Part 13

Oliver sighed--Nancy's firmness had admittedly quite ruined all the better things in life--but even the merest sort of mere existence had got to be, at times, a rather pleasant convention--how pleasant, he felt, he had never quite realized somehow until just now. Then, with a vague idea of getting whatever was to happen over with as quickly and decently as possible, he settled his tie once more and trotted meekly through the dining-room and beyond the curtains.

XL

“Why, Mr. Piper!” was Oliver's first and wholly inane remark.

It was not what he had intended to say at all--something rather more dramatic and on the lines of “Shoot if you must this old grey head, but if you will only listen to a reasonable explanation--” had been uppermost in his mind. But the sight of Peter's father crouched over what must be Mrs. Severance's body, his weak hands fumbling for her wrist and heart, his voice thin with a senile sorrow as if he had been stricken at once and in an instant with a palsy of incurable age, brought the whole world of Southampton and house-parties and reality that Oliver thought he had lost touch with forever, back to him so vividly that all he could do was gape at the tableau on the floor.

Mr. Piper looked up and for a second of relief Oliver thought that the staring eyes had not recognized him at all. Then he realized from the look in them that who or what he was made singularly little difference now to Mr. Piper. “Water!” croaked Mr. Piper. “Water! I've shot her. Oh, poor Rose, poor Rose!” and he was plucking at her dress again with absorbed, incapable fingers.

Oliver looked around him. The gun. There must have been a gun. Where? Oh _there_--and as he picked it up from under a chair he did so with much inward reverence in spite of the haste he took to it, for he felt as if it were all the next forty years of his life made little into something cold and small and of metal that he was lifting like a doll from the floor.

“Water,” said Mr. Piper again and quite horribly. “Water for Rose.”

It was only when he had gone back to the kitchen and started looking for glasses that he realized that Mrs. Severance might very possibly be dying out there in the other room. Till then the mere fact that he was not dying himself had been too large in his vision to give him time to develop proper sympathy for others. When he did, though, he hurried bunglingly, in spite of a nervous flash in which after accidentally touching the revolver in his pocket he almost threw it through the pane of the nearest window before he considered. A moment, though, and he was back with a spilling tumbler.

“Water,” said Mr. Piper with querulous satisfaction. “Give her water.” Oliver hesitated. “Where's she shot?” he said sharply.

“I don't know. Oh, I don't know. But I shot her. I shot her. Poor Rose.”

It was certainly odd, there being no blood about, thought Oliver detachedly. Internal wounds? Possibly, but even so. He dipped his fingers in the glass of water, bent over Mrs. Severance and sprinkled the drops as near her closed eyelids as possible. No sound came from her and not a muscle of her body moved, but the delicate skin of the eyelids shivered momentarily. Oliver drew a long breath and stepped back.

“She's dead,” said Mr. Piper. “She's dead.” And he began to weep, very quietly with a mouselike sound and the slow horrible tears of age. “No use trying water on her,” said Oliver loudly, and again he thought he saw the skin of the eyelids twitch a little. “Is there any brandy here--anything like that, Mr. Piper?”

“K-kitchen,” said Mr. Piper with a sniff and one of his hands came away from Mrs. Severance to fumble for a key.

“I'll go get it,” said Oliver, still rather loudly, and took one step away. Then he bent down again swiftly and poured the whole contents of the tumbler he was holding into the little hollow of Mrs. Severance's throat just above the collar-bone. _“Oh!”_ said the dead Mrs. Severance in the tone of one who has turned on the cold in a shower unexpectedly, and she opened her eyes.

“Rose!” said Mr. Piper snifflingly. “You aren't dead? You aren't dead, dear? Rose! Rose!”

“Oh,” said Mrs. Severance again, but this time tinily and with a flavor of third acts about her, and she started to relax rather beautifully into a Dying Gladiator pose.

“I'll get some more water, Mr. Piper,” said Oliver briskly, and Mrs. Severance began to sit up again.

“I--fainted--silly of me,” she said with a consummate dazedness. “Somebody was firing revolvers--”

“I tried--I tried--I--t-tried to s-shoot you, Rose,” came from the damp little heap on the floor that was Mr. Piper.

“Really, Sargent--” said Mrs. Severance comfortably. Then she turned her head and made what Oliver was always to consider her most perfect remark. “You must think us very queer people indeed, Mr. Crowe?” she said smiling questioningly up at him.

Oliver's smile in answer held relief beyond words. It wasn't the ordinary cosmos again--quite yet--but at least from now on he felt perfectly sure that no matter how irregular anyone's actions might become, in speech at least, every last least one of the social conventions would be scrupulously observed.

“I think--if you could help me, Sargent--” said Mrs. Severance delicately.

“Oh yes, yes, yes,” from Mr. Piper very eagerly and with Oliver's and his assistance Mrs. Severance's invalid form was aided into a deep chair.

“And I think, now,” she went on, “that if I could have just a little--” She let the implication float in the air like a pretty bubble. “Perhaps--it might help us all--”

“Oh _certainly,_ dear,” from Mr. Piper. “I--”

“In the kitchen, you said, Mr. Piper. And you must let _me,”_ from Oliver with complete decision. He hadn't bargained for that. Mr. Piper might not notice Ted on the fire-escape--but then again he might--and if he did he would certainly investigate--mute bound bodies were not ordinary or normal adjuncts of even the most illegal of Riverside Drive apartments. And then. Oliver's hand went down over the revolver in his pocket--if necessary he stood perfectly ready to hold up Mr. Piper at the point of his own pistol to preserve the inviolability of that kitchen.

But Mrs. Severance saved him the bother.

“If you would be so kind?” she said simply. “It's in the small cupboard---the brown one--Sargent, you have the key?”

“Oh, yes, Rose.” Mr. Piper was looking, Oliver thought, rather more embarrassed than it was fair for any man to have to look and live. His eyes kept going pitifully and always to Mrs. Severance and then creeping, away. He produced the key, however, and gave it to Oliver silently and Oliver took the first opportunity when he was through the curtains of giving whatever fates had presided over the insanities of the evening a long cheer with nine Mrs. Severances on the end.

He carefully stayed in the kitchen fifteen minutes--devoting most of the time to a cautious examination of Ted, who seemed to be gradually recovering consciousness. At least he stirred a little when poked by Oliver's foot.

“Sleeps just like a baby--oh, the sweet little fellow--the dear little fellow--” hummed Oliver wildly as he made a few last additions to the curious network of string and towels with which he had wound Ted into the fire-escape as if he had been making him a cocoon. “Well--well--_well_--what a night we're having! What a night we're having and what _will_ we have next?” Then he remembered the reason for his journey and removed a bottle of brandy from the brown cup-board, found appropriate glasses and, in the ice-chest, club-soda and ginger ale. He poured himself a drink reminiscent of Paris--not that he felt he needed it for the reaction from bracing himself to die like a Pythias had left him elvishly grotesque in mind--gathered the bottles tenderly in his arms like small glass babies and went back to the living-room.

XLI

And this time he was forced to pay internal high compliment to Mr. Piper as well as to Mrs. Severance. The pitiful grey image, its knees rumpled from the floor, its features streaked like a cheap paper mask with ludicrous dreadful tears, had turned back into the President of the Commercial Bank with branches in Bombay and Melbourne and all the business-capitals of the world. Not that Mr. Piper was at ease again, exactly--to be at ease under the circumstances would merely have proved him brightly inhuman--but he looked as Oliver thought he might have on one of the Street's Black Mondays when only complete firmness and complete audacity in one could keep even the Commercial afloat at a time when the Stock Exchange had turned into a floor-full of well-dressed maniacs and houses that everyone had thought as solid as granite went to pieces like sand castles.

Oliver set down the bottles and opened them with a feeling both that he had never known Mr. Piper at all before, only Peter's father, and, spookily, that neither Peter's father nor the terrible old man who had wept on the floor beside Mrs. Severance could have any real existence--this was such a complete and unemotional Mr. Piper he had before him, a Mr. Piper, too, in spite of all the oddities of the present situation, so obviously at home in his own house.

None of them said anything in particular until the mixture in the glasses had sunk about half-way down. Then Mr. Piper remarked in a pleasant voice, “I don't often permit myself--seldom even before the country adopted prohibition--but the present circumstances seem to be--er--unusual enough--to warrant--” smiled cheerfully and lifted his glass again. When he had set it down he looked at Mrs. Severance, then at Oliver, and then started to speak.

Oliver listened with some tenseness, knowing only that whatever he might possibly have imagined might happen, what would happen, to judge from the previous events of the evening, would be undoubtedly so entirely different that prophecy was no use at all. But, even so, he was not entirely prepared for the unexpectedness of Mr. Piper's first sentence.

“I feel that I owe you very considerable apologies, Oliver,” the President of the Commercial began with a good deal of stateliness. “In fact I really owe you so many that it leaves me at rather a loss 'as to just how to begin.” He smiled a little shyly.

“Rose has explained everything,” he said, and Oliver looked at Mrs. Severance with stupefied wonder--_how?_

“But even so, there remains the difficulty--of my putting myself into words.”

“Silly boy,” said Mrs. Severance easily, and Oliver noted with fresh amazement that the term seemed to come from her as naturally and almost conventionally as if she had every legal American right to use it. “Let me, dear.” And Oliver felt his head begin to go round like a pinwheel.

But then--but she really _couldn't_ be married to Mr. Piper--and yet somehow she seemed so much more married to him than Mrs. Piper ever had been--Oliver's thoughts played fantastically for an instant over the proposition that she and Mr. Piper had been secretly converted to Mohammedanism together and he looked at Mr. Piper's grey head almost as if he expected to see a large red fez suddenly drop down upon it from the ceiling.

“No, Rose,” and again Mr. Piper's voice was stately. “This is my--difficulty. No matter how hard it may be.”

“Of course I did not understand--how could I?--that Rose--was such a very good friend of your sister's and all your family's. Rose had told me something about it, I believe--but I was so--foolishly disturbed--when I came in--that really, I--well I must admit that even if I had seen you when I first came in that would hardly have been the thought uppermost in my mind at the time.” He spoke in the same tone of kindly reproof toward himself that he would have used if business worries had made him commit a small but definite act of inhospitality toward one of his guests.

“And naturally--you will think me very ignorant indeed of my son's affairs--and those of his friends--but while I had heard from Peter--of the breaking of your engagement--you will pardon me, I hope, if I touch upon a subject that must be so painful to you--I had no idea of the fact that you were--intending to leave the country--and knowing Rose thought that with her present position on 'Mode'--” he paused.

“It was very kind indeed of Mrs. Severance to offer to do what she could for me,” said Oliver non-committally. He thought he got the drift of the story now--a sheer one enough but with Mr. Piper's present reaction toward abasement and his obvious wish to believe whatever he could, it had evidently sufficed.

“I know it was silly of me having Oliver to dinner here alone--” said Mrs. Severance with the air of one ready to apologize for a very minor impropriety. “Silly and wrong--but Louise was coming too until she telephoned about Jane Ellen's little upset--and I thought we could have such fun getting supper together with Elizabeth away. I get a little tired of _always_ entertaining my friends in restaurants, Sargent, especially when I want to talk to them without having to shout. And _really_ I never _imagined_--”

She looked steadily at Mr. Piper and he seemed to shrink a little under her gaze.

“As for Elizabeth,” he said with hurried vindictiveness, “Elizabeth shall leave tomorrow morning. She--”

“Oh, we might as well keep her, Sargent,” said Mrs. Severance placidly. “You will have to pay her blackmail, of course--but after all that's really your fault a little, isn't it?--and it seems as if that was more or less what you had to do with any kind of passable servant nowadays. And Elizabeth is perfection--as a servant. As police--” she smiled a little cruelly. “Well, we shan't go into that, but I think it would be so much better to keep her. Then we'll be getting something out of her in return for our blackmail, don't you see?”

“Perhaps. Still we have no need of discussing that now. I can only say that if Elizabeth is to stay, she will have to--” “Reform? My dear Sargent! When everything she did was from the most rigidly moral motives? I had no idea she was such a _clever_ cat, though--”

“She will have ample opportunities of exercising her cleverness in jail if I can find any means of getting her there, and I think I can. Really,” said Mr. Piper reflectively, “really when I think--”

Then he stopped.

“But you're still waiting for an--explanation--aren't you, Oliver?”

“Having been very nearly assassinated because of Elizabeth's abilities in telephone conversation, I should think he might very well be interested in knowing what is going to happen to her. However--”

“Yes,” and Mr. Piper's face became very sober. He looked at his glass as if he would be willing to resign the Presidency of the Commercial in its favor if it would only explain to Oliver for him.

“You were saying, Sargent?” said Mrs. Severance implacably.

“I was. Well, I,” he began, and then “You,” and stopped, and then he began again.

“I said that it would be--difficult--for me to explain matters to you fully, Oliver; I find it to be--even more difficult than I had supposed. I--it is rather hard for a man of my age to defend his manner of life to one of your age, even when he himself is wholly convinced that that manner is not---unrighteous. And in this particular case, to one of his son's best friends.”

He twisted his fingers around the rim of his glass. Oliver started to speak but Mr. Piper put up his hand. “No--please--it will be so much easier if I finish what I have to say first,” he said rather pleadingly.

“Well--the situation here between Rose and myself--must be plain to you now.” Oliver nodded, he hoped in not too knowing a way. “Plain. How that situation arose--is another matter. And a matter that would take a good deal too long to tell. Except that, given the premises from which we set forth--what followed was perhaps as inevitable as most things are in life.

“That situation has been known to no other person on earth but ourselves--all these years. And now it is known. Well, Oliver, there you have it. And you happen to have us also--entirely in your hands. Because of a spying, greedy servant--and my own stupidity and distrust--we have been completely found out. And by one of my son's best friends.

“I wish that I could apologize for--all the scene before this. Better. I hope that you will believe that I am trying to do so now. But I seldom make apologies, Oliver, even when I am evidently in the wrong--and this hasn't been one of my easiest to make. And now.”

He sat back and waited, his fingers curled round his glass. And, as he looked at him, Oliver felt a little sickish, for, on the whole, he respected Mr. Piper a good deal more than his irreverent habit of mind permitted him to respect most older people, and at the same time felt pitifully sorry for him--it must be intensely humiliating to have to explain this way--and yet the only thing Oliver could do was to take the largest advantage possible of his very humiliation and straightforwardness--the truth could still do nothing at all but wreck everybody concerned.

“I give you my word of honor, Mr. Piper, to keep everything I know entirely and completely secret,” said Oliver, slowly, trying to make the large words seem as little magniloquent as possible. “That's all I can say, I guess--but it's true--you can really depend on it.”

“Thank you,” said Mr. Piper quite simply. “I believe you, Oliver,” and again Oliver felt that little burn of shame in his mind.

“Thank you,” said Mrs. Severance, copying Mr. Piper finished his drink and rose. “And now, I do not wish you to misunderstand me,” he said. “I have not come to my age without realizing that there are certain services that cannot be paid for. But you have done me a very great service, Oliver--a service for which I should have been glad to give nearly everything material that I possess. I merely wish you to know that in case you should ever need--assistance--from an older man---in any way--that is clumsily put, but I can think of no other suitable word at the moment--I am entirely at your disposal. Entirely so.”

“Thank you, sir,” said Oliver a little stiffly. Mr. Piper was certainly heaping coals of fire. Then he wondered for an instant just what Mrs. Ellicott would think if she could have heard the President of the Commercial say that to him--

Mr. Piper was moving slowly toward the door, and the politeness that had been his at the beginning of the conversation was nothing to his supreme politeness now.

“And now,” he said, as if he were asking everybody's pardon for an entirely unintentional intrusion, “I really must be getting back to Southampton--and you and Rose I imagine have still quite a bit to talk over--”

“But--” said Oliver clumsily, “but Mr. Piper--” and “Must you really, dear?” said Mrs. Severance in the softest tones of conventional wifely reproach.

Her manner was ideal but Oliver somehow and suddenly felt all the admiration he had ever had for her calm power blow away from him like smoke. He could not help extremest appreciation of her utter poise--he never would be able to, he supposed--but from now on it would be the somewhat shivery appreciation that anyone with sensitive nerves might give to the smooth mechanical efficiency of a perfectly-appointed electric-chair.

“No,” said Mr. Piper perfectly, “I insist. You certainly could not have finished your discussion before I came and for the present--well--it seems to me that I have intruded quite long enough. I wish it,” he added and Oliver understood.

“You are staying with us, over tomorrow, Oliver, are you not?” said Mr. Piper calmly, and Oliver assented. “I suppose we shall see each other at breakfast then?”

“Oh yes, sir.” And then Oliver tried to rise to Mr. Piper's magnificence of conventionality in remark. “By the way, sir, I'm driving back in Peter's car--as soon as Mrs. Severance and I have finished our talk--I couldn't pick you up anywhere, sir, could I?”

Mr. Piper smiled, consulting his watch. “There is an excellent train at 10.33--an excellent one--” he said, and again Oliver was dumfounded to realize that the whole march of events in the apartment had taken scarcely two hours.

“Thank you, Oliver, but I think I had better take that. Not that I distrust your driving in the least, but it will be fairly slow going, I imagine, over some of those roads at night--and this was one evening on which I had really intended to get a good night's sleep.”

He smiled again very quaintly.

“You'll be dancing as soon as you get back, I suppose? I understand there is to be a dance this evening?”

“Yes, sir--at least, I guess so. Told Peter I'd show up.”

“Youth,” said Mr. Piper. “Youth.” There was a certain accent of dolefulness in the way he said it.

“And now I shall call a taxi,” he said briskly.

“Can't I take you down--?” Oliver began, but

“No, no. I insist,” said Mr. Piper a little irritatedly, and then Oliver understood that though he might be quixotic on occasion, he was both human and--Oliver hesitated over the words, they seemed so odd to his youth to be using of a man who was certainly old enough to be his father--really in love with Mrs. Severance after all. So, until Mr. Piper's taxi came they chatted of indifferent matters much as they might have while watching people splashing about in the water from the porch of the swimming pool at Bar Harbor--and Oliver felt exceedingly in the way. These last dozen minutes were the hardest to get through of the whole evening, he thought rather dizzily; up till now he had almost forgotten about Ted, but it would be quite in keeping with everything else that had happened if just as Mr. Piper were leaving, a formal farewell on his lips and everything straightened out to everyone's conspiratorial or generously befooled satisfaction, Ted should stagger into the room like the galvanized corpse of a Pharoah wrapped in towels instead of mummy-cloth and everything from revolver-shots to a baring of inmost heart-histories would have to be gone through with again.

So when Oliver heard the telephone ring again he knew it was too good to be true, and, even when Mr. Piper started to answer it, was struck chilly with a hopeless fear that it might be police. But Fate had obviously got a trifle bored of her sport with them, or very possibly tired out by the intricacy of her previous combinations--for it was only the taxi after all and Mr. Piper was at the door.

“No use saying good-by to you now, is there, Oliver?” he said quietly, but held out his hand nevertheless.

“Well, good-by, Rose,” as he scrupulously shook hands with Mrs. Severance.

“Good-by, Sargent,” and then the door he had had such difficulty in opening two hours before had shut behind him and Oliver and Mrs. Severance were left looking at each other.

“Well,” said Mrs. Severance with a small gasp.

“Well,” said Oliver. “Well, well!”