The Best of Mary Roberts Rinehart

by Mary Roberts Rinehart

  Positively he was appealing. He sounded fairly sick.

  "Get mother on the wire," said Maisie curtly. "Then call me. I'll talk to her."

  Roger opened the door as soon as she had gone and squeezed in beside me.

  "She's coming to telephone. You'll have to go somewhere else, Clara," he said.

  "Where, for instance?"

  "I may be able to collect them in the pantry. Then you can run across and get out the door."

  "Into the rain?"

  "Well, you can't stay here, can you?' 7

  "I'll do nothing of the sort. Go and tell her the wires are down. They are. And then get that crowd of flappers upstairs. If they go the men will. I give you ten minutes. At the end of that time I'm coming out to the fire. I'm cold."

  "And after they go up, what?"

  "Then you're going into somebody's room to steal me a pair of dry shoes. Get Maisie's, she's about my size. We'll have to walk to mother's."

  "I can't leave, Clara. If anything happened and I was missing--"

  When I said nothing he knew I was in earnest. He went out and told them the telephone was out of order, and somehow or other he shooed them up stairs. I opened the door of the telephone closet for air, and I could hear them overhead, ragging Roger about the engagement and how he happened to get to Maisie's when it was so far from his road home. Every time I thought they were settled, some fool of a boy or giggling debutante would come down again and look for soap, or towels, or matches, or heaven knows what. I could have strangled the lot of them.

  By three o'clock it was fairly quiet, and I crept out and sat by the log fire. If I had had a shoe I would have started off then and there. I'm no coward and I was desperate. But I couldn't go in my silk stockings. And when after a while Roger slipped down the stairs he had no shoes for me.

  "I've tried all the girls' doors," he said wretchedly, "and they're locked. Couldn't you tie a towel round your foot, or something? I'm going to get into trouble over this thing yet. I feel it."

  "Go up and bring me little Teddy Robinson's shoes," I snapped. "It won't compromise you to go into his room, I daresay."

  "What if he's not asleep?"

  "Tell him you're going to clean them. Tell him anything. And, Roger, don't let Maisie pull theingenue stunt on you. I may be years older than she is, but Maisie's no child."

  Well, with everyone gone and Roger hunting me some boots, I felt rather better. I went to the pantry and fixed some hot milk and carried it in to drink by the fire. Roger came down with the boots, and to save time he laced them on my feet while I sat back and sipped.

  That, of course, in spite of what Bill pretends to think, is why Roger was on his knees before me when Peter walked in.

  Oh, yes, Peter Arundel walked in! It just shows the sort of luck I played in that night. He walked in and slammed the door.

  "Thank heaven!" he said, and stalked over to me and jerked the cup out of my hand. "You pair of idiots!" he fairly snarled. "What sort of an escapade is this anyhow?"

  "It it's a joke, Peter," I quavered. He stared at me in speechless scorn. "Positively it is a joke, Peter."

  "I daresay," he said grimly. "Perhaps to-mor row I may see it that way. The question is, will Bill think it's a joke?"

  He looked round, and luckily for me he saw all the girls' wraps lying about.

  "If the family's here, Clara," he said in a milder voice, "I--I may be doing you an injustice."

  Roger had not said a word. He was standing in front of the fire, watching the stairs.

  "When we found the note," Peter went on in his awful booming voice, "saying you were going at last to be true to yourself, and when you and Roger had disappeared, what were we to think? Especially after the way you two had fallen into each other's arms from the moment you met."

  "How interesting!" said a voice from the stair case.

  It was Maisie!

  Well, what's the use of going into it again? She gave Roger his ring instantly, and Roger was posi tively grey. He went back on me without a particle of shame said I'd suggested the whole thing and begged him to help me; that he'd felt like a fool the whole time.

  "Maisie, darling," he said, "surely you know that there's nobody in all the world for me but you."

  He held out the ring to her, but she shook her head.

  "I'm not angry not any more," she said. "I've lost my faith in you, that's all. One thing I'm pro foundly grateful for that you and Clara had this this explosion before we were married and not after."

  "Maisie!" he cried.

  All at once I remembered Bill's letter, which would positively clear us. But Peter said Harry Delaney's coat had been stolen from the machine, letter and all! Maisie laughed at that, as if she didn't believe there had been such a letter, and Roger went a shade greyer. All at once it came to me that now Bill would never forgive me. He is so upright, Bill is, and he expects everyone to come up to his standard. And in a way Bill had always had me on a pedestal, and he would never believe that I had been such a fool as to jump off for a lark.

  Maisie turned and walked upstairs, leaving the three of us there, Roger holding the ring and staring at it with a perfectly vacant face. At last he turned and went to the door.

  "Where are you going, Roger?" I asked help lessly.

  "I'm going out to drown myself," he said, and went out.

  I shall pass over the rest briefly. Peter took me home in his car. I did not go to mother's. For one thing, the bridge was down. For another, it seemed better for Bill and me to settle things ourselves with out family interference.

  I went home and went to bed, and all day Mon day I watched for Bill. Powell came over and I put on my best negligee and waited, with a water bottle to keep my feet warm and my courage up.

  He did not come.

  I stayed in bed for three days, and there was not a sign from him. Carrie and Ida telephoned, but only formal messages, and Alice Warrington sent me a box of flowers with her card. But Bill did not come home or call up. I knew he must be staying at the club, and I had terrible hours when I knew he would never forgive me, and then there would be a divorce, and I wanted to die. Roger never gave a sign, but he had not drowned himself.

  Wednesday evening came, and no Bill. By that time I knew it was Bill or nobody for me. After those terrible two days at Carrie's, the thought of Bill's ugly, quiet face made me perfectly homesick for him. I didn't care how much he fell asleep in the evening after dinner. That only showed how contented he was. And I tried to imagine being married to Roger, and seeing him fuss about his ties, and brush the hair over the thin places on top of his head, and I simply couldn't.

  It was Wednesday evening when I heard a car come up the drive. I knew at once that it was Bill. I had barely time to turn out all the lights but the pink-shaded one by the bed, and to lay a handker chief across my eyes, when he came in.

  "Well, Clara," he said, standing just inside the door, "I thought we'd better talk this over. >J

  "Bill!" I said, from under the handkerchief.

  "I should have come out sooner," he said with out moving, "but at first I could not trust myself. I needed a little time."

  "Who told you?"

  "That doesn't matter, does it? Everybody knows it. But that's not the question. The real issue is between you and me and that that nincompoop, Waite." '

  "What has Roger got to do with it?" I looked out from under the handkerchief, and he was livid, positively.

  "Bill," I said desperately, "will you come over and sit down on the side of the bed and let me tell you the whole story? 7 '

  "I won't be bamboozled, Clara; this is serious. If you've got anything to say, say it. I'll sit here."

  He sat down just inside the door on a straight chair and folded his long arms. It was a perfectly hopeless distance.

  "Bill!" I said appealingly, and he came over and sat, very uncompromising and stiff, on the side of the bed. I put out my hand, and after a moment's hesitation he took it, but I must say without en thusiasm. I f
elt like the guiltiest wretch unhung. That's what makes me so perfectly furious now.

  "You see, Bill," I said, "it was like this." And I told him the whole thing. About halfway through he dropped my hand.

  "It's been an awful lesson, Bill," I ended up. "I'll never say a word again about your enjoying yourself the way you want to. You can swim and play golf and shoot all you like, and and sleep after dinner, if you'll only forgive me. Bill, sup pose I had married Roger Waite!"

  He drew a long breath.

  "So that was it, old dear!" he said. "Well, all right. We'll put the whole thing in the discard." And he leaned over and put his arms round me.

  That ought to be the end of the story. I'd had a lesson and so had some of the others. As Carrie Smith said afterward, to have a good time is one thing, but to be happy is entirely different, and the only way to be happy is to be smug and conventional and virtuous. I never say anything when she starts that line of conversation. But once or twice I've caught her eye, and she has had the grace to look uneasy.

  But that's not all. There is more to the story, and now and then I eye Bill, and wonder when he will come and tell me the whole thing. For the other day, in the back of Bill's chiffonier, I came across the letter to him Harry Delaney said he had lost. And Bill had received it Monday morning!

  That is not all. Clamped to it was a note from Peter Arundel, and that is why I am writing the whole story, using names and everything. It was a mean trick, and if Bill wants to go to Maisie Brown's wedding he can go. I shall not.

  This is Peter's note:

  "Dear Old Man: Inclosed is the letter Clara gave Delaney to mail, which I read to you last night over the long-distance phone. I'm called away or I'd bring it round.

  "It was easy enough for you to say not to let Clara get awciy with it, but for a time during the storm it looked as if she'd got the bit and was off. Luckily their car got stuck in the creek, and the rest was easy. We saw them, during a flash of lightning, climbing the hill to the Brown place for shelter. Luck was with us after that, for Maisie and a crowd came along, and we told Maisie the story. I take my hat off to Maisie. She's a trump. If you could have seen Roger Waite's face when she gave him back the ring! Carrie, who was looking through the windows with the others, was so sorry for him that she wanted to go in and let him cry on her shoulder.

  "I hope Clara didn't take cold. She must have been pretty wet. But you were quite right. It wasn't only that she'd have had the laugh on all of us if she got away with it. As you said, it would be a bad precedent.

  "Burn this, for the love of Mike. If Clara sees if she'll go crazy.

  Yours, PETER,"

  THE BORROWED HOUSE

  I

  "AND the things the balloon man said!" observed Daphne, stirring her tea. Daphne is my English cousin, and misnamed. "He went too high and Poppy's nose began to bleed."

  "It poured," Poppy confirmed plaintively to me. "I leaned over the edge of the basket and it poured. And the next day the papers said it had rained blood in Tooting and that quantities of people had gone to the churches!" Poppy is short and wears her hair cut close and curled with an iron all over her head. She affects plaids.

  "Then," Daphne went on, addressing the room in general, "he let some gas out of the bag and we began to settle. But just when we were directly over the Tower he grew excited and threw out sand. He said he wasn't going to hang his balloon on the Houses of Parliament like a penny ornament on a Christmas-tree. And then the wind carried us north and we missed it altogether."

  Mrs. Harcourt-Standish took a tea-cake. "I was sea-sick," she remarked pensively, "and he was unpleasant about that, too. It was really mountain sickness, although, of course, there wasn't any mountain. When we began to throw out the handbills he asked if I had swallowed them too."

  Mrs. Harcourt-Standish plays up the feminine. She is slim and blond, and wears slinky clothes and a bang only they call it a fringe across her forehead. She has been in prison five times and is supposed to have influence with the Cabinet. She showed me a lot of photographs of herself in the dock and in jail, put up in a frame that was made to represent a barred window. It was Violet Harcourt-Standish, you remember, who broke up the meeting of the Woman's Liberty League, the rival Suffragette association, by engaging the suite below their rooms, burning chemicals in the grates, and sending in a fire alarm when the smoke poured out of the windows.

  I had been in England visiting Daphne for four months while Mother went to Italy, and I had had a very queer time. One was apt to go shopping with Daphne and end up on a carriage block or the box of a hansom cab, passing out handbills about votes for women. And once, when we dressed in our best gowns and went to a reception for the Cabinet, or something of the kind, Daphne stood on the stairs and began to make a speech. It turned out that she hadn't been invited at all and they put her out immediately politely, but firmly. I slid away into the crowd, quite pale with the shock and disgrace, and stood in a corner, waiting to be arrested and searched for the spoons. But for a long time no one noticed me. Then a sunburned gentleman who was passing in the crowd saw me, hesitated and came back.

  "I beg pardon," he said, and my heart turned entirely over, "but I think you came with Miss Wyndham? If you will allow me--"

  "I am afraid you have made a mistake," I replied frigidly, with my lips stiff with fright. He bowed at that and passed on, but not before he had looked straight into my eyes and read the lie there.

  After ages I left the window where I had taken shelter and got somehow to the dressing-room. Of course, Daphne had taken the carriage, so I told a sad-eyed maid that I was ill and would not wait for my brougham, and to call a cab. I was perfectly numb with rage when I got to Daphne's apartment, and burst in like a whirlwind. But Daphne was not at home. She came in at three that morning, maudlin with triumph, and found me asleep on the floor in my ball-gown, with a half-packed trunk before me.

  She brought me tea and toast herself the next morning and offered it on her knees, which means something for Daphne she is very stout and almost imbendable and explained that I had been her patent of respectability, and that it had been a coup; that Mrs. Langley, of the Woman's Liberty League, had hired as a maid for the reception and had never got her foot out of the dressing-room! Red hair? Yes. And when I told Daphne that Mrs. Langley had helped me into my wrap she got up heavily and hopped three steps one way and three another, which is the way Daphne dances with joy.

  I am afraid I have digressed. It is much harder to write a thing than to tell jt. I used to write stories for our Journal at school and the girls were mad over them. But they were love stories, and this one deals with English politics and criminals yes, you might call it a crime story. Of course there is love, too, but it comes in rather unexpectedly.

  I left Daphne hopping three steps each way in triumph. Well, after that she did not take me around with her, although her friends came in and talked about The Cause to me quite often. And gradually I began to see that there was something to it, and why, if I paid taxes, shouldn't I vote? And hadn't I as much intelligence as the cab drivers and street sweepers? And why couldn't I will my money to my children if I ever had any? children, not money. Of course, as Father pointed out after ward, I should have been using my abilities in America; but most of the American women I knew were so cravenly and abjectly contented. But even after my conversion Daphne would not take me in the balloon. She said I represented too much money to risk dumping in the Thames or hanging on a chimney.

  The meeting at Daphne's was mainly to talk over the failure of the balloon ascension and to plan something new. But the actual conspiracy that followed was really an accident. It came about in the most casual way.

  Violet Harcourt-Standlsh got up and went to the mirror to put on her veil, and some of the people began to gather their wraps.

  "I'm tired," Daphne said suddenly. "We don't seem to get anywhere. We always come out the door we go in."

  "Sometimes forcibly," Poppy said to me aside.

  "
And I haven't been strong, you know, since last summer," Daphne went on. Everybody nodded sympathetically. Daffie had raised a disturbance when Royalty was laying a cornerstone and had been jailed for it. (They put her to making bags and she sewed "Votes for Women" in white thread on every bag she made.) "I am going to take Madge down to Ivry for a week." I am Madge.

  Violet turned from the mirror and raised her eye brows. "Ivry!" she said. "How familiar it sounds! Do you remember, Daphne, when pressure at the Hall became too strong for me, how I used to ride over to Ivry and have hysterics in the Tudor Room? And how once I wept on your Louis-Seize divan and had to have the purple stains bleached off my face? You lived a sort of vicarious matrimonial existence in those days, didn't you?"

  Whatever she may have done to the Louis-Seize divan in earlier days, she was cheerful enough now, and I hailed her with delight.

  "Do you live near Ivry?" I exclaimed. "How jolly!" That is English; I am frightfully English in my speech after a few weeks in London.

  Somebody laughed and Daphne chuckled. It isn't especially feminine to chuckle, but neither is Daphne.

  "My dear child," Mrs. Harcourt-Standish said, turning to me, "Harcourt Hall is closed. Mr. Harcourt is no longer my husband. The one is empty, the other in Canada--" vague, but rhetorical "--I have forgotten them both." There was nothing ambiguous about that. "I recall the house as miles from everything that was joyful. I shall always regard my being taken there as nothing short of kidnapping."

  Then she stopped short and glanced at Daphne. From Daphne her eyes travelled to Ernestine Sutcliffe, who put down her teacup with a clatter. There was a sudden hushed silence in the room; then Lady Jane Willoughby, who had been tying her motor veil, took it off and folded it in her lap. The Staffords, Poppy and her mother, exchanged glances. Without in the least understanding it I saw that something psychological was happening.

  "Why not?" said Daphne quietly, looking around. "The house is still furnished, isn't it, Violet? And I suppose you could get in?"

  Violet shrugged her shoulders. "I dare say; as I recall it, one could enter any one of the doors by merely leaning against it. The place is a million years old."