The Husbands of Edith Part 4

"I feel as though I had known you for years," she said, frankly returning his gaze. She leaned forward, her elbows on the table, her chin in her hands. "I'm merely Edith's sister. We live in Paris,--that is, father and I. I'm three years younger than Edith. Of course, you know how old your wife is, so we won't dwell upon that. You don't? Then I'd demand it of her. I haven't been in Philadelphia since I was seven--and that's ages ago. I have no mother, and father is off in South America on business. So, you see, little sister has to tag after big sister. Oh!" She interrupted the recital with an abrupt change of manner. "I'm so sorry you've finished your coffee. Now you'll have to go. Roxbury always does."

"But I haven't finished," he exclaimed eagerly. "I'm going to have three or four more pots. You have no idea how--"

"It's all right then," she said with her rarest and most confident smile. "Well, Edith asked me to come to London for the season. The Rodneys were in Paris at the time, however, and they had asked me to join them for a fortnight in the Tyrol. When I said that I was off for a visit with the--with you, I mean--they insisted that you all should come too. They are connections, in a way, don't you see. So we accepted. And here we are."

"You don't, by any chance, happen to be engaged to be married, or anything of that sort," he ventured. "Don't crush me! It's only as a safeguard, you know. People may ask questions."

"You are not obliged to answer them, Roxbury," she said. The flush had deepened in her cheek. It convinced him that she _was_ in love--and engaged. He experienced a queer sinking of the heart. "You can say that you don't know, if anyone should be so rude as to ask." Suddenly she caught her breath and stared at him in a sort of panic. "Heavens," she whispered, the toast poised half-way to her lips, "_you_'re not, by any chance, engaged, are you? Appalling thought!"

He laughed delightedly. "People won't ask about me, my dear Constance.

I'm already married, you know. But if anyone _should_ ask, you're not obliged to answer."

She looked troubled and uncertain. "You may be really married, after all," she speculated. "Who knows? Poor old Roxbury wouldn't have had the tact to inquire."

"I am a henpecked bachelor, believe me."

For the next quarter of an hour they chatted in the liveliest, most inconsequential fashion, getting on excellent terms with each other and arriving at a fair sense of appreciation of what lay ahead of them in the shape of peril and adventure.

She was the most delightful person he had ever met, as well as being the most beautiful. There was a sprightly, ever-growing air of self-reliance about her that charmed and rea.s.sured him. She possessed the capacity for divining the sane and the ridiculous with splendid discrimination.

Moreover, she could jest and be serious with an impartial intelligence that gratified his vanity without in the least inspiring the suspicion that she was merely clever. He became blissfully imbued with the idea that she had surprised herself by the discovery that he was really quite attractive. In fact, he was quite sincerely pleased with himself--for which he may be pardoned if one stops to think how resourceful a woman of tact may be if she is very, very pretty.

And, by way of further a.n.a.logy, Brock was a thoroughly likable chap, beside being handsome and a thoroughbred to the core. It's not betraying a secret to affirm, cold-bloodedly, that Miss Fowler had not allied herself with the enterprise until after she had pinned Roxbury down to facts concerning Brock's antecedents. She was properly relieved to find that he came of a fine old family and that he had led more than one cotillion in New York.

He experienced a remarkable change of front in respect to Roxbury Medcroft before the breakfast was over. It may have been due to the spell of her eyes or to the call of her voice, but it remains an unchallenged fact that he no longer thought of Medcroft as a stupid bungler; instead, he had come to regard him as a good and irreproachable Samaritan. All of which goes to prove that a divinity shapes our ends, rough hew them how we may.

"I'm sure we shall get on famously," he said, as she signified her desire to return to the compartment. "I've always longed for a nice, agreeable sister-in-law."

"Her mission in life, up to a certain stage, is to make the man appreciate the fact that he has, after all, been snapped up by a small but deserving family," she said blithely. "It is also her duty to pour oil on troubled waters and strew flowers along the connubial highway, so long as her kind offices are not resented. By the way, Roxbury, I am now about to preserve you from bitter reproaches. You have forgotten to order coffee and rolls for your wife."

"Great Scott! So I have! It's nine o'clock." He ordered the coffee and rolls to be sent in at once. "I hope she hasn't starved to death."

"My dear Roxbury," she said sternly, "I must take you under my wing. You have much to accomplish in the next twenty-four hours, not the least of your duties being the subjugation of Tootles and Raggles. Tootles is fifteen months old, it may interest you to know. We can't afford to have Tootles scream with terror every time she sees you, and it would be most unfortunate if Raggles should growl and snap at you as he does at all suspicious strangers. Once in a while he bites too. Do you like babies?"

"Yes, I--I think I do," he said doubtingly. "I daresay I could cultivate a taste for 'em. But, I say," with eager enthusiasm, "I love dogs!"

"It may be distinctly in your favour that Raggles loathes the real Roxbury. He growls every time that Roxy kisses Edith."

"Has he ever bitten Roxy for it?"

"No," dubiously, "but Roxy has had to kick him on several occasions."

"How very tiresome,--to kick and kiss at the same time."

"Raggles is very jealous, you understand."

"That's more than I can say for dear old Roxy. But I'll try to antic.i.p.ate Raggles by compelling Edith to keep her distance," he said, scowling darkly. "Has it not occurred to you that Tootles will be pretty--er--much of a nuisance when it comes to mountain climbing?" He felt his way carefully in saying this.

"Oh, dear me, Roxbury, would you have left the poor little darling at home--in all that dreadful heat?"

"I'm sure I couldn't have been blamed for leaving her at home," he protested. "She didn't exist until half an hour ago. Heavens! how they do spring up!"

The remainder of Brock's day was spent in getting acquainted with his family--or, rather, his _menage_. There were habits and foibles, demands and restrictions, that he had to adapt himself to with unvarying benignity. He made a friend of Raggles without half trying; dogs always took to him, he admitted modestly. Tootles was less vulnerable. She howled consistently at each of his first half-dozen advances; his courage began to wane with shocking rapidity; his next half-hearted advances were in reality inglorious retreats. Spurred on by the sustaining Constance, he stood by his guns and at last was gratified to see faint signs of surrender. By midday he had conquered. Tootles permitted him to carry her up and down the station platform (she was too young to realise the risk she ran). Edith and Constance, with the beaming nurse and O'Brien, applauded warmly when he returned from his first promenade, bearing Tootles and proudly heeled by Raggles. Fond mothers in the crowd of hurrying travellers found time to look upon him and smile as if to say, "What a nice man!" He could almost hear them saying it. Which, no doubt, accounted for the intense ruddiness of his cheeks.

"Do you ever spank her?" he demanded once of Mrs. Medcroft, after Tootles had brought tears to his eyes with a potent attack upon his nose. She caught the light of danger in his grey eyes and hastily s.n.a.t.c.hed the offending Tootles from his arms.

Miss Fowler kept him constantly at work with his eyegla.s.s and his English, neither of which he was managing well enough to please her critical estimate. In fact, he laboured all day with the persistence, if not the sullenness, of a hard-driven slave. He did not have time to become tired. There was always something new to be done or learned or unlearned: his day was full to overflowing. He was a man of family!

The wife of his bosom was tranquillity itself. She was enjoying herself.

When not amusing herself by watching Brock's misfortunes, she was napping or reading or sending out for cool drinks. With all the selfishness of a dutiful wife, she was content to shift responsibilities upon that ever convenient and useful creature--a detached sister.

Brock sent telegrams for her from cities along the way,--Ulm, Munich, Salzburg, and others,--all meant for the real Roxbury in London, but sent to a fict.i.tious being in Great Russell Street, the same having been agreed upon by at least two of the conspirators. It mattered little that she repeated herself monotonously in regard to the state of health of herself and Tootles. Roxbury would doubtless enjoy the protracted happiness brought on by these despatches, even though they got him out of bed or missed him altogether until they reached him in a bunch the next day. He may also have been gratified to hear from Munich that Roxbury was perfectly lovely. She said, in the course of her longest despatch, that she was so glad that the baby was getting to like her father more and more as the day wore on.

At one station Brock narrowly escaped missing the train. He swung himself aboard as the cars were rolling out of the sheds. As he sank, hot and exhausted, into the seat opposite his wife and her sister, the former looked up from her book, yawning ever so faintly, and asked:

"Are you enjoying your honeymoon, Roxbury?"

"Immensely!" he exclaimed, but not until he had searched for and caught Connie's truant gaze. "Aren't we?" he asked of Miss Fowler, his eyes dancing. She smiled encouragingly.

"I think you are such a nice man to have about," commented Mrs.

Medcroft, this time yawning freely and stretching her fine young arms in the luxury of home contentment.

Brock went to bed early, in Vienna that night--tired but happy, caring not what the morrow brought forth so long as it continued to provide him with a sister-in-law and a wife who was devoted--to another man.

CHAPTER III

THE DISTANT COUSINS

The end of the week found Brock quite thoroughly domesticated--to use an expression supplied by his new sister-in-law. True, he had gone through some trying ordeals and had lost not a little of his sense of locality, but he was rapidly recovering it as the pathway became easier and less obscure. At first he was irritatingly remiss in answering to the name of Medcroft; but, to justify the stupidity, it is only necessary to say that he had fallen into a condition which scarcely permitted him to know his own name, much less that of another. He was under the spell!

Wherefore it did not matter at all what name he went by: he would have answered as readily to one as the other.

He blandly ignored telegrams and letters addressed to Roxbury Medcroft, and once he sat like a lump, with everyone staring at him, when the chairman of the architects' convention asked if Mr. Medcroft had anything to say on the subject under discussion. He was forced, in some confusion, to attribute his heedlessness to a life-long defect in hearing. Thereafter it was his punishment to have his name and fragments of conversation hurled about in tones so stentorian that he blushed for very shame. In the Bristol, in the Karntner-Ring, in the Lichtenstein Gallery, in the Gardens--no matter where he went--if he were to be accosted by any of the genial architects it was always in a voice that attracted attention; he could have heard them if they had been a block away. It became a habit with him to instinctively lift his hand to his ear when one of them hove in sight, having seen him first.

"That's what I get for being a liar," he lamented dolefully. Constance had just whispered her condolences. "Do you think they'll consider it odd that you don't shout at me too?"

"You might explain that you can tell what I am saying by looking at my lips," she said. He was immensely relieved.

Considerable difficulty had to be overcome at the Bristol in the matter of rooms. Without going into details, Brock resignedly took the only room left in the crowded hotel--a six by ten cubby-hole on the top floor overlooking the air-shaft. He had to go down one flight for his morning tub, and he never got it because he refused to stand in line and await his turn. Mrs. Medcroft had the choicest room in the hotel, looking down upon the beautiful Karntner-Ring. Constance proposed, in the goodness of her heart, to give up to Brock her own room, adjoining that of her sister, provided Edith would take her in to sleep with her. Edith was perfectly willing, but interposed the sage conclusion that gossiping menials might not appreciate a preference so unique.

Mr. Roxbury Medcroft's sky parlour adjoined the elevator shaft. The head of his bed was in close proximity to the upper mechanism of the lift, a thin wall intervening. A French architect, who had a room hard by, met Brock in the hall, hollow-eyed and haggard, on the morning after their first night. He shouted lugubrious congratulations in Brock's ear, just as if Brock's ear had not been hara.s.sed a whole night long by shrieking wheels and rasping cables.

"Monsieur is very fortunate in being so afflicted," he boomed. "A thousand times in the night have I wished that I might be deaf also. Ah, even an affliction such as yours, monsieur, has its benedictions!"

Matters drifted along smoothly, even merrily, for several days. They were all young and full of the joy of living. They laughed in secret over the mishaps and perils; they whiffed and enjoyed the spice that filled the atmosphere in which they lived. They visited the gardens and the Hofs, the Chateau at Schonbrunn, the Imperial stables, the gay "Venice in Vienna"; they attended the opera and the concerts, ever in a most circ.u.mspect "trinity," as Brock had come to cla.s.sify their parties.

Like a dutiful husband, he always included his wife in the expeditions.