The Best of Mary Roberts Rinehart

by Mary Roberts Rinehart

  That was how it happened that Bettina Bailey, sitting on Eliza Bailey's front piazza, decked out in chintz cushions,--the piazza, of course,--saw a dusty machine come up the drive and stop with a flourish at the steps. And from it alight, not one chaperon, but three.

  After her first gasp Bettina was game. She was a pretty girl in a white dress and bore no traces in her face of any stern religious proclivities.

  "I didn't know--" she said, staring from one to the other of us. "Mother said--that is--won't you go right upstairs and have some tea and lie down?" She had hardly taken her eyes from Tish, who had lifted the engine hood and was poking at the carbureter with a hairpin.

  "No, thanks," said Tish briskly. "I'll just go around to the garage and oil up while I'm dirty. I've got a short circuit somewhere. Aggie, you and Lizzie get the trunk off."

  Bettina stood by while we unbuckled and lifted down our traveling trunk. She did not speak a word, beyond asking if we wouldn't wait until the gardener came. On Tish's saying she had no time to wait, because she wanted to put kerosene in the cylinders before the engine cooled, Bettina lapsed into silence and stood by watching us.

  Bettina took us upstairs. She had put Drummond's "Natural Law in the Spiritual World" on my table and a couch was ready with pillows and a knitted slumber robe. Very gently she helped us out of our veils and dusters and closed the windows for fear of drafts.

  "Dear mother is so reckless of drafts," she remarked. "Are you sure you won't have tea?"

  "We had some blackberry cordial with us," Aggie said, "and we all had a little on the way. We had to change a tire and it made us thirsty."

  "Change a tire!"

  Aggie had taken off her bonnet and was pinning on the small lace cap she wears, away from home, to hide where her hair is growing thin. In her cap Aggie is a sweet-faced woman of almost fifty, rather ethereal. She pinned on her cap and pulled her crimps down over her forehead.

  "Yes," she observed. "A bridge went down with us and one of the nails spoiled a new tire. I told Miss Carberry the bridge was unsafe, but she thought, by taking it very fast--"

  Bettina went over to Aggie and clutched her arm. "Do you mean to say," she quavered, "that you three women went through a bridge--"

  "It was a small bridge," I put in, to relieve her mind; "and only a foot or two of water below. If only the man had not been so disagreeable--"

  "Oh," she said, relieved, "you had a man with you!"

  "We never take a man with us," Aggie said with dignity. "This one was fishing under the bridge and he was most ungentlemanly. Quite refused to help, and tried to get the license number so he could sue us."

  "Sue you!"

  "He claimed his arm was broken, but I distinctly saw him move it." Aggie, having adjusted her cap, was looking at it in the mirror. "But dear Tish thinks of everything. She had taken off the license plates."

  Bettina had gone really pale. She seemed at a loss, and impatient at herself for being so. "You--you won't have tea?" she asked.

  "No, thank you."

  "Would you--perhaps you would prefer whiskey and soda."

  Aggie turned on her a reproachful eye. "My dear girl," she said, "with the exception of a little home-made wine used medicinally we drink nothing. I am the secretary of the Woman's Prohibition Party."

  Bettina left us shortly after that to arrange for putting up Letitia and Aggie. She gave them her mother's room, and whatever impulse she may have had to put the Presbyterian Psalter by the bed, she restrained it. By midnight Drummond's "Natural Law" had disappeared from my table and a novel had taken its place. But Bettina had not lost her air of bewilderment.

  That first evening was very quiet. A young man in white flannels called, and he and Letitia spent a delightful evening on the porch talking spark-plugs and carbureters. Bettina sat in a corner and looked at the moon. Spoken to, she replied in monosyllables in a carefully sweet tone. The young man's name was Jasper McCutcheon.

  It developed that Jasper owned an old racing-car which he kept in the Bailey garage, and he and Tish went out to look it over. They very politely asked us all to go along, but Bettina refusing, Aggie and I sat with her and looked at the moon.

  Aggie in her capacity as chaperon, or as one of an association of chaperons, used the opportunity to examine Bettina on the subject of Jasper.

  "He seems a nice boy," she remarked. Aggie's idea of a nice boy is one who in summer wears fresh flannels outside, in winter less conspicuously. "Does he live near?"

  "Next door," sweetly but coolly.

  "He is very good-looking."

  "Ears spoil him--too large."

  "Does he come around--er--often?"

  "Only two or three times a day. On Sunday, of course, we see more of him."

  Aggie looked at me in the moonlight. Clearly the young man from the next door needed watching. It was well we had come.

  "I suppose you like the same things?" she suggested. "Similar tastes and--er--all that?"

  Bettina stretched her arms over her head and yawned.

  "Not so you could notice it," she said coolly. "I can't thick of anything we agree on. He is an Episcopalian; I'm a Presbyterian. He approves of suffrage for women; I do not. He is a Republican; I'm a Progressive. He disapproves of large families; I approve of them, if people can afford them."

  Aggie sat straight up. "I hope you don't discuss that!" she exclaimed.

  Bettina smiled. "How nice to find that you are really just nice elderly ladies after all!" she said. "Of course we discuss it. Is it anything to be ashamed of?"

  "When I was a girl," I said tartly, "we married first and discussed those things afterward."

  "Of course you did, Aunt Lizzie," she said, smiling alluringly. She was the prettiest girl I think I have ever seen, and that night she was beautiful. "And you raised enormous families who religiously walked to church in their bare feet to save their shoes!"

  "I did nothing of the sort," I snapped.

  "It seems to me," Aggie put in gently, "that you make very little of love." Aggie was once engaged to be married to a young man named Wiggins, a roofer by trade, who was killed in the act of inspecting a tin gutter, on a rainy day. He slipped and fell over, breaking his neck as a result.

  Bettina smiled at Aggie. "Not at all," she said. "The day of blind love is gone, that's all--gone like the day of the chaperon."

  Neither of us cared to pursue this, and Tish at that moment appearing with Jasper, Aggie and I made a move toward bed. But Jasper not going, and none of us caring to leave him alone with Bettina, we sat down again.

  We sat until one o'clock.

  At the end of that time Jasper rose, and saying something about its being almost bedtime strolled off next door. Aggie was sound asleep in her chair and Tish was dozing. As for Bettina, she had said hardly a word after eleven o'clock.

  Aggie and Tish, as I have said, were occupying the same room. I went to sleep the moment I got into bed, and must have slept three or four hours when I was awakened by a shot. A moment later a dozen or more shots were fired in rapid succession and I sat bolt upright in bed. Across the street some one was raising a window, and a man called "What's the matter?" twice.

  There was no response and no further sound. Shaking in every limb, I found the light switch and looked at the time. It was four o'clock in the morning and quite dark.

  Some one was moving in the hall outside and whimpering. I opened the door hurriedly and Aggie half fell into the room.

  "Tish is murdered, Lizzie!" she said, and collapsed on the floor in a heap.

  "Nonsense!"

  "She's not in her room or in the house, and I heard shots!"

  Well, Aggie was right. Tish was not in her room. There was a sort of horrible stillness everywhere as we stood there clutching at each other and listening.

  "She's heard burglars downstairs and has gone down after them, and this is what has happened! Oh, Tish! brave Tish!" Aggie cried hysterically.

  And at that Bettina came in with her hair over h
er shoulders and asked us if we had heard anything. When we told her about Tish, she insisted on going downstairs, and with Aggie carrying her first-aid box and I carrying the blackberry cordial, we went down.

  The lower floor was quiet and empty. The man across the street had put down his window and gone back to bed, and everything was still. Bettina in her dressing-gown went out on the porch and turned on the light. Tish was not there, nor was there a body lying on the lawn.

  "It was back of the house by the garage," Bettina said. "If only Jasper--"

  And at that moment Jasper came into the circle of light. He had a Norfolk coat on over his pajamas and a pair of slippers, and he was running, calling over his shoulder to some one behind as he ran.

  "Watch the drive!" he yelled. "I saw him duck round the corner."

  We could hear other footsteps now and somebody panting near us. Aggie was sitting huddled in a porch chair, crying, and Bettina, in the hall, was trying to get down from the wall a Moorish knife that Eliza Bailey had picked up somewhere.

  "John!" we heard Jasper calling. "John! Quick! I've got him!"

  He was just at the corner of the porch. My heart stopped and then rushed on a thousand a minute. Then:--

  "Take your hands off me!" said Tish's voice.

  The next moment Tish came majestically into the circle of light and mounted the steps. Jasper, with his mouth open, stood below looking up, and a hired man in what looked like a bed quilt was behind in the shadow.

  Tish was completely dressed in her motoring clothes, even to her goggles. She looked neither to the right nor left, but stalked across the porch into the house and up the stairway. None of us moved until we heard the door of her room slam above.

  "Poor old dear!" said Bettina. "She's been walking in her sleep!"

  "But the shots!" gasped Aggie. "Some one was shooting at her!"

  Conscious now of his costume, Jasper had edged close to the veranda and stood in its shadow.

  "Walking in her sleep, of course!" he said heartily. "The trip to-day was too much for her. But think of her getting into that burglar-proof garage with her eyes shut--or do sleep-walkers have their eyes shut?--and actually cranking up my racer!"

  Aggie looked at me and I looked at Aggie.

  "Of course," Jasper went on, "there being no muffler on it, the racket wakened her as well as the neighborhood. And then the way we chased her!"

  "Poor old dear!" said Bettina again. "I'm going in to make her some tea."

  "I think," said Jasper, "that I need a bit of tea too. If you will put out the porch lights I'll come up and have some."

  But Aggie and I said nothing. We knew Tish never walked in her sleep. She had meant to try out Jasper's racing-car at dawn, forgetting that racers have no mufflers, and she had been, as one may say, hoist with her own petard--although I do not know what a petard is and have never been able to find out.

  We drank our tea, but Tish refused to have any or to reply to our knocks, preserving a sulky silence. Also she had locked Aggie out and I was compelled to let her sleep in my room.

  I was almost asleep when Aggie spoke:--

  "Did you think there was anything queer about the way that Jasper boy said good-night to Bettina?" she asked drowsily.

  "I didn't hear him say good-night."

  "That was it. He didn't. I think"--she yawned--"I think he kissed her."

  II

  Tish was down early to breakfast that morning and her manner forbade any mention of the night before. Aggie, however, noticed that she ate her cereal with her left hand and used her right arm only when absolutely necessary. Once before Tish had almost broken an arm cranking a car and had been driven to arnica compresses for a week; but this time we dared not suggest anything.

  Shortly after breakfast she came down to the porch where Aggie and I were knitting.

  "I've hurt my arm, Lizzie," she said. "I wish you'd come out and crank the car."

  "You'd better stay at home with an arm like that," I replied stiffly.

  "Very well, I'll crank it myself."

  "Where are you going?"

  "To the drug store for arnica."

  Bettina was not there, so I turned on Tish sharply. "I'll go, of course," I said; "but I'll not go without speaking my mind, Letitia Carberry. By and large, I've stood by you for twenty-five years, and now in the weakness of your age I'm not going to leave you. But I warn you, Tish, if you touch that racing-car again, I'll send for Charlie Sands."

  "I haven't any intention of touching it again," said Tish, meekly enough. "But I wish I could buy a second-hand racer cheap."

  "What for?" Aggie demanded.

  Tish looked at her with scorn. "To hold flowers on the dining-table," she snapped.

  It being necessary, of course, to leave a chaperon with Bettina, because of the Jasper person's habit of coming over at any hour of the day, we left Aggie with instructions to watch them both.

  Tish and I drove to the drug store together, and from there to a garage for gasoline. I have never learned to say "gas" for gasoline. It seems to me as absurd as if I were to say "but" for butter. Considering that Aggie was quite sulky at being left, it is absurd for her to assume an air of virtue over what followed that day. Aggie was only like a lot of people--good because she was not tempted; for it was at the garage that we met Mr. Ellis.

  We had stopped the engine and Tish was quarreling with the man about the price of gasoline when I saw him--a nice-looking young man in a black-and-white checked suit and a Panama hat. He came over and stood looking at Tish's machine.

  "Nice lines to that car," he said. "Built for speed, isn't she? What do you get out of her?"

  Tish heard him and turned. "Get out of her?" she said. "Bills mostly."

  "Well, that's the way with most of them," he remarked, looking steadily at Tish. "A machine's a rich man's toy. The only way to own one is to have it endowed like a university. But I meant speed. What can you make?"

  "Never had a chance to find out," Tish said grimly. "Between nervous women in the machine and constables outside I have the twelve-miles-an- hour habit. I'm going to exchange the speedometer for a vacuum bottle."

  He smiled. "I don't think you're fair to yourself. Mostly--if you'll forgive me--I can tell a woman's driving as far off as I can see the machine; but you are a very fine driver. The way you brought that car in here impressed me considerably."

  "She need not pretend she crawls along the road," I said with some sarcasm. "The bills she complains of are mostly fines for speeding."

  "No!" said the young man, delighted. "Good! I'm glad to hear it. So are mine!"

  After that we got along famously. He had his car there--a low gray thing that looked like an armored cruiser.

  "I'd like you ladies to try her," he said. "She can move, but she is as gentle as a lamb. A lady friend of mine once threaded a needle as an experiment while going sixty-five miles an hour."

  "In this car?"

  "In this car."

  Looking back, I do not recall just how the thing started. I believe Tish expressed a desire to see the car go, and Mr. Ellis said he couldn't let her out on the roads, but that the race-track at the fair-ground was open and if we cared to drive down there in Tish's car he would show us her paces, as he called it.

  From that to going to the race-track, and from that to Tish's getting in beside him on the mechanician's seat and going round once or twice, was natural. I refused; I didn't like the look of the thing.

  Tish came back with a cinder in her eye and full of enthusiasm. "It was magnificent, Lizzie," she said. "The only word for it is sublime. You see nothing. There is just the rush of the wind and the roar of the engine and a wonderful feeling of flying. Here! See if you can find this cinder."

  "Won't you try it, Miss--er--Lizzie?"

  "No, thanks," I replied. "I can get all the roar and rush of wind I want in front of an electric fan, and no danger."

  He stood by, looking out over the oval track while I took three cinders from Tish's eye
.

  "Great track!" he said. "It's a horse-track, of course, but it's in bully shape--the county fair is held there and these fellows make a big feature of their horse-races. I came up here to persuade them to hold an automobile meet, but they've got cold feet an the proposition."

  "What was the proposition?" asked Tish.

  "Well," he said, "it was something like this. I've been turning the trick all over the country and it works like a charm. The town's ahead in money and business, for an automobile race always brings a big crowd; the track owners make the gate money and the racing-cars get the prizes. Everybody's ahead. It's a clean sport too."

  "I don't approve of racing for money," Tish said decidedly.

  But Mr. Ellis shrugged his shoulders. "It's really hardly racing for money," he explained. "The prizes cover the expenses of the racing-cars, which are heavy naturally. The cars alone cost a young fortune."

  "I see," said Tish. "I hadn't thought of it in that light. Well, why didn't Morris Valley jump at the chance?"

  He hesitated a moment before he answered. "It was my fault really," he said. "They were willing enough to have the races, but it was a matter of money. I made them a proposition to duplicate whatever prize money they offered, and in return I was to have half the gate receipts and the betting privileges."

  Tish quite stiffened. "Clean sport!" she said sarcastically. "With betting privileges!"

  "You don't quite understand, dear lady," he explained. "Even in the cleanest sport we cannot prevent a man's having an opinion and backing it with his own money. What I intended to do was to regulate it. Regulate it."

  Tish was quite mollified. "Well, of course," she said, "I suppose since it must be, it is better--er,--regulated. But why haven't you succeeded?"

  "An unfortunate thing happened just as I had the deal about to close," he replied, and drew a long breath. "The town had raised twenty-five hundred. I was to duplicate the amount. But just at that time a--a young brother of mine in the West got into difficulties, and I--but why go into family matters? It would have been easy enough for me to pay my part of the purse out of my share of the gate money; but the committee demands cash on the table. I haven't got it."