The Best of Mary Roberts Rinehart

by Mary Roberts Rinehart

  Everybody talked at once for a few minutes. I gave up trying to understand and took a fresh tea-cake. Then I noticed Lady Willoughby. In all that militant body, whatever adventure was afoot, hers was the only craven soul. She was picking at her veil with nervous fingers.

  "I don't you think it is very radical?" she ventured when she could be heard. Here Mrs. Stafford objected to the word "radical," and she substituted "revolutionary." "I should not wish anything to happen to him. He was a great friend of Willoughby's mother while she lived."

  "That's all right among ourselves, Jane," Mrs. Stafford put in, "but if I recall the circumstances I wouldn't lay any emphasis on that. Anyhow, we don't intend to murder the man."

  Lady Jane was only partially reassured. "Of course, you wouldn't mean to," she retorted, "but there is no use asking me to forget what Poppy Stafford did to the president of the Board of Trade last summer."

  Poppy glanced up and shook her curls. "You are envious, Willieboy," she said, and put four lumps of sugar in her tea. "Willieboy" is Lady Willoughby's affectionate diminutive. They had started the tea all over again and I rather edged away from Poppy, but Daphne said afterward it was only a matter of a chair Poppy threw from the gallery at a public meeting, and that the man it fell on was only a secretary to the president of the Board of Trade.

  Finally, I made out what the plan was, and mentally during the rest of the meeting I was making bags in jail.

  They were going to abduct the Prime Minister!

  Lady Jane had stopped looking back and had put her hand to the plow. (This sounds well, so I won't cut It out; but wasn't it Lot's wife that looked back? And wasn't that before the day of plows? Or was it?) And it was she who finally settled the whole thing, for it seems that the P. M. had confided to Lord Willoughby that the town was so noisy with Suffragettes that he could not find a quiet spot for a rubber of bridge; that since the balloon incident he slept in his clothes with the windows shut and locked; and that since the latest kitchen-maid had turned out to be the Honourable Maude Twombley, who slipped handbills into his entrees and served warnings in his dessert, he was going to travel, incognito and alone, to his daughter's place, The Oaks, outside of West Newbury, and get a little sleep.

  And West Newbury was only four miles from the empty Harcourt Hall! In short, as Daphne succinctly put it: "Our Jonah was about to jump voluntarily overboard from the ship of state into the whaleboned jaws of the Suffragette whale."

  Everybody went mad at that point, but as they grew excited I got cold. It began with my toes and went all over me.

  Ernestine Sutcliffe stood on one of Daphne's tulip-wood and marquetry chairs and made a speech, gesticulating with her cup and dripping tea on me. And then somebody asked me to stand up and say what I thought. (I have never really spoken in public, but I always second the motions in a little club I belong to at home. It is a current-events club so much easier to get the news that way than to read the newspaper.)

  So I got up and made a short speech. I said: "I am only a feeble voice in this clamour of outraged womanhood against the oppressor, Man. I believe in the franchise for women, the ballot instead of the ballet. But at home, in America, when we want to take a bath we don't jump off the Brooklyn Bridge into the East River to do it."

  Then I sat down. Daphne was raging.

  "You are exceedingly vulgar," she said, "but since you insist on that figure of speech, you in America have waited a long time for the bath, and if you continue your present methods you won't get it before you need it."

  II

  Now that they had thought of it, they were all frantic for fear Mrs. Cobden-Fitzjames and the Woman's Liberty League might think of it, too, kidnap the Prime Minister, and leave us a miserable president of the Local Government Board or a wretched under-secretary of something or other.

  The plan we evolved before the meeting broke up was to send a wire to Mrs. Gresham, the Premier's daughter, that he had been delayed, and to meet a later train. Then, Daphne's motor would meet the proper train he was to arrive somewhere between seven and eight in the evening carry his Impressiveness to Harcourt Hall and deliver him into the hands of the enemy. As Violet Harcourt-Standish voiced it: the motor gone, the railway miles away, what can he do? He will keep awake, because he will have slept in the train going down, and we can give him a cold supper. Nothing heavy to make him drowsy. Perhaps it would be better not to give him anything. (Hear! Hear!) Then, six speeches, each an hour long. At the end of that time we can promise him something to eat and a machine to take him to West Newbury on one condition. Every one looked up. "He must sign an indorsement of Suffrage for Women." (Loud applause.)

  "Why not have a table laid," I suggested, "and show it to him? Let him smell it, so to speak. Visualise your temptation. You know, 'And the devil-'"

  "This is the Prime Minister, Madge," Daphne broke in shortly, "and you are not happy in your Scriptural references."

  Things went along with suspicious smoothness. Daphne really took the onus of the whole thing, and, of course, I helped her.

  We all got new clothes, for everybody knows that if you can attract a man's eye you can get and maybe hold his ear. And Daphne wrote a fresh speech, one she had thought out in jail. It began, "Words! Words!! Words!!!" She wrote a poem, too, called the Song of the Vote, with the meter of the Song of a Shirt, and she wanted me to recite it, but even before I read it I refused.

  The gown Mother had ordered for me at Paqum's on her way to the Riviera came just in time, a nice white thing over silver, with a square-cut neck and bits of sleeves made of gauze and silver fringe. Daphne got a pink velvet, although she is stout and inclined to be florid. She had jet butterflies embroidered over it, a flight of them climbing up one side of her skirt and crawling to the opposite shoulder, so that if one stood off at a distance she had a curiously diagonal appearance, as if she had listed heavily to one side.

  By hurrying we got to Ivry on Thursday evening, and I was in a blue funk. Daphne was militantly cheerful, and, in the drawing-room after dinner, she put the finishing touches to her speech. It was warm and rainy, and I wandered aimlessly around, looking at hideous English photographs and wondering if picking oakum in an English jail was worse than making bags and if they could arrest me, after all. Could they touch an American citizen? (But was I an American citizen? Perhaps I should have been naturalised, or something of that kind!) And I thought of Mother at Florence, in the villa on the Via Michelangelo Mother, who classes Suffragists with Anti-Vaccinationists and Theosophists.

  I would have gone up to bed, but that meant a candle and queer, shaky shadows on the wall; so I stayed with Daphne and looked at the picture of a young man in a uniform.^

  "Basil Harcourt," Daphne said absently, with a pen in her mouth, when I asked about it. "Taken years ago before he became an ass. How do you spell 'Supererogation?"

  "I haven't an idea," I admitted. "I don't even know what it means. I always confuse it with 'eleemosynary'." Daphne grunted. "Do you mean that this is Violet's husband?"

  "It was her first. Don't ask me about him: he always gives me indigestion. The man's mad! He stood right in this room, where he had eaten my ginger-cakes all his life and where he came to show me his first Eton collar and long trousers, and told me that he expected The Cause for his wife to be himself, and if she would rather raise hell for women than a family of children she would have to choose at once. And Violet stood just where you are, Madge, and retorted that maternity was not a Cause, and that any hen in the barnyard could raise a family.

  "'I suppose you want to crow,' Basil said furiously, and slammed out. He went to Canada very soon after."

  "Then perhaps he won't like our using his house for such a purpose. If he isn't in sympathy--"

  "Twaddle," Daphne remarked, poising her pen to go on. "In the first place, it isn't a house it's a rattletrap; and in the second place, he won't know a thing about it."

  It was all very tragic. I was thinking of them when I went out on the terrace in Daphne's
mackintosh. The air was damp and sticky, but it was bet ter than Daphne's conversation. I stood in the fountain court, leaning against a column and listening to the spray as it blew over on to the caladium leaves.

  I am not sure just when I saw the figure. First it was part of the gloom, a deeper shadow in the misty garden. I saw it, so to speak, out of the tail of my eye. When I looked directly there was nothing there. Finally, I called softly over my shoulder to Daphne, but she did not hear. Instead, the shadow disengaged itself, moved forward and resolved into Bagsby, Daphne's chauffeur.

  "I wasn't sure at first that you saw me, Miss," he said, touching his cap. "It's my turn until midnight; Clarkson 'as it until three, and the gardener until daylight."

  "Good gracious!" I gasped. "Do you mean you are guarding the house?"

  "Perhaps it's more what you would call surveil lance," he said cautiously, "the picture gallery being over your head, Miss, and an easy job from the conservatory roof. We 'aven't told Miss Wyndham, yet, Miss, but the Wimberley Romney was stolen from the Towers last night, Miss, and the whole countryside is up."

  "The Romney?" I inquired. "Do you mean a painting"?"

  "Yes, Miss," he said patiently. "Cut out of its frame, and worth twenty thousand pounds! By a gentlemanly-looking chap a tourist by appear ances, with a bicycle, in tweeds and knickers, Miss."

  Whether the bicycle or the tourist wore tweeds and knickers was not entirely clear. Bagsby was saying that the thief was supposed to be hiding on the moor when Daphne came out, and he disappeared.

  Poppy Stafford and Ernestine came unexpectedly late that night after I had gone to bed. I was in my first sleep and dreaming that Poppy was braining Bagsby with a gilt- framed painting, and that he was shouting "Votes for Women" instead of " 'elp!" when somebody knocked at my door. It turned out to be Poppy, and she said she thought there was a bat in her room, and as she was quite pallid with fright I let her get into my bed. I was full of my dream and I wanted to ask her some particulars about the man she had brained the summer before. But she put her head under the sheet, and as soon as she stopped trembling she went to sleep.

  Daphne called me early and we went over to the Hall to take a look around. As Daphne said, it would be night and the grounds would not matter, but we would have to uncover some of the furniture. And as we could not let the servants know, we had to do it ourselves. We took a brush and pan, and tore up a linen sheet to dust with. Bagsby, who had been bribed, and suspected what he wasn't told, got the brush and pan, and later he showed us a pail and a piece of soap in the tonneau.

  The place was dreadful. No doubt the park had been lovely, but it was overshadowed and over grown. The hedges were untrimmed; paths began, wandered around and died in a mess of under growth; and the terrace had lost an end in a wilder ness where a garden-house was falling to decay. The fading outlines of the kitchen garden seemed to shout aloud of lost domesticity, and over every thing lay a sodden layer of the previous autumn's leaves. (For fear I am accused of plagiarism, the sentence about the kitchen garden is not original. Madge.)

  Daphne had got a key somewhere, and inside it was worse. Coverings over the pictures and furniture, six years' dust everywhere, and a smell of mould like a crypt of one of the Continental cathedrals, only not so ancestor-y. While we were taking off the covers, with Bagsby's help, Daphne alternately sang and coughed in the dust.

  "Why aren't you more cheerful?" she demanded. "It will be a red-letter day for The Cause. When I think of Mabel Fitzjames I almost weep!"

  "I think it must be because I am not used to it," I said meekly. "You see, I come from a Republican country and Democratic, too, of course and we don't have any Prime Ministers to steal. One has to grow accustomed to things like this gradually, Daffie, or be born to them. And then I lay awake most of last night, wondering what would happen if he didn't--er--see the joke, you know."

  Daphne jerked a cover from a moth-eaten sofa and sneezed promptly in the dust.

  "Joke!" she repeated when she could speak. "No, I don't think he will see the joke. In fact, I don't believe he will think there is any joke to see. If I know anything, he is going to be wild. He's going to tear his hair and throw the vases off the mantel. He's going to use language that you never heard--at least, I hope not."

  It was then that I realised that I was not, heart and soul, a Suffragist. If I had only had the courage to have spoken up then, to have told her that I didn't feel The Cause the way I ought to, and that I hoped to get married and have dozens of children, and that, anyhow, I had a headache and I thought I ought to go on to Italy and meet Mother! But, instead, I followed her around like a sheep, tacking up cards with Suffrage mottoes on them all over the drawing-room, and stretching a long canvas banner in the hall across the back of a great Gothic hallseat, with "Votes for Women" in red letters on it. Bagsby brushed out a sort of oasis in the middle of the drawing-room and a path to the door, and Daphne and I dusted seven chairs and a table. We had brought over a duplex lamp and some candles, and when we had put a cover on the table the middle of the room looked quite habitable. Then Bagsby brushed the leaves off the steps, and as Daphne pleasantly expressed it:

  Won't you step into my parlor?

  Said the spider to the fly.

  Mrs. Stafford, Violet and Lady Jane arrived that afternoon, after having waited to send the wire on which the conspiracy was hung. They put them selves into negligees and the hands of their maids at once, and were still dressing when Ernestine and I, the advance guard, started with the hamper of cold supper at half after six. Things went wrong from that moment.

  Ernestine started to recite her speech to me as we went down the drive, found she had forgotten every thing but the first sentence, which began, like The Walrus and the Carpenter, "The time has come" and had to go back for the manuscript.

  We had to leave her for the second trip. Bagsby, who was in the conspiracy to the extent of five pounds, took me over alone and lighted the duplex lamp. He cut the telephone wire, also, by Daphne's order, before he left. We were not leaving anything to chance, although the thing had probably been disconnected for years.

  "I 'ardly like to leave you 'ere alone, Miss," he said when everything was ready. It was growing dark by that time and raining again. "Folks is always ready to give a hempty 'ouse a black eye, so to speak. The 'All ghost isn't what you might call authenticated, but the 'ouse isn't 'abitable for a lady alone, Miss."

  "I am not at all nervous," I quavered as he went down the steps. "Only please tell them to hurry, Bagsby."

  I called to him again as he climbed into the car.

  "Oh, Bagsby," I said nervously, "I--I suppose there is no danger of the picture thief being around."

  "Not for pictures, anyhow, Miss," he returned jocularly, and started off.

  Not for pictures, anyhow!

  I stood at the door and watched the tail light of the motor disappear down the drive, show for an instant a spark by the dilapidated lodge and then go out entirely.

  The second part of the story begins about here. The first part, as you have seen, has been purely political: the rest is romance, intermingled with crime. It is a little late to bring in a hero, but to have done it earlier would have spoiled the story, besides being distinctly untruthful. And I suppose a real novelist would have had the hero turn out to be the sunburned gentleman of some pages before; but the fact is he wasn't, and I never saw the sun burned gentleman again.

  Well, after Bagsby left, and I had examined the supper in the hamper and lighted more candles in the drawing-room, I began to wish we had not cut the telephone wire so soon. It was perfectly dark, and any one could step in through the windows open to air the house and cut my throat and take my string of pearls which Father had had matched for me and walk away calmly and be safe ten feet from the house in the undergrowth. And then Bagsby's ghost began to walk in my mind and I quite lost sight of the fact that it was not authenticated.

  It was blowing by that time, and every joint of the rheumatic old house crea
ked and groaned. The candles flickered and nearly went out, and the motto cards began to fly around the room as if carried by invisible fingers. One of them said, "You have been weighed and found wanting," and another one,

  "Beware!" They had all the effect of spirit mes sages on me. When I tried to close the windows I found them stuck in their dilapidated frames. I wanted desperately to hide in a corner behind one of the high-backed chairs, but it was dusty there and hardly dignified for a person who was abducting the Prime Minister. And then it would be ignominious to faint there and have some one peer over the back and say: "Why, here she is!"

  So, to divert my mind from ghosts and gentle men burglars who steal pictures, I began to investigate the hamper. There were pate and salad and sandwiches and quite a lot of stuff. But all at once I remembered that Daphne had given me the small silver and that I had laid it on my bed and left it there. And most of the provisions were too messy for a P. M. to manage with his fingers. Luckily, I remembered something Violet had said when Daphne gave me the silver.

  "Personally," she had announced, "I am not in favor of feeding him at all. Or else I would give him prison fare. But if you're going to be mushy over him you'll probably find some dishes and forks in a little closet over the dining-room fire-place. They were kept there to use if Basil ever went down for the shooting, and I dare say they are still there."

  So I picked up a candle and trembled through the darkness toward where the breakfast-room ought to be. I went through a square garden-hall which shook when I did, and the motor coat around my shoulders made the shadow of a pirate on the wall.

  I found the breakfast-room and the mantel cup board at last, and, putting the candle on a chair, stood for a moment listening, my hands clapped over my heart. I thought I heard some one walking over bare boards near by, but the sounds, whatever they were, ceased.

  The mantel cupboard was locked. I pulled and twisted at the knob to no purpose. Finally, I dug at the lock with a hairpin, and something gave; the door swung open with a squeak, and a moment later I had a flannel case in my hands and was taking out some silver forks. At that moment a plate in the cupboard fell forward with a slam, and something leaped on to the forks, which I dropped with a crash. The candle went out immediately and, gasping for breath, I backed against the cupboard and stood staring into the blackness of the room.