XIIUNDER COVER OF NIGHT
Backat the house Beatrice and Peter went into the east drawing-room, where Mrs. Richmond was giving tea to her half dozen guests. As they entered from the hall Richmond appeared in the opposite doorway of the billiard room. He swept Peter’s face with one of his keen glances. As soon as the agitations and readjustments incident to new arrivals were over, he took his daughter aside.
“Been quarreling with Peter?” said he.
She turned her head, called out: “Hanky—just a minute. You’ll excuse him, Mrs. Martini?” And when Peter, red and ill at ease, was with them in the deep window, she said: “Tell him.”
“Your daughter has—has consented,” said Peter.
Richmond beamed and wrung his hand.
“And as we want to get to London for the end of the season,” continued Peter, “we’d like to be married the last of next month.”
“No objection—none whatever,” said Richmond.
“I’m not sure,” said Beatrice, all this time inscrutably calm. “I’ll have to talk with mother first. It’s not easy to get together the clothes in such a little time.”
“Nonsense,” cried Richmond. “There’s the cable.”
“And you’ll want most of the things sent to you in London,” suggested Peter.
Beatrice shrugged her shoulders. “Just as mamma says.” And she strolled over to the tea table and cut herself a slice of layer cake, which she proceeded to eat with much deliberation and enjoyment.
The two men stood together observing her. Up came Mrs. Martini, slim and willowy and dressed in the extreme of the skin-tight fashions of that year. “What are you two looking so gloomy about?” inquired she.
Richmond scowled. “Gloomy?” said he, with a disagreeable laugh. “We feel anything but gloomy. That is—er—of course my feelings are somewhat confused. I’ve just learned that Peter’s going to take Beatrice away from me the end of next month.”
Peter’s smile in response to Mrs. Martini’s effusive congratulations was sickly, was with difficulty kept alive long enough to meet the requirements of conventionality.
Beatrice had not shown the faintest sign that she was conscious of imprisonment. So far as Richmond observed, not once had she made any attempt to break through or even to explore the limits assigned her. Had it not been for the discontent plain to see upon Peter’s florid, vigorously healthy countenance throughout the four days he lingered at Red Hill, Richmond would have assumed that his daughter had regained her reason as he had felt confident she would. Beatrice did make an effort in public to treat Peter as her fiancé; but she had to give it up. Her nerves refused to assist her in her game of hypocrisy beyond a certain point—and Peter had become physically repulsive to her. She did not regard this defect in her otherwise perfect pose as serious. She knew that her father was not one to relax vigilance because he had won. So, what advantage would there be in striving, and probably failing, to remove his last suspicion?
Without betraying herself she had thoroughly examined all the metes and bounds of her prison. She found it everywhere worthy of her father’s minute ingenuity. By means of his pretext of alarm about cranks and kidnapers she was being thoroughly spied upon without the spies suspecting what they were really about. By day there were the personal guards, to inform him if she tried to communicate with Rogereither personally or by message. By night there were the watchman within and the three patrolmen without, and a system of burglar alarms that made it impossible for anyone either to leave or to enter without flooding the whole house with light and starting up a clamor of bells from attics to cellars.
Apparently she was as free as air—free to roam anywhere in the vast wilderness surrounding the gardens and terraces and lawns from the midst of which the big chateau rose. Really, she could not move a step in secret—and to give Roger the warning she must see him face to face without her father’s knowledge. For, if her father purposed to keep faith with her, it would be folly to give him reason to feel he would do well to ruin Roger anyhow; and, if he did not purpose to keep the agreement under which she had returned and had accepted Peter, it would be madness to provoke him to attack Roger immediately. She must see Roger secretly.
But how?
If chance there was, that chance must be under cover of night—night, when she was at least free from the espionage of human eyes. How could she get out of the house undetected and get back into it unsuspected? And if she could accomplish this well-nigh impossible feat, how arrange to meet Roger—when shecould not communicate with him, when she did not even know where he lived?
Every system of human devising has its weak point. By observing and thinking Beatrice discovered the weak point in this system of her father’s. As soon as she formed her plan she got ready this note:
Chang:It is absolutely necessary that I see you for a few minutes. My only chance is at night. So, come down to the cascade at one o’clock the morning after you get this. Don’t fail me. Don’t think me hysterical or sentimental. I might almost say this is a matter of life and death.Rix.
Chang:
It is absolutely necessary that I see you for a few minutes. My only chance is at night. So, come down to the cascade at one o’clock the morning after you get this. Don’t fail me. Don’t think me hysterical or sentimental. I might almost say this is a matter of life and death.
Rix.
The burglar alarms were switched on every night by Conrad Pinney, the superintendent, just after the house was closed. They were switched off at five in the morning by Tom, the indoors watchman, when the lowest rank of menials in the service of the establishment descended from their little rooms under the eaves of the west wing to make ready the first-floor rooms for the day. The house was closed as soon as the last member of the family went up to his or her rooms. To escape, she must choose the moment or so between the ascending of the last member of the family and the switching on of the alarms—and it must be on a nightwhen some one member of the family stayed down long enough after the going of the rest to make it certain there would be no accidental glancing into her rooms to see that all was well. To get back into the house she must wait until it was opened at five o’clock and slip in unseen by the menial sweepers and cleaners and polishers.
On Tuesdays and Thursdays her father brought from town a bundle of papers which he usually sat up with until midnight or even one o’clock. Then he and Pinney often walked up and down the terrace before the main entrance and smoked for twenty minutes. Peter went away on a Monday. On Tuesday night there were no guests. At dinner were only the family—her mother, her father and herself, her mother’s secretary, Miss Cleets, Mrs. Lambert, the housekeeper, and Pinney. As they sat at table Beatrice revolved her project, decided she would risk a slight change in it that would spare her a night outdoors and the danger of being seen as she entered in the early morning. After dinner she and her mother and the housekeeper and Pinney played bridge until half past ten. By eleven o’clock everyone was gone from downstairs but her father, Pinney, and two servants. In her room in the dark she waited until half past eleven, then changed to outing dress, descended and slipped into the graysalon. Its windows had been locked for the night. She unlocked one, opened it, went out upon the broad, stone veranda, closed the window behind her. The sky was fortunately overcast, or she would have been in full view, as the moon was on that side of the house.
She crept along in the shadow of wall and shrubbery until she was in the woods. There she struck into a path and fled down the hill toward the boathouse. When she was about half way she remembered the outside watchmen—remembered that the boathouse was one of their stations. It would be folly to risk running into them; she must make the trip to the studio on foot by rounding the end of the lake—full five miles instead of less than three. At the shortest she would be gone, not about two hours, but more than three. So, it was useless to think of getting in before her father went to bed and the alarms were switched on. Instead of hurry there was time to waste—all the time before five in the morning. She strolled along, taking the longest way and keeping entirely clear of the watchmen’s routes among the several groups of widely separated outbuildings—the stables and garage, the water, lighting and laundry plants, the kennels, the hothouses, the farm and dairy buildings.
A fine, soft rain fell, but it did not trouble her as the foliage was now—early May—so thick that it wasalmost a roof. When she came out of the woods near the studio the rain had ceased and the moon, never so thickly veiled that it did not give her light, sailed in a clear path among the separating clouds. She looked at the watch on her wrist; it was nearly one o’clock. “I came too quickly,” she said. “I must do better going back.”
She found the studio door open, as she expected; there were no tramps in that region, and Red Hill was guarded only because New York thieves might plan an expedition expressly to plunder it. She dropped the hasp from the staple, pushed the big door open.
The room within was in the full pour of the moon now straight above the huge skylight. She looked round, her heart beating wildly—not with fear, not with expectation, but with memory. From that bench there she had first seen him. There she had watched him making chocolate. There they had sat drinking it, she admiring the swift, vivid play of emotion upon his handsome face—and what interesting emotion!—so free—so simple—so strong—so genuine! She went to the bench, seated herself, stretched herself at full length—and sobbed. “Oh, if you only knew!” she cried. “I’m so different now! I’ve learned so much—and I love you—love you, Chang!” It thrilled and comforted her to speak out her heart without reserve in that place.
She searched the room for some memento of him. In one of the wide chinks in the masonry of the chimney she found a pipe—an old, evil-smelling thing, its mouthpiece almost bitten through. She laughed and cried over it, touching it caressingly, making a face at its really fearful odor, but loving it none the less. She tore up an old newspaper, wrapped the pipe carefully to shut in that odor if possible.
She sat on one of the rough, uncomfortable chairs and proceeded to live over every moment of her acquaintance with him—to recall all he had said and done and looked, all his little peculiarities of gesture and accent; to analyze his fascination for her—why she loved him—the thousand and one reasons in addition to the real reason—which, of course, was that he was Chang, the biggest and straightest and honestest man she had ever known, not even self-conscious enough to be modest. The moon crossed the skylight; the room faded into half darkness; the moon reappeared at the west window, high up in the wall. She dreamed on and on—the dreams with which she filled most of her waking moments when she was alone. When she remembered to look at her watch it was five minutes after three!
She sprang up, took the note from her bosom, thrust it three quarters through the crack between the closet door and its frame, just above the lock. Wouldhe get it that morning? Or, would it be several days before he came there? “I’ll go to the cascade two nights,” said she. “Then, if he doesn’t come, I’ll try some other way.”
When she reached the top of Red Hill it was day, though the sun was not yet above the horizon. She circled round until she was opposite the main entrance, but well concealed. She had come down early so often that she knew the routine through which the servants would go. Just as the first rays of the sun lit upon the topmost of the pointed roofs, Tom, the indoors watchman, appeared in the main entrance. The alarms were off. She circled back to the west and, by way of the dense shrubbery that would hide her from any chance gazer from windows, she gained the veranda—the unlocked window of the gray salon. Her heart stood still while she was raising that window. When no sound of bells banging and clanging came she drew a long breath, stepped weakly through, lowered and locked the window. The rest of the journey was comparatively free from danger.
When her maid came in at nine o’clock she was sleeping soundly; and all traces of her expedition had been removed by her own unaccustomed hands from skirt and leggings and shoes. The old pipe in its newspaper wrappings was hidden deep in a drawer of lingerieodorous of delicate sachet—a drawer of which she had the only key.
Getting away from the house the next night was not so easy.
Several guests came from town in the afternoon. She was obliged to stay down until the last, had difficulty in preventing Josephine Burroughs from following her into her room to chatter for an hour or longer. All evening, as her father lingered in the drawing-room, she had forced herself to act in her gayest, most unconcerned manner. Her nerves were on edge and she had a fever. She knew the servants were closing the house in mad haste. There was no time to change dress or even shoes; there was just time to send her maid away, to catch up a long wrap, turn out her lights and dart downstairs. Probably no one was yet in bed, but she must take the chance of some accidental late call upon her. As she raised the window in the gray salon she confidently expected to hear the bells, to be dazzled by sudden flash of lights. She did not breathe until she had it lowered.
It was after midnight. She congratulated herself on having fixed one o’clock as the hour for the meeting. She would have just time to reach the little cataract. She had not gone far before her slippers were in adreadful state and her legs wet to the knees. “The excitement’s the only thing that can save me from the cold of my life,” thought she. Colds were serious matters with her—disfiguring, desperately uncomfortable, slow to take leave. Long before she reached the lower end of the lake she could feel that her dress was a bedraggled wreck, high though she had held it. As she went along the rough shore path she glanced from time to time at the meeting place on the opposite side. The moon made everything distinct; he was not there. Had it taken her longer to come than she thought, and had he gone? Or had he disregarded her note? Or had he not yet got it? “I don’t believe I’ll dare come again,” she said to herself despondently. But she knew that she would.
She crossed the brook on the stones that fretted it. She reached the place where she could see the grass worn by his working at his easel, the mud of the lake’s brim creased by the keel of her canoe. She looked all round, straining her eyes into the dimness under the trees.
“Chang!” she called.
She gazed, listened, waited. “Chang!” she called again, a sob in her voice.
From the deep shadow of the maple tree immediately in front of her came Roger’s voice: “Some one is coming toward us in a boat.”
“Don’t move!” she exclaimed in an undertone. “No matter what happens, don’t show yourself. I must speak quickly,” she hurried on. “That money you said you had—you must sell out whatever it’s invested in and put it in Government bonds—right away. Will you? Promise me!”
“I can’t,” replied he. “It’s in bonds of the Wauchong Railroad, that’s just gone into the hands of a receiver.”
Beatrice gasped. “Oh!” she cried. But she must not delay. “My father did it,” she hurried on, “because he wants to ruin you and drive you out of the country.”
Roger laughed quietly. “Don’t worry, Rix. I’m all right.”
“I’ve got so much to say. I must see you again——”
“No. This is good-by. I read about your engagement, and I was glad you had made up your mind to do the sensible thing. I hope you’ll be happy—and you will be. I’ll send you the picture as a wedding present.”
“Chang—don’t believe that,” cried she imploringly. “Imustsee you. As soon as I can I’ll let you know. I’m watched. But I’ll give them the slip and——”
“You’ll do nothing stealthy—not with my help,” answered he. “I’ll not come again——”
The clash of oar in lock struck both silent. A rowboat glided from the shadows, thrust its nose far up the muddy shore. Beatrice immediately recognized her father the only occupant. He stood up, looking round. He said in a voice of suspiciously pleasant intonation, “I see Wade hasn’t come yet. Well, I’ll wait and take you back. The walking’s bad—especially in that kind of dress.”
Each could see the other’s face plainly in that bright moonlight. She showed no more sign of agitation than he, and he was suave. Beatrice spoke. “Yes, I’ve ruined my dress. And the slippers—they’re pulp.” She glanced round. “What time is it?”
“Half past one,” he announced, as the result of a look at his watch.
“It’s later than I thought. I’m ready to go home now.”
“I’ve plenty of time,” protested Richmond.
“No. Let’s go. There’s nothing to stay for.”
And she stepped into the boat, steadying herself with a hand on his shoulder as she passed him on her way to sit in the stern. It had been almost necessary that she steady herself somehow in passing him in that rather narrow rowboat. She was hardly conscious that she had touched him; he was touching her as a matter of course, and also his own guiding and steadying handwas on her arm. Yet the incident, apparently trifling, was in fact most significant in itself and fraught with highly important consequences. In the first place it showed that, though father and daughter fancied they were hating each other to the uttermost, they in reality were still father and daughter, with at least one strong, uncleft bond of sympathy through the recognition by each in the other of qualities both intensely admired—for two people who deeply hate do not touch each other except in anger. Also, it altered their immediate relationship; it softened the animosities that were raging for utterance in each, and made it impossible for the quarrel that was bound to come to be of exactly the same complexion—of the same peculiar character it would have taken had they not touched each other.
When she was seated he pushed off and disposed himself at the oars. He kept to the middle of the lake, where the light was clear and strong. They had not gone many yards on that water journey of three miles before her father said:
“You wanted to tell him what I warned you I would do?”
“Yes.”
“And then you intended to break your promise to me?”
“No. I made no promise—not in so many words.But I was going to stand by the engagement. Peter has become repulsive to me, but—any man would be equally so. And I might as well marry and have done with.”
“A few years from now,” said her father, “you will thank me for having saved you from your folly.”
She dropped her hand into the water. The moon-beams glistened on her yellow hair, on her smooth, young face and neck.
“You ought to have known,” pursued her father, “that I would not have told you I would ruin Wade unless it was impossible for him to escape. I have put his investments in such a position that I can wipe them out or not. What I’ll do will depend on whether you are foolish or sensible.”
She glanced up for an instant. Then he was not so guilty as she had thought—that is,perhapshe was not.
“You say you didn’t intend to break the engagement,” he went on. “Why, then, did you come here to-night?”
“Because you had made it impossible for me to let him know in any other way.”
“You could have written,” rejoined he; the familiar note of suspicion, of the keen mind on the scent for the hidden truth was strong in his voice. “I’ve no control over the mails.”
“I didn’t want to put on paper—such a thing—about—my father.”
Richmond rowed in silence perhaps ten minutes. Then he said, and the note of affection was fully as strong in his voice as the note of suspicion had been before:
“Was that your only reason?”
“I thought so,” replied she. “I realize now that I also wanted to see him—to see if there was any hope.”
“You’d feel fine—wouldn’t you—if you made a fool of yourself with this man and then found out that he was already married?”
The change in her expression was apparent even in that misleading light. During the long silence he saw that she was revolving his sinister suggestion. He took his time before going on in a calm, deliberate tone: “We know nothing about him—except that he is a man you, in your right senses, would never think of marrying.”
“That is true,” replied she, “if you mean by right senses the sort of girl I was brought up to be.”
“The sort of girl youare,” said he with gentle emphasis. The Daniel Richmond of rage and threat was engulfed in the wise and skillful man of affairs.
She looked at him with her old-time, gay mockery. “You’ve decided to take a different tack with me, I see.”
Richmond met smile with smile—and it was from him that she had got the peculiar charm of her smile. “I admit I’ve been blundering,” said he. “My eagerness to have you do what was best for you blinded my judgment. And it was very exasperating to see you rushing headlong into a folly you’d repent all your life. It’s hard for an older person to remember how inexperienced youth is, and to be patient. But I’ll try to do better.... I sent your mother to see whether you were in your room. I don’t know why I did it. I’ve got instincts that have saved me in tight places many a time. She went, came back—said you were there. But she can’t deceive me face to face. She has learned that I scent a lie like a terrier a rat. So, I went myself. When I saw you were gone it sobered me.” He said these things in a thoroughly human way, sincerely, simply—himself as he was for the daughter he loved.
“I’d like to be able to—to do as you wish, father,” said she with gentleness. “But when I told you——”
“Let’s not discuss that now,” he interrupted. “To-morrow, perhaps. Not now.”
Another silence, with the girl rapidly softening toward her father—her always-indulgent father, and she, the recently worldly, could appreciate his point of view—why, at times, her own new point of view seemed an aberration in a dream.
She said: “Have you reason to think he is—is married?”
“So have you.”
“He never told me—never hinted such a thing.”
“Did he ever tell you he was not married?”
“Certainly not.” Beatrice laughed aloud. “I never told him I was not married.”
“You say you asked him to marry you?”
“Yes—I did.”
“And you say he refused?”
“He refused absolutely. He laughed at the idea that I really cared for him. If you could have heard, father! That’s why it’d be unjust for you to blame him. It was every bit my fault.”
“Why did he refuse to marry you?” her father asked calmly.
“Because he did not care, I suppose—care enough.”
“What reason did he give?”
“He didn’t think it would be good for his career. He— Oh, he had a lot of reasons. They didn’t seem to me to amount to much, for, of course, everybody wants to get married, and expects to, some time. That was why I—hoped.”
“Don’t you think he may have been evading—didn’t want to tell you the real reason?”
Her father’s calm, searching insistence, free fromanger or malice, friendly toward her, not unjust to Roger—it began to agitate her, to fill her with vague doubts and fears. “But if he had that reason,” urged she, “he could have ended everything at once by telling me.”
“Unless he had a reason for silence,” replied Richmond. And with quiet acuteness he explained: “Maybe he’s planning to get rid of his wife so that he’ll be free to accept you—and the fortune he thinks goes with you.”
“You’re trying to prejudice me against him!” cried the girl, all in a turmoil over this subtle attack, which seemed to come as much from within as from without.
But her father was equal to this emergency. “If you intend to keep your engagement,” said he, “if you have no hope of being accepted by this young man you know nothing about—you wish to be prejudiced against him—don’t you, Beatrice?”
There seemed to be no effective answer to this shrewdness.
“Yes, I do want to prejudice you against him,” continued Richmond. “I want you to wake up to the fact that you’ve been doing all these foolish, compromising things for a man about whom you know absolutely nothing.”
“I’msurehe’s not married!” exclaimed Beatrice with overemphasis.
“Maybe not,” was her father’s unruffled reply. “But it does look exceedingly strange—doesn’t it?—that a girl like you should be refused by a poor nobody—for no reason.”
“He is honest and independent,” replied Beatrice strongly—but not so strongly as she wished. “He wouldn’t marry me unless he loved me.”
“But I should think,” subtly suggested Richmond, “it would be—well, not so very hard for a man to fall in love with a girl who had so many advantages.”
Beatrice’s vanity lined up strongly behind her worldly common sense in conceding plausibility—and more—to this suggestion. She laughed, but she was impressed.
When they were near the house her father said good-humoredly: “Will you take me in the way you came out? I’ve told Pinney not to turn on the alarms until I come out of my study—where he thinks I am.”
So, father and daughter reëntered Red Hill by stealth, getting a lot of fun out of the adventure—and separating at her door with a good, old-fashioned, old-time hug and kiss.