Seven Keys to Baldpate Part 12

"Come back," pleaded Mr. Magee. "That is all I ask."

"A tiny boon," she smiled. "I grant it."

She followed the generous figure of the other woman up the stair and, casting back a dazzling smile from the landing, disappeared. Mr. Magee turned to find Professor Bolton discoursing to Mr. Bland on some aspects of the Pagan Renaissance. Mr. Bland's face was pained.

"That's great stuff, Professor," he said, "and usually I'd like it. But just now--I don't seem in the mood, somehow. Would you mind saving it for me till later?"

"Certainly," sighed the professor. Mr. Bland slouched into the depths of his chair. Professor Bolton turned his disappointed face ceilingward.

Laughing, Mr. Magee sought the solitude of number seven.

"After all, I'm here to work," he told himself. "Alarms and excursions and blue eyes must not turn me from my task. Let's see--what was my task? A deep heart-searching novel, a novel devoid of rabid melodrama.

It becomes more difficult every minute here at Baldpate Inn. But that should only add more zest to the struggle. I devote the next two hours to thought."

He pulled his chair up before the blazing hearth, and gazed into the red depths. But his thoughts refused to turn to the masterpiece that was to be born on Baldpate. They roamed to far-off Broadway; they strolled with Helen Faulkner--the girl he meant to marry if he ever got round to it--along dignified Fifth Avenue. Then joyously they trooped to a far more alluring, more human girl, who pressed a bit of cambric to her face in a railway station, while a ginger-haired agent peeped through the bars. How ridiculously small that bit of cambric had been to hide so much beauty. Soon Mr. Magee's thoughts were climbing Baldpate Mountain, there to wander in a mystic maze of ghostly figures which appeared from the shadows, holding aloft in triumph gigantic keys. Mr. Magee had slept but little the night before. The quick December dusk filled number seven when he awoke with a start.

He remembered that he had asked the girl to come back to the office, and berated himself to think that probably she had done so only to find that he was not there. Hastily straightening his tie, and das.h.i.+ng the traces of sleep from his eyes with the aid of cold water, he ran down-stairs.

The great bare room was in darkness save for the faint red of the fire.

Before the fireplace sat the girl of the station, her hair gleaming with a new splendor in that light. She looked in mock reproval at Mr. Magee.

"For shame," she said, "to be late at the trysting-place."

"A thousand pardons," Mr. Magee replied. "I fell asleep and dreamed of a girl who wept in a railway station--and she was so altogether charming I could not tear myself away."

"I fear," she laughed, "you are old in the ways of the world. A pa.s.sion for sleep seems to have seized the hermits. The professor has gone to his room for that purpose. And Mr. Bland, his broken heart forgot, slumbers over there." She pointed to the haberdasher inert in a big chair drawn up near the clerk's desk. "Only you and I in all the world awake."

"Pretty lonesome, isn't it?" Mr. Magee glanced over his shoulder at the shadows that crept in on them.

"I was finding it very busy when you came," she answered. "You see, I have known the inn when it was gay with summer people, and as I sat here by the fire I pretended I saw the ghosts of a lot of the people I knew flitting about in the dusk. The rocking-chair fleet sailed by--"

"The what?"

"Black flag flying, decks cleared for action--I saw the rocking-chair fleet go by." She smiled faintly. "We always called them that. Bitter, unkind old women who sat hour after hour on the veranda, and rocked and gossiped, and gossiped and rocked. All the old women in the world seem to gather at summer hotels. And, oh, the cruel mouths the fleet had--just thin lines of mouths--I used to look at them and wonder if any one had ever kissed them."

The girl's eyes were very large and tender in the firelight.

"And I saw some poor little ghosts weeping in a corner," she went on; "a few that the fleet had run down and sunk in the sea of gossip. A little ghost whose mother had not been all she should have been, and the fleet found it out, and rocked, and whispered, and she went away. And a few who were poor--the most terrible of sins--to them the fleet showed no mercy. And a fine proud girl, Myra Thornhill, who was engaged to a man named Kendrick, and who never dared come here again after Kendrick suddenly disappeared, because of the whispered dishonors the fleet heaped upon his head."

"What wicked women!" said Magee.

"The wickedest women in the world," answered the girl. "But every summer resort must have its fleet. I doubt if any other ever had its admiral, though--and that makes Baldpate supreme."

"Its admiral?"

"Yes. He isn't really that, I imagine--sort of a vice, or an a.s.sistant, or whatever it is, long ago retired from the navy. Every summer he comes here, and the place revolves about him. It's all so funny. I wonder if any other crowd attains such heights of sn.o.bbishness as that at a summer resort? It's the admiral this, and the admiral that, from the moment he enters the door. Nearly every day the manager of Baldpate has a new picture of the admiral taken, and hangs it here in the hotel. I'll show them to you when it's light. There's one over there by the desk, of the admiral and the manager together, and the manager has thrown his arm carelessly over the admiral's shoulder with 'See how well I know him'

written all over his stupid face. Oh, what sn.o.bs they are!"

"And the fleet?" asked Mr. Magee.

"Wors.h.i.+ps him. They fish all day for a smile from him. They keep track of his goings and comings, and when he is in the card-room playing his silly old game of solitaire, they run down their victims in subdued tones so as not to disturb him."

"What an interesting place," said Mr. Magee. "I must visit Baldpate next summer. Shall--shall you be here?"

"It's so amusing," she smiled, ignoring the question. "You'll enjoy it.

And it isn't all fleet and admiral. There's happiness, and romance, and whispering on the stairs. At night, when the lights are all blazing, and the band is playing waltzes in the casino, and somebody is giving a dinner in the grill-room, and the girls flit about in the shadows looking too sweet for words--well, Baldpate Inn is a rather entrancing spot. I remember those nights very often now."

Mr. Magee leaned closer. The flicker of the firelight on her delicate face, he decided, was an excellent effect.

"I can well believe you do remember them," he said. "And it's no effort at all to me to picture you as one of those who flitted through the shadows--too sweet for words. I can see you the heroine of whispering scenes on the stair. I can see you walking with a dazzled happy man on the mountain in the moonlight. Many men have loved you."

"Are you reading my palm?" she asked, laughing.

"No--your face," answered Mr. Magee. "Many men have loved you, for very few men are blind. I am sorry I was not the man on the stair, or on the mountain in the moonlight. Who knows--I might have been the favored one for my single summer of joy."

"The autumn always came," smiled the girl.

"It would never have come for me," he answered. "Won't you believe me when I say that I have no part in this strange drama that is going on at Baldpate? Won't you credit it when I say that I have no idea why you and the professor and Mr. Bland are here--nor why the Mayor of Reuton has the fifth key? Won't you tell me what it all means?"

"I mustn't," she replied, shaking her head. "I can trust no one--not even you. I mustn't believe that you don't know--it's preposterous. I must say over and over--even he is simply--will you pardon me--flirting, trying to learn what he can learn. I must."

"You can't even tell me why you wept in the station?"

"For a simple silly reason. I was afraid. I had taken up a task too big for me by far--taken it up bravely when I was out in the sunlight of Reuton. But when I saw Upper Asquewan Falls, and the dark came, and that dingy station swallowed me up, something gave way inside me and I felt I was going to fail. So--I cried. A woman's way."

"If I were only permitted to help--" Mr. Magee pleaded.

"No--I must go forward alone. I can trust no one, now. Perhaps things will change. I hope they will."

"Listen," said Mr. Magee. "I am telling you the truth. Perhaps you read a novel called _The Lost Limousine_." He was resolved to claim its authors.h.i.+p, tell her of his real purpose in coming to Baldpate, and urge her to confide in him regarding the odd happenings at the inn.

"Yes," said the girl before he could continue. "I did read it. And it hurt me. It was so terribly insincere. The man had talent who wrote it, but he seemed to say: 'It's all a great big joke. I don't believe in these people myself. I've just created them to make them dance for you.

Don't be fooled--it's only a novel.' I don't like that sort of thing. I want a writer really to mean all he says from the bottom of his heart."

Mr. Magee bit his lip. His determination to claim the authors.h.i.+p of _The Lost Limousine_ was quite gone.

"I want him to make me feel with his people," the girl went on seriously. "Perhaps I can explain by telling you of something that happened to me once. It was while I was at college. There was a blind girl in my cla.s.s and one night I went to call on her. I met her in the corridor of her dormitory. Somebody had just brought her back from an evening lecture, and left her there. She unlocked her door, and we went in. It was pitch dark in the room--the first thing I thought of was a light. But she--she just sat down and began to talk. She had forgot to light the gas."

The girl paused, her eyes very wide, and it seemed to Mr. Magee that she s.h.i.+vered slightly.

"Can you imagine it?" she asked. "She chatted on--quite cheerfully as I remember it. And I--I stumbled round and fell into a chair, cold and trembly and sick with the awful horror of blindness, for the first time in my life. I thought I had imagined before what it was to be blind--just by shutting my eyes for a second. But as I sat there in the blackness, and listened to that girl chatter, and realized that it had never occurred to her to light a lamp--then for the first time--I knew--I knew."

Again she stopped, and Mr. Magee, looking at her, felt what he had never experienced before--a thrill at a woman's near presence.

"That's what I ask of a writer," she said, "that he make me feel for his people as I felt for that girl that night. Am I asking too much? It need not be for one who is enmeshed in tragedy--it may be for one whose heart is as glad as a May morning. But he must make me feel. And he can't do that if he doesn't feel himself, can he?"

William Hallowell Magee actually hung his head.

"He can't," he confessed softly. "You're quite right. I like you immensely--more than I can say. And even if you feel you can't trust me, I want you to know that I'm on your side in whatever happens at Baldpate Inn. You have only to ask, and I am your ally."