Читать книгу The Greatest Murder Mysteries of Mary Roberts Rinehart - 25 Titles in One Edition - Mary Roberts Rinehart - Страница 97

Table of Contents

We got them all into a launch finally, for there was only five feet of water, which explained much that we had not understood about the fight, and they were as disconsolate looking a lot of lovers as I ever wish to see. Mr. Carleton sat in the stem and held his head, which Aggie's oar had almost broken, and the girl dripped and shivered in a comer by herself and stared at the Mansfield man, who was coaxing Tish for one of her petticoats so he could give the girl his shawl.

Aggie was for trying to explain to the girl how we came to be there at all, and without our shoes at that. But it was such a long story, beginning with the dog that had fleas ("mange," says Aggie) and extending through robbery to attempted murder ("I only meant to stun him," says Aggie), that I advised her not to begin it.

The launch would not start after all, and it developed that the propeller shaft was choked with weeds. This meant that the Mansfield man must crawl overboard, get on his back under the launch (which is much more unpleasant, I should think, than getting under an automobile), and clear off the shaft. And while he was holding his breath under the boat, and while Tish had turned her back on everybody and with the aid of the lantern was trying to take a splinter out of the sole of her foot, the Carleton man got up dizzily and went over to the girl.

"Surely, Lillian," he said, steadying himself by the awning frame, "you—you don't intend to let that—"

"Please go away," she said. "I don't want to talk. How funny you look with that bandage around your head." And then, to me (she had accepted the presence of three bare-footed maiden ladies in the launch without comment): "Oh, do you think he might be caught in the weeds and—and drown?"

But he did not drown. He came magnificently over the edge of the boat in a few minutes, with a string of green water-weeds clinging to his head. Aggie, who, as you have seen, is romantic, muttered something about "grape leaves in his hair," which she said afterward was Ibsen, although the only use I have ever known for grape leaves was to wrap pats of butter in, in the country.

He turned the launch around and we started for home. I do not recall that any one spoke on the way back, except Tish, who asked me if I had any castor oil at the house: she wanted it to soften her shoes if they dried stiff. The Girl sat by herself and watched the big fellow in the shawl-toga. And once or twice, when he glanced up and saw her, he smiled over at her, but he did not go near her or speak to her.

It was pale dawn when we stopped at the dock of the Watermelon Camp. We, who had been sodden shadows in the night, were now damp and shivering outlines. Mr. Mansfield, having given the girl the shawl, drew arotmd him still closer the awning curtain with which he had draped himself, and Aggie, still clutching the oar, held up one hand in the gray light to hide the deficiencies of her mouth. No one stirred in the camp.

Mr. Carleton got up stiflly and glanced around at all of us. Then he stalked over to the man at the wheel, who was staring ahead and whistling under his breath.

"Will you give me your word to take her home?" he said.

"Ask her if she wants to go home." He threw this over his shoulder, between whistles, as it were. Then the girl, looking very pretty, but slim and slinky in her wet things, went over to the Mansfield man and put her hand on his shoulder.

"I—I think I will go with you, Don!" she said. And that practically ends the story.

We left Mr. Carleton on the dock, staring after us through the mist, and we all went back to the cottage and put the girl to bed. We gave Mr. Mansfield a pillow by the sitting-room wood fire, and Tish's green kimono to sleep in. And after that we all three took a mustard foot-bath and some camphor sprinkled on sugar and went to bed.

Aggie wakened me at nine o'clock the next morning by hunting in my bureau for her second best teeth, and it was then that we found our lovers had gone. In the girl's room there was a letter of thanks. She said she did not wish to disturb us after that awful night, but that she could not sleep, and that she and Mr. Mansfield were going down to Telusah to be married.

Tish read the letter aloud and stared at us, while Paulina whined for her breakfast.

"Upon my soul," Tish gasped, when she could speak. "Instead of clapping him into jail, she's going to marry him!"

"Do you thuppoth he went to Telutha in that kimono?" Aggie said in a husky whisper. She had taken a terrible cold.

But Mr. Mansfield did not go to Telusah in Tish's kimono.

After all, the beginning of this story is also the end. For now you can understand why Tish dropped the bowl when the young man brought her kimono back from the Watermelon Camp and asked for Mr. Carleton's trousers!

I have told the story in defense of Tish and the rest of us. I wish to brand as false the story told by the man from the hotel who happened to be fishing for muskalunge early that morning. He said, you remember, that he saw. Miss Carberry in her green kimono leave our cottage just after dawn and go stealthily along the beach through the mist to the Watermelon Camp. When she got there, he said, to his horror he saw her strip off the green kimono and hang it to a tree. Just then the mist shut down and he saw nothing more.

In his anxiety for Miss Carberry's sanity he was on the point of landing to investigate, when he hooked the largest 'lunge of the season (registered weight at the hatcheries, thirty-seven pounds four ounces), and when he looked again at the shore all he saw was a red-haired man hurrying along the beach in a pair of corduroy trousers and a bathing-shirt!

Tish closed the incident with one comment.

"Young millionaire!" she snapped when she saw the newspapers. "Young scamp, I say, stealing poor Mr. Carleton's sweetheart and then his trousers. As for my green kimono, after all we did for him, he might at least have had the grace to roll it up and stick it imder a barrel. I shall bum it."

But she did not. Aggie saw it only the other day, put away in a lavender silk sachet, with a bundle of newspaper clippings, a half-eaten bath sponge, and a particular kind of bass hook, which we had found on the sitting-room floor.

THE END