Читать книгу The Wall - Mary Roberts Rinehart - Страница 8

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It was the next day that Juliette disappeared.

I did not like her, but I am glad to feel that at least a part of that last evening of hers was a cheerful one. She had dressed rather elaborately for dinner, and I remember that she had a number of cocktails before we went in to eat. Apparently the wave had improved her morale, and if she knew anything about the condition of those upper rooms she gave no sign of it.

I, too, was feeling more normal. I had played eighteen holes of golf that afternoon, and I was content to sit still and give her the admiration she always craved.

“That’s a lovely dress,” I told her. And I can still see her turning around, complacently, in front of the long Chippendale mirror in the drawing room.

“It is pretty good,” she said. “And I’ve lost an inch off my waist.”

Standing there, tall and slim and smiling, her hair freshly waved, and inspecting herself. Eying her complexion closely in the strong sunset light, and giving a nod of approval. And all the time, as the clock on the mantel ticked on, her span of life growing shorter. The sands in the glass running out.

I am even glad that Lizzie gave her an unusually good dinner that night; and that I said nothing when, later on, she sent Jordan for a long cape with a high fur collar, and stated that she was taking the car.

“I’m fed up with sitting around here alone,” she said. “Doesn’t anybody ever come in? I thought you were the belle of the place!”

She saw my face and laughed her mocking little laugh.

“So I’m the trouble,” she said. “Little Marcia’s trouble, eh? Well, you know the answer to that.”

She went out, and soon after I heard the car. Weeks later we were to wonder about that drive of hers. Where had she gone? Whom had she seen? Had it led to the catastrophe of the next day, and if so, how? But when we did know it was too late to matter.

Tony Rutherford came in just after she had gone.

“Hid in the bushes until she was out of the way,” he said, grinning. “Heard she was here. What’s the idea, anyhow? And how are you? Bearing up?”

“Pretty well,” I told him. “Ring for a drink if you want one, Tony.”

He rang and then coming back, eyed me closely.

“Not so good,” was his verdict. “Juliette and ghosts. Either one would set me running like blazes.”

“Not always,” I reminded him.

He smiled sheepishly.

“Forget that, won’t you? I was an idiot, of course. Maybe I just lost my sense of humor. And she was a lovely thing,” he added reminiscently. “God, what a lovely thing she was!”

I was astonished to find how little that meant to me now. There had been a time when, troubled as I was, I would have wanted to put my head on his shoulder and hear him offer his usual comfort.

“Liquor for men and tears for women,” he would say. “What would we do without them?”

That night I felt nothing at all. He was as good-looking as ever, as immaculate in his dinner clothes; but I could survey him with complete detachment. He got his highball and settled himself comfortably in a chair by the fire.

“Now tell Papa all about it,” he said. “What does she want? Don’t tell me she came for love.”

“She wants a lump sum instead of alimony,” I blurted out. “We can’t raise it, of course.”

“How much?”

“A hundred thousand.”

He whistled. “That’s a lot of money. What does she want it for? Want to marry again?”

“If she does she’s very queer about it. She says she wants to leave America. She seems frightened, Tony.”

“It would take a lot to scare her,” he observed with a grin. “Better get rid of her, Marcia. She’s little poison ivy, my dear. Always has been and always will be.”

She came in soon after that. I thought she looked upset, but when she saw Tony she smiled.

“Why, Tony darling!” she said. “After all these years!”

“Only six months, to look at you,” he said, grinning. “How do you do it, Juliette?”

She gave him a long look.

“The virtuous life, Tony,” she said. “Early to bed and early to rise. You’ve heard of it, haven’t you?”

“Sure,” he said. “It gets worms, or something. And who is your particular worm of the moment?”

I listened as long as I could. She got him over onto the davenport beside her, and he looked both gratified and uneasy. But after a while I whistled for Chu-Chu and went out into the grounds. In the servants’ hall I could see the household staff still at the table, but it looked like a sober meal, with Jordan at William’s right, holding her coffee cup with her little finger elegantly extended and looking like a skeleton at the feast. Then Chu-Chu set up a sharp staccato barking, and when I called to her a man stepped out of the shrubbery.

It was Arthur.

There was no moon, and I did not know him until he spoke to me.

“That you, Marcia?”

“Arthur! What on earth—”

“I don’t want to be seen,” he said. “I flew up this afternoon. Mary Lou thinks I’m out on the sloop. Where can we talk?”

I told him that Tony and Juliette were inside, and suggested the bench down by the pond. When we reached it he lit a cigarette, and I saw how haggard he looked. He had not told Mary Lou he was coming, he said. She hated Juliette, but he had to see her and to see me too.

“I can’t carry on, Marcia,” he said, “and this last thing has only forced my hand. I’m in debt up to the neck, and with taxes and everything I’m about through.”

What he was going to do, he said, was to ask Juliette to take less alimony. If she refused he would go into court and seek relief.

“She’ll raise the roof, of course,” he said. “But I have to do something. I owe everybody, even the dentist! And what with the office expenses—” His voice trailed off, and I reached over and took his hand.

“I might help again,” I said. “I hate to turn off the servants. They’ve been here so long, and what would they do? But I still have Mother’s pearls. We’d better get rid of her if we can. Not only now. For the future. I’ve stood about all I can. When I think what she’s done to us I’m not normal.”

He laughed a little, but his voice was hard.

“You’re not going to sell Mother’s pearls,” he said. “I’ve stripped you of everything else.”

At that moment we heard Tony’s voice from somewhere above.

“Hey, Marcia,” he called. “What are you doing? Hunting pneumonia?”

“I’m coming,” I said, and got up.

“It’s useless to see her,” I told Arthur in a low voice, “but I’ll come back for you after Tony’s gone.”

“Don’t let the servants know I’m here.”

“No.”

I found Tony waiting reproachfully for me at the door.

“I’ve had an hour’s vamping, and liked it,” he said, running his arm through mine. “But enough’s enough. Come in and save my reputation, won’t you?”

I thought there was a change in the tempo of the library when I went back to it. Juliette looked relaxed and comfortable, but Tony was silent, for him. The badinage had gone, and when Juliette asked him to ride with her early the next morning he pleaded a golf engagement and begged off. She raised her eyebrows and gave him an odd look.

“As you like,” she said, with a cool little smile.

There was not much more. I remember Tony retailing a bit of local gossip; and also that it had started to rain, and that I hoped Arthur would remember where we kept the key to the garage and go there for shelter. But finally Juliette began to yawn. Tony alone was one thing. Tony with me sitting by was another. She got up at last and Tony took the hint.

“Suffering cats,” he said. “It’s eleven o’clock. How long are you to be here, Juliette?”

“I’m staying until some business is arranged,” she said sweetly. “I can’t go until it’s finished.”

I went with him into the hall, and I thought he wanted to speak to me. But the door into the library was open, and after glancing at it he bade me a perfunctory good-bye and drove off at his usual wild speed. The rain was stopping by that time and a cold fog was coming in, but I did not dare to bring Arthur into the house at once, although the service wing was dark. I would have to wait until Jordan had put Juliette to bed, with all that that implied, from cream on her face to baby pillows and an electric heating pad. Also she had a wretched habit of slipping down to the library at the last minute for a book for Juliette. I knew I would have to wait until they had both settled down for the night.

I left a lamp on and went upstairs, and it was almost an hour before the sounds ceased from the room down the hall. Then I heard a muffled good night from Jordan and the soft closing of her door. It was half past twelve when, having located Arthur and put him to dry by the library fire, I went upstairs again. I thought I heard a bell ringing in the distance, but I had no time to investigate. I opened Juliette’s door and went unceremoniously into her room.

She was reading, propped up against her pillows, and with a chin strap around the lower part of her face. She was evidently annoyed, and she looked at me resentfully.

“You might at least knock, Marcia.”

“I didn’t want to rouse anybody. Arthur’s downstairs, Juliette.”

“Arthur! What does he want?”

“I suppose he’ll tell you himself.”

She got out of bed and whipped off the strap, as well as the net pinned to her hair to save the wave. Her face was not pretty at that moment. It was hard and calculating without its makeup, but there was relief and hope in it too. God knows I do not want to be too hard on her. She had wrecked us all, but I know now how uneasy she was. If she had only gone away, disappeared, she could have saved herself. The trouble was that she could not see herself without money, and it seems never to have occurred to her that she could earn it.

I waited as patiently as I could while she made up her face again: powder, rouge and lipstick. While she got out an elaborate negligee, which she slipped on over her nightgown. Then she stepped into a pair of feathered mules, and I can still remember the click they made as we went down the stairs.

Arthur was in front of the fire, and he had found the whisky and mixed himself a highball. He merely looked at her as she came in.

“Well?” she said. “Why all the secrecy?”

He did not answer that.

He put down his glass, still eying her steadily.

“When I look at you,” he said, “it doesn’t seem possible that you would wreck a man’s life—as you have mine.”

She made an impatient gesture.

“You seem to have done very well by yourself. Why be dramatic?”

But I think she had still some idea of using her sex against him. She had never learned that lost lovers do not return, and after all he had loved her a long time. She sat on the arm of a chair and carefully tucked her negligee about her, so that it outlined her body; and it must have shocked her when he spoke again.

“There ought to be a particular hell for your sort of woman,” he said slowly. “God knows I loved you, but you took my pride and crushed it. You killed something in me. And now you’re fastened onto me like a leech, and, by heaven, I can’t get rid of you.”

She stopped posturing then, and her face hardened.

“Then what are you going to do?”

He told her, brutally but frankly, what he had told me. There would be no lump sum. The depression had ruined us all. He couldn’t earn enough to support his family and keep her in luxury at the same time. She could take less money, or he would go to court and apply for relief.

“Luxury!” she said. “On twelve thousand a year?”

She was more reasonable after that, however, although she was both angry and resentful. What she wanted, she said, was to leave America and never come back. She liked Europe, and there was a little place in the south of France that she could buy cheaply. Also she could get a good rate on foreign bonds, and living cost very little. With a lump sum—

“What’s the matter with you?” he said roughly. “I know you pretty well, Juliette. You don’t want to leave this country. It suits you down to the ground. What have you done that you’ve got to clean out? For that’s it, isn’t it?”

She went pale, but her voice was calm enough.

“You would think that,” she said. “I haven’t done anything. I’m just fed up.”

“And what do you think I am?” he retorted. “I’m fed up to the teeth.”

It was the impasse again, and at last she gave up. She rose and pulled her dressing gown around her.

“Better think it over,” she said. “And I don’t mean maybe.”

She went out on that, and again I heard the click of her mules as she went up the stairs.

It was the last time I ever saw her.

On account of the servants I put Arthur in the hospital room that night. He had ridden part of the way from the flying field on a truck, he said, and walked the rest; and he meant to leave early the next morning. He was already yawning when I took him up, but he looked around him curiously.

“Queer to be back here, isn’t it?” he said. “I feel like a kid again. Remember the time I brought the starfish in, and you yelled your head off? You yelled a lot, Marcia.”

“I could do a bit of yelling this minute.”

“Why?”

“Having to slip you into your own house and then sneak you out again. How are you going back, Arthur?”

He said he would leave before the servants were up, and thumb a ride back to the mainland. Then he saw the hatchet and picked it up curiously.

“Nice weapon to leave around,” he said. “What’s it doing here?”

But I did not want to add to his troubles. I made some vague explanation about the window not staying closed very well without a latch, and together we got the nails out again. When at last I said good night he was already preparing for bed. He said he would not undress, but merely sleep for a few hours; and I left him with a distinct feeling that he thought he had faced his own particular dragon and slain it.