Ill Met by Moonlight

by Zenith Brown

  “Oh . . . how grand!” she cried, and came towards us, her arms outstretched.

  “Oh, Grace! It’s marvelous to see you . . . I went by, through the old hedge, and they said you were here. Hello, Jim! Hello, everybody! It’s so nice to see you all!”

  Sandra, leaning languorously back in the chintz fireside chair, introduced herself before any of us had a chance.

  “And I am Sandra Gould . . . because, you see, he ees my Jeem now.”

  I suppose it would have been all right in a New York speakeasy in prohibition days, with everybody making a point of not having any manners. Here and now it wasn’t only ill-bred, it was stupid. It brought into a suddenly sharpened focus just the difference between herself and Rosemary. It was so obviously throwing the glove in the rival’s face before it was decent.

  Rosemary smiled.

  “You’re a lucky girl—your Jim’s a very swell person!” she said, a barely perceptible emphasis on the “your.”

  She looked at Jim and smiled again. Poor Jim! He tried to smile too, but he couldn’t.

  “I . . . I didn’t know you were coming back,” he finally blurted out.

  “Why, Jeem, darling! I told you this morning, at breakfast, and you said . . . what is eet so naughty you said? You said, ‘What the hell I care?’ Don’t you remembair, Jeem?”

  There was a little appalled silence as she looked at him, so wide-eyed.

  Then Rosemary laughed. “Sounds just like him,” she said. “Doesn’t it, Grace?”

  “Precisely,” I said.

  “But wait, here’s Dad.”

  Rodman Bishop hadn’t changed, even if his daughter had. He was a little thicker, perhaps, but he had the same tanned rugged square face under the same thatch of thick white hair. But Rosemary had changed in seven years from an extremely pretty girl to one of the loveliest women I’ve ever seen. Not particularly tall, but marvelously slim, with cool gray eyes, warm eggshell skin and pale gold hair. It wasn’t only that she was lovely. There was something else; something cool and immaculate and well-bred about her that made Sandra’s rather lush exotic beauty seem suddenly almost imperceptibly common. I looked at Sandra involuntarily. I think she realized it too. Her dark eyes smoldered. Two spots burned in her cheeks. But they might have been from the wind, or from the julep she had in her hand.

  Rosemary looked around. “Where’s Paul, dad?”

  “Just coming, with George. Here they are.”

  If I hadn’t been looking at Sandra at just that moment, I’d never have seen the sharp surprise in her face as she looked up at the door, or the unbelievably malicious smile that flicked one corner of her red mouth and died, and was then suddenly marked in the depths of her dark eyes. She opened her bag, took out a gold enamel cigarette case and opened it.

  “This is Mr. Dikranov—Grace Latham, Paul, I’m always talking about. Mrs. Gould . . .”

  Sandra looked up, her face blankly innocent.

  She held out her hand. “I’m so stupeed about names,” she murmured.

  “Dikranov,” somebody said. I watched him looking at her. He didn’t seem to know her, or if he did he was a better actor than she was. There was nothing in his face that I could see. And a very handsome face it was, with fine chiseled features and olive skin, and black hair and brows. Paul Dikranov was tall and quite slender, and mature looking—I should have guessed he was nearer forty than Rosemary’s age. On the other hand, he didn’t look as old as George Barrol. Still, I should have been more sure that he hadn’t recognized Sandra if he hadn’t been so completely suave about Jim. Or maybe, of course, he’d never heard of either of them.

  Just how Rosemary and I disentangled ourselves from that group I don’t know—to powder our noses, I suppose. We wandered down the path towards the old mansion orangery.

  “You haven’t changed, Grace. Not much, anyway. You must miss Dick a lot. Why haven’t you ever married again?”

  “I haven’t time, darling. And the boys are trouble enough just now.”

  “Where are they?”

  “One of them’s on a student tour in Europe, and the other’s taken the boat and three friends for a week up the bay. I’m having a rest—or that’s what I’d planned. And what about you?”

  We’d stopped and were looking at each other. Rosemary smiled the cool smile that barely stirred the surface of her wide-set gray eyes.

  “Nothing, darling, nothing.”

  She looked away. I saw the corners of her mouth quiver.

  “She’s quite beautiful, isn’t she. Are they . . . happy?”

  A long savage streak of lightning split the sulphur-gray sky across the dark water. A hideous clap of thunder shivered the air.

  “They seem to get along well enough.”

  “George said she was beautiful and that all the men are mad about her.”

  “Your Paul’s very handsome.”

  She nodded. “He’s rather a dear. He wanted to meet Jim . . . that’s one reason we came. I suppose I wanted to . . . see her.”

  She took my hand suddenly and held it very tight.

  “I wish I hadn’t. I knew the minute he dropped that glass it was all a horrible mistake. I shouldn’t have come.”

  “Why don’t you go back, tomorrow?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “I can’t.”

  “He’d understand. Your Paul, I mean.”

  “Dad wouldn’t. Paul wouldn’t either, not really. I . . . I couldn’t let Jim down, anyway. Not in front of her. She’d love it, if she knew.”

  “She’s not a fool.”

  “No, I suppose not. She’d never have got him if she was. You know about it, don’t you?”

  “Some of it.”

  “It doesn’t matter now, I guess. It’s absurd. I . . . I didn’t care, yesterday—or today, till he dropped the glass.”

  If I’d told him in front of Mr. Toplady’s store that morning, I thought, he’d never have dropped it. But something else would have happened, so I didn’t worry about it just then.

  Another flash of lightning slit the sky and grounded in the bay. It was quite dark all at once. In the club the lights went on first in one window and then another. We could hear the faint sound of laughing voices and the children shouting on the porch. Large drops of rain began coming down.

  “We’d better go back—buck up, darling,” I said. “Look out for Sandra. She’ll make trouble if she can.”

  We went racing across the lawn between drops of rain as big as marbles. It was still poisonously hot and sticky, and the rain was cool on my arms and face.

  “We’ll all feel better when this is over,” I said practically.

  Rosemary’s laugh was a strangled half-sob in her throat. “I hope so,” she said.

  CHAPTER THREE

  I didn’t go back to the lounge with Rosemary. The rain was starting in good earnest, we’d just had the second floor papered, and it would never occur to Julius and Lilac to see that the windows were closed, not if they happened to have company in the kitchen.

  As it happened, I needn’t have bothered. Julius and Lilac did have company, but that inestimable man Sergeant Buck had seen that the hatches were battened down. He had also seen that Aunt Carrie’s ferns were put out on the lawn to catch the rain, the lawn chairs and the hammock brought in to the porch, the net from the tennis court neatly folded and stowed away in the garage, and my hat, gardening gloves and trowel brought in from the rock garden where I’d left them. All that should have given me some idea of what to expect from my week-end guest. Julius and Lilac were goose-stepping about the place in the most alarming fashion, completely regimented in half an hour’s military dictatorship, beaming with pride and importance, and saying, “Yas, Sergeant, suh,” “Yas, indeed, Sergeant, suh,” every ten seconds.

  Sergeant Buck, lantern-jawed, fish-eyed, granite-visaged, six feet and two hundred twenty pounds of beef and brawn, eyed me with what really could only be called a dead pan as I ducked out of the car onto the kitchen porch. It was our fir
st meeting, and I could see he was definitely disappointed in me. He looked at me so forbiddingly, in fact, that I almost hesitated to go into my own house.

  “Where’s the Colonel, ma’am?”

  He said it very suspiciously, almost as if I had him hid somewhere.

  “I just slipped away to see if everything was all right here,” I said meekly. “He stayed on. The Chetwynds will bring him along shortly.”

  Sergeant Buck nodded with some relief.

  “You’ll find everything in order, ma’am.”

  I started in.

  “Excuse me, ma’am,” he said coldly. “I understood we’re staying here. I’ve unpacked the Colonel’s bag.”

  “That’s right,” I said, turning round at the door.

  “Excuse me, ma’am.”

  He hesitated a brief instant, and went stanchly on.

  “It was my understanding we were staying with a widow woman.”

  “That’s me,” I said.

  Sergeant Buck’s face reddened a little.

  “Excuse me, ma’am,” he said again, frigidly. “But who’s going to chaperon the Colonel?”

  I stared for a moment, and Lilac, listening from the kitchen, threw up her hands with a scream of high-pitched colored laughter.

  “Oh, law, Sergeant, suh, the Colonel he’ll be all right! Miss Grace she won’ ’noy the Colonel! ’Deed she won’!”

  Julius grinned and so did I. Sergeant Buck did not.

  “I think it will be all right, Sergeant,” I said soberly. “You see, Julius and Lilac live in the garage and your room is next to the Colonel’s. I’m sure he’ll be perfectly safe.”

  There was no expression of any kind on Sergeant Buck’s face to indicate his acceptance of that. His face got a shade redder. “We understood you were a widow woman,” he said stiffly. “I mean an old lady.”

  Colonel Primrose hadn’t seemed particularly shocked that I was not of advanced age, although of course he may not have noticed it. Somehow I’d been feeling nearer sixty than thirty-eight all that day. The effect that a lot of people in love have on one, I suppose.

  It was almost seven when Colonel Primrose came back from the club. The rain was over, for a moment or two, and I was out on the porch watching the bay, still turbulent and steel-gray under the lowering sky.

  “Why did you leave so soon?”

  “I had to get back to see about my family. Did I miss much?”

  “A first-rate scene from modern melodrama,” he said with a wry smile.

  “Sandra Gould?”

  He nodded. We stood silent a moment.

  “I take it she knows Dikranov.”

  I said “Really?” I didn’t want to talk about that.

  “Her face, you know.”

  “How stupid of me not to notice.”

  Colonel Primrose smiled. He’s very attractive, with thick gray hair and black eyes that seem to snap when he cocks his head down to look up sideways at you. It was a bullet in the neck at the Argonne that makes him have to cock his head before he can turn it. It’s rather effective. And he’s short and rather plump, with nothing in the least machine-gunnish about him—except possibly the sparkle in those keen black eyes.

  “Stupid of me,” he said, looking at me with a sort of amused calculation. “You know, I should have thought you did notice . . . Mrs. Gould and Dikranov, I mean. Anyway, she wasn’t making much time with him while you and Miss Bishop were out. She’s concentrating on George Barrol.”

  “George must be delighted.”

  “And a little nonplused, I should say. He seems to be a pleasant middle-of-the-road sort of chap.”

  Sergeant Buck appeared in the doorway.

  “Well, I see I must go dress,” the Colonel said. “You’re going to the Chetwynds’, and to the dance, of course?”

  “Yes, indeed. It’s Sail Cup Night. Rex Brophy’s Band Wagon is coming down from Philadelphia.”

  Sergeant Buck’s iron face looked at me over the Colonel’s head. I’m afraid I flushed quite guiltily in spite of myself.

  But Rex Brophy’s Band Wagon broke down fifteen miles this side of Wilmington on the Du Pont Highway and didn’t show up at April Harbor till eleven o’clock. Normally that wouldn’t have been of any particular importance, and it wasn’t now, actually, except that it left Sandra Gould at loose ends a bit too long.

  I think we all knew we were in for trouble—all of us in our little crowd, that is. But just what horrible trouble, I don’t suppose any of us—not even Colonel Primrose, who turned out to be pretty well used to that sort of thing—even vaguely or remotely dreamed. We did, as I say, know that something would happen. If we’d been set in a circle and given a pencil and paper, and told it was a new parlor game and to guess what any three people in the room were going to do that night, I’d have written down

  1. Jim Gould was either going to stay home and get stinko drunk, or come here and do it.

  2. Sandra was going to raise as much hell as she could. And

  3. Rosemary was going to come and be beautifully cool and sickeningly well-bred and ignore the whole wretched business.

  Which showed how much I knew about it.

  In the first place, Jim came, and so far as I know didn’t touch a drop of liquor there the whole evening. A lot of us would have been happier the next day if he had. He wasn’t cheerful, and he did act like a man with a terrible load on his mind, but nobody could blame him for that. He had one, in the shape of a wife who had never looked lovelier, or more like the female of the species, in all her life.

  Outwardly Sandra was gentle and outrageously demure in a filmy sea-green chiffon frock with its little cape tied with long narrow grosgrain ribbons at the throat. It wasn’t till you got close to her that you saw the suppressed excitement in the glowing depths of her dark eyes.

  Rosemary, on the other hand, was definitely herself. She still looked like something pretty unattainable, however, with her dull gold hair parted in the middle and a thick coronet braid making a lovely sophisticated halo round her exquisitely shaped head. She had on a deceptively simple pink linen evening frock with a bunch of blue velvet flowers—one of those things that had Paris and New York written all over it and probably cost more than any six other gowns in the room. Beside her Paul Dikranov stood, courteously but definitely possessive, with the air of a man who would allow his property so much rope and not an inch more. There wasn’t anything objectionable about it, however. In fact it was rather comforting in a way to have him there to be reckoned with.

  But chiefly it was the lovely way he ignored Sandra that was noticeable. He talked to Mrs. Gould, he was positively charming to Lucy Lee, and I suppose he would have been to me too if Colonel Primrose hadn’t sort of adopted me—Sergeant Buck not being there—to look after him.

  People were standing about mopping their brows, waiting for something to do. The shower had been too short-lived to clear the air at all, and flashes of heat lightning, and the rumbling thunder still over the bay, made the hot sticky night seem closing ominously in on us.

  Colonel Primrose, Mr. Bishop and I were standing in the window; Sandra, Jim, Andy and George Barrol were across the big room by the silver catboat, the presentation of which would be the high point of the evening. Sandra and Andy were receiving congratulations from people coming up, and George was sort of hanging about the offing saying, “Isn’t she marvelous!” “Lovely child!” and what not.

  They were having some kind of argument about sailsmanship, as Andy calls it, then. Lucy Lee, Paul Dikranov, Rosemary and some other people were playing monopoly. Mrs. Gould and the Chetwynds were talking to Dr. Potter, who’d put on a fresh linen suit and dropped in for his evening highball. It was just the ordinary sort of Saturday evening that you’d find in any country yacht club in America. Nothing on the surface suggested—or would have suggested to an outsider —that the room was packed with dynamite. Certainly not that the coolest, most detached person in the room was the detonating element.

  Sudden
ly the argument in front of the model catboat broke into the loud “You can’t possibly!”—“I can so!” stage. Everybody looked around, rather more amused and interested than surprised, for a moment. But only for a moment. There was something definitely alarming in the abrupt tenseness that was instantly apparent.

  Sandra was facing her husband and Andy and the others. George Barrol was behind her looking a bit fidgety.

  “I can so! Eef she could do eet!” she cried. “I show you! Andy will come with me!”

  Lucy Lee’s dark curly head went up with a jerk.

  “Don’t let him go, Jim!” she cried. Then she tried to laugh, her face quite white.

  “Go where?” Rosemary asked.

  “It’s that old business. . . . Sandra wants to sail out to the lightship—in a storm—just because you did. It’s crazy!”

  Rosemary’s eyes moved across the room and met Jim’s, I imagine in the longest glance they’d yet exchanged. They were both remembering the night they’d gone out on a dare and almost never come back.

  “But I will go!”

  Sandra came across the room, head up, eyes flashing.

  “Or maybe . . . your Paul will go weeth me!”

  She stopped by Dikranov’s chair, her hands resting lightly on her hips . . . rather more like the dancing Carmen than an intrepid young sportswoman.

  “Just for old times’ sake—hein?”

  Her dark head tossed wickedly.

  “But maybe you try to forget! Ah, naughty Paul!”

  She shook her scarlet-tipped finger at him.

  Paul Dikranov’s face was as expressionless—in its own different way—as Sergeant Buck’s. Rosemary stared at them both, her own face a pale mask, ivory-hard suddenly. Sandra made a quick pirouette away from them, like a dancer on a cabaret floor, and came to a stop in front of her husband.

  “Ah, my Jeem! You theenk I don’t know how much you don’t like me tonight . . . but I weel show you!”

  Jim’s jaw tightened. He reached out to take her by the arm, but she eluded him with the grace of an apache. He couldn’t very well chase her across the room with fifty people watching. So he took a deep breath and just stood there.