CHAPTER XVTHE LADY DETECTIVE
Anyfriend of Mr. Richard’s was welcome to “Red Jacket,” Mrs. Wells assured Jawn; and no questions asked; one could never tell when Phœbe Norris was joking and when she was serious; Phœbe Norris herself was never quite certain. When Mrs. Wells remonstrated mildly at her too inquisitive questions on Jawn’s past, Phœbe puzzled Mrs. Wells still further by remarking, “But I must act up to me part of lady detective, mustn’t I? It’s a movie play we’re in. The man with the box is concealed somewhere about, I’m sure. We’ll see the whole thing some evening at Cornwall’s Theatre, I’ll warrant ye!”
“All the world’s a movie,” agreed Jawn, “and men and women merely——”
“Merely fillum,” Phœbe shot in her interruption. “Some bein’ hair-breadth horrors and some, like you, Jawn, bein’ just ‘comics.’”
“Wait!” cried Jawn, striking an attitude.
“He’s got a limerick in him!” shouted Phœbe. “Hush!”
Mrs. Wells was disturbed. “He’s got a what?” she asked.
“Limerick!” cried Phœbe; “it’s kind of fit!”
“Shan’t I get a glass of water?” Mrs. Wells rose timorously.
Phœbe’s laughter pealed again. “No!” she said. “Would you quench the fire of divine doggerel?”
Jawn minded them not at all. His eye was fixed on distance and his hand waved gently and his lips moved.
Mrs. Wells was not quite assured of the humour of the lines, but she found herself laughing with the others at the droll face of the reciter. He seemed a pleasant sort of man, although his laugh was rather startling. But he was a friend of Richard’s; that was enough to assure her; so he was invited to become a guest at “Red Jacket.”
It was a relief to know that he had not called on business connected with the estate. Since the return from Europe Mrs. Wells had found it impossible to focus her mind upon the financial end of her household affairs. Never before had she realized how complicated everything was. Not that she had ever conceived her task to be easy; but she had always been able heretofore to summon her will to the problem, and like an almost impossible puzzle, the answer had come out eventually. One had only to persist, she always told herself. If interest on mortgages was due and the bank balance was needed to pay off the vineyard helpers, there was always a new loan on this or that stock; and if the bills for last year’s grape baskets or this year’s spraying and willow-wiring became too accumulative, one could hypothecate the wine stock or sell a parcel of orchard land or—many things that a resourceful business woman could think of.
Naturally her bookkeeping had assumed an Egyptian character; a private sign here and there, a subtraction indicated without a balance being drawn, a borrowing from this page not paid over to the other page—in short, a system that amounted to a code understoodsolely by Mrs. Wells. And not always to Mrs. Wells was the code instantly clear. There were days when she puzzled over the meaning of this or that entry; and sometimes surprising cheques were received on accounts which she had scored off as settled, and even more surprising bills were presented whose existence had faded from her memory. Concentration had always opened a way of at least temporary escape; but the mental lassitude which had seized her since her return from abroad had made concentration impossible. Even the thought of the figures was terrifying.
There had been strange visitors several times during the previous eight or ten years, men representing corporations with which she had had dealings on matters of mortgages and loans. They had been very pleasant fellows, just like Jawn, only not so boisterous and self-assured; and always she had needed her strength to meet all their exacting requirements. When certain recent polite letters had assured her that it was about time for one to appear, then it was that she had decided to surrender unconditionally and let her healthy grown-up daughter do the worrying.
When the luncheon-gong sounded Phœbe prepared to stay on without question. George Alexander always looked about him before he set the places, and the presence of Phœbe before a meal always meant a place for her. Besides, she announced that Jawn had to be watched.
Mr. Richard’s non-appearance had been explained by Phœbe.
“I was talkin’ nice and pretty to him,” she said, “askin’ him if he thought we’d ever have rain, and all of a sudden he gets displeased and wouldn’t speak to me at all—just sulked, he did.”
“That’s—uh—that’s Richard all right,” said Jawn. “He’s the champion sulker in New York city. I’ve known him to sit for six evenings in a row and never give anybody the gift of a word.”
“On board theVictoriahe was that way, too,” Jerry corroborated.
“I never noticed it,” said Mrs. Wells.
“I mean all day on the way from Genoa to Naples,” Jerry hastened to explain.
“Why, child,” Mrs. Wells remembered, “you did not meet him until the Captain introduced you at Naples!”
“Ha! ha!” cried Phœbe, “more conspiracies for the movie man! Before she met him she had met him all day long, and when he talked to her he didn’t say a word! Doesn’t that strike you as about the time to have another fit, Jawn? It ought to begin:
‘There was a young lady from Naples——’”
“Wait!” Jawn raised a warning finger.
“Wait yourself!” retorted Phœbe, raising a finger, too. “‘There was a young lady from Naples——’ faples, saples, daples, raples, japles—ding it! There ain’t no more rhymes for Naples!”
Jawn was not disturbed, although the evident intention was to clip his budding limerick. When she had quite finished he nodded his head and gave her a limerick with a sufficiency of proper rhymes for “Naples.”
Jerry was not pressed for explanation of her statement concerning the habits of Richard before she had met him. Jawn’s limericks drew attention away from her, and as the luncheon progressed Phœbe noted the far-off approach of the cat-boat with its yacht in tow.From the dining-room the Lake was in full view. And Jerry remembered her telephone communication with Fagner, and explained the purpose of the new yacht. But before luncheon was over Jerry managed to get Jawn to herself.
“Why do you confuse us by taking a strange name?” she asked. “You are really Professor John Galloway, aren’t you?”
“It’s all the style!” he told her. “Your Mr. Richard took a fancy name and he gave me the idea. What’s wrong with John De Lancey? I’m enjoying it. Already I feel like an aristocrat. Your Richard writes me that the new name has made a complete change in his personality. As a psychologist that interests me, so I’m trying it out. I hope to get a new personality, too; you don’t know how tired I am of the old one.”
She had spent the morning upstairs in a fruitless endeavour to get some sense out of the tangle of domestic accounts. There were some worrisome entries in the books, and naturally she was not in the spirit to comprehend Jawn’s humour to the full.
“I fear it will do harm if mother discovers we are all hoaxing her,” she told him.
“She’ll enjoy it,” he insisted. The mother was laughing immoderately at some witticism from Phœbe Norris. “Trust me to clear everything up when the time comes. I’ll study out some special limericks for the occasion. Anyone can see that she is a born lover of limericks. But tell me, how did Mr. Richard become Mr. Richard?”
She explained the beginnings of the incognito and let him understand that she was sorry the innocent lark had developed so far.
“Of course you know who he really is,” he said.
“No.”
“What?” he cried, and was about to explain, but she stopped him.
“Richard must make his own explanations,” she declared. “It would seem like probing; and he is our guest, you know.”
She tried to get him to talk about Walter, but he was very frank in saying that that was Richard’s case.
“But he asked you to come here solely to consult you about Walter.”
It might be, Jawn agreed; but he was on a vacation. It was all guess-work anyway, he assured her; and any man’s guess was as good as another’s. When Richard got going on a thing he could be guaranteed to put genius into it.
The young lady before him appealed more to his interest; and he was not slow in indicating as much. He quoted what he could remember of Richard’s letter to prove that it was Jerry and not Walter that had induced him to come to “Red Jacket.” There was enough chaffing in his tone to cover up the bluntness of his statements, but there was no doubt as to his meaning.
There are many ways to meet this sort of gallantry. Some women affect indifference and grow stupidly reserved—they are the ones hit hardest!—and some simper and pretend that they do not understand; but a wiser group admit everything and bring the game right out in the open, where it quickly perishes for lack of pursuit.
“That was quite right of Richard,” Jerry returned. “Naturally he would recommend me first, but at that time, you know, he had not seen Phœbe Norris.” Sheexplained Phœbe’s widowhood and enlarged upon her qualities. “Phœbe will just suit you,” she concluded, and her good-humoured tone turned all Jawn’s blarneying back on him and made Jerry herself more reserved and unapproachable than ever.
Jawn made a wry face.
“Never!” he whispered, like a stage-aside. “There’s nothing mysterious and romantic in Phœbe to me. We Irish understand one another too well. I know every twist in her head, and she’s on to me, every curve of me. All my charms would be jokes to her; it would be carrying coals to Newcastle with a vengeance. No! the Irish get along best with aliens. In Ireland my father was a subservient peat digger; in America he became instantly an eccentric genius, a man of parts, a West Side statesman and diplomat. The big-wigs in politics consult him now, and his sayings are quoted by the newspaper ‘columnists’; in Ireland he was just like thousands of others. No! Phœbe and I suspect each other already. The feud is on.”
“She seemed to enjoy your verses.”
“Pure bluff to put me off my guard,” he averred. “We’re like a pair of beggars knocking at the same gate.”
“How so?”
She was amused at his obvious humour, and interested; proving his point, he told her, that the alien would love him better than the native.
“How so?” he repeated. “Well, she was the clever, unusual one before I came. Isn’t it true? I see it is. Now I’m proving how easy is all that so-called Irish wit.”
“I’m listenin’, Jawn de Lancey Gallagher,” Phœbe leaned her red head far over the table. “But don’t tempt me to punish you.”
“Maybe I might,” said he, “if I knew the penalty.”
“Well,” she considered, “fight fair, or I may be tempted to go to extremes.”
“And what’d that be?”
“Marry you,” she said.
“Mother of John!” he cried. “Not in America, lass! It’s forbid by the Constitution.”
“How’s that?”
“It’s the law of the land that prohibits cruel and unjust punishments.”
“That’s true,” she recovered quickly, “but for the minute I wasn’t thinkin’ of myself.”
“Oh! oh!” he cried, acknowledging the hit.
“Itwouldbe a kind of slow female suicide, now wouldn’t it, Jerry?”
“That’s not a bad definition of marriage,” commented Jerry thoughtfully; “at least in the majority of cases that we see about us.”
“What’s a good definition of marriage?” inquired Jawn.
“A kind of slow female suicide.”
“Help! Help!” cried Jawn. “They’re both against me! I’m in the lair of the professional man-hater. Which leads me to ask a connundrum——”
“Do you think this is a children’s party, Jawn de Lancey McGinnis?” snapped Phœbe.
“Well, isn’t it?” he stared about him. “Sure we’re all kids here. Look at Mrs. Wells.” Mrs. Wells was ready to laugh before the connundrum was even proposed, and that sudden touch sent her off. “And look at that grey-haired old kid over there!” Black George Alexander, hovering at the door, broke into African cackles. Jawn’s huge face had the native comedian power; wherever he turned it laughter sprang, exceptin one quarter. Phœbe Norris looked straight at him with face set and cold.
“Go on with your connundrum, man,” she commanded icily.
“Well,” he said, evidently shifting his original plan, “why is Mrs. Phœbe Norris’ face like—like—like the Tombs of the Pharaohs?”
Phœbe’s face, in turn, became the instigator to mirth. If it had been stony before, it grew steadily now into a veritable sphinx. Comment and inquiry could not dislodge her external claim.
“Why?” inquired Mrs. Wells; she was rather fond of connundrums, intelligent ones like this one, which brought in one’s knowledge of ancient history. “Why is Phœbe’s face like the Tombs of the Pharaohs?”
“The Lord only knows why,” said John solemnly; “but like the Tombs of the Pharaohs it is.”
A crinkle came to Phœbe’s eyes, and her mouth quivered.
“I’m not laughin’,” she insisted. “My face slipped.”
“And is there no other answer?” inquired Mrs. Wells.
“His wit has run dry,” Phœbe explained. “He opened the sluice too wide at first.”
“Oh, yes,” assented Jawn. “Her face is like the Tombs of the Pharaohs because there’s more wisdom within than the deepest archæologist can ever translate; because the best part of her is hieroglyphic; because it’s worth travelling ten thousand miles to see her; because she is built fit for a king; because no man knows the mystery of her creation, yet all wonder at the marvel of it; because—do you want any more?”
“I just wished to bring you out, Jawn,” Phœbeapologized. “I didn’t want the reputation of the race to languish. And thank you for the compliments. I’m so glad you didn’t say—because it looks so derned life-like and everybody knows it’s a dead one. But that would be a mummy, wouldn’t it, and not the Tomb of the Pharaohs?”
“If it had been a mummy,” said Jawn, “I might have said, because in spite of years of married life she is still so well preserved; or because——”
“That’s enough,” said Phœbe; “in a minute more you’ll be sayin’ somethin’ you’ll be ashamed of. Don’t forget, Jawn, that the Wells’ are very refined.”
“I was only going to say——” the light of deviltry was in Jawn’s eyes, warning enough to this country woman.
“I’m goin’!” she cried, and started from the room. “The boys have docked, I see, and they’ll be wantin’ food. It’s a word of warnin’ I’m tellin’ you, Jawn de Lancey Maguire—save all your piggy sayin’s for me who understands them, and don’t go makin’ me ashamed of you before the quality.”
She courtesied to Jerry and Mrs. Wells, threw a kiss to Jawn, and slipped away.
“It’s a sprite she is,” said Jawn, “a red-headed Irish fay.”
“She is a very great joy to us,” said Mrs. Wells deliberately. “And who would think she was ten years married and a widow! Phœbe hasn’t changed a mite since she was twenty.”
“She’ll never be old,” said Jawn. “I can hardly keep my eyes off her hair—it’s so brilliant and fascinating.” He was about to say something equally complimentary when he caught her shadow at the long front windows. Mrs. Wells had seen her, too, peepingbehind a curtain, and showed the knowledge in her face. “Fascinating?” he continued, “yes. And charming? Not a doubt. She’ll be that way when she’s eighty—I’ve known many of her kind—having all the young boys dancing about her—unless she takes cold and dies from poking her dainty head in at draughty windows!”
“Jawn de Lancey O’Rourke,” she poked her dainty head further in, “you’ll force me to marry you yet in self-defence.”
This time she was really gone. Down the road she walked briskly, a fine glow on her face. It was such an unusual joy for her to meet a mind as absurd as her own. What good is a sense of the ridiculous, a kinship with the Comic Spirit, if folks about you are for ever taking you seriously? It simply means offence when you had meant none; and scandal where none was dreamed. The Wells were the right sort, because they took nothing seriously from Phœbe, which was a good thing in many ways: it gave Phœbe an outlet for some real heavy matters that weighed on her soul, and she never need fear too much sympathy. And it gave her a chance to say the most literal truths about her neighbours, to let loose her satire on their shortcomings, and never to be suspected of wisdom.
The Wells, notwithstanding, were hardly more than appreciative audience; Jawn, now, was a “pardner”—to use the technical term of comedians. He stirred her mind, provoked it, as none of the others did. And every ripple of his own she felt akin to. It would be glorious fun to fight quip with quip; even though he were a rascal.
Of course he was a rascal. The pair of them were. About Richard she might have had doubts, but about Jawn—never! She knew an Irish villain when she sawone. He was a rascal, but she was not sure that she would be against him in the final reckoning. After all, life was a game of matching wits; and if this Wells Virginia-English strain was stupid should it not pay the penalty? But that explanation of her partnership was discarded before she got half-way down the hill. The Irish rascal was a rascal for high philosophic reasons: it was because he placed so little value upon the world’s goods that he concerned himself even less about the matter of precise ownership.—“I am taking your watch,” he might say kindly, “about which you should not grieve too much; for consider, when you come to your last dozen breaths, how little value this watch will have in your eyes, and how quickly you’d give it for another year of living.”
That’s what made the Irish villain so captivating a character in picturesque romances. He cracked his little joke at the world; if he got off with it, he laughed; if he got caught he laughed. The whole business of having and losing is so trivial when life itself is trivial.
In some such ways she defended Jawn, but resolved to watch him, nevertheless. If for no other reason than to get the joy of the play of his mind, she would watch him. And it was delightful to see how easily the good Wells were taken in. Their idea of a swindler was of a sneaking, Uriah Heepish, Sing-Singish cut-throat. They had not the wit to conceive of an honest blarneying lad who went straight at his task, open and above-board.
And what, in the name of pity, had happened to the mistress of the house? The most imposing creature in Jerusalem township had actually shrunk into a timid, smiling—it was as if the Red Queen (“Off with his head!”) had suddenly become the White Queen (“Pather on the head and see how pleased she’ll be”). We all know how age creeps on us, but this time, thought Phœbe, it had pounced! Mrs. Wells had lost her rigidly erect bearing, her face had given up the fixed effort of concentration, she was aimlessly drifting. “A little kindness—and putting her hair in papers—would do wonders with her!” Phœbe laughed at this picture of the helpless White Queen, but the laugh soon died away. The reality was not at all comic.
But no one would have guessed that back of Phœbe’s public mirth and jollity was even a serious observation of the change in Mother Wells. A fine sense of consideration had kept even the glance of curiosity out of her eyes. She was not the sort to greet a lady friend with, “Goodness! Aren’t you getting a little stouter?”
She would not let even her own thoughts dwell too long on her friend’s misfortune. The villains were summoned again before her. Of course, Phœbe agreed before she reached “Lombardy,” her cottage, that she would keep an open mind about these mysterious gentlemen with changeable names. They might in the end turn out to be respectable. Very well. Her plan was to stand guard and never be suspected. And the way never to be suspected is to tell all your plans to the enemy. They won’t believe you, which is exactly what you want. “I’ll tell them they’re a set of rascals,” she chuckled, “and that I’m watchin’ every move of them, and they’ll laugh their heads off and never be disturbed by my little joke.”
Richard and Walter were quite ready for Phœbe’s impromptu luncheon, which she managed in the quickest possible time and set for them on her porch. She listened to their story of the lucky arrival of the yacht, heard its name,Sago-ye-wat-ha, and listenedto its virtues extolled, but kept aloof from their enthusiasm.
Walter was the first to notice her silence. “You tol’ me to get it,” he said; “an’—I got it.”
“Well! well!” said Richard. “Are you at the bottom of this, too?”
Richard had found his voice again.
“I always said if he owned his own boat he could do wonders on this Lake.”
“You are very keen,” he smiled at her.
“Oh, I know my tables,” she replied cheerily; “and I know a good sailor when I see one; and I know your fellow-conspirator, Mr. De Lancey.”
Richard looked up from a sandwich, but said nothing.
“I hope you’re not going to go into the sulks again?” she asked. “There’ll be no fun in houndin’ you to earth and layin’ bare your nefarious plots if every time I get you in a corner you play deaf and dumb.”
He laughed good-naturedly. All the kinks were out of his mind now; he felt vigorous and alert, and knew—he was thankful—that Phœbe had ceased to depress him into speechlessness. And following consistently his tried theory, he knew that all was well between them.
“I was rude, wasn’t I?” he admitted. “That’s an infirmity of mine, like an epileptic fit——”
“Oh, your friend De Lancey has fits, too. You are a pair, all right.”
“I give up,” he said. “De Lancey is no friend of mine. Please explain.”
“You don’t know a John De Lancey?”
“Never heard of him.”
“Well, he’s up at the Big House this minute. You may not know him, but he knows you. To be sure he got twisted in your name—said it was Mr. Dick—untilJerry foolishly gave you away. Then he was sure it was Mr. Richard. He said he had forgotten for the moment what name you had agreed to travel on. You two had better get together and rehearse. You’re both bad actors. I’ll give you that much help, although I’m warnin’ you,” she smiled broadly as she spoke, “that I’m a lady detective in disguise. So look out!”
Walter looked on wisely as they talked. At first he thought he would tell Phœbe what he knew about assumed names; but decided later that she would find it out soon enough. It was not his affair. He had his boat, and he would go off and borrow old sails somewhere and try her out. But before he went he exacted from Phœbe the approval of his latest achievement.
“You said to get one,” he repeated, “an’ I got one.”
“Good boy!” she nodded to him cheerily. “I knew you’d do it.”
That was enough to start him off to the tender in great spirits.
Richard came back to the former topic.
“Really, Mrs. Norris——”
“Don’t Mrs. Norris me.”
“Really, Phœbe, I don’t know any De Lancey. What sort of man is he?”
“Well, to begin with he is the happiest liar, outside of your good self, that I’ve yet met. He’s Irish, and he’s chuck full of limericks and connund——”
“Jove!” cried Richard. “It’s Jawn!”
“Jawn it is; Jawn De Lancey.”
“It’s Jawn Galloway,” he corrected. “It would be just like him to imitate me and take another name——”
“Then Mr. Richard is not your name?” she broke in triumphantly.
“No,” he smiled wryly. “But you mustn’t tell Mrs. Wells. Jerry knows. And so does Walter. You may as well know too. In fact, I thought Jerry had told you. But think of Jawn Galloway taking on a—did you say De Lancey? Jack De Lancey! That is comic.”
“Very comic,” she mimicked. “You’re doin’ well. But as I’m goin’ to get you both in the end you might as well light yourself a cigarette and confess everything. And I may let you off altogether if you flatter me a little. I’m very susceptible to kind words. There’s your cue, man. Now, go on with your tale.”
In a very straightforward manner he told her the whole story from the accidental meeting with Jerry on board theVictoriaat Naples up to the complication made by Walter’s outbreak.
As the story developed, Phœbe gradually lost her chipper attitude. There was something terribly convincing about the Walter episode. She knew all about that threat to do away with himself; it had been made to her, too, and it had taken all her diplomacy to put a right attitude in the boy and start him off on his trip with the mother freed from much of his unnatural antipathy. But secretly she had always believed that Walter’s threats were idle boasts. The reality frightened her, for Richard made no attempt either to minimize or magnify the determined struggle of the boy to end his mixed-up life on the stern of the steamer.
“Well,” she drew in a deep breath, “you may be featherin’ your nest or not; all I say is you’ve earned the right to do what you please up at the Big House. As far as you are concerned, Mr. What-ever-your-name-is, I resign; but I’ll keep my eye on your Jawn friend a little longer, if you don’t mind.”
Richard smoked away for a while in great contentment.
“Do you know, Phœbe,” he turned to her chummily, “I really may be feathering my nest, as you call it; and without ever intending to perform that delicate operation.”
“I guess you’re old enough to know your way about.” She busied herself clearing away the lunch dishes.
“Age doesn’t help at that,” he said, “it hinders. The older you grow the more sure you seem; but you fool yourself.... I’m sure I don’t know why I do anything.”
“You didn’t come all the way to Penn Yan on a wild-goose chase. Don’t tell me that.”
“That’s life exactly,” he said, “a wild-goose chase.”
“Humph!” she sniffed significantly. “You can’t fool your grandmother! Every sensible person in this world is after something, and he knows mighty well what it is. It’s all moonshine, this not knowin’ why you do things. Now, own up; it wasn’t an overpowering interest in Walter that brought you here; now, was it?”
“I don’t believe it was,” he admitted cheerfully.
“And it wasn’t due to the overpowering attractions of Phœbe Norris?” she persisted in her cross-examination.
“It may have been,” he looked at her calmly.
“What?” she cried. “You’d never heard of me.”
“Well,” he argued, “Adam had never heard of Eve, but God went on confidently making all the arrangements.”
She mused over the thought.
“I forgot,” she said finally. “I did invite you to lay on a little flattery. And you did it well. And, by the same token, though I know it’s a lie, it gives one a mighty pleasin’ sensation.... Go along with you, man!... Adam and Eve!... Pfut!... It’s a scandalous picture you’re after puttin’ into my mind!”