Kitabı oku: «Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905», sayfa 15
Robert had been forced to wait until he was settled on the train for Washington before he found time to read the note whose possession had caused Helen such perturbation. It was evidently the middle page of a letter, a single sheet, note size, torn from a pad. The handwriting was unquestionably masculine, entirely unfamiliar to Penn, hurried and full of what Helen would have called – temperament.
After one glance, the blood rushed to his head, and his hot eyes devoured again and again these words:
Since our interview yesterday, and in regard to that irresistible scene of the blue stockings, I am not willing to let it drop.
However, I should like to suggest abbreviation, and I fear I shall have to ask you to change the shade to a dull bluish gray. If you will come to my office in the morning, I feel sure we can soon arrange a climax which shall embody your own wishes and mine. As to the effect – the after-effect – of her husband’s death on H. P.’s character, attention will be diverted from that by the previous gossip about —
And there it ended.
The initials, H. P. – Helen Penn – were the tacks that fastened conviction to Robert’s consciousness; conviction of an intrigue of long standing and unspeakable familiarities – all these verbal obscurities were only too sickeningly familiar to him, fresh from the Perry letters – but here was more!
Apparently a coolly plotted murder – one ray of light only his eyes clung to – the “climax” was yet in limine!
In a well-built city house the insertion of a latchkey and opening of a front door between ten and eleven o’clock at night are noises easily covered by the urban roar of even one of the lateral streets of a great city. Robert entered and closed the door with – he assured himself – no greater minimum of noise than is instinctive toward midnight with even a sober married man. Among all the emotions which had seethed through his mind during the past few hours, a reaction was at that moment in possession of him, in favor of his wife, who had been to him a well of sweet water through all those years. If evil was drawing near to her, why push her toward it? Surely a finer thing would be to warn and protect her, to beat down underfoot his own wounded ego and win her back!
The electric light in the hall was burning, and he went directly to the library. Touching an electric button near the door, the room was flooded with light, and there before his weary eyes, hanging over the back of his Morris chair, was – Heaven help him! – a pair of long delft-blue silk stockings! Robert’s agony was black upon him, his mind once more full of crawling, writhing suspicions; his mouth and throat were parched, his pulse beats filled the world.
Then into the silence fell Helen’s laugh from the floor above, a long peal of mirth that spoke clearly of companionship. He had not made a life study of psychic differentiation for nothing – Helen was not alone! From that instant, all pretenses were abandoned, Robert was a sleuthhound on a keen scent.
With his head well forward, he crept up the carpeted stairway. The upper hall light was burning low; from his wife’s “sewing room,” as it was called, came the sound of voices. The door was ajar, and from the crevice a strong light flooded out into the twilight of the hall. Now entirely mad with jealousy, he softly glided toward the crack, but before his eyes could further feed his torture, his ears served up a plenitude, in Helen’s voice – that dear, clear, sweet voice that had sung his child to sleep and —
“Mr. Stillingfleet – my dear Mr. Stillingfleet, if I may be allowed the liberty – ”
“My dearest creature,” interrupted a deep voice, muffled, almost as if by intent disguised, “if it be a liberty to call me dear, I find myself craving the instant fall of kingdoms.”
“La, sir, you confuse me quite!” There was a rustle of silken skirts and Helen laughed again.
Peering cautiously in, this sight met Robert’s bloodshot eyes: Helen – or at least the fantastic figure which had her voice – stood by the mantelpiece. The hair was high-rolled and powdered, in it two nodding white plumes; she wore a yellow brocade gown strangely cut, long black mitts on her hands, which waved a huge fan coquettishly at a man – a creature in the costume of Goldsmith’s day – who stood near her, bowing low. On his head was a wig, powdered and in queue, his face a mask of paint and powder and patches. He was clad in a huge waistcoat, long coat, knee breeches and hose —blue hose – upon his comely legs! Putting out his hand toward Helen’s, he said with sickening affectation, seizing her hand and raising it to his lips:
“It’s high time we were off to Montague’s, my fair H. P. ‘Time flies, death urges, knells call, heaven invites!’”
For an instant a very ancient and honorable desire to enter that room and violently change the face of several things dominated the listening husband; that he did not marked the high tide of his nervous breakdown. A sudden reaction, common to the neurasthenic, swept over him, and his soul withdrew in anguish from the sickening horror of the discovery. He crept softly down the stairs, seized hat and coat and staggered out into the night.
It was five days before Benjamin Bentnor’s best detective work succeeded in finding his brother-in-law in a hall bedroom at an obscure hotel in Washington, for a strong impulse of duty to be performed had landed Robert there, although he had completely lost sight of his mission. When Ben found him, he was seated on the edge of the bed, his head bowed in his hands.
Bentnor’s gentleness toward him would have shown a saner man that his condition was serious; but it took a physician to do that in the end, and a year of rest and travel to cure him.
At first, however, all Bentnor could do was to sit about rather helplessly and chatter in an effort to break through Robert’s gloom. The second day after he found his brother-in-law, he was at his wits’ end to find further subjects for cheerful conversation, until toward evening he had a sudden inspiration!
To be sure it was Helen’s secret, but surely she would not object to anything which might serve to arouse her poor husband’s interest, however slightly, and bring him to the point of consenting to return to his home.
Bentnor was short, stout, slightly bald, and somehow radiated comfort, even while sitting astride of a cane-bottomed chair, and smoking another man’s brand of cigarettes, in a one-windowed room nine feet by ten and a half.
“Helen Bentnor Penn’s a great girl, isn’t she, Rob?” No response came from the huddled figure on the bed.
“Of course, all the Bentnors have brains – you must have observed that for yourself; but she’s the first literary genius among us, although I’ve always felt that all I needed was leisure – however, that’s neither here nor there. Helen has arrived, and shall have the honor. Why, the editor who accepted that clever little lever de rideau of hers and brings it out in this month’s issue of his magazine, was downright enthusiastic – can you imagine an editor having any enthusiasm left in him, Penn? I can’t, for one. Must have a magnificent flow of gastric juice! However that may be, this chap has taken Helen up con amore, and written advice as to some changes, and given her interviews and all that. Most amateurs have to have several ‘fittings,’ I suppose. And then the check he sent her – by Jove, even I was surprised!”
Robert looked up for the first time, and turned a haggard face, blank with wonder, toward his wife’s brother. Ben laughed.
“Well, I suppose it is a bit of a shock to a man to find that his wife’s brains have a market value.” He was greatly encouraged by Penn’s aroused interest and hurried on with his tale:
“It strikes me I oughtn’t to be telling you this, Rob, for it was Helen’s birthday surprise for you. She’s been in an ecstasy over it for about eight weeks. Don’t you tell her I’ve told you! Promise!”
“Trust me,” murmured Penn, and a smile twitched at his face.
“Such plottings and plans and secrecy! I’ve been in it up to the neck from the first. On your birthday – somehow she’s in love with you yet, Penn – Lord, how does a man do that? – for breakfast she was to show you the magazine within whose fold is to be found her first literary lambkin; for luncheon – for you were to spend the day at home – she was going to give you the check! Generous little beggar, Nell! She said she had never been able to really give you anything before – she had only bought with your money and forced upon you things you didn’t want. Then that night after dinner she and I were to act her two-part play – we’ve been at it for weeks, tooth and nail, powder and patches – ”
“You and Helen!” gasped Robert.
“Great Scott! who on earth else? – the editor?” laughed Bentnor, little dreaming what the few words meant to the distraught man before him. “Perhaps you think I can’t do that sort of thing! It’s in our blood, the love of the buskin. The fact is, I’ve always had my suspicions that in the time of Charles the Second – well, never mind. We had our last final farewell dress rehearsal the night you came on here. I tell you I’m great in it. Helen, to be sure, does fairly well as Hester Piozzi, but wait till you see me as Mr. Stillingfleet! You know he was the fellow whose grayish-blue stockings gave the name for all time to ‘blue-stocking’ clubs. He and Dr. Johnson were always buzzing around the literary women of that day, the pretty D’Arblay, the dignified Mistress Montague of Portman Square, and the great Piozzi herself – of course, you remember?”
“Yes, I remember,” whispered Robert, his face once more hidden, but a great peace possessing him. “Ben,” he cried, almost joyfully, “what’s the title of Helen’s play?”
“Bas Bleu,” said Bentnor, concealing his triumph at his own tactics in the lighting of his twenty-third cigarette.
Robert groaned, and his head again drooped in unspeakable humiliation. And in that moment he made up his mind that no one should ever share his guilty secret. To make a pathetic appeal to Helen, dwelling upon his love, his doubts, his torturing jealousy, was one thing; quite another to tell that hopelessly humorous, refusing-to-be-pathetic story of those ridiculous bas bleus– they dangled everywhere from every point of his story; flying, pirouetting, circling and pin-wheeling in a psychic pas seul! It was impossible for even a member of the firm of Flagg, Bentnor & Penn to be impressive. Let them call it a nervous breakdown, his lips were forever sealed.
Then the thought of his home came to him like distant music. He saw himself opening his door; he saw a small ball of white coming down the stairs backward in a terrifying fury of speed, the little, fat, half-bare legs and a swirl of tiny skirts all that was visible of his wee daughter coming to greet him. He saw himself catch her off the last step and lift her in his arms, burying his face against the baby’s hot, panting little body, then he heard Helen’s voice and the sound of her scurrying feet!
Robert sprang up, and with a burst of wild laughter, shouted:
“Ben, let’s go home! I believe you’re dead right – I’ve got nervous prostration, and I’ve got it bad!”
THE VAGABOND
Your arms have held me till they seemed my home.
Your heart denies me; and the spells I weave
Are powerless to hold you. You must roam,
And I must, grieving, hide the thing I grieve.
Oh, love that does not love me, will there come
No time when I am all too dear to leave?
Is life so rich without me? Will there be
No ache of loneliness? No sudden sting
Of loss – of longing? Will your memory
Dwell on no passionate, sweet, familiar thing,
Soft touch or whispered word? Are you so free
From any ties but those new days may bring?
So much I miss you that I do not dare
To let my heart turn backward, nor my eyes
Search the wide future that is swept so bare
Of all I coveted. Yet deeplier lies
Than any misery of dull despair
The fear that you may some day come to prize
The things I stand for, when I am not there
To fill your needs with all my sympathies.
M. M.
THE DOING OF THE LAMBS
By Susan Sayre Titsworth
Well, so long, fellows,” said the Goat, and rose to go.
“Good-night, old man,” responded the cheerful chorus of his hosts. As the Goat went out into the hall there was silence in the room he had left, which lasted until after he had opened the hall door and had had time to close it. But instead of closing it, he merely bumped noisily against it, and rattled the knob, and stood listening. As if his departure were a signal, a roar of laughter from within followed his stratagem. One voice rose above the noise.
“By George!” it said. “Isn’t he the limit?”
The Goat closed the door silently and mounted the stairs to his own room in the apartment above. His suspicions were confirmed.
They had dragged him in with them as they all came over together from dinner at the Commons, to tell them some more of his wild Western tales. It was not the first time they had done it. They were a select little group of Eastern men, two or three years out of Harvard or Yale, in rather good repute with the faculty of the Law School for the quality of their work, and known among their fellow students as the Lambs, from their somewhat ostentatious habit of flocking together.
The Goat was from the West, a graduate of a prairie college of Moravian foundation, an athletic, good-looking young fellow in badly-fitting clothes, who appeared in no way ashamed to admit that he had never before been east of the Mississippi, and was frankly impressed by New York. His gaucherie was not ungraceful; there was an attractive impertinence in his cheerful assertions that his Moravian grandparents had desired him not to smoke or drink until he had completed his education and was earning his own living, and that, consequently, he knew tobacco only by sight and smell, and had contented himself with looking on the wine when it was red. There was one vacant seat at the table, which the Lambs occupied at the Commons; with an eye to future entertainment they had invited the Goat to join them, and in the two months since the term began, the arrangement had given general satisfaction.
They had undertaken the education of the Goat; they set him up to the theater, with supper at the Black Cat or Pabst’s afterward, and lay awake nights howling at the recollection of his naïve and shrewd comments; they took him walking to show him the historical landmarks of New York, extemporizing the landmarks and the history as they went along, to the delighted gratitude of the Goat, who lamented that Arizona had no associations. They egged him on to tell stories of his prowess with lasso and lariat, of which he was boyishly proud, and listened with flattering attention to his relations of grizzly hunts and Greaser raids. He usually told these experiences as happening to a friend of his, and blushed and looked sheepish when they accused him of modesty. In return for the pleasure he afforded them, they coached him in first-year law, and gave him pointers about the professors’ idiosyncrasies, feeling well repaid by his enthusiastic reports of his good progress, and of the encouraging impression he was making on his instructors.
And, finally, they were teaching him to smoke. After much urging, he had consented to try it, and had accomplished part of a cigar. Then he had suddenly become silent, looked at it intently for a few moments, and then, murmuring an indistinct excuse, had retired with precipitation. He appeared at breakfast the next morning, good-naturedly accepted all the chaffing he got, and bravely essayed another that evening.
That had been a week or more before. On this particular night he had successfully smoked a whole Chancellor without growing pale or letting it go out, treating them meanwhile to a vivacious narrative of a drunken gambler who had been run out of a little mining camp one stormy winter night, and had taken refuge with a friend of the Goat, also caught out in the blizzard, in a cave which proved to be the domicile of a big hibernating grizzly not thoroughly hibernated; at the close, he had, as usual, protested but not denied when they politely insisted on identifying his friend with himself. Then he had torn himself away to study common-law pleading in the suspicious manner previously described.
There was, however, no sign of resentment or of injured feelings in his face as he lit the gas in his own room. On the contrary, he grinned cheerfully at his reflection in the glass, and, pulling open his top drawer, took from the remote corner an unmistakably sophisticated brier and a package of Yale Mixture, and proceeded to light up. He grinned again as his teeth clamped on the stem, and jerked it into the corner of his mouth with a practiced twist of his tongue. Then he picked up a small and well-thumbed book lying half hidden among his law books and papers, and glanced over a few pages.
“I did that pretty well,” he said, approvingly. “Pity those babes don’t know their Bret Harte any better. Guess I’ll ring in some of Teddy’s ’97 trip on ’em to-morrow night.” And then he sat down to study.
The next day the Lamb from Boston announced that his cousin and her mother, who were passing through town on their way home from three years of wandering abroad, were coming to call on him at four. Therefore, at two, he and his brother Lambs began to prepare his room, and the only other one that was visible from the front door of their apartment, for the fitting reception of his relatives. This preparation consisted largely in moving all presentable articles in all the rooms into these two, and banishing all unpresentable into the most remote of the other rooms, and shutting that door. The Lamb from Brookline inspected the pictures and photographs, straightening the first, retiring some of the second, and adding a few of both borrowed from the other members of the flock, and arranged to suit his own artistic fancy; the Lamb from Philadelphia polished off the cups and saucers with a clean towel; then the Lamb from Boston took the towel and dusted the mantel. After their labors, they attired themselves in their “glad rags,” and sat in readiness behind their half-closed doors, while the Boston Lamb laid out two or three law tomes on his couch, and assumed a studious attitude in his Morris chair. Promptly at four appeared the Cousin and the Aunt.
They were courteously impressed by the Lamb’s bachelor quarters and the appurtenances thereof, nor was the significance of the “Cases on Quasi-Contracts,” which the Lamb ostentatiously hustled away, lost upon them. The Cousin insisted on looking at it, and her comments were of so sprightly a character and so difficult to return in kind, that the Lamb, conscious of the open doors, and not desiring to subject the esprit de corps of his friends to a very severe strain, called in his brother Lambs to meet his relatives.
They attended promptly, three personable young men in irreproachable afternoon dress, overjoyed to find the Cousin as pretty as her voice was musical, and as entertaining as her skillful jolly of the Boston Lamb had led them to expect. In ten minutes the flock was hers to command. The Philadelphia Lamb took down from its new position on the Boston Lamb’s wall the cherished Whistler of the Brookline Lamb, and presented it to her; the Boston Lamb begged her acceptance of the quaint little Cloisonné cup which she admired as she drank from it, and which was the property of the Philadelphia member; the Albany Lamb, on the plea that everything of value had already been abstracted from him to make the Boston Lamb’s room pretty for her, offered her himself, and was in no way cast down when she declined him on the ground that he was too decorative to be truly useful. But in the middle of the recrimination that followed this turning state’s evidence on the part of the Albany Lamb, the Cousin inquired:
“You are all law students – do any of you know a man named Freeman who is studying up here?” The flock looked at each other and smiled. Freeman was the Goat’s name.
“She doesn’t mean the Goat,” explained the Boston Lamb, hastily. “We know a first-year man named Freeman,” he added, turning to her, “but he’s a wild and woolly Westerner, who’d never been off the plains of Arizona till he came here. There may be others, but we’re educating only one.”
“Oh, no,” said the Cousin. “The Mr. Freeman I mean is the son of the consul-general to Japan – he’s a San Francisco man, and he’s been everywhere. We met him first in Cairo, and then we played together in Yokohama, and came as far as Honolulu together, last spring. He decided to study law in New York, and I know he lives up here somewhere.”
“Such a nice young fellow!” contributed the Aunt.
“Don’t know him,” said the flock.
“We’ll ask the Goat about him,” suggested the Philadelphia Lamb.
“We’ve been so engrossed with our own pet Freeman that we haven’t had time for any other,” volunteered the Brookline Lamb.
“It’s rather strange,” began the Cousin, and then interrupted herself. “Anyway, I hope you’ll all look him up; I am sure he will be very grateful.” The flock acknowledged the bouquet by appropriate demonstrations.
“Our acquaintance with his namesake verges on the altruistic, also,” ventured the Albany Lamb.
“I should not like, myself, to be the victim of your altruism,” said the Cousin, with a slow glance that took them all in. In the midst of the delighted expostulations that greeted this shot, the apartment bell rang sharply. The Brookline Lamb, being nearest, went to open the door, and, having opened it, remarked in a subdued but unmistakably sincere manner:
“Well, I’ll be – ” A saving recollection of the Cousin and the Aunt brought him to a full stop there, but everybody looked up, and for a moment the flock was speechless. Not so the Goat, for it was the Goat who stood there, arrayed in the afternoon panoply of advanced civilization, with a cigarette between his fingers and the neatest of sticks under his arm.
“Beg pardon!” he said. “Didn’t realize – regret exceedingly – should never have intruded – why, Miss Brewster!” And with an instant combination of high hat, stick and cigarette that showed much practice, he came in to shake hands with the Cousin, who, suddenly displaying a brilliant color, had risen and taken a step toward him.
“What luck! what bully good luck!” he went on. “Mrs. Brewster, how do you do? This is like old Cairo days. Boston, you brute, why didn’t you mention this at luncheon?”
The flock choked; this was from the Goat, who had unobtrusively consumed most of the plate of toast at noon while the Lambs were discussing the visit of the Cousin and the Aunt. The Albany Lamb rose to the occasion feebly.
“There seems to have been some mistake,” he said. The Goat put his hat on the bust of the young Augustus, and sat down on the divan beside the Cousin.
“Well, now I’ve happened in, mightn’t I have some tea?” he inquired, genially. “No lemon, if you please,” and he pointed a suggestive finger at the rum. In dazed silence the Brookline Lamb hastened to serve him, while the Cousin said, with a peculiar little smile tightening the corners of her mouth:
“I thought it was strange that you didn’t know Mr. Freeman.”
“We really don’t,” said the Boston Lamb, making a late recover. “I’m not at all sure that he is a fit person for you to associate with – all we know of him is what he has told us himself.”
“That’s all right,” said the Goat, impudently. “And, anyway, I didn’t come to see you this time, old man.”
“What has he told you?” demanded the Cousin, as the Boston Lamb gasped with impotent rage.
“A series of Munchausen adventures,” returned the Philadelphia Lamb, vindictively. “Six Apaches and three and a half Sioux with one throw of the lasso.”
“Won out in a hugging match with a ten-foot grizzly,” added the Albany Lamb.
“Nonsense!” said the Cousin, interrupting the Brookline Lamb’s sarcasm in regard to nerve cures. “Hasn’t he told you about the mob at Valladolid? Or about San Juan?” The flock gazed with unutterable reproach at the Goat, who sipped his tea with a critical frown, and observed, pleasantly:
“That happened to a friend of mine.”
The Lambs surrendered at discretion, and roared. The Cousin glanced at the Aunt, and they rose.
“We have had the most attractive time,” said the Cousin, prettily, as, suddenly sobered by this calamity, the Lambs protested in a body against her going. “It has been charming – and I am so interested in your experiment in altruism.” The Lambs collapsed under the ex cathedra nature of the smile she bestowed upon them, as she turned and held out a frank hand to the Goat. “I am glad you happened in,” she said. “I mailed a note to you this morning – you will doubtless get it to-night. Come and see us.”
“The Holland, isn’t it?” said the Goat, holding her hand, and then he made a short speech to her that sounded to the paralyzed Lambs like a Chinese laundry bill, but which evidently carried meaning to the Cousin, for she flushed and nodded. Then she turned back to the flock, who by this time, with touching unanimity, were showering devoted attentions on the Aunt. At the elevator they were all graciously dismissed except the Boston Lamb, who alone went down to put his relatives into their cab.
“Come and see us, all of you,” called the Cousin, cordially, as the car began to descend.
“How soon?” begged the Albany Lamb, anxiously.
“Any time, after to-night,” returned the Cousin, and was lowered from their sight.
Then with one accord they fell upon the Goat, and bore him into the apartment for condign punishment, regardless of his indignant assertions of his right as a citizen to a trial by a jury of his peers. When the Boston Lamb came leaping up the stairs to add his weight to the balancing of accounts, he found a riotous crowd.
“Just because my luggage was derailed and burned up out in the Kansas deserts,” the Goat was saying, “and I struck New York in a suit of hobo clothes from Topeka – oh, you fellows are easy marks!”
“Where are your Moravian grandparents?” demanded the Albany Lamb.
“Don’t know,” said the Goat, unfilially. “They died before I was born. They weren’t Moravians, anyway.”
“See here!” The Boston Lamb jerked him to his feet with one hand and assaulted him with the other. “What was that stuff you were reeling off to my cousin? As her nearest male relative, geographically speaking, I insist on an explanation.”
“That was Japanese,” said the Goat, with a grin, and immediately favored the crowd with several more doubtfully emphatic remarks in the same tongue.
“I pass!” said the Boston Lamb, meekly. “But one thing more. Are you engaged to my cousin?”
“How very impertinent!” returned the Goat. “Why didn’t you ask her?”
The Boston Lamb inserted four determined fingers between the Goat’s collar and the back of his neck, and in view of the attitude of mind and body of the other Lambs, the Goat saw fit to yield.
“Not exactly, as yet,” he admitted. “But to-night – I hope – ”
“After which we are invited to call – oh, you brute!” groaned the Albany Lamb, and started for him. But the Goat had pulled himself loose, and gained the door. He stopped, however, to pull an oblong package from his coat pocket.
“Here,” he said, tossing it toward the crowd. “The smokes are on me tonight. Sorry I can’t be here to assist, for they’re a distinct advance on your husky old Chancellors. Also, there’s a case of fairly good booze downstairs that the janitor is taking care of until you call for it. So long, fellows!” And with a wave of his hat the Goat departed.
