CHAPTER XXVBONNIE MAY SEES TWO FACES AT A WINDOW
Itwas at luncheon, and Baron was down-stairs for the first time since his accident.
“It’s just like having Johnny come back from the war,” observed Bonnie May, as the family took their places at table. Baron, Sr., was not there. He usually spent his midday hour at his club.
“From the war?—Johnny?” replied Baron. He stood by his chair an instant, putting most of his weight on one foot.
“I mean, you can think of so many delicious things. We might believe you were wounded, you know, coming home to see your wife and daughter. As if the sentries had allowed you to come in for a little while. They would be outside now, watching. Men with dirty faces and heavy boots.”
“Yes, if I had a wife and daughter,” suggested Baron.
“Oh, well—Flora and I. Anyway, you’ve got a mother, and that’s the real thing when there’s any soldier business.”
“It’s a real thing, anyway,” observed Mrs. Baron.
“Yes, of course,” admitted the child. She sighed deeply. How was any one to get anywhere, withso many literal-minded people about? She remembered the man in the play who said, “If we are discovered, we are lost,” and the other who replied, “No, if we are discovered, we are found.”
It was Mrs. Baron who returned to prosaic affairs.
“I’m going out this afternoon,” she said briskly. “I’ve been tied up here in the house three Thursdays. There are people I simply must call on.”
Bonnie May did not know why her heart should have jumped at this announcement. Still, there seemed to be no end to the possibilities for enjoyment in a big house when there wasn’t anybody to be saying continuously: “You must,” or “You mustn’t.”
She wandered up-stairs as soon as luncheon was over, and in Baron’s room she was overcome by an irresistible impulse.
She heard the houseman moving about in the next room, and the thought occurred to her that she had never seen the houseman’s room. She had never even spoken to the houseman. There was something quite mysterious about the fact that he always kept to himself.
Mrs. Shepard had assured her on one occasion that Thomason never had a word to say to anybody—that he was a perverse and sullen creature.
Now it occurred to her that possibly Mrs. Shepard’s estimate might lack fairness. Anyway, it would be interesting to find out for herself. It would be a kind of adventure.
She tapped lightly on Thomason’s door.
After an interval of silence, during which one might have thought that the room itself was amazed, there was the sound of heavy feet approaching.
The door opened and Thomason stood on the threshold. Bonnie May had never been near enough to him really to see him before. Now she discovered that he had quaint creases about his mouth and eyes, and that his eyes were like violets. It was as if you had dropped some violets accidentally, and they had fallen in a strange place. There was a childish expression in Thomason’s eyes, and it occurred to Bonnie May that possibly he was afraid of people.
It seemed to her quite shocking that the little man should remain by himself always, because he was afraid of mingling with people.
Thomason’s eyes were very bright as he looked at her. Then he winked slowly, to facilitate thought. He was thinking: “She’s the one who does whatever she pleases.” Despite his habits of seclusion, Thomason was by no means oblivious to the life that went on in the mansion.
“May I come in?” asked Bonnie May. She did not worry about the absence of a spontaneous welcome. “It’s an adventure,” she was thinking.
Thomason laboriously turned about, with a slight list to leeward, and ambled to the middle of the room, where he sat down on a bench. He took up a pair of steel-rimmed glasses from which onetemple had been broken and replaced by a piece of twine. He slipped the twine over his head and adjusted the glasses on his nose. It seemed necessary for him to sit quite still to keep this contrivance in place. When he reached around to his bed for a coat, which he had evidently been mending, he held his head and body as rigid as possible.
Bonnie May advanced into the room, her hands clasped before her, her eyes quite freely surveying her surroundings.
“What a quaint setting!” she observed.
Thomason jerked his needle through a tough place and pulled it out to arm’s length, holding his head with painful sedateness, on account of the glasses. He seemed afraid to glance to left or right. He made no reply at all.
“I’ve been learning to use a needle, too,” she confided, thinking that he did not do it very skilfully.
Thomason held his head as far back as possible and closed one eye. He was thus handicapping himself, it appeared, in order to get a better view of the work he held on his knee.
“Would you like me to hold it, while you go across the room to look?” she asked.
Thomason suddenly became quite rigid. It was as if his works had run down. He was thinking about what Bonnie May had said.
Then, “Women!” he muttered, and the works seemed to have been wound up again.
Thomason jerked his needle through a tough placeThomason jerked his needle through a tough place and pulled it out to arm’s length.
Thomason jerked his needle through a tough place and pulled it out to arm’s length.
Thomason jerked his needle through a tough place and pulled it out to arm’s length.
This seemed a somewhat indefinite and meagre return for so much cheerful effort, and Bonnie May decided not to try any more just then. She went to the gable window and looked out. She was almost on a level with the fourth story of the building next door, which had been remodelled for use as a boarding-house. And looking up into the window nearest her, she suddenly became animated in the most extraordinary manner.
A man was looking down at her, and in his eyes there was a puzzled expression to match the puzzled expression in her own.
She turned, with subdued excitement, to Thomason, sitting on his bench near the middle of the room, with his bed and an old trunk for a shabby background. If he would only go away!
She looked up at the man in the window opposite and smiled. In a guarded tone she remarked: “It’s a very nice day!” and instantly she turned toward Thomason again, so that he might believe she was addressing him in the event of his looking up from his work.
But Thomason, believing this needless remark had been addressed to him, had borne enough. He arose laboriously, grasping his coat in one hand and his spectacles in the other, and left the room. At the door there was a muttered “Women!”—and then a bang.
Bonnie May clasped her hands in delighted relief and drew closer to the window. “It’s Clifton!”she exclaimed to the man in the window opposite.
“It’s Bonnie May!” came back the eager response.
“Oh!” she moaned. She smiled up at the man across the open space helplessly. Then she took her left hand into her right hand, and shook it affectionately.
“You dear thing!” came back the word from Clifton. “Where have you been?”
“Oh, why can’t I get at you?” was Bonnie May’s rejoinder, and she looked down at the ground and shuddered at the abysmal depths.
The man she had called Clifton disappeared for a moment, and when he stood at the window again there was some one close beside him, looking out over his shoulder.
“And Jack, too!” she breathed eagerly, yet fearfully. It occurred to her that some one must hear her, and drag her back into the tedious realm of conventionality again. For the moment she was almost inclined to regard herself as a kidnapped person, held apart from friends and rescuers.
“If it isn’t the kid!” was the comment of the second man, and his eyes beamed happily.
“You both rooming over there?” asked Bonnie May.
“Since yesterday. We’ve got an engagement at the Folly.”
“And to think of your being within—oh, I can’t talk to you this way! I must get to you!”
“You and Miss Barry stopping there?”
“Why, you see, I’m not working just now. Miss Barry——”
She stopped suddenly, her eyes filling with terror. She had heard a step behind her.
Turning, she beheld Baron in the doorway.
“I thought I heard you talking,” he said, in quite a casual tone. “Was Thomason here?”
“I was talking—to Thomason. My back was turned. He seems to have gone out.” She looked about the room, even under the bed. She didn’t want Baron to see her eyes for a moment. “Such a quaint old gentleman—isn’t he?” she commented. She had moved away from the window. She had almost regained her composure now.
Baron’s brows contracted. He glanced toward the window at which she had been standing. In the depths of the room beyond he thought he could detect a movement. He was not sure.
“Do you and Thomason talk to each other—quite a little?” he asked. He tried to make his tone lightly inconsequential.
“That wouldn’t express it, so far as he is concerned. He won’t talk to me at all. I have to do all the talking.”
“And do you—feel quite confidential toward him?”
“Why, I think you might feel safe in talking to him. He doesn’t seem the sort that carries tales.”
Baron went to the window and looked out. He could see nobody. But when he confronted her again his expression was harsh, there was an angry light in his eyes.
“Bonnie May, you were talking to some one in the other house. You were mentioning Miss Barry. You weren’t talking to Thomason at all.”
She became perfectly still. She was now looking at him steadily. “I was talking to Thomason until he went out,” she said. “Then, as you say, I was ‘talking to some one in the other house.’ Why? Why not?”
The docility of the home life, the eagerness to be pliant and sweet, fell from her wholly. An old influence had been brought to bear upon her, and she was now Bonnie May the actress again. For the moment benefits and obligations were forgot, and the old freedom was remembered.
“We don’t know the people in that house,” retorted Baron.
“That isn’t my fault. I happen to know two of them. If you like I’ll introduce you. Very clever people.” Her tone was almost flippant.
Baron was astounded. “You’ve found friends!” he said. He couldn’t help speaking with a slight sneer.
“You don’t do it very well,” she said. “I could show you how, if you cared to learn—though it’s rather out of date.”
“Bonnie May!” he cried reproachfully.
“You made me do it!” she said, suddenly forlorn and regretful. “I didn’t do anything. That’s a rooming-house over there, and I happened to see two old friends of mine at the window. They were glad to see me, and I was glad to see them. That’s all.” Her expression darkened with discouragement. She added: “And I wasn’t quite untruthful. Ihadbeen talking to Thomason.”
Baron meditatively plucked his lower lip between his finger and thumb. “I was wrong,” he said. “I admit, I was in the wrong.” He tried to relieve the situation by being facetious. “You know I’ve been an invalid,” he reminded her. “And people are always patient with invalids.”
“It’s all right,” she said. And he had the disquieting realization that she had grown quite apart from him, for the moment at least, and that it didn’t matter to her very much now whether he was disagreeable or not.
She sighed and walked absent-mindedly from the room. She remembered to turn in the doorway and smile at him amiably. But he felt that the action was polite, rather than spontaneous.
And he reflected, after she had gone away, that she hadn’t volunteered to say a word about the people she had talked to through the window.