IV
At seven-twenty-nine Susie eluded the vigilance of the wondering lions and ran up the Burgess steps.
Burgess met her in the hall, where she stepped out of her wrap and stood forth rather taller than he remembered her, by reason of her high-heeled slippers.
Mrs. Burgess, proud of her reputation for meeting emergencies, did not wait for her guest to be presented. Her quick scrutiny discovered nothing alarming in this young person. With a quick eye she appraised the three-year-old gown, correctly placed its vintage and said:
“So nice that you could come.”
Pendleton, who knew a great many girls in different parts of the world, saw nothing disquieting in this Miss Parker. She was merely another girl. Billy Merrill, who was forty, wondered whether there would be champagne or only sauterne besides the cocktail. He had never heard of Pendleton, any more than he had heard of Miss Parker, and he was speculating as to whether he had ever really been in love with Floy Wilkinson, and whether he should venture to propose to her again just after Christmas. Proposing to Floy was a habit with Billy.
At the round table the forks for the caviar had been overlooked, and this gave the dinner a bad start. Mrs. Burgess was annoyed, and to cover her annoyance she related an anecdote, at which the guest of honor only smiled wanly. He did not seem happy. He barely tasted his soup, and when Burgess addressed a question to him directly Pendleton did not hear it until it had been repeated. Things were not going well. Then Billy Merrill asked Pendleton if he was related to some Pendletons he knew in St Louis. Almost every one knew that Brown Pendleton belonged to an old Rhode Island family—and Merrill should have known it. Mrs. Burgess was enraged by the fleeting grin she detected on her husband’s face. Web was always so unsympathetic. Burgess was conversing tranquilly with Susie; he never grasped the idea that his wife gave small dinners to encourage general conversation. And this strange girl would not contribute to the conversation; she seemed to be making curious remarks to Webster in a kind of baby talk that made him choke with mirth. “An underbred, uncultivated person!” thought Mrs. Burgess.
Mrs. Burgess decided that it would not be amiss to take soundings in the unknown’s past and immediate present.
“You don’t usually come back to town so early, do you, Miss Parker?” she asked sweetly.
“No; but Newport was rather slow this year—so many of the houses weren’t open.”
Mrs. Burgess and her sister exchanged a glance of startled surprise. Brown Pendleton’s thoughts came back from Babylon. Merrill looked at Miss Parker with open-eyed admiration.
“Dear old Newport!” Pendleton remarked with feeling. “It has rather lost tone. I’m not surprised that you didn’t care for it.”
He examined Susie with deliberation.
“The Niedlingers and the Parquetries didn’t show up at all; and the Ossingtons are said to have cut it out for good,” observed Susie.
“Yes; I saw Fred Ossington in London in the spring, and he said he had enough. Nice chap, Fred.”
“Too bad he had to give up polo,” said Susie, advancing her pickets daringly; “but I fancy his arm will never be fit again.”
“He’s going in for balloons. Can you believe it? Amusing fellow! Said he preferred falling on the earth to having it fall on him. And, besides, a balloon couldn’t kick when it had him down.”
The conversation was picking up, and quite clearly it was the unknown who was giving it momentum. Fish had been disposed of satisfactorily and Mrs. Burgess began to regain confidence. The unknown must be checked. It would not do for the girl to go further with this light, casual discussion, conveying as she did all sorts of implications of knowledge of the great in lofty places. The vintage of the dinner gown testified unimpeachably against her having any real knowledge of Newport, a place where Mrs. Burgess had once spent a day at a hotel. Mrs. Burgess resolved to squelch the impostor. Such presumption should not go unrebuked even at one’s own table. Pendleton was now discussing aviation with this impertinent Susie, who brought to the subject the same light touch of apparent sophistication she had employed in speaking of Newport and polo. She asked him if he had read an account of a new steering device for dirigibles; she thought she had seen it in L’Illustration. Pendleton was interested, and scribbled the approximate date of the journal on the back of his namecard.
“I suppose you came back ahead of your family, Miss Parker? I really don’t know who’s in town.”
“Yes; I’m quite alone, Mrs. Burgess. You see,” and Susie tilted her head Susily and spoke directly to Mrs. Burgess, “one never really knows anything about one’s neighbors.”
“Ah—you live close by?” asked Pendleton.
Susie answered with an imperceptible movement of the head:
“Oh, just next door, you know.”
“How charming! At the sign of the lions? I noticed them as we came up. I must have another look at them. Rather good, as near as I could make out.”
“They are rather nice, I think,” said Susie as one who would not boast of her possessions. “Ernestenoff did them—one of Barye’s pupils.”
Burgess wondered how far she would go. Merrill’s face wore the look of a man who is dying of worry. He had lived in town all his life, and it was inconceivable that this was one of Logan’s daughters. He had forgotten the girl’s name, and he resolved to pay attention in future when people were introduced.
Mrs. Burgess was too far at sea herself to bother with his perplexities. Thoroughly alarmed, she threw the conversation back three thousand years and shifted its playground from the Wabash Valley to the left bank of the Euphrates, confident that the temerarious person with the yellow hair and blue eyes would be dislodged.
“When you first began your excavations in Assyria, Mr. Pendleton, I suppose you didn’t realize how important your work would be to the world.”
The table listened. Merrill groped for light. This Pendleton was, then, a digger among ancient ruins! Miss Wilkinson’s eyes were ready to meet Pendleton’s responsively and sympathetically: her interest in archæology was recent and superficial, but this was only the more reason for yielding ungrudging admiration to the eminent digger. Pendleton did not reply at once to Mrs. Burgess’s question, and instead of appearing pleased by its ingratiating flattery he frowned and played with his wine-glass nervously. When he broke the silence it was to say in a hard tone that was wholly unlike his usual manner of speech:
“I’m not at all sure that it has been of importance; I’m inclined to think I wasted five years on those jobs.”
His depression was undeniable and he made no effort to conceal it. And Mrs. Burgess was angry to find that she had clumsily touched the wrong chord, and one that seemed to be vibrating endlessly. She had always flattered herself that she had mastered the delicate art of drawing out highbrows. Scores of distinguished visitors to the Hoosier capital had gone forth to publish her charm and wit; and this was the first cloud that had ever rested above a dinner table where a Chinese prince had been made to feel at home, and whence poets, bishops, novelists, scientists and statesmen had departed radiant. She had not only struck the wrong note but one that boomed monotonously down the long corridors of time.
Burgess mildly sought to inject a needleful of bromide into the situation.
“You’re probably not a good judge of that, Mr. Pendleton. The world has already set its seal of approval upon your investigations.”
“It’s not the world’s praise we want,” said Pendleton; “it’s the praise of the men who know.”
This was not tactful; it apparently brushed aside his host’s approval as negligible. Miss Wilkinson flashed Pendleton one of her brilliant smiles, remarking:
“You are altogether too modest, Mr. Pendleton. Every one says that your ‘Brickyards of Nebuchadnezzar’ is the last word on that subject.”
And then a chill seized Mrs. Burgess. The yellow-haired, blue-eyed unknown moved her head slightly to one side, bit an almond in two with neatness, and said:
“If I were you, Mr. Pendleton, I shouldn’t let a faker like Geisendanner annoy me.”
Susie regarded the remaining half of the almond indifferently and then ate it musingly. At the mention of Geisendanner Pendleton flushed, and his head lifted as though he heard trumpets calling to action. Then he bent toward Susie. The salad had just been removed. Mrs. Burgess beat the table with her fingers and awaited the earthquake. Her only relief at the moment was in the consciousness that her husband, from the look of his face, at last realized the heinousness of his conduct in bringing just any little whipper-snapper to her table. And Susie seemed to be the only member of the company who was wholly tranquil. Mrs. Burgess wondered whether she could be more than twenty, so complete had been the reinvestiture of the girl in the robes of her Susiness. She had spoken of Geisendanner as though he lived round the corner and were a person that every one with any sort of decent bringing up knew or should know. The effect of the name upon Pendleton was not pleasant to see, and Mrs. Burgess shuddered. After the first shock of surprise he seemed wonderfully subdued. Clearly this Geisendanner was an enemy or a man he feared. The eminent Babylonian met Susie’s eyes apprehensively. He said in a low tone of dejection:
“So you know then?” As though of course she did, and that a dark understanding had thus been established by their common knowledge.
Susie nodded.
“Rather absurd, on the whole, when you consider——”
Her plate was being changed and she drew back during the interruption. Pendleton shook his head impatiently at the delay.
“Absurd! How absurd? If it’s absurd to have the results of years of hard work chucked into the rubbish heap, then——”
“But no!” Susie felt for her fork without breaking the contact of their eyes. She was smiling as though quite the mistress of the occasion and waiting merely to prolong the agony of the sufferers about her. She was not insensible to their sufferings; it was pleasant rather than otherwise to inflict torture. Still her attitude toward the distressed scientist was kindly—but she would make him wait. Her bearing toward Pendleton at the moment was slightly maternal. It was only a matter of bricks anyhow; and trifles like the chronological arrangement of bricks, where, one toppling, all went down, were not only to the young person’s liking but quite within the range of her powers of manipulation. “As I remember,” she continued, “Geisendanner first attacked the results of the Deutsche Orientgesellschaft; but, of course, that was disposed of.”
“Yes,” assented Pendleton eagerly; “Auchengloss did that.”
It seemed preposterous that the small mouth of this young person could utter such names at all, much less with an air of familiarity, as though they were the names of streets or of articles of commerce.
“It was Glosbrenner, however, who paved the way for you by disposing of Geisendanner—absolutely.”
“The excavations they made in their absurd search for treasure in the ruins confused everything; but Glosbrenner’s exposé was lost—burnt up in a printing-office fire in Berlin. There’s not an assertion in my ‘Brickyards of Nebuchadnezzar’ that isn’t weakened by that bronze-gate rubbish, for Geisendanner was a scholar of some reputation. After the failure of his hidden-treasure scheme he faked his book on the Bronze Gates of Babylon as a pot boiler, and died leaving it behind him—one of the most plausible frauds ever perpetrated. They went in on top of my excavations of the brickyard—thought because I was an American I must have been looking for gold images. Glosbrenner was an American student; and seeing that his fellow-adventurer’s book was taken seriously he wrote his exposé, swore to it before the American consul at Berlin and then started for Tibet to sell an automobile to the Grand Lama—and never came back.”
Pendleton’s depression had increased; gloom settled upon the company—or upon all but this demure young skeleton at the feast, who had thus outrageously brought to the table the one topic of all topics in the world that was the most ungrateful to the man Mrs. Burgess most particularly wished to please. She sought without avail to break in upon a dialogue that excluded the rest of the company as completely as though they were in the kitchen.
“I was just reading that thing in the Seven Seas’ Review; but you can see that the reviewer swallowed Geisendanner whole. He takes your brickyards away from Nebuchadnezzar and gives them to Nabopolassar, which seems v-e-r-y c-a-r-e-l-e-s-s!”
This concluding phrase, drawled most Susesquely, brought a laugh from Burgess, and Pendleton’s own face relaxed.
“They’re all flinging Geisendanner at me!” continued Pendleton with renewed animation. “It’s humiliating to find the English and Germans alike throwing this impostor at my head. Those fellows began their excavations secretly and without authority, in a superstitious belief that they’d find gold images of heathen gods and all manner of loot there. And it’s hard luck that the confession of one of the conspirators is lost forever and the man himself dead.”
“It certainly is most unfortunate!” mourned Mrs. Burgess, anxious to pour balm upon his wounds.
“It’s curious, however, Mr. Pendleton,” said Susie casually, “that I happen to know of the existence of a copy of that Glosbrenner pamphlet.”
“A copy—— You mustn’t chaff me about that!”
“Yes,” said Susie; “it’s really quite the funniest thing that ever happened.”
“This seems to be an important matter, Miss Parker. You have no right to play upon Mr. Pendleton’s credulity, his hopes!” said Mrs. Burgess icily.
“Nothing like that, Mrs. Burgess!” chirruped Susie. “I can tell Mr. Pendleton exactly where one copy of that pamphlet, and probably the only one in the world, may be found. And a small investment in a night message to Poughkeepsie will verify what I say. There is a copy of that pamphlet at Vassar College that was picked up in Berlin by one of the professors, who gave it to the library. It had a grayish cover and looked like a thesis for a doctorate—that sort of thing. It was a little burned on the edges, and that was one reason why it caught my eye one day when I was poking about looking for something among a lot of German treatises with the most amusing long titles. And it was a perfectly dee-li-cious story—how they dug and mixed up those dynasties there; and then one of them wrote a book about it, just for the money he could get out of it. It was all a fake, but they knew enough to make it look like real goods. It was a kind of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer joke, muddying the water that way.”
The conjunction of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer with Nebuchadnezzar caused even Merrill to laugh.
“I must wire tonight for a confirmation of this—or, perhaps, if you are an alumna of the college you would do it for me.”
“I think,” said Susie, “they still remember me at college. I was the limit!”
“If what you say is right,” Pendleton resumed, “I can smash those Germans and make that Seven Seas’ reviewer eat his words! I really believe it would be better for you to wire for me to the librarian for confirmation; I’d rather not publish my anxiety to the world. If you will do this I shall look upon it as the greatest possible favor.”
“Delighted!” said Susie, crumpling her napkin.
Mrs. Burgess showed signs of rising, but delayed a moment.
“Miss Parker, you rather implied that there was more than one reason why you happened to notice a singed document in a strange language, bearing upon a subject usually left to scientists and hardly within the range of a young girl’s interests. Would you mind enlightening us just a little further in the matter?”
“I thought it was so funny,” said Susie, smiling upon them all, “because of my papa.”
“Your father?” gasped Mrs. Burgess.
“Yes, Mrs. Burgess. Anything about bricks always seemed to me so amusing, because papa used to own a brickyard.”