The Sick a Bed Lady Part 24

The older girl's face was piteous to see. "Y--e--s," she stammered. "It is Love."

The Woodland Girl's eyes grew big with wonder. "But the other man?" she gasped. "You are going to be married next week!"

Adele Reitzen's eyes blurred. "Yes," she repeated, "I am going to be married next week." A little s.h.i.+ver went flickering across her shoulders.

The Woodland Girl's heart began to plunge and race. "What's the matter with the man out on the street corner?" she asked nervously.

Adele Reitzen caught her breath. "He's a civil engineer," she said. "His name is Brian Baird. He's just back from Central America. I met him on the steamer once. He was traveling second cabin. My--family--won't--let --me--have--him."

The Woodland Girl threw back her head and laughed, and smothered her laugh contritely with her hand. "Your family won't let you have him?"

she mumbled. "What a funny idea! What has your family got to do about it?" Her breath began to quicken, and she reached out suddenly and clutched Adele Reitzen's shoulder. "Do you know where my uncle's musty old law library is?" she hurried. "It's downstairs, you know, close to the store room--n.o.body ever uses it. You go down there just as fast as you possibly can, and wait there, and I'll be back in five minutes with the--Love Man."

Before Adele Reitzen's feebler courage could protest, the Woodland Girl was scurrying up the short flight to the dressing-room and pawing like a prankish terrier through the neatly folded evening coats that snuggled across the bed. Tingling with excitement, she arrayed herself finally in the luxuriantly m.u.f.fling black and gold splendor, and started cautiously down the long, creaky front stairs.

Like the inimitable, familiar thrill of little wild, phosph.o.r.escent eyes looming suddenly out of the black night-woods at home, the adventure challenged her impetuous curiosity. Bored puzzlingly by the big city's utter inability to reproduce the identical, simple lake-and-forest emotionalism that was the breath of life to her, she quickened now precipitately to the possible luring mystery in human eyes. Through the dark mahogany stripes of the bal.u.s.trade, the drawing-room candles flared and sputtered like little finger-pinches of fluid flame, and the violin's shuddering voice chased after her, taunting, "Hurry! Hurry! Or it won't be there!" Beyond the lights and music, and the friendly creaking stairs, the strange black night opened forth like the scariest sort of a bottomless pit; but as yet, in all the girl's twenty coltish years nothing except headache and heart-beat had ever made her feel perfectly throbbing-positive that she was alive. She could spare the headache, but she could not spare the heart-beat. Paddling with muscle-strained shoulder and heaving breast across a November-tortured lake, or huddling under forbidden pine trees in a rackety August thunder storm, or floundering on broken snowshoes into the antlered presence of an astounded moose--Fun and Fear were synonymous to her.

Once on the street, like water to thirst, the cold night air freshened and vivified her. Over her head the electric lights twinkled giddily like real stars. On either side of her the huge, hulking houses reared up like pleasant imitation mountains. Her trailing cloak slipped now and then from her clutching fingers, but she trudged along toward the corner with just one simple, supreme sense of pleasurable excitement--somewhere out of the unfathomed shadows a real, live Adventure was going to rise up and scare her.

But the man, when he came, did not scare her one hundredth part as much as she scared him, though he jumped at her from the snuggling fur robe of a stranded automobile, and s.n.a.t.c.hed at her arm with an almost bruising intensity.

"Oh, Adele," he cried huskily, "I thought you had failed me again."

The Woodland Girl threw back her somber hood and stood there all blonde and tousle-haired and astonis.h.i.+ng under the electric light. "I'm not your Adele," she explained breathlessly. "I'm just Chloe Curtis. Adele sent me out to tell you that she absolutely couldn't--couldn't come.

You yourself would have seen that it was horridly impossible. But you are to go back to the house now with me--to my uncle's old unused library and see Adele yourself for as much as fifteen minutes. No one--oh, I'm sure that no one--could persuade a woman to be brave--on a street corner; but I think that perhaps if you had a chance to see Adele all alone, she would be very--extraordinarily brave."

Anger, resentment, confusion, dismay flared like successive explosions in the man's face, and faded again, leaving his flesh utter ash gray.

"It was plucky of you to come," he muttered grimly, "but I haven't quite reached the point yet--thank you--where I go sneaking round people's unused rooms to meet any one!"

"Is it so very different from sneaking round street corners?" said the Woodland Girl.

The man's head lifted proudly. "I don't go 'sneaking' round street corners," he answered simply. "All Outdoors _belongs_ to me! But I won't go secretly to any house that doesn't welcome me."

The Woodland Girl began to stamp her foot. "But the house does welcome you," she insisted. "It's my visity-house, and you are to come there as my friend."

In her ardor she turned and faced him squarely under the light, and winced to see how well worth facing he was--for the husband of a coward. There was no sleek New York about him, certainly, but rather the merge of all cities and many countries, a little breath of unusualness, a touch of mystery, a trifling suggestion, perhaps, of more dusty roads than smug pavements, twenty-eight or thirty years, surely, of adventurous youth. Impulsively she put out her hand to him. "Oh, please come," she faltered. "I--think you are so nice."

With a little laugh that had no amus.e.m.e.nt in it, nor pleasure, nor expectation, nor any emotion that the Woodland Girl had ever experienced, he stood and stared at her with some sudden impulse. "Does Adele really want me to come?" he asked trenchantly.

"Why yes," insisted the Woodland Girl. "It's life or death for you and Adele."

Ten minutes later, standing on guard at the edge of the library door, the Woodland Girl heard, for the first time in her life, the strange, low, vibrant, mysterious mate-tone of a human voice. If she had burrowed her head in a dozen pillows, she could not have failed to sense the amazing wonder of the sound, though the clearer-worded detail of hurried plans and eager argument and radiant acquiescence pa.s.sed by her un.o.bserved. "But I must be perfectly sure that you love me," persisted the man's voice.

"You and--you only," echoed the woman's pa.s.sion.

Then suddenly, like a practical joke sprung by a half-witted Fate, the store room door opened with casual, exploring pleasantness, and the Journalist and Adele Reitzen's promised husband and big Peter himself stepped out into the hallway.

Before the surprised greeting in two men's faces the Woodland Girl retreated step by step, until at last with a quick turn she whirled back into the dingy, gas-lit library--her chalky face, her staring eyes proclaiming only too plainly the calamity which she had no time to stuff into words.

Close behind her followed the three smiling, unsuspicious intruders.

Even then the incident might have pa.s.sed without gross awkwardness if the Woodland Girl's uncle and aunt had not suddenly joined the company.

From the angry, outraged flush on the two older faces it was perfectly evident that these two, at least, had been waylaid by kitchen gossip.

Brian Baird laughed. Like a manly lover goaded and hectored and cajoled too long into unworthy secrecy, his pulses fairly jumped to meet the frank, forced issue. But with a quick, desperate appeal Adele Reitzen silenced the triumphant speech on his lips. "Let me manage it!" she whispered, so vehemently that the man yielded to her, and stepped back against the fireplace, and spread his arms with studied, indolent ease along the mantel, like a rustic cross tortured out of a supple willow withe. One of his hands played teasingly with a stale spray of Christmas greens. Nothing but the straining, white-knuckled grip of his other hand modified the absolute, wilful insolence of his pose.

As for Adele, her face was ghastly.

With crude, uncontrolled venom the Woodland Girl's aunt plunged into the emergency. "Adele," she cried shrilly, "I think you owe your _fiance_ an explanation! You promised us faithfully last year that you would never, never see Mr. Baird again--and now to-night our chauffeur saw you steal out to the street corner to meet him--like a common shop-girl. And you dare to bring him back--to my house! What have you to say for yourself?"

For the fraction of a moment Adele Reitzen's superb beauty straightened up to its full majestic height, and all the love-pride that was in her white, white flesh flamed gloriously in her face. Then her sleek, prosperous, arrogant city lover stepped suddenly forward where the yellow light struck bleakly across his shrewd, small eyes and his thin, relentless mouth.

"I should be very glad, indeed, to hear what you have to say," he announced, and his voice was like a nicked knife blade.

Flush by flush by flush the red glory fled from Adele Reitzen's face.

Her throat began to flutter. Her knees crumpled under her. Fear went over her like a gray fog.

With one despairing hand she reached back to the Woodland Girl. "Oh, tell them it was you," she whispered hotly. "Oh, tell them it was you."

Her scared face brightened viciously. "It _was_ you--you know! Tell them--oh, tell them anything--only save me!"

The Woodland Girl's eyes were big with horror. She started to speak, she started to protest, but before the jumbled words could leave her lips Adele Reitzen turned to the others and blurted out hysterically:

"Surely I can't be expected to keep even a love-secret under these--distressing circ.u.mstances. _It was Chloe who went out to the street corner to-night--like a common shop-girl--to meet Brian Baird.

She wore my cloak on purpose to disguise her._"

Like the blaring scream of a discordant trumpet, the treacherous, flatted truth crashed into the Woodland Girl's startled senses, and the man in the shape of a sagging willow cross started up and cried out, "My G.o.d!"

For a second the Woodland Girl stood staring into his dreadful, chaotic face, then she squared her shoulders and turned to meet the wrathful, contemptuous surprise in her uncle's and aunt's features.

"So it was you," sneered the uncle, "embroiling our decent household in a common, vulgar intrigue?"

"So it was you," flamed her aunt, "you who have been posing all these days as an Innocent?"

Frantic with perplexity, muddled with fear, torn by conflicting chivalries, the Woodland Girl stared back and forth from Adele Reitzen's agonized plea to the grim, inscrutable gleam in Brian Baird's eyes. As though every living, moving verb had been ripped out of that night's story, and all the inflexible nouns were printing themselves slam-bang one on top of another--Roses, Wine, Music, Silver, Diamonds, Fir-Balsam telescoped each other in her senses.

"Your father sent you down here," persisted her aunt brutally, "on the private plea to me that he was planning to be married again--but I can readily see that perhaps no one would exactly want you."

The Woodland Girl's heart began to pound.

"We--are--waiting," prodded her uncle's icy voice.

Suddenly the Girl's memory quickened. Once, long ago, her father had said to her: "Little Daughter, if you are ever in fear and danger by sea or land--or city, which is neither sea nor land--turn always to that man, and to that man only, whom you would trust in the deep woods. Put your imagination to work, not your reason. You have no reason!"

Desperately she turned to Peter. His face, robbed utterly of its affection, was all a-shock with outraged social proprieties, merging the merest bit unpleasantly into the racy appreciation of a unique adventure. Panic-stricken, she turned to the Journalist. Already across the Journalist's wine-flushed face the pleasant, friendly smile was souring into worldly skepticism and mocking disillusionment.

She shut her eyes. "O Big Woods, help me!" she prayed. "O Cross Storm, warn me! O Rough Trail, guide me!"

Behind her tightly scrunched lids her worried brain darkened like a jumbled midnight forest. Jaded, bedraggled, aching with storm and terror, she saw herself stumbling into the sudden dazzling splurge of a stranger's camp fire. Was it a man like Peter? Was it the Journalist?

She began to s.h.i.+ver. Then her heart gave a queer, queer jump, and she opened her eyes stark wide and searched deep into Brian Baird's livid face. One of his hands still strained at the wooden mantel. The other still bruised the pungent balsam tip between its restive fingers. His young hair was too gray about his temples. His shoulders were too tired with life's pack burdens. His eyes had probably grown more bitter that night than any woman's lips could ever sweeten again. And yet--