"Unless," continued Brown, "you think I had better remain--somewhere on
the premises--until your maid arrives."
"That might be safer," said Betty, more thoughtfully.
"Your maid will probably be here in a few minutes."
"Probably," said Betty, head bent, slim, ringless fingers busy with the
sparkling drop that glimmered pendant from her neckchain.
Silence--the ironing board between them--she standing, bright head
lowered, worrying the jewel with childish fingers; he following every
movement, fascinated, spellbound.
After a moment, without looking up: "You have been very, very nice to me--
in the nicest possible way," she said.... "I am not going to forget it
easily--even if I might wish to."
"I can never forget _you!_... I d-don't want to."
The sparkling pendant escaped her fingers; she picked it up again and
spoke as though gravely addressing it:
"Some day somewhere," she said, looking at the jewel, "perhaps chance--
the hazard of life--may bring us to--togeth--to acquaintance--a more
formal acquaintance than this.... I hope so. This has been a little--
irregular, and perhaps you had better not wait for my maid.... I hope we
may meet--sometime."
"I hope so, too," he managed to say, with so little fervor and so
successful an imitation of her politely detached interest in convention
that she raised her eyes. They dropped immediately, because his quiet
voice and speech scarcely conformed to the uncontrolled protest in his
eyes.
For a moment she stood, passing the golden links through her white
fingers like a young novice with a rosary. Steps on the stairs disturbed
them; the recessional had begun; four solemn persons filed out the area
gate. At the same moment, suave and respectful, her butler pro tem.
presented himself at the doorway:
"Luncheon is served, madam."
"Thank you." She looked uncertainly at Brown, hesitated, flushed a
trifle.
"I will stay here and admit the plumber and then--then--I'll g-go," he
said with a heartbroken smile.
"I suppose you took the opportunity to lunch when you went out?" she
said. Her inflection made it a question.
Without answering he stepped back to allow her to pass. She moved
forward, turned, undecided.
"_Have_ you lunched?"
"Please don't feel that you ought to ask me," he began, and checked
himself as the vivid pink deepened in her cheeks. Then she freed herself
of embarrassment with a little laugh.
"Considering," she said, "that we have been chasing cats on the back
fences together and that, subsequently, you dug me out of the coal in my
own cellar, I can't believe it is very dreadful if I ask you to luncheon
with me.... Is it?"
"It is ador--it is," he corrected himself firmly, "exceedingly civil of
you to ask me!"
"Then--will you?" almost timidly.
"I will. I shall not pretend any more. I'd rather lunch with you than be
President of this Republic."
The butler pro tem. seated her.
"You see," she said, "a place had already been laid for you." And with
the faintest trace of malice in her voice: "Perhaps your butler had his
orders to lay two covers. Had he?"
"From me?" he protested, reddening.
"You don't suspect _me_, do you?" she asked, adorably mischievous. Then
glancing over the masses of flowers in the center and at the corners of
the lace cloth: "This is deliciously pretty. But you are either
dreadfully and habitually extravagant or you believe I am. Which is it?"
"I think both are true," he said, laughing.
And a little while later when he returned from the basement after
admitting Mr. Quinn, the plumber:
"Do you know that this is a most heavenly luncheon?" she said, greeting
his return with delightfully fearless eyes. "Such Astrakan caviar! Such
salad! Everything I care for most. And how on earth you guessed I can't
imagine.... I'm beginning to think you are rather wonderful."
They lifted the long, slender glasses of iced Ceylon tea and regarded one
another over the frosty rims--a long, curious glance from her; a straight
gaze from him, which she decided not to sustain too long.
Later, when she gave the signal, they rose as though they had often dined
together, and moved leisurely out through the dim, shrouded drawing-rooms
where, in the golden dusk, the odor of camphor hung.
She had taken a great cluster of dewy Bride's roses from the centerpiece,
and as she walked forward, sedately youthful, beside him, her fresh,
young face brooded over the fragrance of the massed petals.
"Sweet--how sweet!" she murmured to herself, and as they reached the end
of the vista she half turned to face him, dreamily, listless, confident.
They looked at one another, she with chin brushing the roses.
"The strangest of all," she said, "is that it _seems_ all right--and--and
we _know_ that it is all quite wrong.... Had you better go?"
"Unless I ought to wait and make sure your maid does not fail you....
Shall I?" he asked evenly.
She did not answer. He drew a linen-swathed armchair toward her; she
absently seated herself and lay back, caressing the roses with delicate
lips and chin.
Twice she looked up at him, standing there by the boarded windows.
Sunshine filtered through the latticework at the top--enough for them to
see each other as in a dull afterglow.
"I wonder how soon my maid will come," she mused, dropping the loose
roses on her knees. "If she is going to be very long about it perhaps--
perhaps you might care to find a chair--if you have decided to wait."
He drew one from a corner and seated himself, pulses hammering his
throat.
Through the stillness of the house sounded at intervals the clink of
glass from the pantry. Other sounds from above indicated the plumber's
progress from floor to floor.
"Do you realize," she said impulsively, "how _very_ nice you have been to
me? What a perfectly horrid position I might have been in, with poor
Clarence on the back fence! And suppose I had dared follow him alone to
the cellar? I--I might have been there yet--up to my neck in coal?"
She gazed into space with considerable emotion.
"And now," she said, "I am safe here in my own home. I have lunched
divinely, a maid is on the way to me, Clarence remains somewhere safe
indoors, Mr. Quinn is flitting from faucet to faucet, the electric light
and the telephone will be in working order before very long--and it is
_all_ due to you!"
"I--I did a few things I almost w-wish I hadn't," stammered Brown,
"b-because I can't, somehow, decently t-tell you how tremendously
I--I--" He stuck fast.
"What?"
"It would look as though I were presuming on a t-trifling service
rendered, and--oh, I can't say it; I want to, but I can't."
"Say what? Please, I don't mind what you are--are going to say."
"It's--it's that I----"
"Y-es?" in soft encouragement.
"W-want to know you most tremendously now. I don't want to wait several
years for chance and hazard."
"O-h!" as though the information conveyed a gentle shock to her. Her low-
breathed exclamation nearly finished Brown.
"I knew you'd think it unpardonable for me--at such a time--to venture
to--to--ask--say--express--convey----"
"Why do you--how can I--where could we--" She recovered herself
resolutely. "I do not think we ought to take advantage of an accident
like this.... Do you? Besides, probably, in the natural course of social
events----"
"But it may be years! months! weeks!" insisted Brown, losing control of
himself.
"I should hope it would at least be a decently reasonable interval of
several weeks----"
"But I don't know what to do if I never see you again for weeks! I c-care
so much--for--you."
She shrank back in her chair, and in her altered face he read that he had
disgraced himself.
"I knew I was going to," he said in despair. "I couldn't keep it--I
couldn't stop it. And now that you see what sort of a man I am I'm going
to tell you more."
"You need not," she said faintly.
"I must. Listen! I--I don't even know your full name--all I know is that
it is Betty, and that your cat's name is Clarence and your plumber's name
is Quinn. But if I didn't know anything at all concerning you it would
have been the same. I suppose you will think me insane if I tell you that
before the car, on which you rode, came into sight I _knew_ you were on
it. And I--cared--for--you--before I ever saw you."
"I don't understand----"
"I know you don't. _I_ don't. All I understand is that what you and I
have done has been done by us before, sometime, somewhere--part only--
down to--down to where you changed cars. Up to that moment, before you
took the Lexington Avenue car, I recognized each incident as it
occurred.... But when all this happened to us before I must have lost
courage--for I did not recognize anything after that except that I cared
for you.... _Do_ you understand one single word of what I have been
saying?"
The burning color in her face had faded slowly while he was speaking; her
lifted eyes grew softer, serious, as he ended impetuously.
She looked at him in retrospective silence. There was no mistaking his
astonishing sincerity, his painfully earnest endeavor to impart to her
some rather unusual ideas in which he certainly believed. No man who
looked that way at a woman could mean impertinence; her own intelligence
satisfied her that he had not meant and could never mean offense to any
woman.
"Tell me," she said quietly, "just what you mean. It is not possible for
you to--care--for--me.... Is it?"
He disclosed to her, beginning briefly with his own name, material and
social circumstances, a pocket edition of his hitherto uneventful career,
the advent that morning of the emissary from The Green Mouse, his
discussion with Smith, the strange sensation which crept over him as he
emerged from the tunnel at Forty-second Street, his subsequent
altercation with Smith, and the events that ensued up to the eruption of
Clarence.
He spoke in his most careful attorney's manner, frank, concise,
convincing, free from any exaggeration of excitement or emotion. And she
listened, alternately fascinated and appalled as, step by step, his story
unfolded the links in an apparently inexorable sequence involving this
young man and herself in a predestined string of episodes not yet ended--
if she permitted herself to credit this astounding story.
Sensitively intelligent, there was no escaping the significance of the
only possible deduction. She drew it and blushed furiously. For a moment,
as the truth clamored in her brain, the self-evidence of it stunned her.
But she was young, and the shamed recoil came automatically. Incredulous,
almost exasperated, she raised her head to confront him; the red lips
parted in outraged protest--parted and remained so, wordless, silent--the
soundless, virginal cry dying unuttered on a mouth that had imperceptibly
begun to tremble.
Her head sank slowly; she laid her white hands above the roses heaped in
her lap.
For a long while she remained so. And he did not speak.
First the butler went away. Then Mr. Quinn followed. The maid had not yet
arrived. The house was very still.
And after the silence had worn his self-control to the breaking point he
rose and walked to the dining room and stood looking down into the yard.
The grass out there was long and unkempt; roses bloomed on the fence;
wistaria, in its deeper green of midsummer, ran riot over the trellis
where Clarence had basely dodged his lovely mistress, and, after making a
furry pin wheel of himself, had fled through the airhole into Stygian
depths.
Somewhere above, in the silent house, Clarence was sulkily dissembling.
"I suppose," said Brown, quietly coming back to where the girl was
sitting in the golden dusk, "that I might as well find Clarence while we
are waiting for your maid. May I go up and look about?"
And taking her silence as assent, he started upstairs.
He hunted carefully, thoroughly, opening doors, peeping under furniture,
investigating clothespresses, listening at intervals, at intervals
calling with misleading mildness. But, like him who died in malmsey,
Clarence remained perjured and false to all sentiments of decency so
often protested purringly to his fair young mistress.
Mechanically Brown opened doors of closets, knowing, if he had stopped to
think, that cats don't usually turn knobs and let themselves into tightly
closed places.
In one big closet on the fifth floor, however, as soon as he opened the
door there came a rustle, and he sprang forward to intercept the
perfidious one; but it was only the air stirring the folds of garments
hanging on the wall.
As he turned to step forth again the door gently closed with an ominous
click, shutting him inside. And after five minutes' frantic fussing he
realized that he was imprisoned by a spring lock at the top of a strange
house, inhabited only by a cat and a bewildered young girl, who might, at
any moment now that the telephone was in order, call a cab and flee from
a man who had tried to explain to her that they were irrevocably
predestined for one another.
Calling and knocking were dignified and permissible, but they did no
good. To kick violently at the door was not dignified, but he was obliged
to do it. Evidently the closet was too remote for the sound to penetrate
down four flights of stairs.
He tried to break down the door--they do it in all novels. He only
rebounded painfully, ineffectively, which served him right for reading
fiction.
It irked him to shout; he hesitated for a long while; then sudden
misgiving lest she might flee the house seized him and he bellowed. It
was no use.
The pitchy quality of the blackness in the closet aided him in bruising
himself; he ran into a thousand things of all kinds of shapes and
textures every time he moved. And at each fresh bruise he grew madder and
madder, and, holding the cat responsible, applied language to Clarence of
which he had never dreamed himself capable.
Then he sat down. He remained perfectly still for a long while, listening
and delicately feeling his hurts. A curious drowsiness began to irritate
him; later the irritation subsided and he felt a little sleepy.
His heart, however, thumped like an inexpensive clock; the cedar-tainted
air in the closet grew heavier; he felt stupid, swaying as he rose. No
wonder, for the closet was as near air-tight as it could be made.
Fortunately he did not realize it.
And, meanwhile, downstairs, Betty was preparing for flight.
She did not know where she was going--how far away she could get in a
rose-silk morning gown. But she had discovered, in a clothespress, an
automobile duster, cap, and goggles; on the strength of these she tried
the telephone, found it working, summoned a coupé, and was now awaiting
its advent. But the maid from Dooley's must first arrive to take charge
of the house and Clarence until she, Betty, could summon her family to
her assistance and defy The Green Mouse, Beekman Brown, and Destiny
behind her mother's skirts.
Flight was, therefore, imperative--it was absolutely indispensable that
she put a number of miles between herself and this young man who had just
informed her that Fate had designed them for one another.
She was no longer considering whether she owed this amazing young man any
gratitude, or what sort of a man he might be, agreeable, well-bred,
attractive; all she understood was that this man had suddenly stepped
into her life, politely expressing his conviction that they could not,
ultimately, hope to escape from each other. And, beginning to realize the
awful import of his words, the only thing that restrained her from
instant flight on foot was the hidden Clarence. She could not abandon her
cat. She must wait for that maid. She waited. Meanwhile she hunted up
Dooley's Agency in the telephone book and called them up. They told her
the maid was on the way--as though Dooley's Agency could thwart Destiny
with a whole regiment of its employees!
She had discarded her roses with a shudder; cap, goggles, duster, lay in
her lap. If the maid came before Brown returned she'd flee. If Brown came
back before the maid arrived she'd tell him plainly what she had decided
on, thank him, tell him kindly but with decision that, considering the
incredible circumstances of their encounter, she must decline to
encourage any hope he might entertain of ever again seeing her.
At this stern resolve her heart, being an automatic and independent
affair, refused to approve, and began an unpleasantly irregular series of
beats which annoyed her.
"It is true," she admitted to herself, "that he is a gentleman, and I can
scarcely be rude enough, after what he has done for me, to leave him
without any explanation at all.... His clothes are ruined. I must
remember that."
Her heart seemed to approve such sentiments, and it beat more regularly
as she seated herself at a desk, found in it a sheet of notepaper and a
pencil, and wrote rapidly:
"_Dear Mr. Brown:_
"If my maid comes before you do I am going. I can't help it. The maid
will stay to look after Clarence until I can return with some of the
family. I don't mean to be rude, but I simply cannot stand what you told
me about our--about what you told me.... I'm sorry you tore your clothes.
"Please believe my flight has nothing to do with you personally or your
conduct, which was perfectly ('charming' scratched out) proper. It is
only that to be suddenly told that one is predestined to ('marry'
scratched out) become intimately acquainted (all this scratched out and a
new line begun).
"It is unendurable for a girl to think that there is no freedom of choice
in life left her--to be forced, by what you say are occult currents,
into--friendship--with a perfectly strange man at the other end. So I
don't think we had better ever again attempt to find anybody to present
us to each other. This doesn't sound right, but you will surely
understand.
"Please do not misjudge me. I must appear to you uncivil, ungrateful, and
childish--but I am, somehow, a little frightened. I know you are
perfectly nice--but all that has happened is almost, in a way, terrifying
to me. Not that I am cowardly; but you must understand. You will--won't
you?.... But what is the use of my asking you, as I shall never see you
again.
"So I am only going to thank you, and say ('with all my heart' crossed
out) very cordially, that you have been most kind, most generous and
considerate--most--most----"
* * * * *
Her pencil faltered; she looked into space, and the image of Beekman
Brown, pleasant-eyed, attractive, floated unbidden out of vacancy and
looked at her.
She stared back at the vision curiously, more curiously as her mind
evoked the agreeable details of his features, resting there, chin on the
back of her hand, from which, presently, the pencil fell unheeded.
What could he be doing upstairs all this while. She had not heard him for
many minutes now. Why was he so still?
She straightened up at her desk and glanced uneasily across her shoulder,
listening.
Not a sound from above; she rose and walked to the foot of the stairs.
Why was he so still? Had he found Clarence? Had anything gone wrong? Had
Clarence become suddenly rabid and attacked him. Cats can't annihilate
big, strong young men. But _where_ was he? Had he, pursuing his quest,
emerged through the scuttle on to the roof--and--and--fallen off?
Scarcely knowing what she did she mounted on tiptoe to the second floor,
listening. The silence troubled her; she went from room to room, opening
doors and clothespresses. Then she mounted to the third floor, searching
more quickly. On the fourth floor she called to him in a voice not quite
steady. There was no reply.
Alarmed now, she hurriedly flung open doors everywhere, then, picking up
her rose-silk skirts, she ran to the top floor and called tremulously.
A faint sound answered; bewildered, she turned to the first closet at
hand, and her cheeks suddenly blanched as she sprang to the door of the
cedar press and tore it wide open.
He was lying on his face amid a heap of rolled rugs, clothes hangers and
furs, quite motionless.
She knew enough to run into the servants' rooms, fling open the windows
and, with all the strength in her young body, drag the inanimate youth
across the floor and into the fresh air.
"O-h!" she said, and said it only once. Then, ashy of lip and cheek, she
took hold of Brown and, lashing her memory to help her in the emergency,
performed for that inanimate gentleman the rudiments of an exercise
which, if done properly, is supposed to induce artificial respiration.
It certainly induced something resembling it in Brown. After a while he
made unlovely and inarticulate sounds; after a while the sounds became
articulate. He said: "Betty!" several times, more or less distinctly. He
opened one eye, then the other; then his hands closed on the hands that
were holding his wrists; he looked up at her from where he lay on the
floor. She, crouched beside him, eyes still dilated with the awful fear
of death, looked back, breathless, trembling.
"That is a devil of a place, that closet," he said faintly.
She tried to smile, tried wearily to free her hands, watched them, dazed,
being drawn toward him, drawn tight against his lips--felt his lips on
them.
Then, without warning, an incredible thrill shot through her to the
heart, stilling it--silencing pulse and breath--nay, thought itself. She
heard him speaking; his words came to her like distant sounds in a dream:
"I cared for you. You give me life--and I adore you.... Let me. It will
not harm you. The problem of life is solved for me; I have solved it; but
unless some day you will prove it for me--Betty--the problem of life is
but a sorry sum--a total of ciphers without end.... No other two people
in all the world could be what we are and what we have been to each
other. No other two people could dare to face what we dare face." He
paused: "Dare we, Betty?"
Her eyes turned from his. He rose unsteadily, supported on one arm; she
sprang to her feet, looked at him, and, as he made an awkward effort to
rise, suddenly bent forward and gave him both hands in aid.
"Wait--wait!" she said; "let me try to think, if I can. Don't speak to me
again--not yet--not now."
But, at intervals, as they descended the flights of stairs, she turned
instinctively to watch his progress, for he still moved with difficulty.
In the drawing-room they halted, he leaning heavily on the back of a
chair, she, distrait, restless, pacing the polished parquet, treading her
roses under foot, turning from time to time to look at him--a strange,
direct, pure-lidded gaze that seemed to freshen his very soul.
Once he stooped and picked up one of the trodden roses bruised by her
slim foot; once, as she passed him, pacing absently the space between the
door and him, he spoke her name.
But: "Wait!" she breathed. "You have said everything. It is for me to
reply--if I speak at all. C-can't you wait for--me?"
"Have I angered you?"
She halted, head high, superb in her slim, young beauty.
"Do I look it?"
"I don't know."
"Nor I. Let me find out."
The room had become dimmer; the light on her hair and face and hands
glimmered dully as she passed and re-passed him in her restless progress--
restless, dismayed, frightened progress toward a goal she already saw
ahead--close ahead of her--every time she turned to look at him. She
already knew the end.
_That_ man! And she knew that already he must be, for her, something that
she could never again forget--something she must reckon with forever and
ever while life endured.
She paused and inspected him almost insolently. Suddenly the rush of the
last revolt overwhelmed her; her eyes blazed, her white hands tightened
into two small clenched fists--and then tumult died in her ringing ears,
the brightness of the eyes was quenched, her hands relaxed, her head sank
low, lower, never again to look on this man undismayed, heart free,
unafraid--never again to look into this man's eyes with the unthinking,
unbelieving tranquillity born of the most harmless skepticism in the
world.
She stood there in silence, heard his step beside her, raised her head
with an effort.
"Betty!"
Her hands quivered, refusing surrender. He bent and lifted them, pressing
them to his eyes, his forehead. Then lowered them to the level of his
lips, holding them suspended, eyes looking into hers, waiting.
Suddenly her eyes closed, a convulsive little tremor swept her, she
pressed both clasped hands against his lips, her own moved, but no words
came--only a long, sweet, soundless sigh, soft as the breeze that stirs
the crimson maple buds when the snows of spring at last begin to melt.
From a dark corner under the piano Clarence watched them furtively.
[Illustration]