False to Any Man

by Leslie Ford

  “Dad, I’ve got to talk to you.”

  Mr. Doyle’s rich voice had the faintest inflection of reproof.

  “I’m busy now, son.”

  “I know, Dad. But this is important. Grace won’t mind waiting a minute. I’ll walk over with her—I want to see her myself.”

  His father looked at him, the same odd cold movement behind his fine warm eyes that I’d seen when I came in.

  “I’ll be glad to wait,’” I said.

  Philander Doyle glanced at me and back at his son, and got up with a deprecatory paternal smile.

  “All right, my boy,” he said. He gave me another kind of smile. “He doesn’t realize yet that a pretty woman never waits.—I trust this one will.”

  I couldn’t tell whether he realized I already had one eye on the door.

  “People can’t get rid of me,” I said, trying to be gay, I suppose to cover up the situation that the tense young man, lean-jawed and dangerous-eyed, was creating from the doorway.

  “The library’s in the back, Mrs. Latham, if you hear me shout for help,” Philander Doyle boomed jovially. And it struck me instantly that that didn’t sound forced. He was actually pleased about something, though what it could be, with his son in the poisonous state he was in, was beyond me.

  I heard their footsteps along the wide panelled hall, and a door close behind them. And then I did practically the most awful thing I ever did in my life. I got up and stood for a moment, looking around the room. I was absolutely alone—there wasn’t even a Staffordshire spaniel or a China cat to see me. I slipped across the room to my coat on the chair, took the big old key to Karen’s kitchen out of my pocket, and moved noiselessly back across the room to the mantel. I reached up and took down the center vase of the five-piece Ming garniture, and let the key slide gently down to the bottom. Then I put it back, my hands shaking as I suddenly thought that if I dropped it, I could never in the world scrape together enough money to pay the purchase price on a thing that was utterly irreplaceable.

  I went back to my chair and sat down. Then I got up again, and went back and wiped the vase off neatly with my tea napkin, and settled down again. I had a sudden picture of myself flicking my hands off in precisely the way Karen had done the day she came from her questionable triumph over Jerry in Judge Candler’s library; but for some reason or other I sat there feeling a lot more at ease inside myself than I had at any time before . . . and considering what I’d just done, than I had any right to feel if the wicked have uneasy hearts.

  Finally, because it seemed to me that not even Philander Doyle would expect me to stay all night, I got up and put on my coat, and went out into the hall. I thought vaguely that maybe I’d see a servant and leave a message. But the hall was quite empty. Then, as I moved toward the door, I heard a sound on the elegant curving stairway.

  I glanced up. Leaning over the mahogany hand rail, her full black silk skirt showing between the white spindles, was Miss Isabel Doyle. She came down, almost quickly, it seemed to me, and with one ear sort of cocked toward the library.

  She held out her hand.

  “I’m so happy you could come,” she said, with aloof graciousness, as casually as if the whole proceeding hadn’t been most irregular. “I’m sorry I couldn’t get down, earlier, but I’ve been sorting some old things for the Leper Guild at the church.”

  “I had a very nice time,” I said, edging closer to the door. From the end of the hall I could hear Roger’s angry voice and his father’s mellow one, but I couldn’t make out their words.

  Miss Isabel glanced back too. I thought I saw a worried line tremble at the corner of her mouth, but I probably didn’t.

  At any rate she turned back with her vague smile.

  “My brother’s a very unusual man,” she said. “He always gets what he goes after—if not one way, then another.”

  There was a certain airy approval in her voice.

  “I think it’s most unfortunate that he dislikes Judge Candler so much.”

  I stared at her, literally open-mouthed.

  “Oh, my dear, but he does, you know. He always has.”

  Her voice and manner were quite charming.

  “I’m sure the whole business about Karen’s stock was his idea, not hers. She really was too stupid to have ever thought of such a thing.”

  I had the odd feeling that I was quietly going mad. I moistened my lips.

  “But . . . Karen was going to have the stock!” I exclaimed, not realizing—until later—that it must have sounded a complete non-sequitor.

  Miss Isabel looked at me as if I’d said the butter tasted of fish, her eyebrows raised ever so slightly.

  “But, my dear . . . don’t you see that that’s the point?”

  15

  I went back across the slippery street a very bewildered woman. For one thing, I was quite certain that inviting me to tea had been Philander Doyle’s idea, not Miss Isabel’s. And for another, that she had had a vague notion of what his purpose had been in asking me.

  Whether she’d known it from the beginning, or had sorted it out with the garments that would certainly amuse the lepers if nothing else, I hadn’t an idea. That she’d let slip an eternal truth when she said it was unfortunate that her brother disliked the Candlers so much, I was almost as certain as I was that it was dark and twenty minutes past six on a winter day . . . and I hadn’t a doubt that her brother would have strangled her if he knew she’d said it.

  Nevertheless, as I went up the Candlers’ steps, with the pale yellow gas flames in their old wrought-iron standards glimmering feebly, I was still trying vainly to make sense out of her last remark: “But, my dear . . . don’t you see that’s the point?” What was the point, I wondered desperately? If it was Philander Doyle who was trying to frighten Jerry into returning Karen’s stock by setting Mr. Samuel Smith of New York to dog her trail and her brother’s, why should the fact that he’d succeeded be anything but a satisfaction to him? It was utterly beyond me.

  I opened the door and went in. The warm smell of frying chicken from William’s kitchen greeted my nostrils pleasantly. I glanced at the grospoint bench between the closed door of the library and the open one of the drawing room, and saw that Colonel Primrose and Sergeant Buck had gone. I had a little sinking feeling inside me, and realized I’d more or less counted on seeing one of them if not the other. I went on upstairs to my room. The fire had been replenished and the light on the bedside table was on. Beside it lay a folded piece of paper with William’s long black thumbprint on it. I picked it up and opened it.

  It said, “Dear Mrs. Latham—I’m staying in Alexandria at the George Mason Hotel.—John Primrose.”

  I crossed the room and dropped it in the fire. Whatever possible doubt I’d had that he hoped somebody would furnish him a fresh clue by slaughtering me had vanished. He could quite as easily have got rooms in the house next to the Doyles’, on the corner, so he’d be near enough to hear me. I knew I was being unreasonable, of course, but that’s never deterred me yet, and I couldn’t let it now.

  I washed my face in the cold water in the basin in the corner and changed my dress. As I was wondering vaguely what time the Candlers dined, I heard Sandy galloping down the stairs. In a moment I heard Jerry’s light footstep coming along the hall and stop, hearing me in my room. She tapped at the door and put her bright head inside. Then she came in, closed the door and stood leaning against it, her hands behind her on the tiny old-fashioned brass knob.

  “Well—how was it?”

  “Miss Isabel didn’t show,” I said. “I had a pleasant talk with the master.”

  I almost added “—mind,” and stopped before I did.

  “I suppose he’s worried that his dear friends the Candlers may be involved in this unfortunate business,” she said, with a faintly ironic inflection that somehow didn’t go with her delicate ivory face and wide autumn eyes.

  “That was what I gathered,” I said.

  She moved over to the bed and started tak
ing off the big old counterpane.

  “Roger was here again,” she said, her voice muffled as she held the heavy woven cloth under her chin, folding it.

  “Did you talk to him?”

  She shook her head.

  “My father opened the door. It was just as Colonel Primrose was leaving. I didn’t know he was here till William came up. He said, ‘Miss Jer’my, why you all treatin’ Mr. Roger like he was scum,’ and Sandy said, ‘Because he is,’ and William said he ought to be ashamed and that’s all.”

  She put the counterpane on the window seat and folded back the blanket, moving as if something had died inside her.

  “Did Roger talk to your father?”

  She shook her head.

  “You just throw scum out, don’t you?”

  “Listen, lamb,” I said. “Sit down.”

  She slumped half down on the blanket chest, her eyes wide open, gazing into the fire.

  “Roger’s head over heels in love with you, Jerry,” I said earnestly. “Don’t you know that’s why no girl has ever made any time with him? . . . and you know every new season’s batch has a go at it.”

  She shook her head slowly.

  “Then why all this Karen business? Mr. Doyle wouldn’t have said . . .”

  “Rot,” I said rudely. “Why do you believe one thing he says and not the next? I don’t believe for an instant that Roger and Karen had any understanding of the sort. If they did, it would only conceivably be because you’d turned him down flat and he was trying to save things for you by marrying her—but that doesn’t make sense.”

  I looked at her. “—You didn’t turn him down, did you, darling?”

  She caught her lower lip in her white little teeth and drew a long breath.

  “I told him I couldn’t marry him unless his father and Miss Isabel approved, and they wouldn’t, of course.”

  “Why not?”

  “Oh, lots of reasons.”

  Her eyes were fixed on the dark windowpane.

  “What are they?”

  “It doesn’t have anything to do with me, really,” she answered after a moment. “Miss Isabel has never forgiven Dad for not marrying her. Mr. Doyle said he’d never let a daughter of Dad’s benefit by the money he’d made sluicing out drains while Dad stayed poor as a church mouse gathering respectability and prestige instead of . . . money. At least that’s what Miss Isabel told me one afternoon at a tea at the rector’s. You can’t believe anything she says, of course, unless she just lets it drop out of a clear sky without thinking.”

  I smiled. Which had she just been doing across the street, I wondered—thinking, or just letting things drop?

  “She’s batty,” I said.

  “No, she’s not, not by a jugful,” Jerry said quickly. “She just likes to get even with people when they aren’t expecting it. At least that’s what Sandy thinks—and I do too.”

  She’d certainly got even with her brother then, I thought, and in a big way . . . except that it didn’t make sense.

  “What did Roger say?” I asked.

  “He said they didn’t make any difference to us. I could take in washing and he’d get a job with the W. P. A. He says he’s got a lot of political influence.”

  She smiled suddenly, more like her brother than herself.

  “And what did you say?”

  “I said I’d only think of marrying him on account of his money, and anyway I had to keep house for Dad. William won’t live forever. He’s getting so old now he spends half his time praying. We couldn’t afford a cook, if anything happened to him.—But this isn’t important, Grace. I mean what happens to me. It’s . . . it’s the other thing.”

  “I think what happens to you and Roger is important,” I said. “I don’t think his father’s money is, awfully. More than that, no one will ever convince me that Roger had anything to do with the man Sandy socked in the nose. Roger’s over there now, closeted in the library with his father, looking as if he’d been through living torment. You’re not being fair, not to at least let him say what’s on his mind.”

  She leaned her head back against the foot of the high bed and closed her eyes.

  “I . . . I know, Grace—but what can I do?” she said. “Don’t you see, I can’t let my father and Sandy down, not if I never see Roger again. I can’t, I can’t!”

  “Look, my sweet,” I said. “It’s just about time you let your father and your brother start looking after themselves and begin listening to your own heart. Alexandria’s full of women who let their father and their brothers keep them from marrying. Do you want to end your days like Miss Isabel, keeping house for Sandy, and have him marry some young snip when he’s forty and you keep house for both of them? If you let them keep you from even talking to Roger, what do you think you’ll do when they say, ‘But Jerry, who’ll cook now William’s gone?’—I think female sacrifice is a beautiful thing . . . in nineteenth-century novels. I’m opposed to it as a working program. But of course if you don’t love Roger——”

  “But I do, Grace! I do!”

  “Then for heaven’s sake, act like it.”

  “What can I do? Father won’t let him in the house. He hasn’t said so—he never would . . . but let him try to come.”

  “Is your car out of gas?”

  She hesitated, and shook her head.

  “I can’t . . . go running after him, Grace,” she said.

  “Well, you can have tea with me, and he can drop in, can’t he?” I demanded.

  A little smile lighted her face. “If I didn’t know it, I suppose.”

  “All right,” I said. “What about tomorrow at four?”

  Her face went pale again.

  “I’ve got to go to Karen’s . . . funeral.—Oh, Grace, don’t you see?”

  Her voice sank to a frightened whisper.

  “We’re in a trap! He’s part of it, no matter whether he wants to be or not! Can’t you see?”

  I think I was beginning to, as a matter of fact, just when the bell rang in the hall below. Jerry got up slowly, stepped to the mirror and dusted her eyes with my puff. She stood looking at herself for a long time. Then she turned around.

  “It’s funny to find you look just the same, isn’t it?”

  Judge Candler and Sandy were waiting in the library. We went silently in to dinner. Thinking of it now, I have no idea what we ate, except for dessert, which was apples baked in molasses with flour and butter till they were transparent gold, flavored with rum and served with thick yellow cream. I could never forget them. Yet it seems to me that the thirty minutes we spent at that long bare table, with the light from the tall candelabra at either end gleaming on the old silver epergne filled with polished red apples and clusters of raisins and nuts, was one of the longest and most disturbing half-hours I’ve ever spent. The silence, with old William’s creaking shoes, was bad enough. Judge Candler’s voice as he said the simple grace had faltered a little. The arms of his chair as he drew it in hit the table, a walnut rolled off the epergne onto the bare wood, so that I jumped at least a foot to begin with.

  He didn’t speak again, but sat there, his thick white-thatched head bent a little forward. William in his old black coat and white cotton gloves would stop each time he passed his chair, look at him and move sadly on. Jerry and Sandy kept casting secret sidelong glances at him and looking quickly away. Whether it was my knowing that Colonel Primrose had talked to him without my knowing what had been said that made his silence so alarming, or it may have been that it had some special quality of its own. Or it may have been that now I was back in the quiet house seated where I could see their young faces, strange and drawn in the candlelight, the brief conversation I’d overheard through the flimsy wallboard kept coming back to me again.

  Outside the stiff icy branches of the old lilac trees touched the dark panes like fingers long dead. The wind whooooed softly down the wide chimneys, frightening the sober yellow flame tips of the candles, making them tremble and try to flee from the black points t
hat held their feet and brought them back strong again. I watched Jerry. She raised her fork to her lips and put it down again untouched. And then suddenly, when she couldn’t stand it another instant, she pushed back her chair and stood steadying herself with her fingertips against the gleaming satin surface of the old table, her slim body shaking, her face as pale as the candlelight.

  Her voice came in a quick heartbroken sob :

  “Oh, Daddy, don’t! Don’t!” she cried. “Oh, I wish it had been me—you wouldn’t have cared so much then!”

  She turned and groped blindly out of the room. For a moment we were all too shocked to move, I think. Then Sandy pushed his chair back and went out after her.

  I sat perfectly still looking at Judge Candler. Had he, I wondered, also been so much in love with Karen’s mother that seeing her with her hair up in the black velvet dress had reminded him, as it had Philander Doyle . . . so that Jerry’s mother, and Jerry, had become dim and unreal? He hadn’t moved except to raise his head and look profoundly shocked but apparently unmoved at his daughter’s outburst. It flashed through my mind, watching him, that never once had I seen him make the slightest gesture of affection toward her. From everything I’d seen he moved, an august person, through the house, accepting everything, giving nothing of himself—except to Karen Lunt. And yet, there must have been something to make her adore him so. I suppose that’s what made me braver than the angels. I heard myself saying, with astonishing coolness, considering what I was saying and to whom:

  “You don’t deserve Jerry, Judge Candler.”

  His sombre eyes were still fixed, dumbfounded, on the door his children had fled through. He turned them slowly to mine, across the dark candle-lit table, and looked at me silently. Then he said, the timbre of his voice like the G string of an old violin, “I love my daughter very deeply, Mrs. Latham.”

  Dead fingers scratched at the windowpanes. The wind whooed down the chimney, the candlelights flickered so that his face was barely visible. But in that moment I saw what I hadn’t ever thought to see there—anguish, and pain, and fear so naked and alone that my heart almost stopped beating.