“You’re a damn bad judge of men,” commented the red-headed gentleman beside him. “Still, I’d rather extend myself not to let you down. If I can get out of something that I’m a bit tied up in at present, I’ll take you on. All right if I let you know this week?”
“Absolutely.”
“You and Joel,” said the red-headed young man a little thickly—“you two—” He broke off abruptly, and moved toward the door. “I’ve missed you two like hell. If I stick around here much longer I’ll be crying on your shoulder. What in—Sorry, Jill, it’s idle to pretend that I was looking where I was going. See you later.”
Jill Leighton paused uncertainly in her light advance down the room, peering into the fire-lit shadows.
“Lindy said no one was down yet—how in the world do you turn on these lights?” Almost before the words were off her lips they flooded about her, and she saw him; it had not taken more than a stride to bring him to the door, cutting off her retreat so casually that it was difficult to know whether it was deliberate.
“Oh,” she said, her face hardening to a delicate mask of contempt, no trace of the sick panic that consumed her in the clear, disdainful voice, “It’s you!”
“None other, Jill.” He did not move from the threshold, his face hard, too, his voice harder. “I am obviously Heaven’s favourite child to-night. I’d been wondering a bit how I was going to obtain this coveted interview short of abduction, and here, no less, you come as conveniently as though I’d whistled. Who says I don’t believe in fairies?”
Jill, looking like a strayed dryad in her floating green and silver, permitted the contempt to become a trifle more open.
“Do you consider yourself amusing?”
“Candidly, I don’t. The faintly implied rebuke in your tone is justified—unlike some of your friends, I have no particular aptitude for clowning. The good, solid, old-fashioned American business man, with no nonsense about him—that’s me. So let’s get down to business.” He took a step toward her, his pleasant voice raised to something menacingly out of control. “How dared you write me that letter?”
To Jill, the brown young man bearing relentlessly down on her looked singularly unlike a good, solid, old-fashioned American business man—he looked three inches taller than she remembered him and three times more terrible, rather like an avenging angel—a fallen angel.… She remembered Sunny’s bright hair, and stood her ground, unflinching.
“How dared you write such things to me?”
“It requires no great courage to ask the girl that you love to marry you,” said Larry Redmond grimly. “Though I’ll admit that it isn’t particularly edifying to choose the day before sailing into battle to do it. The hero in the book wouldn’t, I know, but I’m not a hero in a book—or out of one. I was afraid to my bones that if you didn’t know how much I loved you you wouldn’t wait for me, and I was ass enough to think that if you did—well, never mind. That was my mistake. I’ll admit I lost my head—ordered off overnight without even a chance of a word with you, and leaving a whole damned country full of men behind me! I stayed awake all that night thinking how young you were—and how beautiful—and how dear—”
“And how rich,” said the green wood nymph clearly.
For a paralyzing space while she could have counted ten heart beats the man who had asked her to marry him stood staring down at her. She closed her eyes so that she could not see his face, only to feel his hands, cruelly heavy, on her shoulders.
“That’s twice that you’ve called me a fortune hunter,” he said, in a voice that came from some place more distant and more cold than any she had ever known. “I have an idea that it’s going to be the last time. Sit there.”
She sat, clinging to the chair arms with icy hands; and then because she remembered Sunny’s laughter, she once more fixed on him unwavering eyes.
“Larry, there’s no use humiliating yourself—and me—by this kind of thing. It’s horrible—it’s indecent to talk about caring for me. And you can’t frighten me. Nothing can frighten me any more. Please let me go.”
“Sit still. What made you think it was your money that I cared for?”
“I don’t think—I know. Larry, I know everything. I knew before I got the letter.”
“You knew what, in God’s name?”
“I knew about Sunny—about you and Sunny. Now will you let me go?”
“I will not let you stir one inch. Are you clean out of your head?”
“Oh,” she cried passionately. “You’re contemptible—vile and stupid and contemptible—to keep up this farce with me!”
“What did you know about Sunny and about me?”
“I know everything, I tell you. I know that when you found that she had no money you turned her out into the street. I know that she told you that the money was mine. Is there anything more that you’d like to tell me?”
“I turned Sunny into the street? Sunny?”
“I know that she had not been dead two days when you were writing me weeping over her and begging me to wait until you came back. To wait for you. Oh—oh—”
Suddenly she twisted in the chair, clinching her teeth to keep back the storm of tears flooding up to engulf her, the tears that had been waiting ten years to beat their way through.
The man before her said:
“One of us is stark, staring mad. This is the first time in my life that I ever knew whether Sunny had money or hadn’t. I did know that there was some mystery about her death, something about an unhappy love affair—”
Jill wrung her hands together with a frantic little sound that was meant to be laughter.
“You dare—you dare to stand there and talk to me about mysteries! There’s no mystery about Sunny’s death—none. When you sent her back from Baltimore that night you became as truly her murderer as any poor devil with a knife who swings by his neck till dead.”
“Jill, listen to me—are you listening? I never laid eyes on Sunny in Baltimore; I swear it before God. There’s been a hideous mistake.”
She asked in a drowned whisper: “It wasn’t you? It wasn’t you that Sunny went to?”
“I tell you that I never thought of Sunny in my life except to envy her for being near you. She was your little sister—I loved her for being your sister, and she was sweet to me because she was sweet to everyone.”
She sat quite still, looking up at him with a face so lost and dazed that he knelt suddenly beside her and put his arms about her.
She said, “All the time—all the time it was me, Larry?”
“You—ever since the first time I saw you. You coming down that long flight of stairs at the Randalls’ in something that looked like a little gray cloud—see how I remember, Jill—you had silver buckles on your slippers and an enormous fan of gray feathers, and someone behind me said, ‘There are those pretty Leighton girls!’ But I only saw the Leighton girl in gray, the one with the fan, the one called Jill, the one that I’d been looking for half a lifetime, and who was smiling down at me because she knew it. Smile at me again, Jill.”
She cried, “Oh, Larry, all those years—all those years! They’re gone—I’ve lost them for us.”
“Jill, let’s forget what we’ve lost, and remember what we’ve found. Bless that girl Lindy! If I buy you a gray cloud will you come down the stairs again, carrying the fan?”
“It’s gone,” she whispered. “It’s gone, too.”
“Where do good fans go when they die? There must be a star full of them somewhere. Never mind, Blessed; I’ll get you another fan, and new silver buckles for your slippers, and a beautiful new world for a rotten old one—all for one smile. Smile at me, Jill.”
“I can’t. If you’d done it to me, you couldn’t smile. I’ve cheated us out of ten beautiful years—I’ve poisoned all the years we’ve got left. If I hadn’t been vile myself I’d never have believed those vile things about you, I’d never have written that—that filthy letter.”
She pushed him from her with a sudden shudder,
burying her face in the faded cushions.
And for a moment he made no motion toward her. For a moment he did not even see her; he was once more standing in a little clearing in a wood in France, leaning against a beech tree and staring down at the straight, dainty words marching so neatly across the blue sheet in his hand, with the guns sounding in his ears, distant as a dream. And as of old, he flung up his arm, to shield his eyes from the terrible little words. Still, still, they came marching toward him, across the seas, across the years—enemies more dreadful than any he had found, for all their exquisite and orderly array.… He heard her sob once, and dropped his hand, so that it might reach hers and give her comfort.
“My fault, every time,” he said. “If I hadn’t been the ass of the world I’d have known when I read it that there was some incredible mistake. Only, Jill, I swear I was so—so dazed—so numbed that I do honestly think that my brain stopped working. If I hadn’t been so sure that it was going to be the most beautiful love letter that a lucky guy ever got—” He tried a laugh without marked success, and after a brief pause said, “D’you know, it was three good years before I could open a letter without feeling actual physical nausea swamp me.… I’m telling you that because I’m crawling around in dark corners looking for excuses for being the damnedest fool in three continents. But there aren’t any.… Don’t grudge those lost years, Jill. It’s taken ten of them to give me sense enough to ask you a question that would have cleared everything up in as many seconds. It’s taken ten of them to make you lovelier than anyone else in the world.… Shall we call those lunatics upstairs down and tell them we’re engaged?”
Jill lifted her head from the cushion, her eyes brilliant with some strange fever.
“But we aren’t engaged,” she said clearly.
Larry Redmond released her hand.
“I see,” he said slowly.
“We aren’t ever going to be engaged.”
He said again more slowly still, “I see,” and rose to his feet. Jill rose, too.
“We’re only going to be married,” she informed him. “How long does it take to be married? Let’s hurry.…”
“If people are the kind of people that go in for this kind of thing,” remarked a dispassionate voice from the doorway, “I wish that they’d have the rudimentary nice feeling to pick out a good hole and corner and stick to it. Personally, I am now shot to pieces for the rest of the evening, so go right ahead, don’t mind me.”
Jill raised a flushed and exultant countenance from a concealing shoulder.
“Trudi, go away! He loves me—he loves me dreadfully. Don’t tell anyone, will you, darling?”
“Why, it’s that Leighton girl!” remarked Trudi virtuously to the universe at large, “and that nice quiet Mr. Redmond. Kindly consider me all in a heap. Jill, if you have nothing to tell any of us except that the young man loves you dreadfully, I’ll just drift off into the hall and head off the others until you have time to wash your face, brush your hair, and do deep-breathing exercises for about five minutes. Otherwise the casual observer might think that your own feelings were temporarily involved. In the meantime, I’ll sit at the foot of the stairs and pretend I’ve turned my ankle rather badly. If I go ‘Cuck-oo!’ once, you’ll know they’re coming. If I do it twice, you’ll know I couldn’t hold them. I won’t do it more than twice, probably; someone might think it sounded queer. You never can tell about people in this world—just great big balls of convention, if you ask me. Jill, you little loon, stop looking like that! He’s probably quite horrid if you get to know him; he looks to me like the kind of a man that wants to read you bits out of the papers and doesn’t believe that really nice people eat snails. I eat snails, Larry.”
“Well, eat them in the hall, will you?” suggested Mr. Redmond inhospitably. “You know as well as I do, Trudi, that with this crew I’ll never get another word in edgewise with this girl to-night.”
“And a good thing, too, if you ask me. Anything more revolting …” Trudi’s voice withdrew majestically in the direction of the stairs, whence issued shortly small, experimental moans, groans, and curses suitable to one suffering a minor injury.
“Oh, how I adore Trudi!” laughed Jill, on tiptoe before the dim mirror, touching the bright disorder of her hair to its accustomed soft decorum. “How I adore everyone—what a heavenly, heavenly party! Oh, Larry, I’d forgotten how beautiful it was to be happy—no, no, darling—be careful!”
“Jill, listen; it doesn’t make any difference now—nothing makes any difference now except that we’ve remembered how to be happy, but just before we forget all the unhappy things forever I wish that you’d tell me where you heard that ghastly nonsense about me and Sunny and Baltimore?”
The joyous face in the mirror clouded, fixed in concentration.
“Larry, that’s what’s so strange. I don’t see how I ever—I think it was Lindy first—or maybe that was afterwards. It was Lindy who told about Sunny’s going there; I’m sure of that, I know, because Mother and I thought at first that maybe—maybe Sunny had been—murdered, by a tramp or a maniac of some kind, so Lindy thought we ought to know just what had happened. She wouldn’t ever have told us if it hadn’t been for that.”
“Lindy told you that I’d taken Sunny to Baltimore? Jill, we’re dreaming.”
“No, no, she said—Weren’t you in Baltimore that Saturday, Larry?”
“I was never in Baltimore in my life except at a house-party the first winter that I was in Washington.”
“Not the Saturday before Sunny died?”
“That was January, the week before I sailed, wasn’t it? No, I was in Wilmington for Kim Farrell’s wedding. Kit and I motored over—” He halted, staring at her incredulously over memory’s warning hand. “You’re right; I was in Baltimore. At the hotel, for about half an hour. We got off the road—”
“You didn’t go there to meet Sunny?”
“I never laid eyes on Sunny, Jill. Was she there?”
“Yes—with a man. Someone—someone thought it was you.”
“Lindy?”
“Cuckoo!” cried the gay voice from the stairs.
“No … not Lindy.”
“Then who?”
“Larry, wait; I’ve got to straighten this thing out. Someone saw you there—and saw Sunny—and must have jumped at the conclusion that you were there together.”
“And that someone,” remarked Larry, his face suddenly grim, “is responsible for ten lost years. And a bit over, too. Who saw me in Baltimore, Jill?”
“Cuck-oo, Cuck-oo!” Blithe and imperious it rose, with the sound of half a dozen scoffing voices breaking over it.
“Just wait till I get a chance to think, will you, darling? I can’t think at all, now, except that it’s all over and we’re so happy—I don’t want to spoil things by getting them all twisted again.… Larry, darling, darling, please let’s just be happy.”
He stared down at the lovely flushed face, so piteously eager, and abruptly his own relaxed.
“Happiness it is!” he said. “Everything else can wait. Now we’ll show those maniacs in the hall what a party is.… Hi, what goes on out there?”
“It’s the Sheridan woman!” shouted Doug King. “She’s stretched clear across the staircase with what she claims is a vitally injured leg, and she’s carrying on like a blasted clock. Come on out and hear her.”
“I think I just might manage if I did it on four paws,” remarked Trudi’s voice, suddenly brisk. “Or even if I could drape myself around you and Joel and hop—like that, if you get what I mean.”
“Game, I calls it,” commented Joel. “Especially coming down bang like that on the wrong foot each time. Never one to spare yourself, were you, Trudi?”
Trudi, festooned gracefully about the two masculine forms in the doorway, had the grace to look disconcerted for almost three seconds.
“If you went in for—uh—anatomy, my glib young sophist,” she commented loftily, “you’d jolly well know that it’s up to the
sufferer to bear down heavily on the injured limb or take the consequences. If you don’t it’s liable to swell up or cave in or mortify or something. This chair, darling—and a stool—and two pillows. And I think some ice would help, too; they say ice is the very thing for this kind of thing—alcohol’s good, too—ask anybody. You might just pour the alcohol on the ice and leave it here beside me—in rather a tall glass, thanks. I can manage the rest all by myself. I knew that first-aid course was going to come in handy some day.”
Sherry, eyeing the blandly impish countenance before him, inquired suspiciously, “I think there’s some kind of monkey business going on. What were you yipping ‘Cuckoo, cuckoo!’ for all the time out there?”
“How like you, Sheridan, to describe two or three vague little noises in that hysterical way. All the time, indeed! I’d have you know that all the Derriers make that noise when they’re in trouble it’s a family trait, like whistling to keep your courage up, only rather nicer, I think. And even you will admit that it would ill become me, as practically the last of the Derriers, to go back on the old family traditions at this stage of the game. I’ll thank you for a little more of that alcohol, Mr. King.”
“I never heard you make a noise like that in my whole enduring life,” commented Sherry incredulously. “I never—”
“You never pay the slightest attention to me when I’m in trouble, beloved. You’re one of these blooming hedonists; if you smell trouble five miles off you stuff cotton in your ears and tie bandages around your eyes and go and hide in the darkest corner in the place with your head under three pillows—Great jumping Jehoshaphat, children, listen to that wind! I’ll bet it’s tearing the boxwood up by the roots—and kindly look at the way it flattens down those flames. God help all poor sailors on the Potomac to-night, say I.”
“What’s the weather report, little Mabel with your face against the pane?”
Ray, her nose slightly pink from the zeal with which she had applied it to the square of inky blackness, remarked plaintively over her shoulder:
“It’s perfectly frightful. All those trees over by the—the graveyard are absolutely twisting themselves inside out. It’s too dark to see anything else, but I think it’s beginning to rain. Listen!”
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