could I?”
Mr. Piper smiled, consulting his watch.
“There is an excellent train at 10:33—an excellent one—” he said, and again Louis was dumfounded to realize that the whole march of events in the apartment had taken scarcely two hours.
“Thank you, Louis, but I think I had better take that. Not that I distrust your driving in the least, but it will be fairly slow going, I imagine, over some of those roads at night—and this was one evening on which I had really intended to get a good night's sleep.”
He smiled again very quaintly.
“You'll be dancing as soon as you get back, I suppose? I understand there is to be a dance this evening?”
“Yes, sir—at least, I guess so. Told Peter I'd show up.”
“Youth,” said Mr. Piper. “Youth.” There was a certain accent of dolefulness in the way he said it.
“And now I shall call a taxi,” he said briskly.
“Can't I take you down—?” Louis began, but “No, no. I insist,” said Mr. Piper a little irritatedly, and then Louis understood that though he might be quixotic on occasion, he was both human and—Louis hesitated over the words, they seemed so odd to his youth to be using of a man who was certainly old enough to be his father—really in love with Mrs. Severance, after all.
So, until Mr. Piper's taxi came, they chatted of indifferent matters on as they might have while watching people splashing about in the water from the porch of the swimming pool at Bar Harbor—and Louis felt exceedingly in the way. But at last the telephone on the table rang again—and it wasn't police—it was only the taxi after all and Mr. Piper was at the door.
“No use saying good-by to you now, is there, Louis?” he said quietly, but held out his hand nevertheless.
“Well, good-by, Rose,” as he scrupulously shook hands with Mrs. Severance.
“Good-by, Sargent,” and then the door he had had such difficulty in opening two hours before shut behind him, and Louis and Mrs. Severance were left looking at each other.
“Well,” said Mrs. Severance with a small gasp.
“Well,” said Louis. “Well, well!”
“Excuse me,” said Louis, and he walked over to the table and poured himself what he thought, as he looked at it, was very like the father and mother of all drinks.
“You might—do something like that for me—” said Mrs. Severance helplessly. “If you did—I think—lI might be able to think—oh, well!”
“Well,” repeated Louis like a toast as he tipped the bottle, and the drink which he poured for Mrs. Severance was so like unto his drink that it would have taken a fine millimeter-gauge to measure the difference between them.
Mrs. Severance went back to her chair and Louis sank into the chair that had been previously occupied by Mr. Piper. As he stretched back luxuriously something small and hard and bulging made him aware of itself in his pocket.
“Oh, Lord, I forgot I still had that gun of Mr. Piper's!” said Louis inconsequentially.
“Have you?” said Mrs. Severance. The fact did not seem to strike her as being of any particular importance. They both drank long and frankly and thirstily, as if they were drinking well-water after having just come in from a ten-mile tramp along a hot mountain trail. And again, and for a considerable time, neither spoke.
“I suppose,” said Mrs. Severance finally, with a blur of delicate scorn, “I suppose our friend Mr. Billett—got away safely?”
Her words brought up a picture of Ted to Louis—Ted netted like a fish out there on the fire-escape, swaddled up like a great papoose in all the towels and dish-cloths Louis had been able to find. The release was too sudden, too great—the laughter came—the extreme laughter—the laughter like a giant. He swayed in his chair, choking and beating his knees and making strange lion-like sounds.
“Ted,” he gasped. “Ted! Oh, no, Mrs. Severance, Ted didn't get away! He didn't get away at all—Ted didn't! He didn't because you see he couldn't. He's out on the fire-escape now—oh, wait till you see him—oh, Ted, oh, glory, oh, what a night, what a night, what a night!”
IT took a good deal of explaining, however, to make Ted understand. He was still tightly bound, though very angrily conscious when they found him, and his language when Louis removed the improvised gag was at first of an army variety. Also Louis was forced to curse himself rather admiringly for the large number of unnecessary knots he had used when he started to unravel his captive.
When they finally got him completely untangled Ted's first remarks were hardly those of gratitude. He declared sulkily that his head felt as if it were going to split open, that he must have a bump on the back of it as big as a squash and that it wasn't Louis's fault if he hadn't caught pneumonia out on that fire-escape—the air, believe him, was cold!
Mrs. Severance, however and as usual, rose to the occasion and produced a bottle of witch-hazel from the bathroom with which she insisted on bathing the bump till Ted remarked disgruntledly that he smelt like a maternity hospital. Louis watched the domestic scene with frantic laughter tearing at his vitals—this was so entirely different and unromantic an end to the evening from that from which Louis had set out to rescue Ted like a spectacled Mr. Grundy, and which Ted in his gust of madness had so bitterly and grandiosely planned. Somehow, Louis didn't imagine that there could be very much sensual danger left in either of them for the other now.
Then they moved back into the living-room and the story was retold consecutively, by Louis with fanciful adornments, by Mrs. Severance with a chill self-satisfaction that, Louis noticed with pleasure, was like touching icicles to Ted. Ted gave his version—which only amounted to waking up on the fire-escape, trying to shout and succeeding merely in getting mouthfuls of towels—Louis preened himself a little there—and lying there stoically and getting more and more furious until he was rescued. And while he told it, he kept looking everywhere in the room but at Rose. And then Louis remembered Mr. Piper and looked at his watch—11:04. He rose and gazed at Mrs. Severance.
“Well,” he said, and then caught her eye. It was chilly, doubtless, and even by Louis's unconventional standards he could not think of her as anything but a highly dangerous and disreputable woman—but that eye was alive with an irony and humor that seemed to him for moment more perfect than any he had ever seen
“Must you go?” she said sweetly, “It's been such an interesting party—so original,” she hesitated, “Isn't that the word? Of course,” she shrugged, “I can see that you're simply dying to get away and yet you can hardly complain that I haven't been an entertaining hostess, can you?”
“Hardly,” said Louis meekly, and Ted said nothing—he merely looked down as jf his eyes were augers and his only concern in life was screwing them into the floor,
“Must you go?” she repeated with merciless mocking. “When it has been fun—and I don't suppose we'll ever see each other again in all our lives? For I can hardly come out to Scarsdale now, can I Louis? And after you've had a quiet brotherly talk with her, I suppose I'll even have to give up lunching with Anne. And as for Ted—poor Ted—poor Mr. Billett with all his decorations of the Roller Towel, First Class—Mr. Billett must be a child that has been far too well burnt this evening, not, in any imaginable future, to dread the fire.”
BOTH flushed, Ted deeper perhaps than Louis, but neither answered. There really did not seem to be anything for them to say. She moved gently toward the door—the ideal hostess. And as she moved she talked, and every word she said was a light little feathered barb that fell on them softly as snowflakes and stuck like tar.
“I hope you won't mind if I send you wedding presents—both of you—oh, of course, I'll be quite anonymous but it will be such a pleasure—if you'll both of you only marry nice homey girls!” Ted started at this as if he had been walking barefoot and stepped on a wasp, and she caught him instantly.
“Dear, dear, so Mr. Billett has serious intentions also—and I thought a little while ago that I was really in Mr. Billett's confidence—it only shows how little one can tell. As for Louis, he of course is blighted—at present—but I'm sure that that will not last very long—one always finds most adequate consolation sooner or later, though possibly not in the way in which one originally supposed.” She sighed elfinly as Louis muttered under his breath.
“What was that, Louis? Oh no, I am not at all the sort of person that writes anonymous letters to one's wife—or family—or sister,” a spaced little pause between each noun. “And besides, it wouldn't be much use in me, would it? For of course you among gentlemen will tell the young ladies you marry everything about yourselves—all honorable young people do. And then, too,” she spread out her hands, “to be frank—we've all been so beautifully frank about ourselves to-night—that's one thing I have liked so much about the evening—well, it would hardly be worth my while to take lessons in blackmailing from Elizabeth if the only subjects on which I could apply them were two impecunious young men. And, oh, I realize most perfectly—and please, please don't misunderstand me!—that we're all of us thieves together, so to speak, and only getting along on each other's sufferance. But then, if one of us ever starts telling, even a little, he or she can hardly do so in any way that will redound to anything but his or her discredit and social obliteration—how nicely I've put that!—so I don't think any of us will be very anxious to tell.
“Good-by, Mr. Billett—and when you do marry, please send me an invitation—oh, I sha'n't come, I've been far too well brought up—but I must send—appreciations—and so must have the address. We have had a pleasant acquaintanceship together, haven't we?—perhaps a little more pleasant on my side than on yours—but even so it's so nice to think that nothing has ever happened that either of us could really regret.
“Just remember that the only person I could incriminate you to would be Mr. Piper, and not even there very much, due to Sargent's melodramatic appearance 1n the middle of dinner. But I sha'n't even there—it would mean incriminating myself a little too much, too, don't you know? And even if the apartment here does get a trifle lonely one evening and another, I have got to be extraordinarily fond of it and I couldn't have nearly as nice a one—or as competent an Elizabeth—on what they pay me on Mode. So I'll keep it, I think, if you don't mind.
“But that may make you a little more comfortable when you think things over—and I'm sure we all deserve to be very comfortable indeed for quite a long while been after the very trying time we've just been through.
“Good-by, and I assure you that even if I shall never be able to think of you in the future except as all wrapped up in the middle of those absurd towels, I shall think of you quite kindly though rather ridiculously, nevertheless. And now if you will just run away a minute and wait down in that car of Sargent's that Louis—borrowed—so effectively—because I must have one motherly word with Louis alone before we part forever! Thank you so much! Good-by!”
SO Louis was left alone with her, he didn't know why. He noticed, however, that when she came to talk to him, though it was still with lightness, she was at no particular effort any longer to make the lightness anything but a method of dealing with wounds.
“Mr. Billett does not seem quite to appreciate exactly how much your timely pugilistics did for him,'” she observed. “Or exactly how they might have affected you.”
Louis set his jaw, rather. He was hardly going to discuss what Ted might or might not owe him with Mrs. Severance. Hardly.
“No, I suppose you wouldn't,” she said uncannily. Then she spoke again and this time, if the tone was airy, it was with the airiness of a defeated swordsman apologizing for having been killed by such a clumsy stroke of fence.
“But I have some—comprehension—of just what you did. And besides—I seem to have a queer foible for telling the truth now. Odd, isn't it, when I've been lying so successfully all evening?”
“Very successfully,” said Louis, and to his astonishment saw her wince.
“Yes—well. Well, I don't know quite why I'm keeping you here—though there was something I wanted to say to you, I believe—in a most serious and grandmotherly manner too—the way of a grown woman, as Sargent would probably put it—poor Sargent—” She laughed.
“Oh, yes, I remember now. It was only that I don't think you need—worry—about Mr. Billett any more. You see?”
“I think so,” said Louis with some incomprehension.
“Seeing him done up that way in towels,” she mused with a flicker of mirth. “And the way he looked at me when I was telling about things afterwards—oh, it wouldn't do, you know, Louis, it wouldn't do! Your friend is—essentially—a—highly—Puritan—young man,” she added slowly. Louis started—that was one of the things so few people knew about Ted.
“Oh, yes—wholly. Even in the way he'd—go to the devil. He'd do it with such a religious conviction—take it so hard! It would eat him up. Completely. And it isn't—amusing—to go to the devil with anybody whose diabolism would be so efficiently pious—a reversed kind of Presbyterianism. We wouldn't do that, you know—you or myself,” and for an instant as she spoke Louis felt what he characterized as a most damnable feeling of kinship with her.
“Which is one reason that I feel so sure Mr. Billett will get on very well with Sargent's daughter—if his Puritan principles don't make him feel too much as if he were linking her for life to a lost soul,” went on Mrs. Severance.
“Wha-a-at!”
“My dear Louis, whatever my failings may be, I have some penetration. Mr. Billett was garrulous at times, I fear—young men are so apt to be with older women. Oh, no—he was beautifully sure that he was not betraying himself—the dear ostrich. And that letter—really that was clumsy of both of you, Louis—when I could see the handwriting—all modern and well-bred girls seem to write the same curly kind of hand somehow—and then Sargent's address in embossed blue letters on the back. And I couldn't have suspected him of carrying on an intrigue with Mrs. Piper!” and Louis was forced to smile at her tinkle of laughter. Then she grew a little earnest.
“I don't suppose it was—Mr. Billett—I exactly,” she mused. “It was more—Mr. Billett's age—Mr. Billett's undeniable freshness—if you see. I'm not quite a Kipling vampire—no—a vampire that wants to crunch the bones of a new young man every week or so. Or do vampires crunch bones? I believe they only act like babies with bottles—nasty of them, isn't it? But one gets to a definite age—and Sargent's a dear. but he has all the defects of a husband—and things begin slipping away, slipping away—”
She made a motion of sifting between her hands, letting fall light grains of a precious substance that the hands were no longer young enough to keep.
“And life goes so queerly and keeps moving on like a tramp in front of a policeman till you've started being crazy and taking off your corsets every time you're alone because you like being comfortable better than having a waist-line—and you've never had anything to settle you,” her face twitched, “not children—nor even the security of marriage—nothing but work that only interests part of you—and this—”
She spread her hands at the apartment.
“Well—what a lot of nonsense I'm talking—and keeping Mr. Billett out in the car when he's sure he has pneumonia already—how unkind of me. You must think me a very immoral old woman, don't you”
“I think you're very sporting,” said Louis, truthfully.
“Not very. If I really wanted Mr, Billett, you see,” her eyes sparkled. “I'm afraid you wouldn't think me sporting at all—in that case. But then I don't think you'd have been able to—save—anybody I really wanted as you did Mr. Billet.” She spoke slowly. “Even with that very capable looking right hand. But in case you're still worried—'”
“I'm not, really.”
She paid no attention.
“In case you're still worried—what I told Mr. Billett was true. In the first place, Sargent would never believe me, anyway. In the second place it would mean breaking with Sargent—and do you know I'm rather fond of Sargent in my own way?—and a thing like that—well, you saw how he was to-night—it would mean more things like revolvers and I hate revolvers. And hurting Sargent—and ruining Mr. Billett who is a genuinely nice boy and can't help being a Puritan, though I never shall forget the way he looked in those towels. Still, I'm rather fond of him, too—oh, I'm perfectly unashamed about it, it's quite in an aunty way now and he'll never see me again if he can help it.
“And hurting Sargent's daughter—who must be charming from what I hear of her—but charming or not, she happens to be a woman and I have a feeling that, being a woman, life will hurt her quite sufficiently without my adding my wholly vicarious share. Oh, I'm perfectly harmless now, Louis,” she made a pretty gesture with her hands. “You and Sargent and the fire-escape between you have drawn my fangs.”
“I can't exactly—thank you,” said Louis, “but I do repeat—you're sporting.”
“Never repeat a compliment to a woman over twenty and seldom then.” She looked at him reflectively. “The same woman, that is. There is such a great deal I could teach you though, really,” she said. “You're much more teachable than Mr. Billett, for instance,” and Louis felt a little shudder of terror go through him for a moment at the way she said it. But she laughed again.
“I shouldn't worry. And besides, you're blighted, aren't you—and they're unteachable till they recover. Well.
“Oh yes, there was something else I meant to be serious about. Sargent said something about our—disappearing, and all that. Well, Sargent has always been enamored of puttering around a garden somewhere in an alias and old trousers, with me to make him lemonade when he gets overheated—and so far I've humored him—but I've really never thought very much of the idea. That would be—for me—a particularly stupid way of going to seed.” She was wholly in earnest now. “And I haven't the slightest intention of going to seed with Sargent or anybody else for a very long time yet. If it ever comes definitely to that I shall break with Sargent; you can depend on my selfishness—arrogance—anything you like for that. Quite depend.
“To-night,” she hesitated. “To-night has really made a good many things—clear to me. Things that were moving around in my mind, though I didn't know quite what to call them. For one thing it has made me—realize,” her eyes darkened, “that my time for really being—a woman—not in the copy-book sense—is diminishing. Getting short. Oh, you and Mr. Billett will have to reconcile your knowledge of Sargent's and my situation with whatever moral ideas you may happen to have of fathers-in-law and friends' fathers for some time yet—and I'm sure I don't know how you're going to do it, especially Mr. Billett, and I can't honestly say that I particularly care. But that will not be—permanent, I imagine. You understand?”
SHE put her hand on the door-knob to imply that the audience was over.
“I shall miss Anne, though,” she said frankly.
“Anne will miss you.” Louis saw no need for being politic now. He added hesitatingly, “After all—”
“Oh, no. No,” she said lightly but very firmly. “I couldn't very well, now, could I?” and Louis, in spite of all the broadmindedness upon which he prided himself, was left rather dumb.
“Oh, it won't be—difficult,” she added. “We can keep up—in the office—yes?”
“Yes,” said Louis hastily. He might be signing a compact with all the powers of darkness, but even so.
“For the rest, I am—used to things like that,” she added, and once again her face grew suddenly bright with pain. Then she recovered herself.
“Well—our next merry meeting and so forth,” she said airily. “Because when it happens, if it does, I may be so stodgily respectable you'll be very glad to ask me to dinner, you know. Or I may be—completely disreputable—one never knows. But in any case,” and she gave her hand.
“Mr. Billett must be freezing to death in that car,” she murmured. “Good-by, Louis, and my best if wholly unrespectable good wishes.”
“Thanks and—good luck to you.”
She turned on him swiftly.
“Oh, no. All the happiness in the world and no luck—that's better, isn't it? Good-by.”
“Good-by.”
And then Louis was out in the hall pressing the button that would summon a sleepy, disgruntled elevator-boy to take him down to Ted and the car. He decided as he waited that few conversations he had ever had had made him feel quite so inescapably, irritatingly young; that he saw to the last inch of exactitude just why Mr. Piper completely and Ted very nearly had fallen in love with Mrs. Severance; that she was one of the most remarkable individuals he had ever met; and that he hoped from the bottom of his heart he never, never saw her again.
TED and he had little conversation going back in the car. The most important part of it occurred when they had left New York behind and were rushing along cool moon-strewn roads to Southampton. Then,
“Thanks,” said Ted suddenly and fervently and did not seem to be able to say anything more.
The events of the evening had come too close, at moments, to grotesque tragedy for Louis to pretend to misunderstand him.
“Oh, that's all right. And, anyhow, I owed you one for that time with the gendarmes in Nantes.”
“Maybe,” but Ted didn't seem to be convinced. “That was jocose enough, even at the worst.” The words came with effort. “This was—serious I owe you about everything, I guess.”
“Oh, go take a flying leap at a galloping goose!”
“Go do it yourself. Oh, Louis, you ass, I will be pretty and polite about your saving my life.” And both laughed and felt easier. “Saved a good deal more than that as a matter of fact—or what counts for more with me,” Ted added soberly.
“Then the letter I brought was satisfactory?”
“Satisfactory? Gee!” said Ted intensely and again they fell silent.
Some miles later Louis added casually:
“You won't have any trouble with our late hostess, by the way. Though she knows all about it.”
“She knows?”
Louis couldn't resist.
“And quite approves. But she's—a sport.” Then for Ted's sake, “Besides, you see, it would crab her game completely.”
“I'll tell Elinor, though,” said Ted stubbornly.
“About her father? You can't.”
“Oh, Lord, no. About myself. Don't have to give names and addresses.”
“Afterwards.”
“Well, yes—afterwards. Though it makes me feel like a swine. I will marry her! I don't give a damn what's happened.”
Louis chuckled.
“Good egg. Of course you will.”
Ted turned to him anxiously after another silence.
“Look, Caw, that bump on my head—you've seen the size it is. Well, is it going to show up like thunder at this silly dance?”
HALF-PAST five in the morning and Louis undressing wearily by the light of a pale pink dawn.
Now and then he looks at his bed with a gloating expression that almost reaches the proportions of a lust—he is so tired he can hardly get off his clothes. The affairs of the last twenty-four hours mix in his mind like a jumble of colored post-cards, all loose and disconnected and brightly unreal. Ted—Elinor—Mrs. Severance—Mr. Piper—the dance he has just left—sleep—oh—sleep!
Where is Ted? Somewhere with Elinor of course—it doesn't matter—both were looking suspiciously starry when he last saw them from across the room—engagements—marriages—sleep—Mr. Piper's revolver—sleep. How will he return Mr. Piper's revolver? Can't do it tactfully—can't leave it around to be lost, the servants are too efficient—send it to Ted and Elinor as a wedding present—no, that's not tactful either—what silly thoughts—might have been dead by this time—rather better, being alive—and in bed—and asleep and—
Oh, bed!—and he falls into it as if he were diving into butter and though he murmurs “Nancy” once to himself before his head sinks into the pillows, in two seconds he is drugged with such utter slumber that it is only the blind stupified face of a man under ether that he is able to lift from his haven when Ted comes in half an hour later and announces, in the voice of one proclaiming a new revelation, that Elinor is the finest person that ever lived and that everything is most wholly and completely all right.
“A LETTER for you, dear Nancy.” Mrs. Winters gestures at it refinedly—she never points—as Nancy comes in to breakfast looking as if whatever sleep she had had not done her very much good,
“From your dear, dear mother, I should imagine,” she adds in sugared watery tones.
Nancy opens it without much interest. Mother, oh yes, Mother. Six crossed pages of St. Louis gossip and wanderingly fluent advice. She sets herself to read it, though, dutifully enough—she is under Mrs. Winters' eyes.
Father's usual September cold. The evil ways of friends' servants. Good wishes to Mrs. Winters. “Heart's Gold—such a really inspiring moving-picture.” Advice. Advice. Then, half-way down the next to last page Nancy stops puzzledly She doesn't quite understand.
“—and hope, my daughter, that now you are really cured, though you may have passed through bitter waters, but all such things are but God's divine will to chasten us. And when the young man told me of his escapade (heavily underlined) I felt that even over the telephone he might have—”
She sets herself wearily to decode some sort of definite meaning out of Mother's elliptic style. An escapade. Of Louis? And over the telephone—what was that? Mother hadn't said anything—
She finishes the letter and then rereads all the parts of it that seem to have any bearing on the cryptogram, and finally near the end, and evidently connected with the “telephone,” she comes upon the phrase “that day.”
There is only one day that Mother alludes to as “That Day” now. Before her broken engagement “That Day” was when Father failed.
But Louis hadn't telephoned—she'd asked Mother particularly if he had, and he hadn't. But surely if he had telephoned, surely, surely, Mother would have told her about it—Mother would have known that there were a few things where she really hadn't any right to interfere.
Mother had never liked Louis, though she'd pretended. Never.
Nancy remembers back and with fatally clear vision. It is fortunate that Mrs. Ellicott can not turn over with Nancy that little shelfful of memories—all the small places where she was not quite truthful with Nancy, where she was not quite fair, where she “kept things from her”—Mrs. Ellicott has always been the kind of woman who believes in “keeping things from” people as long as possible and then “breaking them gently.” Almost any sort of things.
It is still more fortunate that Mrs. Ellicott cannot see Nancy's eyes as she reviews all the tiny deceptions, all the petty affairs about which she was never told or trusted—and all for her own best interests, my dear, Mrs. Ellicott would most believingly assure her.
Nancy doesn't want to believe. She keeps telling herself that she won't, she absolutely won't unless she absolutely has to. But she is lucky or unlucky enough to be a person of some intuition—she knows Louis, and, also, she knows her mother—though now she is beginning to think with an empty feeling that she really know the latter at all.
What facts there are, are rather like Mrs. Ellicott's handwriting—vague and crossed and illegibly hard to read. But Nancy stares at them all the time that she is eating her breakfast and responding mechanically to Mrs. Winters' questions. And then, suddenly, she knows. “There is genuine tragedy in store for Mrs. Ellicott—Nancy, in spite of being modern, is Nancy and will forgive her—but Nancy, for all her trying, will never quite be able to respect her again.
Nancy doesn't finish her breakfast as neatly as Mrs. Winters would have wished. She goes into the next room to telephone.
“Business, dear?” says Mrs. Winters brightly from the midst of a last piece of toast, and “Yes—something Mother wants me to do,” from Nancy, unfairly. Then she gives the number—it is still the same number she called when Louis and she used to talk after he had caught the last train back to Scarsdale and both by all principles that make for the life efficient should have gone to bed—though to Nancy's mind that seems a great while ago.
“Can I speak to Mrs. Crowe, please?” The explaining can be as awful as it likes, Nancy doesn't care any more. An agitated rustle comes to her ears—that must be Mrs. Winters listening.
“Mrs. Crowe? This—is—Nancy—Ellicott.”
She says it very loudly and distinctly and for Mrs. Winters to hear.
LOUIS wakes around one o'clock with a dim consciousness that noisy crowds of people have been talking very loudly at him a good many too many times during the past few hours, but that he has managed to fool them, many or few, by always acting as much like a Body as possible. His chief wish is to turn over on the other side and sleep for another seven hours or so, but one of those people is standing respectfully beside his bed and though Louis blinks eyes at him reproachfully, he will not vanish back into his proper nonentity—he remains standing there—obsequious words come out of his mouth.
“Ten minutes to one, sir. Lunch is at one, sir.”
Louis stares at the blue waistcoat gloomily. “What's that?”
“Ten minutes to one, sir. Lunch is at one, sir.
“Lunch?”
“Yea, sir.”
“Then I'd better get up, I suppose. Ow—ooh!” as he stretches.
Yes, sir. A bath, sir?”
“Bath?
“Yes, sir.”
“Oh, yes, bath. No—don't bother—I mean, I'll take it myself. You needn't watch me.”
“Certainly not, sir. Thank you, sir. There have been several telephone calls for you, sir.”
Louis sighs—he is really awake now—it will be less trouble to get up than to try and go back to sleep. Besides, if he tries, that brass-buttoned automaton in front of him will probably start shaking him gently in its well-trained English way.
“Telephone calls? Who called?”
“The name was Crowe, sir. The lady who was calling said she would call again around lunch time. She said you were to be sure to wait until she called, sir.”
“Oh, yes, certainly.” Politely, “And now I think I'll get up, if you don't mind?”
“Oh, no, sir,” rather scandalizedly. “You are in need of nothing, sir?”
Louis thinks of replying, “Oh, just bring me a little more sleep if you have it in the house,” but then thinks better of it.
“No, thanks.”
“Very good, sir,” and the automaton pussyfoots away.
LOUIS, still half asleep, manages to rise and find slippers and a wrapper and then pads over to an empty bathroom where he disports himself like a whale. To his surprise he discovers himself whistling. True, the sunlight has an excellent shine to it this morning, and the air and the sky outside seem blue and crisp with first fall—but even so.
“Nancy,” he murmurs and frowns and finishes his bath rather gloomily—a gloom which is in nowise diminished when he goes down-stairs to find every everybody nearly through lunch and Ted and Elinor, as far away from each other at the table as possible, quite sure that they are behaving exactly as usual while the remnants of the house-party do their best to seem tactfully unconcerned.
Louis, while managing to get through a copious and excellent lunch in spite of his sorrows, regards them with the morose pity of a dyspeptic octogenarian for healthy children. It is all very well and beautiful for them now, he supposes grimly, but sooner or later even such babes as they will have to Face Life—Come Up Against Facts—
He is having a second piece of blueberry pie when he is summoned to the telephone. Rather tiresome of Mother, really, he thinks as he goes out of the dining-room—something about his laundry again most probably—or when he is coming back.
“Hello, Louis?”
“Hello, dear. Anything important?”
Mrs. Crowe's voice has a tiny chuckle in it—a chuckle that only comes when Mrs. Crowe is being very pleased indeed.
“Well, Louis, that depends—”
“Well, Mother, honestly! I'm right in the middle of lunch—”
“Oh, I'll call up again later if you'd rather, Louis dear.” But Mrs. Crowe for private reasons doesn't seem to be at all ashamed of taking up so much of her son's very valuable time.
“Only I did think it would interest you—that you'd like to know as soon as possible.”
Impatiently, “Yes. Well?”
“Well—a friend of yours is coming to see you on the three o'clock. A rather good friend. We thought you'd be back by then, you see, and so—”
Louis's heart jumps queerly for an instant.
“Who?”
But the imp of the perverse has taken complete charge of Mrs. Crowe.
“Oh—a friend. Not a childhood one—oh, no—but a—good—one, though you haven't seen each other for—more than three weeks now, isn't it? You should just be able to make it, I should think, if somebody brought you over in a car, but of course, if you're so busy—”
“Mother!”
Then Louis jangles the little hook of the telephone frantically up and down.
“Mother! Listen! Listen! Who is it? Is it—honestly?”
But Mrs. Crowe has hung up. Shall he get the connection again? But that means waiting—and Mother said he would just be able to make it—and Mother isn't at all the kind that would fool him over a thing like this no matter how much she wanted to tease. Louis bounds back toward the dining-room and nearly runs into Elinor Piper. He grabs her by the shoulders.
“Listen, El!” he says feverishly. “Oh, I'll congratulate you properly and all that some time but this is utterly everything—I've got to go home right away—this minute—toot sweet—and no, by gum, I won't apologize this time for asking you to get somebody to take me over in a car!”
SHE was sitting on the porch of the house—a small figure in the close blue hat he knew, a figure that seemed as if it had come tired from a long journey. She had been talking with his mother, but as soon as the car drew up, Mrs. Crowe rose quickly and went into the house.
Then they were together again.
The instant paid them for all. For the last weeks' bitterness and the human doubt, the human misunderstandings that had made it. And even as it opened before them a path, some corners and resting-places of which seemed almost too proud with living for them to dare to be alive on it—both knew that that fidelity which is intense and of the soul had ended between them forever an emptier arrogance that both had once delighted in like bright colors—a brittle proudness that lives only by the false things in being young.
They had thought they were sure of each other in their first weeks together—they had said many words about it and some of them clever enough. But their surety now had no need of any words at all—it had been too well tempered by desolation to find any obligation for speech or the calling of itself secure.
They kissed—not as a pleasant gesture, and no fear of looking publicly ridiculous stopped them.
The screen door behind Nancy pushed open. Jane Ellen appeared—Jane Ellen, by the look of her, intent upon secret and doubtful business, a large moth-eaten bear dangling by its leg from one of her plump hands. She was too concerned with getting her charge through the door to notice what was happening at first but as soon as she was fairly out on the porch she looked about her. The bear dropped from her fingers—her eyes grew rounder than buttons and very large.
“Why, it's Louis and he's kissing Aunt Nancy!” she squeaked in a small voice of reproachful surprise.
WHATEVER the number was of the second-class stateroom on the Aguitania, it was rather too far down in the belly of that leviathan to have suited fashionable people. But Louis and Nancy had stopped being fashionable some time before and they told each other that it was much nicer than first-class on one of the small liners with apparent conviction, and never got tired of rejoicing at their luck in its being an outside. It was true that the port-hole might most of the time have been wholly ornamental for all the good it did them, for it was generally splashed with gray October sea, but, at least, as Nancy lucently explained, you could see things—once there had actually been a porpoise—and that neither of them, in their present condition, would have worried very much about it if their cabin had been an aquarium was a fact beyond dispute.
“Time to get up, dear!” This is Louis a little sternly from the upper berth. “That was your bath that came in a minute ago and said something in cockney. At least I think it was—mine's voice is a good deal more like one of Peter's butlers—”
“But, Louis, I'm so comfortable!”
“So am I But think of breakfast.”
“Well—breakfast is a point.” Then she chuckles, “Oh, Louis, wouldn't it have been awful if we'd either of us been bad sailors!
“We couldn't have been,” says Louis placidly. “We have too much luck.”
“I know but—that awful woman with the face like a green pea—oh, Louis, you'd have hated me—we are lucky, darling.”
Louis has thought seriously enough about getting up to be dangling his legs over the edge of his shelf by now.
“Aren't we?” he says soberly. “I mean I am.”
“I am. And everybody's been so nice about giving us checks we can use instead of a lot of silly things we wouldn't know what to do with.” She smiles. “Those are your feet, she announces gravely.
“Yes. Well?”
“Oh, nothing. Only I'm going to tickle them.”
“You're not! Ouch—Nancy, you brute!” and Louis slides hastily to the floor. Then he goes over to the port-hole.
“A very nice day!” he announces in the face of a bull's-eye view of dull skies and oily dripping sea.
“Is it? How kind of it! Louis, I must get up.”
“Nancy, you must.” He goes over and kneels awkwardly by the side of her berth—an absurd figure enough no doubt in tortoise-shell spectacles and striped pajamas, but Nancy doesn't think so. As for him he simply knows he never will get used to having her with him this way all the time; he takes his breath delicately whenever he thinks of it, as if, if he weren't very careful always about being quiet, she might disappear any instant like a fairy back into a book.
He kisses her.
“Good morning, Nancy.”
Her arms go around him.
“Good morning, dearest Louis.”
“It isn't that I don't want to get up, really,” she explains presently. “It's only that I like lying here and thinking about all the things that are going to happen.”
“We are lucky, you know. That job with the American Express.”
“And my job.” She smiles and Louis winces.
“Oh, Louis, dear.”
“It was so damn silly,” says Louis muffledly.
“Both of us. But now it doesn't matter. And we're both of us going to work and be very efficient at it—only now we'll have time and together and Paris to do all the things we really wanted to do. You are going to be a great novelist, Louis, you know—”
“Well, you're going to be the foremost etcher—or etcheress—since Whistler—there. But, oh, Nancy, I don't care if I write great novels—or any novels—or anything else—just now.”
She mocks him pleasantly. “Why, Louis, Louis, your Art?”
“Oh, damn my art—I mean—well, I don't quite mean that. But this is life.”
“Just as large and twice as natural,” says Nancy quoting, but for once Louis is too interested with living to be literary.
“Life,” he says with an odd shakiness, an odd triumph. “Life,” and his arms go round her shoulders (The End.)