The Red Cross Girl Part 23

Philip proceeded to make it easier.

"Will you miss me," he asked, "in the Row, where I used to wait among the trees to see you ride past? Will you miss me at dances, where I used to hide behind the dowagers to watch you waltzing by? Will you miss me at night, when you come home by sunrise, and I am not hiding against the railings of the Carlton Club, just to see you run across the pavement from your carriage, just to see the light on your window blind, just to see the light go out, and to know that you are sleeping?"

Helen's eyes were smiling happily. She looked away from him.

"Did you use to do that?" she asked.

"Every night I do that," said Philip. "Ask the policemen! They arrested me three times."

"Why?" said Helen gently.

But Philip was not yet free to speak, so he said:

"They thought I was a burglar."

Helen frowned. He was making it very hard for her.

"You know what I mean," she said. "Why did you keep guard outside my window?"

"It was the policeman kept guard," said Philip. "I was there only as a burglar. I came to rob. But I was a coward, or else I had a conscience, or else I knew my own unworthiness." There was a long pause. As both of them, whenever they heard the tune afterward, always remembered, the Hungarian band, with rare inconsequence, was playing the "Grizzly Bear,"

and people were trying to speak to Helen. By her they were received with a look of so complete a lack of recognition, and by Philip with a glare of such savage hate, that they retreated in dismay. The pause seemed to last for many years.

At last Helen said: "Do you know the story of the two roses? They grew in a garden under a lady's window. They both loved her. One looked up at her from the ground and sighed for her; but the other climbed to the lady's window, and she lifted him in and kissed him--because he had dared to climb."

Philip took out his watch and looked at it. But Helen did not mind his doing that, because she saw that his eyes were filled with tears. She was delighted to find that she was making it very hard for him, too.

"At any moment," Philip said, "I may know whether I owe two hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars which I can never pay, or whether I am worth about that sum. I should like to continue this conversation at the exact place where you last spoke--AFTER I know whether I am going to jail, or whether I am worth a quarter of a million dollars."

Helen laughed aloud with happiness.

"I knew that was it!" she cried. "You don't like my money. I was afraid you did not like ME. If you dislike my money, I will give it away, or I will give it to you to keep for me. The money does not matter, so long as you don't dislike me."

What Philip would have said to that, Helen could not know, for a page in many b.u.t.tons rushed at him with a message from the telephone, and with a hand that trembled Philip s.n.a.t.c.hed it. It read: "Combine is announced, shares have gone to thirty-one, shall I hold or sell?"

That at such a crisis he should permit of any interruption hurt Helen deeply. She regarded him with unhappy eyes. Philip read the message three times. At last, and not without uneasy doubts as to his own sanity, he grasped the preposterous truth. He was worth almost a quarter of a million dollars! At the page he shoved his last and only five-pound note. He pushed the boy from him.

"Run!" he commanded. "Get out of here, Tell him he is to SELL!"

He turned to Helen with a look in his eyes that could not be questioned or denied. He seemed incapable of speech, and, to break the silence, Helen said: "Is it good news?"

"That depends entirely upon you," replied Philip soberly. "Indeed, all my future life depends upon what you are going to say next."

Helen breathed deeply and happily.

"And--what am I going to say?"

"How can I know that?" demanded Philip. "Am I a mind reader?"

But what she said may be safely guessed from the fact that they both chucked Lady Woodcotes luncheon, and ate one of penny buns, which they shared with the bears in Regents Park.

Philip was just able to pay for the penny buns. Helen paid for the taxi-cab.

Chapter 7. THE NAKED MAN

In their home town of Keepsburg, the Keeps were the reigning dynasty, socially and in every way. Old man Keep was president of the trolley line, the telephone company, and the Keep National Bank. But Fred, his son, and the heir apparent, did not inherit the business ability of his father; or, if he did, he took pains to conceal that fact. Fred had gone through Harvard, but as to that also, unless he told people, they would not have known it. Ten minutes after Fred met a man he generally told him.

When Fred arranged an alliance with Winnie Platt, who also was of the innermost inner set of Keepsburg, everybody said Keepsburg would soon lose them. And everybody was right. When single, each had sighed for other social worlds to conquer, and when they combined their fortunes and ambitions they found Keepsburg impossible, and they left it to lay siege to New York. They were too crafty to at once attack New York itself. A widow lady they met while on their honeymoon at Palm Beach had told them not to attempt that. And she was the Palm Beach correspondent of a society paper they naturally accepted her advice. She warned them that in New York the waiting-list is already interminable, and that, if you hoped to break into New York society, the clever thing to do was to lay siege to it by way of the suburbs and the country clubs. If you went direct to New York knowing no one, you would at once expose that fact, and the result would be disastrous.

She told them of a couple like themselves, young and rich and from the West, who, at the first dance to which they were invited, asked, "Who is the old lady in the wig?" and that question argued them so unknown that it set them back two years. It was a terrible story, and it filled the Keeps with misgivings. They agreed with the lady correspondent that it was far better to advance leisurely; first firmly to intrench themselves in the suburbs, and then to enter New York, not as the Keeps from Keepsburg, which meant nothing, but as the Fred Keeps of Long Island, or Westchester, or Bordentown.

"In all of those places," explained the widow lady, "our smartest people have country homes, and at the country club you may get to know them.

Then, when winter comes, you follow them on to the city."

The point from which the Keeps elected to launch their attack was Scarboro-on-the-Hudson. They selected Scarboro because both of them could play golf, and they planned that their first skirmish should be fought and won upon the golf-links of the Sleepy Hollow Country Club.

But the attack did not succeed. Something went wrong. They began to fear that the lady correspondent had given them the wrong dope. For, although three months had pa.s.sed, and they had played golf together until they were as loath to clasp a golf club as a red-hot poker, they knew no one, and no one knew them. That is, they did not know the Van Wardens; and if you lived at Scarboro and were not recognized by the Van Wardens, you were not to be found on any map.

Since the days of Hendrik Hudson the country-seat of the Van Wardens had looked down upon the river that bears his name, and ever since those days the Van Wardens had looked down upon everybody else. They were so proud that at all their gates they had placed signs reading, "No horses allowed. Take the other road." The other road was an earth road used by tradespeople from Ossining; the road reserved for the Van Wardens, and automobiles, was of bluestone. It helped greatly to give the Van Warden estate the appearance of a well kept cemetery. And those Van Wardens who occupied the country-place were as cold and unsociable as the sort of people who occupy cemeteries--except "Harry" Van Warden, and she lived in New York at the Turf Club.

Harry, according to all local tradition--for he frequently motored out to Warden Koopf, the Van Warden country-seat--and, according to the newspapers, was a devil of a fellow and in no sense cold or unsociable.

So far as the Keeps read of him, he was always being arrested for overspeeding, or breaking his collar-bone out hunting, or losing his front teeth at polo. This greatly annoyed the proud sisters at Warden Koopf; not because Harry was arrested or had broken his collar-bone, but because it dragged the family name into the newspapers.

"If you would only play polo or ride to hounds instead of playing golf,"

sighed Winnie Keep to her husband, "you would meet Harry Van Warden, and he'd introduce you to his sisters, and then we could break in anywhere."

"If I was to ride to hounds," returned her husband, "the only thing I'd break would be my neck."

The country-place of the Keeps was completely satisfactory, and for the purposes of their social comedy the stage-setting was perfect. The house was one they had rented from a man of charming taste and inflated fortune; and with it they had taken over his well-disciplined butler, his pictures, furniture, family silver, and linen. It stood upon an eminence, was heavily wooded, and surrounded by many gardens; but its chief attraction was an artificial lake well stocked with trout that lay directly below the terrace of the house and also in full view from the road to Albany.

This latter fact caused Winnie Keep much concern. In the neighborhood were many Italian laborers, and on several nights the fish had tempted these born poachers to trespa.s.s; and more than once, on hot summer evenings, small boys from Tarrytown and Ossining had broken through the hedge, and used the lake as a swimming-pool.

"It makes me nervous," complained Winnie. "I don't like the idea of people prowling around so near the house. And think of those twelve hundred convicts, not one mile away, in Sing Sing. Most of them are burglars, and if they ever get out, our house is the very first one they'll break into."

"I haven't caught anybody in this neighborhood breaking into our house yet," said Fred, "and I'd be glad to see even a burglar!"

They were seated on the brick terrace that overlooked the lake. It was just before the dinner hour, and the dusk of a wonderful October night had fallen on the hedges, the clumps of evergreens, the rows of close-clipped box. A full moon was just showing itself above the tree-tops, turning the lake into moving silver. Fred rose from his wicker chair and, crossing to his young bride, touched her hair fearfully with the tips of his fingers.

"What if we don't know anybody, Win," he said, "and n.o.body knows us?

It's been a perfectly good honeymoon, hasn't it? If you just look at it that way, it works out all right. We came here really for our honeymoon, to be together, to be alone--"

Winnie laughed shortly. "They certainly have left us alone!" she sighed.

"But where else could we have been any happier?" demanded the young husband loyally. "Where will you find any prettier place than this, just as it is at this minute, so still and sweet and silent? There's nothing the matter with that moon, is there? Nothing the matter with the lake?

Where's there a better place for a honeymoon? It's a bower--a bower of peace, solitude a--bower of--"

As though mocking his words, there burst upon the sleeping countryside the shriek of a giant siren. It was raucous, virulent, insulting. It came as sharply as a scream of terror, it continued in a bellow of rage.

Then, as suddenly as it had cried aloud, it sank to silence; only after a pause of an instant, as though giving a signal, to shriek again in two sharp blasts. And then again it broke into the hideous long drawn scream of rage, insistent, breathless, commanding; filling the soul of him who heard it, even of the innocent, with alarm.