Who Cares? Part 23

"Murder!" echoed Palgrave, scoffing.

"Yes, murder. Can't you see that this boy could take you and break you like a dry twig? Let's go back, all three of us. We don't want to become the center of a sight-seeing crowd." And she took an arm of each shaking man and went across the drive to where the car was parked.

And so the danger moment was evaded,--young Oldershaw warm with pride, Palgrave sullen and angry. They made a trio which had its prototypes all the way back to the beginning of the world.

It did Palgrave no good to crouch ignominiously on the step of the car which Oldershaw drove back h.e.l.l for leather.

The bridge tables were still occupied. The white lane was still across the sea. Frogs and crickets still continued their noisy rivalry, but it was a different climate out there on the dunes from that of the village with its cloying warmth.

Palgrave went into the house at once with a brief "Thank you." Joan waited while Harry put the car into a garage. Bed made no appeal.

Bridge bored,--it required concentration. She would play the game of s.e.x with Gilbert if he were to be found. So the boy had to be disposed of.

"Harry," she said, when he joined her, chuckling at having come top dog out of the recent blaze, "you'd better go straight to bed now. We're going to be up early in the morning, you know."

"Just what I was thinking," he answered. "By Jove, you've given me a corking good evening. The best of my young life. You ... you certainly are,--well, I don't know how to do you justice. I'd have to be a poet."

He fumbled for her hand and kissed it a little sheepishly.

They went in. "You're a nice boy, Harry," she said. There was something in his charming simplicity and muscular strength that reminded her of,--but she refused to let the name enter her mind.

"I could have broken that chap like a dry twig, too, easy. Who does he think he is?" He would have p.a.w.ned his life at that moment for the taste of her lips.

She stood at the bottom of the stairs and held out her hand. "Good night, old boy," she said.

And he took it and hurt it. "Good night, Joany," he answered.

That pet name hurt her more than his eager grasp. It was Marty's own word--Marty, who--who--

She threw up her head and stamped her foot, and slammed the door of her thoughts. "Who cares?" she said to herself, challenging life and fate.

"Come on. Make things move."

She saw Palgrave standing alone in the library looking at the sea. "You might be Canute," she said lightly.

His face was curiously white. "I'm off in the morning," he said. "We may as well say good-by now."

"Good-by, then," she answered.

"I can't stay in this cursed place and let you play the fool with me."

"Why should you?"

"There'll be Hosack and the others as well as your new pet."

"That's true."

He caught her suddenly by the arms. "d.a.m.n you," he said. "I wish to G.o.d I'd never seen you."

She laughed. "Cave man stuff, eh?"

He let her go. She had the most perfect way of reducing him to ridicule.

"I love you," he said. "I love you. Aren't you going to try, even to try, to love me back?"

"No."

"Not ever?"

"Never." She went up to him and stood straight and slim and bewitching, eye to eye. "If you want me to love you, make me. Work for it, move Heaven and earth. You can't leave it to me. I don't want to love you.

I'm perfectly happy as I am. If you want me, win me, carry me off my feet and then you shall see what it is to be loved. It's entirely up to you, understand that. I shall fight against it tooth and nail, but I give you leave to do your best. Do you accept the challenge?"

"Yes," he said, and his face cleared, and his eyes blazed.

V

At the moment when the Nice Boy, as brown as the proverbial berry, was playing a round of golf with Joan within sound of the sea, Howard Oldershaw, his cousin, drove up to the little house in East Sixty-fifth Street to see Martin.

He, too, had caught the sun, and his round fat face was rounder and fatter than ever. He, too, had the epitome of health, good nature, and misdirected energy. He performed a brief but very perfect double shuffle on the top step while waiting for the door to open, and then barged past the const.i.tutionally unsurprised man servant, sang out a loud woo-hoo and blew into the library like an equinoctial gale.

Pipe in mouth, and wearing a thin silk dressing gown, Martin was standing under the portrait of his father. He slipped something quickly into his pocket and turned about. It was a photograph of Joan.

"Well, you Jack-o'-Lantern," he said. "It's better late than never, I suppose."

Howard sent his straw hat spinning across the room. It landed expertly in a chair. "My dear chap, your note's been lying in my apartment for a week, snowed under my bills. I drove back this morning, washed the bricks out of my eyes and came right around. What are you grumbling about?"

"I'm not grumbling. When you didn't show up in answer to my note I telephoned, and they told me you were away. Where've you been?"

"Putting in a week at the Field Club at Greenwich," replied Howard, filling a large cigarette case from the nearest box, as was his most friendly habit. "Two sweaters, tennis morning, noon and night, no sugar, no beer, no b.u.t.ter, no bread, gallons of hot water--and look at me! Martin, it's a tragedy. If I go on like this, it's me for Barnum's Circus as the world's prize pig. What's the trouble?"

There was not the usual number of laughter lines round Martin's eyes, but one or two came back at the sight and sound of his exuberant friend. "No trouble," he said, lying bravely. "I got here the day you left and tried to find you. That's all. I wanted you to come down to Shinnec.o.c.k and play golf. Everybody else seems to be at Plattsburg, and I was at a loose end."

"Golf's no good to me. It wouldn't reduce me any more than playing the piano with somebody dying in the next room. Been here all the week?"

"Yes," said Martin.

"What? In this fug hole, with the sun shining? Out with it, Martin. Get it off your chest, old son."

Just for an instant Martin was hugely tempted to make a clean breast of everything to this good-hearted, tempestuous person, under whose tight skin there was an uncommon amount of shrewdness. But it meant dragging Joan into open discussion, and that was all against his creed. He had inherited from his father and his father's father an absolute incapability of saying anything to anybody about his wife. And so he slammed the door of his soul and presented an enigmatical front.

"There's nothing on my chest," he said. "Business downtown has kept me here,--legal stuff and that sort of thing. But I'm free now. Got any suggestions?"

Howard accepted this. If a pal was determined not to confide and get invaluable advice, what was the use of going for him with a can opener?

But one good look at the face whose every expression he knew so well convinced him that something was very much the matter. "Why, good Lord," he said to himself, "the old thing looks as if he'd been working night and day for an examination and had been plucked. I wonder which of the two girls is at the back of all this,--the wife or the other?"

Rumors had reached his way about both.

"What do you want to do?" he asked.