Читать книгу Ill Met by Moonlight - Leslie Ford - Страница 6

I didn’t go back to the lounge with Rosemary. The rain was starting in good earnest, we’d just had the second floor papered, and it would never occur to Julius and Lilac to see that the windows were closed, not if they happened to have company in the kitchen.

As it happened, I needn’t have bothered. Julius and Lilac did have company, but that inestimable man Sergeant Buck had seen that the hatches were battened down. He had also seen that Aunt Carrie’s ferns were put out on the lawn to catch the rain, the lawn chairs and the hammock brought in to the porch, the net from the tennis court neatly folded and stowed away in the garage, and my hat, gardening gloves and trowel brought in from the rock garden where I’d left them. All that should have given me some idea of what to expect from my week-end guest. Julius and Lilac were goose-stepping about the place in the most alarming fashion, completely regimented in half an hour’s military dictatorship, beaming with pride and importance, and saying, “Yas, Sergeant, suh,” “Yas, indeed, Sergeant, suh,” every ten seconds.

Sergeant Buck, lantern-jawed, fish-eyed, granite-visaged, six feet and two hundred twenty pounds of beef and brawn, eyed me with what really could only be called a dead pan as I ducked out of the car onto the kitchen porch. It was our first meeting, and I could see he was definitely disappointed in me. He looked at me so forbiddingly, in fact, that I almost hesitated to go into my own house.

“Where’s the Colonel, ma’am?”

He said it very suspiciously, almost as if I had him hid somewhere.

“I just slipped away to see if everything was all right here,” I said meekly. “He stayed on. The Chetwynds will bring him along shortly.”

Sergeant Buck nodded with some relief.

“You’ll find everything in order, ma’am.”

I started in.

“Excuse me, ma’am,” he said coldly. “I understood we’re staying here. I’ve unpacked the Colonel’s bag.”

“That’s right,” I said, turning round at the door.

“Excuse me, ma’am.”

He hesitated a brief instant, and went stanchly on.

“It was my understanding we were staying with a widow woman.”

“That’s me,” I said.

Sergeant Buck’s face reddened a little.

“Excuse me, ma’am,” he said again, frigidly. “But who’s going to chaperon the Colonel?”

I stared for a moment, and Lilac, listening from the kitchen, threw up her hands with a scream of high-pitched colored laughter.

“Oh, law, Sergeant, suh, the Colonel he’ll be all right! Miss Grace she won’ ’noy the Colonel! ’Deed she won’!”

Julius grinned and so did I. Sergeant Buck did not.

“I think it will be all right, Sergeant,” I said soberly. “You see, Julius and Lilac live in the garage and your room is next to the Colonel’s. I’m sure he’ll be perfectly safe.”

There was no expression of any kind on Sergeant Buck’s face to indicate his acceptance of that. His face got a shade redder. “We understood you were a widow woman,” he said stiffly. “I mean an old lady.”

Colonel Primrose hadn’t seemed particularly shocked that I was not of advanced age, although of course he may not have noticed it. Somehow I’d been feeling nearer sixty than thirty-eight all that day. The effect that a lot of people in love have on one, I suppose.

It was almost seven when Colonel Primrose came back from the club. The rain was over, for a moment or two, and I was out on the porch watching the bay, still turbulent and steel-gray under the lowering sky.

“Why did you leave so soon?”

“I had to get back to see about my family. Did I miss much?”

“A first-rate scene from modern melodrama,” he said with a wry smile.

“Sandra Gould?”

He nodded. We stood silent a moment.

“I take it she knows Dikranov.”

I said “Really?” I didn’t want to talk about that.

“Her face, you know.”

“How stupid of me not to notice.”

Colonel Primrose smiled. He’s very attractive, with thick gray hair and black eyes that seem to snap when he cocks his head down to look up sideways at you. It was a bullet in the neck at the Argonne that makes him have to cock his head before he can turn it. It’s rather effective. And he’s short and rather plump, with nothing in the least machine-gunnish about him—except possibly the sparkle in those keen black eyes.

“Stupid of me,” he said, looking at me with a sort of amused calculation. “You know, I should have thought you did notice . . . Mrs. Gould and Dikranov, I mean. Anyway, she wasn’t making much time with him while you and Miss Bishop were out. She’s concentrating on George Barrol.”

“George must be delighted.”

“And a little nonplused, I should say. He seems to be a pleasant middle-of-the-road sort of chap.”

Sergeant Buck appeared in the doorway.

“Well, I see I must go dress,” the Colonel said. “You’re going to the Chetwynds’, and to the dance, of course?”

“Yes, indeed. It’s Sail Cup Night. Rex Brophy’s Band Wagon is coming down from Philadelphia.”

Sergeant Buck’s iron face looked at me over the Colonel’s head. I’m afraid I flushed quite guiltily in spite of myself.

But Rex Brophy’s Band Wagon broke down fifteen miles this side of Wilmington on the Du Pont Highway and didn’t show up at April Harbor till eleven o’clock. Normally that wouldn’t have been of any particular importance, and it wasn’t now, actually, except that it left Sandra Gould at loose ends a bit too long.

I think we all knew we were in for trouble—all of us in our little crowd, that is. But just what horrible trouble, I don’t suppose any of us—not even Colonel Primrose, who turned out to be pretty well used to that sort of thing—even vaguely or remotely dreamed. We did, as I say, know that something would happen. If we’d been set in a circle and given a pencil and paper, and told it was a new parlor game and to guess what any three people in the room were going to do that night, I’d have written down

1. Jim Gould was either going to stay home and get stinko drunk, or come here and do it.

2. Sandra was going to raise as much hell as she could. And

3. Rosemary was going to come and be beautifully cool and sickeningly well-bred and ignore the whole wretched business.

Which showed how much I knew about it.

In the first place, Jim came, and so far as I know didn’t touch a drop of liquor there the whole evening. A lot of us would have been happier the next day if he had. He wasn’t cheerful, and he did act like a man with a terrible load on his mind, but nobody could blame him for that. He had one, in the shape of a wife who had never looked lovelier, or more like the female of the species, in all her life.

Outwardly Sandra was gentle and outrageously demure in a filmy sea-green chiffon frock with its little cape tied with long narrow grosgrain ribbons at the throat. It wasn’t till you got close to her that you saw the suppressed excitement in the glowing depths of her dark eyes.

Rosemary, on the other hand, was definitely herself. She still looked like something pretty unattainable, however, with her dull gold hair parted in the middle and a thick coronet braid making a lovely sophisticated halo round her exquisitely shaped head. She had on a deceptively simple pink linen evening frock with a bunch of blue velvet flowers—one of those things that had Paris and New York written all over it and probably cost more than any six other gowns in the room. Beside her Paul Dikranov stood, courteously but definitely possessive, with the air of a man who would allow his property so much rope and not an inch more. There wasn’t anything objectionable about it, however. In fact it was rather comforting in a way to have him there to be reckoned with.

But chiefly it was the lovely way he ignored Sandra that was noticeable. He talked to Mrs. Gould, he was positively charming to Lucy Lee, and I suppose he would have been to me too if Colonel Primrose hadn’t sort of adopted me—Sergeant Buck not being there—to look after him.

People were standing about mopping their brows, waiting for something to do. The shower had been too short-lived to clear the air at all, and flashes of heat lightning, and the rumbling thunder still over the bay, made the hot sticky night seem closing ominously in on us.

Colonel Primrose, Mr. Bishop and I were standing in the window; Sandra, Jim, Andy and George Barrol were across the big room by the silver catboat, the presentation of which would be the high point of the evening. Sandra and Andy were receiving congratulations from people coming up, and George was sort of hanging about the offing saying, “Isn’t she marvelous!” “Lovely child!” and what not.

They were having some kind of argument about sailsmanship, as Andy calls it, then. Lucy Lee, Paul Dikranov, Rosemary and some other people were playing monopoly. Mrs. Gould and the Chetwynds were talking to Dr. Potter, who’d put on a fresh linen suit and dropped in for his evening highball. It was just the ordinary sort of Saturday evening that you’d find in any country yacht club in America. Nothing on the surface suggested—or would have suggested to an outsider —that the room was packed with dynamite. Certainly not that the coolest, most detached person in the room was the detonating element.

Suddenly the argument in front of the model catboat broke into the loud “You can’t possibly!”—“I can so!” stage. Everybody looked around, rather more amused and interested than surprised, for a moment. But only for a moment. There was something definitely alarming in the abrupt tenseness that was instantly apparent.

Sandra was facing her husband and Andy and the others. George Barrol was behind her looking a bit fidgety.

“I can so! Eef she could do eet!” she cried. “I show you! Andy will come with me!”

Lucy Lee’s dark curly head went up with a jerk.

“Don’t let him go, Jim!” she cried. Then she tried to laugh, her face quite white.

“Go where?” Rosemary asked.

“It’s that old business. . . . Sandra wants to sail out to the lightship—in a storm—just because you did. It’s crazy!”

Rosemary’s eyes moved across the room and met Jim’s, I imagine in the longest glance they’d yet exchanged. They were both remembering the night they’d gone out on a dare and almost never come back.

“But I will go!”

Sandra came across the room, head up, eyes flashing.

“Or maybe . . . your Paul will go weeth me!”

She stopped by Dikranov’s chair, her hands resting lightly on her hips . . . rather more like the dancing Carmen than an intrepid young sportswoman.

“Just for old times’ sake—hein?”

Her dark head tossed wickedly.

“But maybe you try to forget! Ah, naughty Paul!”

She shook her scarlet-tipped finger at him.

Paul Dikranov’s face was as expressionless—in its own different way—as Sergeant Buck’s. Rosemary stared at them both, her own face a pale mask, ivory-hard suddenly. Sandra made a quick pirouette away from them, like a dancer on a cabaret floor, and came to a stop in front of her husband.

“Ah, my Jeem! You theenk I don’t know how much you don’t like me tonight . . . but I weel show you!”

Jim’s jaw tightened. He reached out to take her by the arm, but she eluded him with the grace of an apache. He couldn’t very well chase her across the room with fifty people watching. So he took a deep breath and just stood there.

Sandra had whirled across to poor George Barrol and had him by the arm.

“You weel come with me, George! They are cowards—we weel show them!”

Poor George! He hates to get his feet wet, and even Rodman Bishop’s yacht is torture to him in rough weather. But Sandra was the better man. She dragged him out of the open French windows and down the steps, the rest of us looking on dum-founded and horribly, horribly embarrassed . . . for Jim.

“Can’t somebody stop them?” Mrs. Gould said quietly.

Rodman Bishop’s deep voice brought all of us back to our senses. “We don’t have to worry. George won’t leave the dock—wild asses couldn’t drag him into a boat tonight.”

A terrible forked streak of lightning split the dark night. Jim and Andy went out through the windows. The rest of us looked at each other, breathed again and turned back to where we’d been. All except Rosemary. She sat erect in the white leather chair, as frozen as an icicle.

“Let’s not play any more,” Lucy Lee said abruptly. “I’m going outside.”

Dikranov stood up and bowed formally. “Shall we go out on the porch, Rosemary?”

“No . . . thanks,” Rosemary said quickly. Her voice was strained, almost harsh. Then she caught herself and said quite naturally, “You stay and talk to Dad. I’ll go out with Lucy Lee. Come on, Grace.”

We went, Bill Chetwynd coming with us. From the porch we could hear the sudden burst of applause that went up, and in another minute a saxophone blared. We knew that Rex Brophy’s Band Wagon had arrived. I looked at my watch. It was just eleven.

Rosemary and I ran across the lawn. Lucy Lee had disappeared. Even when the lightning flashed so that we had a momentary picture of the entire scene we couldn’t see her white little figure in it. We could, however, see a small boat with two figures in it bouncing on the dark waves, and on the dock two other figures in white flannels and dark jackets, running down, shouting.

“Is her boat out?” Rosemary whispered.

“Unless they brought it in tonight. They all thought the storm had died down for good.”

We picked our way down the rock steps aided by the flashes of white light. Not that we needed it. Either of us could have gone from one end of April Harbor to the other in the dark with our eyes closed.

Suddenly, in front of us, was Lucy Lee, sitting on a step. Just sitting there.

“What’s the matter, Lucy—hurt your ankle?” Rosemary asked quickly.

Lucy Lee shook her head.

“Go on down. I’m all right.”

Rosemary went on. I stayed.

“What’s the matter, Lucy Lee?”

She laughed . . . a ghastly tear-stained laugh.

“I’m just being a silly fool. Don’t mind me. Go on down.”

I sat down beside her.

“Look, precious,” I said. “You are being a silly fool. It’s all right if you can’t help it, but for Heaven’s sake don’t let everybody on the place know it.”

She didn’t say anything, just sat, a white-faced stricken child, with a thunderstorm playing havoc with her life.

“I’ll go back up,” she said suddenly. “Mother wants to go home early anyway. Tell Andy, will you? Not that he’ll care, but it . . . sort of keeps up the joke.”