It was infuriating to see how much enjoyment every one but Jim and myself got out of the situation. They howled with mirth over the feeblest jokes, and when Max told a story without any point whatever, they all had hysteria. Immediately after dinner Aunt Selina had begun on the family connection again, and after two bad breaks on my part, Jim offered to show her the house. The Mercer girls trailed along, unwilling to lose any of the possibilities. They said afterward that it was terrible: she went into all the closets, and ran her hand over the tops of doors and kept getting grimmer and grimmer. In the studio they came across a life study Jim was doing and she shut her eyes and made the girls go out while he covered it with a drapery. Lollie! Who did the Bacchante dance at three benefits last winter and was learning a new one called “Eve”!
When they heard Aunt Selina on the second floor, Anne, Dal and Max sneaked up to the studio for cigarettes, which left Mr. Harbison to me. I was in the den, sitting in a low chair by the wood fire when he came in. He hesitated in the doorway.
“Would you prefer being alone, or may I come in?” he asked. “Don’t mind being frank. I know you are tired.”
“I have a headache, and I am sulking,” I said unpleasantly, “but at least I am not actively venomous. Come in.”
So he came in and sat down across the hearth from me, and neither of us said anything. The firelight flickered over the room, bringing out the faded hues of the old Japanese prints on the walls, gleaming in the mother-of-pearl eyes of the dragon on the screen, setting a grotesque god on a cabinet to nodding. And it threw into relief the strong profile of the man across from me, as he stared at the fire.
“I am afraid I am not very interesting,” I said at last, when he showed no sign of breaking the silence. “The—the illness of the butler and—Miss Caruthers’ arrival, have been upsetting.”
He suddenly roused with a start from a brown reverie.
“I beg your pardon,” he said, “I—oh, of course not! I was wondering if I—if you were offended at what I said earlier in the evening; the—Brushwood Boy, you know, and all that.”
“Offended?” I repeated, puzzled.
“You see, I have been living out of the world so long, and never seeing any women but Indian squaws”—so there were no Spanish girls!—“that I’m afraid I say what comes into my mind without circumlocution. And then—I did not know you were married.”
“No, oh, no,” I said hastily. “But, of course, the more a woman is married—I mean, you can not say too many nice things to married women. They—need them, you know.”
I had floundered miserably, with his eyes on me, and I half expected him to be shocked, or to say that married women should be satisfied with the nice things their husbands say to them. But he merely remarked apropos of nothing, or following a line of thought he had not voiced, that it was trite but true that a good many men owed their success in life to their wives.
“And a good many owe their wives to their success in life,” I retorted cynically. At which he stared at me again.
It was then that the real complexity of the situation began to develop. Some one had rung the bell and been admitted to the library and a maid came to the door of the den. When she saw us she stopped uncertainly. Even then it struck me that she looked odd, and she was not in uniform. However, I was not informed at that time about bachelor establishments, and the first thing she said, when she had asked to speak to me in the hall, knocked her and her clothes clear out of my head. Evidently she knew me.
“Miss McNair,” she said in a low tone. “There is a lady in the drawing room, a veiled person, and she is asking for Mr. Wilson.”
“Can you not find him?” I asked. “He is in the house, probably in the studio.”
The girl hesitated.
“Excuse me, miss, but Miss Caruthers—”
Then I saw the situation.
“Never mind,” I said. “Close the door into the drawing room, and I will tell Mr. Wilson.”
But as the girl turned toward the doorway, the person in question appeared in it, and raised her veil. I was perfectly paralyzed. It was Bella! Bella in a fur coat and a veil, with the most tragic eyes I ever saw and entirely white except for a dab of rouge in the middle of each cheek. We stared at each other without speech. The maid turned and went down the hall, and with that Bella came over to me and clutched me by the arm.
“Who was being carried out into that ambulance?” she demanded, glaring at me with the most awful intensity.
“I’m sure I don’t know, Bella,” I said, wriggling away from her fingers. “What in the world are you doing here? I thought you were in Europe.”
“You are hiding something from me!” she accused. “It is Jim! I see it in your face.”
“Well, it isn’t,” I snapped. “It seems to me, really, Bella, that you and Jim ought to be able to manage your own affairs, without dragging me in.” It was not pleasant, but if she was suffering, so was I. “Jim is as well as he ever was. He’s upstairs somewhere. I’ll send for him.”
She gripped me again, and held on while her color came back.
“You’ll do nothing of the kind,” she said, and she had quite got hold of herself again. “I do not want to see him: I hope you don’t think, Kit, that I came here to see James Wilson. Why, I have forgotten that there IS such a person, and you know it.”
Somebody upstairs laughed, and I was growing nervous. What if Aunt Selina should come down, or Mr. Harbison come out of the den?
“Why DID you come, then, Bella?” I inquired. “He may come in.”
“I was passing in the motor,” she said, and I honestly think she hoped I would believe her, “and I saw that am—” She stopped and began again. “I thought Jim was out of town, and I came to see Takahiro,” she said brazenly. “He was devoted to me, and Evans is going to leave. I’ll tell you what to do, Kit. I’ll go back to the dining room, and you send Taka there. If any one comes, I can slip into the pantry.”
“It’s immoral,” I protested. “It’s immoral to steal your—”
“My own butler!” she broke in impatiently. “You’re not usually so scrupulous, Kit. Hurry! I hear that hateful Anne Brown.”
So we slid back along the hall, and I rang for Takahiro. But no one came.
“I think I ought to tell you, Bella,” I said as we waited, and Bella was staring around the room—“I think you ought to know that Miss Caruthers is here.”
Bella shrugged her shoulders.
“Well, thank goodness,” she said, “I don’t have to see her. The only pleasant thing I remember about my year of married life is that I did NOT meet Aunt Selina.”
I rang again, but still there was no answer. And then it occurred to me that the stillness below stairs was almost oppressive. Bella was noticing things, too, for she began to fasten her veil again with a malicious little smile.
“One of the things I remember my late husband saying,” she observed, “was that HE could manage this house, and had done it for years, with flawless service. Stand on the bell, Kit.”
I did. We stood there, with the table, just as it had been left, between us, and waited for a response. Bella was growing impatient. She raised her eyebrows (she is very handsome, Bella is) and flung out her chin as if she had begun to enjoy the horrible situation.
I thought I heard a rattle of silver from the pantry just then, and I hurried to the door in a rage. But the pantry was empty of servants and full of dishes, and all the lights were out but one, which was burning dimly. I could have sworn that I saw one of the servants duck into the stairway to the basement, but when I got there the stairs were empty, and something was burning in the kitchen below.
Bella had followed me and was peering over my shoulder curiously.
“There isn’t a servant in the house,” she said triumphantly. And when we went down to the kitchen, she seemed to be right. It was in disgraceful order, and one of the bottles of wine that had ben banished from the dining room sat half empty on the floor.
“Drunk!” Bella said with conviction. But I didn’t think so. There had not been time enough, for one thing. Suddenly I remembered the ambulance that had been the cause of Bella’s appearance—for no one could believe her silly story about Takahiro. I didn’t wait to voice my suspicion to her; I simply left her there, staring helplessly at the confusion, and ran upstairs again: through the dining room, past Jimmy and Aunt Selina, past Leila Mercer and Max, who were flirting on the stairs, up, up to the servants’ bedrooms, and there my suspicions were verified. There was every evidence of a hasty flight; in three bedrooms five trunks stood locked and ominous, and the closets yawned with open doors, empty. Bella had been right; there was not a servant in the house.
As I emerged from the untidy emptiness of the servants’ wing, I met Mr. Harbison coming out of the studio.
“I wish you would let me do some of this running about for you, Mrs. Wilson,” he said gravely. “You are not well, and I can’t think of anything worse for a headache. Has the butler’s illness clogged the household machinery?”
“Worse,” I replied, trying not to breathe in gasps. “I wouldn’t be running around—like this—but there is not a servant in the house! They have gone, the entire lot.”
“That’s odd,” he said slowly. “Gone! Are you sure?”
In reply I pointed to the servants’ wing. “Trunks packed,” I said tragically, “rooms empty, kitchen and pantries, full of dishes. Did you ever hear of anything like it?”
“Never,” he asserted. “It makes me suspect—” What he suspected he did not say; instead he turned on his heel, without a word of explanation, and ran down the stairs. I stood staring after him, wondering if every one in the place had gone crazy. Then I heard Betty Mercer scream and the rest talking loud and laughing, and Mr. Harbison came up the stairs again two at a time.
“How long has that Jap been ailing, Mrs. Wilson?” he asked.
“I—I don’t know,” I replied helplessly. “What is the trouble, anyhow?”
“I think he probably has something contagious,” he said, “and it has scared the servants away. As Mr. Brown said, he looked spotty. I suggested to your husband that it might be as well to get the house emptied—in case we are correct.”
“Oh, yes, by all means,” I said eagerly. I couldn’t get away too soon. “I’ll go and get my—” Then I stopped. Why, the man wouldn’t expect me to leave; I would have to play out the wretched farce to the end!
“I’ll go down and see them off,” I finished lamely, and we went together down the stairs.
Just for the moment I forgot Bella altogether. I found Aunt Selina bonneted and cloaked, taking a stirrup cup of Pomona for her nerves, and the rest throwing on their wraps in a hurry. Downstairs Max was telephoning for his car, which wasn’t due for an hour, and Jim was walking up and down, swearing under his breath. With the prospect of getting rid of them all, and, of going home comfortably to try to forget the whole wretched affair, I cheered up quite a lot. I even played up my part of hostess, and Dallas told me, aside, that I was a brick.
Just then Jim threw open the front door.
There was a man on the top step, with his mouth full of tacks, and he was nailing something to the door, just below Jim’s Florentine bronze knocker, and standing back with his head on one side to see if it was straight.
“What are you doing?” Jim demanded fiercely, but the man only drove another tack. It was Mr. Harbison who stepped outside and read the card.
It said “Smallpox.”
“Smallpox,” Mr. Harbison read, as if he couldn’t believe it. Then he turned to us, huddled in the hall.
“It seems it wasn’t measles, after all,” he said cheerfully. “I move we get into Mr. Reed’s automobile out there, and have a vaccination party. I suppose even you blase society folk have not exhausted that kind of diversion.”
But the man on the step spat his tacks in his hand and spoke for the first time.
“No, you don’t,” he said. “Not on your life. Just step back, please, and close the door. This house is quarantined.”
There is hardly any use trying to describe what followed. Anne Brown began to cry, and talk about the children. (She went to Europe once and stayed until they all got over the whooping cough.) And Dallas said he had a pull, because his mill controlled I forget how many votes, and the thing to do was to be quiet and comfortable and we would get out in the morning. Max took it as a huge joke, and somebody found him at the telephone, calling up his club. The Mercer girls were hysterically giggling, and Aunt Selina sat on a stiff-backed chair and took aromatic spirits of ammonia. As for Jim, he had collapsed on the lowest step of the stairs, and sat there with his head in his hands. When he did look up, he didn’t dare to look at me.
The Harbison man was arguing with the impassive individual on the top step outside, and I saw him get out his pocketbook and offer a crisp bundle of bills. But the man from the board of health only smiled and tacked at his offensive sign. After a while Mr. Harbison came in and closed the door, and we stared at one another.
“I know what I’m going to do,” I said, swallowing a lump in my throat. “I’m going to get out through a basement window at the back. I’m going home.”
“Home!” Aunt Selina gasped, jumping up and almost dropping her ammonia bottle. “My dear Bella! Home?”
Jimmy groaned at the foot of the stairs, but Anne Brown was getting over her tears and now she turned on me in a temper.
“It’s all your fault,” she said. “I was going to stay at home and get a little sleep—”
“Well, you can sleep now,” Dallas broke in. “There’ll be nothing to do but sleep.”
“I think you haven’t grasped the situation, Dal,” I said icily. “There will be plenty to do. There isn’t a servant in the house!”
“No servants!” everybody cried at once. The Mercer girls stopped giggling.
“Holy cats!” Max stopped in the act of hanging up his overcoat. “Do you mean—why, I can’t shave myself! I’ll cut my head off.”
“You’ll do more than that,” I retorted grimly. “You will carry coal and tend fires and empty ash pans, and when you are not doing any of those things there will be pots and pans to wash and beds to make.”
Then there WAS a row. We had worked back to the den now, and I stood in front of the fireplace and let the storm beat around me, and tried to look perfectly cold and indifferent, and not to see Mr. Harbison’s shocked face. No wonder he thought them a lot of savages, browbeating their hostess the way they did.
“It’s a fool thing anyhow,” Max Reed wound up, “to celebrate the anniversary of a divorce—especially—” Here he caught Jim’s eye and stopped. But I had suddenly remembered. BELLA DOWN IN THE BASEMENT!
Could anything have been worse? And of course she would have hysteria and then turn on me and blame me for it all. It all came over me at once and overwhelmed me, while Anne was crying and saying she wouldn’t cook if she starved for it, and Aunt Selina was taking off her wraps. I felt queer all over, and I sat down suddenly. Mr. Harbison was looking at me, and he brought me a glass of wine.
“It won’t be so bad as you fear,” he said comfortingly. “There will be no danger once we are vaccinated, and many hands make light work. They are pretty raw now, because the thing is new to them, but by morning they will be reconciled.”
“It isn’t the work; it is something entirely different,” I said. And it was. Bella and work could hardly be spoken in the same breath.
If I had only turned her out as she deserved to be, when she first came, instead of allowing her to carry through the wretched farce about seeing Takahiro! Or if I had only run to the basement the moment the house was quarantined, and got her out the areaway or the coal hole! And now time was flying, and Aunt Selina had me by the arm, and any moment I expected Bella to pounce on us through the doorway and the whole situation to explode with a bang.
It was after eleven before they were rational enough to discuss ways and means, and, of course, the first thing suggested was that we all adjourn below stairs and clean up after dinner. I could have slain Max Reed for the notion, and the Mercer girls for taking him up.
“Of course we will,” they said in a duet. “What a lark!” And they actually began to pin up their dinner gowns. It was Jim who stopped that.
“Oh, look here, you people,” he objected, “I’m not going to let you do that. We’ll get some servants in tomorrow. I’ll go down and put out the lights. There will be enough clean dishes for breakfast.”
It was lucky for me that they started a new discussion then and there about who would get the breakfast. In the midst of the excitement I slipped away to carry the news to Bella. She was where I had left her, and she had made herself a cup of tea, and was very much at home, which was natural.
“Do you know,” she said ominously, “that you have been away for two hours; and that I have gone through agonies of nervousness for fear Jim Wilson would come down and think I came here to see him?”
“No one would think that, Bella,” I soothed her. “Everybody knows you loathe him—Jim, too.” She looked at me over the edge of her cup.
“I’ll run along now,” she said, “since Takahiro isn’t here. And if Jim has any sense at all, he will clear out every maid in the house. I never saw such a kitchen in all my life. Well, lead the way, Kit. I suppose they are deep in bridge, or roulette, or something.”
She was fixing her veil, and I saw I would have to tell her. Personally, I would much rather have told her the house was on fire.
“Wait a minute, Bella,” I said. “You see, something queer has happened. You know this is the anniversary—well, you know what it is—and Jim was awfully glum. So we thought we would come—”
“What are you driving at?” she demanded. “You are sea-green, Kit. What’s the matter? You needn’t think I mind because Jim has a jollification to celebrate his divorce.”
“It—it was Takahiro—in the ambulance,” I blurted. “Smallpox. We—Bella, we are shut in, quarantined.”
She didn’t faint. She just sat down and stared at me, and I stared back at her. Then a miserable alarm clock on the table suddenly went off like an explosion, and Bella began to laugh. I knew what that was—hysteria. She always had attacks like that when things went wrong. I was quite despairing by that time; I hoped they would all hear her and come downstairs and take her up and put her to bed like a Christian, so she could giggle her soul out. But after a bit she quieted down and began to cry softly, and I knew the worst was over. I gave her a shake, and she was so angry that she got over it altogether.
“Kit, you are horrid,” she choked. “Don’t you see what a position I am in? I am not going upstairs to face Anne and the rest of them. You can just put me in the coal cellar.”
“Isn’t there a window you could get through?” I asked desperately. “Locking the door doesn’t shut up a whole house.”
Bella’s courage revived at that, and she said yes, there were windows, plenty of them, only she didn’t see how she could get out. And I said she would HAVE to get out, because I was playing Bella in the performance, and I didn’t care to have an understudy. Then the situation dawned on her, and she sat down and laughed herself weak in the knees. Of course she wanted to stay, then, and see the fun out. But I was firm; she would have to go, and I told her so. Things were complicated enough without her.
Well, we looked funny, no doubt, Bella in a Russian pony automobile coat over the black satin she had worn at the Clevelands’ dinner, and I in cream lace, the skirt gathered up from the kitchen floor, with Bella’s ermine pelerine around my bare shoulders, and dishes and overturned chairs everywhere.
Bella knew more about the lower regions of her ex-home than I would have thought. She opened a door in a corner and led the way through a narrow hall past the refrigerating room, to a huge, cemented cellar, with a furnace in the center, and a half-dozen electric lights making it really brilliant.
“Get a chair,” Bella said over her shoulder, excitedly. “I can get out easily here, through the coal hole. Imagine my—”
But it was my turn to grip Bella. From behind the furnace were coming the most terrible sounds, rasping noises that fairly frayed the silk of my nerves. We stood petrified for an instant. Then Bella laughed. “They are not all gone,” she said carefully. “Some one is asleep there.”
We tiptoed to where we could see around the furnace, and, sure enough, some one WAS asleep there. Only, it was not one of the servants; it was a portly policeman, with a newspaper and an empty plate on the floor on one side, and a champagne bottle on the other. He had slid down in his chair, with his chin on his brass buttons, and his helmet had rolled a dozen feet away. Bella had to clap her hand over her mouth.
“Fairly caught!” she whispered. “Sartor Resartus, the arrester arrested. Oh, Jim and his flawless service!”
But after we got over our surprise, we saw the situation was serious. The policeman was threatening to awaken. Once he stopped snoring to yawn noisily, and we beat a hasty retreat. Bella switched off the lights in a hurry and locked the door behind us. We hardly breathed until we were back in the kitchen again, and everything quiet. And then Jimmy called my name from up above somewheres.
“I am going to call him down, Bella,” I said firmly. “Let him help you out. I’m sure I don’t see why I should have all this when the two of you—”
“Oh, no, no! Surely, Kit, you wouldn’t be so cruel!” she whispered pleadingly. “You know what he would think. He—oh, Kit, let them all get settled for the night, and then come down, like a dear, and help me out. I know loads of ways—honestly I do.”
“If I leave you here,” I debated, “what about the policeman?”
“Never mind him”—frantically. “Listen! There’s Jim up in the pantry. Run, for the sake of Heaven!”
So—I ran. At the top of the stairs I met Jimmy, very crumpled as to shirt-front and dejected as to face.
“I’ve been hunting everywhere for you,” he said dismally. “I thought you had added to the general merriment by falling downstairs and breaking your neck.”
I went past him with my chin up. Now that I had time to think about it, I was furiously angry with him.
“Kit!” he called after me appealingly, but I would not hear. Then he adopted different tactics. He took advantage of my catching my foot in the lace of my gown to pass me, and to stand with his back against the door.
“You’re not going until you hear me, Kit,” he declared miserably. “In the first place, for all you are down on me, is it my fault? Honestly, now IS IT MY FAULT?”
I refused to speak.
“I was coming home to be miserable alone,” he went on, “and—oh, I know you meant well, Kit; but YOU asked all these crazy people here.”
“Perhaps you will give me credit for some things,” I said wearily. “I did NOT give Takahiro smallpox, for instance, and—if you will permit me to mention the fact—Aunt Selina is not MY Aunt Selina.”
“That’s what I wanted to speak to you about,” Jimmy went on wretchedly, trying not to look at me. “You see, when they were rowing so about who would get the breakfast—I never saw such a lot of people; half of them never touch breakfast, but of course now they want all kinds of things—when they were talking, Aunt Selina said she knew YOU would get it, being the hostess, and responsible, besides knowing where things are kept.” He had fixed his eyes on the orchids, and he looked shrunken, actually shrunken. “I thought,” he finished, “you might give me a few pointers now, and I could come down in the morning, and—and fuss up something, coffee and so on. I would say you did it! Oh, hang it all, Kit, why don’t you say something?”
“What do you want me to say?” I demanded. “That I love to cook, and of course I’ll fix trays and carry them up in the morning to Anne Brown and Leila Mercer and the rest; and that I will have the shaving water ready—”
“I know what I’m going to do,” Jimmy said, with a sudden resolution. “Aunt Selina and her money can go to blazes. I am going right upstairs and tell her the truth, tell her who you are, what I am, and all the rest of it.” He opened the door.
“You’ll do nothing of the kind,” I gasped, catching him in time. “Don’t you dare, Jimmy Wilson! Why, what would they think of me? After letting her call me Bella, and him—Jim, if Mr. Harbison ever learns the truth—I—I will take poison. If we are going to be shut up here together, we will have to carry it on. I couldn’t stand the disgrace.”
In spite of an heroic effort, Jim looked relieved. “They have been hunting for the linen closet,” he said, more cheerfully, “and there will be room enough, I think. Harbison and I will hang out in the studio; there are two couches there. I’m afraid you’ll have to take Aunt Selina, Kit.”
“Certainly,” I said coldly. That was the way it was all along. Whenever there was something to do that no one else would undertake—any unpleasant responsibility—that entire mongrel household turned with one gesture and pointed its finger at me! Well, it is over now, and I ought not to be bitter, considering everything.
It was quite characteristic of that memorable evening (that is quite novelesque, I think) that my interview with Jimmy should have a sensational ending. He was terribly down, of course, and as I was trying to pass him to get to the door, he caught my hand.
“You’re a girl in a thousand, Kit,” he said forlornly. “If I were not so damnably, hopelessly, idiotically in love with—somebody else, I should be crazy about you.”
“Don’t be maudlin,” I retorted. “Would you mind letting my hand go?” I felt sure Bella could hear.
“Oh, come now, Kit,” he implored, “we’ve always got along so well. It’s a shame to let a thing like this make us bad friends. Aren’t you ever going to forgive me?”
“Never,” I said promptly. “When I once get away, I don’t want ever to see you again. I was never so humiliated in my life. I loathe you!”
Then I turned around, and, of course, there was Aunt Selina with her eyes protruding until you could have knocked them off with a stick, and beside her, very red and uncomfortable, Mr. Harbison!
“Bella!” she said in a shocked voice, “is that the way you speak to your husband! It is high time I came here, I think, and took a hand in this affair.”
“Oh, never mind, Aunt Selina,” Jim said, with a sheepish grin. “Kit—Bella is tired and nervous. This is a h—deuce of a situation. No—er—servants, and all that.”
But Aunt Selina did mind, and showed it. She pulled the unlucky Harbison man through the door and closed it, and then stood glaring at both of us.
“Every little quarrel is an apple knocked from the tree of love,” she announced oratorically.
“This was a very little quarrel,” Jim said, edging toward the door; “a—a green apple, Aunt Selina, a colicky little green apple.” But she was not to be diverted.
“Bella,” she said severely, “you said you loathed him. You didn’t mean that.”
“But I do!” I cried hysterically. “There isn’t any word to tell how I—how I detest him.”
Then I swept past them all and flew to Bella’s dressing room and locked myself in. Aunt Selina knocked until she was tired, then gave up and went to bed.
That was the night Anne Brown’s pearl collar was stolen!
Of course, one knows that there are people who in a different grade of society would be shoplifters and pickpockets. When they are restrained by obligation or environment they become a little overkeen at bridge, or take the wrong sables, or stuff a gold-backed brush into a muff at a reception. You remember the ivory dressing set that Theodora Bucknell had, fastened with fine gold chains? And the sensation it caused at the Bucknell cotillion when Mrs. Van Zire went sweeping to her carriage with two feet of gold chain hanging from the front of her wrap?
But Anne’s pearl collar was different. In the first place, instead of three or four hundred people, the suspicion had to be divided among ten. And of those ten, at least eight of us were friends, and the other two had been vouched for by the Browns and Jimmy. It was a horrible mix-up. For the necklace was gone—there couldn’t be any doubt of that—and although, as Dallas said, it couldn’t get out of the house, still, there were plenty of places to hide the thing.
The worst of our trouble really originated with Max Reed, after all. For it was Max who made the silly wager over the telephone, with Dick Bagley. He bet five hundred even that one of us, at least, would break quarantine within the next twenty-four hours, and, of course, that settled it. Dick told it around the club as a joke, and a man who owns a newspaper heard him and called up the paper. Then the paper called up the health office, after setting up a flaming scare-head, “Will Money Free Them? Board of Health versus Millionaire.”
It was almost three when the house settled down—nobody had any night clothes, although finally, through Dallas, who gave them to Anne, who gave them to the rest, we got some things of Jimmy’s—and I was still dressed. The house was perfectly quiet, and, after listening carefully, I went slowly down the stairs. There was a light in the hall, and another back in the dining room, and I got along without any trouble. But the pantry, where the stairs led down, was dark, and the wretched swinging door would not stay open.
I caught my skirt in the door as I went through, and I had to stop to loosen it. And in that awful minute I heard some one breathing just beside me. I had stooped to my gown, and I turned my head without straightening—I couldn’t have raised myself to an erect posture, for my knees were giving way under me—and just at my feet lay the still glowing end of a match!
I had to swallow twice before I could speak. Then I said sharply:
“Who’s there?”
The man was so close it is a wonder I had not walked into him; his voice was right at my ear.
“I am sorry I startled you,” he said quietly. “I was afraid to speak suddenly, or move, for fear I would do—what I have done.”
It was Mr. Harbison.
“I—I thought you were—it is very late,” I managed to say, with dry lips. “Do you know where the electric switch is?”
“Mrs. Wilson!” It was clear he had not known me before. “Why, no; don’t you?”
“I am all confused,” I muttered, and beat a retreat into the dining room. There, in the friendly light, we could at least see each other, and I think he was as much impressed by the fact that I had not undressed as I was by the fact that he HAD, partly. He wore a hideous dressing gown of Jimmy’s, much too small, and his hair, parted and plastered down in the early evening, stood up in a sort of brown brush all over his head. He was trying to flatten it with his hands.
“It must be three o’clock,” he said, with polite surprise, “and the house is like a barn. You ought not to be running around with your arms uncovered, Mrs. Wilson. Surely you could have called some of us.”
“I didn’t wish to disturb any one,” I said, with distinct truth.
“I suppose you are like me,” he said. “The novelty of the situation—and everything. I got to thinking things over, and then I realized the studio was getting cold, so I thought I would come down and take a look at the furnace. I didn’t suppose any one else would think of it. But I lost myself in that pantry, stumbled against a half-open drawer, and nearly went down the dumb-waiter.” And, as if in judgment on me, at that instant came two rather terrific thumps from somewhere below, and inarticulate words, shouted rather than spoken. It was uncanny, of course, coming as it did through the register at our feet. Mr. Harbison looked startled.
“Oh, by the way,” I said, as carelessly as I could. “In the excitement, I forgot to mention it. There is a policeman asleep in the furnace room. I—I suppose we will have to keep him now,” I finished as airily as possible.
“Oh, a policeman—in the cellar,” he repeated, staring at me, and he moved toward the pantry door.
“You needn’t go down,” I said feverishly, with visions of Bella Knowles sitting on the kitchen table, surrounded by soiled dishes and all the cheerless aftermath of a dinner party. “Please don’t go down. I—it’s one of my rules—never to let a stranger go down to the kitchen. I—I’m peculiar—that way—and besides, it’s—it’s mussy.”
Bang! Crash! through the register pipe, and some language quite articulate. Then silence.
“Look here, Mrs. Wilson,” he said resolutely. “What do I care about the kitchen? I’m going down and arrest that policeman for disturbing the peace. He will have the pipes down.”
“You must not go,” I said with desperate firmness. “He—he is probably in a very dangerous state just now. We—I—locked him in.”
The Harbison man grinned and then became serious.
“Why don’t you tell me the whole thing?” he demanded. “You’ve been in trouble all evening, and—you can trust me, you know, because I am a stranger; because the minute this crazy quarantine is raised I am off to the Argentine Republic,” (perhaps he said Chili) “and because I don’t know anything at all about you. You see, I have to believe what you tell me, having no personal knowledge of any of you to go on. Now tell me—whom have you hidden in the cellar, besides the policeman?”
There was no use trying to deceive him; he was looking straight into my eyes. So I decided to make the best of a bad thing. Anyhow, it was going to require strength to get Bella through the coal hole with one arm and restrain the policeman with the other.
“Come,” I said, making a sudden resolution, and led the way down the stairs.
He said nothing when he saw Bella, for which I was grateful. She was sitting at the table, with her arms in front of her, and her head buried in them. And then I saw she was asleep. Her hat and veil were laid beside her, and she had taken off her coat and draped it around her. She had rummaged out a cold pheasant and some salad, and had evidently had a little supper. Supper and a nap, while I worried myself gray-headed about her!
“She—she came in unexpectedly—something about the butler,” I explained under my breath. “And—she doesn’t want to stay. She is on bad terms with—with some of the people upstairs. You can see how impossible the situation is.”
“I doubt if we can get her out,” he said, as if the situation were quite ordinary. “However, we can try. She seems very comfortable. It’s a pity to rouse her.”
Here the prisoner in the furnace room broke out afresh. It sounded as though he had taken a lump of coal and was attacking the lock. Mr. Harbison followed the noise, and I could hear him arguing, not gently.
“Another sound,” he finished, “and you won’t get out of here at all, unless you crawl up the furnace pipe!”
When he came back, Bella was rousing. She lifted her head with her eyes shut and then opened them one at a time, blinked, and sat up. She didn’t see him at first.
“You wretch!” she said ungratefully, after she had yawned. “Do you know what time it is? And that—” Then she saw Mr. Harbison and sat staring at him.
“This is Mr. Harbison,” I said to her hastily. “He—he came with Anne and Dal and—he is shut in, too.”
By that time Bella had seen how handsome he was, and she took a hair pin out of her mouth, and arched her eyebrows, which was always Bella’s best pose.
“I am Miss Knowles,” she said sweetly (of course, the court had given her back her name), “and I stopped in tonight, thinking the house was empty, to see about a—a butler. Unfortunately, the house was quarantined just at that time, and—here I am. Surely there can not be any harm in helping me to get out?” (Pleading tone.) “I have not been exposed to any contagion, and in the exhausted state of my health the confinement would be positively dangerous.”
She rolled her eyes at him, and I could see she was making an impression. Of course she was free. She had a perfect right to marry again, but I will say this: Bella is a lot better looking by electric light than she is the next morning.
The upshot of it was that the gentleman who built bridges and looked down on society from a lofty, lonely pinnacle agreed to help one of the most gleaming members of the aforesaid society to outwit the law.
It took about fifteen minutes to quiet the policeman. Nobody ever knew what Mr. Harbison did to him, but for twenty-four hours he was quite tractable. He changed after that, but that comes later in the story. Anyhow, the Harbison man went upstairs and came down with a Bagdad curtain and a cushion to match, and took them into the furnace room, and came out and locked the door behind him, and then we were ready for Bella’s escape.
But there were four special officers and three reporters watching the house, as a result of Max Reed’s idiocy. Once, after trying all the other windows and finding them guarded, we discovered a little bit of a hole in an out-of-the-way corner that looked like a ventilator and was covered with a heavy wire screen. No prisoners ever dug their way out of a dungeon with more energy than that with which we attached that screen, hacking at it with kitchen knives, whispering like conspirators, being scratched with the ragged edges of the wire, frozen with the cold air one minute and boiling with excitement the next. And when the wire was cut, and Bella had rolled her coat up and thrust it through and was standing on a chair ready to follow, something outside that had looked like a barrel moved, and said, “Oh, I wouldn’t do that if I were you. It would be certain to be undignified, and probably it would be unpleasant—later.”
We coaxed and pleaded and tried to bribe, and that happened, as it turned out, to be one of the worst things we had to endure. For the whole conversation came out the next afternoon in the paper, with the most awful drawings, and the reporter said it was the flashing of the jewels we wore that first attracted his attention. And that brings me back to the robbery.
For when we had crept back to the kitchen, and Bella was fumbling for her handkerchief to cry into and the Harbison man was trying to apologize for the language he had used to the reporter, and I was on the verge of a nervous chill—well, it was then that Bella forgot all about crying and jumped and held out her arm.
“My diamond bracelet!” she screeched. “Look, I’ve lost it.”
Well, we went over every inch of that basement, until I knew every crack in the flooring, every spot on the cement. And Bella was nasty, and said that she had never seen that part of the house in such condition, and that if I had acted like a sane person and put her out, when she had no business there at all, she would have had her freedom and her bracelet, and that if we were playing a joke on her (as if we felt like joking!) we would please give her the bracelet and let her go and die in a corner; she felt very queer.
At half-past four o’clock we gave up.
“It’s gone,” I said. “I don’t believe you wore it here. No one could have taken it. There wasn’t a soul in this part of the house, except the policeman and he’s locked in.”
At five o’clock we put her to sleep in the den. She was in a fearful temper, and I was glad enough to be able to shut the door on her. Tom Harbison—that was his name—helped me to creep upstairs, and wanted to get me a glass of ale to make me sleep. But I said it would be of no use, as I had to get up and get the breakfast. The last thing he said was that the policeman seemed above the average in intelligence, and perhaps we could train him to do plain cooking and dishwashing.
I did not go to sleep at once. I lay on the chintz-covered divan in Bella’s dressing room and stared at the picture of her with the violets underneath. I couldn’t see what there was about Bella to inspire such undying devotion, but I had to admit that she had looked handsome that night, and that the Harbison man had certainly been impressed.
At seven o’clock Jimmy Wilson pounded at my door, and I could have choked him joyfully. I dragged myself to the door and opened it, and then I heard excited voices. Everybody seemed to be up but Aunt Selina, and they were all talking at once.
Anne Brown was in the corner of the group, waving her hands, while Dallas was trying to hook the back of her gown with one hand and hold a blanket around himself with the other. No one was dressed except Anne, and she had been up for an hour, looking in shoes and under the corners of rugs and around the bed clothing for her jeweled collar. When she saw me she began all over again.
“I had it on when I went into my room,” she declared, “and I put it on the dressing table when I undressed. I meant to put it under my pillow, but I forgot. And I didn’t sleep well; I was awake half the night. Wasn’t I, Dal? Then, when the clock downstairs in the hall was chiming five, something roused me, and I sat up in bed. It was still dark, but I pinched Dal and said there was somebody in the room. You remember that, don’t you, Dal?”
“I thought you had nightmare,” he said sheepishly.
“I lay still for ages, it seemed to me, and then—the door into the hall closed. I heard the catch click. I turned on the light over the bed then, and the room was empty. I thought of my collar, and although it seemed ridiculous, with the house sealed as it is, and all of us friends for years—well, I got up and looked, and it was gone!”
No one spoke for an instant. It WAS a queer situation, for the collar was gone; Anne’s red eyes showed it was true. And there we stood, every one of us a miserable picture of guilt, and tried to look innocent and debonair and unsuspicious. Finally Jim held up his hand and signified that he wanted to say something.
“It’s like this,” he said, “until this thing is cleared up, for Heaven’s sake, let’s try to be sane! If every fellow thinks the other fellow did it, this house will be a nice little hell to live in. And if anybody”—here he glared around—“if anybody has got funny and is hiding those jewels, I want to say that he’d better speak up now. Later, it won’t be so easy for him. It’s a mighty poor joke.”
But nobody spoke.