The clash that came that evening had been threatening for some time. Take an immovable body, represented by Mr. Harbison and his square jaw, and an irresistible force, Jimmy and his weight, and there is bound to be trouble.
The real fault was Jim’s. He had gone entirely mad again over Bella, and thrown prudence to the winds. He mooned at her across the dinner table, and waylaid her on the stairs or in the back halls, just to hear her voice when she ordered him out of her way. He telephoned for flowers and candy for her quite shamelessly, and he got out a book of photographs that they had taken on their wedding journey, and kept it on the library table. The sole concession he made to our presumptive relationship was to bring me the responsibility for everything that went wrong, and his shirts for buttons.
The first I heard of the trouble was from Dal. He waylaid me in the hall after dinner that night, and his face was serious.
“I’m afraid we can’t keep it up very long, Kit,” he said. “With Jim trailing Bella all over the house, and the old lady keener every day, it’s bound to come out somehow. And that isn’t all. Jim and Harbison had a set-to today—about you.”
“About me!” I repeated. “Oh, I dare say I have been falling short again. What was Jim doing? Abusing me?”
Dal looked cautiously over his shoulder, but no one was near.
“It seems that the gentle Bella has been unusually beastly today to Jim, and—I believe she’s jealous of you, Kit. Jim followed her up to the roof before dinner with a box of flowers, and she tossed them over the parapet. She said, I believe, that she didn’t want his flowers; he could buy them for you, and be damned to him, or some lady-like equivalent.”
“Jim is a jellyfish,” I said contemptuously. “What did he say?”
“He said he only cared for one woman, and that was Bella; that he never had really cared for you and never would, and that divorce courts were not unmitigated evils if they showed people the way to real happiness. Which wouldn’t amount to anything if Harbison had not been in the tent, trying to sleep!”
Dal did not know all the particulars, but it seems that relations between Jim and Mr. Harbison were rather strained. Bella had left the roof and Jim and the Harbison man came face to face in the door of the tent. According to Dal, little had been said, but Jim, bound by his promise to me, could not explain, and could only stammer something about being an old friend of Miss Knowles. And Tom had replied shortly that it was none of his business, but that there were some things friendship hardly justified, and tried to pass Jim. Jim was instantly enraged; he blocked the door to the roof and demanded to know what the other man meant. There were two or three versions of the answer he got. The general purport was that Mr. Harbison had no desire to explain further, and that the situation was forced on him. But if he insisted—when a man systematically ignored and neglected his wife for some one else, there were communities where he would be tarred and feathered.
“Meaning me?” Jim demanded, apoplectic.
“The remark was a general one,” Mr. Harbison retorted, “but if you wish to make a concrete application—!”
Dal had gone up just then, and found them glaring at each other, Jim with his hands clenched at his sides, and Mr. Harbison with his arms folded and very erect. Dal took Jim by the elbow and led him downstairs, muttering, and the situation was saved for the time. But Dal was not optimistic.
“You can do a bit yourself, Kit,” he finished. “Look more cheerful, flirt a little. You can do that without trying. Take Max on for a day or so; it would be charity anyhow. But don’t let Tom Harbison take into his head that you are grieving over Jim’s neglect, or he’s likely to toss him off the roof.”
“I have no reason to think that Mr. Harbison cares one way or the other about me,” I said primly. “You don’t think he’s—he’s in love with me, do you, Dal?” I watched him out of the corner of my eye, but he only looked amused.
“In love with you!” he repeated. “Why bless your wicked little heart, no! He thinks you’re a married woman! It’s the principle of the thing he’s fighting for. If I had as much principle as he has, I’d—I’d put it out at interest.”
Max interrupted us just then, and asked if we knew where Mr. Harbison was.
“Can’t find him,” he said. “I’ve got the telephone together and have enough left over to make another. Where do you suppose Harbison hides the tools? I’m working with a corkscrew and two palette knives.”
I heard nothing more of the trouble that night. Max went to Jim about it, and Jim said angrily that only a fool would interfere between a man and his wife—wives. Whereupon Max retorted that a fool and his wives were soon parted, and left him. The two principals were coldly civil to each other, and smaller issues were lost as the famine grew more and more insistent. For famine it was.
They worked the rest of the evening, but the telephone refused to revive and every one was starving. Individually our pride was at low ebb, but collectively it was still formidable. So we sat around and Jim played Grieg with the soft stops on, and Aunt Selina went to bed. The weather had changed, and it was sleeting, but anything was better than the drawing room. I was in a mood to battle with the elements or to cry—or both—so I slipped out, while Dal was reciting “Give me three grains of corn, mother,” threw somebody’s overcoat over my shoulders, put on a man’s soft hat—Jim’s I think—and went up to the roof.
It was dark in the third floor hall, and I had to feel my way to the foot of the stairs. I went up quietly, and turned the knob of the door to the roof. At first it would not open, and I could hear the wind howling outside. Finally, however, I got the door open a little and wormed my way through. It was not entirely dark out there, in spite of the storm. A faint reflection of the street lights made it possible to distinguish the outlines of the boxwood plants, swaying in the wind, and the chimneys and the tent. And then—a dark figure disentangled itself from the nearest chimney and seemed to hurl itself at me. I remember putting out my hands and trying to say something, but the figure caught me roughly by the shoulders and knocked me back against the door frame. From miles away a heavy voice was saying, “So I’ve got you!” and then the roof gave from under me, and I was floating out on the storm, and sleet was beating in my face, and the wind was whispering over and over, “Open your eyes, for God’s sake!”
I did open them after a while, and finally I made out that I was laying on the floor in the tent. The lights were on, and I had a cold and damp feeling, and something wet was trickling down my neck.
I seemed to be alone, but in a second somebody came into the tent, and I saw it was Mr. Harbison, and that he had a double handful of half-melted snow. He looked frantic and determined, and only my sitting up quickly prevented my getting another snow bath. My neck felt queer and stiff, and I was very dizzy. When he saw that I was conscious he dropped the snow and stood looking down at me.
“Do you know,” he said grimly, “that I very nearly choked you to death a little while ago?”
“It wouldn’t surprise me to be told so,” I said. “Do I know too much, or what is it, Mr. Harbison?” I felt terribly ill, but I would not let him see it. “It is queer, isn’t it—how we always select the roof for our little—differences?” He seemed to relax somewhat at my gibe.
“I didn’t know it was you,” he explained shortly. “I was waiting for—some one, and in the hat you wore and the coat, I mistook you. That’s all. Can you stand?”
“No,” I retorted. I could, but his summary manner displeased me. The sequel, however, was rather amazing, for he stooped suddenly and picked me up, and the next instant we were out in the storm together. At the door he stooped and felt for the knob.
“Turn it,” he commanded. “I can’t reach it.”
“I’ll do nothing of the kind,” I said shrewishly. “Let me down; I can walk perfectly well.”
He hesitated. Then he slid me slowly to my feet, but he did not open the door at once. “Are you afraid to let me carry you down those stairs, after—Tuesday night?” he asked, very low. “You still think I did that?”
I had never been less sure of it than at that moment, but an imp of perversity made me retort, “Yes.”
He hardly seemed to hear me. He stood looking down at me as I leaned against the door frame.
“Good Lord!” he groaned. “To think that I might have killed you!” And then—he stooped and suddenly kissed me.
The next moment the door was open, and he was leading me down into the house. At the foot of the staircase he paused, still holding my hand, and faced me in the darkness.
“I’m not sorry,” he said steadily. “I suppose I ought to be, but I’m not. Only—I want you to know that I was not guilty—before. I didn’t intend to now. I am—almost as much surprised as you are.”
I was quite unable to speak, but I wrenched my hand loose. He stepped back to let me pass, and I went down the hall alone.
I didn’t go to the drawing room again. I went into my own room and sat in the dark, and tried to be furiously angry, and only succeeded in feeling queer and tingly. One thing was absolutely certain: not the same man, but two different men had kissed me on the stairs to the roof. It sounds rather horrid and discriminating, but there was all the difference in the world.
But then—who had? And for whom had Mr. Harbison been waiting on the roof? “Did you know that I nearly choked you to death a few minutes ago?” Then he rather expected to finish somebody in that way! Who? Jim, probably. It was strange, too, but suddenly I realized that no matter how many suspicious things I mustered up against him—and there were plenty—down in my heart I didn’t believe him guilty of anything, except this last and unforgivable offense. Whoever was trying to leave the house had taken the necklace, that seemed clear, unless Max was still foolishly trying to break quarantine and create one of the sensations he so dearly loves. This was a new idea, and some things upheld it, but Max had been playing bridge when I was kissed on the stairs, and there was still left that ridiculous incident of the comfort.
Bella came up after I had gone to bed, and turned on the light to brush her hair.
“If I don’t leave this mausoleum soon, I’ll be carried out,” she declared. “You in bed, Lollie Mercer and Dal flirting, Anne hysterical, and Jim making his will in the den! You will have to take Aunt Selina tonight, Kit; I’m all in.”
“If you’ll put her to bed, I’ll keep her there,” I conceded, after some parley.
“You’re a dear.” Bella came back from the door. “Look here, Kit, you know Jim pretty well. Don’t you think he looks ill? Thinner?”
“He’s a wreck,” I said soberly. “You have a lot to answer for, Bella.”
Bella went over to the cheval glass and looked in it. “I avoid him all I can,” she said, posing. “He’s awfully funny; he’s so afraid I’ll think he’s serious about you. He can’t realize that for me he simply doesn’t exist.”
Well, I took Aunt Selina, and about two o’clock, while I was in my first sleep, I woke to find her standing beside me, tugging at my arm.
“There’s somebody in the house,” she whispered. “Thieves!”
“If they’re in they’ll not get out tonight,” I said.
“I tell you, I saw a man skulking on the stairs,” she insisted.
I got up ungraciously enough, and put on my dressing gown. Aunt Selina, who had her hair in crimps, tied a veil over her head, and together we went to the head of the stairs. Aunt Selina leaned far over and peered down.
“He’s in the library,” she whispered. “I can see a light.”
The lust of battle was in Aunt Selina’s eye. She girded her robe about her and began to descend the stairs cautiously. We went through the hall and stopped at the library door. It was empty, but from the den beyond came a hum of voices and the cheerful glow of fire light. I realized the situation then, but it was too late.
“Then why did you kiss her in the dining room?” Bella was saying in her clear, high tones. “You did, didn’t you?”
“It was only her hand,” Jim, desperately explaining. “I’ve got to pay her some attention, under the circumstances. And I give you my word, I was thinking of you when I did it.” THE WRETCH!
Aunt Selina drew her breath in suddenly.
“I am thinking of marrying Reggie Wolfe.” This was Bella, of course. “He wants me to. He’s a dear boy.”
“If you do, I will kill him.”
“I am so very lonely,” Bella sighed. We could hear the creak of Jim’s shirt bosom that showed that he had sighed also. Aunt Selina had gripped me by the arm, and I could hear her breathing hard beside me.
“It’s only Jim,” I whispered. “I—I don’t want to hear any more.”
But she clutched me firmly, and the next thing we heard was another creak, louder and—
“Get up! Get up off your knees this instant!” Bella was saying frantically. “Some one might come in.”
“Don’t send me away,” Jim said in a smothered voice. “Every one in the house is asleep, and I love you, dear.”
Aunt Selina swallowed hard in the darkness.
“You have no right to make love to me,” Bella. “It’s—it’s highly improper, under the circumstances.”
And then Jim: “You swallow a camel and stick at a gnat. Why did you meet me here, if you didn’t expect me to make love to you? I’ve stood for a lot, Bella, but this foolishness will have to end. Either you love me—or you don’t. I’m desperate.” He drew a long, forlorn breath.
“Poor old Jim!” This was Bella. A pause. Then—“Let my hand alone!” Also Bella.
“It is MY hand!”—Jim’s most fatuous tone. “THERE is where you wore my ring. There’s the mark still.” Sounds of Jim kissing Bella’s ring finger. “What did you do with it? Throw it away?” More sounds.
Aunt Selina crossed the library swiftly, and again I followed. Bella was sitting in a low chair by the fire, looking at the logs, in the most exquisite negligee of pink chiffon and ribbon. Jim was on his knees, staring at her adoringly, and holding both her hands.
“I’ll tell you a secret,” Bella was saying, looking as coy as she knew how—which was considerable. “I—I still wear it, on a chain around my neck.”
On a chain around her neck! Bella, who is decollete whenever it is allowable, and more than is proper!
That was the limit of Aunt Selina’s endurance. Still holding me, she stepped through the doorway and into the firelight, a fearful figure.
Jim saw her first. He went quite white and struggled to get up, smiling a sickly smile. Bella, after her first surprise, was superbly indifferent. She glanced at us, raised her eyebrows, and then looked at the clock.
“More victims of insomnia!” she said. “Won’t you come in? Jim, pull up a chair by the fire for your aunt.”
Aunt Selina opened her mouth twice, like a fish, before she could speak. Then—
“James, I demand that that woman leave the house!” she said hoarsely.
Bella leaned back and yawned.
“James, shall I go?” she asked amiably.
“Nonsense,” Jim said, pulling himself together as best he could. “Look here, Aunt Selina, you know she can’t go out, and what’s more, I—don’t want her to go.”
“You—what?” Aunt Selina screeched, taking a step forward. “You have the audacity to say such a thing to me!”
Bella leaned over and gave the fire log a punch.
“I was just saying that he shouldn’t say such things to me, either,” she remarked pleasantly. “I’m afraid you’ll take cold, Miss Caruthers. Wouldn’t you like a hot sherry flip?”
Aunt Selina gasped. Then she sat down heavily on one of the carved teakwood chairs.
“He said he loved you; I heard him,” she said weakly. “He—he was going to put his arm around you!”
“Habit!” Jim put in, trying to smile. “You see, Aunt Selina, it’s—well, it’s a habit I got into some time ago, and I—my arm does it without my thinking about it.”
“Habit!” Aunt Selina repeated, her voice thick with passion. Then she turned to me. “Go to your room at once!” she said in her most awful tone. “Go to your room and leave this—this shocking affair to me.”
But if she had reached her limit, so had I. If Jim chose to ruin himself, it was not my fault. Any one with common sense would have known at least to close the door before he went down on his knees, no matter to whom. So when Aunt Selina turned on me and pointed in the direction of the staircase, I did not move.
“I am perfectly wide awake,” I said coldly. “I shall go to bed when I am entirely ready, and not before. And as for Jim’s conduct, I do not know much about the conventions in such cases, but if he wishes to embrace Miss Knowles, and she wants him to, the situation is interesting, but hardly novel.”
Aunt Selina rose slowly and drew the folds of her dressing gown around her, away from the contamination of my touch.
“Do you know what you are saying?” she demanded hoarsely.
“I do.” I was quite white and stiff from my knees up, but below I was wavery. I glanced at Jim for moral support, but he was looking idolatrously at Bella. As for her, quite suddenly she had dropped her mask of indifference; her face was strained and anxious, and there were deep circles I had not seen before, under her eyes. And it was Bella who finally threw herself into the breach—the family breach.
“It is all my fault, Miss Caruthers,” she said, stepping between Aunt Selina and myself. “I have been a blind and wicked woman, and I have almost wrecked two lives.”
Two! What of mine?
“You see,” she struggled on, against the glint in Aunt Selina’s eyes. “I—I did not realize how much I cared, until it was too late. I did so many things that were cruel and wrong—oh, Jim, Jim!”
She turned and buried her head on his shoulder and cried; real tears. I could hardly believe that it was Bella. And Jim put both his arms around her and almost cried, too, and looked nauseatingly happy with the eye he turned to Bella, and scared to death out of the one he kept on Aunt Selina.
She turned on me, as of course I knew she would.
“That,” she said, pointing at Jim and Bella, “that shameful picture is due to your own indifference. I am not blind; I have seen how you rejected all his loving advances.” Bella drew away from Jim, but he jerked her back. “If anything in the world would reconcile me to divorce, it is this unbelievable situation. James, are you shameless?”
But James was and didn’t care who knew it. And as there was nothing else to do, and no one else to do it, I stood very straight against the door frame, and told the whole miserable story from the very beginning. I told how Dal and Jim had persuaded me, and how I had weakened and found it was too late, and how Bella had come in that night, when she had no business to come, and had sat down in the basement kitchen on my hands and almost turned me into a raving maniac. As I went on I became fluent; my sense of injury grew on me. I made it perfectly clear that I hated them all, and that when people got divorces they ought to know their own minds and stay divorced. And at that a great light broke on Aunt Selina, who hadn’t understood until that minute.
In view of her principles, she might have been expected to turn on Jim and Bella, and disinherit them, and cast them out, figuratively, with the flaming sword of her tongue. BUT SHE DID NOT!
She turned on me in the most terrible way, and asked me how I dared to come between husband and wife, because divorce or no divorce, whom God hath joined together, and so on. And when Jim picked up his courage in both hands and tried to interfere, she pushed him back with one hand while she pointed the other at me and called me a Jezebel.
She talked for an hour, having got between me and the door, and she scolded Jim and Bella thoroughly. But they did not hear it, being occupied with each other, sitting side by side meekly on the divan with Jim holding Bella’s hand under a cushion. She said they would have to be very good to make up for all the deception, but it was perfectly clear that it was a relief to her to find that I didn’t belong to her permanently, and as I have said before, she was crazy about Bella.
I sat back in a chair and grew comfortably drowsy in the monotony of her voice. It was a name that brought me to myself with a jerk.
“Mr. Harbison!” Aunt Selina was saying. “Then bring him down at once, James. I want no more deception. There is no use cleaning a house and leaving a dirty corner.”
“It will not be necessary for me to stay and see it swept,” I said, mustering the rags she had left of my self-respect, and trying to pass her. But she planted herself squarely before me.
“You can not stir up a dust like this, young woman, and leave other people to sneeze in it,” she said grimly. And I stayed.
I sat, very small, on a chair in a corner. I felt like Jezebel, or whatever her name was, and now the Harbison man was coming, and he was going to see me stripped of my pretensions to domesticity and of a husband who neglected me. He was going to see me branded a living lie, and he would hate me because I had put him in a ridiculous position. He was just the sort to resent being ridiculous.
Jim brought him down in a dressing gown and a state of bewilderment. It was plain that the memory of the afternoon still rankled, for he was very short with Jim and inclined to resent the whole thing. The clock in the hall chimed half after three as they came down the stairs, and I heard Mr. Harbison stumble over something in the darkness and say that if it was a joke, he wasn’t in the humor for it. To which Jim retorted that it wasn’t anything resembling a joke, and for heaven’s sake not to walk on his feet; he couldn’t get around the furniture any faster.
At the door of the den Mr. Harbison stopped, blinking in the light. Then, when he saw us, he tried to back himself and his dishabille out into the obscurity of the library. But Aunt Selina was too quick for him.
“Come in,” she called, “I want you, young man. It seems that there are only two fools in the house, and you are one.”
He straightened at that and looked bewildered, but he tried to smile.
“I thought I was the only one,” he said. “Is it possible that there is another?”
“I am the other,” she announced. I think she expected him to say “Impossible,” but, whatever he was, he was never banal.
“Is that so?” he asked politely, trying to be interested and to understand at the same time. He had not seen me. He was gazing fixedly at Bella, languishing on the divan and watching him with lowered lids, and he had given Jim a side glance of contempt. But now he saw me and he colored under his tan. His neck blushed furiously, being much whiter than his face. He kept his eyes on mine, and I knew that he was mutely asking forgiveness. But the thought of what was coming paralyzed me. My eyes were glued to his as they had been that first evening when he had called me “Mrs. Wilson,” and after an instant he looked away, and his face was set and hard.
“It seems that we have all been playing a little comedy, Mr. Harbison,” Aunt Selina began, nasally sarcastic. “Or rather, you and I have been the audience. The rest have played.”
“I—I don’t think I understand,” he said slowly. “I have seen very little comedy.”
“It was not well planned,” Aunt Selina retorted tartly. “The idea was good, but the young person who was playing the part of Mrs. Wilson—overacted.”
“Oh, come, Aunt Selina,” Jim protested, “Kit was coaxed and cajoled into this thing. Give me fits if you like; I deserve all I get. But let Kit alone—she did it for me.”
Bella looked over at me and smiled nastily.
“I would stop doing things for Jim, Kit,” she said. “It is SO unprofitable.”
But Mr. Harbison harked back to Aunt Selina’s speech.
“PLAYING the part of Mrs. Wilson!” he repeated. “Do you mean—?”
“Exactly. Playing the part. She is not Mrs. Wilson. It seems that that honor belonged at one time to Miss Knowles. I believe such things are not unknown in New York, only why in the name of sense does a man want to divorce a woman and then meet her at two o’clock in the morning to kiss the place where his own wedding ring used to rest?”
Jim fidgeted. Bella was having spasms of mirth to herself, but the Harbison man did not smile. He stood for a moment looking at the fire; then he thrust his hands deep into the pockets of his dressing gown, and stalked over to me. He did not care that the others were watching and listening.
“Is it true?” he demanded, staring down at me. “You are NOT Mrs. Wilson? You are not married at all? All that about being neglected—and loathing HIM, and all that on the roof—there was no foundation of truth?”
I could only shake my head without looking up. There was no defense to be made. Oh, I deserved the scorn in his voice.
“They—they persuaded you, I suppose, and it was to help somebody? It was not a practical joke?”
“No,” I rallied a little spirit at that. It had been anything but a joke.
He drew a long breath.
“I think I understand,” he said slowly, “but—you could have saved me something. I must have given you all a great deal of amusement.”
“Oh, no,” I protested. “I—I want to tell you—”
But he deliberately left me and went over to the door. There he turned and looked down at Aunt Selina. He was a little white, but there was no passion in his face.
“Thank you for telling me all this, Miss Caruthers,” he said easily. “Now that you and I know, I’m afraid the others will miss their little diversion. Good night.”
Oh, it was all right for Jim to laugh and say that he was only huffed a little and would be over it by morning. I knew better. There was something queer in his face as he went out. He did not even glance in my direction. He had said very little, but he had put me as effectually in the wrong as if he had not kissed me—deliberately kissed me—that very evening, on the roof.
I did not go to sleep again. I lay wretchedly thinking things over and trying to remember who Jezebel was, and toward morning I distinctly heard the knob of the door turn. I mistrusted my ears, however, and so I got up quietly and went over in the darkness. There was no sound outside, but when I put my hand on the knob I felt it move under my fingers. The counter pressure evidently alarmed whoever it was, for the knob was released and nothing more happened. But by this time anything so uncomplicated as the fumbling of a knob at night had no power to disturb me. I went back to bed.
Hunger roused everybody early the next morning, Friday. Leila Mercer had discovered a box of bonbons that she had forgotten, and we divided them around. Aunt Selina asked for the candied fruit and got it—quite a third of the box. We gathered in the lower hall and on the stairs and nibbled nauseating sweets while Mr. Harbison examined the telephone.
He did not glance in my direction. Betty and Dal were helping him, and he seemed very cheerful. Max sat with me on the stairs. Mr. Harbison had just unscrewed the telephone box from the wall and was squinting into it, when Bella came downstairs. It was her first appearance, but as she was always late, nobody noticed. When she stopped, just above us on the stairs, however, we looked up, and she was holding to the rail and trembling perceptibly.
“Mr. Harbison, will you—can you come upstairs?” she asked. Her voice was strained, almost reedy, and her lips were white.
Mr. Harbison stared up at her, with the telephone box in his hands.
“Why—er—certainly,” he said, “but, unless it’s very important, I’d like to fix this talking machine. We want to make a food record.”
“I’d like to break a food record,” Max put in, but Bella created a diversion by sitting down suddenly on the stair just above us, and burying her face in her handkerchief.
“Jim is sick,” she said, with a sob. “He—he doesn’t want anything to eat, and his head aches. He—said for me—to go away and let him die!”
Dal dropped the hammer immediately, and Lollie Mercer sat petrified, with a bonbon halfway to her mouth. For, of course, it was unexpected, finding sentiment of any kind in Bella, and none of them knew about the scene in the den in the small hours of the morning.
“Sick!” Aunt Selina said, from a hall chair. “Sick! Where?”
“All over,” Bella quavered. “His poor head is hot, and he’s thirsty, but he doesn’t want anything but water.”
“Great Scott!” Dal said suddenly. “Suppose he should—Bella, are you telling us ALL his symptoms?”
Bella put down her handkerchief and got up. From her position on the stairs she looked down on us with something of her old haughty manner.
“If he is ill, you may blame yourselves, all of you,” she said cruelly. “You taunted him with being—fat, and laughed at him, until he stopped eating the things he should eat. And he has been exercising—on the roof, until he has worn himself out. And now—he is ill. He—he has a rash.”
Everybody jumped at that, and we instinctively moved away from Bella. She was quite cold and scornful by that time.
“A rash!” Max exclaimed. “What sort of rash?”
“I did not see it,” Bella said with dignity, and turning, she went up the stairs.
There was a great deal of excitement, and nobody except Mr. Harbison was willing to go near Jim. He went up at once with Bella, while Max and Dal sat cravenly downstairs and wondered if we would all take it, and Anne told about a man she knew who had it, and was deaf and dumb and blind when he recovered.
Mr. Harbison came down after a while, and said that the rash was there, right enough, and that Jim absolutely refused to be quarantined; that he insisted that he always got a rash from early strawberries and that if he DID have anything, since they were so touchy he hoped they would all get it. If they locked him in he would kick the door down.
We had a long conference in the hall, with Bella sitting red-eyed and objecting to every suggestion we made. And finally we arranged to shut Jim up in one of the servants’ bedrooms with a sheet wrung out of disinfectant hung over the door. Bella said she would sit outside in the hall and read to him through the closed door, so finally he gave a grudging consent. But he was in an awful humor. Max and Dal put on rubber gloves and helped him over, and they said afterward that the way he talked was fearful. And there was a telephone in the maid’s room, and he kept asking for things every five minutes.
When the doctor came he said it was too early to tell positively, and he ordered him liquid diet and said he would be back that evening.
Which—the diet—takes me back to the famine. After they had moved Jim, Mr. Harbison went back to the telephone, and found everything as it should be. So he followed the telephone wire, and the rest followed him. I did not; he had systematically ignored me all morning, after having dared to kiss me the night before. And any other man I know, after looking at me the way he had looked a dozen times, would have been at least reasonably glad to find me free and unmarried. But it was clear that he was not; I wondered if he was the kind of man who always makes love to the other man’s wife and runs like mad when she is left a widow, or gets a divorce.
And just when I had decided that I hated him, and that there was one man I knew who would never make love to a woman whom he thought married and then be very dignified and aloof when he found she wasn’t, I heard what was wrong with the telephone wire.
It had been cut! Cut through with a pair of silver manicure scissors from the dressing table in Bella’s room, where Aunt Selina slept! The wire had been clipped where it came into the house, just under a window, and the scissors still lay on the sill.
It was mysterious enough, but no one was interested in the mystery just then. We wanted food, and wanted it at once. Mr. Harbison fixed the wire, and the first thing we did, of course, was to order something to eat. Aunt Selina went to bed just after luncheon with indigestion, to the relief of every one in the house. She had been most unpleasant all morning.
When she found herself ill, however, she insisted on having Bella, and that made trouble at once. We found Bella with her cheek against the door into Jim’s room, looking maudlin while he shouted love messages to her from the other side. At first she refused to stir, but after Anne and Max had tried and failed, the rest of us went to her in a body and implored her. We said Aunt Selina was in awful shape—which she was, as to temper—and that she had thrown a mustard plaster at Anne, which was true.
So Bella went, grumbling, and Jim was a maniac. We had not thought it would be so bad for Bella, but Aunt Selina fell asleep soon after she took charge, holding Bella’s hand, and slept for three hours and never let go!
About two that afternoon the sun came out, and the rest of us went to the roof. The sleet had melted and the air was fairly warm. Two housemaids dusting rugs on the top of the next house came over and stared at us, and somebody in an automobile down on Riverside Drive stood up and waved at us. It was very cheerful and hopelessly lonely.
I stayed on the roof after the others had gone, and for some time I thought I was alone. After a while, I got a whiff of smoke, and then I saw Mr. Harbison far over in the corner, one foot on the parapet, moodily smoking a pipe. He was gazing out over the river, and paying no attention to me. This was natural, considering that I had hardly spoken to him all day.
I would not let him drive me away, so I sat still, and it grew darker and colder. He filled his pipe now and then, but he never looked in my direction. Finally, however, as it grew very dusk, he knocked the ashes out and came toward me.
“I am going to make a request, Miss McNair,” he said evenly. “Please keep off the roof after sunset. There are—reasons.” I had risen and was preparing to go downstairs.
“Unless I know the reasons, I refuse to do anything of the kind,” I retorted. He bowed.
“Then the door will be kept locked,” he rejoined, and opened it for me. He did not follow me, but stood watching until I was down, and I heard him close the roof door firmly behind me.
Late that evening Betty Mercer and Dallas were writing verses of condolence to be signed by all of us and put under the door into Jim’s room when Bella came running down the stairs.
Dal was reading the first verse when she came. “Listen to this, Bella,” he said triumphantly:
Then he caught sight of Bella’s face as she stood in the doorway, and stopped.
“Jim is delirious!” she announced tragically. “You shut him in there all alone and now he’s delirious. I’ll never forgive any of you.”
“Delirious!” everybody exclaimed.
“He was sane enough when I took him his chicken broth,” Mr. Harbison said. “He was almost fluent.”
“He is stark, staring crazy,” Bella insisted hysterically. “I—I locked the door carefully when I went down to my dinner, and when I came up it—it was unlocked, and Jim was babbling on the bed, with a sheet over his face. He—he says the house is haunted and he wants all the men to come up and sit in the room with him.”
“Not on your life,” Max said. “I am young, and my career has only begun. I don’t intend to be cut off in the flower of my youth. But I’ll tell you what I will do; I’ll take him a drink. I can tie it to a pole or something.”
But Mr. Harbison did not smile. He was thoughtful for a minute. Then:
“I don’t believe he is delirious,” he said quietly, “and I wouldn’t be surprised if he has happened on something that—will be of general interest. I think I will stay with him tonight.”
After that, of course, none of the others would confess that he was afraid, so with the South American leading, they all went upstairs. The women of the party sat on the lower steps and listened, but everything was quiet. Now and then we could hear the sound of voices, and after a while there was a rapid slamming of doors and the sound of some one running down to the second floor. Then quiet again.
None of us felt talkative. Bella had followed the men up and had been put out, and sat sniffling by herself in the den. Aunt Selina was working over a jig-saw puzzle in the library, and declaring that some of it must be lost. Anne and Leila Mercer were embroidering, and Betty and I sat idle, our hands in our laps. The whole atmosphere of the house was mysterious. Anne told over again of the strange noises the night her necklace was stolen. Betty asked me about the time when the comfort slipped from under my fingers. And when, in the midst of the story, the telephone rang, we all jumped and shrieked.
In an hour or so they sent for Flannigan, and he went upstairs. He came down again soon, however, and returned with something over his arm that looked like a rope. It seemed to be made of all kinds of things tied together, trunk straps, clothesline, bed sheets, and something that Flannigan pointed to with rage and said he hadn’t been able to keep his clothes on all day. He refused to explain further, however, and trailed the nondescript article up the stairs. We could only gaze after him and wonder what it all meant.
The conclave lasted far into the night. The feminine contingent went to bed, but not to sleep. Some time after midnight, Mr. Harbison and Max went downstairs and I could hear them rattling around testing windows and burglar alarms. But finally every one settled down and the rest of the night was quiet.
Betty Mercer came into my room the next morning, Sunday, and said Anne Brown wanted me. I went over at once, and Anne was sitting up in bed, crying. Dal had slipped out of the room at daylight, she said, and hadn’t come back. He had thought she was asleep, but she wasn’t, and she knew he was dead, for nothing ever made Dal get up on Sunday before noon.
There was no one moving in the house, and I hardly knew what to do. It was Betty who said she would go up and rouse Mr. Harbison and Max, who had taken Jim’s place in the studio. She started out bravely enough, but in a minute we heard her flying back. Anne grew perfectly white.
“He’s lying on the upper stairs!” Betty cried, and we all ran out. It was quite true. Dal was lying on the stairs in a bathrobe, with one of Jim’s Indian war clubs in his hand. And he was sound asleep.
He looked somewhat embarrassed when he roused and saw us standing around. He said he was going to play a practical joke on somebody and fell asleep in the middle of it. And Anne said he wasn’t even an intelligent liar, and went back to bed in a temper. But Betty came in with me, and we sat and looked at each other and didn’t say much. The situation was beyond us.
The doctor let Jim out the next day, there having been nothing the matter with him but a stomach rash. But Jim was changed; he mooned around Bella, of course, as before, but he was abstracted at times, and all that day—Sunday—he wandered off by himself, and one would come across him unexpectedly in the basement or along some of the unused back halls.
Aunt Selina held service that morning. Jim said that he always had a prayer book, but that he couldn’t find anything with so many people in the house. So Aunt Selina read some religious poetry out of the newspapers, and gave us a valuable talk on Deception versus Honesty, with me as the illustration.
Almost everybody took a nap after luncheon. I stayed in the den and read Ibsen, and felt very mournful. And after Hedda had shot herself, I lay down on the divan and cried a little—over Hedda; she was young and it was such a tragic ending—and then I fell asleep.
When I wakened Mr. Harbison was standing by the table, and he held my book in his hands. In view of the armed neutrality between us, I expected to see him bow to me curtly, turn on his heel and leave the room. Indeed, considering his state of mind the night before, I should hardly have been surprised if he had thrown Hedda at my head. (This is not a pun. I detest them.) But instead, when he heard me move he glanced over at me and even smiled a little.
“She wasn’t worth it,” he said, indicating the book.
“Worth what?”
“Your tears. You were crying over it, weren’t you?”
“She was very unhappy,” I asserted indifferently. “She was married and she loved some one else.”
“Do you really think she did?” he asked. “And even so, was that a reason?”
“The other man cared for her; he may not have been able to help it.”
“But he knew that she was married,” he said virtuously, and then he caught my eye and he saw the analogy instantly, for he colored hotly and put down the book.
“Most men argue that way,” I said. “They argue by the book, and—they do as they like.”
He picked up a Japanese ivory paper weight from the table, and stood balancing it across his finger.
“You are perfectly right,” he said at last. “I deserve it all. My grievance is at myself. Your—your beauty, and the fact that I thought you were unhappy, put me—beside myself. It is not an excuse; it is a weak explanation. I will not forget myself again.”
He was as abject as any one could have wished. It was my minute of triumph, but I can not pretend that I was happy. Evidently it had been only a passing impulse. If he had really cared, now that he knew I was free, he would have forgotten himself again at once. Then a new explanation occurred to me. Suppose it had been Bella all the time, and the real shock had been to find that she had been married!
“The fault of the situation was really mine,” I said magnanimously; “I quite blame myself. Only, you must believe one thing. You never furnished us any amusement.” I looked at him sidewise. “The discovery that Bella and Jim were once married must have been a great shock.”
“It was a surprise,” he replied evenly. His voice and his eyes were inscrutable. He returned my glance steadily. It was infuriating to have gone half-way to meet him, as I had, and then to find him intrenched in his self-sufficiency again. I got up.
“It is unfortunate that our acquaintance has begun so unfavorably,” I remarked, preparing to pass him. “Under other circumstances we might have been friends.”
“There is only one solace,” he said. “When we do not have friends, we can not lose them.”
He opened the door to let me pass out, and as our eyes met, all the coldness died out of his. He held out his hand, but I was hurt. I refused to see it.
“Kit!” he said unsteadily. “I—I’m an obstinate, pig-headed brute. I am sorry. Can’t we be friends, after all?”
“‘When we do not have friends we can not lose them,’” I replied with cool malice. And the next instant the door closed behind me.
It was that night that the really serious event of the quarantine occurred.
We were gathered in the library, and everybody was deadly dull. Aunt Selina said she had been reared to a strict observance of the Sabbath, and she refused to go to bed early. The cards and card tables were put away and every one sat around and quarreled and was generally nasty, except Bella and Jim, who had gone into the den just after dinner and firmly closed the door.
I think it was just after Max proposed to me. Yes, he proposed to me again that night. He said that Jim’s illness had decided him; that any of us might take sick and die, shut in that contaminated atmosphere, and that if he did he wanted it all settled. And whether I took him or not he wanted me to remember him kindly if anything happened. I really hated to refuse him—he was in such deadly earnest. But it was quite unnecessary for him to have blamed his refusal, as he did, on Mr. Harbison. I am sure I had refused him plenty of times before I had ever heard of the man. Yes, it was just after he proposed to me that Flannigan came to the door and called Mr. Harbison out into the hall.
Flannigan—like most of the people in the house—always went to Mr. Harbison when there was anything to be done. He openly adored him, and—what was more—he did what Mr. Harbison ordered without a word, while the rest of us had to get down on our knees and beg.
Mr. Harbison went out, muttering something about a storm coming up, and seeing that the tent was secure. Betty Mercer went with him. She had been at his heels all evening, and called him “Tom” on every possible occasion. Indeed, she made no secret of it; she said that she was mad about him, and that she would love to live in South America, and have an Indian squaw for a lady’s maid, and sit out on the veranda in the evenings and watch the Southern Cross shooting across the sky, and eat tropical food from the quaint Indian pottery. She was not even daunted when Dal told her the Southern Cross did not shoot, and that the food was probably canned corn on tin dishes.
So Betty went with him. She wore a pale yellow dinner gown, with just a sophisticated touch of black here and there, and cut modestly square in the neck. Her shoulders are scrawny. And after they were gone—not her shoulders; Mr. Harbison and she—Aunt Selina announced that the next day was Monday, that she had only a week’s supply of clothing with her, and that no policeman who ever swung a mace should wash her undergarments for her.
She paused a moment, but nobody offered to do it. Anne was reading De Maupassant under cover of a table, and the rest pretended not to hear. After a pause, Aunt Selina got up heavily and went upstairs, coming down soon after with a bundle covered with a green shawl, and with a white balbriggan stocking trailing from an opening in it. She paused at the library door, surveyed the inmates, caught my unlucky eye and beckoned to me with a relentless forefinger.
“We can put them to soak tonight,” she confided to me, “and tomorrow they will be quite simple to do. There is no lace to speak of”—Dal raised his eyebrows—“and very little flouncing.”
Aunt Selina and I went to the laundry. It never occurred to any one that Bella should have gone; she had stepped into all my privileges—such as they were—and assumed none of my obligations. Aunt Selina and I went to the laundry.
It is strange what big things develop from little ones. In this case it was a bar of soap. And if Flannigan had used as much soap as he should have instead of washing up the kitchen floor with cold dish water, it would have developed sooner. The two most unexpected events of the whole quarantine occurred that night at the same time, one on the roof and one in the cellar. The cellar one, although curious, was not so serious as the other, so it comes first.
Aunt Selina put her clothes in a tub in the laundry and proceeded to dress them like a vegetable. She threw in a handful of salt, some kerosene oil and a little ammonia. The result was villainous, but after she tasted it—or snuffed it—she said it needed a bar of soap cut up to give it strength—or flavor—and I went into the store room for it.
The laundry soap was in a box. I took in a silver fork, for I hated to touch the stuff, and jabbed a bar successfully in the semi-darkness. Then I carried it back to the laundry and dropped it on the table. Aunt Selina looked at the fork with disgust; then we both looked at the soap. ONE SIDE OF IT WAS COVERED WITH ROUND HOLES THAT CURVED AROUND ON EACH OTHER LIKE A COILED SNAKE.
I ran back to the store room, and there, a little bit sticky and smelling terribly of rosin, lay Anne’s pearl necklace!
I was so excited that I seized Aunt Selina by the hands and danced her all over the place. Then I left her, trying to find her hair pins on the floor, and ran up to tell the others. I met Betty in the hall and waved the pearls at her. But she did not notice them.
“Is Mr. Harbison down there?” she asked breathlessly. “I left him on the roof and went down to my room for my scarf, and when I went back he had disappeared. He—he doesn’t seem to be in the house.” She tried to laugh, but her voice was shaky. “He couldn’t have got down without passing me, anyhow,” she supplemented. “I suppose I’m silly, but so many queer things have happened, Kit.”
“I wouldn’t worry, Betty,” I soothed her. “He is big enough to take care of himself. And with the best intentions in the world, you can’t have him all the time, you know.”
She was too much startled to be indignant. She followed me into the library, where the sight of the pearls produced a tremendous excitement, and then every one had to go down to the store room, and see where the necklace had been hidden, and Max examined all the bars of soap for thumb prints.
Mr. Harbison did not appear. Max commented on the fact caustically, but Dal hushed him up. And so, Anne hugging her pearls, and Aunt Selina having put a final seasoning of washing powder on the clothes in the tub, we all went upstairs to bed. It had been a long day, and the morning would at least bring bridge.
I was almost ready for bed when Jim tapped at my door. I had been very cool to him since the night in the library when I was publicly staked and martyred, and he was almost cringing when I opened the door.
“What is it now?” I asked cruelly. “Has Bella tired of it already, or has somebody else a rash?”
“Don’t be a shrew, Kit,” he said. “I don’t want you to do anything. I only—when did you see Harbison last?”
“If you mean ‘last,’” I retorted, “I’m afraid I haven’t seen the last of him yet.” Then I saw that he was really worried. “Betty was leading him to the roof,” I added. “Why? Is he missing?”
“He isn’t anywhere in the house. Dal and I have been over every inch of it.” Max had come up, in a dressing gown, and was watching me insolently.
“I think we have seen the last of him,” he said. “I’m sorry, Kit, to nip the little romance in the bud. The fellow was crazy about you—there’s no doubt of it. But I’ve been watching him from the beginning, and I think I’m upheld. Whether he went down the water spout, or across a board to the next house—”
“I—I dislike him intensely,” I said angrily, “but you would not dare to say that to his face. He could strangle you with one hand.”
Max laughed disagreeably.
“Well, I only hope he is gone,” he threw at me over his shoulder, “I wouldn’t want to be responsible to your father if he had stayed.” I was speechless with wrath.
They went away then, and I could hear them going over the house. At one o’clock Jim went up to bed, the last, and Mr. Harbison had not been found. I did not see how they could go to bed at all. If he had escaped, then Max was right and the whole thing was heart-breaking. And if he had not, then he might be lying—
I got up and dressed.
The early part of the night had been cloudy, but when I got to the roof it was clear starlight. The wind blew through the electric wires strung across and set them singing. The occasional bleat of a belated automobile on the drive below came up to me raucously. The tent gleamed, a starlit ghost of itself, and the boxwoods bent in the breeze. I went over to the parapet and leaned my elbows on it. I had done the same thing so often before; I had carried all my times of stress so infallibly to that particular place, that instinctively my feet turned there.
And there in the starlight, I went over the whole serio-comedy, and I loathed my part in it. He had been perfectly right to be angry with me and with all of us. And I had been a hypocrite and a Pharisee, and had thanked God that I was not as other people, when the fact was that I was worse than the worst. And although it wasn’t dignified to think of him going down the drain pipe, still—no one could blame him for wanting to get away from us, and he was quite muscular enough to do it.
I was in the depths of self-abasement when I heard a sound behind me. It was a long breath, quite audible, that ended in a groan. I gripped the parapet and listened, while my heart pounded, and in a minute it came again.
I was terribly frightened. Then—I don’t know how I did it, but I was across the roof, kneeling beside the tent, where it stood against the chimney. And there, lying prone among the flower pots, and almost entirely hidden, lay the man we had been looking for.
His head was toward me, and I reached out shakingly and touched his face. It was cold, and my hand, when I drew it back, was covered with blood.