The Best of Mary Roberts Rinehart

by Mary Roberts Rinehart

  Mr. Harcourt picked me out of my bush and we darted into the shrubbery.

  I have only a sketchy recollection of what followed. The rain beat on my face and my bare shoulders; the drive was a river. Once some one came to the entry door of the Hall behind us and waved a lamp, which the wind promptly extinguished. And on either side of me, in gloomy silence, ploughed the Prime Minister and Mr. Harcourt. Once Sir George left the drive, seeking bet ter walking on the turf, and came back after a mo ment with a brief statement that he had collided with a tree and had loosened a tooth. And twice Mr. Harcourt touched my elbow to guide me and I shook him off.

  He got into the gatekeeper's house through a window and opened the door for us. The interior was desolate enough, but it was at least dry. Mr. Harcourt produced a candle from his pocket, evidently from the room we had left, and it revealed two packing-cases, one small keg, and a collection of straw and rubbish in a corner. It also showed that Sir George had struck his nose and that it was bleeding profusely. I got a glimpse, too, of the wreck of my gown, and that and the blood together brought my responsibility for the whole thing home to me. I sat down on the keg and buried my face in my hands.

  When I looked up again a fire was crackling on the hearth and Sir George's boots were steaming in front of it. Mr. Harcourt had taken off his coat and was drying it. The smell of wet woollen cloth filled the air. He smiled at me over his shoulder.

  "This is for you," he said cheerfully. "Go into the back room and strip off that draggled gown and put this on."

  "I'm very well as I am," I said, and shivered.

  "Nonsense!" He came over to me and held out the coat. "That white satin is saturated. Don't be idiotic. This is certainly no time to stand on propriety."

  "I--I can't," I stammered.

  "Now, look here," he persisted. "I've got sisters lots of 'em, and Sir George is a grandfather. Put this on over your petticoat."

  Now, of course, anybody who knows anything about clothing today knows that petticoats don't belong with it. And even if they did, there were about eighty-seven hooks on the back of my gown, and only four that I could reach.

  "I am very comfortable as I am," I said stubbornly. "Please don't bother about me. I sha'n't make any change."

  He flung the coat angrily on to a box and turned his back squarely on me. It was maddening to have him think me some prudish little schoolgirl who would say limbs for legs, and who, after showing them for years in very short frocks, suddenly puts on her first long gown and is for denying she has any limbs--that is, legs. Sir George sneezed and drew a long, shuddering breath.

  "Terrible!" he said. "This is what comes of admitting women to the universities. Would any man in his senses believe that such a situation as this is real?'

  Nobody answered. Sir George was inspecting the inner room. I had gone to the window, and after a moment Mr. Harcourt joined me there. The thunder, which had ceased, was commencing again, and a blue-white flash threw out the landscape. It showed a long stretch of country road, running with mad little streams of yellow water, the drive curving past and flowing a dignified tributary into the lane, and it revealed something else. The lodge gates were there, opened back against the shrubbery! Under cover of the noise I turned to my companion.

  "Who are you?" I demanded under my breath. "You are not Basil Harcourt! You had no more right to be in that house than I had."

  "Save the right of sanctuary," he returned, looking at me oddly. "I got in through the chapel. And what does it matter, anyhow? It is enough for me just now that you are you and I am I."

  "You are flippant," I retorted cautiously. "Why did you say you had had the gates taken down when they are still there, opened against the hedge?"

  "Jove! That's a piece of luck," he exclaimed, without troubling to explain. "Why in the world did you say there were no gates?"

  He opened the door and ran out into the storm. A moment later I saw him testing the hinges, and I flung away from the window. Before he came back he had closed the outer shutters.

  Sir George had taken off his mackintosh and cap and, with a candle and a deck of cards, was preparing for solitaire on the top of the keg. The candle-light struck full on his face and showed his sandy moustache hanging limp and dejected, while little beads of moisture showed between the thin hair brushed across the top of his head. He was more nervous than he would have had us know, and the hands very fine, long-fingered hands they were that laid out the cards were trembling noticeably. At every sound he raised his head and stared at the door, and his arched, patrician nose would have been pinched if it had not been so swollen. I shuddered with remorse every time I looked at him. His right trouser was torn to ribbons from the knee down, and soon after our arrival he had disappeared into the rear room and emerged, bandaged with his spare handkerchiefs, and limping.

  We sat there for two hours. Sir George pretending to play, I huddled on a box by the fire, and The Unknown across the hearth from me, stretched on the floor, and leaning on his elbows and whistling softly. Sometimes he looked at me and sometimes at the fire, and once or twice I found him watching Sir George with a curiously meditative gaze. I could not help wondering if he was thinking what a chance for ransom there 7 would be if he could hold the two of us prisoner for a time.

  (For story purposes, it is a pity he did not. What a novel it would have made! The whole House of Lords out searching for us, and the Premier and my self living in a cave, with our captor sitting at the entrance with a gun across his knees!)

  After two hours of cards and steaming before the fire Sir George became drowsy. He yawned prodigiously, apologised to me thickly, and when the candle finally burned out he put his head on top of the keg and was asleep immediately. Not a sound had come from the Hall; everything was quiet except for a drip from the leaking roof, that splashed in a corner.

  Then:

  "If you please," I said in a small voice, "may I have my necklace now?"

  The Unknown turned quickly and glanced at Sir George, but he was noisily asleep. Then he edged over along the hearth until he was almost at my feet.

  "I was going to advertise them," he said in an undertone. "Possibly you recall my fair offer. Some poor woman is probably having a serious illness at this minute because her pearls have been --er--appropriated."

  "I don't feel a particle ill," I said stubbornly, "but I want them back. They belong to me. What are you going to do with them?"

  "'Melt them down and sell them,'" he quoted easily. "Or dissolve them in vinegar and swallow them. That's historic, anyhow."

  "There is a better Biblical precedent," I said and stopped, furious at myself. He was an ordinary highwayman masquerading as a gentleman, and for all I knew he might at that very minute have had the stolen Romney sewed around him like a cuirass. (He did hold himself very erect, now I thought of it.) And I had allowed his debonair manner to carry me away.

  But he did not give me a chance to snub him, for the next moment he was speaking gravely in an undertone and looking directly in my eyes. I will say he had a most misleadingly frank expression.

  "I will give them to you when you are safely back at Ivry," he said, "and not one moment before. I am sure Sir George would agree with me that they are too valuable for a young girl to wear under the circumstances. I will give you my word, if it is worth anything to you."

  "And if I will not take it?'

  "It would make no difference," he replied imperturbably, and leaned over to replenish the fire.

  Sir George slept on noisily; the drip in the corner had become a splash; my white satin slippers before the fire were drying into limp shapelessness. The man in tweeds on the floor raised himself into a sitting position and listened, his hands clasped about his knees.

  (Knickers with a man are like decolletage with a woman, only to be worn by the elect. Mother wishes me to cut this out, because she says this story is to be read by young persons. But the modern young person is really awfully sophisticated. Sometimes I feel as though mother is a mere
child, compared to me.)

  After a time the man in knickers who was one of the elect dropped on his elbow and began to talk again, looking into the fire.

  "Rum affair altogether, isn't it?" he said chattily. "Nature having a spasm outside, half a dozen lady votaries of the vote having spasms up at the house, the er Premier of Great Britain, on whose possessions the sun never sets, having apoplexy on a packing-case. And out of all this chaos a moment like this: you and I alone here, where I could reach out my hand and touch you if I dared--" he supplemented as I straightened. "You see, you have gone to my head. You are the most beautiful person I have ever seen."

  One could tell that, however low he had fallen, he had been properly raised although I think fire light is always becoming, especially with a white gown.

  Here Sir George began to rouse. He coughed huskily, sat up and looked around him in a daze, and then stretched out his legs and groaned.

  "Gad!" he said with a deep breath, "I hoped I had dreamed it." He looked at us both as if to establish our reality, and, reaching over, began to struggle into his shrunken boots.

  "If the storm has subsided," he said, stamping his foot in an endeavour to get his heel down where it belonged, "I think I shall be going on. This place is damp."

  "Not half so damp as the road," objected the other man. "It's a matter of miles, you know; and besides, I imagine we are going to have another storm. Listen!"

  The distant rumble of thunder had been coming closer to us. The rain had almost stopped, but, as Sir George opened the door, over the ominous stillness flashed a terrific fork of lightning, followed in stantly by a crash near at hand. A blue-white streak ran down the bole of a tree across the road. The thunder that followed echoed and re-echoed above our heads as we faced each other in the firelight. Sir George had closed the door precipitately, but, as the noise died away, he jammed his cap over his ears and resolutely prepared for flight.

  Argument had no effect on him. Whatever had caused his sudden change of mind, he was determined to leave at once. I was panic-stricken. He had been my patent of respectability so far in what was, to say the least, an unconventional situation. But to have him go like that and leave me there with an ordinary thief, even if he did look like a Greek god except his nose, which was modern (I do not like those old Greek noses, anyhow; they begin so far up on the forehead) to have him leave me like that was dreadful.

  However, there came an interruption just then, a splashing of horses' feet along the road and the sound of men's voices. They halted just outside the gates and we caught a word here and there: "Gresham Place," and "Automobile," and one sentence that stuck in my mind and brought me a picture of myself in a hideous prison cap, sewing bags. It was: "Half a dozen are watching Ivry Manor House!"

  I think Sir George realised when I did that it was a searching party for him; he had been leaning against the door, listening. Suddenly he bolted for the keg where he had left his mackintosh, and picked it up. But The Unknown was before him. He quickly locked the outer door and stood with his back against it.

  "I cannot allow you to go out, sir," he said very politely. "Whether those men are searching for you or are hunting for for some one else, you and I have a duty to perform: we must protect this young lady. In fact, and however strongly you may feel against it, I hope, sir, you will see the wisdom of shielding all the women concerned from publicity. And in this case it is not chivalry; it is self-protection." Sir George wavered. "You can see what the papers will make of it, sir. That the plot has failed would not check the general excitement; the situation is ludicrous instead of serious. That is the dif ference."

  Sir George sat down heavily and groaned. Per haps I imagined it, but he looked older, leaner, paler than he had done earlier in the evening.

  "I have this plan to offer," pursued The Un known. "We will get the machine from Bagsby in an hour" he consulted a handsome watch; I wondered whose it had been "and I will take you wherever you wish; to Gresham Place, or, if you will feel safer back in town, to the express for London. You can get it at East Newbury. If if the young lady wishes, we will drop her at Ivry on the way."

  Sir George considered and decided to go back to town. He would not feel safe, after this, in the country, and he could wire ahead and be met by I think he said he intended to call out the reserves. I may be wrong about this, but he gave me the impression that he would never walk out again without a detachment of the Royal Guard.

  And so we settled down again to wait for Bagsby that is, we settled down apparently; actually, I was busy devising a method to get rid of our high wayman and to secure my necklace again. For any one could tell that he only meant to get Daphne's motor to escape in and that he would probably dump Sir George and me in a ditch, or cut our throats, or sandbag us, and make his escape with everything valuable on us, including my slipper buckles which were platinum and had my monogram on in dia monds.

  If I could only have warned Sir George! But there The Unknown sat between us, with his eyes on both of us at once (if this is possible in anything but a fish), asking me how I liked England and what I thought of wealthy American girls marrying impoverished foreigners; and did I know that in the Canadian Northwest Mounted Police the word "home" was practically taboo! And I said I abominated England and that I couldn't understand any kind of an American girl marrying any Englishman, and where was Canada? He gave up at that and, producing a gold cigarette-case with somebody's initials on it, smoked moodily for some time.

  Then I had my second inspiration of the evening. I began to get hungry, and by stages I grew weak, dizzy and, finally, almost fainting. Sir George was very mildly interested, but The Unknown was flatteringly so. However, when I said faintly that I had had no dinner, and that I was sure I should swoon if I did not have the hamper brought from the Hall at once, he cooled somewhat.

  "You would better try to stick it out," he urged. "You haven't had any dinner: I haven't had food for well, for some time. There's a tap in the back room: let me bring you a drink of water. You have no idea, until you have to, how long you can go on water."

  "I am not a boat," I said scornfully. And after a time, when he proved shockingly distrustful of me and most unchivalrous, he agreed grudgingly to try to steal the hamper from the house.

  "But remember," he said, turning up his coat col lar, "if anything goes wrong you will have the whole shooting-match down on us here." (Item: was he American, after all? An Englishman would have said "the whole bally crowd.")

  I think he wanted to say something to me before he left, but having gained my point I turned my back on him. He went, finally, but he stood for a moment on the lodge porch, looking back at me. I pretended not to know it.

  When I heard him splashing up the drive I turned on Sir George like a hurricane. It took him some time to understand; I had to go over the part about the pearls several times, and when he finally made out that they were very valuable he still could not understand how I came to throw them at the other man. Then I told him about the theft of the picture, and that we had the thief in our grasp if we could get him. Sir George's face was very queer. When he got it all finally, however, he wakened up at once. He asked me what the collar was worth, and said young English girls did not wear such costly jewels, but that he would see that they were recovered. And the plan was simple enough. The great est things in life are simple. I said to him that I could easily see how he became Premier.

  The shutters of the inner room were bolted on the outside. We would coax our gentleman in there and lock the door. He would be there, as I said with enthusiasm to Sir George, like a ripe apple on a tree, ready for picking at any time.

  It worked to a charm, although the result was not what, we had expected. Very far from it, indeed. The Unknown, which is shorter than saying "The Man in Tweeds" or "The Sociable Highwayman," came back in about half an hour, with his cap missing and mud up to his knees.

  "Jove," he said, shaking himself, "this is Paradise compared to that up there. The lower floor is a wreck:
two of them are asleep, three of them are standing on chairs and talking at once, and a tall, fair woman in green satin is having ladylike hysterics by herself in a corner."

  "The tall, fair woman in green," I said coldly, "is Mrs. Harcourt-Standish. It is strange you did not know her."

  He whistled and then looked at me with one of his slow, boyish smiles.

  "Well, as to that," he observed, opening the hamper, "I--you see, I never saw her in hysterics. It's supposed to make a great difference."

  "We need a box from the other room," I said, inwardly trembling. "We have used one for fire wood." We had, purposely, and it threatened to fire the chimney. I don't mind saying that I had a horrid guilty feeling when I said it, like Delilah cutting Samson's hair, or the place where Blanche Bates took the card out of her stocking in The Girl of the Golden West. The Unknown glanced at the box on the hearth, at the Prime Minister, who was getting out the salad, and at me, feeling as I have just said. Then he turned on his heel, whistling softly, and went into the inner room.

  Sir George dropped the salad on the instant, with a crash, and had the door slammed and locked immediately. His sandy moustache stood out quite straight, and he looked very military (or is it militant?). There was silence from the inner room, and then my gentleman found the door and rattled the crazy latch.

  "The lock has sprung in some way," he said politely from the other side. "I will have to trouble you to open it."

  The band around my throat began to loosen, and, anyhow, if he had been little and ugly I would not have cared. Why should I condone a crime because Nature had given him a handsome body to hold an ignoble spirit? I went over to the door and called through it triumphantly: