Mary Roberts Rinehart

“ 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!” ”

“ Of course, huddled in the kitchen we had heard little or nothing. But we plainly heard Dal on the first floor and Flannigan on the second yelling “fire,” and the patter of feet as the guards ran to the front of the house. And at that instant we remembered Aunt Selina!
That was the cause of the whole trouble. I don’t know why they turned on me; she wasn’t my aunt. But by the time we had got her out of bed, and had wrapped her in an eiderdown comfort, and stuck slippers on her feet and a motor veil on her head, the glare at the front of the house was beginning to die away. ”

“ It would be impossible to cut him, without rousing the curiosity of the others to fever pitch; and it was equally impossible to ignore the disgraceful episode on the stairs. As it happened, however, I need not have worried. I went down to dinner, languidly, when every one was seated, and found Max at my right, and Mr. Harbison moved over beside Bella. Every one was talking at once, for Flannigan, ambling around the table as airily as he walked his beat, had presented Bella with her bracelet on a salad plate, garnished with romaine. ”

“ If you want to see your life passing away, if you want to see the steps by which you are marching to eternity, watch that clock marking the time. Look at that infernal hand staying quiet for sixty seconds and then jumping forward to catch up with the procession. Ugh!”
“See here, Jim,” I said, leaning forward, “you’re not well. You can’t go through the rest of the day like this. I know what you’ll do; you’ll go home to play Grieg on the pianola, and you won’t eat any dinner.” ”

“ Take Max on for a day or so; it would be charity anyhow. But don’t let Tom Harbison take into his head that you are grieving over Jim’s neglect, or he’s likely to toss him off the roof.”
“I have no reason to think that Mr. Harbison cares one way or the other about me,” I said primly. “You don’t think he’s—he’s in love with me, do you, Dal?” I watched him out of the corner of my eye, but he only looked amused.
“In love with you!” he repeated. “Why bless your wicked little heart, no! He thinks you’re a married woman! It’s the principle of the thing he’s fighting for. ”

“ Every one went up on the roof and left him to his mystery. Anne drank her tea in a preoccupied silence, with half-closed eyes, an attitude that boded ill to somebody. The rest were feverishly gay, and Aunt Selina, with a pair of arctics on her feet and a hot-water bottle at her back, sat in the middle of the tent and told me familiar anecdotes of Jimmy’s early youth (had he known, he would have slain her) . Betty and Mr. Harbison had found a medicine ball, and were running around like a pair of children. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Down on the street automobiles were starting and stopping, cabs rolling, doors slamming, all the maddening, delightful bustle of people who are foot-free to dine out, to dance, to go to the theater, to do any of the thousand possibilities of a long February evening. And above them I sat on the roof and cried. Yes, cried.
I was roused by some one coughing just behind me, and I tried to straighten my face before I turned. It was Flannigan, his double row of brass buttons gleaming in the twilight. ”

“ Mr. Harbison went out, muttering something about a storm coming up, and seeing that the tent was secure. Betty Mercer went with him. She had been at his heels all evening, and called him “Tom” on every possible occasion. Indeed, she made no secret of it; she said that she was mad about him, and that she would love to live in South America, and have an Indian squaw for a lady’s maid, and sit out on the veranda in the evenings and watch the Southern Cross shooting across the sky, and eat tropical food from the quaint Indian pottery. ”

“ He was still quite shaken from his experience when the dumb-waiter stuck. The wine cheered him a little, and he told his story, in a voice that was creaky from disuse, while Tom held my hand under the table.
He had had a dreadful week, he said; he spent his days in a closet in one of the maids’ rooms—the one where we had put Jim. It was Jim waking out of a nap and declaring that the closet door had moved by itself and that something had crawled under his bed and out of the door, that had roused the suspicions of the men in the house—and he slept at night on the coal in the cellar. ”

“ He’ll be crazy about you. That type of man, big and deadly earnest, always falls in love with your type of girl, the appealing sort, you know. And he has been too busy, up to now, to know what love is. But mind, don’t hurt him; he’s a dear boy. I’m half in love with him myself, and Dallas trots around at his heels like a poodle.”
But all Anne’s geese are swans, so I thought little of the Harbison man except to hope that he played respectable bridge, and wouldn’t mark the cards with a steel spring under his finger nail, as one of her “finds” had done. ”

“ Anne stiffened.
“He is perfect,” she declared. “Of good family, warm-hearted, courageous, handsome, clever—what more do you ask?”
“Honesty,” said Leila hotly. “That a man should be what he says he is.”
Anne and I both stared.
“It is your Mr. Harbison,” Leila went on, “who tried to escape from the house by putting a board across to the next roof!”
“I don’t believe it,” said Anne. “You might bring me a picture of him, board in hand, and I wouldn’t believe it.”
“Don’t then,” Lollie said cruelly. “Let him get away with your pearls; they are yours. ”

“ And Tom had replied shortly that it was none of his business, but that there were some things friendship hardly justified, and tried to pass Jim. Jim was instantly enraged; he blocked the door to the roof and demanded to know what the other man meant. There were two or three versions of the answer he got. The general purport was that Mr. Harbison had no desire to explain further, and that the situation was forced on him. But if he insisted—when a man systematically ignored and neglected his wife for some one else, there were communities where he would be tarred and feathered. ”

“ But never, NEVER should he think of me as a silly little fool who pretended that she was the other man’s wife and had a lump in her throat because when a really nice man came along, a man who knew something more than polo and motors, she had to carry on the deception to keep his respect, and be sedate and matronly, and see him change from perfect open admiration at first to a hands-off-she-is-my-host’s-wife attitude at last. ”

“ It never occurred to any one that Bella should have gone; she had stepped into all my privileges—such as they were—and assumed none of my obligations. Aunt Selina and I went to the laundry.
It is strange what big things develop from little ones. In this case it was a bar of soap. And if Flannigan had used as much soap as he should have instead of washing up the kitchen floor with cold dish water, it would have developed sooner. The two most unexpected events of the whole quarantine occurred that night at the same time, one on the roof and one in the cellar. ”

“ And if it’s scandal I don’t want to know it.”
“Look here, Kit,” she retorted, “you needn’t be so superior. If I like to talk scandal, I’m not so sure you aren’t making it.”
That was the way right along: I was making scandal; I brought them there to dinner; I let Bella in!
And, of course, Anne came up then, and began on me at once.
“You are a very bad girl,” she began. “What do you mean by treating Tom Harbison the way you do? He is heart-broken.” ”

“ Why should I help him impose on an unsuspecting elderly woman? And it was only putting off discovery anyhow. Sooner or later, she would learn of the divorce, and—Just at that instant my eyes fell on Mr. Harbison—Tom Harbison, as Anne called him. He was looking on with an amused, half-puzzled smile, while people were rushing around hiding the roulette wheel and things of which Miss Caruthers might disapprove, and Betty Mercer was on her knees winding up a toy bear that Max had brought her. ”

“ Max raised a glass of benedictine and posed for a moment, melodramatically.
“To the Wilson roof garden!” he said. “To Kit, who inspired; to the creators, who perspired; and to Takahiro—may he not have expired.”
Every one was very gay; I think the knowledge that tomorrow Aunt Selina might be with them urged them to make the most of this last night of freedom. I tried to be jolly, and succeeded in being feverish. Mr. Harbison did not come up to enjoy what he had wrought. Jim brought up his guitar and sang love songs in a beautiful tenor, looking at Bella all the time. ”

“ A man who would kiss a woman on a dark staircase—a woman he had known only two days—was capable of anything.
“Kit has only been a little keener than the rest of us,” Lollie said. “She found him out yesterday.”
“Upon my word,” said Anne indignantly, preparing to go, “if I didn’t know you girls so well, I would think you were crazy. And now, just to offset this, I can tell you something. Flannigan told me this morning not to worry; that he has my pearl collar spotted, and that YOUNG LADIES WILL HAVE THEIR JOKES!” ”

“ The trouble was, I think, that no one took Jim seriously. His ambition in life was to be taken seriously, but people steadily refused to. His art was a huge joke—except to himself. If he asked people to dinner, every one expected a frolic. When he married Bella Knowles, people chuckled at the wedding, and considered it the wildest prank of Jimmy’s career, although Jim himself seemed to take it awfully hard. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ At the top of the stairs, she turned around suddenly to me.
“That policeman looks cruel,” she said. “What’s more, he’s been in a bad humor all day. More than likely he’ll put James flat on the roof and tramp on him, under pretense of training him. All policemen are inhuman.”
“He only rolls him over a barrel or something like that,” I protested.
“James had a bump like an egg over his ear last night,” Aunt Selina insisted, glaring at Flannigan’s unconscious back. “I don’t think it’s safe to leave him. It is my time to relax for thirty minutes, or I would watch him. ”

“ Anne said when she had gone, “as she does to her skin, she would let that nice Harbison boy alone. She must have been brutal to him tonight, for he went to bed at nine o’clock. At least, I suppose he went to bed, for he shut himself in the studio, and when I knocked he advised me not to come in.”
I had pleaded my headache as an excuse for avoiding Aunt Selina all day, and she had not sent for me. Bella was really quite extraordinary. She was never in the habit of putting herself out for any one, and she always declared that the very odor of a sick room drove her to Scotch and soda. ”

“ Betty was really pleased when Aunt Selina sent for her. She took in a bottle of cologne to bathe her brow, and we all stood outside the door and listened. Betty tiptoed in in her pretty cap and apron, and we heard her cautiously draw down the shades.
“What are you doing that for?” Aunt Selina demanded. “I like the light.”
“It’s bad for your poor eyes,” Betty’s tone was exactly the proper bedside pitch, low and sugary.
“Sweet and low, sweet and low, wind of the western sea!” Dal hummed outside.
“Put up those window shades!” Aunt Selina’s voice was strong enough. “What’s in that bottle?” ”

“ One does not need to like a man to admire him physically, any more than one needs to like a race horse or any other splendid animal. No one could deny that the man on the parapet was a splendid animal; he looked quite big enough and strong enough to have tossed his slender bridge across the gulf to the next roof, without any difficulty, and coordinate enough to have crossed on it with a flourish to safety. ”