When a Man Marries Part 19

"Never mind," Dal said rea.s.suringly. "He can borrow Aunt Selina's comfort. Make the old lady discard from weakness. Anyhow, Bella, if I know anything of human nature, the old lady will make it hot enough for him. Poor old Jim!"

Then they shook hands again, and with that there came a terrible banging at the door, which we had locked.

"Open the door!" some one commanded. It was one of the guards.

"Open it yourself!" Dallas called, moving a kitchen table to reenforce the lock.

"Open that door or we will break it in!"

Dallas put his hands in his pockets, seated himself on the table, and whistled cheerfully. We could hear them conferring outside, and they made another appeal which was refused. Suddenly Bella came over and confronted Dallas.

"They have brought them back!" she said dramatically. "They are out there now; I distinctly heard Jim's voice. Open that door, Dallas!"

"Oh, DON'T let them in!" I wailed. It was quite involuntary, but the disappointment was too awful. "Dallas, DON'T open that door!"

Dal swung his feet and smiled from Bella to me.

"Think what a solution it is to all our difficulties," he said easily.

"Without Aunt Selina I could be happy here indefinitely."

There was more knocking, and somebody--Max, I think--said to let them in, that it was a fool thing anyhow, and that he wanted to go to bed and forget it; his feet were cold. And just then there was a crash, and part of one of the windows fell in. The next blow from outside brought the rest of the gla.s.s, and--somebody was coming through, feet first. It was Jim.

He did not speak to any of us, but turned and helped in a bundle of red and yellow silk comfort that proved to be Aunt Selina, also feet first.

I had a glimpse of a half-dozen heads outside, guards and reporters.

Then Jim jerked the shade down and unswathed Aunt Selina's legs so that she could walk, offered his arm, and stalked past us and upstairs, without a word!

None of us spoke. We turned out the lights and went upstairs and took off our wraps and went to bed. It had been almost a fiasco.

Chapter XV. SUSPICION AND DISCORD

Every one was nasty the next morning. Aunt Selina declared that her feet were frost-bitten and kept Bella rubbing them with ice water all morning. And Jim was impossible. He refused to speak to any of us and he watched Bella furtively, as if he suspected her of trying to get him out of the house.

When luncheon time came around and he had shown no indication of going to the telephone and ordering it, we had a conclave, and Max was chosen to remind him of the hour. Jim was shut in the studio, and we waited together in the hall while Max went up. When he came down he was somewhat ruffled.

"He wouldn't open the door," he reported, "and when I told him it was meal time, he said he wasn't hungry, and he didn't give a whoop about the rest of us. He had asked us here to dinner; he hadn't proposed to adopt us."

So we finally ordered luncheon ourselves, and about two o'clock Jim came downstairs sheepishly, and ate what was left. Anne declared that Bella had been scolding him in the upper hall, but I doubted it. She was never seen to speak to him unnecessarily.

The excitement of the escape over, Mr. Harbison and I remained on terms of armed neutrality. And Max still hunted for Anne's pearls, using them, the men declared, as a good excuse to avoid tinkering with the furnace or repairing the dumb waiter, which took the queerest notions, and stopped once, half-way up from the kitchen, for an hour, with the dinner on it. Anyhow, Max was searching the house systematically, armed with a copy of Poe's Purloined Letter and Gaboriau's Monsieur LeCoq. He went through the seats of the chairs with hatpins, tore up the beds, and lifted rugs, until the house was in a state of confusion. And the next day, the fourth, he found something--not much, but it was curious. He had been in the studio, poking around behind the dusty pictures, with Jimmy expostulating every time he moved anything and the rest standing around watching him.

Max was strutting.

"We get it by elimination," he said importantly. "The pearls being nowhere else in the house, they must be here in the studio. Three parts of the studio having yielded nothing, they must be in the fourth. Ladies and gentlemen, let me have your attention for one moment. I tap this canvas with my wand--there is nothing up my sleeve. Then I prepare to move the canvas--so. And I put my hand in the pocket of this disreputable velvet coat, so. Behold!"

Then he gave a low exclamation and looked at something he held in his hand. Every one stepped forward, and on his palm was the small diamond clasp from Anne's collar!

Jimmy was apoplectic. He tried to smile, but no one else did.

"Well, I'll be flabbergasted!" he said. "I say, you people, you don't think for a minute that I put that thing there? Why, I haven't worn that coat for a month. It's--it's a trick of yours, Max."

But Max shook his head; he looked stupefied, and stood gazing from the clasp to the pocket of the old painting coat. Betty dropped on a folding stool, that promptly collapsed with her and created a welcome diversion, while Anne pounced on the clasp greedily, with a little cry.

"We will find it all now," she said excitedly. "Did you look in the other pockets, Max?"

Then, for the first time, I was conscious of an air of constraint among the men. Dallas was whistling softly, and Mr. Harbison, having rescued Betty, was standing silent and aloof, watching the scene with non-committal eyes. It was Max who spoke first, after a hurried inventory of the other pockets.

"Nothing else," he said constrainedly. "I'll move the rest of the canvases."

But Jim interfered, to every one's surprise.

"I wouldn't, if I were you, Max. There's nothing back there. I had 'em out yesterday." He was quite pale.

"Nonsense!" Max said gruffly. "If it's a practical joke, Jim, why don't you fess up? Anne has worried enough."

"The pearls are not there, I tell you," Jim began. Although the studio was cold, there were little fine beads of moisture on his face. "I must ask you not to move those pictures." And then Aunt Selina came to the rescue; she stalked over and stood with her back against the stack of canvases.

"As far as I can understand this," she declaimed, "you gentlemen are trying to intimate that James knows something of that young woman's jewelry, because you found part of it in his pocket. Certainly you will not move the pictures. How do you know that the young gentleman who said he found it there didn't have it up his sleeve?"

She looked around triumphantly, and Max glowered. Dallas soothed her, however.

"Exactly so," he said. "How do we know that Max didn't have the clasp up his sleeve? My dear lady, neither my wife nor I care anything for the pearls, as compared with the priceless pearl of peace. I suggest tea on the roof; those in favor--? My arm, Miss Caruthers."

It was all well enough for Jim to say later that he didn't dare to have the canvases moved, for he had stuck behind them all sorts of chorus girl photographs and life-cla.s.s crayons that were not for Aunt Selina's eye, besides four empty siphons, two full ones, and three bottles of whisky. Not a soul believed him; there was a a new element of suspicion and discord in the house.

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 att.i.tude 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. It was quite certain that neither his escape from death nor my accusation weighed heavily on him.

While Aunt Selina was busy with the time Jim had swallowed an open safety pin, and just as the pin had been coughed up, or taken out of his nose--I forget which--Jim himself appeared and sulkily demanded the privacy of the roof for his training hour.

Yes, he was training. Flannigan claimed to know the system that had reduced the president to what he is, and he and Jim had a seance every day which left Jim feeling himself for bruises all evening. He claimed to be losing flesh; he said he could actually feel it going, and he and Flannigan had spent an entire afternoon in the cellar three days before with a potato barrel, a cane-seated chair and a lamp.

The whole thing had been shrouded in mystery. They sandpapered the inside of the barrel and took out all the nails, and when they had finished they carried it to the roof and put it in a corner behind the tent. Everybody was curious, but Flannigan refused any information about it, and merely said it was part of his system. Dal said that if HE had anything like that in his system he certainly would be glad to get rid of it.

At a quarter to six Jim appeared, still sullen from the events of the afternoon and wearing a dressing gown and a pair of slippers, Flannigan following him with a sponge, a bucket of water and an armful of bath towels. Everybody protested at having to move, but he was firm, and they all filed down the stairs. I was the last, with Aunt Selina just ahead of me. 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 b.u.mp 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. You will have to stay," she said, fixing me with her imperious eyes.

So I stayed. Jim didn't want me, and Flannigan muttered mutiny. But it was easier to obey Aunt Selina than to clash with her, and anyhow I wanted to see the barrel in use.

I never saw any one train before. It is not a joyful spectacle. First, Flannigan made Jim run, around and around the roof. He said it stirred up his food and brought it in contact with his liver, to be digested.

Flannigan, from meekness and submission, of a sort, in the kitchen, became an autocrat on the roof.

"Once more," he would say. "Pick up your feet, sir! Pick up your feet!"