wife is, I'll strangle you. Now listen to me. This is Mrs. Bob Blake,
wife of my cousin Robert. She's an old friend of Marjorie's. We had a
half engagement to meet here this week. Bob is due any minute, but
Marjorie is lost. There is only one record of a Blake in to-day's
register and that's this room and this lady--when Marjorie left me at
the ferry she was coming here, straight. I've been to all the possible
hotels. She is nowhere. You say she telephoned to you. From where?"
"She didn't say," answered Uncle Richard, shame-facedly, and added still
more dejectedly, "I didn't ask. She said in a letter her aunt received
this morning that she was coming here. So I inferred that she was here."
"Then she is here," cried Gladys. "It's some stupid mistake in the
office."
"I'll go down to that chap," John threatened, "and if he doesn't
instantly produce Marjorie I'll shoot him."
[Illustration: UNCLE RICHARD'S FACE, AS HE MET JOHN'S EYES, WAS A STUDY.]
"You'll do nothing of the sort," his uncle contradicted, "the child
appealed to me and I am the one to rescue her. I shall interview the
manager. I know him. You may come with me if you like."
Down at the desk they accosted the still-courteous clerk. Uncle Richard
produced his card, and, before he could ask for the manager the clerk
flicked a memorandum out of one pigeon-hole, a key out of another, and
twirled the register on its turn-table almost into the midst of the
white waistcoat.
"The lady has been expecting you for hours, Mr. Underwood," said he.
"Looked for you quite early in the afternoon, so the maid says. Register
here, please. Quite hysterical, she is, they tell me, and the maid was
asking for the doctor--Front! 625!"
Uncle Richard's face, as he met John's eyes, was a study. The
telephone-girl disentangled the receiver from her pompadour so that she
might hear without hindrance the speech which was bursting through the
swelling buttons of the white waistcoat and making the white whiskers
quiver.
"I know nothing whatever about _any_ lady in _any_ of your rooms," he
roared, greatly to the delight of the bellboys. "I know nothing about
your Underwood woman, with her doctors and her hysterics. I want to see
the manager."
"If," said the telephone maiden, adjusting her skirt at the hips and
shaking her figure into greater conformity with the ideal she had set
before it--"If this gentleman is 2525 Gram., then the lady in 625 rang
him up at seven-thirty and held the wire seven minutes talkin' to him
and cryin' to beat Sousa's band. All about her uncle she was talkin'. I
guess it was him, all right, all right. His voice sounds sort of
familiar to me when he talks mad."
But John had neither eyes nor ears for Uncle Richard's wrath. He
snatched the key and the paper upon which the supercilious clerk had
inscribed, at Marjorie's embarrassed dictation, "Mrs. Underwood, West
Hills, N.J. (husband to arrive later), 625 and 6," and, since love is
keen, he jumped to the right conclusion and the open elevator without
further delay.
An hour or so later the attention of the clerk and the telephone-girl
was again drawn to the complicated Blakes. A party of four sauntered out
of the dining-room and approached the desk.
"I'll register now, I think," said John. And when he had finished he
turned to the star-eyed girl behind him.
"Look carefully at this, Marjorie," he admonished. "Mr. and Mrs. John
Blake. _You_ are Mrs. John Blake. Do you think you can remember that?"
"Don't laugh at me," she pleaded, "Gladys says it was a most natural
mistake, and so does Bob. Don't you, Gladys and Bob?"
"An almost inevitable mistake," they chorused mendaciously, "but," added
Bob, "a rather disastrous mistake for your uncle to explain to his wife,
the doctor and the nurse. He'll be able for it, though; I never saw so
game an old chap."
"And I'll never do it again," she promised. People never do when they've
been married a long, long time, and I feel as though I had been married
thousands and thousands of years."
"Poor, tired little girl," said John, "you have had a rather indifferent
time of it. Say good-night to Dick and Gladys. Come, my dear."
MISERY LOVES COMPANY.
"But, Win," remonstrated the bride-elect, "I really don't think we
_could_. Wouldn't it look awfully strange? I don't think I ever heard of
its being done."
"Neither did I," he agreed. "And yet I want you to do it. Look at it
from my point of view. I persuade John Mead to stop wandering around the
world and to take an apartment with me here in New York. Then I meet
you. The inevitable happens and in less than a year John is to be left
desolate. You know how eccentric he is, and how hard it will be for him
to get on with any other companion--"
"I know," said Patty, "that he never will find any one--but you--to put
up with his eccentricities."
"And then, as if abandoning him were not bad enough, I go and maim the
poor beggar: blind him temporarily--permanently, if he is not taken care
of--and disfigure him beyond all description. Honestly, Patty, you never
saw anything like him."
"I know," said she, "I know. A pair of black eyes."
"Black!" he cried, "why, they're all the colors of the rainbow and two
more beside, as the story-book says. All the way from his hair to his
mustache he is one lurid sunset. I don't want to minimize this thing. It
has only one redeeming feature: he will be a complete disguise. No
amount of rice or ribbon could counteract his sinister companionship. No
bridal suspicions could live in the light of it. Doesn't that thought
help?".
The conversation wandered into personalities and back again, as a
conversation may three days before a wedding, but Patty was not entirely
won over to Hawley's view of his responsibility for having with
unprecedented dexterity and precision planted a smashing "right" on the
bridge of his friend's nose in the course of an amicable "bout."
"And the oculist chap says," Winthrop urged, "that he simply must not be
allowed to use his eyes. I'm the only one who takes any interest in him
or has any control over him, and to abandon him now would be an awful
responsibility. Can't you see that, dear? If we stay at home to take
care of him he will understand why we're doing it, and he'd vanish. Do
let me put him into a motor mask and attach him to the procession."
"Well, of course, Win," Patty answered, "of course we must have him if
you feel so strongly about it. It's a pity," she ended mischievously,
"that he dislikes me so much."
"That's because you dislike him. But just wait till you know one
another."
"I will," she answered with a spirit which promised well for the future.
"I'll wait."
And Winthrop was so touched and gratified by her complaisance that he
had no alternative, save to duplicate it, when the following evening
brought him this communication:
"Kate Perry and I were playing golf this morning. And, oh! Win, it seems
just too dreadful! I banged her between the eyes with my driver. I can't
think how I ever did it. She's not fit to be seen. Awful! worse than Mr.
Mead can possibly be. She can't stay here and she can't go home to
Washington.
"So, now, if you will consent, we shall be four instead of three. Let me
take poor Kate. She can wear a thick veil and sit in behind with Mr.
Mead, in his goggles, and leave the front seats for us. They'll be
company for one another."
Winthrop questioned this final sentence. A supercilious, spoiled
beauty--a beauty now doubly spoiled and presumedly bad tempered--was
hardly an ideal companion for the misanthropic Mead.
* * * * *
The wedding took place in the morning and the beginning of the honeymoon
was prosaic enough. Winthrop and Patty sat in the front seat of the
throbbing touring car, while hysterical bridesmaids and vengeful
groomsmen showered the requisite quantities of rice, confetti and old
slippers upon them.
It was at the New York side of the ferry that a shrouded female joined
them, and it was at the Hoboken side of the river that a be-goggled
young man was added unto her. The bride rushed through the formula of
introduction: a readjustment of dress-suit cases and miniature trunks
was effected, and the disguise which the bridegroom had predicted was
complete. The most romantic onlooker would not have suspected them of
concealing a honeymoon about them.
It was nearly six o'clock when at last they reached their destination,
the little town of Rapidan, in New Jersey, and stopped before the
Empress Hotel. Hawley had visited Rapidan once before, as a member of
his college glee club, and he had recalled it instantly when Mead's
disfigurement made sequestration imperative.
The motor sobbed itself to a standstill: several children and dogs
gathered to inspect it, and then finding more interest and novelty in
Mead's mask turned their attention to him.
The Empress had evidently been dethroned for some years, and the
hospitality she afforded her guests was of an impoverished sort. Hawley,
approaching the desk to make enquiries, was met by a clerk incredibly
arrayed, and the intelligence that the whole house was theirs to choose,
except for two small rooms on the third floor occupied by two gentlemen
who "traveled" respectively in sarsaparilla and molasses.
Hawley returned to his friends and repeated this information.
"How perfectly sweet of them," cried the irresponsible bride. "Oh! Win,
we must stay here and see them. Isn't it the dearest sleepy hollow of a
place?"
Attended by the impressed and impressive clerk, they made an inspection
of the house. Mr. and Mrs. Hawley settled upon a suite just over the
main entrance. Mead was established across the hall. But Kate found a
wonderful panorama which could only be seen from the rooms on the third
floor, and there, down a dreary length of oil-clothed hall, she bestowed
herself and her belongings.
"For I must," she explained to Patty, "I simply _must_ get out of this
veil and breathe, and I shouldn't dare to do it within reach of that
horribly supercilious friend of Winthrop's. I'm going to plead headache
or something, and have my dinner sent up here."
Mead, meanwhile, was unfolding similar plans to Hawley. "I should have
joined you," said he, "if your wife's friend had been a little less
self-sufficient and unsympathetic. Of course, I don't require any
sympathy; but I don't want ridicule either. So, while she is of the
party I'll have my meals in my room. I can't act the 'Man in the Iron
Mask' forever. You just leave the ladies together after dinner and come
up here for a pipe with me."
And when Mr. and Mrs. Hawley next encountered one another and reported
the wishes of their friends, he suggested and she rapturously agreed,
that they should dine in their horse-hair-covered sitting-room.
"I have a reason, dear," she told him, "for not wishing to go to the
dining-room for our first meal together. I'll explain later."
"Your wishing it is enough," he answered before the conversation sank to
banalities.
And when these several intentions were made clear to the conscientious
clerk, he sent for the police force of the town--it consisted of a mild,
little old man in a uniform and helmet which might have belonged to some
mountainous member of the Broadway Squad in its prime--and implored him
to spend the evening in the hall.
"They're beginning to act up funny already," the clerk imparted. "This
eatin' all over the house don't seem just right to me. What do they
think the dining-room's for anyway? Sam was up with the bag belonging to
the single fellow, and he says he's got the worst looking pair of black
eyes he ever saw. Here, Sam, you come and tell Jimmie what he looks
like."
Sam, a middle-aged combination of porter, bellboy, furnace-man, office
assistant and emergency barkeeper was but newly launched upon his
description of Mead's face, when the chambermaid, who was also the
waitress and housekeeper, broke in upon them with the intelligence that
never in all her born days _or_ nights had she seen anything like the
face of the young lady on the third floor.
"What's the matter with her," said the clerk suspiciously, with a look
which warned Jimmie to be at once a Bingham and a Sherlock Holmes.
"Why, Horace," she answered tragically, "that girl has two of the most
awful black eyes. The whites of them is red and then comes purple and
green and yellow. I guess they was meant to be blue."
This chromatic scale was too much for Jimmie. He reeled where he sat and
then, the postman opportunely arriving, sent word to Mrs. Jimmie that
duty would keep him from her all the night.
"Tell her," he huskily charged his messenger, "that there is suspicious
circumstances going on in this house."
"You bet there is," the clerk agreed. "It looks like a case of attempted
murder to me."
"Divorce, more likely," was Jimmie's professional opinion, but he had
scant time to enlarge upon it before the waitress, outraged to the point
of tears, broke out of her domain. She brought with her an atmosphere of
long-dead beefsteak, chops and onions, and she shrilled for an answer to
her question.
"What's the matter with 'em anyway? Ain't the dining-room good enough
for 'em to eat in? It done all right for Judge Campbell's funeral this
afternoon, and I found a real sweet wreath on that there whatnot in the
corner. The candles wasn't all burnt up neither, an' I set out four of
'em on the four corners. It looks elegant, an' them tube-roses smells
grand. An' when I told that young lady what's got the use of her eyes
how glad I was they happened in when we was so well fixed for
decorations, she looked awful funny. Most like she was cross-eyed."
"They all seem to have eye-trouble," Jimmie commented. "Do you suppose
they're running away from one of these here blind asylums."
"Lunatic asylum, most likely," the cheerful clerk contributed.
When the other two guests ceased from traveling in molasses and
sarsaparilla and returned to their quiet hostelry, all these surmises
had hardened into certainties, and were imparted to them with a new maze
of suspicion, more dense, more deadly, and more strictly in accordance
with the principles laid down in "Dandy Dick, the Boy Detective."
Madeline, the waitress, reported further particulars as she ministered
to the creature-comforts of the traveling gentlemen dining alone among
the funeral-baked meats. So interested and excited did these gentlemen
become that they determined to interview, or at least to see, their
mysterious fellow guests.
When their elaborate supper had reached its apotheosis of stewed prunes
and blue-boiled rice, Hawley and Mead had gone out for a meditative and
tobacco-shrouded stroll. They passed through the hall and inspiration
awoke in Jimmie.
"By gum," said he, "I know them now. I suspicioned them from the first
by what Horace told me. But now I've got them sure. You mind that time I
was down to New York and was showed over Police Headquarters, by
professional etiquette?"
"Sure," they all agreed. It was indeed a reminiscence, the details of
which had been playing havoc with Rapidan's nerves for the past fifteen
years. They felt that they could not bear it now.
"Well," continued Jimmie, gathering his auditors close about him by the
husky whisper he now adopted, "I see them two fellers then. Mebbe 'twas
in the Rogue's Gallery and mebbe it was in the cells. I ain't worked it
down that fine yet, but I'll think and pray on it and let you know when
I get light."
When the staff and the commercial guests of the Empress Hotel were
waiting to see illumination burst through the blue-shrouded protector,
the bridal party was veering momentarily further from the normal. For
the deserted bride, alone in the desolate best sitting-room, laid her
head upon her arms and laughed and laughed. She had made one cautious
descent to the ground floor in search of diversion, and meeting Jimmie,
she found it. After a conversation strictly categorical upon his side
and widely misleading upon hers, she had gone up stairs again and halted
in the upper hall just long enough to hear Jimmie's triumphant:
"Well, we know _her_ name anyway."
"What is it?" hissed Horace, while the porter relieved himself of a quid
of tobacco so that nothing should interfere with his hearing and
attention.
"Huh!" ejaculated Jimmie, "you bin a hotel clerk two years and sold
seegars all that time (when you could) and you don't know Ruby
Mandeville when she stands before you."
A box of the "Flor de" that gifted songstress, was soon produced and
pried open, and the effulgent charms of its godmother compared with the
less effulgent, but no less charming figure which had just trailed away.
"It's her, sure as you're born," cried the gentleman who traveled in
molasses, absent-mindedly abstracting three cigars and conveying them
surreptitiously to his coat pocket.
"She's fallen off some in flesh," commented Horace, as with careful
presence of mind he drew out his daybook and entered a charge for those
three cigars.
"But she don't fool me," said Jimmie, "she can put flesh on or she can
take it off--"
"My, how you talk!" shrilled the chambermaid-bellboy, "you'd think you
was talkin' about clothes."
"It ain't no different to them," Jimmie maintained. "That's one of the
things us detekitives has got to watch out for."
"What do you s'pose she's doing here?" asked the porter.
"Gettin' married again most likely. That's about all she does nowadays."
Patty was still chuckling and choking over these remarks, when the door
of the sitting-room opened cautiously and Kate Perry, swathed in her
motor veil, looked in.
"Are we alone?" she demanded with proper melodramatic accent.
"We are," the bride answered, "Winthrop and Mr. Mead have gone out for a
smoke."
"Then I want you to tell me if I'm fading at all. I've been looking at
it upstairs, in a little two-by-three mirror, and taken that way, by
inches, it looks awful. Tell me what you think?" She removed the veil
and presented her damaged face for her friend's inspection. There was
not much improvement to report, but the always optimistic Patty did what
she could with it.
[Illustration: SHE SWOOPED UNDER THE LARGE CENTER TABLE, DRAGGING PATTY
WITH HER.]
"The left cheek," she pronounced, "is really better, less swollen,
less--Oh! Kate, here they come."
Miss Perry began to readjust her charitable gray chiffon veil. It was
one of those which are built around a circular aperture, and as the
steps in the hall came ever closer she, in one last frantic effort
succeeded in framing the most lurid of her eyes in this opening. Casting
one last look into the mirror, she swooped under the large center-table,
dragging Patty with her, and disposing their various frills and ribbons
under the long-hanging tablecover.
"If they don't find either of us," she whispered, "they'll go away to
look for us."
She had no time to say more, and Patty had no time to say anything
before the door opened and presented to their limited range of vision,
two utterly strange pairs of shoes and the hems of alien trousers.
"I hope you will excuse me, Miss," began the molasses gentleman, so full
of his entrance speech that he said the first part of it before he
noticed that the room was empty. And then turned to rend his fellow
adventurer, who was laughing at him.
"Didn't Horace tell us," he stormed, "that she was here, and wasn't you
going to say how you had saw her in the original 'Black Crook?'"
"I seen her all right," said his more grammatical friend, with heavy
emphasis.
"Do you see her now?" demanded the irate molasses traveler.
"I do not, but I'll set here 'til she comes."
They both sat. Not indeed until the arrival of Ruby Mandeville, but
until Hawley and Mead made their appearance, and made it, too, very
plain that they had not expected and did not enjoy the society of the
travelers.
"Where are the ladies?" asked Hawley.
"Search us," responded the travelers.
"They must have gone to their rooms," said the bridegroom. "If these
gentlemen don't object to our waiting here," he went on with a fine and
wasted sarcasm.
"Set right down," said the genial sarsaparilla man, and to further
promote good feeling he tendered his remaining "Ruby Mandeville" cigar.
"Your friend," said he affably, "does he always wear them goggles?"
"Always," answered Hawley. "Eats in them, sleeps in them."
"Born in them," supplemented Mead savagely.
They sat and waited for yet a few moments, and though Mead did not add
geniality to the conversation, he certainly contributed interest to it.
For his views on honeymoon etiquette being strong within him, and an
audience made to his hand, he went on to amplify some of the theories
with which he had been trying to undermine Winthrop's loyalty.
"I am persuaded that most of the disappointments of married life are due
to the impossible standards set up at the beginning. Look at it this
way. You know the fuss most wives make about the hours a husband keeps.
Well! suppose Mr. Hawley comes out in the car with me to-night. I know
some fellows who have a summer studio near here. We'll run over and make
a night of it."
"Say," the molasses gentleman broke in, "be you married, mister?"
"No!" said Mead.
"Sounds like it," said the molasses gentleman. "Marriage will sort of
straighten you out on these here subjects."
"Oh, leave 'em be," admonished the sarsaparilla man. "If I had 'a met up
with him thirty years ago, mebbee I wouldn't be in the traveling line
now. He's got a fine idee."
Hawley, meanwhile, was wrestling with his manners and the "Ruby
Mandeville," until the lady, as was her custom, triumphed.
He hurriedly and incompletely extinguished the cigar, and attracted by
the same opportunity for concealment which had appealed to Kate and
Patty, he lifted a corner of the heavy-fringed tablecover and sent Ruby
to join the other ladies.
Now, a lighted cigar applied suddenly to the ear of an excited and
half-hysterical conspirator, will generally produce results. In this
case it produced a scream, the bride, and after an interval, the
shrouded confidential friend.
"See where amazement on your mother sits," the ghost remarks in Hamlet,
but amazement never sat so hard on the wicked Gertrude of Denmark as it
did upon the four men who saw the tablecloth give up its ghosts.
At first there was silence. One of those throbbing, abominable silences
whose every second makes a situation worse and explanation more
impossible.
The "Black Crook" speech of welcome and appreciation died in the heart
of the molasses traveler. It did not somehow seem the safest answer to
Hawley's threatening--
"I think you gentlemen had better explain how you happen to be in my
private sitting-room. Perhaps we had better step out into the hall."
They did, and the echoes of their conversation brought Jimmie, that
trusty sleuth, upon the scene. With him he brought Horace as witness.
Also, he carried his dark lantern. He directed its glare fitfully at the
two strangers until Mead, catching a beam in his eye, turned and drove
Jimmie and his cohorts from the scene. They retreated in exceedingly
bad order to the bar, and then Jimmie announced in sepulchral whispers
that he had further identification to impart. He required much liquid
refreshment to nerve him to speech, and his audience required to be
similarly strengthened to hear.
"I've got 'em," he began, "I know 'em now. Horace, this is the biggest
thing you'll ever be anywhere near." And, as his hearers drew close
about him, he whispered "counterfeiters. The hull kit and bilin' of 'em."
* * * * *
Meanwhile, Kate and Patty wrestled afresh with the automobile veil, and
had succeeded in getting it tied in a limp string around the
bridesmaid's neck, leaving all her head and face uncovered. And when the
groom and the groomsman returned she, with a muffled gurgle, dived back
into the seclusion of the tablecover.
"We've got rid of those bounders," Hawley announced, and--
"Hello!" cried Mead, "Miss Perry gone already?"
"She was very tired," said Patty veraciously, but evasively.
"Awfully jolly girl, isn't she Mead?" said Hawley, with the
expansiveness of the newly-wed. "Handsome, too?"
"Perhaps she is, but so long as she dresses like a veiled prophet it is
hard to tell."
"If you two can get on without me," said Patty, disregarding a muffled
protest from under the table, "I'll go up and fetch," she made these
comforting words very clear, "my green motor veil."
Instantly, when he closed the door after her, Mead turned to Hawley.