Part 8

"You see, Bill," I said, "it was like this." And I told him the whole thing. About halfway through he dropped my hand.

"It's been an awful lesson, Bill," I ended up. "I'll never say a word again about your enjoying yourself the way you want to. You can swim and play golf and shoot all you like, and--and sleep after dinner, if you'll only forgive me. Bill, suppose I had married Roger Waite!"

He drew a long breath.

"So that was it, old dear!" he said. "Well, all right. We'll put the whole thing in the discard." And he leaned over and put his arms round me.

* * * * *

That ought to be the end of the story. I'd had a lesson and so had some of the others. As Carrie Smith said afterward, to have a good time is one thing, but to be happy is entirely different, and the only way to be happy is to be smug and conventional and virtuous. I never say anything when she starts that line of conversation. But once or twice I've caught her eye, and she has had the grace to look uneasy.

But that's not all. There is more to the story, and now and then I eye Bill, and wonder when he will come and tell me the whole thing. For the other day, in the back of Bill's chiffonier, I came across the letter to him Harry Delaney said he had lost. And Bill had received it Monday morning!

That is not all. Clamped to it was a note from Peter Arundel, and that is why I am writing the whole story, using names and everything. It was a mean trick, and if Bill wants to go to Maisie Brown's wedding he can go. I shall not.

This is Peter's note:

"_Dear Old Man_: Inclosed is the letter Clara gave Delaney to mail, which I read to you last night over the long-distance phone. I'm called away or I'd bring it round.

"It was easy enough for you to say not to let Clara get away with it, but for a time during the storm it looked as if she'd got the bit and was off. Luckily their car got stuck in the creek, and the rest was easy. We saw them, during a flash of lightning, climbing the hill to the Brown place for shelter. Luck was with us after that, for Maisie and a crowd came along, and we told Maisie the story. I take my hat off to Maisie. She's a trump. If you could have seen Roger Waite's face when she gave him back the ring! Carrie, who was looking through the windows with the others, was so sorry for him that she wanted to go in and let him cry on her shoulder.

"I hope Clara didn't take cold. She must have been pretty wet. But you were quite right. It wasn't only that she'd have had the laugh on all of us if she got away with it. As you said, it would be a bad precedent.

"Burn this, for the love of Mike. If Clara sees it she'll go crazy.

"Yours,

"PETER."

THE BORROWED HOUSE

I

"And the things the balloon man said!" observed Daphne, stirring her tea. Daphne is my English cousin, and misnamed. "He went too high and Poppy's nose began to bleed."

"It poured," Poppy confirmed plaintively to me. "I leaned over the edge of the basket and it poured. And the next day the papers said it had rained blood in Tooting and that quantities of people had gone to the churches!" Poppy is short and wears her hair cut close and curled with an iron all over her head. She affects plaids.

"Then," Daphne went on, addressing the room in general, "he let some gas out of the bag and we began to settle. But just when we were directly over the Tower he grew excited and threw out sand. He said he wasn't going to hang his balloon on the Houses of Parliament like a penny ornament on a Christmas tree. And then the wind carried us north and we missed it altogether."

Mrs. Harcourt-Standish took a tea-cake. "I was sea-sick," she remarked pensively, "and he was unpleasant about that, too. It was really mountain sickness, although, of course, there wasn't any mountain. When we began to throw out the handbills he asked if I had swallowed _them_, too."

Mrs. Harcourt-Standish plays up the feminine. She is slim and blond, and wears slinky clothes and a bang--only they call it a fringe--across her forehead. She has been in prison five times and is supposed to have influence with the Cabinet. She showed me a lot of photographs of herself in the dock and in jail, put up in a frame that was made to represent a barred window. It was Violet Harcourt-Standish, you remember, who broke up the meeting of the Woman's Liberty League, the rival Suffragette association, by engaging the suite below their rooms, burning chemicals in the grates, and sending in a fire alarm when the smoke poured out of the windows.

I had been in England visiting Daphne for four months while Mother went to Italy, and I had had a very queer time. One was apt to go shopping with Daphne and end up on a carriage block or the box of a hansom cab, passing out handbills about votes for women. And once, when we dressed in our best gowns and went to a reception for the Cabinet, or something of the kind, Daphne stood on the stairs and began to make a speech. It turned out that she hadn't been invited at all and they put her out immediately--politely, but firmly. I slid away into the crowd, quite pale with the shock and disgrace, and stood in a corner, waiting to be arrested and searched for the spoons. But for a long time no one noticed me. Then a sunburned gentleman who was passing in the crowd saw me, hesitated and came back.

"I beg pardon," he said, and my heart turned entirely over, "but I think you came with Miss Wyndham? If you will allow me----"

"I am afraid you have made a mistake," I replied frigidly, with my lips stiff with fright. He bowed at that and passed on, but not before he had looked straight into my eyes and read the lie there.

After ages I left the window where I had taken shelter and got somehow to the dressing-room. Of course, Daphne had taken the carriage, so I told a sad-eyed maid that I was ill and would not wait for my brougham, and to call a cab. I was perfectly numb with rage when I got to Daphne's apartment, and burst in like a whirlwind. But Daphne was not at home. She came in at three that morning, maudlin with triumph, and found me asleep on the floor in my ball-gown, with a half-packed trunk before me.

She brought me tea and toast herself the next morning and offered it on her knees, which means something for Daphne--she is very stout and almost unbendable--and explained that I had been her patent of respectability, and that it had been a _coup_; that Mrs. Langley, of the Woman's Liberty League, had hired as a maid for the reception and had never got her foot out of the dressing-room! Red hair? Yes. And when I told Daphne that Mrs. Langley had helped me into my wrap she got up heavily and hopped three steps one way and three another, which is the way Daphne dances with joy.

I am afraid I have digressed. It is much harder to write a thing than to tell it. I used to write stories for our Journal at school and the girls were mad over them. But they were love stories, and this one deals with English politics and criminals--yes, you might call it a crime story. Of course there is love, too, but it comes in rather unexpectedly.

I left Daphne hopping three steps each way in triumph. Well, after that she did not take me around with her, although her friends came in and talked about The Cause to me quite often. And gradually I began to see that there was something to it, and why, if I paid taxes, shouldn't I vote? And hadn't I as much intelligence as the cab drivers and street sweepers? And why couldn't I will my money to my children if I ever had any?--children, not money. Of course, as Father pointed out afterward, I should have been using my abilities in America; but most of the American women I knew were so cravenly and abjectly contented. But even after my conversion Daphne would not take me in the balloon. She said I represented too much money to risk dumping in the Thames or hanging on a chimney.

The meeting at Daphne's was mainly to talk over the failure of the balloon ascension and to plan something new. But the actual conspiracy that followed was really an accident. It came about in the most casual way.

Violet Harcourt-Standish got up and went to the mirror to put on her veil, and some of the people began to gather their wraps.

"I'm tired," Daphne said suddenly. "We don't seem to get anywhere. We always come out the door we go in."

"Sometimes forcibly," Poppy said to me aside.

"And I haven't been strong, you know, since last summer," Daphne went on. Everybody nodded sympathetically. Daffie had raised a disturbance when Royalty was laying a cornerstone and had been jailed for it. (They put her to making bags and she sewed "Votes for Women" in white thread on every bag she made.) "I am going to take Madge down to Ivry for a week." I am Madge.

Violet turned from the mirror and raised her eyebrows. "Ivry!" she said. "How familiar it sounds! Do you remember, Daphne, when pressure at the Hall became too strong for me, how I used to ride over to Ivry and have hysterics in the Tudor Room? And how once I wept on your Louis-Seize divan and had to have the purple stains bleached off my face? You lived a sort of vicarious matrimonial existence in those days, didn't you?"

Whatever she may have done to the Louis-Seize divan in earlier days, she was cheerful enough now, and I hailed her with delight.

"Do you live near Ivry?" I exclaimed. "How jolly! That is English; I am frightfully English in my speech after a few weeks in London."

Somebody laughed and Daphne chuckled. It isn't especially feminine to chuckle, but neither is Daphne.

"My dear child," Mrs. Harcourt-Standish said, turning to me, "Harcourt Hall is closed. Mr. Harcourt is no longer my husband. The one is empty, the other in Canada"--vague, but rhetorical--"I have forgotten them both." There was nothing ambiguous about that. "I recall the house as miles from everything that was joyful. I shall always regard my being taken there as nothing short of kidnapping."

Then--she stopped short and glanced at Daphne. From Daphne her eyes travelled to Ernestine Sutcliffe, who put down her teacup with a clatter. There was a sudden hushed silence in the room; then Lady Jane Willoughby, who had been tying her motor veil, took it off and folded it in her lap. The Staffords, Poppy and her mother, exchanged glances. Without in the least understanding it I saw that something psychological was happening.

"Why not?" said Daphne quietly, looking around. "The house is still furnished, isn't it, Violet? And I suppose you could get in?"

Violet shrugged her shoulders. "I dare say; as I recall it, one could enter any one of the doors by merely leaning against it. The place is a million years old."

Everybody talked at once for a few minutes. I gave up trying to understand and took a fresh tea-cake. Then I noticed Lady Willoughby. In all that militant body, whatever adventure was afoot, hers was the only craven soul. She was picking at her veil with nervous fingers.

"I--don't you think it is very radical?" she ventured when she could be heard. Here Mrs. Stafford objected to the word "radical," and she substituted "revolutionary." "I should not wish anything to happen to him. He was a great friend of Willoughby's mother while she lived."

"That's all right among ourselves, Jane," Mrs. Stafford put in, "but if I recall the circumstances I wouldn't lay any emphasis on _that_. Anyhow, we don't intend to murder the man."

Lady Jane was only partially reassured. "Of course, you wouldn't mean to," she retorted, "but there is no use asking me to forget what Poppy Stafford did to the president of the Board of Trade last summer."

Poppy glanced up and shook her curls. "You are envious, Willieboy," she said, and put four lumps of sugar in her tea. "Willieboy" is Lady Willoughby's affectionate diminutive. They had started the tea all over again and I rather edged away from Poppy, but Daphne said afterward it was only a matter of a chair Poppy threw from the gallery at a public meeting, and that the man it fell on was only a secretary to the president of the Board of Trade.

Finally, I made out what the plan was, and mentally during the rest of the meeting I was making bags in jail.

_They were going to abduct the Prime Minister!_

Lady Jane had stopped looking back and had put her hand to the plow. (This sounds well, so I won't cut it out; but wasn't it Lot's wife that looked back? And wasn't that before the day of plows? Or was it?) And it was she who finally settled the whole thing, for it seems that the P. M. had confided to Lord Willoughby that the town was so noisy with Suffragettes that he could not find a quiet spot for a rubber of bridge; that since the balloon incident he slept in his clothes with the windows shut and locked; and that since the latest kitchen-maid had turned out to be the Honourable Maude Twombley, who slipped handbills into his entrées and served warnings in his dessert, he was going to travel, incognito and alone, to his daughter's place, The Oaks, outside of West Newbury, and get a little sleep.

And West Newbury was only four miles from the empty Harcourt Hall! In short, as Daphne succinctly put it: "Our Jonah was about to jump voluntarily overboard from the ship of state into the whaleboned jaws of the Suffragette whale."

Everybody went mad at that point, but as they grew excited I got cold. It began with my toes and went all over me.

Ernestine Sutcliffe stood on one of Daphne's tulip-wood and marquetry chairs and made a speech, gesticulating with her cup and dripping tea on me. And then somebody asked me to stand up and say what I thought. (I have never really spoken in public, but I always second the motions in a little club I belong to at home. It is a current-events club--so much easier to get the news that way than to read the newspaper.)

So I got up and made a short speech. I said: "I am only a feeble voice in this clamour of outraged womanhood against the oppressor, Man. I believe in the franchise for women, the ballot instead of the ballet. But at home, in America, when we want to take a bath we don't jump off the Brooklyn Bridge into the East River to do it."

Then I sat down. Daphne was raging.

"You are exceedingly vulgar," she said, "but since you insist on that figure of speech, you in America have waited a long time for the bath, and if you continue your present methods you won't get it before you need it."

II

Now that they had thought of it, they were all frantic for fear Mrs. Cobden-Fitzjames and the Woman's Liberty League might think of it, too, kidnap the Prime Minister, and leave us a miserable president of the Local Government Board or a wretched under-secretary of something or other.

The plan we evolved before the meeting broke up was to send a wire to Mrs. Gresham, the Premier's daughter, that he had been delayed, and to meet a later train. Then, Daphne's motor would meet the proper train--he was to arrive somewhere between seven and eight in the evening--carry his Impressiveness to Harcourt Hall and deliver him into the hands of the enemy. As Violet Harcourt-Standish voiced it: the motor gone, the railway miles away, what can he do? He will keep awake, because he will have slept in the train going down, and we can give him a cold supper. Nothing heavy to make him drowsy. Perhaps it would be better not to give him anything. (Hear! Hear!) Then, six speeches, each an hour long. At the end of that time we can promise him something to eat and a machine to take him to West Newbury on one condition. Every one looked up. "He must sign an indorsement of Suffrage for Women." (Loud applause.)

"Why not have a table laid," I suggested, "and show it to him? Let him smell it, so to speak. Visualise your temptation. You know,--'And the devil----'"

"This is the Prime Minister, Madge," Daphne broke in shortly, "and you are not happy in your Scriptural references."

Things went along with suspicious smoothness. Daphne really took the onus of the whole thing, and, of course, I helped her.

We all got new clothes, for everybody knows that if you can attract a man's eye you can get and maybe hold his ear. And Daphne wrote a fresh speech, one she had thought out in jail. It began, "Words! Words!! Words!!!" She wrote a poem, too, called the Song of the Vote, with the meter of the Song of a Shirt, and she wanted me to recite it, but even before I read it I refused.

The gown Mother had ordered for me at Paquin's on her way to the Riviera came just in time, a nice white thing over silver, with a square-cut neck and bits of sleeves made of gauze and silver fringe. Daphne got a pink velvet, although she is stout and inclined to be florid. She had jet butterflies embroidered over it, a flight of them climbing up one side of her skirt and crawling to the opposite shoulder, so that if one stood off at a distance she had a curiously diagonal appearance, as if she had listed heavily to one side.

By hurrying we got to Ivry on Thursday evening, and I was in a blue funk. Daphne was militantly cheerful, and, in the drawing-room after dinner, she put the finishing touches to her speech. It was warm and rainy, and I wandered aimlessly around, looking at hideous English photographs and wondering if picking oakum in an English jail was worse than making bags--and if they could arrest me, after all. Could they touch an American citizen? (But was I an American citizen? Perhaps I should have been naturalised, or something of that kind!) And I thought of Mother at Florence, in the villa on the Via Michelangelo--Mother, who classes Suffragists with Anti-Vaccinationists and Theosophists.

I would have gone up to bed, but that meant a candle and queer, shaky shadows on the wall; so I stayed with Daphne and looked at the picture of a young man in a uniform.

"Basil Harcourt," Daphne said absently, with a pen in her mouth, when I asked about it. "Taken years ago before he became an ass. How do you spell 'Supererogation'?"

"I haven't an idea," I admitted. "I don't even know what it means. I always confuse it with 'eleemosynary'." Daphne grunted. "Do you mean that this is Violet's husband?"

"It was--her first. Don't ask me about him: he always gives me indigestion. The man's mad! He stood right in this room, where he had eaten my ginger-cakes all his life and where he came to show me his first Eton collar and long trousers, and told me that he expected The Cause for his wife to be himself, and if she would rather raise hell for women than a family of children she would have to choose at once. And Violet stood just where you are, Madge, and retorted that maternity was not a Cause, and that any hen in the barnyard could raise a family.

"'I suppose you want to crow,' Basil said furiously, and slammed out. He went to Canada very soon after."

"Then perhaps he won't like our using his house for such a purpose. If he isn't in sympathy----"

"Twaddle," Daphne remarked, poising her pen to go on. "In the first place, it isn't a house--it's a rattletrap; and in the second place, he won't know a thing about it."

It was all very tragic. I was thinking of them when I went out on the terrace in Daphne's mackintosh. The air was damp and sticky, but it was better than Daphne's conversation. I stood in the fountain court, leaning against a column and listening to the spray as it blew over on to the caladium leaves.

I am not sure just when I saw the figure. First it was part of the gloom, a deeper shadow in the misty garden. I saw it, so to speak, out of the tail of my eye. When I looked directly there was nothing there. Finally, I called softly over my shoulder to Daphne, but she did not hear. Instead, the shadow disengaged itself, moved forward and resolved into Bagsby, Daphne's chauffeur.

"I wasn't sure at first that you saw me, Miss," he said, touching his cap. "It's my turn until midnight; Clarkson 'as it until three, and the gardener until daylight."

"Good gracious!" I gasped. "Do you mean you are guarding the house?"

"Perhaps it's more what you would call surveillance," he said cautiously, "the picture gallery being over your head, Miss, and an easy job from the conservatory roof. We 'aven't told Miss Wyndham, yet, Miss, but the Wimberley Romney was stolen from the Towers last night, Miss, and the whole countryside is up."

"The Romney?" I inquired. "Do you mean a painting?"

"Yes, Miss," he said patiently. "Cut out of its frame, and worth twenty thousand pounds! By a gentlemanly-looking chap--a tourist by appearances, with a bicycle, in tweeds and knickers, Miss."

Whether the bicycle or the tourist wore tweeds and knickers was not entirely clear. Bagsby was saying that the thief was supposed to be hiding on the moor when Daphne came out, and he disappeared.

Poppy Stafford and Ernestine came unexpectedly late that night after I had gone to bed. I was in my first sleep and dreaming that Poppy was braining Bagsby with a gilt-framed painting, and that he was shouting "Votes for Women" instead of "'elp!" when somebody knocked at my door. It turned out to be Poppy, and she said she thought there was a bat in her room, and as she was quite pallid with fright I let her get into my bed. I was full of my dream and I wanted to ask her some particulars about the man she had brained the summer before. But she put her head under the sheet, and as soon as she stopped trembling she went to sleep.

Daphne called me early and we went over to the Hall to take a look around. As Daphne said, it would be night and the grounds would not matter, but we would have to uncover some of the furniture. And as we could not let the servants know, we had to do it ourselves. We took a brush and pan, and tore up a linen sheet to dust with. Bagsby, who had been bribed, and suspected what he wasn't told, got the brush and pan, and later he showed us a pail and a piece of soap in the tonneau.

The place was dreadful. No doubt the park had been lovely, but it was overshadowed and overgrown. The hedges were untrimmed; paths began, wandered around and died in a mess of undergrowth; and the terrace had lost an end in a wilderness where a garden-house was falling to decay. The fading outlines of the kitchen garden seemed to shout aloud of lost domesticity, and over everything lay a sodden layer of the previous autumn's leaves. (For fear I am accused of plagiarism, the sentence about the kitchen garden is not original. Madge.)

Daphne had got a key somewhere, and inside it was worse. Coverings over the pictures and furniture, six years' dust everywhere, and a smell of mould like a crypt of one of the Continental cathedrals, only not so ancestor-y. While we were taking off the covers, with Bagsby's help, Daphne alternately sang and coughed in the dust.

"Why aren't you more cheerful?" she demanded. "It will be a red-letter day for The Cause. When I think of Mabel Fitzjames I almost weep!"

"I think it must be because I am not used to it," I said meekly. "You see, I come from a Republican country--and Democratic, too, of course--and we don't have any Prime Ministers to steal. One has to grow accustomed to things like this gradually, Daffie, or be born to them. And then--I lay awake most of last night, wondering what would happen if he didn't--er--see the joke, you know."

Daphne jerked a cover from a moth-eaten sofa and sneezed promptly in the dust.

"Joke!" she repeated when she could speak. "No, I don't think he will see the joke. In fact, I don't believe he will think there is any joke to see. If I know anything, he is going to be wild. He's going to tear his hair and throw the vases off the mantel. He's going to use language that you never heard--at least, I hope not."