The Week-end Guest
BY
MARIE VAN VORST
THE WEEK-END GUEST1
By MARIE VAN VORST
From the room where Patricia Hereford’s wedding gifts were displayed, the Long Island Sound was visible, and it lay in the distance on this October day, blue as a patch of cornflowers. Down at the dock the yacht waited to take the master of the house to town. Underneath the window in kilts, bare legs, bagpipes and all, a Highland shepherd, imported by the lady of the house from his native heather because he was picturesque, watched his sheep and was homesick to the bone! The twenty-five Southdown sheep were astoundingly clean and moved about in patches on the flawless lawn. Now and again the wretched piper played a few Scotch melodies as he was paid to do, and the lady of the house listened to the piper’s tunes with her pencil on her lips as she prepared for the detective a list of the wedding presents.
“What melody is Sandy playing now, Nell?”
One of the bridesmaids, a girl who was staying in the house, perched nonchalantly on a table, a notebook and a pencil in her hands. Miss Moore was helping Mrs. Hereford list the wedding presents, and presumably Miss Cynthia Moore was thinking of her own wedding, when it should come to pass, as bridesmaids will! She dictated to Mrs. Hereford.
“Number one thousand and six, Nell, a pigskin purse from Eric Johnson. Pat’s own chauffeur, isn’t he?”
“Yes,” said Mrs. Hereford, “nice of him and in perfectly good taste.”
Miss Moore swung to and fro a foot encased in a correct golf brogue. She was the champion woman golfer of the Eastern States, and came downstairs in the morning dressed for golf, ready for her game. Indeed she said she only put on evening dress in order to keep out of social jail!
“That’s the nicest thing I have heard you say about any of the presents, Nell! If people who sent them could only hear you!”
The lady of the house shrugged.
“I have always wondered why certain frightful things were manufactured and now I know they are for wedding gifts. The boring part is that over a thousand people will have to be lied to and thanked! Poor Patricia!”
There they were, over a thousand wedding presents! Patricia Hereford was a popular débutante and her father the best host on Long Island. Everything that indifferent taste could select and money pay for, from Hereford’s own gift of diamonds to the modest pigskin purse, was here displayed. One of the most truly beautiful things was a pink Persian prayer rug of rich soft tones, a Persian proverb in delicate lettering running around the border. It hung on the wall opposite the pearls and valuable jewels. Two rooms on the second floor of the big country house had been consecrated to this exhibition, and the presents were to be seen by the guests on the following afternoon, after the wedding.
“Mr. Jones is downstairs in the fur room,” Mrs. Hereford said, “but his men have not come up from Waybrook, and I thought he had better stay with the sables and the silver fox. We must not budge from here until they come, but you can go to Pat if you like, Cinnie. I’ll stay on.” The lady of the house glanced out at the Highland piper and his astoundingly clean sheep on the lawn.
“There!” exclaimed Miss Moore. “That’s the tune I mean, Nell! What is it—do you know? Hear it and weep, don’t you think so?”
Mrs. Hereford hummed the tune through, accompanied by the melancholic piper from without.
“Jolly!” exclaimed Cynthia from her table. “Jolly in your adorable voice! Are there any words that go with it or is it only a sob and a wail?”
“Ye Highlands and ye Lowlands oh! Where have you been?
They have slain the Earl of Moray and laid him on the green.
He was a braw gallant and he rode for the glove,
And the gallant Earl of Moray he was the Queen’s love;
And long shall the Lady look from the Castle down
To hear the Earl of Moray go stounin’ through the Town.”
Mrs. Hereford’s really beautiful voice filled the gift room with its sweetness.
“I’ll catalogue wedding presents indefinitely,” said Miss Moore, “if you’ll go on like that. Anyhow, Nell, he is the Queen’s Love all right!”
“What do you mean?” asked Mrs. Hereford sharply.
“Captain Ramsay. He is crazy about you.”
Mrs. Hereford had been comparing her list with that of Miss Moore. She went over to the window, looked out until the red died from her face, and said over her shoulder:
“Go on with your list, Cinnie, and don’t be a goose.”
The girl wrote diligently for a few moments. Mrs. Hereford returned to the table where the pigskin purse reposed between the red lacquer box, on which the card read: “Maharajah of Singapore,” and a sapphire ring on the other side.
“I am awfully sorry for you, Nell, you’ll miss Pat beyond words, shan’t you?”
“Yes,” said the lady of the house, “to-morrow night I shall be utterly alone.”
“How nice for your husband!” Miss Moore laughed. “Where is poor old Tommy going, anyway?”
“Nowhere,” said the lady of the house coolly. “I mean we will be all alone.”
Mrs. Hereford was twenty years younger than her husband. She had never asked herself so often before, how she was going to be able to entertain the prospect of endless luncheons and endless dinners opposite Tommy Hereford.
“Entirely alone,” she murmured again, walking down the long line of presents. From the splendid pearls she came back to Eric Johnson’s purse and stood near it as though something drew her to that special spot. She had not married Hereford to bring up his children, she was only a little older than they. She had been a sister to them during the five years of her married life and Jack Hereford, who was unpopular with his father, adored his stepmother.
“Why did you marry your husband, Helen?” Cynthia Moore asked laughingly, but she did wonder with all her might. Since she had known the two she had never been able to understand the union.
Mrs. Hereford, leaning with one hand on the gift table, the other playing with her long rope of pearls, said absent-mindedly,
“Oh, there must be twenty reasons why!”
“And you can’t think of one!” exclaimed the girl.
On the hard floor of the next room fell the footsteps of some one coming quickly toward them.
“Listen, Nell,” laughed the girl who was staying in the house, “‘the Earl of Moray is stounin’ through the town!’ You’ll miss him, too, when he goes to-morrow! I am awfully sorry for him.”
“Hello, Captain Ramsay!” she said. “Come and take my place and list these things with Mrs. Hereford.” She held out the book and the pencil to him. She understood many things.
Since Ramsay had come to Waybrook ten days before with Jack Hereford, he had scarcely spoken a word to any one; scarcely looked at any one but the lady of the house, and his absorption in her was dangerously charming to a woman not in love with her husband.
“You don’t have to stay in the house all morning, do you, Mrs. Hereford?” he asked eagerly. Ramsay wore the uniform of the Blank Flying Corps, and his breast was full of stars.
“Yes, Miss Moore and I are on guard here, and I wish you would do something for me, will you, like an angel?”
Ramsay mechanically picked up the pigskin purse.
“I have got one like this,” he said, “it doesn’t look like a wedding present! I have carried mine through the war and it is as empty now as it was then,” he laughed.
“Please, please!” urged the lady of the house, “do run down to the graperies where we were yesterday——”
Ramsay interrupted.
“I wanted to go with you now, Mrs. Hereford, down there; can’t we?”
“I am on guard. If anything were stolen from this room, Cynthia and I would be responsible. I am making up a lunch basket for Patricia. She is crazy about Hamburg grapes and I want to put some in.”
“You only want to send me away,” he laughed. “I never went on so many distant errands in my life! Isn’t there something you want in New York?”
“I do want the grapes!”
She wanted to get him from under the clever scrutiny of Cynthia Moore, and after he had gone out of the room, reluctant in every move of his body, Miss Moore asked,
“What do you know about Captain Ramsay?”
The bridesmaid had a fashion of putting questions when she was interested in anything with a frank abruptness, at once alluring and embarrassing.
“Not much, just picturesque things,” said the lady of the house. “There’s the last item, Cinnie, diamond pendant, value four thousand dollars.”
Cynthia Moore scrutinized her list. “All right! We have varied it agreeably! We began with ‘gift of the bridegroom, one hundred thousand dollars,’ and we drift along to a pigskin purse, value one dollar fifty, I should say, and close with a medium note, a little four thousand! Tell me about Ramsay.”
Miss Moore had arrived the day before, coming back with the Herefords from the races, to a large house party of which Jack Hereford, son of the house, home from France, and Captain Ralph Ramsay were part.
“Jack’s crazy about him,” said Mrs. Hereford. “He is Jack’s best friend.”
“’M!” murmured Miss Moore. “Excuse me, my dear! You have a soft spot in your heart for Jack. I don’t understand it—I never have.”
Mrs. Hereford went on.
“They have been together for two years in France in the same sector. Captain Ramsay is an ace with a ripping record, as you know.”
“No,” returned the bridesmaid, giving her book up to Mrs. Hereford, “I don’t know anything about him.”
Miss Moore was an unusually understanding young person; some people said she had ten senses where others have only seven.
“Well!” said the lady of the house. “He is quite poor; lots of nice people are. He is from the West as you can hear by his accent.”
“No one has a chance to hear much of his accent but you! He never speaks to any one else.”
“Ridiculous!” said the lady of the house. “Jack told me that every one in the sector from the mascot to the colonel was crazy about Ralph, and as you see, he has all the medals that can be won.”
“Too bad he couldn’t have worked off a few on Jack,” said Cynthia. “Jack is as bare as a bone, and his father seems to have it in for him harder than ever! What has Jack done since he was demobilized, Nell?”
Mrs. Hereford shook her head.
“Don’t ask me! My husband doesn’t like my interference. I learned that and I don’t try to know. Jack is going to California to-morrow. He is going on with aviation, and I hope will go into the United States army for good. I hope he will.”
“Too bad!” murmured Miss Moore. For in her kind and understanding heart there was a very warm place for the master of the house. “Too bad such a fine man as Tommy should have a son like Jack.”
“You are very unfair to him,” said the lady of the house warmly. “I think I am the only one to understand him. I believe the very best of Jack, and I know he’ll come out all right. He has a good military record over there.”
Miss Moore laughed. “Well, he did not get shot in the back! I know I’m rotten, but—” She came impulsively over to her friend and put her arms around her. “Now the Earl of Moray is another thing. He’s all right. You can see his record on his face and on his breast, and I excuse his ’stounin’ through the town’ and his entire absorption in another woman—he is all right!”
Cynthia Moore kissed Mrs. Hereford and then went upstairs to Patricia, who had been waiting for her for the last half hour. The lady of the house was not sorry to be alone.
She knew about Ralph Ramsay only what her stepson had told her in his letters from France during the past two years. In these letters Ralph Ramsay had been described as a “wonder, a corker, a dare-devil in the air, a chap who defied danger and death, a little bit of all right,” and when Jack took the trouble to detail some thrilling event or to tell of fine achievements, Ralph Ramsay would turn out to be the man who had done the thing. In Jack’s letters the ace had charmed this imaginative and loveless woman, and his valor and his courage had fascinated her from afar. In her room, on her bureau and on her desk, were numerous snapshots of the two young men, and the ace seemed always to be smiling at her and to be the expression of la joie de vivre. He attracted her enormously, and in the little pictures she grew to know every line of his slim body and of his beautiful head. As he waved his cap at the side of a broken machine from which he had landed that time safely, he seemed to wave to her and to greet her.
When her husband came into her little room, if he resented the fact that there were no pictures of himself there and too many of his scapegrace of a son, his good breeding did not allow him to comment on the fact! He showed a friendly approval of Captain Ramsay, however.
“Now there is a fine-looking chap, Nell, and I hope to God he does Jack good. I’d like a son like that!”
But he saw the flying man under different colors when Ramsay appeared at Waybrook. Ramsay came into a conventional atmosphere with a vivid charm of which no one was unconscious, and if Jack had written that from the mascot to the colonel he was popular in France—he was popular at Waybrook, from the chauffeur by whose side he had sat on the way from the train, to the lady of the house. Not even the big wedding with the rush, excitement, and absorption had been able to cloud over the brightness of the passing of Ralph Ramsay. If he defied danger in the air, the young man defied convention here; and with utter disregard of propriety he fell in love with the lady of the house and took no pains to conceal his passion. Mrs. Hereford remembered what her stepson had said of him: “Women go crazy about Ralph. In the hospital he had the nurses nailed. It was comic, the poor chaps on either side of him stood no chance at all!”
Tommy Hereford, the best host on Long Island, had on this occasion displayed a perfect hospitality! For ten days he watched this young man make love to his wife and did not throw him out! Hereford sincerely loved his wife, and was determined to win her if he could. He had no intention of playing the losing game of a jealous husband.
The day before, to protect Ramsay and to get him away where she could warn him, and try to make him behave, she had snatched half an hour from the rushing day and taken him to the graperies. He had drawn her into his arms and held her in spite of the fact that the gardener was in the next glass house and talking across to Mrs. Hereford. Ramsay had said over the man’s voice and over the scent of violets:
“I love you terribly—with every bit of me—thank God I was not smashed up in France before I could tell you this!”
Now she knew he would think of every moment of this. She could never go into those graperies again without a thrill. Her husband was going to town on the yacht and came in smoking and holding out two one-thousand-dollar bills.
“Nell, I want Patricia to have some pocket money in her dressing case. Slip these in, will you?”
“Tommy,” exclaimed his wife, “you never stop, do you?”
“I am glad I don’t have to stop,” said the father, “when it is the case of doing something for my little girl.”
“I’ll put them in this little leather purse,” said Mrs. Hereford and she took up the little pocketbook. “Pat says she is going to take it with her, Tommy, and she’ll be frightfully pleased.”
He gave her the bills, and Mrs. Hereford slipped them into the little purse.
“Going to leave it there around loose like that?” asked the business man.
“Why not? Jones’ men will be here in a minute. Think of the things farther along and what they are worth. There is no one here but ourselves.”
Through the other doorway Jack Hereford and Ralph Ramsay came in together. Since he had been at Waybrook, Ramsay had never seen the husband and wife alone together. He stopped short on the threshold, but the son went in.
“I’ve not been robbing the graperies,” Ramsay said. “These are going in your daughter’s lunch basket, Mr. Hereford.”
“I dare say,” nodded the father. “Everything goes with Pat!”
“Look what dad has just given her.” Mrs. Hereford held up the purse and the bills. “I am putting them in this little pigskin purse so that if she wants to buy some stamps she’ll find them handy.”
Jack looked at his father’s last generous gift without a word, turned about and went and stood at the window. The piper, who felt he had done as much as his salary demanded, was silent. With his back to the house he gazed beyond the Sound toward the bonnie hills of Scotland. Ramsay seemed to appreciate the generosity, however.
“Wonderful!” he exclaimed. “Wonderful to be able to do things like that for one’s children!”
And he looked from the husband to the wife, but his tone was bitter. Mrs. Hereford had never heard a note like this in his voice. As her husband went out of the room and his son slowly followed him, Mrs. Hereford asked Ramsay:
“Why did you speak so bitterly when my husband gave Patricia his parting gift? It was not like you!”
“Bitterly!” he exclaimed. “My dad threw me out when I was twelve—he married again—I wasn’t wanted, and since then I have never known a home. I have knocked about the world. I have never seen a family life and when Jack used to talk of his people I never believed that anything like this existed! And now that I see what it means to a chap, it makes me bitter, that’s all!”
“Poor boy!”
“Oh, no! Oh, no,” he hurried. “For God’s sake, don’t pity me! I don’t want to grouch. I have been hungry, I have always been poor, but I’ve managed to get something of life everywhere! I suppose you’d call me an adventurer.”
He threw back his beautiful head and laughed.
“It is a good adventure all right and I am glad I am part of it.”
He took her hand, looked down at her with his wonderful frank smile, and with the courage that conquers the world.
“I am glad that all those hard paths have brought me here to you. I have seen a lot of women, but I never cared like this.”
She believed it and he kissed her again deeply, deeply, many times; indifferent to the fact that they might be observed, and how serious it would be for her; but she freed herself saying:
“What madness! This must have its end, you know!”
And he murmured passionately, “Yes, it must have its end, dearest. When can I see you?”
“To-night,” she said, “in the music room at twelve—at half past twelve.”
Unmistakably some one was coming in the hall. Mrs. Hereford turned and hurriedly left the room.
After she had gone out Ramsay stood motionless beside the long tables. Life, which had been so full of unkindness to him and so full of caprices, seemed at last to have smiled upon him. Only certain moments in the air when above the German lines he had escaped the enemy’s barrage and later brought down his black foe—seen him fall, only in moments of such magnitude, had he felt lifted as high as to-day.
Here some one called:
“Nell! Nell, where are you?”
And down through the long room, next where his own eager footsteps had gone “stounin’” on the parquet floor, came Patricia Hereford, the bride, in her wedding dress, looking for her stepmother. She stood hesitatingly on the threshold between the rooms.
“Where’s mother, Captain Ramsay?”
Patricia passed for a beauty. She was happy and healthy, lit by young expectancy and young hope and love. White as a lily, and tall as a lily, she stood looking about at her beautiful things as a child might at his Christmas gifts.
“What a crowd of things!” she murmured. “What an awful lot, isn’t it? And all for little me.” She nodded and laughed. “It will take a thousand years to write letters of thanks for them all. I’ll make Nelly do it.”
She slowly walked along in front of the presents, lifting a card here, stopping a moment there, only half attentive, half seeing them, having this day more dazzling things than material jewels to think about. She stopped finally, before the pigskin purse lying between the sapphire ring and the lacquer box. The young man who had been thrown out of family life at twelve to fight for his existence, watched this spoiled society girl in her satin dress, surrounded by objects whose value footed up to hundreds of thousands.
“I have not half seen the things yet! Aren’t they wonderful?”
She picked up the purse.
“This is from my chauffeur. Wasn’t it kind of him?”
She opened it mechanically, looked up at Ramsay, and said, laughing:
“Oh, gracious! That’s daddy!”
“It was meant for a surprise for you.”
“Never mind,” she said, “I won’t tell. Indeed, if any one asks, I’ll swear it was empty.” She laughed and put it down again.
“It is great of you, Captain Ramsay, to have watched the presents for me. Thank you a thousand times.”
Ramsay looked up at the prayer rug.
“I wish since you are here, Miss Hereford, you’d tell me what the letters around this prayer rug mean! What do they say?”
She thought a minute.
“I have got it written out upstairs somewhere.”
It was difficult for the bride to bring her attention to Persian characters.
“As near as I can remember they say:
“To the Great Lover Honor and Dishonor Life and Death are in the hands of the Beloved.”
Ramsay nodded. “Great!” he said. “I like it awfully. It’s ripping.”
“Hello, Pat!” Her brother stood on the threshold she had crossed. “Hello, people! I have been looking for you, Pat. I have been up to your room.”
The two young people, absorbed in a saying of the Far East, did not answer. Patricia and Ralph stood with their backs to the sapphire ring and the maharajah’s red lacquer box and the pigskin purse.
“The Maharajah of Singapore,” said Miss Hereford, “gave me wonderful lessons last year in Boston. All the girls were crazy about him. You read from left to right.” She pointed with her slender finger of the left hand on which the wedding ring would be very soon. “There like that, see:
“‘To the Great Lover Honor and Dishonor’ on the first line; ‘Life and Death are in the hands of the Beloved’ on the second line.”
The Scotch piper without, on the flawless lawn with his twenty-five astoundingly clean sheep, had decided to take his grazing herd farther along and had gone to the end of the park. From the distance they could hear the tune of his melancholic music as it came to them faintly as they stood there reading the rug.
“And the gallant Earl of Moray he was the queen’s love.”
“The Great Lover,” Ramsay repeated the words; they were fascinating. Oh, it was worth while in life to be a great lover! Ah, he could be it now for her—for her—for the woman he had kissed and held in his arms!
“Mr. Rolland would like to speak to Miss Hereford in her room.”
No one but the family was allowed in the gift room and the footman with a message for Patricia from the bridegroom stopped halfway down the next room, and even though she was so near being Mrs. Rolland, the girl blushed at the name and started forward.
“I’ll come at once. Captain Ramsay, do find Nell. Ask her to come up to my room. I must see her.”
“I can’t leave here,” said Ramsay. “Jack will tell her. I say, old man—” And he turned round to speak to Jack, but Hereford had simply crossed the room and gone out by the other door.
As Mrs. Hereford, after leaving Ramsay, went out of the gift room she ran into young Hereford, who caught her arm and drew her toward her own room.
“Nell, come along with me a second, will you?”
Her stepchildren called her by her first name. She was more like a sister than a mother to them. She was always dreading demands of money from Jack, for whenever he wanted either to confess to her or to demand a favor, he made her boudoir a confessional.
Mrs. Hereford was a Southerner, accustomed to a great deal of admiration from young men, and Jack Hereford was especially chivalrous and devoted to her. He might well be, for she had been his defender against his father more than once. Now he put her in a comfortable chair and called in to her maid, who happened to be in the next room.
“Marie, like an angel fetch a couple of cocktails for Mrs. Hereford and me, will you?”
“You should rest, Nell; you’ve been worn out with all this rush.”
When he had made his stepmother comfortable, he lit a cigarette for her, took one himself, and looked around at the photographs of himself and Ramsay.
“Gee, what a lot of me! You framed everything I ever sent you, I guess. Isn’t Ralph a corker? Now he’s got the good luck to be staying on. I’ve brought you here, Nell, to say good-by. I’ve got to go to-day.”
She looked at him in surprise.
“You mean to say you are going to miss the wedding?”
“I am awfully cut up about it—military orders, and—honestly, I’m not sorry to get away. Dad has been rotten to me—absolutely rotten!”
The maid brought the two cocktails on a tray. Jack drank his and said half smiling:
“You’re a brick, Nell. Ralph will bring me news of everything when he comes. Good-by—don’t get too tired. See you at Christmas.” He leaned over, kissed her, and went to bid his sister good-by.
The lady of the house, while alone in her room the next few moments, received countless telephone calls and messages. As soon as they knew she was to be found every one came to her. Only after she had dismissed the last messenger could she draw a long breath and remember Ralph in the room beyond.
Ramsay had become a great excitement and a problem. To-morrow he would be gone, however, and to-night she would try to put things on another footing, and in his absence turn to the occupations of her busy social life to try to forget him.
As she passed through the apartment adjoining the gift room, she could see the tables weighed down with their priceless things, and Ralph still alone in front of the maharajah’s lacquer box and the sapphire ring opposite the prayer rug on the wall. She could see, too, that in his hands was the little purse; he was closing it—slipping the strap under the band. He put it quickly down as he heard her steps and came toward her with a radiant face as though he had no thought beyond the fact that she had come back and alone. She had time only to meet his eyes with a troubled question in her own, for, sharp and alert, Mr. Jones, with one of the other detectives, followed behind her. The three together entered the room where Ramsay stood. Jones said briskly:
“Now, we’ll take charge here, Mrs. Hereford, and relieve you, Captain Ramsay.”
But the young man paid no more attention to them than if they had been ghosts. He was looking only at the woman whom he had taken lately in his arms.
“Since you went away I have learned to read the writing on the wall.”
She did not answer. She was not thinking of Persian characters and Persian rugs.
“Miss Hereford came in her wedding gown. She was looking for you and she read me the writing on the wall.”
“I have forgotten what it says.”
At the far end of the big room Jones and his man were comparing the lists and checking them.
“I saw Miss Hereford, too,” said Jones. “She came to the fur room to tell me about the little pigskin purse with loose cash—two thousand dollars! I told Miss Hereford it was a mistake to let loose cash like that lie around.”
And the detective took up the little pocketbook, undid the strap which Mrs. Hereford had just seen Ramsay close. Jones was perfunctory, and he looked into the little purse out of habit. Finding it empty, he held it over to Mrs. Hereford and Ramsay, saying:
“Empty as a drum.”
Jones was delighted. He was glad of the snappy little incident, and his man, at the other end of the room, turned round with alacrity at his chief’s voice. Captain Ramsay, his hands in his pockets, stood perfectly motionless, looking quietly at the lady of the house. Before he could speak she said:
“Miss Hereford is very careless, and how could she possibly exchange two thousand-dollar bills on her honeymoon? I thought as you did, Mr. Jones, and I told her father before he went to town I had a lot of large bills to pay on the place and I wanted some cash. Mr. Hereford asked me to slip in my own check instead. I left it out on my desk in my boudoir. I’ll go and fetch it now.”
There was nothing whatsoever to say to the lady of the house—it was perfectly en règle.
“All right,” said Jones. “We’ll list it properly and it will be much safer.”
As the lady of the house went out the detective said to Captain Ramsay:
“Now if you want to go off duty?”
The young man even then looked at nothing but the disappearing figure of Helen Hereford. He stared at it as if he wanted to follow her, then wheeled about and went out by the opposite door. He called out to Jones:
“I am going to have a bit of air before luncheon.”
How that day passed she never knew. She had gone to Patricia and kissed her under her wedding veil, and there had been the bustle in the busy house—countless things to be done, to be decided—endless messages and calls. No one saw Captain Ramsay or knew where he had gone and, at dinner, when the host asked for him, a manservant answered:
“Captain Ramsay was called over the phone by a brother officer and has gone to the club. He has taken his traps.”
“Après la guerre comme à la guerre!” said Cynthia Moore. “Manners! That’s the Earl of Moray all over!” And she made a grimace at Mrs. Hereford as much as to say: “You packed him off at last, and no wonder.”
He had simply fled, and the shame and the degradation sickened her to the soul. He had not given her time to recover from his passionate declarations before he had stolen under her very eyes, one might say, under her very kisses. How had he dared to touch her? How had he dared?
By dinner time she was so overcome by her wretchedness that she was obliged to go to her boudoir to shut herself away. As she saw him on the little photograph by the side of his machine, ready to ascend—and in another near the broken wing of a fallen plane after an accident, she thought:
“Far better to have died than to have come back to this! What must this day have been for him?” All day she disputed with herself, loathing herself one moment, believing him innocent the next.
Her husband had come out to Waybrook early. He, as well as Cynthia Moore, thought that Mrs. Hereford had sent the young man away. Hereford came in to his wife’s room just before dinner.
“I’ll be glad when all this is over and you can rest.”
She looked at him gratefully. He seemed so true and honorable. She turned away that he might not see her tears.
“I am dog tired, Tommy, and I’ll be glad, too, when it’s all over.”
Mrs. Hereford was a true musician, and her husband loved her talent. When she came to Waybrook after her marriage she found the beautiful music room he had created waiting for her. Hereford had copied it from a villa near Cremona in Italy. The woodwork lining the walls had been brought to this American house from a music room whose traditions were hundreds of years old. Besides modern instruments—a phonograph, a harp, and two grand pianos looking at each other from the opposite ends of the room—rare instruments hung on the walls. Before the windows leading out on the porches, fell curtains of Renaissance brocade. The room was rich in tone and full of shadow and charm. The lady of the house had seen Captain Ramsay alone in this room for the first time one evening when a guest in the smoking room beyond had been telling a ghost story.
She and Captain Ramsay had played “Manon,” “Butterfly,” and Irish songs to make a thrilling accompaniment for a thrilling tale, but more sincerely to cover what Ramsay was saying to her in his young, eager voice with his young, eager feelings.
As Helen Hereford now came quickly in the music room past midnight she found it was still as death and it seemed to her as nearly ominous.
She walked softly over the thick rugs. The black paneling of the walls made a striking background for her figure in white evening dress. From one of the windows through which streamed October moonlight, the curtains were drawn; and the night, suggesting only beauty and peace, did not seem a proper setting for the story of a crime. During the war she had often stood in this window thinking of Jack Hereford and his friend flying over the enemy’s lines. She had looked forward with interest to seeing and knowing this brave man. How little she had imagined there would ever be a moment like this!
How cruel Ralph’s need of money must have been in order to have brought him so low as this! Jack had told her that Ramsay was as poor as a rat—with never a cent in his pocket—but Ralph himself had told her more that very afternoon when she had seen in the bitterness on his face a record of his cruel life.
Then he had acknowledged being a castaway and a vagabond. Had he not called himself an adventurer? The fact that he had rushed out of the house was against him. She did not believe that he would come here, and if he did not, she would keep his miserable secret as she would keep secret his kisses which she could not efface.
At the sound of steps on the veranda she went hurriedly to the window to open it herself. As she turned the handle of the French window, Ramsay came in, dressed just as he was when he had gone out that morning to fetch the grapes, in white flannel and white shoes. Her first expression was maternal as she saw him.
“You will catch a terrible cold. You must be frightfully cold! I am going to fetch you something to drink. There is whisky in the smoking room.”
Ramsay’s face was white and drawn. He came out in the room only a little beyond the window, his back against the red and gold Renaissance curtain. It framed him with its long lines falling behind him. He seemed to stand between in the folds.
“Please!” he said. “Don’t get me anything.”
He might have been embroidered on the satin of the curtains. He was moveless and beautiful in his pallor and silence; nevertheless he was only a modern figure, a modern man.
“How could you? How could you?” she breathed. “I did not think you would come to-night and yet I hoped you would”—and she felt her voice desert her—“and explain.”
He repeated the word “explain” with a laugh.
“I came back because I wanted to see you—for no other reason.”
She interrupted him with a passionate gesture as though she would dismiss her memories and his.
“To see me again! What can this matter?” In spite of herself she cried, “How horrible! How horrible!” and she covered her face.
He understood that she hated herself because he had taken her in his arms. He looked quietly at her from his greater height, and his expression did not indicate that all day he had been wandering like a hunted animal.
“This is the most dreadful thing that has ever come into my life! Oh! Why did you come back?” she cried.
“To see you—just to see you.”
There was a silence between them for a second, and the clock in the hall outside struck one. Ramsay said:
“You are sick with disgust. You are full of regret at—our love.”
“You think of that first! You think of that first of all!”
“First—second—last and above everything.”
“After what I saw this morning every word like that is an insult,” Mrs. Hereford said.
Ramsay came forward and caught her hands, saying tensely:
“And the look I saw on your face to-day when you came in the gift room? You use the word insult. What was the look I saw on your face when you came into the room?”
She murmured: “Explain, you must explain, you must!”
He let her hands fall.
“I have nothing to explain.
“You knew I was poor. A poor man has debts—gambling debts perhaps. Then there are women in men’s lives who make dreadful scandals—there is blackmail. A chap does things in desperation and is not all bad. I have known men to do such things. But from the moment I saw that look on your face to-day, the look which said you thought I was a thief, the world stopped for me.” He threw back his head and gave a little laugh. “It will never go on as it was before.”
Here she put out her hand as if about to take his, but let it fall.
“I’ve nothing to explain. The fact that for the tenth of a second you believed me a thief makes everything else of no value. Of course now”—there was a break in his voice—“you don’t even believe in my love!” His voice was low, but there was a ring in it that she never forgot. “It doesn’t make any difference any more. I’ve tramped with that horror all day.
“Ever since I was a kid I have had a hard time. I have gone to all lengths in time of stress. I have been in all parts of the globe after adventures, but this is the saddest adventure of them all. My heart stopped when I saw that look on your face.”
He stood straight as an arrow, fine as a lance; his figure once more was immovable against the curtain, and he looked like the picture up in her room, but the smile was gone.
“My things are all in the station. Before your clock strikes again I shall be gone. Think of me as you will, but you can’t believe that I did not love you. That you can’t believe!”
She would have given much to think him innocent. She covered her face with her hands, murmuring:
“Oh—you better just go—you better just go.”
He looked around the dark, paneled room where the shadows gathered like ghosts ready, when he should go, to haunt Waybrook; and as she stood with her hands across her eyes, he took her in his arms and kissed her upon her hair, upon the hand covering her eyes, and upon her lips. He opened the window and she heard him say, “Good-by! Good-by!” and only stirred when she felt the cold night air rushing in upon her.
She found herself clinging to the curtain, her face buried in its folds. She might have been a night moth blown there as she clung and shook, the heavy curtain wrapping her round. Ramsay had drawn her toward the window as if he wanted to take her with him into a world which had treated him not any too well! She came to herself as the clock struck, realizing that she was part of a household whose conventions would not stand for the lady of the house wandering about at dawn through the lower rooms without excuse!
She passed her hands over her face to wipe away not the kisses of an hour before, but the marks of tears; and drew the curtains to shut out with the moonlight the figure of the man who had disappeared into the night. Then she left the music room, intending to go upstairs. She remembered what Cynthia Moore had said that morning about the Earl of Moray and the line of the Persian proverb: “Honor and Dishonor are in the hands of the Beloved.”
On the first step of the staircase she stopped to look toward the smoking room at the far end of the hall, and she saw a line of light under the doorway. Her first thought was that Ramsay had hidden there, and as she crossed the hall she realized that she wanted him to be there—she wanted him to be there!
In one of the entirely comfortable chairs, his hand shading his eyes, an open book on his knee, unconscious of midnight rendezvous, her husband was sitting. He turned round and rose as his wife came in, and she saw, although grave and stern, he was impersonal as far as she was concerned.
“Hello, Nell! Couldn’t sleep, just as I couldn’t, I suppose?”
She wondered if it was possible that he had heard her in the music room at the end of the hall.
She came over to him.
“Two o’clock, Tommy; terribly late!”
Hereford drew over the other big chair.
“Since you are up, Nell, sit out a bit longer with me, will you?”
He would think she had been weeping at losing Patricia, no doubt imagine that she had come directly from Patricia’s room. He said:
“The little girl will leave an empty place and we are going to be awfully lonely. We’ll have to go on a new honeymoon trip, Nell!”
Mrs. Hereford sank down in her chair and tried to smile.
“Have you been mourning here all the evening for Patricia, Tommy?”
“No, only been down about half an hour.”
He smoked without looking at her, and again she wondered whether it were possible that he knew she had been in the other room with Ralph.
“I’ve been in the music room for some time. It was full of memories of our jolly times, of dances, of Patricia’s coming-out ball.”
But Hereford did not appear to have heard what she said. His face had settled into the harsh gravity and look of displeasure that she always connected with his son.
“What is the matter, Tommy, tell me?”
“The old story—Jack!”
Mrs. Hereford, with a breath of keen relief, put her hand on his knees, and sat back in her chair.
“Poor Tommy! It must be something perfectly terrible for you to look as you look and to sit here like this half the night.”
“It is the worst.”
“What is it? Tell me.”
“Blackmail!”
And clear as ice came to her the remembrance of Ramsay’s words: “There are women in men’s lives who make dreadful scandals for them. There is blackmail—”
“It is a relief to speak to you, Nell. When Jack was at Cambridge he got mixed up with the worst kind of woman and made some sort of marriage with her. Drunk, of course. She has trailed him ever since, followed him even to France; been bleeding him to death. The money you and I have given him has gone to her. He’s been keeping her quiet until now. He told me this last night, here in this room, and he asked for money to shut her up, as she threatened on Patricia’s wedding day to give out a flashy story to the newspapers and drag us all in.”
Mrs. Hereford never stirred.
“I fairly kicked him out of the house,” her husband said. He heard her ask:
“But you refused to give him money?”
“Yes, and I told him all the newspapers in the United States could print his story if they liked. It was his own life!”
Mrs. Hereford half rose, murmuring:
“Oh, and he needed money like that! Tommy, like that, and you didn’t give it to him?”
“I told him if he went to you or Patricia I would disinherit him. I told him to get his lawyer. It was up to him. If you begin to give to blackmail you are lost. Let him take what is coming to him—he has made his own life!”
She gave a cry, sank more deeply into her chair, and burst into tears, her head on the arm of the chair. Her husband bent over, reassuring her, telling her not to worry; Jack would get a lawyer and he had been a brute to tell her when she was so utterly done up and tired.
But she had broken down under the strain of fatigue, emotion, and passion greater, at last, than her control.
She tried to pull herself together, to control her grief. She would wire Ramsay to-morrow, she would ask his pardon. To her now it was clear as day. Oh, it was clear! But Ralph would never forgive her—never in the world. She heard her husband go over to a little cupboard in the wall where drinks were kept; she heard the snap of the soda-bottle cork like a little shot.
There was nothing she could say to her husband. Her passion for Ramsay had protected his son. Hereford would never know anything of the theft or anything of her false suspicion.
“Honor and dishonor had been in her hands!”
Her husband came back with a refreshing drink for her, and sat down on the arm of the chair, made her swallow it, and then he drew her up with great gentleness.
“It is nearly morning,” he said, “and we have a busy day before us. Brace up, old girl!” He kissed her on her hair.
Mrs. Hereford looked up at him through her tears. First of all, her husband’s honor had been given to her for keeping. How ruthlessly she had torn it and thrown it away!
Hereford put his arm around her. She needed his support, and they went out, side by side, past the music room, where the ghostly shadows gathered in the four corners, only waiting to take possession.
The American Magazine