Mrs. Stirling invoked the universe at large somewhat plaintively.
“So he ran across an announcement, did he? Well, there’s one thing that you have to say for the boy, he’s not just plain half cocked. There’s something rather pitiful about him—what Good Queen Bess, drat her, used to call an innocent! All right, young Sheridan, come along and tell Abby all about the nice announcement. Even a detective could see that you have something on your mind!”
“Thanks,” replied the innocent austerely. “I have already an engagement to bring Miss Wilde her supper. Perhaps you could be persuaded to join us?”
“Join you and Vicki? You’re simply full of fun, aren’t you? No, I’m afraid you’ll have to wait till you’ve thoroughly exhausted her possibilities before you try out mine! Any time that you feel that you have to chatter away or explode, you’ll probably find me crouching out there in the shrubbery round the swimming pool, gnawing a bone, and crying to myself because you’ve taken so long to come. Hurry along, there’s a darling detective!”
Sheridan, adding two minute blocks of ice hollowed and filled with caviar the size of gray pearls to plates that duplicated the disappearing lady’s with a shocking lack of originality, captured another mint julep and headed gloomily back towards the terrace. Most certainly he would see that green-eyed and self-sufficient young woman again before this party was over, and more certainly still he would impress upon her the fact that not every detective that came out of Vienna was a fool—above all, not the one that was condescending to explain it to her. He pushed the swinging door open impatiently, the muscle in the curve of his cheek tensing as it always did when he felt nerves or emotion getting the upper hand, and wished for a second, with a fervor unequaled in many a long year, that it had never occurred to him that the career of a detector of crime was as useful, honorable, and distinguished a profession as any other two in the world put together. In America, apparently it was a highly amusing joke—and yet it was only here in America that he had come to realize how sinister, how hateful, how utterly loathsome and intolerable such an honorable career might be. In Vienna, where the creatures that he snared in his skillful nets and traps never became more actually alive than the specimens writhing on the slides beneath his microscope lens—in Vienna it had been different. But here, even while you analyzed and dissected them in the most approved and detached manner, they became terrifyingly and touchingly real. Not specimens—not puppets—not words out of a report—but people. People who looked into your eyes, and laughed, and cried, and mocked you, just enough for your own good. People who were kind, and generous, and frightened, and foolish, and brave, and gracious, and reckless—all the things that specimens under a microscope never dreamt of being. Even Vicki Wilde, with the wary eyes of a small creature forever on the lookout for traps as yet unsprung.
“Oh, good work, Mr. Sheridan!” Her boyish voice hailed him from the shadows with unqualified friendliness, and even more amazing, the wary eyes that she lifted to him, as he swung down to the cushions by her side, were more friendly still. “You surely know how to keep all that crockery in its place—if I ever need a butler again, I’m coming crying round your doorstep.… Not that I’m liable to need one for the next thirty or forty years.” She investigated the plate before her with all the delightful greediness of a hungry child at a birthday party. “What a perfectly grand picker and chooser you are, too! It looks simply heavenly. Let’s go!”
“Mrs. Stirling was my model as a good, intelligent gourmet,” he confessed, attacking the results of Mrs. Stirling’s acumen with enthusiasm and a fugitive hope that people would stay in the pigeonholes that he selected for them long enough for him to draw one long deep breath of achievement. This young thing, for example, suddenly and unaccountably as gayly affable as though she did not so much as know how to spell “sulkiness” and “rudeness.” “I am afraid that I copied her leaf for leaf and pie for pie. But you can at least congratulate me for my intelligence in selecting her as a guide.”
The sudden cloud over Vicki Wilde’s now unguarded countenance edged a little into her voice—enough to cause Sheridan to glance up swiftly.
“Well, she may be all right as a pie-chooser! I don’t mind saying that she leaves me darn cool as any other kind of a model.… Did you see this morning that X’s column was being dropped? Or are you too new to these parts to know about X?”
“New, but not too new for that,” he assured her, obviously undisturbed by the apparent irrelevancy of these last queries. “And as it happens, I did notice it. There are many to whom its omission will not cause unqualified regret, I gather?”
“About half the reading population of Washington ought to be out dancing in the streets.” She returned to the laden plate somewhat reluctantly, and after a moment’s apathetic toying with its treasures, murmured in a voice half tentative, half reckless, “Some people think Abby Stirling had a good lot to do with the beastly, hateful devil!”
“Yes?” inquired the stranger in town, encouragingly, his tone still untouched by any marked surprise. “That, now, is extremely interesting.”
Vicki Wilde, putting down her fork with a small clatter, lifted her eyes to the imperturbable ones turned towards her and said breathlessly:
“Some people think—some people think that Abby Stirling was the whole thing.”
Sheridan, lowering his eyes so that the bearer of strange tidings should not be too abruptly disconcerted by the amusement that suddenly lit them, inquired with due gravity:
“Were some of those people, by any chance, called Freddy Parrish?”
“Oh, you knew all the time, then! Did she tell you?”
“It was not so much what the lady said, as the manner in which she said it. In all fairness to Mrs. Stirling, however, I should add that it is not the first rumor that I have heard about the mysterious X.”
“Oh—rumors!” She dismissed them with a disdainful wave of the hand. “It was rumors that I really wanted to talk to you about, anyway, not that vile little cad. Whoever X was, he, she, it, or they are done for now, praises be! Did you see the paper this morning?”
“Yes. At least I saw the morning paper to which I imagine that you refer. I was led to understand by it that X is indulging in an indefinite nervous breakdown.”
“Sez they!” commented Miss Wilde on a note of definite skepticism. “I’ll bet you a dime to a diamond that this very second their precious X is sitting somewhere around this place on a cushion and tucking into a nice hot little beef-and-marrow pie.”
“If I had the diamond, I well believe that on such a bet it might change hands.… But these other rumors of which you were going to tell me—what were they?”
“Yes—those. I’m not forgetting them in a hurry, let me tell you! The one about why Jack was going to marry me, and why I wasn’t going to marry him. And then the one about why I was going to marry him, and why he wasn’t going to marry me. And a whole flock of little babies about where he came from, and where I came from, and where we both were going, and what, when, and where we ate and drank and smoked and slept and talked and thought—what business was it of theirs, the rotten-minded old snoopers?”
The Wilde girl, small and fierce and accusing—the smoky eyes that exactly matched her gown suddenly bright with disdain, the flame in her scarf dimmed by the rising flame in her cheeks—struck him abruptly as being an amazingly attractive young person.
“No business whatever,” he replied promptly. “That, undoubtedly, is why they were driven to snooping. It is always the people who know how to mind their own business who find that this planet is filled to bursting with people who want to show them how to mind it. It is only the gossips and chatterboxes and magpies of the world who have to buttonhole fugitives and push them into dark corners in order to get a hearing.”
“I’m glad you feel that way about it, because maybe then you’ll understand why I was so disgustingly rude to you a little while ago, before you went in to get all this heavenly truck for us to ea
t. Or didn’t you notice it?”
Sheridan, tearing himself with a valiant effort from the realization that this was the best foie gras that he had eaten since a walking trip in Burgundy three summers before, remarked without undue emphasis that he had indeed noticed it.
“Though possibly,” he added, “only because I had been led to believe that in this enchanting region known as the South the most charming of ladies were not entirely averse to the—er—assiduities of the least charming of men.”
“South?” echoed its temporarily adopted daughter recklessly. “South Dakota! Do you know that I was never five miles outside of a little hole there called Cooney Center until I was ten years old? And even if you’re talking about Washington, you’ll find after you’ve been here awhile it’s just about as enchantingly Southern as Budapest or Brussels. No, you won’t find me up to any Southern monkey-shines, if that’s what you’re looking for. All I’m trying to get at is that even Cooney Center would have bawled me out for being a bad-mannered, bad-tempered brat if they’d heard me going after you a few minutes ago. But since you understand why I hate snoopers, you’ll understand what I felt about you, gumshoeing around on the tips of your toes, trying to find out what Jack and I were doing that night.”
Sheridan, frowning in spite of himself at this unattractive picture of a brilliant young detective going skillfully about his appointed task, hastily balanced the respective merits of cards on the table and cards up the sleeve, and proceeded to hurl them on the table.
“Not you and Jack. Jack,” he informed her, his eyes fast on hers—“if you and Dr. Byrd will permit me to make temporarily so free with his name. You have made my own conduct sound so appallingly distasteful that I feel that I should make at least a feeble attempt to extenuate it. You see, I honestly thought that throughout most of our conversation you were industriously supplying ammunition that would equip Dr. Byrd with an alibi.”
“An alibi?” The eyes that he was holding with his were so utterly blank with surprise that Sheridan rapidly retrieved three of the invisible cards on the table and stuffed, them back up his sleeve. “What for, for heaven’s sake? … Oh, you mean because of that doggoned hyoscine that Tess was talking to him about—the stuff he got for Fay? Do you and Tess think he needs an alibi to prove that he didn’t sit beside the poor little devil Saturday night and watch her eat about a hundred too many? Or maybe you think that he fed them to her?”
Sheridan, who had for some time been making violent endeavors to think exactly that, uttered a sound intended to represent amused protest that did not strike even himself as a brilliant success.
“Because if that’s what you want an alibi for,” remarked Miss Wilde, obviously more diverted than her supper partner, “he’s got a perfectly grand one. Want it?”
“I enjoy any good alibi, naturally,” he assured her, pushing his plate from him with the revolted conviction that he was going to hear one that would make the average specimen seem amateur in the extreme. “They’re quite a hobby of mine. Where other and possibly wiser men go in for first editions and butterflies, I have a really distinguished collection of alibis. Let us have your friend Dr. Byrd’s by all means!”
“Oh, he’s not exactly a friend! I’ve been trying to explain that all evening. Well, from eight until after eleven he was practically under your nose at the Temples’. If you didn’t see him all that time, eight or ten other people did. Then we stood on the pavement outside near his car for about five minutes arguing whether we’d go on to the backgammon party or up to my apartment. Two chauffeurs seemed so interested that I’m sure they’d remember us. We must have arrived at the apartment at about eleven twenty-five, according to Cyril Demarest, and that’s directly in the opposite direction from the Stuarts’. Katie, my old nurse who looks after the apartment, was up and waiting for me, and she made us some cocoa and sandwiches while Jack and I thrashed things out. There are only two rooms and a kitchenette in the apartment, and we didn’t bother to lower our voices much. Katie was in the kitchenette, and she could probably even tell you what we said. We were both pretty interested in the conversation, and it wasn’t until nearly one that Jack remembered that Jerry Hardy was so desperately ill. He’s awfully fond of Jerry, and he made a dash for the telephone and called up Stillhaven. He pretty nearly died when he found out that he’d been gone from the hospital since ten, and he tore out of the apartment like a maniac, and probably drove his car like one if you say that he made Stillhaven by a quarter to two. The night clerk saw him go, if you want to ask him about it—and you and Dion seem to have checked the Baltimore–Stillhaven end pretty well.… Anything else, sir?”
She leaned forward, her teeth gleaming in a broad, amused grin, and for the first time he saw the orchids lying on the step beside her—two enormous purplish red orchids with a few bedraggled wisps of fern and lilies of the valley, half smothered in a bow of tinsel and green gauze.
Vicki, following the direction of his startled eyes, allowed the grin to widen slightly.
“Awful, aren’t they?” she agreed serenely. “Was it you who sent me those heavenly white freckled ones? I suppose you won’t ever tell me why, but I was crazy to wear them. Well, there’s no getting around the fact that good taste isn’t one of Jack’s strong points! But then it isn’t one of mine, either.… That’s one reason why we’re probably going to get on better than any other two people in the world.”
He repeated mechanically:
“Get on better? But surely I am not dreaming? Surely you told me no later than thirty minutes ago that you and Dr. Byrd were no longer engaged?”
Vicki Wilde, smiling at him with a new gentleness across the flowers cradled in her arm, said, more gently still:
“No, we aren’t.… We never were, exactly.… We’re married.”
Sheridan, who by this time had completely forgotten that a gentleman called Talleyrand had ever existed, repeated, in a loud voice of stupefied unbelief:
“Married? How could you be? When were you married?”
Half a dozen people a dozen yards down the terrace turned heads alert with interest in their direction, and the girl in the shadows beside him said softly:
“Oh, hush! It’s still a secret; nobody knows anything about it at all. I’m waiting for Jack to get here before we tell them. He’s been held up at the sanitarium because Jerry Hardy’s so ill, of course, but he promised to call up by ten if he couldn’t get away. It’s not ten yet, is it? I do hope—oh, I do hope that he can get away.”
“Vicki”—it was impossible to continue to call this incredible young woman Miss Wilde, it was more than impossible to call her Mrs. Byrd—“you are actually telling me that all this time that everyone has believed that you two have been quarreling and unhappy—all this time that Tess was so worried about your embarrassment at the Temples’ dinner—all the time that people have been sorry for you because an engagement that had never taken place had never been broken off—all this time you were married to Jack Byrd?”
Vicki Wilde shook her cropped bronze head with a small sound of mirth.
“Oh, Lord, no! We’ve only been, married since eleven this morning, at Elkton, Maryland, if you want names, dates, and addresses. Jack drove over from Baltimore at about ten, and I hired a perfectly grand-looking hack to ride out and meet him in, and there, after what they refer to in our best papers as ‘the simplest of ceremonies,’ we both moved on a few blocks to a pretty fairly awful little lunchroom and spent a good old-fashioned honeymoon, over ham and eggs and doughnuts, on a table covered with checked oilcloth.… Sure I’m not boring you?”
“Quite sure, thanks.”
“Well, a little after noon the lucky bridegroom departed somewhat abruptly for his private sanitarium, and the bride drove back in solitary splendor to her city estate. And if you think that I’m making up fairy tales for your private amusement, here are the very little monsters that he sent her for a wedding bouquet, and the very ring he put on her hand.”
She moved, unwinding
the scarlet scarf that still bound her left hand and lifting the gaudy, drooping flowers against her heart like a shields—and above the faint glitter of the broad gold band on her finger he saw that the wide, mocking eyes were bright with tears. But before he could speak, she stretched out her hand to stop him, and he saw that she was still smiling.
“No, no; I’m not crying because I’m sad; I’m crying because I’m happy.… That’s old stuff, I know, but this time it’s true, honestly. Honestly, it is.”
She tilted her face so that the moonlight caught it in full flood, and in that swift illumination he saw that it was very true indeed. All the hardness, all the defiance, all the wary tension had vanished as completely as though they had never been there, and in the silver magic that hung about her like a veil, a child sat smiling to herself—a child with all the shy, proud humility of a bride.
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you how happy I am, because you don’t like Jack, do you? I could see it from the way you looked when you even said his name. No, you needn’t bother; it doesn’t bother me. Hardly anyone does, but that’s because they don’t know him, you see. I’m the girl that knows him, and I’m the girl he’s married, so the rest don’t make much difference, do they?”
“None whatever,” agreed Sheridan, a good deal more stiffly than he had intended to. “As a matter of fact, I have not had the pleasure so far of exchanging two words with Dr. Byrd.”
She brought her eyes back to him at that, still wide and shining with that new, amused tolerance.
“No, but you’ve heard more than two words about him, haven’t you? I’ll say you have! All about how he runs a private dope farm that he calls a sanitarium—and how in his spare moments he also runs poor little heiresses ragged until he finds that they really aren’t heiresses at all, and then drops them so hard that you can hear every bone in their hearts crack—and how he’s nothing but a social climber, and a glad-hander and a grafter and a sponger? Oh, you needn’t take the trouble to deny it. I got both ears full of it myself from kind friends who wanted me to know what I was up against, so I can imagine what they’d let fall to the stranger in their midst.”
The Crooked Lane Page 22