The Best of Mary Roberts Rinehart

by Mary Roberts Rinehart

  Clayton never had, but the term explained itself.

  "Set a spy to watch a spy," said Dunbar. "Let him think he's going on fine. Find his confederates. Let them get ready to spring something. And then - get them. Remember," he added with sarcasm, "we're still neutral. You can't lock a man up because he goes around yelling 'Down with capital!' The whole country is ready to yell it with him. And, even if you find him with a bomb under his coat, labeled 'made in Germany,' it's hard to link Germans up with the thing. He can say that he always buys his bombs in Germany. That they make the best bombs in the world. That he likes the way they pack 'em, and their polite trade methods."

  Clayton listened, thinking hard.

  "We have a daughter of Klein's here. She is my son's secretary."

  Dunbar glanced at him quickly, but his eyes were on the window.

  "I know that."

  "Think I should get rid of her?"

  Dunbar hesitated. He liked Clayton Spencer, and it was his business just then to know something about the Kleins. It would be a good thing for Clayton Spencer's boy if they got rid of the girl.

  On the other hand, to keep her there and watch her was certainly a bigger thing. If she stayed there might be trouble, but it would concern the boy only. If she left, and if she was one link in the chain to snare Rudolph, there might be a disaster costing many lives. He made his decision quickly.

  "Keep her, by all means," he said. "And don't tell Mr. Graham anything. He's young, and he'd be likely to show something. I suppose she gets considerable data where she is?"

  "Only of the one department. But that's a fair indication of the rest."

  Dunbar rose.

  "I'm inclined to think there's nothing to that end of it," he said. "The old chap is sulky, but he's not dangerous. It's Rudolph I'm afraid of."

  At the luncheon hour that day Clayton, having finished his mail, went to Graham's office. He seldom did that, but he was uneasy. He wanted to see the girl. He wanted to look her over with this new idea in his mind. She had been a quiet little thing, he remembered; thorough, but not brilliant. He had sent her to Graham from his own office. He disliked even the idea of suspecting her; his natural chivalry revolted from suspecting any woman.

  Joey, who customarily ate his luncheon on Clayton's desk in his absence, followed by one of Clayton's cigarets, watched him across the yard, and whistled as he saw him enter Graham's small building.

  "Well, what do you think of that?" he reflected. "I hope he coughs before he goes in."

  But Clayton did not happen to cough. Graham's office was empty, but there was a sound of voices from Anna Klein's small room beyond. He crossed to the door and opened it, to stand astonished, his hand on the door-knob.

  Anna Klein was seated at her desk, with her luncheon spread before her on a newspaper, and seated on the desk, a sandwich in one hand, the other resting on Anna's shoulder, was Graham. He was laughing when Clayton opened the door, but the smile froze on his face. He slid off her desk.

  "Want me, father?"

  "Yes," said Clayton, curtly. And went out, leaving the door open. A sort of stricken silence followed his exit, then Graham put down the sandwich and went out, closing the door behind him. He stood just inside it in the outer room, rather pale, but looking his father in the eyes.

  "Sorry, father," he said. "I didn't hear you. I - "

  "What has that to do with it?"

  The boy was silent. To Clayton he looked furtive, guilty. His very expression condemned him far more than the incident itself. And Clayton, along with his anger, was puzzled as to his best course. Dunbar had said to leave the girl where she was. But - was it feasible under these circumstances? He was rather irritated than angry. He considered a flirtation with one's stenographer rotten bad taste, at any time. The business world, to his mind, was divided into two kinds of men, those who did that sort of thing, and those who did not. It was a code, rather than a creed, that the boy had violated.

  Besides, he had bad a surprise. The girl who sat laughing into Graham's face was not the Anna Klein he remembered, a shy, drab little thing, badly dressed, rather sallow and unsmiling. Here was a young woman undeniably attractive; slightly rouged, trim in her white blouse, and with an air of piquancy that was added, had he known it, by the large imitation pearl earrings she wore.

  "Get your hat and go to lunch, Graham," he said. "And you might try to remember that a slightly different standard of conduct is expected from my son, here, than may be the standard of some of the other men."

  "It doesn't mean anything, that sort of fooling."

  "You and I may know that. The girl may not."

  Then he went out, and Graham returned unhappily to the inner room. Anna was not crying; she was too frightened to cry. She had sat without moving, her hand still clutching her untouched sandwich. Graham looked at her and tried to smile.

  "I'm gone, I suppose?"

  "Don't you worry about that," he said, with boyish bravado. "Don't you worry about that, little girl."

  "Father will kill me," she whispered. "He's queer these days, and if I go home and have to tell him - " She shuddered.

  "I'll see you get something else, if the worst comes, you know."

  She glanced up at him with that look of dog-like fidelity that always touched him.

  "I'll find you something good," he promised.

  "Something good," she repeated, with sudden bitterness. "And you'll get another girl here, and flirt with her, and make her crazy about you, and - "

  "Honestly, do you like me like that?"

  "I'm just mad about you," she said miserably.

  Frightened though he was, her wretchedness appealed to him. The thought that she cared for him, too, was a salve to his outraged pride. A moment ago, in the other room, he had felt like a bad small boy. As with Marion, Anna made him feel every inch a man. But she gave him what Marion did not, the feeling of her complete surrender. Marion would take; this girl would give.

  He bent down and put his arms around her.

  "Poor little girl!" he said. "Poor little girl!"

  CHAPTER XV

  The gay and fashionable crowd of which Audrey had been the center played madly that winter. The short six weeks of the season were already close to an end. By mid-January the south and California would have claimed most of the women and some of the men. There were a few, of course, who saw the inevitable catastrophe: the Mackenzies had laid up their house-boat on the west coast of Florida. Denis Nolan had let his little place at Pinehurst. The advance wave of the war tide, the increased cost of living, had sobered and made thoughtful the middle class, but above in the great businesses, and below among the laboring people, money was plentiful and extravagance ran riot.

  And Audrey Valentine's world missed her. It refused to accept her poverty as an excuse, and clamored for her. It wanted her to sit again at a piano, somewhere, anywhere, with a lighted cigaret on the music-rack, and sing her husky, naive little songs. It wanted her cool audacity. It wanted her for week-end parties and bridge, and to canter on frosty mornings on its best horses and make slaves of the park policemen, so that she might jump forbidden fences. It wanted to see her oust its grinning chauffeurs, and drive its best cars at their best speed.

  Audrey Valentine leading a cloistered life! Impossible! Selfish!

  And Audrey was not cut out for solitude. She did not mind poverty. She found it rather a relief to acknowledge what had always been the fact. But she did mind loneliness. And her idea of making herself over into something useful was not working out particularly well. She spent two hours a day, at a down-town school, struggling with shorthand, and her writing-table was always littered with papers covered with queer hooks and curves, or with typed sheets beginning:

  "Messrs Smith and Co.,: Dear Sirs."

  Clayton Spencer met her late in December, walking feverishly along with a book under her arm, and a half-desperate look in her eyes. He felt a little thrill when he saw her, which should have warned him but did not.

>   She did not even greet him. She stopped and held out her book to him.

  "Take it!" she said. "I've thrown it away twice, and two wretched men have run after me and brought it back."

  He took it and glanced at it.

  "Spelling! Can't you spell?"

  "Certainly I can spell," she said with dignity. "I'm a very good speller. Clay, there isn't an "i" in business, is there?"

  "It is generally considered necessary to have two pretty good eyes in business." But he saw then that she was really rather despairing. "There is, one 'i,'" he said. "It seems foolish, doesn't it? Audrey dear, what are you trying to do? For heaven's sake, if it's money?"

  "It isn't that. I have enough. Honestly, Clay, I just had some sort of an idea that I'd been playing long enough. But I'm only good for play. That man this morning said as much, when we fussed about my spelling. He said I'd better write a new dictionary."

  Clayton threw back his head and laughed, and after a moment she laughed, too. But as he went on his face was grave. Somebody ought to be looking after her. It was not for some time that he realized he carried the absurd little spelling-book. He took it back to the office with him, and put it in the back of a drawer of his desk. Joey, coming in some time later, found him, with the drawer open, and something in his hands which he hastily put away. Later on, Joey investigated that drawer, and found the little book. He inspected it with a mixture of surprise and scorn.

  "Spelling!" he muttered. "And a hundred dollar a month girl to spell for him!"

  It was Rodney Page who forced Audrey out of her seclusion.

  Rodney had had a prosperous year, and for some time his conscience had been bothering him. For a good many years he had blithely accepted the invitations of his friends - dinners, balls, week-end and yachting parties, paying his way with an occasional box of flowers. He decided, that last winter of peace, to turn host and, true to instinct, to do the unusual.

  It was Natalie who gave him the suggestion.

  "Why don't you turn your carriage-house into a studio, and give a studio warming, Roddie? It would be fun fixing it up. And you might make it fancy dress."

  Before long, of course, he had accepted the idea as of his own originating, and was hard at work.

  Rodney's house had been his father's. He still lived there, although the business district had encroached closely. And for some time he had used the large stable and carriage-house at the rear as a place in which to store the odd bits of furniture, old mirrors and odds and ends that he had picked up here and there. Now and then, as to Natalie, he sold some of them, but he was a collector, not a merchant. In his way, he was an artist.

  In the upper floor he had built a skylight, and there, in odd hours, he worked out, in water-color, sketches of interiors, sometimes for houses he was building, sometimes purely for the pleasure of the thing.

  The war had brought him enormous increase in his collection. Owners of French chateaus, driven to poverty, were sending to America treasures of all sorts of furniture, tapestries, carpets, old fountains, porcelains, even carved woodwork and ancient mantels, and Rodney, from the mixed motives of business and pride, decided to exhibit them.

  The old brick floor of the stable he replaced with handmade tiles. The box-stalls were small display-rooms, hung with tapestries and lighted with candles in old French sconces. The great carriage-room became a refectory, with Jacobean and old monastery chairs, and the vast loft overhead, reached by a narrow staircase that clung to the wall, was railed on its exposed side, waxed as to floor, hung with lanterns, and became a ballroom.

  Natalie worked with him, spending much time and a prodigious amount of energy. There was springing up between them one of those curious and dangerous intimacies, of idleness on the woman's part, of admiration on the man's, which sometimes develop into a wholly spurious passion. Probably Rodney realized it; certainly Natalie did not. She liked his admiration; she dressed, each day, for Rodney's unfailing comment on her clothes.

  "Clay never notices what I wear," she said, once, plaintively.

  So it was Rodney who brought Audrey Valentine out of her seclusion, and he did it by making her angry. He dropped in to see her between Christmas and New-years, and made a plea.

  "A stable-warming!" she said. "How interesting! And fancy dress! Are you going to have them come as grooms, or jockeys? If I were going I'd go as a circus-rider. I used to be able to stand up on a running horse. Of course you're having horses. What's a stable without a horse?"

  He saw she was laughing at him and was rather resentful.

  "I told you I have made it into a studio."

  But when he implored her to go, she was obdurate.

  "Do go away and let me alone, Rodney," she said at last. "I loathe fancy-dress parties."

  "It won't be a party without you."

  "Then don't have it. I've told you, over and over, I'm not going out. It isn't decent this year, in my opinion. And, anyhow, I haven't any money, any clothes, any anything. A bad evening at bridge, and I shouldn't be able to pay my rent."

  "That's nonsense. Why do you let people say you are moping about Chris? You're not."

  "Of course not."

  She sat up.

  "What else are they saying?"

  "Well, there's some talk, naturally. You can't be as popular as you have been, and then just drop out, without some gossip. It's not bad."

  "What sort of talk?"

  He was very uncomfortable.

  "Well, of course, you have been pretty strong on the war stuff?"

  "Oh, they think I sent him!"

  "If only you wouldn't hide, Audrey. That's what has made the talk. It's not Chris's going."

  "I'm not hiding. That's idiotic. I was bored to death, if you want the truth. Look here, Rodney. You're not being honest. What do they say about Chris and myself?"

  He was cornered.

  "Is it - about another woman?"

  "Well, of course now and then - there are always such stories. And of course Chris - "

  "Yes, they knew Chris." Her voice was scornful. "So they think I'm moping and hiding because - How interesting!"

  She sat back, with her old insolent smile.

  "Poor Chris!" she said. "The only man in the lot except Clay Spencer who is doing his bit for the war, and they - when is your party, Roddie?"

  "New-year's Eve."

  "I'll come," she said. And smiling again, dangerously, "I'll come, with bells on."

  CHAPTER XVI

  There had been once, in Herman Klein the making of a good American. He had come to America, not at the call of freedom, but of peace and plenty. Nevertheless, he had possibilities.

  Taken in time he might have become a good American. But nothing was done to stimulate in him a sentiment for his adopted land. He would, indeed, have been, for all his citizenship papers, a man without a country but for one thing.

  The Fatherland had never let go. When he went to the Turnverein, it was to hear the old tongue, to sing the old songs. Visiting Germans from overseas were constantly lecturing, holding before him the vision of great Germany. He saw moving-pictures of Germany; he went to meetings which commenced with "Die Wacht am Rhine." One Christmas he received a handsome copy of a photograph of the Kaiser through the mail. He never knew who sent it, but he had it framed in a gilt frame, and it hung over the fireplace in the sitting-room.

  He had been adopted by America, but he had not adopted America, save his own tiny bit of it. He took what the new country gave him with no faintest sense that he owed anything in return beyond his small yearly taxes. He was neither friendly nor inimical.

  His creed through the years had been simple: to owe no man money, even for a day; to spend less than he earned; to own his own home; to rise early, work hard, and to live at peace with his neighbors. He had learned English and had sent Anna to the public school. He spoke English with her, always. And on Sunday he put on his best clothes, and sat in the German Lutheran church, dozing occasionally, but always rigidly erect.


  With his first savings he had bought a home, a tiny two-roomed frame cottage on a bill above the Spencer mill, with a bit of waste land that he turned into a thrifty garden. Anna was born there, and her mother had died there ten years later. But long enough before that he had added four rooms, and bought an adjoining lot. At that time the hill had been green; the way to the little white house had been along and up a winding path, where in the spring the early wild flowers came out on sunny banks, and the first buds of the neighborhood were on Klein's own lilac-bushes.

  He had had a magnificent sense of independence those days, and of freedom.

  He voted religiously, and now and then in the evenings he had been the moderate member of a mild socialist group. Theoretically, he believed that no man should amass a fortune by the labor of others. Actually he felt himself well paid, a respected member of society, and a property owner.

  In the early morning, winter and summer, he emerged into the small side porch of his cottage and there threw over himself a pail of cold water from the well outside. Then he rubbed down, dressed in the open air behind the old awning hung there, took a dozen deep breaths and a cup of coffee, and was off for work. The addition of a bathroom, with running hot water, had made no change in his daily habits.

  He was very strict with Anna, and with the women who, one after another, kept house for him.

  "I'll have no men lounging around," was his first instruction on engaging them. And to Anna his solicitude took the form almost of espionage. The only young man he tolerated about the place was a distant relative. Rudolph Klein.

  On Sunday evenings Rudolph came in to supper. But even Rudolph found it hard to get a word with the girl alone.

  "What's eating him, anyhow," he demanded of Anna one Sunday evening, when by the accident of a neighbor calling old Herman to the gate, he had the chance of a word.

  "He knows a lot about you fellows," Anna had said. "And the more he knows the less he trusts you. I don't wonder."

  "He hasn't anything on me."

  But Anna had come to the limit of her patience with her father at last.