Читать книгу The Wall - Mary Roberts Rinehart - Страница 5

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I drove her back to Sunset. There was nothing else to do. But I had some satisfaction, after piling her maid and a half dozen suitcases in the rear of the car, in putting the lobsters at her feet. She did not like it, although she still smiled.

“They smell,” she said. “Do you always have to carry your own food, Marcia?”

“I don’t often have to carry passengers.”

“No? Then I take it you are alone.”

“I am. I’ve just arrived.”

“No Mary Lou? No little Arthur?”

“No.”

“Well, thank God for that,” she said, and seemed to relax.

“What a train, and what a trip!” she said. “Why in heaven’s name bury yourself way up here all summer? Why not Newport? Not that I’m crazy about Newport, but you can at least get away from it.”

“Even if I liked Newport I couldn’t afford it,” I said evenly. “You ought to know that.”

I thought she glanced quickly at me. Then she drew a long breath.

“So that’s the way it is. I thought it might be.”

She said nothing more before we reached the house; I supposed because of the maid behind us. As we turned in at the driveway, however, she leaned forward and looked down at the pond.

“It used to give me the creeps, that place,” she said.

I had a chance to look at her then. She was several years older than I was, but she had kept her looks extremely well. As though she had read my mind she turned to me.

“Not so bad, am I? The face isn’t yet on the barroom floor, although it’s seen a number of barrooms. And so here’s the dear old place again! Well, well, who would have thought it!”

I stopped the car at the door, and William’s eyes almost popped out of his head when he saw who was with me. Juliette chose to be gracious.

“Well, William,” she said. “How are you? And how do you manage never to grow any older?”

He had the grace to color, for it is an open secret that he dyes his hair; that pathetic effort of the old servant to conceal his age. But he was very civil.

“Time passes, Miss Juliette,” he said. She had been Miss Juliette while Mother lived, and she was still that to him. “Shall I take out the bags?”

The maid, whose name I learned was Jordan, got out stiffly. She clutched Juliette’s jewel case in her hands but made no other effort with the luggage; and I led them both in and up the stairs.

“I’ll give you your old rooms,” I said. “I suppose you’ll want Jordan next to you. She can use the laundry downstairs if you need anything pressed.”

Juliette did not answer at once. She had moved to a window and was staring at the bay. The tide was out, and the gulls were busy and noisy on the rocks below.

“Those damned birds,” she said at last. “They used to drive me crazy.”

I faced her then for the first time. Jordan had disappeared into the next room, and William was lugging her baggage up the stairs.

“See here, Juliette,” I said. “You don’t like me and you don’t like this place. You never have. Why have you come back?”

“Because I have to talk to you,” she said. “If you want the truth, I’m in a jam.”

Then William came in, and there was no chance for more.

I stood by for a few minutes. Juliette traveled, as she did everything, extravagantly. I recognized the suitcase in which she carried, for any night on any train, her own soft blankets, her own towels, and even a pillow or two. I saw her dressing case, filled with lotions, creams, and all the paraphernalia with which she cared for her smooth skin. I even watched with some irritation while Jordan, taciturn but skillful, whipped my best guest linen from the bed and replaced it with the monogrammed pale-rose silk sheets which Juliette affected. And I retired when, with her usual complete abuse of all ordinary decency, Juliette began to strip for her bath. Nudity means nothing to me, but long ago her particular form of exhibitionism had palled on me.

It was some time before I could face the servants. I went into my own room and had what amounted to a private fit with the door locked. She had come for something. I knew that. And mixed with this fear was acute resentment. Not only was my peace gone, but Mary Lou’s plans would have to be changed.

When at last I went downstairs it was to find Lizzie, lacking a kitchen maid these days, grumpily peeling potatoes. She looked up at me sourly.

“How long’s she going to be here?” she said without preamble.

“I haven’t an idea, Lizzie. Probably not long, but we’ll have to do our best by her.”

“I’ll feed her all right,” said Lizzie, unappeased. “I’ll feed that sour-faced woman she’s brought with her too, if I have to stuff her meals down her throat. What I want to know is, what’s she doing here?”

I never have had any secrets from Lizzie, nor—I suspect—had Mother before me. I put a hand on her militant old shoulder.

“I don’t know, Lizzie,” I said. “All I know is that she has a reason, and that we’ll know it in due time. Perhaps she’ll stay only a day or two. She loathes it here.”

“Then praise God for that,” said Lizzie, and went on paring potatoes.

Nevertheless, and in spite of what was to come, that arrival of Juliette’s had its humorous side. One and all, the servants were determined that she should find nothing changed from our more opulent days. Perhaps I had fallen into slack habits. Ordinarily during the season I am not at home much. I am likely to lunch at the club and play bridge, and to dine out on those nights when I am not giving a small dinner myself.

Now the best silver was coming out from the safe in the library, a safe cannily camouflaged by my grandfather by glass doors painted with imitation books which would not have deceived a blind burglar; Mother’s old Georgian tea set, the candelabra and even the silver service plates. The pantry was seething with activity, and a wide-eyed Ellen was polishing vigorously under William’s watchful eyes.

But my hopes that the visit was to be brief were short-lived. Late in the afternoon two large trunks arrived and were carried up to Juliette’s room; and suddenly I felt the need of air and action. As a result I took Chu-Chu, my toy Pekingese—so called because of various tracks hither and yon, on carpets and lawns—and went down beside the pond, where Chu-Chu and a red squirrel carried on a sort of daily flirtation, the squirrel plainly refusing to consider Chu-Chu a dog at all. On the way down I turned and looked back at the house, and I was almost certain that I saw a curtain move up in the old hospital room.

I watched for some time but the movement was not repeated, and at last I went on. There was a bench there, out of sight of the house, and I sat down and faced my problem as well as I could.

The pond was very still. At the upper end, where Stony Creek flowed down from the hills to feed it, it was shallow; but where I sat near the dam it was deep and dark. What was left of the spring wild flowers formed small patches of color on the banks, and the thin overflow slid over the red stone wall and splashed cheerfully onto the shore below. But the air was cold. I found myself shivering, and so, calling Chu-Chu, who had found an acorn and was pretending to be a squirrel herself, I went back to the house.

Before I dressed for dinner I went up to the hospital suite. Nothing had been disturbed there, but acting on impulse I turned the key in the door at the top of the stairs and took it down with me. I put it in my handkerchief bag in the upper drawer of my bureau, and when Maggie came in to dress me for dinner I showed her where it was. Also I told her what I had seen, and she sniffed audibly.

“She’s a snooper,” she said. “Always was and always will be. But what did she want up there?”

“I’m not certain she was there, Maggie.”

“Well, she’s up to something,” she said, slapping the brush down on my cringing scalp as she used to do when I was a child. “What did I tell you about those crows? I’m only thankful your mother didn’t live to see this day, miss.”

Maggie’s conversations with me are rather like those with the Queen of England, when one drops in a “ma’am” now and then, like inserting a comma. Sometimes I am miss to her, sometimes not. Privately and in her loyal old heart I am still little Marcia, making faces when she jerks my hair, and being inspected surreptitiously to see if I have washed my ears. But she was in deadly earnest that day. I knew it when she brought out one of my best dinner dresses and fairly dared me not to wear it.

“Don’t let her patronize you,” she said, slipping it over my head. “You’re better looking than she is any day; and as for that woman she’s got with her—”

Here words failed her. She gave me a final jerk and stood back to survey her handiwork.

“Let her beat that!” she said vindictively.

It was half past seven that night before I saw Juliette again. Then she trailed downstairs in a long silver-gray creation with bands of silver fox on the sleeves. It was still broad daylight, and the low sun, streaming in through the big windows in the drawing room, showed her face older and more tired than it had been that morning. There were deep lines around her eyes, and for all her nonchalance she looked worn and harassed. Her earlier cheerfulness, too, was gone. She was irritable and nervy.

“Heavens, what a glare!” she said. “I could do with a cocktail, if you can manage one.”

“They are coming.”

“Thank God,” she said. “In the old days it was sherry. Do you remember? I’ve never looked at the stuff since.”

She relaxed over the cocktails, and she ate a fair dinner, but no sweet.

“I have to watch my figure,” she said. “I’m thirty-two, and I can’t go on forever being twenty-five. How do you stay so slim?”

She was more than that, I knew; but I let it go.

“I exercise a lot. And I have plenty to do.”

It was not a pleasant meal, for all the newly polished silver and Lizzie’s efforts. There were long intervals of silence when only William’s quiet movements and the lapping of the waves were to be heard. But once she glanced around her and spoke almost violently.

“God, how I hate this place,” she said.

There was an obvious answer to that, but I did not make it. As the daylight faded she looked prettier and rather tragic. The candles shone on her fair hair, on her long white hands with their scarlet nails and on her petulant painted mouth.

“I’m sorry, Juliette,” I said quietly. “Of course it’s home to me.”

“It never was home to me,” she said, and launched into a barbed attack on all of us; on her home-coming as a bride, and Father at the head of the table, stiff and uncompromising. On the close association between Arthur and me, so that she was often the unwanted third. On the time, a year or so later, when she took sick and Mother sent her to the quarantine room until she had been diagnosed.

“She hated me from the start,” she said.

“I don’t believe that, Juliette. She was very good to you. Maybe she was a little jealous of you. Arthur was her only son.”

“You never liked me yourself.”

“You didn’t much care, did you? If you had tried—”

“Tried! What was the use? You were too complacent, too rich in those days. And I was nobody. So far as you were concerned I was something he picked up out of the gutter; and you were glad to pay any price to get rid of me at the end.”

Enough of that was true to make me acutely uncomfortable. But luckily William reappeared then, and when he brought coffee to the library where a fire was burning, she had made up her mind to be more amiable.

It was there, over a cigarette, that she divulged the reason for her visit.

“I want to change the arrangement with Arthur, Marcia,” she said.

“Change it? How?” I asked, startled.

“I want a lump sum and call it quits.”

I sat quite still. A lump sum, when none of us had any available capital! On the other hand, if it could be managed, an end for all time to the yearly drain on Arthur’s resources.

“You said you were in trouble, Juliette. Is it about money? Is that the reason?”

She hesitated.

“I need money, yes. I suppose that’s no news to you. But—well, see here, Marcia. I’m young, comparatively; and I’m strong. I’ll probably live a long time.” She laughed a little. “Look what Arthur will have paid me in the next twenty years. A quarter of a million! That’s a lot of money.”

“How much do you want?”

“A hundred thousand dollars.”

I must have gasped, for she looked at me queerly.

“I have to have it,” she said. “He’ll be getting off easy at that, Marcia.”

I remember the desperation in her voice when she said that, and it made me sorry for her and anxious. The next minute she had lighted another cigarette, and although her hands trembled her voice was steady enough. She knew there had been a depression. She knew our money—Arthur’s and mine—was in a trust fund for his children and mine if I ever had any. But there was property, wasn’t there? How about selling Sunset? It was supposed to be valuable.

“Sunset belongs to me now,” I told her. “I bought Arthur’s share. As for selling it, even if I wanted to, I can’t. There’s no market for big places, Juliette.”

She saw that I was speaking the truth, and she looked fairly haunted. She got up suddenly and went to one of the windows, standing there and staring out.

“I loathe night on the water!” she said. “It makes me think of death.”

By the time she came back to the fire she was in better control. She even smiled her old mocking smile when I asked her if there was any emergency back of the idea.

“You could call it that,” she said. “Why shouldn’t I want to marry again, and need some capital for the love nest?”

“Is that the real reason?”

She did not reply at once. She sat looking somberly at the fire, and I thought she shivered.

“No,” she said finally, and let it go at that.

I felt sorry for her that night. She looked frightened, and I wondered if she was being blackmailed. Before we went upstairs I tried to explain things to her.

“I know Arthur would do it if he could, Juliette,” I said. “But you must know how things are. Junior had an appendix operation last spring, and now he has measles. That means nurses and hospital bills. He just manages; no more.”

She had no reply to that, and we went up early to bed; Juliette to the long massaging, the creams and astringents which were her evening ritual; and I to write to Arthur.

“I don’t know what the trouble is,” I wrote, “but there is something. She is worried, Arthur. Do you know what it is? I know the whole thing is impossible, but you will have to tell her yourself.”

I left it in the hall with a special-delivery stamp on it and went to bed. But I could not sleep. I was back with the young Arthur who had married her secretly, and then proudly brought her to Sunset. I was only seventeen at the time, but I remembered it well; William and the second man serving—it was lunchtime—and Arthur leading her into the room by the hand. He looked uneasy, but she was calm; calm and smiling.

“This is my wife,” he said, looking at Father. “I hope you will all be good to her.”

Father got up. He looked stunned. Mother could only gaze at them both, helplessly.

“When did this happen?” said Father.

“Yesterday, sir.”

Then Juliette took a hand. She went directly to Mother and, bending over, kissed her on the cheek.

“Try to forgive me,” she said. “I love him so terribly.”

And Mother, who was a gentlewoman first and Father’s wife only secondarily, had put an arm around her and held her for a moment.

“Then be kind to him,” she said gently. “For I love him too.”

Father never fully accepted Juliette. I know that he took a horse out that day and brought it back hours later in a state which set the stableboy to wondering. But the thing was done. We were all helpless.

From the first it was obvious that she was not one of us, if I can say that without being snobbish. She had no family save an aunt, Aunt Delia she called her, somewhere in the Middle West. She had come to New York to study music, and Arthur had met her there. But she was a lovely thing to look at, and if the songs she sang in a sweet husky voice were rather of the music-hall variety, we did our best by her.

She was quick to learn, too; how to dress—her first clothes were pretty terrible, how to ride, even how to talk. And Arthur’s pride in her was touching.

“She’s beautiful, isn’t she, Marcia?”

“Very.”

“And you don’t mind?”

“Why should I?” I said lightly. “She’s yours, and you love her.”

But I never really liked or trusted her, and as time went on I found I was not alone. Women did not care for her, but she had a curious effect on men. They clustered about her like flies around honey. It was for men that she sang her throaty little songs, and when the Park Avenue house was too staid for her, it was still men who filled the new apartment. Arthur used to come home and find them there, laughing and drinking.

I lay in my bed that night, remembering all this. But I was seeing her, too, as she had trailed up the stairs ahead of me, her body lithe and effortless as a girl’s and her high heels clicking on the hard wood of the steps. At the top she had turned and looked down at me.

“I’m warning you,” she said. “I’m staying until something is done, Marcia. It has to be done.”

That had been her good night.