The Girl in his House - Harold MacGrath (reading fiction .txt) 📗

Arabian Nights! They stole out unobserved.

But no sooner were they in the house next door than he saw the monumental folly of his act. “We’d better run right back,” he said, gravely.

“But why?”

He covered his confusion. “Well, they’ll be missing us shortly. Betty has Argus eyes.”

“But what if they do miss us?” she asked, innocently.

“How the dickens am I going to make her understand?” he thought.

“Come into your old study. There’s a fire ready. And I’ve got the most wonderful surprise for you. I was going to give it to you some morning after our ride, but the weather’s been too bad.”

“We’d better march right back to Betty’s.”

“Don’t you… Wouldn’t you like to stay?”

“Like to! Why… that isn’t it.” How was he going to tell her that it was not proper to be with her in this house at this hour? He saw instantly that, whatever she knew about social conventions, the present situation was not clear to her. The innocent! He arraigned himself bitterly.

Whatever his resolves, these were negatived by an unexpected action on her part. She laughed, caught him by the sleeve, and ran with him into the study.

“I planned all this this afternoon,” she confessed. She turned, struck a match, and threw it into the grate. “Now, sir, you sit perfectly still. You know all the nooks in this room. Study them out while I go. I’ll be right back.”

Never had he met such a woman, and she was a woman. She was at least twenty-two. In many things she was uncannily wise, in others as innocent as a child. And the exquisite lure of her lay in these two opposites. Never had he struck a happier phrase: pearl and pomegranate and Persian peach—jewels and fruit. She made him think of summer clouds, so lightly she moved. She made him think of his loneliness, too. He did not know then that his thought of loneliness was a dangerous one. “Let’s go home; The thrill of it!”

He leaned back against the cushions, as he had leaned a thousand times before. By now the fire had got into the chestnut log, and everything was touched by the rosal light. Four weeks; he had known her just about four weeks. Her father’s picture stood on the mantel, and he wondered how a man with such a daughter could lead such a life. There was a bit of mystery around the man somewhere.

This spot had always been Armitage’s favorite. He had invariably smoked a pipe here after dinner, before going out for the evening. He fell into a dream. Supposing he was really living here again, and this child-woman who had unconsciously thrown about him an irresistible enchantment…. He heard the rustle of her gown, and she was standing before him, her hands behind her back, a tantalizing smile on her lips.

“La mano destraf—la sinistra?” she asked. “Which hand?”

“The one nearest the heart”—recalling an old game of his youth.

She thrust forth her left hand. It held a brown meerschaum pipe!

“Where did you find that?”

“In a comer of the bookcases. Oh, there are signs of you all over the house. There was a sealed tobacco-jar. Take the pipe and light it. I’m going to read you some of daddy’s letters. “

“But the odor of pipe tobacco?”

“I smelled a pipe the first day I entered the house, and nobody but a caretaker has been in it for years. It will always be in the curtains. Light it.”

He obeyed. In truth he would have obeyed her had she asked him to take a live log from the grate with his bare hands. He did not comprehend what was happening to him.

She took an Oriental pillow—Scheherazade herself might have called upon it once upon a time—from the lounge and dropped it between the fire and the lounge and sat down, cross-legged. She untied a bundle of letters and selected three or four. Her gown was emerald-green. On the side nearest him her throat and cheek reflected the green; on the other side the flames tinted her with rose. Her arms and shoulders were, in these changeful lights, more wonderful than any marble he had ever seen.

Oh, this must be some dream, a recurrence of some fragment he had read in a forgotten book. Presently she would vanish, his old butler would touch him on the shoulder, he would rub his eyes for a moment, and then go down to the club. The life in the jungles was a dream also—green and rose, like a cloud on the face of a stream. He longed to reach down and touch her, to assure himself that she was real. Here in his house!

She began to read. At the sound of her voice he lowered his pipe and never put it to his lips again that night. Think of her finding his pipe! Sometimes a beautiful line caught his attention; but to-night his ears were keyed to music and not to words.

The French ormolu clock struck twelve— the faithful old watchdog of his childhood. Twelve o’clock! The many times his mother had said: ‘; Time for bed, Jimmiekins!” Doris had finished the last letter and was doing up the packet. “Isn’t he wonderful?” she looked up, her eyes full of marvel.

“Very.” But he hoped she would not ask him what he thought of this passage or that. He could not remember a single line!

“Did you ever know that floors talk in the night?” she asked. She possessed the queerest fancies.

“What do they say?” He glanced anxiously at the clock.

“There’s a board over there, just this side of the curtains, that is always yawning and saying, ‘Oh, dear!’ There’s another in the middle hall that says, ‘Look sharp!’ And I always walk around it. There’s the funniest old grumbler in my room. I can’t get it to say anything; it just mumbles and grumbles. The one in your room says, ‘Lonesome! Lonesome!’ And the storeroom has one that says, ‘Hark!’ so sharply that I always stop and listen. I suppose it’s because I’m not used to wooden floors.”

“And because I don’t believe you’re a real human being at all, only just a fairy.”

“Well, perhaps.” She rose and faced him suddenly. “Am I different? I mean, am I different from your friends? Do I do things I oughtn’t? Why did you want to go back?”

“I didn’t. I only felt I ought to.”

She wrinkled her forehead, trying to decipher this. “I speak English like anybody else, but sometimes I don’t understand… Santa Maria! There goes the bell!”

“It’s Burlingham probably, come after us.” And Bob would doubtless take Jimmie Armitage’s head off for this night’s work.

“AU right. But wasn’t it fun!”

“Hello!” said Burlingham as they opened the door. “Thought you’d be here. Jilli has just dropped in to play the violin for us. He’s come straight from his concert. Mighty fine of him. He charges a thousand a night for those who consider him a fad of the hour and gives away his genius to those he knows love music. Come along.”

“A violin?” Doris threw her cloak over her shoulders. “Isn’t it wonderful! Floors that talk and little red-brown boxes with singing souls!”

Armitage’s anxiety grew. He knew Bob’s voice of old, and Bob was deeply angry about something; and Armitage suspected readily enough what this something was. Hang the world with its right-and-left angles, its fussy old hedges and barricades!

“Smoke a cigar with me when they all go,” whispered Burlingham in the vestibule of his own house.

It was half after two in the morning when Armitage found himself alone with Bob and his wife. Bob lighted a cigar and walked about for a space.

“I don’t know how it came to pass, but Betty and I have grown very fond of that girl next door. We’ve formed a kind of protectorate over her. She puzzles us. She’s a type we haven’t run into before. She is both worldly wise and surprisingly innocent. She’ll air her views of monogamy one moment and then ask why a woman shouldn’t go to a restaurant alone at night if she wanted to. We know why she can’t. Cities and men have made it impossible.”

“Don’t beat about the bush with me, Bob. You’re angry because I went over there the way I did.”

“Why the dickens did you do it, then?”

“Don’t you folks trust me?” Armitage asked, rather pathetically.

“We’d trust you anywhere, Jim, in any situation,” said Betty. “That isn’t it.”

“I understand. I was simply hypnotized. What do you suppose she said to me? ‘Let’s go home!’ When I followed her I did not realize what I was doing. I’m a bit tangled up still. I don’t know whether I’m happy or miserable. ‘Let’s go home!’ Think of her saying that to me! Think of going over with her to my house! I shall never be able to look upon it as anything but mine. Think of her finding an old pipe of mine and offering it to me! I’ve been wandering through labyrinths ever since I struck New York.”

“What are you driving at?” demanded Burlingham.

“Hush!” said Betty,

Armitage went on L if he had not heard the interruption: “When I followed her to-night I did not comprehend until I got into the house and she began reading her father’s letters to me. Then I knew. I followed her because it was written that I should… all the rest of my days.”