The Indifference of Juliet Part 9

He swung her down, and they went slowly up the walk. "Somehow," said Anthony Robeson, looking up at the house, lying as if asleep in the September night, "when I thought of taking you to that little public inn, and then remembered that we might have this instead--We can go on with our wedding journey to-morrow, dear-but--to-night----"

He led her silently upon the porch. He found the key, where in jest he had bade his best man put it, and unlocked the door and threw it open.

He stepped first upon the threshold, and, turning, held out his arms.

"Come," he said, smiling in the darkness.

XI.--A BACHELOR AT DINNER

"Hallo there--Anthony Robeson--don't be in such a hurry you can't notice a fellow."

The big figure rushing through the snow paused, wheeled, and thrust out a hand of hearty greeting. "That you, Carey? Hat over your eyes like a train robber--electric lights all behind you--and you expect me to smile at you as I go by! How are you? How's Judith?"

"Infernally lonely--I mean I am--Judith's off on a visit to her mother.

Say, Tony--take me home with you--will you? I want some decent things to eat, so I'm holding you up on purpose."

"Good--come on. Train goes in a few minutes. Juliet will be delighted."

The two hurried on together into the station from which the suburban trains were constantly leaving. As they entered they encountered a mutual friend, at whom both flung themselves enthusiastically with alternate greetings:

"Roger Barnes----"

"Roger--old fellow--glad to see you back!"

"Patient safely landed?"

"Get a big fee?"

"Where you going?"

"Let's take him home with us, Tony----" The third man looked smiling at Tony. "I'll challenge you to," said he.

"That's easy--come on," responded Anthony Robeson with cordiality. "I'll just telephone Mrs. Robeson."

"That's it," said Dr. Roger Barnes. "You don't dare not to. I understand.

Go ahead. But if she's too much dashed let me know, will you?"

Anthony turned, laughing, into a telephone closet, from which he emerged in time to catch his train with his guests.

"It's all right," he a.s.sured them. "But it's only fair to let her know a few minutes ahead. You like to understand, Roger, before you start, don't you, whether your emergency case is a hip-fracture or a cut lip, so you can tell whether to take your glue or your sewing-silk?"

"By all means," said the bachelor of the party. "And I suppose you think Mrs. Juliet Marcy Robeson is now smiling happily to herself over this little surprise. I'll lay you anything you please that if I can make her own up she'll admit that she said '_Merciful heavens!_' into the telephone when she got your message."

Anthony shook his head. "Evidently you don't know what guests in the remote suburbs on a stormy February night mean to a poor girl whose nearest neighbour is five hundred feet away. Your ideas of married life need a little freshening, too. They're pretty antique."

It was a half-mile from the station to the house--the "box of a house"--which had been Anthony's home for five months, and toward which he now led his friends with the air of a man about to show his most treasured possessions. He strode through the deepening snow as if he enjoyed the strenuous tramp, setting a pace which Wayne Carey, with his office life, if not the doctor, more vigorously built and bred, found difficult to maintain.

"Here we are," called the leader, pointing toward windows glowing with a ruddy light. The doctor looked up with interest. Carey was a frequent visitor, but the busy surgeon, old school-and-college chum of Anthony's though he was, was about to have his first introduction to a place of which he had heard much, but of whose nearness to Paradise he doubted with the strong skepticism of a man who has seen many a fair beginning end in all unhappiness and desolation.

As they stamped upon the little porch the door flew open, the brilliancy and comfort of a fire-and-lamplit room leaped out at them, a delicious faint odour of cookery a.s.sailed their hungry nostrils, and the welcome which makes all worth having met them on the threshold.

"Wayne," said the rich young voice of the mistress of the house, "I'm so glad. Roger Barnes, this is just downright good of you; it's so long you've promised us this. Tony----"

What she said to Tony must have been whispered in his ear if voiced at all, for the two guests, looking on with laughing, envious eyes, saw their hostess swept unceremoniously into a bearlike embrace, swung into the air as one thrusts up a child, poised there an instant, laughing and protesting, then slowly lowered to be kissed, and set down once more lightly upon the floor.

"It's all right. I didn't tumble your hair a bit," said Anthony coolly.

"Excuse me, gentlemen, but Wayne understands--and Roger will some day, I hope--that a man who has been thinking about it all the way home can't put it off on account of a couple of idiots who stand and stare instead of politely turning their backs. Oh, don't mention it--it doesn't disturb me at all; and Mrs. Robeson is becoming reconciled to my impetuosity by degrees. Make yourselves at home, boys. Juliet----"

"Take them upstairs, Tony, please. Of course we can't let them go back to-night, now we have them. It's beginning to storm heavily, isn't it? I thought so. Take them to the guest-room, Tony--and dinner will be served as soon as you are down."

"By Jupiter, I believe she means it," declared the doctor, with approval, as the door of the bedroom closed on his host. "I think I can tell when a woman is shamming. She's improved, hasn't she, tremendously? Pretty girl always, but--well--bloomed now. Nice little house. Believe I'll have to stay, though I ought not--just to take observations on Tony. His enthusiasm has all the appearance of reality. In fact, it strikes me he has rather----"

It was on his lips to say "rather more than you have," but it occurred to him in time that jokes on this ground are dangerous. Wayne Carey had been married in November, was living in a somewhat unpretentious way in a downtown boarding-house, and certainly had to-night so much of a lost-dog air that it made the doctor pause. So he subst.i.tuted: "--rather more than I should have expected, even of a fellow who has got the girl he has wanted all his life," and fell to washing and brushing vigorously, eyeing meanwhile the little room with a critical bachelor's appreciation of beauty and comfort in the quarters he is to occupy. It was very simply furnished, certainly, but it struck him as a place where his dreams were likely to be pleasant for every reason in the world.

Downstairs, Juliet, in the dining-room, was surveying her table with the hostess's satisfaction. Opposite her stood a tall and slender girl, black-haired, black-eyed, with a face of great attractiveness.

"I wish, Mrs. Robeson," she was saying eagerly, "you would let me serve you as your maid, and not make a guest of me. Really, I should love to do it. I don't need to meet your friends, and I don't mind seeming what I really am--your----"

"Rachel Redding," Juliet interrupted, lifting an affectionate glance across the table, "if you want to seem what you really are--my friend--you will let me do as I like."

"My shabby clothes----" murmured the girl.

"If I could look as much like a princess as you do in them----"

"Mrs. Robeson, in that lovely dull red you're a queen----"

"--dowager," finished Juliet gayly. "Well, I'll be proud of you, and you can be proud of me, if you like, and together we'll make those hungry men think there's nothing like us. The dinner's the thing. Isn't it the luckiest chance in the world I sent for those oysters this morning? Doctor Barnes is perfectly fine, but he never would believe in the happiness of married life if the coffee were poor or the beefsteak too much broiled.

Doesn't the table look pretty? Those red geranium blossoms you brought me give it just the gay touch it needed this winter night."

Three men, standing about the wide fireplace, warming cold hands at its friendly blaze, turned expectantly as their youthful hostess came in, followed by a graceful girl in gray. Juliet presented her guests with the air of conferring upon them a favour, and they seemed quite ready to accept it as such.

Anthony looked on with interest to see a person whom he had known hitherto only as a pretty but poor young neighbour whom Juliet had engaged to help her for a certain part of every day, introduced as his wife's friend, and greeted by Doctor Barnes and Wayne Carey with quite evident admiration and pleasure. He looked hard at her, as Carey seated her, noticing for the first time that she was really worth consideration, and remembering vaguely that Juliet had more than once tried to impress him with the fact.

If it had not been for the other fellows, with whose eyes as their host he was now stimulated to observe her, he might have been still some time longer in coming to the realisation that Juliet had found somebody in whom her genuine interest was not misplaced. But Anthony Robeson had all his life been singularly blind to the fascinations of most other women than Juliet. As he turned his keen gaze from Rachel Redding to the charming figure that sat on the other side of the table the satisfaction in his eyes became so p.r.o.nounced that it could mean, Dr. Roger Barnes admitted to himself, as he caught it, nothing less than a very real happiness.

It was not an elaborate dinner. It was not by any means the sort of dinner Juliet might have prepared had she known that morning whom she was to entertain. It was merely a dinner planned with affectionate care to please and satisfy one hungry man who liked good things to eat--and amplified as much as possible in quant.i.ty after Anthony's message reached her. And by that admirable collusion between hostess and feminine friend which can sometimes be effected when the situation demands it, the dinner prepared for three seemed ample for five.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "Three men, standing about the wide fireplace ... turned expectantly as their youthful hostess came in, followed by a graceful girl in gray."]

Between them Juliet and Rachel Redding served the various dishes and changed the plates which Anthony handed from his place. It was gracefully done and so simply that the absence of a maid was a thing to be enjoyed rather than regretted. When Juliet, in the softly sweeping dull-red frock which made of her a warm picture for a winter's night, slipped from her chair and moved about the room, or brought in from the kitchen a steaming dish, she seemed the ideal hostess, herself bestowing what her own hands had prepared. And when Rachel Redding offered a man a cup of fragrant coffee, smiling down in the general direction of his uplifted face without meeting his eyes, there was certainly nothing lost from his enjoyment of the beverage.

"Say, but this dinner has tasted just about right," was Wayne Carey's satisfied observation as he leaned back in his chair at last, after draining his third cup of coffee--and the pot itself, if he had but known it.

"Went to the spot?" asked Anthony, leaning back also with the expression of the friendly host. He was young to cultivate that expression, but he appeared to find no difficulty about it.

"It did--every last mouthful."