We were sitting on the porch of the cottage at Lake Penzance when I
received the letter, and I read it aloud. "Humph!" said Tish, putting
down the stocking she was knitting and looking over her spectacles at
me--"Likes her Presbyterianism pure and believes in a large family! How
old is she? Forty?"
"Eighteen or twenty," I replied, looking at the letter. "I'm not anxious
to go. She'll probably find me frivolous."
Tish put on her spectacles and took the letter. "I think it's your duty,
Lizzie," she said when she'd read it through. "But that young woman
needs handling. We'd better all go. We can motor over in half a day."
That was how it happened that Bettina Bailey, sitting on Eliza Bailey's
front piazza, decked out in chintz cushions,--the piazza, of course,--saw
a dusty machine come up the drive and stop with a flourish at the steps.
And from it alight, not one chaperon, but three.
After her first gasp Bettina was game. She was a pretty girl in a white
dress and bore no traces in her face of any stern religious proclivities.
"I didn't know--" she said, staring from one to the other of us. "Mother
said--that is--won't you go right upstairs and have some tea and lie
down?" She had hardly taken her eyes from Tish, who had lifted the
engine hood and was poking at the carbureter with a hairpin.
"No, thanks," said Tish briskly. "I'll just go around to the garage and
oil up while I'm dirty. I've got a short circuit somewhere. Aggie, you
and Lizzie get the trunk off."
Bettina stood by while we unbuckled and lifted down our traveling trunk.
She did not speak a word, beyond asking if we wouldn't wait until the
gardener came. On Tish's saying she had no time to wait, because she
wanted to put kerosene in the cylinders before the engine cooled,
Bettina lapsed into silence and stood by watching us.
Bettina took us upstairs. She had put Drummond's "Natural Law in the
Spiritual World" on my table and a couch was ready with pillows and a
knitted slumber robe. Very gently she helped us out of our veils and
dusters and closed the windows for fear of drafts.
"Dear mother is so reckless of drafts," she remarked. "Are you sure you
won't have tea?"
"We had some blackberry cordial with us," Aggie said, "and we all had a
little on the way. We had to change a tire and it made us thirsty."
"Change a tire!"
Aggie had taken off her bonnet and was pinning on the small lace cap she
wears, away from home, to hide where her hair is growing thin. In her
cap Aggie is a sweet-faced woman of almost fifty, rather ethereal. She
pinned on her cap and pulled her crimps down over her forehead.
"Yes," she observed. "A bridge went down with us and one of the nails
spoiled a new tire. I told Miss Carberry the bridge was unsafe, but she
thought, by taking it very fast--"
Bettina went over to Aggie and clutched her arm. "Do you mean to say,"
she quavered, "that you three women went through a bridge--"
"It was a small bridge," I put in, to relieve her mind; "and only a foot
or two of water below. If only the man had not been so disagreeable--"
"Oh," she said, relieved, "you had a man with you!"
"We never take a man with us," Aggie said with dignity. "This one was
fishing under the bridge and he was most ungentlemanly. Quite refused
to help, and tried to get the license number so he could sue us."
"Sue you!"
"He claimed his arm was broken, but I distinctly saw him move it."
Aggie, having adjusted her cap, was looking at it in the mirror. "But
dear Tish thinks of everything. She had taken off the license plates."
Bettina had gone really pale. She seemed at a loss, and impatient at
herself for being so. "You--you won't have tea?" she asked.
"No, thank you."
"Would you--perhaps you would prefer whiskey and soda."
Aggie turned on her a reproachful eye. "My dear girl," she said, "with
the exception of a little home-made wine used medicinally we drink
nothing. I am the secretary of the Woman's Prohibition Party."
Bettina left us shortly after that to arrange for putting up Letitia
and Aggie. She gave them her mother's room, and whatever impulse she
may have had to put the Presbyterian Psalter by the bed, she restrained
it. By midnight Drummond's "Natural Law" had disappeared from my table
and a novel had taken its place. But Bettina had not lost her air of
bewilderment.
That first evening was very quiet. A young man in white flannels called,
and he and Letitia spent a delightful evening on the porch talking
spark-plugs and carbureters. Bettina sat in a corner and looked at the
moon. Spoken to, she replied in monosyllables in a carefully sweet tone.
The young man's name was Jasper McCutcheon.
It developed that Jasper owned an old racing-car which he kept in the
Bailey garage, and he and Tish went out to look it over. They very
politely asked us all to go along, but Bettina refusing, Aggie and I sat
with her and looked at the moon.
Aggie in her capacity as chaperon, or as one of an association of
chaperons, used the opportunity to examine Bettina on the subject of
Jasper.
"He seems a nice boy," she remarked. Aggie's idea of a nice boy is one
who in summer wears fresh flannels outside, in winter less conspicuously.
"Does he live near?"
"Next door," sweetly but coolly.
"He is very good-looking."
"Ears spoil him--too large."
"Does he come around--er--often?"
"Only two or three times a day. On Sunday, of course, we see more of
him."
Aggie looked at me in the moonlight. Clearly the young man from the next
door needed watching. It was well we had come.
"I suppose you like the same things?" she suggested. "Similar tastes
and--er--all that?"
Bettina stretched her arms over her head and yawned.
"Not so you could notice it," she said coolly. "I can't thick of
anything we agree on. He is an Episcopalian; I'm a Presbyterian. He
approves of suffrage for women; I do not. He is a Republican; I'm a
Progressive. He disapproves of large families; I approve of them, if
people can afford them."
Aggie sat straight up. "I hope you don't discuss that!" she exclaimed.
Bettina smiled. "How nice to find that you are really just nice elderly
ladies after all!" she said. "Of course we discuss it. Is it anything to
be ashamed of?"
"When I was a girl," I said tartly, "we married first and discussed
those things afterward."
"Of course you did, Aunt Lizzie," she said, smiling alluringly. She was
the prettiest girl I think I have ever seen, and that night she was
beautiful. "And you raised enormous families who religiously walked to
church in their bare feet to save their shoes!"
"I did nothing of the sort," I snapped.
"It seems to me," Aggie put in gently, "that you make very little of
love." Aggie was once engaged to be married to a young man named
Wiggins, a roofer by trade, who was killed in the act of inspecting a
tin gutter, on a rainy day. He slipped and fell over, breaking his neck
as a result.
Bettina smiled at Aggie. "Not at all," she said. "The day of blind love
is gone, that's all--gone like the day of the chaperon."
Neither of us cared to pursue this, and Tish at that moment appearing
with Jasper, Aggie and I made a move toward bed. But Jasper not going,
and none of us caring to leave him alone with Bettina, we sat down
again.
We sat until one o'clock.
At the end of that time Jasper rose, and saying something about its
being almost bedtime strolled off next door. Aggie was sound asleep in
her chair and Tish was dozing. As for Bettina, she had said hardly a
word after eleven o'clock.
Aggie and Tish, as I have said, were occupying the same room. I went to
sleep the moment I got into bed, and must have slept three or four hours
when I was awakened by a shot. A moment later a dozen or more shots were
fired in rapid succession and I sat bolt upright in bed. Across the
street some one was raising a window, and a man called "What's the
matter?" twice.
There was no response and no further sound. Shaking in every limb, I
found the light switch and looked at the time. It was four o'clock in
the morning and quite dark.
Some one was moving in the hall outside and whimpering. I opened the
door hurriedly and Aggie half fell into the room.
"Tish is murdered, Lizzie!" she said, and collapsed on the floor in a
heap.
"Nonsense!"
"She's not in her room or in the house, and I heard shots!"
Well, Aggie was right. Tish was not in her room. There was a sort of
horrible stillness everywhere as we stood there clutching at each other
and listening.
"She's heard burglars downstairs and has gone down after them, and this
is what has happened! Oh, Tish! brave Tish!" Aggie cried hysterically.
And at that Bettina came in with her hair over her shoulders and asked
us if we had heard anything. When we told her about Tish, she insisted
on going downstairs, and with Aggie carrying her first-aid box and I
carrying the blackberry cordial, we went down.
The lower floor was quiet and empty. The man across the street had put
down his window and gone back to bed, and everything was still. Bettina
in her dressing-gown went out on the porch and turned on the light. Tish
was not there, nor was there a body lying on the lawn.
"It was back of the house by the garage," Bettina said. "If only
Jasper--"
And at that moment Jasper came into the circle of light. He had a
Norfolk coat on over his pajamas and a pair of slippers, and he was
running, calling over his shoulder to some one behind as he ran.
"Watch the drive!" he yelled. "I saw him duck round the corner."
We could hear other footsteps now and somebody panting near us. Aggie
was sitting huddled in a porch chair, crying, and Bettina, in the hall,
was trying to get down from the wall a Moorish knife that Eliza Bailey
had picked up somewhere.
"John!" we heard Jasper calling. "John! Quick! I've got him!"
He was just at the corner of the porch. My heart stopped and then rushed
on a thousand a minute. Then:--
"Take your hands off me!" said Tish's voice.
The next moment Tish came majestically into the circle of light and
mounted the steps. Jasper, with his mouth open, stood below looking up,
and a hired man in what looked like a bed quilt was behind in the
shadow.
Tish was completely dressed in her motoring clothes, even to her
goggles. She looked neither to the right nor left, but stalked across
the porch into the house and up the stairway. None of us moved until we
heard the door of her room slam above.
"Poor old dear!" said Bettina. "She's been walking in her sleep!"
"But the shots!" gasped Aggie. "Some one was shooting at her!"
Conscious now of his costume, Jasper had edged close to the veranda and
stood in its shadow.
"Walking in her sleep, of course!" he said heartily. "The trip to-day was
too much for her. But think of her getting into that burglar-proof
garage with her eyes shut--or do sleep-walkers have their eyes
shut?--and actually cranking up my racer!"
Aggie looked at me and I looked at Aggie.
"Of course," Jasper went on, "there being no muffler on it, the racket
wakened her as well as the neighborhood. And then the way we chased
her!"
"Poor old dear!" said Bettina again. "I'm going in to make her some
tea."
"I think," said Jasper, "that I need a bit of tea too. If you will put
out the porch lights I'll come up and have some."
But Aggie and I said nothing. We knew Tish never walked in her sleep.
She had meant to try out Jasper's racing-car at dawn, forgetting that
racers have no mufflers, and she had been, as one may say, hoist with
her own petard--although I do not know what a petard is and have never
been able to find out.
We drank our tea, but Tish refused to have any or to reply to our
knocks, preserving a sulky silence. Also she had locked Aggie out and
I was compelled to let her sleep in my room.