CHAPTER VI
THE HERO TALKS WITH A LADY IN THE DARK
Varney called reassuringly into the gloom: "I sincerely beg your pardon for bursting in like that. I—had no idea there was any one here."
There was a second's pause.
"N—no," said the pretty voice, hesitatingly. "You—you couldn't—of course."
"But please tell me at once," he said, puzzled by this—"have I taken the unforgivable liberty of breaking into your house?"
"My house?" And he caught something like bewildered relief in her voice.
"Why—I—was thinking that I had broken into yours."
Varney laughed, his back against the door.
"If it were, I'm sure I should be able to offer you a light at the least. If it were yours, now that I stop to think—well, perhaps it would be a little eccentric for you to be sitting there in your parlor in the inky dark."
To this there came no reply.
"I suppose you, like me," he continued courteously, "are an unlucky wayfarer who had to choose hastily between trespassing and being drowned."
"Yes."
Inevitably he found himself wondering what this lady who shared his stolen refuge could be like. That she was a lady her voice left no doubt. His eye strained off into the Ethiopian blackness, but could make neither heads nor tails of it.
"Voices always go by contraries," he thought. "She's fifty-two and wears glasses."
Aloud he said: "But please tell me quite frankly—am I intruding?"
"Not at all," said the lady, only that and nothing more.
"Perhaps then you won't object if I find a seat? Leaning against a door is so dull, don't you think?"
He groped forward, hands outstretched before him, stumbled against the stairway which he sought, and sat down uncomfortably on the next-to-the-bottom step. Then suddenly the oddness of his situation rushed over him, and, vexed though he was with the chain of needless circumstances which had brought him into it, he with difficulty repressed a laugh.
An hour ago he had been lounging at peace upon the yacht, looking forward to nothing more titillating than bed at the earliest respectable hour. Now he was sitting with a strange lady of uncertain age in an unlighted cottage on a lonely country road, while a howling thunderstorm raved outside imprisoning him for nobody could say how long. In the interval between these two extremes, he had discovered that he was a "double," been threatened with violence, hopelessly lost Peter, and found Mary Carstairs. Surely and in truth, a pretty active hour's work!
On the tin roof of the cottage the rain beat a wild tattoo. Within, the silence lengthened. Under the circumstances, Varney considered reserve on the lady's part not unnatural; but a little talk, as he viewed the matter, would tend to help the dreary evening through.
He cleared his throat for due notice and began with a laugh.
"I was industriously chasing two men from town when the storm caught me. You know what I mean—not drumming them out of the city, but merely pursuing them in this general direction. I wonder if by any chance you happened to pass them on the road?"
"N-no, I believe not."
"A very small man, very well-dressed, and a very large man, very badly dressed, wearing a kind of curious, rococo straw hat. I know," he mused, "that you could not have forgotten that hat. Once seen—"
"Oh!" she exclaimed with sudden evidences of interest—"do tell me—is the smaller man you mention Mr. Hare?"
"He is indeed," he answered surprised. "You know him? Oh, yes,—certainly! In Hunston—"
"Know him!" said she in tones of hardly suppressed indignation. "It is he who is responsible for my being caught in this—this annoying predicament."
At something in the way the lady said that, Varney unconsciously chipped twenty years off her age and conceded that she might be no more than thirty-two.
"I'm sorry to hear that," he said with a laugh. "I should say that Mr.
Hare has already had quite enough troubles for one night."
"Oh—then you have seen him this evening?"
"I had the pleasure of meeting him on the square not half an hour ago."
Each waited for the other to say more; and it was the lady who yielded. She went on hesitatingly, yet somehow as if she were not unwilling to justify herself to this stranger in the curious position in which she found herself.
"It—is very strange—and unlike him," she said doubtfully. "He was to call for me—at quarter past seven—and take me home. I was at the seamstress's, perhaps quarter of a mile up the road. I waited and waited—and then—Oh—what was that, do you know?"
"Only this old floor cracking. Don't flatter it by noticing. How odd to find, meeting in this way, that we are both searching for the same man. Isn't it?"
"It—seems to me even odder to find that he is not searching for me."
She was sitting, so he judged from the sound, about fifteen feet away. There was coldness in her voice as she spoke of the candidate. Varney felt sorry for that young man when he next held converse with her. From her voice he had also gathered that the dark rather frightened her, and that the presence of an unknown man had not allayed her uneasiness; though something of her reserve had vanished, he thought, when she found that the intruder knew Mr. Hare.
"Oh, but he was—is!" he cried encouragingly.
"I'm positive that he's searching for you at this minute. Why, of course—certainly! That would explain the whole thing."
Sitting damply on the dark stairway, he told of J. Pinkney Hare's evidently impromptu experiences in the public square, which had undoubtedly knocked from his mind all memory of his engagement at the seamstress's; and of the sudden recollection of it, which, there could be no question, was what had sent him and his new friend bursting out of the house and tearing for dear life up the road.
"I'll bet," said he, "that not a minute after you turned into shelter, they raced by here after you. Now they're kicking their heels at the sewing-lady's, probably soaked through, and wild to know if you got home safely. Oh, he's being punished for his sins, never fear."
"I—am sorry for your friend," her voice replied. "And I believe that I forgive Mr. Hare—now that I know what detained him. I think I must have heard them go by—just after I got in. Once I was sure I heard voices, but, of course, I was expecting Mr. Hare to be alone."
"Ha!" thought Varney. "A Hunston romance!"
"You don't know Maginnis," he answered gloomily. "Nobody in the world ever stays alone long when Maginnis can possibly get to him."
He heard something that he thought might be a faint laugh. And immediately ten years more came off the lady's age, and she stood at twenty-two. The young man began to consider with less distaste his obvious duty of escorting her home.
In the momentary silence, wood somewhere near them once more creaked loudly and scarily.
"Oh!" came her voice out of the blackness. "Would you mind striking a match and seeing if there isn't a lamp or something we could light?"
"But I haven't a match—that's just it! If I had—! Why I assure you I've been wishing for nothing so much as a light ever since you—ever since I came in."
"If I were a man—" she began, vexedly, but suddenly checked herself.
"Are you quite sure you haven't a single one?"
"I'll gladly look again in all my twenty-seven pockets. I've been doing it ever since I arrived, and I've gotten rather to like it. But I'm awfully afraid it's a wild goose chase."
Crack! Crack! went the mysteriously stirring woodwork, for all the world like a living thing; and the lady again said "Oh!" And after that she said: "You are not—in this room, are you?"
"I'm sitting quietly on the steps digging around for matches," he said.
"Would you prefer to have me come in there?"
"Would you mind—? Not that I'm in the least frightened, but—"
"It will give me great pleasure to come—faithfully searching my pockets as I grope forward. Thus," he said, laughing, "I must grope only with my head and feet, which is a slightly dangerous thing to do. Ouch! Where are you, please?"
"Here."
"'Here' is not very definite, you know. I have nothing to steer by but my ear. Would you mind talking a good deal for a while?"
"It is not often," she said, with further signs of a thawing in her manner, "that a woman gets an invitation like that."
"Opportunity knocks at your door, golden, novel, and unique."
"The luck of it is that I can't think of anything to say. Would you care to have me hum something?"
Off came the lady's glasses, never to be donned again in fancy or in life; and Varney was ready to admit that there might be ladies in Hunston who were worse-looking than she by far. In the Stygian blackness he collided with a chair and paused, leaning upon the back of it.
"I'd like extremely to have you hum. From your voice, I—I'm sure that you do it div—awfully well. But since you seem to leave it to me, I'd honestly rather have you do something else."
"Yes?"
Larry laughed. "It's a game. A—an evening pastime—a sort of novel guessing contest. Played by strangers in the dark. You see—I must tell you that ever since you first spoke, my mind has been giving me little thumbnail sketches—each one different from the last—of what you look like."
She said nothing to this; so he laughed again.
"Oh, it's not mere curiosity, you know. It's purely a scientific matter with me. The science of deduction. The voice, you know, tells little or nothing. I may say that I have made something of a study of voices, and have discovered that they always go by contraries. For this reason," he laughed gayly, "when you first spoke, I—but perhaps I am simply tiring you?"
There was a small pause, and then the lady spoke, with apparent reluctance:
"I am not tired."
Varney smiled into the great darkness. "Well, when I first heard your voice—ha, ha!—I made up my mind that you could not possibly be less than fifty-two."
He was rewarded with a faint laugh: this time there could be no doubt of it.
"You remember that mythological tunnel where everybody went in old and came out young. This conversation has been like that. Since we have talked," said Varney, "I have knocked thirty years off your age. But much remains to be told—and that is the game. Are you dark?"
"Are you punning?"
"This is no punning matter," he said; and began his third exploration of himself for a match. And above them the water continued to thud upon the roof like a torrent broken out of a dam.
"This is too bad!" breathed the lady impatiently, and plainly she was not speaking to Varney. "I believe it's coming down harder and harder every minute!"
"Yes," he answered cheerfully, "the good old rain is at it in earnest. We're probably fixed for hours and hours. I might argue, you know," he added, "that I have a right to know these things. The box of matches I just gave away like a madman would have told me, and no questions asked. Matches and lamps you have none, but such as you have—"
"Could you not talk of something else, please?"
Varney laughed. "Certainly, if I must. Only I've been rather generous about this, I think, showing you my hand and giving you the chance to laugh at me. You see, for all I know you may be fifty-two, after all. Or even sixty-two—Oh, glory! Hallelujah!"
"What on earth is the matter?"
"Oh, nothing! Nothing at all! Just I have found a match. That's all!"
"A match! Splendid!" she cried, and her voice suddenly seemed to come from a higher point in the darkness, as though she had risen. "Just one! Oh, we—you must be extremely careful with it."
"The trouble is," he said with exaggerated dejection, "it's pretty wet.
I don't know whether it will strike or not."
"You must make it strike. Oh, it will be—unpardonable—if you don't make it strike!"
"Then I'll throw my soul into the work. I'll concentrate my whole will-power upon it. On the back of this chair here—shall I?"
"All right. I'll concentrate too. Are—you ready?"
"Ready it is," said Varney.
Gently he drew the match across the rough wood of the chair-back, his ear all eager expectancy—and nothing happened. Thrice he did this fruitless thing, and something told him that a large section of the sulphur had been rubbed away into eternity.
"It's nip and tuck," he breathed, stifling an impulse to laugh. "Nip and tuck!"
Pressing the match's diminished head firmly against the wood, he drew it downward vigorously and long. There was a faint crackle, a little splutter, and—glory of glories!—a tiny flame faltered out into the darkness.
"Oh—be careful!"
Varney cupped his hand about the little flare, and for a moment ceased to breathe. Then it caught more fully, and it was evident to both that the victory was won.
He had meant to look instantly about for lamp or candle to light; but if all his future happiness had hinged upon it, it seemed to him that he could not have helped one glance at the lady who shared that shelter and that match with him.
She stood a few feet away, regarding him breathlessly, hatted, gloved, all in white, one hand resting lightly on the center-table, one folded about the crook of a dainty draggled parasol. The match threw a small and ghostly light, but he saw her, and she wore no veil.
"Why—why—I—"
"Oh, quick! There's a lamp just behind you."
He caught himself with a start. By incredible luck a lamp was at his very elbow; as it was the match died on the wick. He put back the chimney and shade, turned up the wick, and the room was bathed in golden light.
It was a good-sized room, evidently newly furnished and as neat as a bandbox. The empty book-case on which the lamp rested was of handsome quartered oak, which transiently struck him as curious. But in the next instant he turned away and forgot all about it.
The lady stood where she had risen and was regarding him without a word. The lamplight fell full upon her. He came nearer, and his waning assurance shook him like a pennant in the wind and was suddenly gone. The sense of camaraderie which the dark had given faded; his easy friendliness left him; and he was an embarrassed young man face to face with a girl whose sudden beauty seemed to overwhelm him with the knowledge that he did not so much as know her name.
"None of my thumbnail sketches," he faltered, "made you look like this."
She had rested her wet parasol against the table, where a slow pool gathered at the ferrule, and was pulling on more trimly her long white gloves. Now she looked at him rather quizzically, though her young eyes reflected something of his own unsteadying embarrassment.
"No," she said, "I shall not be sixty-two for—for some time yet. But of course it was a game—a pastime—where I had a—little the advantage. Do you know, I—I am not entirely surprised, after all."
"Oh, aren't you?" he said, completely mystified, but as charmed by her smile as he was by the subtle change in her manner which had come with the lighting of that match.
"And it was nice of you to tell me that polite story at the beginning," she said. "And quick—and clever. When I heard the front door burst open, the first thing I thought of, really, was that it must be you."
"I can't think," he said, unable to take his eyes off her, "what in the world you are talking about."
She laughed with something of an effort, and sat down exquisitely in a cruel cane chair. "Well, then—do you forgive me for taking possession of your house like this? You will, won't you? I can't be silly, now, and pretend not to know you. But really I never dreamed that you—"
"Is it possible," he broke in stormily, "that you are mistaking me for that insufferable Stanhope?"
She looked at him startled, dumfounded; in her eyes amazement mingled with embarrassment; then her brow wrinkled into a slow, doubtful smile.
"Oh-h—I beg your pardon! I—did n't understand. But is it my fault that I've seen your picture a hundred times? Yes, I suppose it is; for, at the risk of making you crosser still, I'll confess that I—I cut it out and framed it."
Varney leaned his elbow on the mantel and faced her.
"You have made a mistake," he said. "I am not Mr. Stanhope."
"You mean," she laughed, very pretty and pink, "that it is no affair of mine that you are."
A kind of desperation seized him. It was evident that she did not believe him, just as Coligny Smith had not believed him, and the plump young woman of the grocery who had used his Christian name. He was almost ready not to believe himself. However, there were cards in his pocket; he got one of them out, and coming nearer, handed it to her.
"My name is Laurence Varney," he said mechanically, for that slogan seemed fated to meet skeptics everywhere. "I am from New York and have happened to come up here on a friend's yacht to—to spend a few days. You have made a mistake."
She took the card, held it lightly in her gloved hand, bowed to him with mocking courtesy.
"I am very glad to meet you—Mr. Laurence Varney! I—I am from New York, too, and have happened to come up here on the New York Central with my mother to spend a few years. And I live in a white house half a mile down the road, where I ought to have been an hour ago. And I am Mary Carstairs, who has read all your books and thinks that they—Oh"—she broke off all at once: for there was no missing the look in his astounded face. "What in the world have I said now?"
"You—can't be—Mary Carstairs!" he cried.
"Is—that so terrible?" she laughed, a little uncertainly.