Lady Larkspur. Meredith Nicholson

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      "Oh, I didn't burn it; I have a copy locked in a safety vault, and Dalton left one heavily sealed at a small exclusive London hotel where, he found after much difficulty, the girl had lodged during her two engagements."

      "You're morbid," I said. "Show me her photograph."

      He laughed ironically. "Never a chance, Singleton! You haven't yet got the idea that this young woman is out of the ordinary. She refused to be photographed—wrote it into her two contracts that this was not to be asked. I never saw her off the stage, and I can't give you a description of her that would be of the slightest assistance to the keenest detective alive. As I've tried to convey to your practical mind, it's the spirit of the girl—the spirit of comedy, that I've dramatized—not a girl you take out to supper only to find that she has no wit, no charm, no anything but a monstrous appetite for indigestible food and a silly ambition to play rôles the gods never intended her to play. In that pantomime she was a frolic, the clown's daughter, and, though nobody saw it, she was the whole piece, the elusive sprite that could evoke laughter and tears by a gesture, a lifting of the brows, a grimace. By utterly different methods in 'Honourable Women' she proved her wide range of appeal. The chap who produced 'Honourable Women' told me that after the first rehearsal Bayley, the author, begged him for God's sake to let the girl do it her own way, so as not to lose her freshness and spontaneity. Hers was the one true characterization in the piece. When Terry was in her prime you remember how we used to say that only one bird sang like that, and from paradise it flew? Well, this bird sings on the same branch! Her voice was her charm made audible! She's the most natural being I ever saw on the stage, and she can look more comedy than anybody else I ever saw act!"

      "Rave some more!" I pleaded. "You never talked better in your life."

      "Don't be an ass," he said sourly. "Let's forget her and take a squint at your affairs. Just what do you mean to do with yourself?"

      "My shoulder still creaks a little, and the doctors advise me to sit around for a while. They offered me some jobs in Washington, but desk work and inspection duty are too tame after a couple of years spent in star climbing. The doctors tell me to cultivate repose for a few months and maybe they'll pass me into our flying corps, but they don't promise anything. I'm going up to Barton-on-the-Sound and I'll camp in the garage on my uncle's place. You remember that I built the thing myself, and the quarters are good enough for a busted veteran."

      "Your uncle played you a nasty trick," interrupted Searles; "getting married and then adding to the crime by dying. You couldn't beat that for general spitefulness."

      "Do you remember the immortal lines:

      "'Oh, skip your dear uncle!'

       The Bellman exclaimed

       As he angrily tingled his bell"?

      "Oh, I'm not knocking the dead!" he protested. "Mr. Bashford always struck me as a pretty decent, square sort of chap, and not at all the familiar grouchy uncle of fiction and the drama. I made notes on him from time to time with a view to building a play around him—the perfect uncle, unobtrusive, never blustering at his nephew; translating the avuncular relationship into something remote and chaste like a distant view of Mount Washington in winter. As I recall, there were only two great passions in your uncle's life—Japanese art and green-turtle soup. It was just like him to retire from business on his sixtieth birthday and depart for the Orient, there to commit the shameless indiscretion of matrimony."

      "Like him! It was the greatest shock of my life. To the best of my knowledge he never knew any women except the widow of his partner in the importing house. He used to dine with her now and then, and I caught him once sending her flowers at Easter—probably an annual stunt. She was about eighty and perfectly safe. He spent twenty years in the Tyringham, the dullest and most respectable hotel in the world, and his chief recreation was a leisurely walk in the park before going to bed. You could set your clock by him. Pretty thin picking for a dramatist, I should think. He used to take me to the theatre regularly every other Thursday—it was a date—and his favorite entertainment was vaudeville with black-face embellishment preferred. You should add that to Japanese pottery and potage à la tortue. He joined the yacht club just because the green turtle at that joint is the best in New York. Yachts! He never sailed in anything but the biggest steamers, and got no fun out of that. I crossed with him twice, and he never left his bunk. But in his shy fashion he was kind and generous and mighty good to me."

      "If you hadn't gone to war, but had kept right at his elbow, the marriage might have been averted," suggested Searles. "He did leave you something, didn't he?"

      "Fifty thousand cash and the right to use the garage at the Barton farm. Calling it a farm is a joke; it's rocks mostly. He bought the house to have a place to store his prints and ceramics. He hated motoring except in taxis up and down town, and when I urged him to set up a machine, he told me to go ahead and buy one and build the garage. He rather sniffed at the writing I do, but told me I'd better fix up a studio in the garage and have it as a place to work in. His will provides that I may lodge in the garage for life."

      "The estate footed a million, as I remember, so I can't praise his generosity. But the widow, your unknown auntie, the body-snatcher who annexed the old boy—what of her?"

      "I've asked the trust company people whether she's in sight anywhere, and they assure me that she is not on these shores. Torrence, the third vice-president—you know Torry; he was in the class ahead of us at college, the man who never smiles—Torry seemed anxious to learn about her from me, which is certainly droll. He said she acknowledged her last remittance three months ago from Bangkok—wherever that is. Torry couldn't see that Bangkok is so absurdly remote that the idea of a widow's strolling off there is funny. I suppose the old girl's resumed her tour of the world looking for another retired merchant to add to her list."

      "Very likely. To what nation, tribe, or human group does this predatory person belong?"

      "I'll tell you all I know. Just as I was sailing for France I got a letter from Uncle Bash stating in the most businesslike fashion that he was about to be married to a lady he had met on his trip out to Japan. The dire event was to occur at the American Embassy the following day. From which I judged that my presence at the ceremony was neither expected nor desired. Oddly enough, months afterward, I picked up an English paper in a French inn that contained an announcement of the marriage in the usual advertisement form. The lady was succinctly described as Mrs. Alice Wellington Cornford, widow of the late Archibald Reynolds Cornford, Pepperharrow Road, Hants. All Torrence knows of the subsequent proceedings is what he got in official reports of Uncle Bash's death from the consul-general at Tokyo. He was buried over there and the life-insurance companies were rather fussy about the legal proof, Torry says. Whether the widow expects to come to America ultimately or will keep moving through the Orient marrying husbands and burying them is a dark mystery. If she should turn up, the house at Barton is hers, of course, but with her roving disposition I fancy my aunt Alice wouldn't like the place. The Jap stuff is worth a bit of money, and if the lady is keen for such things and not a mere adventuress she may take it into her head one of these days to come over and inspect the loot."

      "I can see the vampire," said Searles musingly, "landing at the Grand Central with enough hand-luggage to fill a freight-car; a big, raw-boned creature, with a horse face and a horrible mess as to clothes. You will be there to meet her, deferential, anxious to please. You will pilot her up the coast to Barton, tip the servants heavily to keep them from murdering her, and twiddle your thumbs in your garage as you await her further pleasure. By the way, are those ancient freaks still on the place—those broken-down hotel employees who were your uncle's sole experiment in philanthropy?"

      "Torrence assures me that they are all very much there."

      Searles СКАЧАТЬ