The Best of Mary Roberts Rinehart

by Mary Roberts Rinehart

  Dinner was a half hour late when we finally went out, Jimmy leading off with Aunt Selina, and I, as hostess, trailing behind the procession with Mr. Harbison. Dallas took in the two Mercer girls, for we were one man short, and Max took Anne. Leila Mercer was so excited that she wriggled, and as for me, the candles and the orchids—everything—danced around in a circle, and I just seemed to catch the back of my chair as it flew past. Jim had ordered away the wines and brought out some weak and cheap Chianti. Dallas looked gloomy at the change, but Jim explained in an undertone that Aunt Selina didn't approve of expensive vintages. Naturally, the meal was glum enough.

  Aunt Selina had had her dinner on the train, so she spent her time in asking me questions the length of the table, and in getting acquainted with me. She had brought a bottle of some sort of medicine downstairs with her, and she took a claret-glassful, while she talked. The stuff was called Pomona; shall I ever forget it?

  It was Mr. Harbison who first noticed Takahiro. Jimmy's Jap had been the only thing in the menage that Bella declared she had hated to leave. But he was doing the strangest things: his little black eyes shifted nervously, and he looked queer.

  "What's wrong with him?" Mr. Harbison asked me finally, when he saw that I noticed. "Is he ill?"

  Then Aunt Selina's voice from the other end of the table:

  "Bella," she called, in a high shrill tone, "do you let James eat cucumbers?"

  "I think he must be," I said hurriedly aside to Mr. Harbison. "See how his hands shake!" But Selina would not be ignored.

  "Cucumbers and strawberries," she repeated impressively. "I was saying, Bella, that cucumbers have always given James the most fearful indigestion. And yet I see you serve them at your table. Do you remember what I wrote you to give him when he has his dreadful spells?"

  I was quite speechless; every one was looking, and no one could help. It was clear Jim was racking his brain, and we sat staring desperately at each other across the candles. Everything I had ever known faded from me, eight pairs of eyes bored into me, Mr. Harbison's politely amused.

  "I don't remember," I said at last. "Really, I don't believe—" Aunt Selina smiled in a superior way.

  "Now, don't you recall it?" she insisted. "I said: 'Baking soda in water taken internally for cucumbers; baking soda and water externally, rubbed on, when he gets that dreadful, itching strawberry rash.'"

  I believe the dinner went on. Somebody asked Aunt Selina how much over-charge she had paid in foreign hotels, and after that she was as harmless as a dove.

  Then half way through the dinner we heard a crash in Takahiro's pantry, and when he did not appear again, Jim got up and went out to investigate. He was gone quite a little while, and when he came back he looked worried.

  "Sick," he replied to our inquiring glances. "One of the maids will come in. They have sent for a doctor."

  Aunt Selina was for going out at once and "fixing him up," as she put it, but Dallas gently interfered.

  "I wouldn't, Miss Caruthers," he said, in the deferential manner he had adopted toward her. "You don't know what it may be. He's been looking spotty all evening."

  "It might be scarlet fever," Max broke in cheerfully. "I say, scarlet fever on a Mongolian—what color would he be, Jimmy? What do yellow and red make? Green?"

  "Orange," Jim said shortly. "I wish you people would remember that we are trying to eat."

  The fact was, however, that no one was really eating, except Mr. Harbison who had given up trying to understand us, considering, no doubt, our subdued excitement as our normal condition. Ages afterward I learned that he thought my face almost tragic that night, and that he supposed from the way I glared across the table, that I had quarreled with my husband!

  "I am afraid you are not well," he said at last, noticing my food untouched on my plate. "We should not have come, any of us."

  "I am perfectly well," I replied feverishly. "I am never ill. I—I ate a late luncheon."

  He glanced at me keenly. "Don't let them stay and play bridge tonight," he urged. "Miss Caruthers can be an excuse, can she not? And you are really fagged. You look it."

  "I think it is only ill humor," I said, looking directly at him. "I am angry at myself. I have done something silly, and I hate to be silly."

  Max would have said "Impossible," or something else trite. The Harbison man looked at me with interested, serious eyes.

  "Is it too late to undo it?" he asked.

  And then and there I determined that he should never know the truth. He could go back to South America and build bridges and make love to the Spanish girls (or are they Spanish down there?) and think of me always as a married woman, married to a dilettante artist, inclined to be stout—the artist, not I—and with an Aunt Selina Caruthers who made buttons and believed in the Cause. But never, NEVER should he think of me as a silly little fool who pretended that she was the other man's wife and had a lump in her throat because when a really nice man came along, a man who knew something more than polo and motors, she had to carry on the deception to keep his respect, and be sedate and matronly, and see him change from perfect open admiration at first to a hands-off-she-is-my-host's-wife attitude at last.

  "It can never be undone," I said soberly.

  Well, that's the picture as nearly as I can draw it: a round table with a low centerpiece of orchids in lavenders and pink, old silver candlesticks with filigree shades against the somber wainscoting; nine people, two of them unhappy—Jim and I; one of them complacent—Aunt Selina; one puzzled—Mr. Harbison; and the rest hysterically mirthful. Add one sick Japanese butler and grind in the mills of the gods.

  Every one promptly forgot Takahiro in the excitement of the game we were all playing. Finally, however, Aunt Selina, who seemed to have Takahiro on her mind, looked up from her plate.

  "That Jap was speckled," she asserted. "I wouldn't be surprised if it's measles. Has he been sniffling, James?"

  "Has he been sniffling?" Jim threw across at me.

  "I hadn't noticed it," I said meekly, while the others choked.

  Max came to the rescue. "She refused to eat it," he explained, distinctly and to everybody, apropos absolutely of nothing. "It said on the box,'ready cooked and predigested.' She declared she didn't care who cooked it, but she wanted to know who predigested it."

  As every one wanted to laugh, every one did it then, and under cover of the noise I caught Anne's eye, and we left the dining room. The men stayed, and by the very firmness with which the door closed behind us, I knew that Dallas and Max were bringing out the bottles that Takahiro had hidden. I was seething. When Aunt Selina indicated a desire to go over the house (it was natural that she should want to; it was her house, in a way) I excused myself for a minute and flew back to the dining room.

  It was as I had expected. Jim hadn't cheered perceptibly, and the rest were patting him on the back, and pouring things out for him, and saying, "Poor old Jim" in the most maddening way. And the Harbison man was looking more and more puzzled, and not at all hilarious.

  I descended on them like a thunderbolt.

  "That's it," I cried shrewishly, with my back against the door. "Leave her to me, all of you, and pat each other on the back, and say it's gone splendidly! Oh, I know you, every one!" Mr. Harbison got up and pulled out a chair, but I couldn't sit; I folded my arms on the back. "After a while, I suppose, you'll slip upstairs, the four of you, and have your game." They looked guilty. "But I will block that right now. I am going to stay—here. If Aunt Selina wants me, she can find me—here!"

  The first indication those men had that Mr. Harbison didn't know the state of affairs was when he turned and faced them.

  "Mrs. Wilson is quite right," he said gravely. "We're a selfish lot. If Miss Caruthers is a responsibility, let us share her."

  "To arms!" Jim said, with an affectation of lightness, as they put their glasses down, and threw open the door. Dal's retort, "Whose?" was lost in the confusion, and we went into the library. On the way Dallas managed to speak to
me.

  "If Harbison doesn't know, don't tell him," he said in an undertone. "He's a queer duck, in some ways; he mightn't think it funny."

  "Funny," I choked. "It's the least funny thing I ever experienced. Deceiving that Harbison man isn't so bad—he thinks me crazy, anyhow. He's been staring his eyes out at me—"

  "I don't wonder. You're really lovely tonight, Kit, and you look like a vixen."

  "But to deceive that harmless old lady—well, thank goodness, it's nine, and she leaves in an hour or so."

  But she didn't and that's the story.

  Chapter IV. THE DOOR WAS CLOSED

  It was infuriating to see how much enjoyment every one but Jim and myself got out of the situation. They howled with mirth over the feeblest jokes, and when Max told a story without any point whatever, they all had hysteria. Immediately after dinner Aunt Selina had begun on the family connection again, and after two bad breaks on my part, Jim offered to show her the house. The Mercer girls trailed along, unwilling to lose any of the possibilities. They said afterward that it was terrible: she went into all the closets, and ran her hand over the tops of doors and kept getting grimmer and grimmer. In the studio they came across a life study Jim was doing and she shut her eyes and made the girls go out while he covered it with a drapery. Lollie! Who did the Bacchante dance at three benefits last winter and was learning a new one called "Eve"!

  When they heard Aunt Selina on the second floor, Anne, Dal and Max sneaked up to the studio for cigarettes, which left Mr. Harbison to me. I was in the den, sitting in a low chair by the wood fire when he came in. He hesitated in the doorway.

  "Would you prefer being alone, or may I come in?" he asked. "Don't mind being frank. I know you are tired."

  "I have a headache, and I am sulking," I said unpleasantly, "but at least I am not actively venomous. Come in."

  So he came in and sat down across the hearth from me, and neither of us said anything. The firelight flickered over the room, bringing out the faded hues of the old Japanese prints on the walls, gleaming in the mother-of-pearl eyes of the dragon on the screen, setting a grotesque god on a cabinet to nodding. And it threw into relief the strong profile of the man across from me, as he stared at the fire.

  "I am afraid I am not very interesting," I said at last, when he showed no sign of breaking the silence. "The—the illness of the butler and—Miss Caruthers' arrival, have been upsetting."

  He suddenly roused with a start from a brown reverie.

  "I beg your pardon," he said, "I—oh, of course not! I was wondering if I—if you were offended at what I said earlier in the evening; the—Brushwood Boy, you know, and all that."

  "Offended?" I repeated, puzzled.

  "You see, I have been living out of the world so long, and never seeing any women but Indian squaws"—so there were no Spanish girls!—"that I'm afraid I say what comes into my mind without circumlocution. And then—I did not know you were married."

  "No, oh, no," I said hastily. "But, of course, the more a woman is married—I mean, you can not say too many nice things to married women. They—need them, you know."

  I had floundered miserably, with his eyes on me, and I half expected him to be shocked, or to say that married women should be satisfied with the nice things their husbands say to them. But he merely remarked apropos of nothing, or following a line of thought he had not voiced, that it was trite but true that a good many men owed their success in life to their wives.

  "And a good many owe their wives to their success in life," I retorted cynically. At which he stared at me again.

  It was then that the real complexity of the situation began to develop. Some one had rung the bell and been admitted to the library and a maid came to the door of the den. When she saw us she stopped uncertainly. Even then it struck me that she looked odd, and she was not in uniform. However, I was not informed at that time about bachelor establishments, and the first thing she said, when she had asked to speak to me in the hall, knocked her and her clothes clear out of my head. Evidently she knew me.

  "Miss McNair," she said in a low tone. "There is a lady in the drawing room, a veiled person, and she is asking for Mr. Wilson."

  "Can you not find him?" I asked. "He is in the house, probably in the studio."

  The girl hesitated.

  "Excuse me, miss, but Miss Caruthers—"

  Then I saw the situation.

  "Never mind," I said. "Close the door into the drawing room, and I will tell Mr. Wilson."

  But as the girl turned toward the doorway, the person in question appeared in it, and raised her veil. I was perfectly paralyzed. It was Bella! Bella in a fur coat and a veil, with the most tragic eyes I ever saw and entirely white except for a dab of rouge in the middle of each cheek. We stared at each other without speech. The maid turned and went down the hall, and with that Bella came over to me and clutched me by the arm.

  "Who was being carried out into that ambulance?" she demanded, glaring at me with the most awful intensity.

  "I'm sure I don't know, Bella," I said, wriggling away from her fingers. "What in the world are you doing here? I thought you were in Europe."

  "You are hiding something from me!" she accused. "It is Jim! I see it in your face."

  "Well, it isn't," I snapped. "It seems to me, really, Bella, that you and Jim ought to be able to manage your own affairs, without dragging me in." It was not pleasant, but if she was suffering, so was I. "Jim is as well as he ever was. He's upstairs somewhere. I'll send for him."

  She gripped me again, and held on while her color came back.

  "You'll do nothing of the kind," she said, and she had quite got hold of herself again. "I do not want to see him: I hope you don't think, Kit, that I came here to see James Wilson. Why, I have forgotten that there IS such a person, and you know it."

  Somebody upstairs laughed, and I was growing nervous. What if Aunt Selina should come down, or Mr. Harbison come out of the den?

  "Why DID you come, then, Bella?" I inquired. "He may come in."

  "I was passing in the motor," she said, and I honestly think she hoped I would believe her, "and I saw that am—" She stopped and began again. "I thought Jim was out of town, and I came to see Takahiro," she said brazenly. "He was devoted to me, and Evans is going to leave. I'll tell you what to do, Kit. I'll go back to the dining room, and you send Taka there. If any one comes, I can slip into the pantry."

  "It's immoral," I protested. "It's immoral to steal your—"

  "My own butler!" she broke in impatiently. "You're not usually so scrupulous, Kit. Hurry! I hear that hateful Anne Brown."

  So we slid back along the hall, and I rang for Takahiro. But no one came.

  "I think I ought to tell you, Bella," I said as we waited, and Bella was staring around the room—"I think you ought to know that Miss Caruthers is here."

  Bella shrugged her shoulders.

  "Well, thank goodness," she said, "I don't have to see her. The only pleasant thing I remember about my year of married life is that I did NOT meet Aunt Selina."

  I rang again, but still there was no answer. And then it occurred to me that the stillness below stairs was almost oppressive. Bella was noticing things, too, for she began to fasten her veil again with a malicious little smile.

  "One of the things I remember my late husband saying," she observed, "was that HE could manage this house, and had done it for years, with flawless service. Stand on the bell, Kit."

  I did. We stood there, with the table, just as it had been left, between us, and waited for a response. Bella was growing impatient. She raised her eyebrows (she is very handsome, Bella is) and flung out her chin as if she had begun to enjoy the horrible situation.

  I thought I heard a rattle of silver from the pantry just then, and I hurried to the door in a rage. But the pantry was empty of servants and full of dishes, and all the lights were out but one, which was burning dimly. I could have sworn that I saw one of the servants duck into the stairway to the basement, but when I got
there the stairs were empty, and something was burning in the kitchen below.

  Bella had followed me and was peering over my shoulder curiously.

  "There isn't a servant in the house," she said triumphantly. And when we went down to the kitchen, she seemed to be right. It was in disgraceful order, and one of the bottles of wine that had ben banished from the dining room sat half empty on the floor.

  "Drunk!" Bella said with conviction. But I didn't think so. There had not been time enough, for one thing. Suddenly I remembered the ambulance that had been the cause of Bella's appearance—for no one could believe her silly story about Takahiro. I didn't wait to voice my suspicion to her; I simply left her there, staring helplessly at the confusion, and ran upstairs again: through the dining room, past Jimmy and Aunt Selina, past Leila Mercer and Max, who were flirting on the stairs, up, up to the servants' bedrooms, and there my suspicions were verified. There was every evidence of a hasty flight; in three bedrooms five trunks stood locked and ominous, and the closets yawned with open doors, empty. Bella had been right; there was not a servant in the house.

  As I emerged from the untidy emptiness of the servants' wing, I met Mr. Harbison coming out of the studio.

  "I wish you would let me do some of this running about for you, Mrs. Wilson," he said gravely. "You are not well, and I can't think of anything worse for a headache. Has the butler's illness clogged the household machinery?"

  "Worse," I replied, trying not to breathe in gasps. "I wouldn't be running around—like this—but there is not a servant in the house! They have gone, the entire lot."

  "That's odd," he said slowly. "Gone! Are you sure?"

  In reply I pointed to the servants' wing. "Trunks packed," I said tragically, "rooms empty, kitchen and pantries, full of dishes. Did you ever hear of anything like it?"