Two Flights Up (15 page)

“I had it in the taxicab. I took out a dollar for the man; see, I still have the change.” She held out her hand. “And then I closed it again. I must have dropped it there.”

“How much was in it?”

“Six hundred and ten dollars.”

Mrs. Bayne turned slowly and stared at herself in the mirror. Then, without any warning, she sank on her knees and fell over in a dead faint.

J
AMES STILL SAT IN
the living room. The events of the day and Warrington’s visit that evening had left him benumbed. The very futility of anger left him weaponless. He was ready to shake his fist at the world, but the world was callous to the shaking of fists. It recognized only effective action—and he could not act.

For the first time since his marriage he did not go to bed when Margaret did. He was not sensual, but for a long time he had been very lonely. The sense of her bodily nearness in the double bed had been happiness; the longing of his solitary soul for companionship was partially eased by the contact with her not beautiful but warm and alive human body.

Something of this he must have felt in advance, when they were buying their furniture.

“No twin beds for me, Al,” he said to the salesman. “I’m old-fashioned. My father and mother used the same bed for thirty years—and settled many a squabble in it, like as not. Anyhow, that’s what we’re going to have.”

And Margaret had blushed and agreed.

But that night he was alone, marooned by misery, cut off from her by despair and suspicion.

“Won’t you come to bed, James? You need to sleep and forget things for a while.”

“Not now,” he said, and looked at her with eyes at once hard and hurt.

“I could warm some milk. If you have something in your stomach, it will make you sleepy.”

He shook his head obstinately. “I don’t want to sleep,” he protested vehemently. “I’ve got to think. I’ve got to think this thing out.”

He could not get into the same bed with her, with that suspicion between them. And he distrusted himself. He felt that, if he did, he would somehow weaken. He would not be able to think clearly. He would even be sorry for her.

She was suffering; he knew that. All her new vitality had been drained from her. She might have been the Margaret of six months ago. He was afraid to look at her hands, so sure he was that she had clenched the left one.

“You go to bed,” he told her roughly. “I’ll come in later.”

He heard her moving about, undressing, the slow sound of the brush over her hair, the two small knocks of her bedroom slippers on the floor, and the soft rustle as she got into the bed. He wanted to go in, to kneel beside her and put his head down and be comforted.

But how could he?

She was keeping something from him, something that she and Warrington both knew.

At two o’clock in the morning he took off his shoes and tiptoed into the bedroom. Margaret was wide awake and stirred as he entered, but he only took an extra quilt from the top of the closet and went out again. When, toward daylight, she crept to the living-room door, he was asleep on the davenport, fully dressed but for his shoes and coat.

Things were no better between them in the morning. He shaved while she got the breakfast, but before he ate, he went down and bought a morning paper, and she found him in the living room with the paper on the floor, and what was left of his world in ruins.

“Your breakfast’s ready, James,” said Margaret quietly.

“I don’t want any breakfast.”

Her look was piteous, but he did not see it.

“You can’t work all day without food.”

Then he turned on her.

“Work!” he said. “Do you suppose I can go to the store after that?” He pointed to the paper, then picked it up and thrust it at her savagely.

“Read it,” he said. “Look what you’ve done to me. Read it and smile!”

“I! You know better than that.”

“Oh, I do, do I? You knew what was in that bag. You arranged to have it brought here. I’m no fool. You lied last night. Look here, have you and your precious family been living off that stuff all this time? That’s what I want to know, and, by God, I’m going to know it.”

“If you can think that,” said Margaret, “you can think anything.” And she left the room.

She heard him go out soon after, not slamming the door, but going quietly, as though ashamed of his recent violence. She moved about, automatically doing her usual morning work, but inwardly in a turmoil. It couldn’t go on. It must not go on. As between James and Annie, it must be James.

She would have to tell him, and let him make such use of it as he would.

The decision gave her courage. She took off her morning dress and put on her street clothes. While she dressed, she listened, but there was no sound of his latchkey in the lock, none of that preliminary clearing of the throat which always preceded his entrance. Waiting for him, with the habit of years she picked up her sewing basket; but when she saw the fragment of Holly’s wedding gown, she put it down again.

For the first time she saw all the destruction that would follow her confession to James—that it involved Holly’s future too.

Unlike Holly, her experience of the day before had left her in terror of the law. Out of her ignorance she drew a picture of her sister in prison. It would kill her; she would never live through the trial.

Her imagination leaped on. She saw Mrs. Bayne gone, and Holly’s engagement broken. She saw the shabby old house, and only Tom Bayne and Holly in it. Time going on, and Tom Bayne creeping about, a sick man, a friendless man—and Holly’s youth going, gone, like her own. “I can’t do it,” she told herself. But she knew she would do it.

By noon she had worked herself into a state of frenzy, and then the telephone rang. She was so certain it was James that her heart leaped; but the call was from Simmons’s grocery store on Kelsey Street.

“We have a message for you, Mrs. Cox,” said Simmons himself. “Your sister ain’t so well, and Miss Holly would like you to come right up.”

M
RS. BAYNE LAY IN
her bed. There were purplish shadows under her eyes, and she was lying quite flat, by the doctor’s orders.

She was very comfortable. Now and then she reached out a white hand to the glass of water beside her and took a sip, and always at such times somebody came and helped her to raise her head; sometimes it was Holly, sometimes Margaret. Now and then she dozed a little, but mostly she lay still.

There was a fire on the hearth, and she could hear it crackling.

Once she said, conscious that she was not alone: “It is nice to be waited on. Like old times.” And Holly from the hearth answered her cheerfully enough: “Why shouldn’t you be waited on? It’s a poor house that can’t have one lady!”

Her hearing was preternaturally acute, and the front door seemed to be opening and closing rather often.

“Who’s downstairs?” she asked once. “Someone keeps going out and coming in.”

“It’s Aunt Margaret. She’s been telephoning the taxi company again.”

“It hasn’t been found?”

“Not yet, but the men don’t report until six o’clock. Even if they don’t find it, what do we care?” She came to the side of the bed and. touched her mother’s forehead. “We’ve still got each other,” she said shakily.

“Has Furness been in?”

“No. I didn’t expect him to-day. Now close your eyes and see if you can’t sleep again.”

Toward evening she really fell asleep. The firelight flickered in the darkened room, making it soothingly warm and restful; her pillows in their fresh slips were smooth and soft. Tragedy, grim and heartbreaking, was reigning downstairs, but in her sheltered bed, her firelit room, Mrs. Bayne went peacefully to sleep.

Holly went down the stairs.

Margaret was in the drawing room. There was no fire there, and under the hard top light of the chandelier her face looked drawn and old. Each time she had gone to the grocery store she had called up the flat, only to be told that her number did not answer, and unreasoning terror began to possess her.

“I’m afraid,” she told Holly. “Unless you knew him, you couldn’t understand. He might do anything.
Anything
.”

Holly tried to comfort her. The dog had adopted the house as his permanent home and now lay beside her on the old sofa, and as she talked, she stroked him. She felt almost as though she and the dog were alone in the room. This Margaret sitting across from her, detached and frozen, her mind on the husband Holly hardly knew, was scarcely more than conscious of her.

“Of course he’s worried, but he’s sure to go back. Probably he is just walking around.”

“He didn’t even take his overcoat.”

Once Holly asked her if she knew whether Mr. Cox and Howard Warrington had met, and Margaret at first said no. Later on, however, she said they had; she had sent a message to James by Warrington one night. But Holly did not tell her the District Attorney’s theory. She was troubled enough without that.

It was after one of the painful silences that Margaret suddenly announced her decision.

“I’m going to tell him, Holly. I’ve got to.”

“I think you must,” said Holly quietly. “Only, he’d better know what the doctor said to-day. She can’t stand a shock.”

Margaret said nothing.

At six o’clock Holly boiled some eggs and made toast, and they ate, the two of them, in the kitchen, because it was warm. While she was preparing the meal, Margaret went out once more to telephone, but Holly had no need to ask the result.

Margaret sat stiff and silent at the kitchen table, busy with her own thoughts, and Holly said very little. Once she asked Margaret a question, but the answer to it was vague and faintly hostile.

“Do you think Father told her the day she went to see him?”

“I haven’t an idea. He might. He put it there.”

Holly sat with her chin in her hands and gazed at her.

“Still, I would like to think he did,” she persisted. “That he told her, so she could send it back. Wouldn’t you?”

“Don’t fool yourself. If he told her at all, it wasn’t for that.”

Holly made an impatient gesture.

“There are still some decent motives in the world, you know, and some honest people.”

“There are,” said Margaret, rising. “There is my James. And look what it’s brought him to!”

She put down her cup and went upstairs, and soon afterward she came down with her wraps on.

“I’m going now,” she said heavily. “She’s still sleeping, and her colour is good. But I don’t quite like leaving you alone with her.”

“I’ll be all right. And I’ll not be alone in the house. Mr. Warrington will be here.”

Had Margaret been less absorbed in her own troubles, she would have seen Holly’s sensitive colour rise.

Holly saw her to the door and kissed her good-bye, but Margaret was still frozen. There was a sag to her shoulders that had been absent now for months. It was as though she was afraid to go home. Holly closed the door and went in, shivering.

She and the dog were alone. She got a coat from the hall closet and spread it over the two of them on the sofa. She knew Warrington had brought the dog. It was his dog. She pulled it closer to her and tucked the coat in around it.

She was waiting for Warrington. Now and then she looked at the clock. She knew he was all right. When she had reached the house that morning, a dapper-looking young man had been waiting on the doorstep, and had told her with a twinkle in his eyes that he had called for a suit of clothes.

He explained, not much, but that Warrington had torn something and needed other clothes.

“But he is all right?” she had asked. The young man had laughed cheerfully, with the air of one who has a secret and merry joke.

“Sure, he’s all right,” he said, “except for a little wear and tear.” And he had gone up the stairs chuckling.

So now Holly was waiting. Soon he would come and tell her what to do, and she would do it. An anchor, he had said; but he was to be more than that: he was to be steersman, quiet and strong and resourceful, to pilot her out of these troubled waters.

The clock moved on. Nine, ten, eleven, and still he did not come. At midnight she put the dog to bed and went up the stairs. Her mother was still sleeping. She sat down by the fire; and confused with thinking, the warmth wrapping her like a blanket, she too finally slept.

At half-past one that morning Mrs. Bayne awakened. She felt completely rested and refreshed. She sat up in bed and took another sip of water, and then made out Holly’s quiet figure in the chair by the dying fire. She got out of bed, and taking one of her blankets, put it carefully around the girl’s body. Holly stirred but did not waken.

Mrs. Bayne moved about the room. She knew that, if her purse had been returned, they would have left it out for her to see; so she examined the bureau and the bedside table, but it was not there. She felt no particular shock at the discovery; she had had very little hope of its return. But her mind, rested from her long sleep, turned at once to the practical problem of the loss.

Sitting on the side of her bed, in her slippers and dressing gown, she surveyed the situation. She could see, in the corner between the mantel and her high mahogany wardrobe, the white boxes which contained her purchases. She knew what was in each one of them; no miser ever hoarded and counted gold as she had hoarded and counted their contents.

At least they had those, and they were paid for.

Her mind travelled to the big young man she thought asleep in the room above. He had been very obliging about the bond; he would be sorry to know she had lost most of what he had got for it. Really, they had been most fortunate. He was a gentleman, and then to have him know about bonds and such things, that had been fortunate too.

She was not consciously evading temptation as she had that morning. Rather, in her new ease of mind, she was subconsciously savouring it. This morning it had been weakness, but whatever she might do now was out of dire necessity. But she was in no hurry. Why hurry, when she knew that she had above her this treasure trove of security, this wall between her and privation, lying snug and tight beneath the attic floor?