by Rufus King
“What is the trouble, Leila?”
“It’s that Miss Ashley.”
“Well?”
“Ella took her upstairs to her room when she left her box and bag. Ella stepped into that nook by the linen room and waited.”
“I must speak to Ella.”
“I wouldn’t. It’s a very good thing she did. Forewarned, I say, is forearmed.”
“Just what are you talking about, Leila?”
“I’m telling you what Ella saw from the nook. She saw Miss Ashley come out and open every door on the floor and look inside, including yours.”
“How odd.”
“You’ll say it’s odd all right when you hear what she said to Ella. Ella asked her if she was looking for something, and she told Ella she was wondering just which room had the view of the cemetery.”
Leila, on this note, again offered the pickerel and garden peas. Mrs. Giles declined. Her appetite, her happiness at Kent’s wire, both fled. Her most sable suspicions concerning Miss Ashley surely were confirmed. She was completely familiar with the proper literary term: Miss Ashley had been casing the house in preparation for her villainous campaign.
CHAPTER 6
Mr. Dugald Smith had not tarried at the bond sale.
He left it shortly on the heels of Mrs. Giles. He held the etching of the water-sipping stag carefully beneath one arm. Never, he considered, had the cost of a hundred-dollar bond been better spent. It was Mrs. Giles, far more than her artistic handicraft, who entranced him. He thought her a sketch and, of course, a complete push-over. How kind the gods were! At last to smile.
He hailed a taxicab and was driven to the end of Joroloman Street, from where he stepped out upon an unpaved quagmire leading to the first of a series of wretched shacks. The door of this nightmare opened into a boxlike room which was lighted by a hanging oil lantern.
He observed the figure of Fergus Wade sprawled on one of the room’s two cots.
As always, whenever he looked freshly at Fergus after an absence, the artist in Smith was momentarily enchanted. No youngster outside of the classic models of early Greece had the right to be so handsome or to have a physique so well shaped. Everything was right about the fellow, including the candor that seemed to lie in Fergus’ eyes, which were of a smoky blue and fringed with dark lashes.
There was only one thing about Fergus that gave Smith an occasional chilled tremor. He didn’t care much about looking at Fergus’ hands. They were strong hands, remarkably strong, and perfectly modeled, but Smith had seen them in action.
“The most astonishing luck,” Smith said.
He placed the etching on the room’s one table while Fergus stretched fluid limbs lazily on the cot, and lamplight caught the peach-down quality of his cheek.
“What’s that you got?” Fergus asked with tepid curiosity.
“An etching. A pleasantly minor atrocity involving a thirsty stag. I bought it at the bond sale.”
Fergus yawned again.
“Why?”
“For a sesame.”
“A what?”
“That is a name with which to open doors.”
Faint curiosity stirred in Fergus and then died. He held the greatest admiration for Smith, possibly for the very reason that he couldn’t understand him. This in no way irritated Fergus, for few things outside of the most elemental ever did. Muscles moved in slow quicksilver as he settled on one shoulder.
“I’m hungry.”
Smith drew a camp chair close to Fergus and sat down. His attitude was a good deal like that of a patient schoolteacher about to expound the simplest problem to a backward child.
“Later. This is important. We are moving to a house called River Rest right after dinner. It belongs to a Mrs. Giles. She is socially prominent and rich.”
“What’s she renting rooms for?”
“She has just been seized with a sharp attack of acute patriotism. She has a grandson in the Army.”
“A nut.”
“No, she is completely sane. Mrs. Giles and I have discovered a mutual interest in etching.”
This was something that Fergus could understand. His smile was swift. It was a shy smile, appealing and very young, but Smith averted his eyes from it. It, too, although in a lesser degree than Fergus’ hands, was something Smith couldn’t stomach.
Pathologically the smile would have fascinated him if only from the standpoint of a scientific observer studying an impersonal specimen. Living with Fergus brought it too close. Smith knew the change that at fortunately rare intervals could come over it. It was a slight change, merely a faint distortion, but it would alter the smile’s charm into a grimace which inspired both revulsion and horror.
“Are you being funny?” Fergus asked.
“I am not.”
“Then what’s the idea?”
“That etching on the table is the work of Mrs. Giles. It is an India proof pulled from her own press in her own studio which is in the attic of River Rest. I lingered by the etching at the exhibition on purpose, in the hope that its perpetrator would be magnetized toward it. I tell you that a setup so perfect might not happen again in a hundred years.”
“I’ll say it wouldn’t.”
“Remember this. You are to be my nephew, the son of my late sister.”
“You had no sister.”
Smith sighed.
“Nor, thank God, a nephew. It is the story we are to tell Mrs. Giles. We will call this sister of mine Alice. She and your father died, let us say, four years ago when their launch exploded on Long Island Sound.”
“While fishing?”
“This I must beg of you. Do not embroider. Permit a simple statement to rest in its simplicity. If Mrs. Giles should become intrigued into wanting further details I shall be by your side and will supply them. During dinner I will consider your background more accurately. Plain and worthy middle class. The backbone of America. Yes, something along those lines.”
Fergus slid muscular legs over the edge of the cot while a soft and unhealthy light crept into his eyes.
“Will I have to do it, Dugald?”
A cold wind struck Smith swiftly and brought on a shiver in the close, warm room. Where there was no wind. It was the question which he had dreaded, one which he always dreaded. But in this feral world in which he lived and exercised his special talents it was a problem which, no matter how distasteful, you could not always evade. There were situations in which the thing had to be done.
He hoped in this instance that such would not be the case. He had felt a genuine liking for Mrs. Giles. Not that that would ever stand in the way. The stupidity of the tenderer emotions never had.
“I think not,” he said. “I think everything will run perfectly straight.”
CHAPTER 7
Mrs. Giles, after a raspberry sherbet with angel food, left the table and went into the drawing room, prepared to receive.
At a quarter to eight she heard the hoofbeats of the roached black mare on the driveway, and Leila (still Delphic) shortly announced Mr. Dugald Smith and Mr. Fergus Wade.
“Ask Hopkins to take their luggage up to their rooms, Leila.”
Leila agreed to do this and then as she turned to leave announced confidentially: “He’s like a god.”
Mrs. Giles was considerably confused by this crypticism until Smith presented Fergus. Then it did, to a fashion, make sense. She caught Leila’s point and swiftly hoped there would be none of that sort of trouble there. Mild manias including the klepto were bad enough without it.
She herself felt agreeably stirred by Fergus, although certainly to no devotional extent, and was pleased with his youthful vigor and his shy, pleasant smile. She accepted his hand and thought his grip the cool, firm, line one, just right for his sturdy class of young American manhood.
“I feel pleasure in welcoming your uncle to River Rest, Mr. Wade. I have an equal one in welcoming you.”
“Glad to be here,” Fergus said. His altar-boy eyes looked candidly at her. �
�The house is nice, and you’re nice too.”
“Stunning!” Smith murmured as he inspected, with glazed eyes, the ragamuffin canvas with its guttered bread. “Surely a Bouguereau—or after him?”
Mrs. Giles and Fergus joined him.
“Papa said it was, Mr. Smith. A dealer whom he struck up an acquaintanceship with in the Academia di Belle Art in Venice advised him to buy it. The dealer told Papa it came from the Palazzo Pisani collection.” She eyed Leila coming in with a tray. “I thought perhaps a glass of Madeira and a biscuit before you went up to your rooms?”
They sat. They were outfitted with Madeira and biscuits, and Mrs. Giles was embarked on a harmless if thoroughly pointless anecdote of how Papa had himself selected the wine while visiting the Madeira Islands, when she realized that Leila was lingering. The girl was in a state of suspended animation near the doorway, and Mrs. Giles followed the direction of Leila’s gaze and brought up short against the face of Fergus.
She said sharply, “That will be all, Leila.”
Fergus, at reflective length, watched Leila go.
“The port of Funchal in Madeira,” he said, “isn’t bad. Not hot, of course. Just isn’t bad.”
“You have visited there, Mr. Wade?”
“We put in there once on the way to West Africa. I was on a Barber boat. Mess boy. Spent a night at the Golden Gate Hotel on the Avenue Goncalve Zarco. Your papa may remember it.”
“Papa is dead, Mr. Wade.”
“Well, I’m sorry to hear it. Anyhow, I took a two-bit bus ride to the Mount and also knocked out a pair of touts who wanted to show me the sights. I knocked them out because—”
“My nephew,” Smith interrupted smoothly, “sailed the seas for adventure. Ah, the eternal quest of youth! This was during that blessed period when we had finished with one war and the world was not as yet embarked on another. Fergus is heartbroken that the Navy will not accept his services. An operation. So he is doing his bit in defense work instead.”
An odd look came into Smith’s eyes, and an odder one into Fergus’. Oh dear! Mrs. Giles thought. I must somehow get rid of her. This is going to be much more difficult even than I imagined. She observed Effie Ashley’s sultry approach down the long living room. “Sinuous” alone was the word for it.
Miss Ashley came to a draped rest and summed up with a leisured inspection the several assets of Smith and Fergus.
“I want a key, Mrs. Giles,” she said. “I don’t care whether it’s for the front door or not, but I want to be able to go out and then get back in here again without pushing a bell. That fugitive from a midsummer night’s dream who let me in gives me the delirium with tremors.”
“I shall see that you have a key, Miss Ashley.”
“Thanks.”
“A fellow lodger?” Smith asked.
A lifetime of habit made Mrs. Giles’s introductions complete and formal, and the very act of going through with this familiar ritual restored the moment to a semblance of social balance.
“I see you wasted no more time than my nephew and I did in seeking this haven, Miss Ashley. It smacks of divine guidance, or is there a Sunday evening paper in town I’ve missed?”
“I heard you fixing things up with Mrs. Giles at the bond sale. It sounded good.” Miss Ashley glanced with undisturbed openness at Fergus. “It’s looking a good deal better too.”
Mrs. Giles was not entirely displeased with the boldness of this optical attack. For Kent’s sake and, to a lesser degree, for Leila’s, although she felt confident of being able to manage that. But was this fair? Not really. Even though young Mr. Wade was a stranger and obviously quite competent in taking care of himself, were not the production secrets of his factory as valuable to the enemy as were the military ones of Kent? Almost? But in any case wouldn’t Miss Ashley put Mr. Wade on ice until she had first drained Kent?
Her head was beginning to swim, and Mrs. Giles was grateful when Mr. Smith said that he and his nephew would retire and enjoy the first good night’s sleep they would have had since they had come to Bridgehaven.
“I will ask Ella to show you which your rooms are,” Mrs. Giles said. “And you, Miss Ashley? Will you be retiring too?”
Miss Ashley permitted amazement to settle on her face.
She said, “At half-past eight?”
CHAPTER 8
Mrs. Giles carried unease upstairs with her.
She took off the violet crepe and slipped on a wrapper, then went into her living room. No air came in through its open windows. She stood at one for a while looking out across the driveway off to the river. The summer shower had petered out, and a full moon patterned violet high lights on the shrubbery and grass.
Through the front windows of the drawing room just below came a scratching screech, then a full-toned blast of Johann Strauss’s “Wiener Blut” waltz. The volume decreased, and Mrs. Giles felt a surge of outraged anger that that woman had dared—but why not? It was in character, and character was something which so rarely could be changed. Having taken her in, why should she draw the line at Miss Ashley using the victrola? Certainly a guest could have. But even so Mrs. Giles remained shaken.
“Wiener Blut” was cut short in the middle. A heavenly arrangement of “Künsterleben” didn’t even get to the middle. “Voices of Spring” lived for six bars. Silence.
Mrs. Giles sighed deeply and selected a book on the downfall of the Roman Empire with the hope that it would make her sleepy enough to take her mind off things. It didn’t. The only historical work which had ever jounced her had dealt with Napoleon, and Mrs. Giles had been horrified on discovering that Napoleon wasn’t all he was cracked up to be.
She read with admirable determination for two hours, until the clock struck eleven, but persistently in her thoughts was an awareness of how subtly and yet how decisively the basic atmosphere of her house had changed.
It felt no longer like her house.
In its silence, in their several rooms, were the three strangers, and all of them had keys. There were plenty of keys, for the family had been large and Papa had been completely broad-minded about letting every member have one, his theory being that locks were no bars to any sprouting of wild oats: his own sowings presumably having taught him this.
The impressionable stillness was disturbing, more so even than had been Miss Ashley’s quickly disgusted rendezvous with the recordings. It was a blessing she hadn’t come upon Kent’s private stock. Mrs. Giles could stand them when Kent played them, because anything that Kent did was all right, but she was sure that if Miss Ashley had done so—especially that one with the hot licks—her nerves would have snapped.
What, now, were the strangers about? Conjectures obsessed her. Mr. Smith she felt sure of. Bed and sleep would have claimed him. But of his sturdy handsome nephew and that seductive agent—a myriad of distressing surmises flitted through the heavy night air with the persistency of gnats.
Tell me (Mrs. Giles could almost hear Miss Ashley’s husky voice drifted at Fergus through clouds of that reeking perfume), how many gyroscopes came off the assembly line last week? Or some such pertinent question cunningly framed for the later delight and comfort of the Axis.
She shut the book, its secondary worthiness as a soporific having failed. She turned the lights out in the living room and in the bedroom and went to bed. Curious how that sensing, that feeling of Kent’s nearness persisted. He couldn’t be close, of course. The wire had been sent from Washington.
What was he like now? Would the terrible hours and months of active combat have changed him? Stamped his brash, fine youth with some imprint of bestial iron? She thought not. She prayed not. His rare letters had been increasingly unintelligible in part, with a confusing new vocabulary that housed such indigestible pearls as knuckleheads, gizmos, pogie bait, boon dockers, and gloms.
A terrible suspicion seized Mrs. Giles that Miss Ashley, instead of being bewildered, would know exactly what Kent meant. Surely such linguistics must enter in the curriculum of Gestapo school
s.
Scuffle?
Mrs. Giles held her breath. A scuffle was what it had sounded like: outside on the graveled driveway. She got out of bed and put on her wrapper and slippers. She did not turn on a light but hurried to a window and looked down. She could see nothing and the night was quiet again, but she went into the living room to try the view from there.
Clearly it struck her, clear in the moonlight, like ice in swift congealment around her heart: Kent’s rangy, beloved figure standing down there on the driveway, and with him, with her face turned up to him and the moonlight exposing the—yes, the passionate earnestness of her expression—was Miss Ashley.
Mrs. Giles closed her eyes and gripped the back of a chair for support. Rage filled her more than fear as the scuffle sound recurred to her. The most elementary sort of common sense tried to reassure her that the tableau with its implications of intimacy was too coincidental (and far too sudden) to be possible, even for the seductive machinations of a Miss Ashley. They couldn’t have known one another (optical testimony shouted that they did) previously… Mrs. Giles took another look.
It was worse. Miss Ashley’s face was still turned up toward Kent’s, and her voice, although whispering, was able from its very intensity to reach Mrs. Giles’s ears.
“We must. I insist!”
Mrs. Giles no longer waited. At no matter what cost to Kent’s opinion of her it was time for the personal touch. She felt her way through darkness along the familiar hall and started downstairs. Halfway there was a turning accented by an ornate post on which stood a statue in bronze of winged Mercury poised on one tiptoe for flight. Mrs. Giles waited until the smacking sound of it hitting the hall floor subsided.
She went on down. She opened the front door and went through the vestibule onto the porch. A strong effort helped to make her voice sound warmly welcoming: “Kent darling—I heard your voice.”
Her own voice died as the moonlight betrayed an empty driveway. Silence and emptiness were where Kent and Miss Ashley had been. Had the sound of the falling statue sent them into flight? Why flight? Why should Kent, from his own home…? Gravel was sharp through the thin soles of her slippers as she stepped down onto the drive. She walked as far as the branch curve to the stables. No one. Nothing moved in the whole silent night.
