“No one is high-hatting you, Phil. You told me that you would take a hand at contract. Please go.”
“Oh, all right. I’m going because you ask it, Pam, understand?”
He strolled away, as if at any moment he might change his mind and return. Pamela’s eyes followed till the front door slammed behind him. The hurt, the sense of loss, the disappointment of the days which had passed since she had last seen Scott Mallory, smoldered as she looked up at him defiantly.
“All the dictators are not in Europe.”
His amused eyes tore at her heart. “Was I dictatorial? What’s the difference so long as I carried my point? He’s gone. Come over to the seat. I have something to ask you.”
He laid his hand on her arm. She shook it off even as her whole being responded passionately to his touch. “Are you that kind of a person?” she asked herself. “Lucky, you have found it out in time. Just an aching, spineless jellyfish when he touched you, weren’t you?” She was conscious of a nervous break in her flippant protest.
“Sit on that damp, rustic seat in the only evening gown I own?”
In answer, he pulled off his coat and spread it over the rough wood. Before she realized what had happened he was seated beside her. Behind them the drowsy quiet of the orchard was stirred by a plaintive “Whip-poo’-will! Whip-poo’-will!” The moon had withdrawn its watchful eye to sulk behind a silver fleece. Had it not been for his white shirt sleeves she could hardly have made out Scott Mallory’s figure in the scented dusk. She could feel his presence. Did little currents of suspense and passionate emotion pass between them? Apparently he was unconscious of the tension. Perhaps it was she who was at once broadcaster and receiver.
“Why didn’t you tell me about the Babe’s attack on your stepmother?”
Surprise tripped Pamela’s breath. How had he known?
“Why should I tell you?” The desire to hurt him as he had hurt her — if that were possible, which it probably wasn’t — sent her plunging on. “Expect me to keep a line-a-day book for your perusal? I don’t tell you everything that happens in my life, you know.”
“I know, all right. I know that a lot is happening you don’t tell me. But, he is my dog and I am responsible if he makes trouble.”
His anger was masked quickly in well-bred calm. Poise with a capital P. One couldn’t imagine Scott Mallory, with his background of good breeding, his cool smile, blowing-up unless under extreme provocation. Even as she acknowledged that, Pamela remembered his passionate fury when she had told him that Phineas Carr was to be her counsel. Nothing calm about him then.
“Did you tell your father about the stamp sale?”
An intuitive flash told her that that question was the real reason for his coming. The give and take about the dog had been but a preliminary. Was that all he had to ask her? Had he no explanation to make of his reason for staying away? No regret to express that he was not to handle her case? Were she submitting her own story for criticism would her instructor point out:
“You have employed a complication here, Miss Leigh, which could easily be unsnarled by a question, a word of explanation. It won’t get by as a story?”
Lot that instructor would know about it! As a general theory his criticism was justifiable. As a practice in this case it would not work. Could she say to Scott, “Why haven’t you been to see me?” She couldn’t, not with Hilda Crane in the offing. She answered his question with another.
“Were you skulking in the shadow like a super-detective in a mystery story to ask me that? I thought you had some dark, dour bit of evidence to contribute to my case. I forgot. You know nothing about it.”
He caught her arm as she rose. “Why do I know nothing about it? Why?”
Lordly impatience. Sparks falling on dry grass. Words setting flares in her imagination like little incendiaries out to start a conflagration. Her voice answering flippantly:
“Because, I couldn’t afford to retain the rising light of the Massachusetts Bar — my mistake — I should have said, ‘risen.’”
He slipped into his coat as he explained irrelevantly, “Thought I heard a mosquito’s faint, far song. They are bloodthirsty devils at this time of day.”
So easily did he put out the fire, blow away the smoke of battle. He walked beside her toward the house. She stopped at the steps.
“Won’t you come in? Miss Crane and her sister are playing contract with Father and —”
“Carr?” He supplied the name quickly, asked as he had asked weeks before, “Do you like this Carr boy?”
She answered as she had answered then, “Quite mad about him.”
Defiantly unmindful of the fact that her flame-color slenderness was visible from the living room window, he caught her by the shoulders.
“Did he give you that topaz bracelet?”
The touch of savagery in his voice set Pamela’s heart soaring like a little balloon which had flung over crippling ballast. Had she her friend back again? Her voice was tormentingly gay.
“Topaz! Don’t you recognize one of Mr. Kresge’s choicest products? I bought it that epoch-making day in Boston when I lost every shred of sales resistance.”
His hands tightened on her shoulders. “Was it epoch-making?” His grip hurt. “We will have another like it. I am only temporarily out of the ring. Temporarily — get that — Pam?”
The front door of the house opened. Mallory stepped back into the shadow of the shrubs. Pamela ran up the steps, slightly breathless. Hilda Crane stood on the threshold, her blonde hair like a halo against the light.
“I came out for air. I’m dummy. Thought I heard voices. Wouldn’t for the world barge in on a twosome.”
Evidently Scott had seen her and had side-stepped recognition. Why? Didn’t he want Hilda to know that he had come to the Silver Moon? Why should she herself care what he did? Why should she care? How life tore at one’s heart. Was it ever simple? For her there seemed always some crippling complication. Would she go on for years fighting herself? Fighting in a circle? As she entered the house she answered Miss Crane’s implication.
“You need not have been so sensitive. A man came — with a message for Father. How is the game going?” She approached the card-table where Mrs. Belle Stevens, the Tenant, was dealing.
She was an ample woman with the back of her plump white neck unmistakably going dowager. Her violet eyes were on her reflection in the gilt-framed mirror as she studied the effect of her long fingers manipulating the brilliant-backed cards. Her small mouth puckered fretfully at the corners — a horrible warning to a person who habitually let her temper get the better of her. Her nose was curiously flat with spreading nostrils. She never looked at one directly but had a way of staring into space as if listening to celestial voices. Harold Leigh was watching her with an annoyed frown. His daughter knew from his expression that he had been losing. He took his contract seriously. He rebuked peevishly:
“We have been waiting for you, Miss Crane.”
Philip Carr rose, pulled forward a chair. “Come and be my mascot, Pam.”
Mrs. Stevens laid down the cards to direct her whole battery of charm at Pamela.
“Your father tells me that you write, Miss Leigh.”
Pamela laughed. “A fact except for the tense. I haven’t touched my typewriter for months. Looking back from the 1950s I may sparkle on the pages of Who’s Who, but at present my name is not one to be used on a magazine cover to lure subscribers.”
Hilda Crane picked up her cards. “Belle has a flair for lions: literary, artistic, musical. Some whom she traps are big ones entitled to roar their way through society, some are little more than tame cats. Look out that she doesn’t annex you, Miss Leigh. Three spades!”
Had Miss Crane intended to imply that she was little more than a tame cat, Pamela wondered. Nothing subtle about the suave blonde’s methods.
“You never want a thing till you suspect that someone else wants it, do you Hilda? Five hearts!” snapped the Tenant.
&nbs
p; As Pamela left the room to prepare a cold drink, voices in a heated game-post-mortem followed her. Philip Carr’s whole attention had not been on the cards. She had realized that. He had laughed, then gone suddenly serious as if a shadow had passed over his mood. What had he on his mind? Mephisto removed his head from under his wing as she passed him in the dining room.
“Look who’s here!” he croaked, blinked lidless eyes and shivered.
“You are a great little stabilizer, Mephisto. You always get a laugh out of me.”
Thoughtlessly she allowed the swing door to strike her heels. The bang wrenched an explosive “Gosh” from the parrot. With the sound came the memory of Thanksgiving Day when, for the first time, Scott Mallory had come to the Silver Moon. A, the advertiser, she and Terry had called him. Sometimes her life seemed like one of her own plot diagrams, criss-crossed with an invisible web, with every contact marked with an ineradicable dot.
She removed a pan of ice-cubes from the electric refrigerator. Lucky Grandmother Leigh had installed it. Her heir might, doubtless would — if that day in Boston was an example of recklessness — have squandered its price on clothes.
What a day! It had left a technicolor memory with sound effects of saxophones whining, piccolos whistling, violins sighing, drums throbbing, voices crooning to voices which crooned in turn:
“‘Should I reveal exactly how I feel
Should I confess I love you?’”
She and Scott had been the best of friends then. If only — The Babe! Barking furiously. Chicken thieves? She ran to the foot of the back stairs, called in a voice she hoped was not audible in the living room:
“Terry! Terry!”
Her brother was already half way down. He took the last three steps in a jump. Pamela caught his hand in which something bright glistened.
“Terry Leigh! You’re not going out with a revolver!”
“Boy! Don’t you know a flashlight when you see one?”
“You mustn’t go out, Terry! They might s-shoot!”
“Let me go! The Babe’s stopped barking! I’ll bet I’ve lost ’em.”
He dashed from the house, his sister at his heels. The world was white with moonlight. At the barn they collided with Hilda Crane and Philip Carr. The Babe was frantically wriggling his head which he had thrust through the opening between the big door and the casing. His eyes were ruby red, he snuffled and whined.
Hilda Crane’s blonde head shone like silver in the moonlight, her bare neck and arms were alabaster fair. Carr’s voice was curiously shaken as he demanded:
“What started the dog on the warpath? We were in the midst of a rubber when he let loose.”
“Chicken thieves, we think,” Pamela answered. Her anxious eyes were on Terrence who was making a round of the few poultry houses in use. Suppose it hadn’t been chicken thieves? Suppose it were someone spying? “Anything wrong?” she called as he tested the lock on the nearest door.
He joined them, a troubled frown wrinkling his brow. “Everything okay so far as I can see. What was it, young fella?” he coaxed soothingly as he approached the door. The others followed close.
“Perhaps Mallory came back and he heard him,” suggested Philip Carr.
“Mallory! Mallory came back!” Miss Crane’s repetition was faintly contemptuous. “What do you mean, Phil? Scott left in his roadster — for Boston, I presume — directly after dining with Belle and me. He had planned to spend the evening but he answered the phone and immediately after said he had been called away on important business.”
Carr’s eyes met Pamela’s. He lifted one brow slightly before he acknowledged:
“My mistake.”
He spoke in a low voice to Terrence, who nodded before he pushed open the great door, switched on the lights. The dog leaped on him, dashed out to sniff the ground.
Four pairs of eyes traveled over the shadowy barn as their owners remained near the door. The place was fragrantly musty from the hay which fringed the lofts. The old horse scrambled clumsily to his feet, thrust his head over the door of his box stall and whinnied; the cow contributed a soft “Moo!”, and went on chewing her cud; the Babe dashed in to snuffle vociferously around a mouse hole.
Terrence whistled to the dog as he flashed the light along the mows. He tweaked the Babe’s ears as the Belgian thrust a cold nose into his hand.
“You’re a false alarm, young fella. You —” the words trailed off in a faint whisper. All eyes followed his. In the spot of light focussed on the hay dangled the sleeve of a yellow slicker.
Chapter XVI
Terrence tipped back his chair, clasped his hands behind his head as he frowned at his sister across the breakfast table. Sunshine streamed in at the window. It dappled with gold the gem-like colors in the rare hooked rug, lingered lovingly on the Lowestoft punchbowl which lent super-distinction to the maple lowboy, shot a vagrant ray through the diamond-shaped panes of the corner cupboard to set the Sandwich glass agleam, gently touched the white hair of John Leigh on the wall as he looked down upon his descendant with speculative blue eyes under bushy gray brows. With many shivers, much rolling of eyes, Mephisto on his perch was practising the rising, falling notes of a motor horn. The aroma of coffee, the smell of golden, crisp curls of bacon were in the air.
“How the dickens do you suppose that slicker got on the hay-mow?”
Pamela thoughtfully creamed her coffee. “Perhaps Eddie Pike threw it there, Terry. He was here yesterday dressing chickens.”
“Eddie Pike! You couldn’t pry him out of that old army coat if you gave him a dozen slickers. I’ll bet there’s nothing under it but skin. No sirree! Someone was sneaking round the poultry house and made his getaway when the Babe barked.”
“Then I suppose the wearer of the slicker crawled through the loft window, deposited his garment on the hay to give local color and departed via airplane.”
“Think you’re comic, don’t you? Just naturally helpful, aren’t you, Miss Pamela Leigh? Oh, shut up that confounded tooting, Mephisto!”
The parrot dodged the muffin the boy flung at him. Head coyly on one side, snickered.
“Bad boy!”
Terrence scowled at his sister’s ripple of laughter. “I suppose you think that’s funny.”
“I do. You shouldn’t spend hours teaching Mephisto to talk if you don’t care for repartee.” She rose and began to clear the table. “Onward Christian Soldiers! I have heaps to do.”
Still in the tipped-back chair, Terrence ran his long, capable fingers through his red hair.
“What did Philip Carr mean about old Scott? Did he show up last night?”
Pamela paused in the process of placing glasses on a tray. “He did. Just before I went into the house.”
“What did he want?”
“To know if I had showed Father a letter he had sent me. He only stayed a few moments.”
“That’s kind of funny. Miss Crane said he left the cottage after a telephone call to go to Boston. I’ll bet he was using business as an excuse to break away from her.”
Pamela sternly disciplined an impulse to hug him. “Then you don’t think Hilda attractive, Terry?”
“Who me! Nothing doing! I hate a girl who paws. She — I’ll answer.”
Pamela followed him into the kitchen, set down the tray as he picked up the receiver.
“Silver Moon … She’s here. Hi, Pam —”
Pamela answered the call.
“Right here … Judge Carr! … I know you are not a judge, but I have caught the habit from the villagers … Today! Ten o’clock! I thought it was set down for next week … I’ll be there … Yes, I remember. No — I will be glad to have it over. Good-bye!”
She hung up the receiver. Sat back for a moment in the little chair. Terry caught her shoulder.
“What is it, Pam? You’re chalky!”
“The trial begins today.”
“Thought it was set down for next week.”
“It was, but Mr. Carr — he corrected me when I call
ed him Judge — said that the cases ahead of us had gone off the list — if you know what that means — and ours would go on today. He knew it yesterday afternoon but didn’t tell me for fear I would lie awake all night thinking about it. Terry, I’m panicky. Suppose Cecile wins the fight?”
Terrence patted his sister’s shoulder. “Brace up! It will be great to have the darn thing behind us. Pull yourself together and don’t let the lawyer on the other side get you on the run. His name is Hale, isn’t it? I’ll bet he’s the big-hearted-Otis type. Hale by name and hearty by nature. Watch your step. He’ll get you all messed up if he can.”
“How can he, if I am telling the truth?”
“What does that guy care about the truth?”
“Mr. Carr said that he had little to lose if defeated, much to gain if he wins; that several times he has been spectacularly successful. Suppose this is another victory?”
“Don’t get excited. I don’t know anything about him except that he is attorney for the second Mrs. Leigh. That’s enough for me. I’ll bet ‘He’s tough ma’am, tough is J.B. Tough and devilish sly’.”
A smile lightened the gravity of Pamela’s eyes. “Been reading Dombey and Son again, haven’t you? I wonder if Cecile will stay at the Inn.”
“In our village? Why should she? The county-seat is in the next town. She’d be likely to put up as near the court-house as possible. Wish I could drive you over, Pam, but there’ll be the dickens to pay and then some if I don’t report at the Academy. The powers that be don’t like it much that, with exams in the offing, I have to appear as witness.”
“I’m sorry, Terry. Isn’t it maddening that our lives can be upset like this by a lie? Put up the ‘Closed’ sign as you go down the drive, will you? Hitty must call off all reservations by phone. Disappointing people may permanently disable our business, but, Mr. Carr warned me that because Cecile had been in the talkies and he was appearing in court again — he looked as embarrassed as if he’d been caught beating the tom-tom outside his own show, when he added that — the case would be front page news and the curious would flock to the Silver Moon if it were open.”
Fair Tomorrow Page 16