"But it may be years! months! weeks!" insisted Brown, losing control of himself.
"I should hope it would at least be a decently reasonable interval of several weeks----"
"But I don"t know what to do if I never see you again for weeks! I c-care so much--for--you."
She shrank back in her chair, and in her altered face he read that he had disgraced himself.
"I knew I was going to," he said in despair. "I couldn"t keep it--I couldn"t stop it. And now that you see what sort of a man I am I"m going to tell you more."
"You need not," she said faintly.
"I must. Listen! I--I don"t even know your full name--all I know is that it is Betty, and that your cat"s name is Clarence and your plumber"s name is Quinn. But if I didn"t know anything at all concerning you it would have been the same. I suppose you will think me insane if I tell you that before the car, on which you rode, came into sight I _knew_ you were on it. And I--cared--for--you--before I ever saw you."
"I don"t understand----"
"I know you don"t. _I_ don"t. All I understand is that what you and I have done has been done by us before, sometime, somewhere--part only-- down to--down to where you changed cars. Up to that moment, before you took the Lexington Avenue car, I recognized each incident as it occurred.... But when all this happened to us before I must have lost courage--for I did not recognize anything after that except that I cared for you.... _Do_ you understand one single word of what I have been saying?"
The burning color in her face had faded slowly while he was speaking; her lifted eyes grew softer, serious, as he ended impetuously.
She looked at him in retrospective silence. There was no mistaking his astonishing sincerity, his painfully earnest endeavor to impart to her some rather unusual ideas in which he certainly believed. No man who looked that way at a woman could mean impertinence; her own intelligence satisfied her that he had not meant and could never mean offense to any woman.
"Tell me," she said quietly, "just what you mean. It is not possible for you to--care--for--me.... Is it?"
He disclosed to her, beginning briefly with his own name, material and social circ.u.mstances, a pocket edition of his. .h.i.therto uneventful career, the advent that morning of the emissary from The Green Mouse, his discussion with Smith, the strange sensation which crept over him as he emerged from the tunnel at Forty-second Street, his subsequent altercation with Smith, and the events that ensued up to the eruption of Clarence.
He spoke in his most careful attorney"s manner, frank, concise, convincing, free from any exaggeration of excitement or emotion. And she listened, alternately fascinated and appalled as, step by step, his story unfolded the links in an apparently inexorable sequence involving this young man and herself in a predestined string of episodes not yet ended-- if she permitted herself to credit this astounding story.
Sensitively intelligent, there was no escaping the significance of the only possible deduction. She drew it and blushed furiously. For a moment, as the truth clamored in her brain, the self-evidence of it stunned her.
But she was young, and the shamed recoil came automatically. Incredulous, almost exasperated, she raised her head to confront him; the red lips parted in outraged protest--parted and remained so, wordless, silent--the soundless, virginal cry dying unuttered on a mouth that had imperceptibly begun to tremble.
Her head sank slowly; she laid her white hands above the roses heaped in her lap.
For a long while she remained so. And he did not speak.
First the butler went away. Then Mr. Quinn followed. The maid had not yet arrived. The house was very still.
And after the silence had worn his self-control to the breaking point he rose and walked to the dining room and stood looking down into the yard.
The gra.s.s out there was long and unkempt; roses bloomed on the fence; wistaria, in its deeper green of midsummer, ran riot over the trellis where Clarence had basely dodged his lovely mistress, and, after making a furry pin wheel of himself, had fled through the airhole into Stygian depths.
Somewhere above, in the silent house, Clarence was sulkily dissembling.
"I suppose," said Brown, quietly coming back to where the girl was sitting in the golden dusk, "that I might as well find Clarence while we are waiting for your maid. May I go up and look about?"
And taking her silence as a.s.sent, he started upstairs.
He hunted carefully, thoroughly, opening doors, peeping under furniture, investigating clothespresses, listening at intervals, at intervals calling with misleading mildness. But, like him who died in malmsey, Clarence remained perjured and false to all sentiments of decency so often protested purringly to his fair young mistress.
Mechanically Brown opened doors of closets, knowing, if he had stopped to think, that cats don"t usually turn k.n.o.bs and let themselves into tightly closed places.
In one big closet on the fifth floor, however, as soon as he opened the door there came a rustle, and he sprang forward to intercept the perfidious one; but it was only the air stirring the folds of garments hanging on the wall.
As he turned to step forth again the door gently closed with an ominous click, shutting him inside. And after five minutes" frantic fussing he realized that he was imprisoned by a spring lock at the top of a strange house, inhabited only by a cat and a bewildered young girl, who might, at any moment now that the telephone was in order, call a cab and flee from a man who had tried to explain to her that they were irrevocably predestined for one another.
Calling and knocking were dignified and permissible, but they did no good. To kick violently at the door was not dignified, but he was obliged to do it. Evidently the closet was too remote for the sound to penetrate down four flights of stairs.
He tried to break down the door--they do it in all novels. He only rebounded painfully, ineffectively, which served him right for reading fiction.
It irked him to shout; he hesitated for a long while; then sudden misgiving lest she might flee the house seized him and he bellowed. It was no use.
The pitchy quality of the blackness in the closet aided him in bruising himself; he ran into a thousand things of all kinds of shapes and textures every time he moved. And at each fresh bruise he grew madder and madder, and, holding the cat responsible, applied language to Clarence of which he had never dreamed himself capable.
Then he sat down. He remained perfectly still for a long while, listening and delicately feeling his hurts. A curious drowsiness began to irritate him; later the irritation subsided and he felt a little sleepy.
His heart, however, thumped like an inexpensive clock; the cedar-tainted air in the closet grew heavier; he felt stupid, swaying as he rose. No wonder, for the closet was as near air-tight as it could be made.
Fortunately he did not realize it.
And, meanwhile, downstairs, Betty was preparing for flight.
She did not know where she was going--how far away she could get in a rose-silk morning gown. But she had discovered, in a clothespress, an automobile duster, cap, and goggles; on the strength of these she tried the telephone, found it working, summoned a coupe, and was now awaiting its advent. But the maid from Dooley"s must first arrive to take charge of the house and Clarence until she, Betty, could summon her family to her a.s.sistance and defy The Green Mouse, Beekman Brown, and Destiny behind her mother"s skirts.
Flight was, therefore, imperative--it was absolutely indispensable that she put a number of miles between herself and this young man who had just informed her that Fate had designed them for one another.
She was no longer considering whether she owed this amazing young man any grat.i.tude, or what sort of a man he might be, agreeable, well-bred, attractive; all she understood was that this man had suddenly stepped into her life, politely expressing his conviction that they could not, ultimately, hope to escape from each other. And, beginning to realize the awful import of his words, the only thing that restrained her from instant flight on foot was the hidden Clarence. She could not abandon her cat. She must wait for that maid. She waited. Meanwhile she hunted up Dooley"s Agency in the telephone book and called them up. They told her the maid was on the way--as though Dooley"s Agency could thwart Destiny with a whole regiment of its employees!
She had discarded her roses with a shudder; cap, goggles, duster, lay in her lap. If the maid came before Brown returned she"d flee. If Brown came back before the maid arrived she"d tell him plainly what she had decided on, thank him, tell him kindly but with decision that, considering the incredible circ.u.mstances of their encounter, she must decline to encourage any hope he might entertain of ever again seeing her.
At this stern resolve her heart, being an automatic and independent affair, refused to approve, and began an unpleasantly irregular series of beats which annoyed her.
"It is true," she admitted to herself, "that he is a gentleman, and I can scarcely be rude enough, after what he has done for me, to leave him without any explanation at all.... His clothes are ruined. I must remember that."
Her heart seemed to approve such sentiments, and it beat more regularly as she seated herself at a desk, found in it a sheet of notepaper and a pencil, and wrote rapidly:
"_Dear Mr. Brown:_
"If my maid comes before you do I am going. I can"t help it. The maid will stay to look after Clarence until I can return with some of the family. I don"t mean to be rude, but I simply cannot stand what you told me about our--about what you told me.... I"m sorry you tore your clothes.
"Please believe my flight has nothing to do with you personally or your conduct, which was perfectly ("charming" scratched out) proper. It is only that to be suddenly told that one is predestined to ("marry"
scratched out) become intimately acquainted (all this scratched out and a new line begun).
"It is unendurable for a girl to think that there is no freedom of choice in life left her--to be forced, by what you say are occult currents, into--friendship--with a perfectly strange man at the other end. So I don"t think we had better ever again attempt to find anybody to present us to each other. This doesn"t sound right, but you will surely understand.
"Please do not misjudge me. I must appear to you uncivil, ungrateful, and childish--but I am, somehow, a little frightened. I know you are perfectly nice--but all that has happened is almost, in a way, terrifying to me. Not that I am cowardly; but you must understand. You will--won"t you?.... But what is the use of my asking you, as I shall never see you again.
"So I am only going to thank you, and say ("with all my heart" crossed out) very cordially, that you have been most kind, most generous and considerate--most--most----"
Her pencil faltered; she looked into s.p.a.ce, and the image of Beekman Brown, pleasant-eyed, attractive, floated unbidden out of vacancy and looked at her.