by Rufus King
The “machine, or whatever it is” which she now tossed him like an appeasing bone was an instrument far beyond his own negligible means to possess. It would help his work signally.
He knew it to be the sort of gesture which Christine always held in reserve for use when her subjects grew balky. Such as the gesture of her marriage yesterday to Alan. Hugo was satisfied that sex hadn’t entered into it. She was finished with anything like that. No, it was simply that she would go to any extent rather than release a possession before she herself grew tired of it.
That these possessions were human beings did not matter. Neither Alan, nor Godfrey, nor Cordelia, nor himself.
He said calmly, “Thank you, Christine. That is very good of you. At five, then?”
“If you’re sure you don’t mind, Hugo?”
“No, Christine, I do not mind.”
Stuyvesant Swain’s offices were on the forty-third floor. They consisted of a reception room, three rooms for his junior associates, and what amounted to a salon for himself. This chamber was large and chaste, and its windows gave a stunning view of the harbor and of Battery Park.
He stood up as Christine came in and walked over to greet her. Ever since Charley’s death had left her in control of the Belder fortune he had given it up as stupid to become upset by Christine’s antics. He wished he could understand her. She was so completely different from anyone else whom he had ever known that she fascinated him. She’d get it in the neck, of course, eventually. This latest stunt of marrying that fortune hunter who was young enough to be her grandson might well turn out to be the final outrage.
“So you really did it,” he said, taking one of her gloved hands and leading her to a chair.
She settled herself comfortably, arranged her furs as an effective frame for her face. She reminded Stuyvesant of a portrait sketch he had seen of Sarah Bernhardt done by Whistler. Or had it been an Aubrey Beardsley? Something just as exciting, but decadently so?
“Alan was growing restive,” Christine said. “What else could I do?”
“I don’t mind telling you I kept hoping some last minute bolt from the blue would bring you to your senses.”
“Bolts from the blue no longer impress me, Stuyvesant. I bat them right back.”
Stuyvesant stood looking down at her.
“I’ll never understand you, Christine. God knows why Charley ever married you.”
“He loved me.”
“Yes, I know he did, poor devil. I can almost see him spinning in his grave over this latest outrage.”
“Marrying Alan wasn’t an outrage. It was the most convenient anchor at hand.”
“Are you sure it was worth it? You know what it means, of course.”
“Ostracized by my friends?” Christine smiled briefly. “What friends? They were Charley’s really. Ones veneered on him by his family. Has it never occurred to you that such friends are a form of bondage?”
In a way he could see that for Christine such a viewpoint would be true. Mentally he slid over the roster of families who had been Charley’s friends and who, after his death, had perforce continued to be friends with Christine. To the extent which she would permit. They were sterling. They were sound. And they were a dull lot from the very monotonies of their routine of living. He went behind the desk and sat down.
“I suppose you are here to change your will? Now that you’ve got him?”
Christine succeeded in looking shocked and faintly offended.
“I should think you would know me better than that, Stuyvesant.”
He studied her speculatively, wondering whether after all she had gone slightly soft in the head and had truly fallen for that twirp. Women of Christine’s years were famous for it. They got to the point where they would believe anything, no matter how thickly it was slathered on.
But if not the will, what then? What was she here for? An unpleasant thought came that she might intend to set the fellow up with a personal fortune. Poor Charley! Stuyvesant had been fond of Charley.
He wondered whether it would do any good to pump a scare into Christine. Whether it would be possible to pump one. If it were strong enough, he might even get her to divorce the scoundrel before any harm was done. He had a supreme distaste for melodramatics (his practice lay exclusively in the placid management of large and equally placid estates), but in Christine’s instance wasn’t he justified? Was there not a genuine danger against which she should be warned and sheltered? Surely he owed it to Charley’s memory.
“Look here, Christine,” he said, “has it never struck you that for some time you’ve been heading for trouble?”
“I fail to see how, Stuyvesant.”
He tried not to become impatient.
“I am talking about these various groups of alleged friends you have picked up and discarded since you settled down at Belder Tor. Settled!”
“My motives have always been of the kindest, Stuyvesant. I’ve helped them to the extent of my modest ability, and they have amused me.”
“I’m not questioning your motives. I simply shudder. But I am questioning your common sense. Take that mess with the Laura Destin woman. All you did in that instance was to receive into your home a potential homicidal maniac.”
“That is ended.”
“A situation of that sort is never ended. Diseased minds such as Laura Destin’s brood. They never let up. And now this!”
“You mean Alan?”
“I do. You don’t imagine that he married you for your violet eyes, do you?”
“Evidently you don’t know me as well as I thought you did.”
“That’s better.” Stuyvesant gestured irritably. “I have always detested melodramatics. You know that.”
“And I, darling, adore them.”
“I know you do.” He said in exasperation: “Christine, surely it must have occurred to you that women with far less money than yourself have been murdered for it by the fortune hunters who have married them?”
“Certainly it has. I’ve always been fascinated by the more celebrated cases in the past. Landru, I should say, is my favorite.”
Stuyvesant regarded her helplessly. She must be invincibly sure of herself and of her hold over that popinjay, or else he (the popinjay) must be a sorrier and more spineless lot than Stuyvesant had judged from his press picture. Stuyvesant had little liking for Christine, certainly no fondness, but he still felt that deep obligation to protect her because of Charley. Charley (God knew why) had been crazy about her.
She was up to some mischief right now. She had that demure look of a trusting, guileless child. Guileless!
He said, “Well?”
“I came about an annuity.”
A look of unwilling respect spread across Stuyvesant’s face.
“Christine, this is the most fiendish scheme you have ever cooked up during your lifetime of fiendish schemes.”
She said meekly, “Thank you, Stuyvesant.”
“Naturally you had no intention of changing your will! There would be no need for it. By sinking all your holdings into an annuity there will be nothing but negligible assets left to bestow, while you yourself will draw a large and tax-exempt income for the rest of your life. Do you know that I am almost tempted to feel sorry for that young poison adder?”
“And I shall live to be a hundred.”
“I bet you will. If for no other purpose than to confound the insurance companies who handle the deal.”
“And so safely, Stuyvesant.”
“I know, and for Charley’s sake thank God. It is only by living that you will be worth a cent to anybody. Not only to that virulent mountebank but to all the rest of the satellites you bedizen yourself with. Kill you, and the golden eggs die too. Christine, in this menacing situation an annuity offers a solution of positively asp-like genius. You will let him know of it, of course?”
Christine looked smugly virtuous: an elderly, well-preserved saint done in tinted plaster.
“I tell Alan everything. I wi
ll let him know this evening when I get home. Dear Alan! We will have so much more money to spend. My income will be larger under an annuity, won’t it, Stuyvesant?”
“Considerably.”
He was swept along with his own forebodings. Possibly the darkling day, with its brooding hints of fog, had a good deal to do with lifting the moment from its bedding of outrageous melodrama and into the fields of reality.
He foresaw exigencies: an accident arranged for the car, a welcoming drink on her arrival back at Belder Tor: a chalice tendered by a solicitous Alan in which would lurk the incipience of some subtle manner of death.
“Christine, we will do this as rapidly as possible. I think I can arrange to settle it by this afternoon, at least to the extent of giving you immediate coverage. The amount of the policies will be large enough to tempt them into a reasonable haste. Other details can be left until later, but at least you will be safe.”
“Surely we mustn’t take this too seriously, Stuyvesant.”
“We must! I want you to call that young scorpion up on the telephone and tell him about it right now.”
“But I can’t call up a new husband and just casually announce that I’ve turned my money into an annuity.”
Stuyvesant pressed a handkerchief to his brow. “No, I suppose that would be too much even for you. But tell him the instant you get home, and take every reasonable precaution on the drive back to Belder Tor.” He flipped the switch of an annunciator on his desk, and a girl’s voice said: “Yes, Mr. Swain?”
“Get me Rollins of the Mercantile Trust.”
“Yes, Mr. Swain.”
“If he’s in conference, have them get him out. It’s important. Vitally so.”
“Stuyvesant,” Christine said, “control your nerves. You’re beginning to scare yourself stiff.”
CHAPTER IV
Lida Belder was a pleasant-faced, wholesome young thing of eighteen, and one good look at her would assure you that her interests would promptly identify themselves with any of the more laborious charitable projects of the Junior League. They would fall, in fact, just short of an absorption in puppets.
Wind whipped the sensible handkerchief that guarded her hair as Barry Vanbuskirk drove his roadster beneath the saturnine sky of late afternoon through the infernoesque chasm of Dour Notch.
“Dank,” she said, “isn’t it?”
Barry looked at Lida fondly. He was a spindly but wiry young man of about twenty, and the prototype of any minor official in a good banking house manned by graduates of Groton and Harvard. His features were pleasant enough, even though they successfully concealed the fact that he was anything but dumb.
“At any minute now,” he said to Lida, “I expect to be pelted with gnomes.”
She rested her hand for an affectionate moment on his. She wondered whether her grandaunt Christine would be difficult. Curiously, she felt that any difficulty would arise not so much from a consent to her engagement and hoped-for swift marriage to Barry as it would from the mere act of her coming, without either encouragement or invitation, to Belder Tor at all.
She never had been, because Christine had always managed that their meetings and brief visits take place at Christine’s apartment in New York. Christine had always puzzled her, and dazzled her too, and Lida thought of her as a hummingbird which never aged any more than had Rider Haggard’s She.
Her own and Barry’s impression of Belder Tor (when it frightened them starkly face to face) was a good deal akin to what Joe Inbrun’s had been. Barry parked the roadster and they got out. Barry got and carried Lida’s bags.
He said, “This is something simply out of Disney.” They walked up the shallow granite steps. Barry found and pushed a button. After a while he pushed it again. “Let’s look for a back door,” Lida said.
“If we can find one before dropping through an oubliette.”
They skirted the granite mass and saw one of the french doors of the morning room standing open. They went into the empty, silent room.
“Your telegram,” Barry said, “will probably be delivered here next week by the Headless Horseman.” Lida had been looking around. She went to the spinet desk. A Western Union envelope was propped against an inkwell.
“Here it is, Barry. It isn’t opened.”
Barry, too, had been looking around.
“What do we do now?” he asked. “Yell?”
Lida saw a bellpull. She pulled it. She said, “I’ll ring.”
“Lida, if one panel slides we duck.”
“I don’t see any panels, darling. I suppose the servants’ quarters are a mile away.”
A handset telephone on the spinet desk started ringing. For the first ring or two, Barry and Lida simply looked at it. It kept on ringing.
Barry went over and picked it up.
“That’s one thing,” he said, “that does get on my nerves.”
“It might be Aunt Christine.”
Barry said into the phone: “Hello?” He turned to Lida. “It isn’t. It’s a man’s voice. Pompous type. Sounds something like a bullfrog through an amplifier.” He said into the phone: “I beg your pardon, sir, I didn’t get that. I was talking to Miss Belder. That’s right, Lida Belder.” Barry covered the mouthpiece. “Lida, he knows you.”
“Then it must be Stuyvesant Swain, Aunt Christine’s lawyer. He’s the only one of her friends I know.”
“It is.” He uncovered the mouthpiece. “I’m Barry Vanbuskirk, Mr. Swain.”
Barry gagged faintly and said to Lida: “I think he’s crazy. He just said: ‘One of the menagerie, I presume?’”
“He isn’t crazy a bit. He’s very nice. He takes me to a matinee of The Barber of Seville once a year.”
“I bet he gives you tea afterwards. And cinnamon toast.”
“Yes, he does.”
“Sorry, Mr. Swain,” Barry said into the phone. “Lida keeps interrupting me. Well, Lida didn’t expect to be here herself. She came here because of me. We’re engaged. Yes, Barry Vanbuskirk, that’s right. Yes, that’s right too. Back Bay.”
Barry covered the mouthpiece and said: “He wants to know if we’re the Boston Vanbuskirks. Old snob. If this thing were television I’d open a vein.”
“He isn’t, darling. He’s just stuffy and nice.”
Barry returned to the telephone: “It’s for inspection, sir. Lida needs her grandaunt’s consent before we can get married. Very kind of you, sir. Yes, it is fairly sudden, but I’ve only a week before induction. I know four sentences in German, so they’ve decided to make me a tenth assistant to a minor aide for the occupation. No, Mother and Dad aren’t with us, but they’re coming by train to New York, probably tomorrow. I’m meeting them and driving them out. I’m the only one in the family who’s got any gas. I think the purpose of their coming is that the inspection be mutual—I’m sure you know parents, sir. I don’t believe Mrs. Admont is here. Nobody seems to be here. Lida’s wire to her is still unopened on the desk. Really?”
Barry said to Lida: “He says that doesn’t mean a thing. He seems upset. He asked if she’d reached here safely.” Barry listened, then said: “Around seven o’clock, sir? Yes, I will. No, I’m not sure I’ll be here, sir. Lida will stay at Belder Tor, of course, but I’m putting up at the inn at Dour Notch. Just as a footnote, they use cerements for sheets. Yes, either I or Lida will give Mrs. Admont your message as soon as we find her. Good-by, Mr. Swain.” Barry hung up. He said to Lida: “He’s driving out here around seven. He sounded as though he were in a sweat about something.”
“I wonder if anybody is in the house.”
“We might try the cellar. We could start with digging up the cement. That’s where they usually bury them.”
“Oh, Barry! It is pretty grim, though, isn’t it?”
“I have been in gayer spots, dear. The Boston morgue, to name one. Lida, a good harrowing scream and seven clanking chains would get no attention around here whatsoever.”
A door in the north wall opened suddenly and Godfrey
Lance came in. Godfrey was a man in his forties, completely fattened by a lifetime of gourmandizing, utterly self-centered, and with a voice which he felt commandingly established his own sense of importance. He had been baking petits fours, and chalk-white flour streaked his face where he had wiped it.
Godfrey glanced negligently at Lida and Barry and started up the turret stairs. Before he was quite out of their sight he stopped and ran down to them again. He walked over to Lida and looked at her through slitted eyes.
Barry said to her: “Draw a circle around yourself quick and say abracadabra three times.”
Godfrey ignored this. He ignored Barry. He said to Lida: “I shall paint you. Have you any money? But of course you have. You have the patina of riches. I shall do your flesh in green. Not the stupid fragility of springtime, but with a sturdier, lettuce touch. You have the qualities of Mother Earth. A burgeoning. Your psychoses will hover around in a background. Tomorrow I shall find out what they are.”
Godfrey was finished with Lida. He boomed fiercely at Barry: “I paint!”
“I hoped it was only that.”
Godfrey wasted no more time on them. He ran up the turret stairs.
“This must be Aunt Christine’s house,” Lida said. “I mean, the telegram is here.”
“If that’s a sample of her guests, I wouldn’t call it a house. It’s a home for old ectoplasms.”
“Aunt Christine is simply over-individualistic. I like her, Barry, and you’ll like her too.”
“What earthly difference does it make? I mean to us?”
“Well, it would make a difference if she said no. Three full years, Barry.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll like her and she’ll like me, even if I have to play Josephine to every Napoleon who pops.”
“But her friends aren’t crazy, darling. It’s just that Aunt Christine is amused with unusual people and likes to have them around her. There’s never any harm in them. She explained it all to me two summers ago when she drove me up to stay with Peggy Towner at Martha’s Vineyard.”
Godfrey was suddenly with them again, running down the turret stairs, a dirty piece of paper in his hand, which he waved at them.
