In And Out Part 19

"Strong--rank!" said Anthony's guest. "Don't you smell it?"

"I smell nothing," Anthony said, as an expensive pungence tickled his nostrils suddenly, "but I'll see----"

He started for the corridor and stopped short. David had left his room and was coming down--and still, it did not sound like David! David, in Anthony's shoes, six or seven sizes too large, should have been thumping clumsily; these footsteps were firm little pats, with the sharp rap of a heel once or twice on the polished floor beside the runner. More still, with no regard at all for caution, David, using his soprano voice, was humming the same little tune.

And just as pure premonition had sent Anthony's skin to crawling, just as his scalp was p.r.i.c.kling and his eyes narrowing angrily, David was with them.

By way of raiment, David, the grip emptied, wore the daintiest tailored walking-gown, short of skirt and displaying silken stockings and patent leathers, with high, slender French heels. David's slim, round, girl-throat suggested the faintest powdering; David's abundant hair was dressed bewitchingly, with little reddish-blond curls straying down about the temples--and had one spent a morning on Fifth Avenue it would really have been rather difficult to find a more thoroughly attractive or better gowned girl than David!

Yet, in spite of her charms, Johnson Boller, who had bounced instinctively from his chair, could do no more than stare at David with the general expression of a fish new-s.n.a.t.c.hed from water. Second after second he gaped before his thick:

"Who's that?"

"That's David!" Anthony said weakly.

"The--the boy was a girl?"

"It would seem so."

"Then----" Johnson Boller stopped, teeth shutting suddenly. He stared at the young woman and he stared at Anthony Fry, who smiled faintly and hopelessly. His face grew red and then purple and then black.

"Hah!" he cried savagely. "I've got it! I've got it, you--you----"

"Hey?" said Anthony.

"I see it now!" Mr. Boller vociferated surprisingly. "You framed this thing up on _me_!"

CHAPTER VIII

Scorned

Anthony's brain, accustomed to the most precise and unexciting of routines, was tired--not nearly so tired as it was destined to become, yet too tired to grasp at once the significance of that flaming countenance. He could no more than stand limply and look at Johnson Boller, as that gentleman, ignoring Mary altogether, strode down upon him with clenched fists.

"You did it, but you'll never get away with it!" he cried.

"Johnson----"

"Never in the world! I've got Wilkins as a witness and----"

"Witness for what?"

Johnson Boller, albeit he trembled with fury, controlled himself.

"Don't try that baby-stare stuff on me, Fry," he said. "I understand now. Last night I thought you were off on one of your eccentric spells, but you were crazy like a fox, you were! But don't think for one minute that Beatrice is fool enough to drop into such a trap!"

Anthony himself did a little controlling.

"What are you talking about?" he cried.

"The thing you've tried to put over, to get me away from Beatrice!"

Johnson Boller thundered. "That's enough! Don't deny it! I know you don't approve of matrimony; I know you never wanted me to get married; I know that we haven't traveled around as much this last six months as we did in the twenty years before it--and I suppose you've been lonely, because n.o.body else in the world would stand for you. But by Heaven, Anthony, I never thought you'd try to break up my family by----"

"Try to do what?"

Johnson Boller dashed the sweat of fury from his eyes.

"I come to stay with you, when Beatrice goes," he said tremblingly. "And although there's no woman in this flat ordinarily, a woman's here last night----"

"Stop there!" Anthony Fry cried savagely. "Do you mean that I brought this woman here deliberately? Do you mean that I _knew_?"

"Knew!" Johnson Boller jeered.

"Then I tell you that you're an infernal a.s.s, sir, and I decline to defend myself!" Anthony snarled fiercely. "You! You lovesick fool and your crazy imagination! You're too much in love to reason, but--what about _me_?"

"Well, what about you?" Johnson Boller sneered.

"I," said Anthony, "have borne the reputation of a decent man! No women have ever been in this apartment before, save one or two relatives! No woman of any description has ever pa.s.sed the night here before. And yet now, when this infernal thing has happened, your poor addled wits--oh, bah! Bah, sir!"

"Don't bah at me!" Mr. Boller said dangerously, although not quite so dangerously, because Anthony's emotion had carried its own conviction.

Then, for a little, these two old friends stood and trembled and glared at each other, Johnson Boller contemplating a swift and terrible uppercut to Anthony's lean jaw, which should stretch him unconscious perhaps for hours--Anthony meanwhile wondering superheatedly whether, once his long fingers had wound about Johnson Boller's plump throat, he could hold on until wretched life was extinct.

They were angry, terribly angry and almost for the first time in their lives, and had they stood and glared for another fifteen seconds it is possible that one or the other might have ended his days in Sing Sing's electric chair--but as it happened Mary's voice came upon the vibrating, pregnant air, clear and cool and full of warranted acerbity.

"While all this talk of reputations is going on," said Mary, "what about mine?"

Anthony Fry's tension snapped. Johnson Boller, it seemed, was of no mind to relinquish his rare fury so easily, for he stood with his fists clenched and trembled a little even now and his color was no lighter than scarlet; but Anthony turned and bowed almost humbly.

"I beg your pardon, Miss Mary," he said bitterly.

"Miss Mary!" echoed Boller. "You know her, hey?"

"She told me to call her Mary," Anthony said stiffly.

"When? When you hired her for this job?" Johnson Boller persisted, although quite weakly.

"When I discovered--not half an hour back--that she was--er--what she is," Anthony said coldly. "And let that be an end to your comments, please. You saw me meet this young woman for the first time, as you will know when you recover your senses. You know for what purpose and under what misapprehension I brought her to this apartment. Don't make a bad matter worse by injecting your personal brand of asininity."

He turned his back on Johnson Boller and walked away.

Johnson Boller, however, turned his whole attention to Mary, perched on the arm of a chair, distressed enough but self-contained, pretty as a picture. And slowly reason climbed upon her throne again in Johnson Boller's brain, possessed though it was by Beatrice, loveliest of wives.

He smiled suddenly, because Beatrice in far-off Montreal would never know; he even grinned after a few seconds; and then, the enormity of the joke on Anthony Fry overcoming him suddenly, Johnson Boller opened his mouth and laughed--not a mere, decent expression of mirth, but a roar which suggested a wild bull in acute agony.

A Niagara of sound left Johnson Boller and ended in a deep, happy wheeze--and the torrent broke loose again and he hugged his fat sides and rocked and roared again, until Wilkins, genuinely startled, entered the living-room, and stopped, more genuinely startled, and regarded the altered David with mouth wide open.