Mrs. Balfame Part 13

On Sunday afternoon he had spent two hours with Alys Crumley. At first she had been reluctant to talk of any but the salient phases of the murder, but being appealed to as a "good old pal" and reminded that real newspaper people stood together, she finally had described the scene at the Country Club on the afternoon preceding Balfame's death, and shown him the drawing she had had the superior presence of mind to make.

Broderick had examined every detail of that rapid but demonstrative sketch: the burly form at the head of the room, his condition indicated by an angle of the shoulders and a deft exaggeration of feature which recalled the facile art of the cartoonist; the strained forms of the men surrounding him; Mrs. Balfame heading down the room, her face set and terrible; the groups of women and girls in att.i.tudes expressive of alarm or disgust.

But when he made as if to put the sketch in his pocket she had s.n.a.t.c.hed it from him, and he merely had shrugged his shoulders, confident that he could induce her to give it up should he really need it.

He had questioned her regarding the scene until its outlines were as firm in his mind as in her own. But there had been something else--some impression, not obviously linked with the case: It was for that impression that he sounded his admirable memory; and in a moment he found it and stopped with a smothered exclamation.

He had complimented her on the excellent likeness of Dwight Rush, whom he knew and liked, and remarked quite naturally that he might have sat for her a number of times. The dusky pink had mounted to her hair, but she had replied carelessly that Rush was "a common enough type."

Possibly Broderick would have forgotten the blush had it not have been for the swift change of expression in her eyes: a certain fear followed by a concentrated renitence; and at the same moment he had remembered that he had met Rush once or twice at the Crumleys' during the summer and thought him quite the favoured guest.

Driven only by a mild personal curiosity, he had asked her how she liked Rush and if she saw much of him; he recalled that she had answered with an elaboration of indifference that she hadn't seen him for ages and took no interest in him whatever.

Then Broderick had drawn her on to talk of Mrs. Balfame. Yes, in common with all Elsinore that counted, she admired Mrs. Balfame, although she believed that no one really knew her, that she unconsciously lived among the surfaces of her nature. Her face as she marched down the clubroom that day, and its curious sudden transformation on that other day at the Friday Club when her thoughts so plainly had drifted far from the plat.i.tudinous speakers, indicated to Miss Crumley's temperamental mind "depths and possibly tragic possibilities."

It was patent to Mr. Broderick's own mind that her suspicions had not lighted for a moment on the dead man's widow, but it also transpired in the course of the conversation that the young artist who had so "loved to sketch" the Star of Elsinore had suffered a long drop in personal enthusiasm. Pressed astutely, she had remarked that she guessed she was as broad-minded as anybody, especially since her year on the New York press, but she did not approve of married women claiming a right to share in the Great Game designed by Nature for the young of both s.e.xes.

Then the story came out: Miss Crumley, afflicted with a headache something over a fortnight since, and enjoying the cool night air just behind her front gate, had seen Mrs. Balfame come out of Dr. Steuer's garden next door and meet Dwight Rush face to face. He had begged to be allowed to see her home.

Mrs. Balfame had lovely manners, she couldn't help being sweet unless she disliked a person, and no woman will elect to walk up a long dark avenue alone if a man offer to escort her.

Alys would have thought nothing of it--merely a.s.sumed that Rush, being a comparative newcomer, had caught at the chance to make a favourable impression on the leader of Elsinore society--(no, he was no sn.o.b, but that idea just came to her), if they had not crawled, yes, _crawled_ all the way up the avenue.

Both were vigorous people with long legs; they could have covered the distance to the Balfame place in three minutes. They had been more than ten, and as they pa.s.sed under the successive lamp posts she had noted the man's bent head, the woman's tilted back--as she gazed up into his eyes, no doubt.

"In this town," Miss Crumley had announced, "a woman is fast or she isn't. You know just where you are. There's a cla.s.s that's sly about it, but somehow you get 'on' in time. Mrs. Balfame has stood for the highest and best. Mind you, I'm not saying that she ever saw Rush alone again, or cared a snap of her finger for him--or he for her. No doubt she felt, when the rare chance offered of taking a little flyer, that it was too good to miss. But she shouldn't have done it; that's the point. I don't like my idols to have feet of clay."

Broderick had felt both sympathetic and amused. He knew that Alys Crumley was not only sweet of temper and frank, if not candid, but that in spite of all her desperate modernism she cherished high ideals of conduct; and here she was turning loose the cat that skulks somewhere in every commonplace female's nature.

But the whole conversation had left his mind promptly. He had attached no significance whatever to a ten minutes' walk between a polite man and a woman returning alone from a friend's house on a dark night.

Now every word of the conversation came back to him. Rush, he gathered, had gone to the Crumley house several times a week for a while, and then, for reasons known only to himself and Alys, had ceased his visits abruptly. Had she fallen in love with him? Or was it only her vanity that was wounded? And if Rush had dropped a girl as pretty and bright and winning as Alys Crumley--who improved upon acquaintance, moreover--what was the reason? Why had he not fallen in love with her?

Had he loved some one else?

Broderick swung his mind to the morning following the murder, when he had met Rush in the hall of the Elsinore Hotel. The lawyer professed himself as delighted to "run up against him" and invited him to breakfast. All this had been natural enough, and it was equally natural that the conversation should have but one theme.

Once more Broderick sought a fugitive impression and found it. Rush, who was a master of words when verbal exactness was imperative, had created an impression in his companion's mind of the impeccability of the murdered man's widow.

Broderick had wondered once or twice since whence came that mental picture of Mrs. Balfame that rose clear-cut in his memory, in spite of his deliberate conviction of her guilt. Other people had raved about her and made no impression upon the young reporter's selective and somewhat cynical mind; but Rush had almost accomplished his purpose!

Why had he sought to accomplish it?

Broderick had known Rush in and out of court for nearly two years.

Whenever he had been on an a.s.signment in that part of Brabant County he had made a point of seeking him out, and even of spending an evening with him if he could afford the time. He liked the unique blend of East and West in the man; to Broderick's keen appraising mind Rush reflected the very best of the two great rival bisections of the nation. He liked the mixture of frankness and subtlety, of simple unquestioning patriotism--of a.s.sumption that no country but the United States of America mattered in the very least--and the intense concentrated individualism. Of hard-headed American determination to "get there" at any honourable cost, of jealously hidden romanticism.

Broderick was almost at the Crumley gate. He halted for a moment under the dark maples and glanced up the long shadowy avenue, his own narrower and still more jealously guarded "romantic streak" appreciating the possibilities on a dusky evening with a girl whose face floated for a moment before him. But he banished her promptly, searching his memory for some salient trait in Rush that he instinctively knew would establish the current he desired.

He found it after a moment of intense concentration. Rush was the sort of man that loves not woman but a woman. His very friends.h.i.+p for Alys Crumley was evidence that he cared nothing for girls as girls. Only the exceptional drew him, and mere youth left him unmoved.

Knowing Rush as he did, he felt his way rapidly toward the facts. Alys, woman-like, had succ.u.mbed to propinquity, and betrayed herself; Rush, finding his mere masculine loneliness misinterpreted, and being honourable to boot, had promptly withdrawn.

But why? Alys would have made him a delightful and useful wife. She was one of those too clever girls whom celibacy made neurotic and uncertain, but out of whom matrimony and maternity knocked all the nonsense at once and finally. She would make a splendid woman.

He should have thought her just the girl to allure Rush, whom he also knew to be fastidious and to set a high value on the good old Brabant blood. Moreover, it was time that Rush would be wanting the permanent companions.h.i.+p of a woman, a bright, progressive, but feminine woman. He had observed certain signs.

Alys, apparently, had not measured up to Rush's secret ideal of the wholly desirable woman, nor appealed to that throbbing vein of romanticism which he had striven to bury beneath the dusty tomes of the law. What sort of woman, then, could satisfy all he desired? And had he found her?

Broderick recalled a certain knightly exaltation in Rush's blue eyes which had come and gone as they discussed Mrs. Balfame, although not a word of the adroit concept he had built remained in the reporter's memory. But those eyes came back to Broderick there in the dark--the eyes of a man young and ardent like himself--he almost fancied he had seen the woman's image in them.

He revived his impression of Mrs. Balfame, seen for the first time to-day, and contemplated it impersonally: A beautiful, a fascinating woman--to a man of Rush's limited experience and idealism; fastidious, proud, gracious, supremely poised.

Nor did she look a day over thirty, although she must be a good bit more--he recalled the obituaries of the dead man: they had alluded to his marital accomplishment as covering a term of some twenty years.

Perhaps she was his second wife--but no--nor did it matter. Rush was just the sort of chap to fall in love with a woman older than himself, if she were still young in appearance and as chastely lovely, as unapproachable, as Mrs. Balfame. He would idealise her very years, contrast them with that vague suggestion of virginity that Broderick recalled, of deep untroubled tides.

All romantic men believe in women's unfathomed depths when in love, reflected the star reporter cynically, and Mrs. Balfame was just the sort to go until forty before having the smas.h.i.+ng love affair of her life; and to inspire a similar pa.s.sion in a hard-working idealist like Dwight Rush.

Mrs. Balfame and Dwight Rus.h.!.+ Broderick, who now stood quite still, a few paces from the Crumley gate, whistled.

Could Rush have fired that shot? Broderick recalled that the lawyer had mentioned having spent Sat.u.r.day evening in Brooklyn--on business.

Broderick shook his head vigorously. So far as he was concerned, Rush never should be asked to produce his alibi. He did not believe that Rush had done it, did not propose to harbour the suggestion for a moment.

Rush was not the man to commit a cowardly murder, not even for a woman.

If he had wanted to kill the man he would have involved himself in an election row, forced the bully to draw his gun, and then got in his own fire double quick. Standards were standards.

Broderick was more convinced than ever that Mrs. Balfame had committed the deed, and he had established the current. His work was "cut out" for the evening; and without further delay he presented himself at the Widow Crumley's door.

CHAPTER XIV

Supper was over and Broderick and Miss Crumley sat in the back yard studio; Mrs. Crumley had company of her own, and as Alys decried the vulgarity of the legendary American daughter's att.i.tude to the poor-spirited American mother, she invariably retired to the background whenever it would enhance Mrs. Crumley's self-respect to occupy not only the foreground but (if her daughter had an interesting visitor) the entire stage. Alys, since her humiliating failure with Dwight Rush, clung the more pa.s.sionately to her rules of conduct. They were not red with the blood of life, but at least they served as an anch.o.r.ed buoy.

The atelier was hung with olive green burlap and covered with an artistic litter of sketches. Broderick, before settling himself into a comfortable chair by the stove, examined the more recent and encouraged her with a few words of discriminating praise.

"Keep it up, Alicia. The _News_ for you next month if you are ready for a job. You've improved marvellously in figures, which was where you were weak. Miss Loys, our fas.h.i.+on artist, is marrying next month. You might as well begin with that. You'll be on the paper and can jump into something better when it offers."

Alys nodded emphatically. "Give me work, and as soon as possible. I don't care much what it is. But I want work and plenty of it. It isn't only that I want to use my energies, but I've spent all I can afford on lessons and the rest of it."

"I'll see to it. Your sort doesn't go begging."

Broderick clipped his cigar and watched her thin profile for a moment without speaking.

He noticed for the first time that she had lost the little flesh that formerly had covered her small bones, and that the pink stained the pale ivory of her cheeks only when conversation excited her. But if anything she was prettier--no, more attractive--than ever, for there was more depth in her face, which in spite of its subtle suggestions, had seemed to his critical masculine taste to be too eager, too p.r.o.ne to pour out her personality without reserve when the brain lighted up. Now there was a slight droop of the eyelids which might mean fatigue, but gave length and mystery to the strange olive eyes. Her pink mouth, with its short upper lip, was too small for his taste, but the modelling of her features in general seemed to him more cleanly defined, and the sweep of jaw, almost as keen as a blade, must have delighted her own artist soul.

She was rather diminutive (to her sorrow), but the long lines she cultivated in her house gowns made her figure very alluring, and the limp and awkward grace of fas.h.i.+on singularly became her. She wore to-night a "b.u.t.terfly" gown of georgette (finding, as ever, admirable effects in cotton since she could not afford the costly fabrics), the colour of the American beauty rose, and a narrow band of olive velvet around her thin ivory-white neck. For the moment of her absorption, as she stared into the coals, her att.i.tude would have been one of complete repose had it not been for her restless hands. Broderick noticed, too, that there were darkened hollows under her eyes. "Poor kid," he thought.

"She's been through it, all right, and put up a stiff fight. But what a pity."

As he struck a match she rose, and, opening a drawer in the table, took out a box of Russian cigarettes. "I keep these here," she announced, "because I don't want to shock mother; and I seldom indulge these days in expensive habits. But I shall celebrate and smoke all evening. It is jolly to have you like this again, Jimmy. I heard you were engaged. Is it true? You would seem to have deserted every one else."