CHAPTER X

THE BEGINNING OF A NIGHTMARE

Coming to Parlor A on his way to his apartment, Ryder saw lights and heard a buzz of excited voices. He saw the house detective, and stopped a moment to see what had brought her here in such haste.

Drawn into a corner at the end of the room near the huge picture of "The Cheesemonger" was an invalid's chair, which the colored man, James, had evidently just made up as a bed for his crotchety master. And there was old Cudger, in a blanket robe, nightcap, and carpet slippers, wrathfully facing three women who, so Ryder thought, should have long since been in bed.

Eying both parties stood the sharp-featured Miss Solomons, her novel in one hand, the other on her hip and her head on one side. The chatter of the women, the grumbling of Cudger, and the chuckling of James, who seemed to find much amusement in the situation, made little impression upon the phenomenal calm of the house detective.

"Now, then!" the latter said at last, "let's get this thing straight. Mr. Cudger has permission to sleep here to watch his oil painting tonight. What are you ladies doin' here? Lights'll go out in two minutes anyway."

"It is disgraceful!" ejaculated one woman, a hard-featured person with glasses and a "transformation" that did not match her back hair in color. "This man coming into the ladies' parlor in his nightclothes----"

"Ha! Don't expect me to sleep in my day clothes, do you?" snapped Mr. Cudger.

"What are you ladies here for?" reiterated the sharp voice of Miss Solomons. "I ask you."

"We were holding a committee meeting--a very important meeting," said the hard-featured one. "You know very well, young woman, that the Society for the Betterment of the Condition of Delinquent Girls will hold their convention here next week. We are the advance committee of the S.B.C.D.G.

"All right," interrupted Miss Solomons. "But you had better advance right to bed, ladies. Lights out in one minute. Talk it over in the morning. Mr. Cudger has the call on this parlor tonight."

"But I tell you, young woman, we have a right to hold our meeting here, no matter what the time is," cried the militant lady.

"In the dark?" exclaimed the house detective. "No, ma'am!" and she advanced upon the three much as she might have upon a flock of chickens, literally shooing them out of the parlor.

But once in the hall the women stopped to parley some more.

"Miss Solomons, this is a perfect outrage--an outrage not to be permitted in a well-ordered house, such as the Pinewood Inn is supposed to be," stormed the hard-featured woman, and there was the ring of war in her voice.

"Now, Mrs. Dent," put in the oily voice of a large brawny woman, another of the three ejected committee women, "Miss Solomons is not to blame. Miss Solomons, no doubt, is deeply interested in our work"--Miss Solomons sniffed and the woman with the "transformation" glared angrily at the house detective--"but this awful Bangs----"

"Miss Solomons is to blame!" interrupted Mrs. Dent, in a hard, decisive tone. "If she had the judgment of a kitten----"

"Now, see here, ladies!" flared out the house detective, "we're not a-goin' to have any meanderings around the hallways in the dark this night. There go the lights now. You go, and go now!"

The women scuttled away without further words, and Miss Solomons disappeared in the darkness.

John Ryder, vastly amused, changed his opinion then and there regarding the appointment of a woman for such a position as Miss Solomons held. No man could have handled this situation with such vigor and promptness.

A smile wreathed his lips as he went on to his own door. Along the corridor before him, now illumined only by an occasional bracket lamp, he saw flitting the lighted candles of the other late guests seeking their beds.

Ryder opened the door of his suite expecting to see a picture similar to the one he had observed when he had come to the room before supper. But, although the lamp he had sent up was burning on the reading table, Ruth was not present. The room was empty and the atmosphere of it seemed chill as he stepped in.

Nor was there a light in the inner room. He did not hear a sound. Where had his wife gone? Was she with Mrs. Judson in that lady's rooms? And where were they?

Ryder was suddenly disgusted again. For heaven's sake! couldn't Ruth break away from that woman? And after the experience they had had with her at the supper table, too!

He had heard certain of his married acquaintances occasionally curse the interference of some "woman friend" in the otherwise quiet pool of their domesticity. Was he going to butt up against something like that at the very start? It could not be possible that Ruth was enamored of the society of such a woman as the vulgar Mrs. Judson!

He turned up the wick of the lamp and strode with it to the door of the bedroom, flinging back the hangings. Instantly the light flooded the chamber, and a prettily disheveled figure started up out of a nest of pillows.

"Oh! I was napping!" she cried with a tremulous little laugh. "What a bad girl I am! You were so long, Johnny, and I was so sleepy. It must be very late."

She had made ready for the night. Her beautiful hair was in two thick plaits over her shoulders--those shoulders so white and soft and beautifully curved betrayed by the cut of her nightgown and the lacy negligee she had thrown over it.

As she slipped out of bed he saw her slim bare ankles, her feet thrust into swansdown slippers. They were like a child's. She seemed more childish and appealing to him than she had before. Ryder felt momentary shame again that he should have been impatient.

"It is late," he admitted. "I am afraid, Ruth, you have had a very tiresome evening. This hasn't been just the sort of a beginning to our married life that we might wish."

She laughed merrily. "I guess neither of us imagined a honeymoon like this, dear. I used to try to think what you would be like after all these years--and you were so far away, too, John. It--it was like a dream----"

Ryder had stepped back to replace the lamp upon the table. He almost dropped it. What was she saying? But before he could find his voice or move from the spot where surprise had frozen him, the door which he had failed to lock burst in and Mrs. Judson, in a state of mind--and of dishabille--that completely shocked John Ryder, entered.

A large woman in bedroom wrapper and tears is not a fetching sight. And when she came down the room like a cyclone and flung herself with abandon into his arms, he--well, John Ryder swore!

[Illustration: Flung herself with abandon into John Ryder's arms]

Not loud, but deep and with a fervency that could not be mistaken. She came within an ace of toppling him over, and he dragged her to the couch and dropped her there--the springs creaking a pained objection to her sudden weight.

"Great heavens above!" grumbled the exasperated Ryder. "What's the matter with the creature now?"

"Oh, what is it?" asked Ruth from the chamber, and he heard the patter of her slippered feet as she ran to the door.

"It's your friend, Mrs. Judson," said the harassed bridegroom with disgust. "She's come in here to have a fit--or something." Then to himself he added: "Why in hades didn't I lock that door? But she'd have busted it in and come right through. Talk about a honeymoon! Ye gods! was ever a man----"

Here he was startled by Mrs. Judson's hysterical acrobatics. She was gasping and crying and laughing, all at once. Her state was plainly volcanic.

"What the deuce is to be done with her?" he demanded of his wife.

Ruth brushed him aside and took charge of the patient, whom he had been trying to hold down upon the cushions by main force.

"The ammonia bottle--on the bureau in there--quick!" Ruth commanded, and Ryder ran to obey like a lamb.

Ruth thrust the unstoppered bottle under Mrs. Judson's nose. The ammonia almost choked Ryder when he got a whiff of it; and it brought the widow up standing and trying to catch her breath. She had been by no means unconscious, and it flashed through John Ryder's brain that she might have heard what he said about her.

Mrs. Judson choked for a moment, sputtered, uttered a stifled shriek or two, and then fell to crying more quietly, but rocking herself to and fro on the couch and wringing her bejeweled hands.

"Well, I'm hanged!" muttered Ryder. "This is pretty near the limit!"

Ruth turned to look at him for a moment. Her eyes suddenly sparkled with merriment and she shook a playful finger at him.

"You're like other men, I see," she whispered. "I guess I'm glad. I began to think you were almost an angel, hubby."

Mrs. Judson monopolized her attention then. She began to pour out a tale of woe that Ryder could scarcely understand; but it seemed Marie had left her--had run away while she was at supper--and had gone with some of the hotel help in a wagon back into the country where there was a station on another railroad--a long and toilsome journey, but anything to get away from a hotel that had no heat or electric lights!

"And she's robbed me--I know she has! Of course she has! Don't you say she hasn't!" chattered the large lady, her bosom heaving, threatening to go into another convulsion. "Send for Miss Solomons. She must find my brooches--my rings--my necklace----"

"Who is Miss Solomons?" asked Ruth wonderingly.

"The house detective," said Ryder, and was very glad thereafter that he said no more, for a cold voice at the open door of the suite said clearly:

"What's going on here? Who wants Miss Solomons?"

Mrs. Judson had gone waveringly on to another phase of her trouble. "And I tried to undress myself; but I didn't dare go to bed. And then the lights went out and--and----"

She trailed off again into spasmodic cries. Miss Solomons marched down the room to where the bridegroom and his bride were endeavoring to pacify the large lady.

"Huh!" sniffed the house detective, high disgust expressed upon her keen face. "It's that Judson woman. What's the matter with her now?"

The question, Ryder thought, was to the point. At that moment Mrs. Judson's gyrations reminded him of those of an eel upon a hot frying pan. Personally he was becoming frightened.

"Shouldn't she have a doctor?" he demanded.

"A barrel stave would do her more good," declared Miss Solomons harshly.

"If I had a little aromatic spirits I'd fix her!" exclaimed Ruth, biting her lower lip either to stifle a desire to laugh or to cry, Ryder could not tell which.

"Doctor!" sniffed the house detective, glaring at the hysterical woman.

But Ryder rushed to the telephone and called the office. George answered at once.

"Mrs. Judson is ill--here in our rooms," Ryder said. "Isn't there a doctor in the neighborhood?"

"There's one in the house. I'll send Dr. Hoyle right up, Mr. Ryder," said the clerk.

"Hoyle won't thank you for troubling him," Miss Solomons sneered. But as Mrs. Judson began on another spasm she did not leave Ruth all the work of holding the large lady upon the couch.

"My soul! this is awful!" groaned Ryder, coming back just as Mrs. Judson began another series of convulsions, for which indulgence in public she was not dressed exactly right.

"Say!" exclaimed the house detective to Ryder. "This is no place for a man. You had better go."

"Hang it!" groaned Ryder, realizing that Miss Solomons was right, and starting for the door again. "Why couldn't she have gone somewhere else to have her fit?"

Just then the doctor's welcome knock sounded. Ryder let him in. The medical man appeared, candle in one hand and his black case in the other. The ridiculousness of walking about this big hotel carrying a candle stuck into the neck of a whisky bottle did not appear to strike any of them at the moment as humorous.

Dr. Hoyle was a young but very businesslike practitioner. He handed his candle to Ryder, strode down the room, and sat down beside the widow, one end of whom each of the other women was trying to hold to the couch.

"Half a glass of water, please," he said to Ruth. "Let her go, Miss Solomons. She isn't going to kick any more now."

"Gee!" gasped the house detective, getting up from her knees and striking her usual attitude, one hand on her hip and the other clutching the paper novel.

The doctor selected a vial from his case, dropped a little of its contents into the water, which instantly turned the water cloudy and white; then held the glass to the patient's lips.

"Drink this," he commanded.

Mrs. Judson's jaws seemed to be locked and her eyes were tightly closed. She breathed stertorously. Ryder, looking on from afar, was actually frightened. If that woman dared to die in this room----

"Drink this, Mrs. Judson!" said the doctor again.

No result. Then the professional man leaned forward, with the glass still at her lips, and, seizing the large lady's nose, deliberately wrung it! The seemingly fixed jaws unlocked instantly and Mrs. Judson uttered an entirely different cry from her former painful sounds.

"Gee!" sighed Miss Solomons again, but with satisfaction. "This is no place for us, Mister. Come on! Dr. Hoyle can manage her without our help," and she started for the door.