The House of Intrigue/Chapter 15
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
I WAS never a light sleeper, for when I went to bed I seldom carried my worries there with me. But once my eyes were open, I was always wide awake in a second.
Just how late I slept in that strange bedroom of delft blue I had no means of judging. But I knew that I had slept well, for I wakened to find the sun high in the heavens and an absurd sense of well-being in my healthy young body. So I lay there for a few minutes, blinking contentedly about at my surroundings.
That room, I knew, was a woman's room. I knew it by the canopies of cream lace over blue silk, by the bottles and powder-puff bowl of pale azure ware on the dressing-table, by the little blue patch-box and the crystal clock in the same tone, by the cabinet de peignoir with silk-draped panel doors and the sky-colored shoe-cabinet with its five shelves of glass all empty.
It was the sort of a room any girl would love to lie in bed and study. But I had other things to do, I remembered, besides wriggling my toes over a nest which had been feathered for some other and some much luckier woman. I was only an intruder there, a usurper whose kingdom of grandeur might turn topsy-turvy at the first touch of a bell or the unannounced opening of a door.
So I tumbled out of bed and trotted to the double window through which the sun was shining. Nowhere about the many-acred garden that sloped down to the glinting and sparkling waters of the Hudson could I see any sign of life. But this in no way disturbed me. It left me, in fact, so light of heart that I would have begun to whistle—only I suddenly remembered about the mysterious woman sleeping in the cream and gold room across the hall from me.
The thought of that mysterious woman began to worry me. It worried me so much that I silently removed the dressing-table, unlocked the door, and tiptoed out into the hallway. I stood there listening. But not a sound came to me. Then I crept on to the door across the hall, listening again, and silently opened that door.
I opened it just an inch or two. But that was enough. The curtains had been drawn, and the room was still almost in darkness. But from the bed I could hear the deep and regular breathing of a sleeper. She was still there, and still dead to the world.
I stared at the bed, but all I could make out was the tumbled mass of the woman's hair, and the vague contour of her body under the billowy counterpane. And I had no desire to disturb that child-like and placid sleeper. On the other hand, I did not care to think of her disturbing me. So I reached in, noiselessly lifted out the key, and quietly closed the door. Then, having locked it from the outside, I slipped into the room of delft blue and proceeded to lock myself in.
After that I felt more at my ease, even though I couldn't quite shake off the thought that I was now something worse than an intruder. I was enough at home, however, not only to re-explore the ivory-white bathroom with the sunken tub of Italian marble, which opened off my room, but to unearth a cake of real Roger et Gallet soap and take a cold shower. After that I scrambled into my clothes and sampled the powder in the little azure bowl. For there was no knowing what might turn up, at any moment, in that house of silence.
Now that I'd had time to think things over, indeed, I felt a good deal like Golden-Locks in the house of the three bears. I was eager enough to nose about, but there was no telling when a human grizzly might appear and demand just who had been interfering with his household furniture. And like Golden-Locks, I knew I'd then have to jump from a window and make for the tall timber.
It was as I came to a standstill, half-way down the wide stairway, that the first betraying sign of life came to me from below. It may have been a disturbing sign, but it was at least an appetizing one. For 1 distinctly caught the smell of cooking bacon. And mixed with it, in a sort of symphony of perfumes, was the even more compelling aroma of coffee.
If it was a trap, it was at least a well-baited one. For whatever I may have expected, or may have been afraid of, I could no more resist that mingled smell of coffee and bacon than a mouse can keep away from well-toasted cheese. It drew me like a magnet down through that house of silence. And before I knew it I'd stumbled into a sort of breakfast-room where the sun was shining in through a double pair of French windows and a table with a snow-white cloth was laid for two. It looked appealing enough, but instead of a partner I found a sheet of paper propped up against the sugar-bowl. On this sheet was written:
"Everything looks safe but keep under cover until I can get back. I've put a tea-cosey over the coffee pot to keep it hot."
And this rather remarkable message was signed by the one word "Wendy."
That note, for some reason, started me thinking of the night before. I sat down in a chair beside the table and made an effort to go methodically over the events of the past twenty-four hours. But it proved no easy thing to do. It left me confronted by too many tangles and confounded by too many questions which were still unanswered. And as I pondered over these problems I absently lifted a dish-cover which was still quite warm to the touch, and unearthed a platter of bacon and eggs. Then I lifted the yellow silk tea-cosey and sniffed at the coffee. That, naturally enough, made me look about for the toast. But there was none.
I was still inwardly lamenting this discovery when a sudden sound put an end to all such thoughts. It was the quick shrill of a bell, and it brought me up short. For, at first, I thought that sound was unmistakably a door-bell ringing. As the sound was repeated, however, again and still again, I became convinced it was the call-bell of a telephone from some near-by room. So I started in search of it, for I remembered the sleeper above-stairs, and knew that the sooner that bell was muffled the better.
I found the telephone, still shrilling out its impatient call, in what looked to me like a library. I sat down in front of the rosewood table and stared at the transmitter-stand. Then I deadened the bell-shrill with my hand, debating whether or not it would be best for me to lift that receiver. Finally, as it happened with the wife of Bluebeard, curiosity got the better of mere cold feet. I put the receiver to my ear and whispered a very quiet and cautious "Hello" into the instrument.
"So you got out there all right?" asked a man's voice. There was a familiar ring about that voice, but I was unable to place the speaker.
"Yes," I guardedly whispered back.
"Have you got a cold?" inquired the voice over the wire.
"Yes," I whispered, "a terrible one!"
"Well, I'm glad you're there, anyway," answered the voice, after a pause.
I didn't know what to say, so I ventured a wild guess at it.
"But why didn't you call me earlier?" I whisperingly demanded.
"I'll explain that, me darling, when I get out there to your side," was the answer that came over the wire.
It rather made me sit up. I didn't relish the thought of that particular person visiting my particular house of refuge. For, at some undefined moment during my talk at the phone, the slightly Celtic intonation of that voice had solved the riddle for me. I at last knew my man. It was Pinky McClone himself who was talking over the wire.
"Listen," I said to him with sudden decision. "It won't be safe for you to come out here!"
"I know it won't!" was Pinky's resolute answer. "But all the powers of heaven won't be keeping me away from you!"
"I'm not thinking of the powers of heaven," I tried to tell him, as I ventured a second wild guess. "I'm thinking of the man who's trying to keep us apart!"
"Do you know what I'm going to do when I meet that man?" demanded the voice over the wire.
"What?" I asked.
"I'm going to kill him!" was the altogether disturbing reply that came in to me.
I sat there staring so blankly ahead of me that it was some time before I became actually aware of the fact that Wendy Washburn was standing at the open door, staring in at me. How much he had heard I didn't know, and couldn't tell. There was a smile about his lips, but his forehead wore a little wrinkle of troubled thought. I knew by his face that the eagle of curiosity was clawing at his vitals, that he was dying to know what had been said over that wire. But he was too much of a gentleman to ask me, if I was too much of a cynic to trust him. So his face was blank again as I coolly hung up the receiver and rose from my chair.
He stood waiting for me at the door. I didn't speak to him, at first, for I was afraid the sound of our voices would carry only too clearly up that wide stairway. And there was a sleeper above, I remembered, that it would be best not to waken.
But I found it hard to keep back a chuckle. For on his arm Wendy Washburn carried what was plainly a package of breakfast rolls, a bottle of cream, and a print of butter. In his hand he held a huge bunch of violets. Wendy, it was plain to see, had been making hay while the sun shone.
"You've made quite a haul of it this morning!" I casually remarked, with a nod toward his parcels.
He looked down at them apologetically.
"Oh, these!" he said, with his heat-lightning smile. "To tell the truth, I really had to buy these. I've just been down to the village for 'em!"
He held out the bunch of violets to me. They were not the kind that grow in country glades. They were the kind you get at Thorley's, and they cost more than prints of creamery butter.
"I love flowers!" I told him, as I buried my nose in them. Then I looked up at him and smiled. I was puzzling him, apparently, quite as much as he had been puzzling me. His cut on the lip from the night before, I noticed, was quite swollen and discolored. And he looked rather meek and domestic, loaded down with those parcels like a commuter. Yet he seemed determined to accept the situation quite as casually as I had been doing.
"Sleep well?" he inquired, as I followed him across the breakfast-room to the snowy little table.
"Like a top!" I told him, though just why a top should stand as an emblem of sound slumber was quite beyond my comprehension.
"Hungry?" he inquired, as he tumbled the rolls out on the table-top. I arranged them neatly on an empty plate as I answered him.
"Starving!" I replied, and I remembered that much the same words had been used at the last meal which I had eaten with him.
We sat down, one at each side of the table. Then he suddenly got up again.
"Will you excuse me for one minute?'" he said over his shoulder, as he started for the door.
"Where are you going?" I asked him, with a good deal of trepidation, and one hand firmly on the roll plate, to make sure that the best part of my breakfast wasn't going to follow him. But he didn't wait to answer me. And I sat there wondering if he'd gone for good, or merely slipped out for a policeman, or remembered to awaken the mysterious lady in the cream and gold room above stairs.
But I was wrong on every count. For he came back in a moment or two with the black club-bag in his hand and a look of relief on his face.
"It isn't the sort of thing, you know, that you care to leave lying around in corners!" he apologetically remarked, as he stepped into the room and quietly closed the door behind him.
He put the club-bag close beside his chair as he sat down again.
"Shall I pour?" I asked, as I lifted the cosey from the silver coffee-pot.
"Thanks," he said, but his eyes, I noticed, were studious and abstracted. He served the bacon and eggs. Then he nodded in the direction of the library, where I had answered that mysterious telephone call. The eagle, I knew, was still busy with its clawing act.
"Were you expecting a visitor?" he asked, in an offhanded and impersonal sort of way.
"I'd prefer not having one!" I told him, quite as impersonally.
"I trust you'll not be disappointed in that wish," he said. But there was a note of constraint in his voice as he spoke. And his eyes, from time to time, kept searching my face.
"And you?" I inquired, remembering the sleeper above us. "Were you expecting a visitor?"
"It would rather interfere with our plans, wouldn't it?" he suggested.
I looked up at him.
"What plans have we?" I asked. We were both eating by this time. And I observed that his appetite was quite as normal as my own.
"That's something we have to talk over," he asknowledged.
"I think we have a great deal to talk over," I amended.
"Yes, a great deal," he agreed, as he passed me the breakfast rolls. Then he laughed as he followed my example and took one of them. "You know, it's years since I've done this sort of thing!"
"You mean—er—paid for things?" I calmly inquired, with a head-movement toward the roll plate.
He nodded his own head, almost gleefully, like a street-urchin who'd raided a fruit-cart.
"I find I fail quite often, in the little things," he acknowledged. "It's only the big coups that I care to count on."
"Such as half a million in a club-bag!" I suggested.
Still again he nodded his head.
"Well I want to talk about this club-bag, and certain things that happened last night," I told him.
He at once became serious.
"I was hoping you wouldn't go back to that."
"Why?" I asked him.
"Because I thought perhaps you'd had all you wanted of that sort of thing, and would prefer talking about the future."
"I don't think I've got any future," I told him, with a gulp of self-pity that I couldn't altogether succeed in laughing down.
"That's what I wanted to talk to you about," he calmly retorted.
"For instance?" I said, very much on my guard.
He sat staring at me across the table for a full minute before he spoke.
"Why don't you like me?" he asked, as offhandedly as though he were inquiring the time of day.
"Who said I didn't?"
"Your face says so, five or six times every minute!"
It was my turn to sit and look at him. For it suddenly came home to me that I was enjoying this novel tête-à-tête much more than I had imagined. He was a man easy to talk to, was Wendy Washburn. He was natural and unaffected, and there were times when you seemed to fit into his humor as easily as you fit into an armchair. There was a quiet impersonality about him that put you at your ease. He never reminded you of your sex. There was no smirking gallantry about him. Even in spite of the fact that there were a good many corners in his life that he'd kept covered up, he suggested, in his apparent openness, a young and healthy boy. He always seemed to be doing the right sort of thing. It may not have been the right sort of thing, of course, but he had a way of doing it which made it seem right. And he would always be easy to get on with.
"You oughtn't to trust my face," I finally told him.
"But I do," he said with the utmost solemnity. "I trust it more than you do yourself."
I couldn't quite catch what he meant by that. But I didn't think any the less of him for saying it.
"Go on," I mocked. "Tell me all about myself."
He seemed to jump at the chance.
"All right, I will. And you can tell me whether I'm right or wrong. You've always rather liked nice things. If I'm not greatly mistaken, you always secretly revolted, even as a young girl, at the thought of life in a pigeonhole on one of the side-streets. You've always had a sort of ache to be in touch with the splendor of life—to swim with the swell push, as some of our Center Street friends might express it."
He declined to countenance my interruption.
"Now, pull down those Elsie Ferguson eyebrows until I finish, please," he went on. "I don't mean the white lights and lobster-palace floaters and fifteen-carat diamond rings, by the splendor of life. But no girl is as fastidious as you are about her clothes, and about her hair, and about herself altogether, without having that streak of fineness extending right up into her mind. It has to be a part of her. Now, wait, don't interrupt! I'm not trying to flatter you. You clipped the wings of anything like that one afternoon down at Long Beach. But what I do acknowledge is that the whole thing puzzles me, that I can't quite square you, as you sit there at that side of the table, with what happened that day at Long Beach, and with what happened, well, last night, if we don't want to go back too far."
I think I both liked him and hated him for the things he was saying. I didn't bother to ask myself why. But he was breaking into that high-walled garden which has "Personal" written over its gate-arch. And it had become an instinct of life with me, I suppose, to resent all such intrusions.
"You seem to be rather interested in me," I observed, by way of a "No-Trespassing" sign.
"I am!" he promptly acknowledged. "I'm tremendously interested in you!"
"And how far back does this interest extend?" I coldly inquired.
"Back to the first day I ever met you," he had the candor to acknowledge.
"And how far does it promise to extend into the future?" I asked, more unsettled by his solemnity than I had been by his flippancy.
But Wendy Washburn did not answer my question. Instead he asked me one of his own.
"You don't worry much about things, do you?"
"What's the use?" I retorted.
"You rather surprise me, on that point," he ruefully admitted.
"Then it may surprise you to know that at this very moment I am worried, and terribly worried."
"About what?"
"About everything!"
He smiled a little.
"You don't look it."
"I was always told to keep up a good front," I explained, as that old streak of perversity, which kept tempting me to key my talk down to the underworld plane, reasserted itself. And I could see my Hero-Man's mouth harden.
"The sentiment may be admirable, but the phrase strikes me as rather obnoxious!"
I had always been too much of a pepper-pot, I suppose, to take criticism like that with folded hands and a meekly bowed head.
"It seemed good enough for the man who taught it to me," I said. And I had the satisfaction of beholding a hope fulfilled, for his face clouded up in spite of himself.
"What man?" he inquired.
"Bud Griswold," I told him, with a touch of malice. "Bud always claimed that a good front helped out in our line of business!"
"Our line of business!" echoed Wendy Washburn, in a sort of groan.
"Well, isn't it about the same as your line of business?" I demanded.
He looked at me vacant-eyed, for a moment or two. Then he sat back in a brown study.
"I think I resent, more than anything else, that man's influence over you," he finally asserted. He even sighed, I suppose at the memory of my misspent life.
"There was one thing that Bud was rather particular about," I said with all the sugary indifference that I could command, "and that was to respect the dead!"
"The dead?" he echoed, batting his eyes with perplexity. Then he seemed to waken up to the fact that I had been hurling a harpoon at him, for he looked self-conscious and awkward.
"But so many of us are half dead without quite realizing it," he lamely contended, doing his best to emulate the humble cuttlefish.
"Thank you!" I retorted.
"On the contrary, I couldn't accuse you of not being alive," he protested. "I think, perhaps, that you're rather too much alive. But I can't help feeling it's been a foolish sort of liveliness, like the kind you see in a squirrel-cage."
"Again I thank you!" I solemnly told him. But he refused to be shaken out of his seriousness.
"What I mean is that you've never lived up to your potentialities. You've never given yourself a chance. You've never really risen to your opportunities. You've wasted your time on the small caliber things of life. Instead of conquering, you've merely fretted. Instead of using that restless brain and body Heaven gave you, for one big end, you've let them blow like a leaf in the winds of chance!"
"I don't quite follow you," I coldly affirmed, trying to throw dignity up, like a guard-arm, to ward off the blows that were beginning to hurt.
"I mean that you're too clever a woman, yes, and too fine a woman, to be doing the things you have been doing," he said, still speaking without heat.
"I'm afraid I'm a very stupid woman, or I wouldn't be letting you say the things you are saying to me," I said, meeting his gaze. I was even able to laugh at him, though there wasn't much merriment in that laughter of mine. For there was only too much truth in many of the things he had been saying. He was quite right in suspecting that I was a sort of whip-top, that I could only keep my balance by being kept forever in motion. He was also right in suspecting that I'd always nursed a secret and absurd ache for grandeur, a sort of vague homesickness for some splendor which I couldn't quite define. Often, even as a youngster, I'd imagined myself a changeling. Many a lonely hour of my childhood had been spent in devising romantic fictions as to my origin and ancestry. But every rose-crowned avenue of romance had led me wearily back to Minetta Lane. Yet I'd always loved beautiful things, and hungered to explore beautiful houses, and yearned foolishly after even beautiful clothes.
It was because Bud Griswold had first brought me into touch with these things, I remembered, that I had been weak enough to swing in with him. He had brought me into touch with them crazily and accidentally, perhaps, but it had seemed the only way open to me. Bud had never been able to give me a home. But he'd been able to let me come up like a spoon-bill to breathe in the tawdry beauty of a big hotel. He'd been able to rent splendor, for at least an hour, by dining in state, for instance, at the Biltmore. But we were always renters, and nothing more. Once our bill had been paid we lost our claim on that Island of Enchantment just wide enough from one white damask boundary to the other to hold up two pair of elbows. We were royalty, for an hour, whereupon some other listless-hearted flat-dwelling lady promptly took possession of my chair, reminding me that I was only one in a procession of self-deluded impostors.
Wendy Washburn, who had sat there studying my face, began to look concerned.
"I don't suppose," he finally ventured, "that you know why I'm preaching to you along this particular line?"
"No, I don't," was my reply. "But I do know that preaching isn't ever going to make any difference with me, or even do me any good!"
My note of revolt seemed to disturb him. He even colored a little as he stared across the table at me.
"Oh, I say, you mustn't imagine I'm trying anything so stupid as that!" he cried. "We don't suddenly turn good that way, of course—except in the Elsie books, or at Billy Sunday's revivals!"
"Then why talk about it at all?" I inquired. But that question, apparently, he preferred to leave unanswered.
"By the way, would you regard me as clever as Bud Griswold?" he somewhat startled me by asking.
"You've had more chances, I think, than Bud ever did," I told him. "And you may laugh at me for saying it, but outside his work Bud was the cleanest-living man I ever knew."
"You mean you always considered him that?"
"Always," I affirmed.
"Of course you would," he agreed.
"Why the 'of course'?" I demanded.
"Otherwise you'd never have worked with him," explained my Hero-Man, with a frown of trouble on his fastidious-looking forehead. "But with all due deference to this same Bud, I can't help feeling that his vision was limited. As far as I can estimate him, he was big in just one thing. And that one thing was his treatment of—no, not exactly his treatment of you, but his appreciation of you!"
I felt in no way flattered over that left-handed compliment.
"You never knew Bud Griswold as I knew him," I retorted, trying to speak as calmly as I could. "He may have been nothing better than a confidence-man, but in his own blind way he was always trying to grope up to better things. His thinking may have been all wrong—I suppose the thinking of every criminal has to be wrong—but even at that sort of work Bud tried to keep as clean-handed as he could. I can remember when a porch-climber friend of his steered him into a chance to clean out a four-family flat-house in Cleveland. He merely said, 'Nix on the wage-earners!' And he meant it. For he always drew the line at robbing the poor. But he felt that he had a sort of right to shake down the rich, now and then, and I've seen him make his rounds as though he were a tax-collector after arrears. I think he even took a sort of joy in setting an overdressed dowager back a couple of marquise rings and a sunburst or two!"
Wendy Washburn sat studying me quite soberly. But for some reason or other there was humor in his eyes.
"I like you for being loyal to Bud, no matter what he was," explained the man across the table from me. "But what I've been trying to get at is that all these activities of his were pretty small affairs. They could only lead to failure, in the end. In fact, they did lead to failure. They weren't big enough to justify themselves. Bud, I mean, may have been the most upright burglar who ever jimmied a back window, but to the local police he would always be a burglar!"
I resented that description of Bud, and it made the tone of my retort rather bitter, I suppose.
"While you do your work along such sweeping lines," I suggested, "that the chance to pack a jury is never overlooked and an ex-judge can always be retained to confirm the acquittal!"
He laughed at that, quietly and a little bewilderingly.
"Well," he retorted, "I've at least kept out of jail, however I do my work!"
"So have I!" was my prompt counter to that retort. "And what's more important—"
Instead of completing that sentence, however, my voice trailed off into silence. For, closely as I had been looking at the face of the man across the table from me, I became vaguely conscious of a movement not many feet beyond the spot where that man sat.
Without actually looking at the door in the wall directly behind him, I became aware of the fact that this door had slowly swung back, as though moved by a listener hidden in its shadow.
I didn't betray that discovery by any sudden movement or start. But my first thought was of the unknown woman I had seen asleep in the blue and gold bedroom up-stairs.
The thought of that unknown woman, however, did not stay long in my head. For the door, swinging still wider, had allowed that unseen interloper to pass into the room itself. My gaze was still directed on Wendy Washburn's face. I did not actually look away from him. Yet somewhere on the vague borders of vision I received an impression of a moving shadow. I knew that some one had opened the door, had silently entered the room, and was advancing across the floor.
Wendy Washburn was speaking again, but I had no idea what he was saying. His words became a meaningless jumble of sound, and I lost all thought of him, as that advancing shadow moved more directly into my line of vision.
My first shock came, as I slowly raised my eyes, when I discovered the intruder was not a woman. My second shock came when I realized that this intruder carried a blue-barreled automatic in his right hand. But the third shock, and the greatest of them all, came when I saw that this intruder was a man whom I had been taught to think of as dead.
For standing before me I saw, not a ghost of Bud Griswold, but Bud Griswold himself. Bud in the flesh. Bud with the prison-pallor still on his gaunt face, Bud clad in soiled linen and ill-kempt clothing, 
I saw, not a ghost, but Bud himself