Molly and Sigsbee Horatio, the latter muttering "Gallagher! Gallagher!
Gallagher!" to himself in order that the magic name should not again
escape him, had started out in the two-seater about a quarter of an
hour after the departure of Mrs. Waddington's Hispano-Suiza. Half-way
to New York, however, a blow-out had arrested their progress: and the
inability of Sigsbee H. to make a quick job of fixing the spare wheel
had further delayed them. It was not, therefore, till almost at the
exact moment when Mrs. Waddington was committing the rash act which had
so discomposed Officer Garroway, that Molly, having dropped her father
at Police Headquarters, arrived at the entrance of the Sheridan.
She hurried up the stairs and rang George's front-door bell. For awhile
it seemed as if her ringing was to meet with no response: then, after
some minutes, footsteps made themselves heard coming along the passage.
The door opened, and Molly found herself gazing into the inflamed eyes
of a policeman.
She looked at him with surprise. She had never seen him before, and
she rather felt that she would have preferred not to see him now:
for he was far from being a pleasing sight. His nose, ears and eyes
were a vivid red: and his straggling hair dripped wetly on to the
floor. With the object of diminishing the agony caused by the pepper,
Officer Garroway had for some time been holding his head under the
tap in the kitchen: and he now looked exactly like the body which had
been found after several days in the river. The one small point that
differentiated him from a corpse was the fact that he was sneezing.
"What are you doing here?" exclaimed Molly.
"Achoo!" replied Officer Garroway.
"What?" said Molly.
The policeman, with a nobility which should have earned him promotion,
checked another sneeze.
"There has been an outrage," he said.
"Mr. Finch has not been hurt?" cried Molly, alarmed.
"Mr. Finch hasn't. I have."
"Who are you?"
"My name is Gar-hosh-hoosh-hish."
"What?"
"Gar-ish-wash-WUSH ... Garroway," said the policeman, becoming calmer.
"Where is Mr. Finch?"
"I could not say, miss."
"Have you a cold?"
"No, miss, not a ker-osh-wosh-osh. A woman threw pepper in my face."
"You ought not to know such women," said Molly severely.
The injustice of this stung Officer Garroway.
"I did not know her socially. I was arresting her."
"Oh, I see."
"I found her burgling this apartment."
"Good gracious!"
"And when I informed her that I was compelled to take her into custody,
she threw pepper in my face and escaped."
"You poor man!"
"Thank you, miss," said Officer Garroway gratefully. A man can do with
a bit of sympathy on these occasions, nor is such sympathy rendered
less agreeable by the fact that the one who offers it is young and
charming and gazes at you with large, melting blue eyes. It was at this
point that Officer Garroway began for the first time to be aware of a
distinct improvement in his condition.
"Can I get you anything?" said Molly.
Officer Garroway shook his head wistfully.
"It's against the law, miss, now. In fact, I am to be one of a
_posse_ this very night that is to raid a restaurant which
supplies the stuff."
"I meant something from a drug-store. Some ointment or something."
"It is extremely kind of you, miss, but I could not dream of putting
you to so much trouble. I will look in at a drug-store on my way to
the station-house. I fear I must leave you now, as I have to go and
drish-hosh-hish."
"What?"
"Dress, miss."
"But you are dressed."
"For the purposes of the raid to which I alluded it is necessary for
our _posse_ to put on full evening drah-woosh. In order to deceive
the staff of the rish-wish-wosh, and lull them into a false security.
It would never do, you see, for us to go there in our uniforms. That
would put them on their guard."
"How exciting! What restaurant are you raiding?"
Officer Garroway hesitated.
"Well, miss, it is in the nature of an official secret, of course,
but on the understanding that you will let it go no further, the
rosh-ow-wush is the Purple Chicken, just round the corner. I will wish
you good night, miss, as I really must be off."
"But wait a moment. I came here to meet Mr. Finch. Have you seen
anything of him?"
"No, miss. Nobody has visited the apartment while I have been there."
"Oh, then I'll wait. Good night. I hope you will feel better soon."
"I feel better already, miss," said Officer Garroway gallantly, "thanks
to your kind sympathy. Good nish-nosh, miss."
Molly went out on to the roof, and stood there gazing over the million
twinkling lights of the city. At this height the voice of New York sank
to a murmur, and the air was sweet and cool. Little breezes rustled
in the potted shrubs over which Mullett was wont to watch with such
sedulous care, and a half-moon was shining in rather a deprecating way,
as if conscious of not being at its best in such surroundings. For,
like Sigsbee H. Waddington (now speeding towards his third Gallagher),
the moon, really to express itself, needs the great open spaces.
Molly, however, found nothing to criticise in that pale silver glow.
She felt a proprietary interest in the moon. It was her own private
and personal moon, and should have been shining in through the
windows of the drawing-room of the train that bore her away on her
wedding-journey. That that journey had been postponed was in no way the
fault of the moon: and, gazing up at it, she tried to convey by her
manner her appreciation of the fact.
It was at this point that a strangled exclamation broke the stillness:
and, turning, she perceived George Finch.
George Finch stood in the moonlight, staring dumbly. Although what he
saw before him had all the appearance of being Molly, and though a rash
and irreflective observer would no doubt have said that it was Molly,
it was so utterly impossible that she could really be there that he
concluded that he was suffering from an hallucination. The nervous
strain of the exacting day through which he had passed had reduced
him, he perceived, to the condition of those dying travellers in the
desert who see mirages. And so he remained where he was, not daring to
approach closer: for he knew that if you touch people in dreams they
vanish.
But Molly was of a more practical turn of mind. She had come twenty
miles to see George. She had waited for George for what seemed several
hours. And here George was. She did the sensible thing. Uttering a
little squeak of rapture, she ran at him like a rabbit.
"Georgie! My pet!"
One lives and learns. George found that he had been all wrong, and
that his preconceived ideas about dreams and what could and could
not happen in them must be revised. For, so far from vanishing when
touched, his wraith appeared to be growing more substantial every
moment.
He shut his eyes and kissed her tentatively. He opened his eyes. She
was still there.
"Is it really you?" said George.
"Yes, really me."
"But how ... what...?"
It was borne in upon George--for he was a young man of good average
intelligence--that he was spoiling a golden moment with unseasonable
chatter. This was no time for talk. He talked, accordingly, no more;
and there was silence on the roof. The moon looked down, well pleased.
There is not much of interest for a moon to look at in a large city,
and this was the sort of thing it liked best,--the only sort of thing,
if you came right down to it, that made it worth a moon's while to
shine at all.
George clung to Molly, and Molly clung to George, like two ship-wrecked
survivors who have come together on a wave-swept beach. And the world
moved on, forgotten.
But the world will never allow itself to be forgotten for long.
Suddenly George broke away with an exclamation. He ran to the wall and
looked over.
"What's the matter?"
George returned, reassured. His concern had been groundless.
"I thought I saw some one on the fire-escape, darling."
"On the fire-escape? Why, who could it be?"
"I thought it might be the man who has the apartment on the floor
below. A ghastly, sneaking, snooping fellow named Lancelot Biffen. I've
known him to climb up before. He's the editor of 'Town Gossip,' the
last person we want to have watching us."
Molly uttered a cry of alarm.
"You're sure he wasn't there?"
"Quite sure."
"It would be awful if anyone saw me here."
George silently cursed the too vivid imagination which had led him to
suppose that he had seen a dark form outlined against the summer sky.
He had spoiled the golden moment, and it could not be recaptured.
"Don't be afraid, dear," he said. "Even if he had seen you, he would
never have guessed who you were."
"You mean he would naturally expect to find you up here kissing some
girl?"
George was in the state of mind when a man cannot be quite sure what
his words mean, if anything: but so positive was he that he did not
mean this that he got his tongue tied in a knot trying to say so in
three different ways simultaneously.
"Well, after what happened this afternoon ..." said Molly.
She drew away. She was not normally an unkind girl, but the impulse of
the female of the species to torture the man it loves is well-known.
Woman may be a ministering angel when pain and anguish rack the brow:
but, if at other times she sees a chance to prod the loved one and
watch him squirm, she hates to miss it.
George's tongue appeared to him to be now in the sort of condition
a ball of wool is in after a kitten has been playing with it. With a
supreme effort he contrived to straighten out a few of the major kinks,
just sufficient to render speech possible.
"I swear to you," began George, going so far in his emotion as to raise
a passionate fist towards the moon.
Molly gurgled delightedly. She loved this young man most when he looked
funny: and he had seldom looked funnier than now.
"I swear to you on my solemn oath that I had never seen that infernal
girl before in my life."
"She seemed to know you so well."
"She was a perfect, complete, total, utter and absolute stranger."
"Are you sure? Perhaps you had simply forgotten all about her."
"I swear it," said George, and only just stopped himself from adding
"by yonder moon." "If you want to know what I think...."
"Oh, I do."
"I believe she was mad. Stark, staring mad."
Molly decided that the anguish had lasted long enough. A girl has to
judge these things to a nicety. Sufficient agony is good for a man,
stimulating his mind and keeping him bright and alert: but too much is
too much.
"Poor old Georgie!" she said soothingly. "You don't really suppose for
a moment that I believe a word of what she said, do you?"
"What! You didn't?"
"Of course I didn't."
"Molly," said George, weighing his words, "you are without exception
the dearest, sweetest, loveliest, most perfect and angelic thing that
ever lived."
"I know. Aren't you lucky?"
"You saw at once that the girl was mad, didn't you? You realised
immediately that she was suffering from some sort of obsession, poor
soul, which made her...."
"No, I didn't. I couldn't think what it was all about at first, and
then father came in and said that my pearl necklace had disappeared,
and I understood."
"Your pearl necklace? Disappeared?"
"She stole it. She was a thief. Don't you see? It was really awfully
clever. She couldn't have got it any other way. But when she burst in
and said all those things about you, naturally she took everybody's
attention off the wedding-presents. And then she pretended to faint on
the table, and just snapped the necklace up and rushed out, and nobody
guessed what had happened."
George drew in a whistling breath. His fists clenched. He stared coldly
at one of the potted shrubs as if it had done him a personal injury.
"If ever I meet that girl...."
Molly laughed.
"Mother still insists that you had known her before and that the
story she told was true and that she only took the necklace as an
afterthought. Isn't she funny!"
"Funny," said George heavily, "is not the word. She is one long scream
from the rise of the curtain, and ought to be beaten over the head with
a black-jack. If you want my candid and considered opinion of that
zymotic scourge who has contrived to hook herself on to your family in
the capacity of stepmother to you and general mischief-maker to the
rest of the world, let me begin by saying.... However, there is no time
to go into that now."
"No, there isn't. I must be getting back."
"Oh no!"
"Yes. I must go home and pack."
"Pack?"
"Just a suit-case."
The universe reeled about George.
"Do you mean you're going away?" he quavered.
"Yes. To-morrow."
"Oh, heavens! For long?"
"For ever. With you."
"With...?"
"Of course. Don't you understand? I'm going home now to pack a
suit-case. Then I'll drive back to New York and stay the night at an
hotel, and to-morrow we'll be married early in the morning, and in
the afternoon we'll go off together, all alone, miles and miles from
everybody."
"Molly!"
"Look at that moon. About now it ought to have been shining into our
drawing-room on the train."
"Yes."
"Well, there will be just as good a moon to-morrow night."
George moistened his lips. Something seemed to be tickling his nose,
and inside his chest a curious growth had begun to swell, rendering
breathing difficult.
"And half an hour ago," he said, "I thought I would never see you
again."
"Come down and put me in the car," said Molly briskly. "I left it at
the door."
They descended the stairs. Owing to the eccentricity of the elevator,
George had frequently had to go up and down these stairs before: but
it was only now that he noticed for the first time a peculiarity
about them that made them different from the stairs of every other
apartment-house he had visited. They were, he observed, hedged about
with roses and honeysuckle, and many more birds were singing on them
than you would expect in an apartment-house. Odd. And yet, as he
immediately realised, all perfectly in order.
Molly climbed into the two-seater: and George mentioned a point which
had presented itself to him.
"I don't see why you need hurry off like this."
"I do. I've got to pack and get away before mother gets home."
"Is that blas ... is your stepmother in New York?"
"Yes. She came in to see the police."
Until this moment George had been looking on New York as something
rather out of the common run of cities--he particularly liked the way
those violets were sprouting up through the flagstones: but on receipt
of this information he found that it had lost a little of its charm.
"Oh, she's in New York, is she?"
"Probably on her way home by now."
"You don't think there's time for us to go and have a little dinner
somewhere? Just a cosy little dinner at some quiet little restaurant?"
"Good gracious, no! I'm running it very fine as it is." She looked at
him closely. "But, Georgie darling, you're starving. I can see it.
You're quite pale and worn-out. When did you last have anything to eat?"
"Eat? Eat? I don't remember."
"What did you do after that business this afternoon?"
"I--well, I walked around for awhile. And then I hung about in the
bushes for awhile, hoping you would come out. And then--I believe I
went to the station and took a train or something."
"You poor darling! Go and eat something at once."
"Why can't I come back to Hempstead with you?"
"Because you can't."
"What hotel will you go to to-night?"
"I don't know. But I'll come and see you for a minute before I go
there."
"What, here? You'll come here?"
"Yes."
"You'll come back here?"
"Yes."
"You promise?"
"Yes, if you will go and have some dinner. You look perfectly ghastly."
"Dinner? All right, I'll have some."
"Mind you do. If you haven't by the time I get back, I'll go straight
home again and never marry you as long as I live. Good-bye, darling, I
must be off."
The two-seater moved away and turned into Washington Square. George
stood looking after it long after there was nothing to look at but
empty street. Then he started off, like some knight of old on a quest
commanded by his lady, to get the dinner on which she had so strongly
insisted. She had been wrong, of course, in telling him to go and
dine: for what he wanted to do and what any good doctor would have
recommended him to do was to return to the roof and gaze at the moon.
But her lightest wish was law.
Where could he go most quickly and get the repulsive task done with the
minimum waste of time?
The Purple Chicken. It was just round the corner, and a resolute man if
he stuck to their _prix fixe_ table-d'hôte at one-dollar-fifty,
could shovel a meal into himself in about ten minutes--which was not
long to ask the moon to wait.
Besides, at the Purple Chicken you could get "it" if they knew you.
And George, though an abstemious young man, felt that "it" was just
what at the moment he most required. On an occasion like this he ought,
of course, to sip golden nectar from rare old crystal: but, failing
that, synthetic whisky served in a coffee-pot was perhaps the next best
thing.