The Green Mouse
where, in the golden dusk, the odor of camphor hung.
She had taken a great cluster of dewy Bride's roses from the centerpiece,
and as she walked forward, sedately youthful, beside him, her fresh,
young face brooded over the fragrance of the massed petals.
"Sweet--how sweet!" she murmured to herself, and as they reached the end
of the vista she half turned to face him, dreamily, listless, confident.
They looked at one another, she with chin brushing the roses.
"The strangest of all," she said, "is that it _seems_ all right--and--and
we _know_ that it is all quite wrong.... Had you better go?"
"Unless I ought to wait and make sure your maid does not fail you....
Shall I?" he asked evenly.
She did not answer. He drew a linen-swathed armchair toward her; she
absently seated herself and lay back, caressing the roses with delicate
lips and chin.
Twice she looked up at him, standing there by the boarded windows.
Sunshine filtered through the latticework at the top--enough for them to
see each other as in a dull afterglow.
"I wonder how soon my maid will come," she mused, dropping the loose
roses on her knees. "If she is going to be very long about it perhaps--
perhaps you might care to find a chair--if you have decided to wait."
He drew one from a corner and seated himself, pulses hammering his
throat.
Through the stillness of the house sounded at intervals the clink of
glass from the pantry. Other sounds from above indicated the plumber's
progress from floor to floor.
"Do you realize," she said impulsively, "how _very_ nice you have been to
me? What a perfectly horrid position I might have been in, with poor
Clarence on the back fence! And suppose I had dared follow him alone to
the cellar? I--I might have been there yet--up to my neck in coal?"
She gazed into space with considerable emotion.
"And now," she said, "I am safe here in my own home. I have lunched
divinely, a maid is on the way to me, Clarence remains somewhere safe
indoors, Mr. Quinn is flitting from faucet to faucet, the electric light
and the telephone will be in working order before very long--and it is
_all_ due to you!"
"I--I did a few things I almost w-wish I hadn't," stammered Brown,
"b-because I can't, somehow, decently t-tell you how tremendously
I--I--" He stuck fast.
"What?"
"It would look as though I were presuming on a t-trifling service
rendered, and--oh, I can't say it; I want to, but I can't."
"Say what? Please, I don't mind what you are--are going to say."
"It's--it's that I----"
"Y-es?" in soft encouragement.
"W-want to know you most tremendously now. I don't want to wait several
years for chance and hazard."
"O-h!" as though the information conveyed a gentle shock to her. Her low-
breathed exclamation nearly finished Brown.
"I knew you'd think it unpardonable for me--at such a time--to venture
to--to--ask--say--express--convey----"
"Why do you--how can I--where could we--" She recovered herself
resolutely. "I do not think we ought to take advantage of an accident
like this.... Do you? Besides, probably, in the natural course of social
events----"
"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 circumstances, a pocket edition of his hitherto 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 grass 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 assent, 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 knobs 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 coupé, 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 assistance 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
gratitude, 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