The Crooked Lane

by Frances Noyes Hart

  “Oh, far simpler,” Sheridan agreed, contemplating his wounded hand with modified amusement. “I was about to avail myself of the privilege of doing so when you proved so entirely irresistible in yours that I fear that I turned into wax in your hands. I can only beg you to believe that it was against my better judgment.”

  “I haven’t the remotest idea of what you’re talking about, I’m afraid. If you’ll excuse me for a moment, I hear the telephone ringing somewhere, and I think I’ll take the call here. The servants are scattered over about twenty acres of grounds—”

  “I will excuse you for longer than one minute,” said Karl Sheridan. “Though you may not believe it, I will excuse you for everything.… And I was simply referring to the attractions of your own working clothes, of which you are probably perfectly aware.”

  “I am perfectly well aware of impertinence when I encounter it,” she assured him, with a fastidious contempt that brushed the faint roses back into the small, white face beneath its dark coronet of curls. She went by him to the telephone at the other side of the room as though he were not there, only recalling his presence long enough as she picked up the receiver to remark over her shoulder, “As it happens, I’m not a working woman any longer. Don’t you ever read the papers? You should—they’re full of frightfully amusing things.”

  Sheridan, still smiling a little gravely, put the red glass back on the desk beside the yellow pencil that had once belonged to Jerry Hardy, and stood waiting patiently for his hostess to finish her conversation on the telephone.

  After the first quick cry of, “Margot! Oh, Margot darling, I’ve been so worried!” the fluting little voice that the angels might have envied was curiously muted—a hurried murmur, a blurred whisper through something strangely suggestive of tears, and finally the voice as gentle and protective as a blessing saying clearly, “All right, dearest—not tonight then. But tomorrow, you promise? Anywhere that you want—here, Washington, Baltimore, New York—only just so that I can be with you, Margot—just so that I can take care of you for a while, poor little lamb.”

  Mrs. Lindsay put back the receiver very gently on the hook and looked up at him bravely from a child’s face so drenched in tears that it made any handkerchief in the world seem lamentably inadequate. After a second’s pause she said in a small, woeful voice:

  “That was Margot—Margot Hardy, you know—the girl we were giving the party for. The play’s just over, and it’s apparently a tremendous success, but they couldn’t tell her till after the curtain came down, of course. About Jerry, I mean. He’s dead. He died twenty minutes ago.”

  Sheridan said gently:

  “There are many people who will be the sadder for that news, I fear. Those who knew him seemed to care for him very deeply. Should I find Mallory, do you think?”

  “Oh, yes, poor Dion. He’ll be out of his head—he did so love him—” She had found a scrap of lace and lawn somewhere behind the violets and was striving conscientiously to cope with the flooding tears, scrubbing recklessly at the damply clustering curls and the small pink nose that seemed to become smaller and pinker at each despairing onslaught. “And Margot—this was her first real chance, poor darling, and she really is a simply superb actress, and such a good, good child; I did so want to give her one really heavenly party to remember, and now the whole thing’s just a ghastly mess.” She was twisting the long-suffering handkerchief in an attempt to restore it to at least its original capacity for utility, but after a moment she abandoned it with a discouraged shake of her head and lifted the drowned eyes to his. “It was really a good-bye party, too, though I didn’t want anyone to know that until it was all over. Freddy and Noll Parrish bought the house Saturday—did you know that?”

  “Indeed no. How could I possibly have known that?”

  She shook her head again, with a piteous attempt at a smile and another despairing side glance at the handkerchief.

  “Well, you’ll have to admit that you seem to know practically everything, won’t you? Allan’s family has a lovely old place in St. Paul, and he has a splendid offer to work there, so we couldn’t be luckier. Of course I love Green Gardens dearly, but it’s so huge, and it really is a dreadful strain trying to keep it going night and day.”

  “Such a strain, perhaps, that it has threatened to bring you to the verge of a nervous breakdown?”

  She glanced up swiftly, and when instead of the dark mockery that she expected to find in the face at her side, she saw only a grave and steady pity, she reached blindly again for the discarded handkerchief.

  “You do read the papers, after all, don’t you? That was stupid of me, but I don’t seem to be able to do anything but stupid things tonight. But you did frighten and surprise me rather badly.”

  “I am sorry for that—will you believe me when I say that I never intended to? I was outrageous about that note, but it was because I was interested in something concerning Fay Stuart, who wrote it from the Tappans’ the night before she died—not in that—that business career of yours. And will you believe one thing more? No matter how admirable an actress that poor Margot Hardy may be, I think that we have had with us tonight an actress far more brilliant—an actress who has given in all probability the finest performance in all her career, so that a handful of lucky and thoughtless young idiots—like the one who stands before you, for instance—should carry away with them a memory all charm and fragrance and grace.”

  She said simply:

  “You’re kind, aren’t you? I ought to have known that when Tess liked you so much.… And will you believe something, too? Will you believe that no matter how strange and horrible it may seem to you that a fairly decent person should be that—should be that person X, it seems a hundred times more strange and horrible to me?”

  “Of that,” he told her, “I have been quite sure.”

  “I can’t talk much about it—not even now,” she confided with a small, uncertain smile, more piteous than all her tears. “But it truly did start as sort of a—sort of a joke. At least I thought that’s what it was going to be.… I lost a simply ghastly lot of money on stocks—oh, everyone else did, I know, but I did it so quickly that I didn’t even know what had happened, and I simply didn’t dare tell Allan. Most of it was mine, of course, but some of it really belonged to the babies—and I did think that I ought to try to get back the part that belonged to the babies. And Freddy suggested that it would be a bright idea for me to take a room downtown and work whenever I could with one of the really smart tourist agencies. So I did—but nobody in the world seemed to have the faintest desire to tour, and one morning when I was sitting there with nothing to do but ruin a perfectly good manicure by biting off my fingernails, I started reading one of those syndicated gossip columns, and I remembered that I knew two or three rather amusing things that would fit into them beautifully. Not horrid things—just funny ones.… And I wrote them down and sent them off. And that was the beginning—and that was the end.”

  She sat silent, staring down at the small wet rag, and when she spoke again her voice was so low that he had to bend his head to catch it.

  “When we were in boarding school, we had a special class in literature—I guess all boarding schools have them—and I remember that one term we studied Shelley and his group, and one of the books that we read was by that stuffy girl that Shelley married—or didn’t he marry her?—anyway, her name was Mary something or other—Godwin, wasn’t it? It was about a man called Frankenstein, who created a monster that he thought that he could rule, but who destroyed him. I remember that I couldn’t sleep for nights after I’d finished it.… And that’s what I did—only it was Fay Stuart who was the monster. It’s wicked to say things about people who are dead, I know. But no matter what I said, it couldn’t be as wicked as Fay was.… She found out who I was—no one else here even guessed except Abby Stirling—and she made me print things—she made me print things—”

  She dropped her head in her hands with a long, racking sob, and Sheridan, be
nding lower still, touched with gentle fingers the round, lovely shoulder that should have belonged to the most exquisite of Eugénie’s ladies in waiting.

  “Do not, I beg of you, think of those things any longer. They are past, they are gone, they are not even enough remembered to say that they are forgotten.… Will you wait here a little while until you, too, have forgotten them, and I will tell your guests that you have only just heard of Hardy’s death, but that you will be with them very shortly? I am anxious to find Mallory—it will go hard with him, I know—and if I do not return again to wish you goodnight, you will know—will you not?—that I am wishing you far more than just that.… Shall I go?”

  She nodded, not lifting her head, but touching his fingers with hers for a moment, light and hesitant as butterflies; halfway down the great sweep of the stairway he still felt that light, timid touch, and even half across the wide hall with its flower-colored Persian frescoes where Abby Stirling and a generously proportioned young woman with heavy black brows and a fine sweep of bronze hair were busily engaged over a backgammon board, the pity still remained stamped deep on his dark face.

  “Hey!” saluted the sleek Mrs. Stirling genially, “didn’t you hear me howling out there in the bushes while I was waiting for you, or didn’t you just give a damn? Come over here and meet Nell Tappan—Nell, meet Europe’s latest contribution to us as a token payment—personally, I should think that it leaves us a bit up on that game for the first time! Mr. Sheridan, dear, would you take that little red devil that she’s leaving so attractively exposed in what I can tell her now are vain hopes of starting a premature back game, or would you just take a nimble leap right over him? Mabardi says—”

  “I regret a thousand times,” said Europe’s latest token payment with a misleadingly plaintive expression, “that I know somewhat less than nothing of your undoubtedly admirable game of backgammon. The regret, as a matter of fact, is becoming so gnawing that something fairly drastic is going to have to be done about it. Possibly you or Mrs. Tappan would take me on as a pupil, if I promised on my honor to become an apt one? Mrs. Tappan, I am so very glad to meet you. Later, perhaps, may I not—”

  “And am I glad to meet you!” replied Mrs. Tappan with a girlish enthusiasm not too well adapted by a lady of her somewhat Junoesque proportions. “Later nothing! Boy, oh boy, what I’ve heard about you these last twenty-four hours—”

  “Later, unfortunately.” Sheridan’s agreeable voice carried conviction and finality. “At the time being it is of the very greatest importance that I find—” He paused, eyes riveted on the little tooled-leather cup sitting with the bland unconcern of inanimate objects halfway down the bar dividing the handsome leather backgammon board. “But I see that you are one of the fortunate recipients of Tess Stuart’s famous sets of backgammon markers—and a particularly charming one at that. Ivory and jade, is it not?” Something in the sudden paling of the healthily tinted, pleasantly rustic face checked him again, and he asked, uncertainly, “Or are they yours, Mrs. Stirling? And will you think me quite mad if I ask you whether I could look at them for a moment?” The small heap of matchlike sticks were cupped in the palm of his hand, even as he spoke—the policeman from Vienna was obviously not waiting for anyone’s permission to carry on his experiments, though he managed somewhat to mitigate his audacity by glancing up at the two startled ladies and bestowing on them the brief flash of white teeth that made his dark, controlled face so surprisingly charming. “Believe me, I beg, that there is real method in my madness! I have wanted to count a set of these wretched little objects for enough hours to make eternity—and to whichever one of you they belong, I tender my most abject apologies.… Yes.… Thirty white—twenty green. Fifty exactly—and I was then as right as I thought.” He checked them over again with flying fingers, tucking them back deftly into their round, compact container and restoring them to their place on the bar. “Fifty, that is what the count should be, is it not? They are all in there?”

  “Sure, they’re all in there. We’d just started this game—it was our third shot, wasn’t it, Abby? And they’re certainly mine all right, now—though if I keep on getting the jitters every time I look at them, they won’t be much longer!” Nell Tappan reached mechanically for the tall glass on the table beside her, her face still pale under the ruddy tan. “As a matter of fact, I called Tess up this afternoon to offer to turn them over to her tomorrow if she wanted them for—oh, I dunno—what d’you call it—a souvenir—a memento? At any rate she told me to keep them; said she hoped they’d bring me luck every time I used them, too. There’s a grand gal, let me tell you; if you’re—”

  “But why in the world, if you do not consider the question too impertinent, should you have returned them to Tess—to Miss Stuart? Surely if they were yours—”

  He stood perfectly rigid, so that he would not make a gesture to raise his hands to his ears—that gesture from a long-lost childhood, to shut out something too horrible and intolerable to listen to even for a moment, the gesture that would shut out the reply of the pleasant, well-meaning lady just up from Warrenton.

  “Is this the young fellow you told me was so bright, Ab?” inquired Nell Tappan, taking another long, consoling draft from the glass. “Sure they were mine—from Friday afternoon on. I won ’em somewhere around five o’clock shooting craps on our very best modernistic tufted rug.… But before that they’d belonged to Fay Stuart—and I just happened to think that Tess might want to keep them under the ancestral roof, instead of having them roving to and fro over the country with me as their custodian. Well, it seems that I was wrong.… Will you kindly tell me what you’re staring at now?”

  “Forgive me. I had been told—I had been told quite definitely that the set that belonged to Fay Stuart was of malachite and lapis lazuli. She had two, perhaps?”

  “Lord, no—this was the only one she had; Tess gave it to her on her birthday, and she was proud as Punch of it! As a matter of fact, the lapis and malachite set belongs to Tess—and after she got back late this winter, she had a duplicate made for Dion Mallory. Don’t you remember how everyone teased her, Ab? Because it was the only time that she ever had a duplicate made, and we all thought that it was Fay that Dion was keen about—as far as that goes, a lot of people think so still. Well, there’s no accounting for tastes—listen, will you get me—”

  “Mallory,” said Karl Sheridan in a voice startlingly clear and distinct, speaking as one roused sharply from a dream. “I must find Mallory. It was that I was starting to tell you when I noticed the markers. Have you by any chance seen him? I have, you see, a message for him of the very greatest importance. Jerry Hardy died about half an hour ago.”

  “Oh, Lord!” cried Nell Tappan with smothered violence, pushing the backgammon table from her. “Well, that just about puts the finishing touch on these last few days! I’ve had enough, thanks. I’m going home to bed and—”

  “Steady on, child! You don’t want to do anything to break up Joan’s party, do you?” Abby Stirling swept up Nell Tappan’s exposed red counter and placed it neatly on the center bar of the backgammon board beside the jade and ivory markers. “Mallory’s gone, Mr. Sheridan. He was. here until about half an hour or so ago, watching our first battle, and as a matter of fact he left a message for you. I was going to pass it on the first minute I got a chance to put a word in edgewise—”

  “A message for me?”

  “Yes. Your move, Nell.” She did not even trouble to raise the ingenuous and enigmatic eyes from the dice in the leather shaker. “He said to tell you that he was sorry to have to leave so abruptly, but that it was extremely urgent, and that he had borrowed one of Allan’s cars and left his parked to the right of the side entrance for you to use. whenever you were ready to come home. The keys are in it.”

  “Someone must have told him, then, of Hardy’s death?”

  It was more a statement than a question, but Mrs. Tappan, shaking her dice box with nervous vehemence, uttered an emphatic protest, over its fretfu
l chatter.

  “Oh, Lord, no—I don’t believe that it had a thing to do with Jerry Hardy. One of the servants came dashing in here with a tray of stuff and told Dion that a young lady who wouldn’t give her name was on the phone, and she said that she simply had to speak to Mr. Mallory—that she’d tried three times before to reach him, and that she was just going to hold on till somebody found him—that it was on a matter of the greatest possible importance—”

  “He seemed more wrought up and confidential than the type of domestic that they go in for in our better type of cinema,” murmured Abby Stirling pensively. “But I will say that he got results! Within three minutes Dion was back from the telephone, and within four minutes he was off—Nell, darling, you know the idea is that eventually you throw the dice, not just keep on shaking the spots off them?”

  Sheridan, like his impetuous housemate, clearly did not intend to stand longer on the order of his going. He glanced briefly at his watch, made an even briefer and silent calculation that did not seem to give him any marked pleasure, and stood bowing over Abby Stirling’s small, capable hand.

  “You will forgive me if I follow his example? I am really anxious about the effect that Hardy’s death will have on him. This morning he seemed so profoundly upset at the thought even of his illness. And the next time that we meet, I will promise to do my level best to atone for all the sins of this evening. I trust that I may be permitted to do penance to you, too, Mrs. Tappan. And will one of you be gracious enough to make my apologies to my host? To Mrs. Lindsay I have already done so.… Good-night, then—and to our very speedy reunion.”