CHAPTER IV
SLEEP is a funny thing! Really comical I mean! A magician's trick! "Now you have it—and now you don't!"
Certainly I had very little of it the night of Dr. Brawne's telephone conversation. I was too surprised.
Yet staring up through those long wakeful hours into the jetty black heights of my bedroom ceiling it didn't seem to be so much the conversation itself as the perfectly irrelevant events succeeding that conversation that kept hurtling back so into my visual consciousness—The blueness of the May Girl's eyes! The brightness of her hair!— Rollins's necktie! The perfectly wanton hideousness of Rollins's necktie!—The bang—bang—bang of a storm- tortured shutter way off in the ell somewhere.
Step by step, item by item, each detail of events reprinted itself on my mind. Fumbling back from the shadowy telephone- stand into the brightly lighted upper hall with the single desire to find my Husband and confide to him as expeditiously as possible this news which had so amazed me, I had stumbled instead upon the May Girl herself, climbing somewhat listlessly up the stairs toward bed, Rollins was close behind her carrying her book and a filmy sky-blue scarf. George Keets followed with a pitcher of water.
"Oh, it isn't Good Night, dear, is it?" I questioned.
"Yes," said the May Girl. "I'm—pretty tired." She certainly looked it.
Rollins quite evidently was in despair. He was not to accomplish his 'kiss' after all, it would seem. All the long day, I judged, he had been whipping up his cheeky courage to meet some magic opportunity of the evening. And now, it appeared, there wasn't going to be any evening! Even the last precious moment indeed was to be ruined by George Keets's perfidious intrusion!
It was the Bride's voice though that rang down the actual curtain on Rollins's "Perfect Day."
"Oh, Miss Davies!—Miss Davies!" called the Bride. "You mustn't forget to return your ring, you know!"
"Why, no, so I mustn't," rallied the May Girl.
Twice I heard Rollins swallow very hard. Any antique was sacred to him, but a family antique. Oh, ye gods!
"K—K—Keep the ring!" stammered Rollins. It was the nearest point to real heroism surely that funny little Rollins would ever attain.
"Oh, no, indeed," protested the May Girl. Very definitely she snapped the silken threads, removed the clumsy bauble from her finger, and handed it back to Rollins. "But—but it's a beautiful ring!" she hastened chivalrously to assure him. "I'll—I'll keep the orchids!" she assented with real dimples.
On Rollins's sweating face the symptoms of acute collapse showed suddenly. With a glare that would have annihilated a less robust soul than George Keets's he turned and laid bare his horrid secret to an unfeeling Public.
"I'd rather you kept the ring," sweated Rollins. "The—The orchids have got to go back!—I only hired the orchids!—That is I—I bribed the gardener. They've got to be back by nine o'clock to-night. For some sort of a—a party."
"To-night?" I gasped. "In all this storm f Why, what if the May Girl had refused to—to——?"
In Rollins's small, blinking eyes, Romance and Thrift battled together in terrible combat.
"I gotta go back," mumbled Rollins. "He's got my watch!"
"Oh, for goodness sake you mustn't risk losing your watch!" laughed the May Girl.
George Keets didn't laugh. He hooted! I had never heard him hoot before, and ribald as the sound seemed emanating from his distinctly austere lips, the mechanical construction of that hoot was in some way strangely becoming to him.
The May Girl quite frankly though was afraid he had hurt Rollins's feelings. Returning swiftly from her bedroom with the lovely exotics bunched cautiously in one hand she turned an extravagantly tender smile on Rollins's unhappy face.
"Just—Just one of them," she apologized, "is crushed a little. I know you told me to be awfully careful of them. I'm very sorry. But truly," she smiled, "it's been perfectly Wonderful—just to have them for a day! Thank you!—Thank you a whole lot, I mean! And for the day itself—it's—it's been very—pleasant," she lied gallantly.
Snatching the orchids almost roughly from her hand Rollins gave another glare at George Keets and started for his own room. With his fingers on the door-handle he turned and glared back with particular ferocity at the May Girl herself. "Pleasant?" he scoffed. "Pleasant?" And crossing the threshold he slammed the door hard behind him.
Never have I seen anything more boorish!
"Why—Why, how tired he must be," exclaimed the May Girl.
"Tired?" hooted George Keets. He was still hooting when he joined the Bride and Bridegroom in the library.
It must have been fifteen minutes later that, returning from an investigation of the banging blind, I ran into Rollins stealing surreptitiously to the May Girl's door. Quite unconsciously, doubtless, but with most rapacious effect, his sparse hair was rumpled in innumerable directions, and the stealthy boy-pirate hunch to his shoulders added the last touch of melodrama to the scene. Rollins, as a gay Lothario, was certainly a new idea. I could have screamed with joy. But while I debated the ethics of screaming for joy only, the May Girl herself, as though in reply to his crafty knock, opened her door and stared frankly down at him with a funny, flushed sort of astonishment. She was in her great boyish blanket- wrapper, with her gauzy gold hair wafting like a bright breeze across her neck and shoulders, and the radiance of her I think would have startled any man. But it knocked the breath out of Rollins.
"P-p-pleasant!" gasped Rollins, quite abruptly. "It was a—a Miracle!"
"—Miracle?" puzzled the May Girl.
"Wall-papers!" babbled Rollins. "Suppose it had been true?" he besought her. "To-day, I mean? Our betrothal?" With total unexpectedness he began to flutter a handfull of wall-paper samples under the May Girl's astonished nose. "I've got a little flat you know in town," babbled Rollins. "Just one room and bath. It's pretty dingy. But for a long time now I've been planning to have it all repapered. And if you'd choose the wallpaper for it—it would be pleasant to think of during—during the years!" babbled Rollins.
"What?" puzzled the May Girl. Then quite suddenly she reached out and took the papers from Rollins's hand and bent her lovely head over them in perfectly solemn contemplation. "Why—why the pretty gray one with the white gulls and the flash of blue!" she decided almost at once, looked up for an instant, smiled straight into Rollins's fatuous eyes, and was gone again behind the impregnable fastness of her closed door, leaving Rollins gasping like a fool, his shoulders drooping, his limp hands clutching the sheet of white gulls with all the absurd manner of an amateur prima donna just on the verge of bursting into song!
And all of a sudden starting to laugh I found myself crying instead. It was the expression in Rollins's eyes, I think. The one "off-guard" expression perhaps of Rollins's life! A scorching flame of self-revelation, as it were, that consumed even as it illuminated, leaving only gray ashes and perplexity. Not just the look it was of a Little-Man-Almost- Old-who-had-Never-Had-a-Chance-to-Play. But the look of a Little-Man-Almost-Old who sensed suddenly for the first time that he never would have a chance to play! That Fate denying him the glint of wealth, the flash of romance, the scar even of tragedy, had stamped him merely with the indelible sign of a Person-Who wasn't—Meant to-be-Liked!
Truly I was very glad to steal back into my dark room for a moment before trotting downstairs again to join all those others who were essentially intended for liking and loving, so eminently fitted, whether they refused or accepted it, for the full moral gamut of human experience.
On my way down it was only human, of course, to stop in the May Girl's room. Rollins or no Rollins it was the May Girl's problem that seemed to me the only really maddening one of the moment. What in creation was life planning to proffer the May Girl?—Dr. Brawne?—Dr. Brawne?—It wasn't just a question of Dr. Brawne! But a question of the May Girl herself?
She was still in her blanket-wrapper when I entered the room, but had hopped into bed, and sat bolt-up-right rocking vaguely, with her knees gathered to her chin in the circle of her slender arms.
"What seems to be the matter?" I questioned.
"That's what I don't know," she dimpled almost instantly. "But I seem to be worrying about something.
"Worrying?" I puzzled.
"Well,—maybe it's about the Pom dog," suggested the May Girl helpfully. "His mouth is so very—very tiny. Do you think he had enough supper?"
"Oh, I'm sure he had enough supper," I hastened to reassure her.
Very reflectively she narrowed her eyes to review the further field of her possible worries.
"That cat—that your Husband said he sent away just before I came for fear I'd bring some—some contradictory animals—are you quite sure that he's got a good home?" she worried.
"Oh, the best in the world," I said. "A Maternity Hospital!"
"Kittens?" brightened the May Girl for a single instant only. "Oh, you really mean kittens? Then surely there's nothing to worry about in that direction!"
"Nothing but—kittens," I conceded.
"Then it must be Allan John," said the May Girl. "His feet! Of course, I can't exactly help feeling pretty responsible for Allan John. Are you sure—are you quite sure, I mean, that he hasn't been sitting round with wet feet all the evening? He isn't exactly the croupy type, of course, but—" With a sudden irrelevant gesture she unclasped her knees, and shot her feet straight out in front of her. "Whatever in the world," she cried out, "am I going to do with Allan John when it comes time to go home! Now gold-fish," she reflected, "in a real emergency,—can always be tucked away in the bath-tub. And once when I brought home a Japanese baby," she giggled in spite of herself, "they made me keep it in my own room. But——"
"But I've got a worry of my own," I interrupted. "It's about your fainting. It scared me dreadfully. I've just been telephoning to Dr. Brawne about it."
Across the May Girl's supple body a curious tightness settled suddenly.
"You—told—Dr. Brawne that—I fainted?" she said. "You—you oughtn't to have done that!" It was only too evident that she was displeased.
"But we were worried," I repeated. "We had to tell him. We didn't like to take the responsibility."
With her childish hands spread flatly as a brace on either side of her she seemed to retreat for a moment into the gold veil of her hair. Then very resolutely her face came peering out again.
"And just what did Dr. Brawne—tell you?" asked the May Girl.
"Why something very romantic," I admitted. "The somewhat astonishing news, in fact, that you were engaged—to him."
"Oh, but you know, I'm not!" protested the May Girl with unmistakable emphasis. "No—No!"
"And that he was hoping to be married next September. On the 15th to be perfectly exact," I confided.
"Well, very likely I shall marry him," admitted the May Girl somewhat bafflingly. "But I'm not engaged to him now! Oh, I'm much too young to be engaged to him now! Why, even my grandmother thinks I'm much too young to be engaged to him now!—Why, he's most fifty years old!" she affirmed with widely dilating eyes. "—And I—I've scarcely been off my grandmother's place, you know, until this last winter! But if I'm grown-up enough by September, they say—you see I'll be eighteen and a half by September," she explained painstakingly, "so that's why I wanted to get engaged as much as I could this week!" she interrupted herself with quite merciless irrelevance. "If I've got to be married in September—without ever having been engaged or courted at all—I just thought I'd better go to work and pick up what experience I could—on my own hook!"
"Dr.—Dr. Brawne will, of course, make you a very distinguished husband," I stammered, "but are you sure you love him?"
"I love everybody!" dimpled the May Girl.
"Yes, dogs, of course," I conceded, "and Rabbits—and horses and——"
"And kittens," supplemented the May Girl.
"Your mother is—not living?" I asked rather abruptly.
"My father is dead," said the May Girl. "But my mother is in Egypt." Her lovely face was suddenly all excitement. "My mother ran away!"
"Oh! An elopement, you mean?" I laughed. "Ran away with your father. Youngsters used to do romantic things like that."
"Ran away from my father," said the May Girl. "And from me. It was when I was four years old. None of us have ever seen her since. It was with one of Dr. Brawne's friends that she ran away. That's one reason, I think, why Dr. Brawne has always felt so sort of responsible for me."
"Oh, dear—oh, dear, this is very sad," I winced.
"N-o," said the May Girl perfectly simply. "Maybe it was bad but I'm almost sure it's never been sad. Dr. Brawne hears from her sometimes. Mother's always been very happy, I think. But everybody somehow seems to be in an awful hurry to get me settled."
"Why?" I asked quite starkly, and could have bitten my tongue out for my impertinence.
"Why—because I'm so tall, I suppose," said the May Girl. "And not so very specially bright. Oh, not nearly as bright as I am tall!" she hastened to assure me with her pretty nose all crinkled up for the sheer emphasis of her regret. "Life's rather hard, you know, on tall women," she confided sagely. "Always trying to take a tuck in them somewhere! Mother was tall," she observed; "and Father, they say, was always and forever trying to make her look smaller—especially in public! Pulling her opinions out from under her! Belittling all her great, lovely fancies and ideas! Not that he really meant to be hateful, I suppose. But he just couldn't help it. It was just the natural male-instinct I guess of wanting to be the everythinger—himself!"
"What do you know of the natural male 'instinct'?" I laughed out in spite of myself.
"Oh—lots," smiled the May Girl. "I have an uncle. And my grandmother always keeps two hired men. And for almost six months now I've been at the Art School. And there are twenty- seven boys at the Art School. Why there's Jerry and Paul and Richard and—and——"
"Yes, but your father and mother?" I pondered. "Just how——?"
"Oh, it was when they were walking downtown one day past a great big mirror," explained the May Girl brightly. "And Mother saw that she was getting round-shouldered trying to keep down to Father's level—it was then that she ran away! It was then that she began to run away I mean! To run away in her mind! I heard grandmother and Dr. Brawne talking about it only last summer. But I?" she affirmed with some pride, "oh, I've known about being tall ever since I first had starch enough in my knees to stand up! While I stayed in my crib I don't suppose I noticed it specially. But just as soon as I was big enough to go to school. Why, even at the very first," she glowed, "when every other child in the room had failed without the slightest reproach some perfectly idiotic visitor would always pipe up and say, 'Now ask that tall child there! The one with the yellow hair!' And everyone would be as vexed as possible because I failed, too! It isn't my head, you know that's tall," protested the May Girl with some feeling, "it's just my neck and legs!
"You certainly are entrancingly graceful," I smiled. How anybody as inexpressibly lovely as the May Girl could be so oblivious of the fact was astonishing!
But neither smile nor compliment seemed to allay to the slightest degree the turmoil that was surging in the youngster's mind.
"Why, even at the Art School," she protested, "it's just as bad! Especially with the boys! Being so tall—and with yellow hair besides—you just can't possibly be as important as you are conspicuous! And yet every individual boy seems obliged to find out for himself just exactly how important you are! But no matter what he finds," she shrugged with a gesture of ultimate despair, "it always ends by everybody getting mad!"
"Mad?" I questioned.
"Yes—very mad," said the May Girl. "Either he's mad because he finds you're not nearly as nice as you are conspicuous, or else, liking you most to death, he simply can't stand it that anyone as nice as he thinks you are is able to outplay him at tennis or—that's why I like animals best—and hurt things!" she interrupted herself with characteristic impetuosity. "Animals and hurt things don't care how rangy your arms are as long as they're loving! Why if you were as tall as a tree," she argued, "little deserted birds in nests would simply be glad that you could reach them that much sooner! But men? Why, even your nice Mr. Keets," she cried; "even your nice Mr. Keets, with his fussy old Archaeology, couldn't even play at being engaged without talking down—down—down at me! Tall as he is, too! And funny little old Mr. Rollins," she flushed. "Little—little—old Mr. Rollins—Mr. Rollins really liked me, I think, but he—he'd torture me if he thought it would make him feel any burlier!
"And Claude Kennilworth," I questioned.
The shiver across the May Girl's shoulders looked suddenly more like a thrill than a distaste.
"Oh, Claude Kennilworth," she acknowledged quite ingenuously. "He's begun already to try to 'put me in my place'! Altogether too independent is what he thinks I am. But what he really means is 'altogether too tall'!" Once again the little shiver flashed across her shoulders. "He's so—so awfully temperamental!" she quickened. "Goodness knows what fireworks he'll introduce tomorrow! I can hardly wait!"
"Is—is Dr. Brawne—tall?" I asked a bit abruptly.
"N—o," admitted the May Girl. "He's quite short! But—his years are so tall!" she cried out triumphantly. "He's so tall in his attainments! I've thought it all out—oh very—very carefully," she attested. "And if I've got to be married in order to have someone to look out for me I'm almost perfectly positive that Dr. Brawne will be quite too amused at having so young a wife to bully me very much about anything that goes with the youngness!"
"Oh—h," I said.
"Yes,—exactly," mused the May Girl.
With a heart and an apprehension just about as gray and as heavy as lead I rose and started for the door.
"But, May Girl?" I besought her in a single almost hysterical desire to rouse her from her innocence and her ignorance. "Among all this great array of men and boys that you know— the uncle—yes, even the hired men," I laughed, "and all those blue-smocked boys at the Art School—whom do you really like the best?"
So far her eyes journeyed off into the distance and back again I thought that she had not heard me. Then quite abruptly she answered me. And her voice was all boy-chorister again.
"The best?—why, Allan John!" she said.
Taken all in all there were several things said and done that evening that would have kept any normal hostess awake, I think.
The third morning dawned even rainier than the second! Infinitely rainier than the first! It gave everybody's coming-down-stairs expression a curiously comical twist as though Dame Nature herself had been caught off-guard somehow in a moment of dishabille that though inexpressibly funny, couldn't exactly be referred to—not among mere casual acquaintances—not so early in the morning, anyway!
Yet even though everybody rushed at once to the fireplace instead of to the breakfast-table nobody held us responsible for the weather. Everyone in fact seemed to make rather an extra effort to assure us that he or she—as the case might be, most distinctly did not hold us responsible.
Paul Brenswick indeed grew almost eloquent telling us about an accident to the weather which he himself had witnessed in a climate as supposedly well-regulated as the climate of South Eastern Somewhere was supposed to be! Ann Woltor raked her cheerier memories for the story of a four days' rain- storm which she had experienced once in a very trying visit to her great aunt somebody-or-other on some peculiarly stormbound section of the Welsh coast. George Keet's chivalrous anxiety to set us at our ease was truly heroic. He even improvised a parody about it: "Rain," observed George Keets, "makes strange umbrella-mates!" A leak had developed during the night it seemed in the ceiling directly over his bed—and George, the finicky, the fastidious, the silk- pajamered—had been obliged to crawl out and seek shelter with Rollins and his flannel night-cap in the next room. And Rollins, it appeared, had not proved a particularly genial host.
"By the way, where is Mr. Rollins this morning?" questioned the Bride from her frowning survey of the storm-swept beach.
"Mr. Rollins," confided my Husband, "has a slight headache this morning."
"Why, that's too bad," sympathized Ann Woltor.
"No, it isn't a bad one at all," contradicted my Husband. "Just the very mildest one possible—under the circumstances. It was really very late when he got in again last night. And very wet." From under his casually lowered eyes a single glance of greeting shot out at me.
"Now, there you are again!" cried George Keets. "Flirting! You married people! Something that anyone else would turn out as mere information,—'The Ice Man has just left two chunks of ice!' or 'Mr. Rollins has a headache'!—you go and load up with some mysterious and unfathomable significance! Glances pass! Your wife flushes!" "Mysterious?" shrugged my Husband. "Unfathomable? Why it's clear as crystal. The madam says, 'Let there be a headache'—and there is a headache!"
As Allan John joined the group at the fireplace everybody began talking weather again. From the chuckle of the birch- logs to the splash on the window-pane the little groups shifted and changed. Everybody seemed to be waiting for something. On the neglected breakfast table even the gay upstanding hemispheres of grapefruit rolled over on their beds of ice to take another nap.
In a great flutter of white and laughter the May Girl herself came prancing over the threshold. It wasn't just the fact of being in white that made her look so astonishingly festal; she was almost always in white. Not yet the fact of laughter. Taken all in all I think she was the most radiantly laughing youngster that I have ever known. But most astonishingly festal she certainly looked, nevertheless. Maybe it was the specially new and chic little twist which she had given her hair. Maybe it was the absurdly coquettish dab of black court-plaster which she had affixed to one dimply cheek.
"Oh, if I'm going to be engaged to-day to a real artist," she laughed, "I've certainly got to take some extra pains with my personal appearance. Why, I've hardly slept all night," she confided ingenuously, "I was so excited!"
"Yes, won't it be interesting," whispered the Bride to George Keets, "to see what Mr. Kennilworth will really do? He's so awfully temperamental! And so—so inexcusably beautiful. Whatever he does is pretty sure to be interesting. Now up- stairs—all day yesterday—wouldn't it——?"
"Yes, wouldn't it be interesting," glowed Ann Woltor quite unexpectedly, "if he'd made her something really wonderful? Something that would last, I mean, after the game was over? Even just a toy, something that would outlast Time itself. Something that even when she was old she could point to and say, 'Claude Kennilworth made that for me when—we were young'."
"Why, Ann Woltor!" I stammered. "Do you feel that way about him? Does—does he make you feel that way, too!"
"I think—he would make—anyone feel that way—too," intercepted Allan John quite amazingly. In three days surely it was the only voluntary statement he had made, and everybody turned suddenly to stare at him. But it was only too evident from the persistent haggardness of his expression that he had no slightest intention in the world of pursuing his unexpected volubility.
"And it isn't just his good looks either!" resumed the Bride as soon as she had recovered from her own astonishment at the interpolation.
"Oh, something, very different," mused Ann Woltor. "The queer little sense he gives you of—of wires humming! Whether you like him or not that queer little sense of 'wires humming' that all really creative people give you! As though—as though—they were being rather specially re-charged all the time from the Main Battery!"
"The 'Main Battery,'" puzzled the Bridegroom, "being——?"
"Why God,—of course!" said the Bride with a vague sort of surprise.
"When women talk mechanics and religion in the same breath," laughed the Bridegroom, "it certainly——"
"I was talking neither mechanics nor religion," affirmed the Bride, with the faintest possible tinge of asperity.
"Oh, of course, anyone can see," admitted the Bridegroom, "that Kennilworth is a clever chap."
"Clever as the deuce!" acquiesced George Keets.
With an impatient tap of her foot the May Girl turned suddenly back from the window.
"Yes! But where is he?" she laughed.
"That's what I say!" cried my Husband. "We've waited quite long enough for him!"
"Dallying up-stairs probably to put a dab of black court- plaster on his cheek!" observed George Keets drily.
With one accord everybody but the May Girl rushed impulsively to the breakfast table.
"Seems as though—somebody ought to wait," dimpled the May Girl.
"Oh, nonsense!" asserted everybody.
A little bit reluctantly she came at last to her place. Her face was faintly troubled.
"On—on an engagement morning," she persisted, "it certainly seems as though—somebody ought to wait."
In the hallway just outside a light step sounded suddenly. It was really astonishing with what an air of real excitement and expectancy everybody glanced up.
But the step in the hall proved only the step of a maid.
"The young gentleman upstairs sent a message," said the maid. "Most particular he was that I give it exact. 'It being so rainy again,' he says, 'and there not being anything specially interesting on the—the docket as far as he knows, he'll stay in bed—thank you.'"
For an instant it seemed as though everybody at the table except Allan John jerked back from his plate with a knife, fork or spoon, brandished half-way in mid air. There was no jerk left in Allan John, I imagine. It was Allan John's color that changed. A dull flush of red where once just gray shadows had lain.
"So he'll stay in bed, thank you," repeated the maid sing- songishly.
"What?" gasped my Husband.
"W-w-what?" stammered the May Girl.
"Well—of all the—nerve!" muttered Paul Brenswick.
"Why—why how extraordinary," murmured Ann Woltor.
"There's your 'artistic temperament' for you, all right!" laughed the Bride a bit hectically. "Peeved is it because he thought Miss Davies——?"
"Don't you think you're just a bit behind the times in your interpretation of the phrase 'artistic temperament'?" interrupted George Keets abruptly. "Except in special neurasthenic cases it is no longer the fashion I believe to lay bad manners to the artistic temperament itself but rather to the humble environment from which most artistic temperaments are supposed to have sprung."
"Eh? What's that?" laughed the Bride.
Very deliberately George Keets lit a fresh cigarette. "No one person, you know, can have everything," he observed with the thinnest of all his thin-lipped smiles. "Three generations of plowing, isn't it, to raise one artist? Oh, Mr. Kennilworth's social eccentricities, I assure you, are due infinitely more to the soil than to the soul."
"Oh, can your statistics!" implored my Husband a bit sharply, "and pass Miss Davies the sugar!"
"And some coffee!" proffered Paul Brenswick.
"And this heavenly cereal!" urged the Bride.
"Oh, now I remember," winced the May Girl suddenly. "He said 'she'll wait all right'—but, of course, it does seem just a little—wee bit—f-funny! Even if you don't care a—a rap," she struggled heroically through a glint of tears. "Even if you don't care a rap—sometimes it's just a little bit hard to say a word like f-funny!"
"Damned hard," agreed my Husband and Paul Brenswick and George Keets all in a single breath.
The subsequent conversation fortunately was not limited altogether to expletives. Never, I'm sure, have I entertained a more vivacious not to say hilarious company at breakfast. Nobody seemed contented just to keep dimples in the May Girl's face. Everybody insisted upon giggles. The men indeed treated them selves to what is usually described as "wild guffaws."
Personally I think it was a mistake. It brought Rollins down- stairs just as everybody was leaving the table in what had up to that moment been considered perfectly reestablished and invulnerable glee. Everybody, of course, except poor Allan John. No one naturally would expect any kind of glee from Allan John.
In the soft pussy-footed flop of his felt slippers none of us heard Rollins coming. But I—I saw him! And such a Rollins! Stripped of the single significant facial expression of his life which I had surprised so unexpectedly in his eyes the night before, Rollins would certainly never be anything but just Rollins! Heavily swathed in his old plaid ulster with a wet towel bound around his brow he loomed cautiously on the scene bearing an empty coffee cup, and from the faintly shadowing delicacy of the parted portieres affirmed with one breath how astonished he was to find us still at breakfast, while with the next he confided equally fatuously, "I thought I heard merry voices!"
It was on Claude Kennilworth's absence, of course, that his maddening little mind fixed itself instantly with unalterable concentration.
"What ho! The—engagement?" he demanded abruptly.
"There isn't any engagement," said my Husband with a somewhat vicious stab at the fire.
From his snug, speculative scrutiny of the storm outside, George Keets swung round with what quite evidently was intended to be a warning frown.
"Mr. Kennilworth has—defaulted," he murmured.
"Defaulted!" grinned Rollins. Then with perfectly unprecedented perspicacity his roving glance snatched up suddenly the unmistakable tremor of the May Girl's chin. "Oh, what nonsense!" he said. "There are plenty of other eligible men in the party!"
"Oh, but you see—there are not!" laughed Paul Brenswick. "Mr. Delville and I are Married—and our wives won't let us."
"Oh, nonsense!" grinned Rollins. Once again his roving glance swept the company.
Everybody saw what was coming, turned hot, turned cold, shut his eyes, opened them again, but was powerless to avert.
"Why, what's the matter with trying Allan John?" grinned Rollins.
The thing was inexcusable! Brutal! Blundering! Absolutely doltish beyond even Rollins's established methods of doltishness. But at last when everybody turned inadvertently to scan poor Allan John's face—there was no Allan John to be scanned. Somewhere through a door or a window—somehow between one blink of the eye and another—Allan John had slipped from the room.
"Why—why, Mr. Rollins!" gasped everybody all at once. "Whatever in the world were you thinking of?"
"Maybe—maybe—he didn't hear it—after all!" rallied the Bride with the first real ray of hope.
"Maybe he just saw it coming," suggested the Bridegroom.
"And dodged in the nick of time," said George Keets.
"To save not only himself but ourselves," frowned my Husband, "from an almost irretrievable awkwardness.
"Why just the minute before it happened," deprecated Ann Woltor, "I was thinking suddenly how much better he looked, how his color had improved,—why his cheeks looked almost red."
"Yes, the top of his cheeks," said the May Girl, "were really quite red." Her own cheeks at the moment were distinctly pale. "Where do you suppose he's gone to?" she questioned. "Don't you think that—p'raps—somebody ought to go and find him?"
"Oh, for heaven's sake leave him alone!" cried Paul Brenswick.
"Leave him alone," acquiesced all the other men.
In the moment's nervous reaction and letdown that ensued it was really a relief to hear George Keets cry out, with such poignant amazement from his stand at the window:
"Why what in the world is that red-roof out on the rocks?" he cried.
In the same impulse both my Husband and myself ran quickly to his side.
"Oh, that's all right!" laughed my Husband. "I thought maybe it had blown off or something. Why, that's just the 'Bungalow on the Rocks,'" he explained.
"My Husband's study and work-room," I exemplified. "'Forbidden-Ground' is its real name! Nobody is ever allowed to go there without an invitation from—himself!"
"Why—but it wasn't there yesterday!" asserted George Keets.
"Oh, yes, it was!" laughed my Husband.
"It was not!" said George Keets.
The sheer unexpected primitiveness of the contradiction delighted us so that neither of us took the slightest offense.
"Oh, I beg your pardon, of course," George Keets recovered himself almost in an instant—"that right here before our eyes—that same vivid scarlet roof was looming there yesterday against the gray rocks and sea—and none of us saw it?"
"Saw what?" called Paul Brenswick. "Where?" And came striding to the window.
"Gad!" said Paul Brenswick. "Victoria! Come here, quick!" he called.
With frank curiosity the Bride joined the group. "Why of all things!" she laughed. "Why it never in the world was there yesterday!"
A trifle self-consciously Ann Woltor joined the group. "Bungalow?" she questioned. "A Bungalow out on the rocks." Her face did certainly look just a little bit queer. Anyone who wanted to, was perfectly free of course, to interpret the look as one of incredulity.
"No, of course not! Miss Woltor agrees with me perfectly," triumphed George Keets. "It was not there yesterday!"
"Oh, but it must have been!" dimpled the May Girl. "If Mr. and Mrs. Delville say so! It's their bungalow!"
"It—was—not there—yesterday," puzzled George Keets. More than having his honor at stake he spoke suddenly as though he thought it was his reason that was being threatened.
With her cheeks quite rosy again the May Girl began to clap her hands. Her eyes were sparkling with excitement.
"Oh, I don't care whether it was there yesterday or not!" she triumphed. "It's there to-day! Let's go and explore it! And if it's magic, so much the better! Oh, loo—loo—look!" she cried as a great roar and surge of billows broke on the rocks all around the little red roof and churned the whole sky-line into a chaos of foam. "Oh, come—come!" she besought everybody.
"Oh, but, my dear!" I explained, "How would you get there? No row-boat could live in that sea! And by way of the rocky ledge there's no possible path except at the lowest tide! And besides," I reminded her, "it's named 'Forbidden Ground', you know! No body is supposed to go there without——"
With all the impulsiveness of an irresponsible baby the May Girl dashed across the room and threw her arms round my neck.
"Why, you old dear," she laughed, "don't you know that that's just the reason why I want to explore it! I want to know why it's 'Forbidden Ground'! Oh, surely—surely," she coaxed, "even if it is a work-room, there couldn't be any real sin in just prying a little?"
"No, of course, no real sin," I laughed back at her earnestness. "Just an indiscretion!"
Quite abruptly the May Girl relaxed her hug, and narrowed her lovely eyes dreamily to some personal introspection.
"I've—never yet—committed a real indiscretion," she confided with apparent regret.
"Well, pray don't begin," laughed George Keets in spite of himself, "by trying to explore something that isn't there."
"And don't you and Keets," flared Paul Brenswick quite unexpectedly, "by denying the existence of something that is there!"
"Well, if it is there to-day," argued George Keets, "it certainly wasn't there yesterday!"
"Well, if it wasn't there yesterday, it is at least there to- day!" argued Paul Brenswick.
"Rollins! Hi there—Rollins!" they both called as though in a single breath.
From his humble seat on the top stair to which he had wisely retreated at his first inkling of having so grossly outraged public opinion, Rollins's reply came wafting some what hopefully back.
"H—h—iii," rallied Rollins.
"That red roof on the rocks—" shouted Paul Brenswick.
"Was it there—yesterday?" demanded George Keets.
"Wait!" cackled Rollins. "Wait till I go look!" A felt footstep thudded. A window opened. The felt footstep thudded again. "No," called Rollins. "Now that I come to think of it— I don't remember having noticed a red roof there yesterday."
"Now!" laughed George Keets.
"But, oh, I say!" gasped Rollins, in what seemed to be very sudden and altogether indisputable confusion. "Why—why it must have been there! Because that's the shack where we've catalogued the shells every year—for the last seven years!"
"Now!" laughed Paul Brenswick.
Without another word everybody made a bolt for the hat-rack and the big oak settle, snatched up his or her oil-skin clothes—anybody's oil-skin clothes—and dashed off through the rain to the edge of the cliff to investigate the phenomenon at closer range.
Truly the thing was almost too easy to be really righteous! Just a huge rock-colored tarpaulin stripped at will from a red-tiled roof and behold, mystery looms on an otherwise drab-colored day! And a mystery at a houseparty? Well— whoever may stand proven as the mother of invention— Curiosity, you know just as well as I do, is the father of a great many very sprightly little adventures!
Within ten minutes from the proscenium box of our big bay- window, my Husband and I could easily discern the absurd little plot and counterplots that were already being hatched.
It was the Bride and George Keets who seemed to be thinking, pointing, gesticulating, in the only perfect harmony. Even at this distance, and swathed as they were in hastily adjusted oil-skins, a curiously academic sort of dignity stamped their every movement. Nothing but sheer intellectual determination to prove that their minds were normal would ever tempt either one of them to violate a Host's "No Trespass" sign!
Nothing academic about Paul Brenswick's figure! With one yellow elbow crooked to shield the rain from his eyes he stood estimating so many probable feet of this, so many probable feet of that. He was an engineer! Perspectives were his playthings! And if there was any new trick about perspectives that he didn't know—he was going to solve it now no matter what it cost either him or anybody else!
More like a young colt than anything else, like a young colt running for its pasture-bars, the May Girl dashed vainly up and down the edge of the cliff. Nothing academic, nothing of an engineer—about any young colt! If the May Girl reached "the Bungalow on the Rocks" it would be just because she wanted to!
Ann Woltor's reaction was the only one that really puzzled me. Drawn back a little from the others, sheltered transiently from the wind by a great jagged spur of gray rock but with her sombre face turned almost eagerly to the rain, she stood there watching with a perfectly inexplainable interest the long white blossomy curve of foam and spray which marked the darkly submerged ledge of rock that connected the red-tiled bungalow with the beach just below her. Ann Woltor certainly was no prankish child. Neither was it to be supposed that any particular problem of perspective had flecked her mind into the slightest uneasiness. Ann Woltor knew that the bungalow was there! Had spent at least nine hours in it on the previous day! Lunched in it! Supped in it! Proved its inherent prosiness! Yet even I was puzzled as she crept out from the shelter of her big boulder to the very edge of the cliff, and leaned away out still staring, always at that wave-tormented ledge.
From the hyacinth-scented shadows just behind me I heard a sudden little laugh.
"I'll wager you a new mink muff," said my Husband quite abruptly, "that Ann Woltor gets there first!"