Part 54

“My child,” she said, “you think I am a very hard woman. Perhaps it is so; but, like you, I do what seems to me the right. Certainly it is better now that you should leave us; but not like this. You must have your lunch here, then you must return to the house and sleep there, all in the usual way. To-morrow you shall go.” She paused a moment. “You shall go, if you are still determined that you will not keep faith with me.”

It was not a very difficult matter to touch Lexy’s heart. Whatever resentment she may have felt against Mrs. Enderby vanished now, lost in a sincere pity and respect; but she was firm in her purpose.

“I’ve got to tell one person,” she said. “If I do, I shall be able to tell you something you ought to know. I wish you could trust me! I wish you could believe that all I’m thinking of is--Caroline!”

“I do believe you,” said Mrs. Enderby. “You are very honest, and very, very young. You wish to do good, but you do harm. Very well, my child--I cannot stop you. Go your way, and I go mine; but”--she paused again, and again smiled her faint, shadowy smile--“if I think it right that you should be sacrificed, it shall be so. I am sorry. I have affection for you. I shall be sorry if you stand in my way.”

Lexy met her eyes steadily.

“I’m sorry, too,” she said.

And so she was. There was nothing in her heart now but sorrow for them all--for Caroline, for Mrs. Enderby, for the luckless Mr. Houseman, even for Miss Craigie; but most of all for Caroline.

“I’ve got to find her,” she thought, over and over again; “and _he’ll_ help me!”

She had lunch in Miss Craigie’s cottage--a melancholy meal, with the hostess red-eyed and dejected and Mrs. Enderby sternly silent. Then, after lunch, poor Miss Craigie was sent out for a drive, in order to get rid of the chauffeur while Lexy slipped out of the house and down to the station.

Everything went as Mrs. Enderby had willed it. Lexy caught the designated train, and returned to the city. All the way in, her great comfort was the thought of Mr. Houseman. He would help her. Now she could tell him that Caroline had gone, and he would help her.

“Of course, I’ve missed him to-day,” she thought; “but he’s sure to be in the park again to-morrow. Perhaps he’ll telephone. He’s not the sort to be easily discouraged, I’m sure.”

It was dark when she reached the Grand Central, but, at the risk of being late for dinner, Lexy chose to walk back to the house. She could always think better when she was walking.

“I want to get the thing in order in my own mind,” she reflected. “Mrs. Enderby is so--confusing. Here’s the case--Mr. Houseman says Caroline promised to meet him last night at a place called Wyngate, and they were to be married. She left the house. This morning there was a letter from her, postmarked Wyngate; but he says she didn’t go there. Well, then, where did she go?”

Impossible to answer that question with even the wildest surmise.

“I’ll have to wait,” Lexy went on. “I’ll have to find out more from Mr. Houseman. Perhaps they misunderstood each other. It’s no use trying to guess. I’ll have to wait till I see him.”

She recalled his honest, sunburned face with great good will. He was her ally. He was young, like herself, not old and cautious and deliberate. She liked him. She trusted him. In her loneliness and anxiety, he seemed a friend.

Annie opened the door with her customary air of disapproval.

“Yes, miss,” she answered. “Mrs. Enderby came home in the car half an hour ago. Dinner ’ll be served in ten minutes. Here’s a letter for you. A young man left it about twenty minutes ago.”

“If I’d taken a taxi from Grand Central, I’d have seen him!” was Lexy’s first thought.

Even a letter was something, however, and she ran upstairs with it, very much pleased. Of course, it was from Mr. Houseman. She locked the door, and, standing against it, looked at the envelope. It was addressed to “Miss Lexy” in a good clear hand. That made her smile, remembering her first indignation that morning.

The letter ran thus:

DEAR MISS LEXY:

Please excuse me for addressing you like this, but I don’t know your other name. I forgot to ask you.

I waited in the park for you all afternoon. When it got dark, I couldn’t stand it any longer, so I went to the house and asked for Miss Enderby. The servant told me she had gone away to the country with her mother this morning.

Please tell Miss Enderby that I understand. I am sorry she didn’t tell me before that she had changed her mind, instead of letting me wait like that; but it’s finished now. Please tell her she can count on me to hold my tongue, and never to bother her again in any way.

We are sailing to-night, or I should have tried to see you to-morrow. In case you have any message for me, you can address me at the company’s office, J. J. Eames & Son, 99 State Street. I expect to be back in about six weeks.

Very truly yours, CHARLES HOUSEMAN.

“Sailing to-night!” cried Lexy. “Then he’s gone! He’s gone!”

VII

“So you are still of the same mind?” inquired Mrs. Enderby.

“More so, if anything,” Lexy answered seriously.

It was after breakfast the next morning. Mr. Enderby had gone to his office, and Mrs. Enderby and Lexy were alone in the dining room. There was an odd sort of friendliness between them. Lexy felt no constraint in asking questions.

“There isn’t any letter this morning, is there, Mrs. Enderby?”

“There is not.”

“Then I suppose you’re going to tell Mr. Enderby?”

“This evening.”

“And then?”

“Then I shall be guided by his advice,” Mrs. Enderby replied blandly.

Lexy could have smiled at this. She knew how likely Mrs. Enderby was to be guided by her husband; but she kept the smile and the thought to herself.

“I don’t want to interfere with your plans--” she began.

“I have no plans.”

“I mean, if you’re going to take steps to find her--”

“My child,” said Mrs. Enderby, “it is clear that you wish to amuse yourself with a grand mystery. I tell you there is no mystery, but you do not believe me. I ask you to say nothing of this matter, but you refuse. So I say to you now--go your own way, proceed with your mystery. I do not think you can hurt me very much.”

Lexy flushed.

“I don’t want to hurt any one,” she declared stiffly. “I just want to help your daughter.”

“Proceed, then!” said Mrs. Enderby.

Lexy rose.

“Then I’ll say good-by, Mrs. Enderby,” she said. “My trunk’s packed. I’ll send for it this afternoon.”

“And where are you going in such a hurry?”

“I’m going to Wyngate,” said Lexy.

“Ah!” said Mrs. Enderby. “It is a pretty place, is it not?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never seen it.”

“Pardon me--you saw it yesterday. It is a small village through which we passed on the way to Miss Craigie’s house.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Now that you do know, perhaps you will spare yourself the trouble of going there,” said Mrs. Enderby. “I assure you you will not find Caroline there. I myself made certain inquiries. No such person has arrived in Wyngate.”

There was a moment’s silence.

“But I observe by your face that you are not convinced,” Mrs. Enderby went on. “‘This Mrs. Enderby, she is a stupid old creature,’ you think to yourself. ‘I shall go there myself, and I shall discover that which she could not.’”

Lexy reddened again.

“I don’t mean it that way,” she said. “It’s only that we look at this from different points of view, and I feel--I feel that I’ve got to go.”

“Very well!” said Mrs. Enderby, and she, too, rose. “You will please to come to my room with me. There is part of your salary to be paid to you.”

Lexy followed her, still flushed, and very reluctant. She wished she could afford to refuse that money.

“But I’ve earned it,” she thought; “and goodness knows I’ll need it!”

Mrs. Enderby sat down at her desk and took out her check book. While she wrote, Lexy looked out of the window.

“The amount due to you, including to-day, is thirty-two dollars,” said Mrs. Enderby. “Here is a check for it.”

“Thank you,” said Lexy.

“One minute more! Here, my child, is another check.”

Lexy stared at it, amazed. It was for one hundred dollars.

“But, Mrs. Enderby, I can’t--”

“You will please take it and say nothing more. I give you this because I shall give you no reference. I shall answer no inquiries about you. You understand?”

“But I don’t want--”

Mrs. Enderby pushed back her chair, and rose. She crossed the room to Lexy, put both hands on the girl’s shoulders, and then did something far more astonishing than the gift of the check. She kissed Lexy on the forehead.

“Good-by, and God bless you, little honest one!” she said, with a smile. “I think we shall not see each other again, but I shall sometimes remember you. Go, now, and bear in mind that you can always trust Miss Craigie. She is an imbecile, but she can be trusted. _Adieu!_”

Lexy’s eyes filled with tears.

“_Au revoir!_” she said stoutly; and then, with one of her sudden impulses, she put both arms around Mrs. Enderby’s neck and returned her kiss vigorously. “I’m sorry!” she said. “I’m awfully sorry!”

This was their parting. Lexy was thankful that it had been like this, very glad that she could leave the house in good will and kindliness. It strengthened her beyond measure. She wanted to help Caroline, and she wanted to help Mrs. Enderby, too.

“And I will!” she thought. “I know that I’m right and she’s wrong! She’s rather terrible, too. Sometimes I think she’d almost rather not find out the truth, if it was going to make what she calls a scandal. She will have it that Caroline’s gone away of her own free will, to get married; and if it’s anything else, she doesn’t want to know. She is hard, but there’s something rather fine about her.”

There was no one in the hall when Lexy left, and this was a relief, for she supposed that Mrs. Enderby had told the servants, or would tell them, that Miss Moran had been discharged.

She went out and closed the door behind her. A fine, thin rain was falling--nothing to daunt a healthy young creature like Lexy; yet she wished that the sun had been shining. She wished that she hadn’t had to leave the house in the rain, under a gray sky. Somehow it made her only too well aware that she was homeless now, and alone.

As was her habit when depressed, she set off to walk briskly; and by the time she reached the Grand Central her cheeks were glowing and her heart considerably less heavy. She learned that she had nearly three hours to wait for the next train to Wyngate; so she bought her ticket, checked her bag, and went out again.

In a near-by department store she bought a little chamois pocket. Then she went to the bank, cashed both her checks, and, putting the bills into her pocket, hung it around her neck inside her blouse. It was very comfortable to have so much money.

Then, only as a forlorn hope, she rang up the offices of J. J. Eames & Son, on State Street.

“I don’t suppose they keep track of their passengers,” she thought; “but it can’t do any harm.”

So, when she got the connection, she asked politely:

“Could you possibly tell me where Mr. Charles Houseman has gone?”

“Certainly!” answered an equally polite voice at the other end of the wire. “Just a moment, please! You mean Mr. Houseman, second officer on the Mazell?”

“I don’t know,” said Lexy, surprised. “Has he blue eyes?”

There was an instant’s silence. Then the voice spoke again, a little unsteadily.

“I--I believe so.”

“He’s laughing at me!” thought Lexy indignantly, and her voice became severely dignified.

“Can you tell me where the--the Mazell has gone?”

“Lisbon and Gibraltar. We expect her back in about five weeks.”

“Thank you!” said Lexy. “And that’s that!” she added, to herself. “So he’s a sailor! I rather like sailors. Well, anyhow, he’s gone.” She sighed. “Carry on!” she said.

She went into a tea room on Forty-Second Street and ordered herself a very good lunch.

“Much better than I can afford,” she thought. “Goodness knows what’s going to happen to me! Here I am, without visible means of support. I suppose I’m an idiot. Lots of people would say so. They’d say I ought to be looking for a new job this instant; but I don’t care! I’m not going back on Caroline. Mrs. Enderby won’t do anything, and Mr. Houseman’s gone away, and there’s nobody but me. Perhaps I can’t do very much, but, by jiminy, I’m going to try!”

There was still an hour to spare, and she passed it in a fashion she had often scornfully denounced. She went shopping--without buying. She wandered through a great department store, looking at all sorts of things. Some of them she wanted, but she resolutely told herself that she was better off without them.

Then, at the proper time, she went back to the Grand Central, recovered her bag, bought herself two or three magazines and a bar of chocolate, and boarded the train. For all that she tried to be so cool and sensible, she could not help feeling a queer little thrill of excitement. Her quest had begun, and she could not in any way foresee the end.

VIII

Now it certainly was not Lexy’s way to take any great interest in strange young men. There was not a trace of coquetry in her honest heart, and she had always looked upon the little flirtations of her friends with distaste and wonder.

“_I’m_ not romantic!” she had said more than once.

She believed that. She would have denied indignantly that her present mission was romantic. She thought it a matter-of-course thing which she was in honor bound to do for her friend Caroline Enderby. She felt that she was very cool and practical about it, and a mighty sensible sort of girl altogether.

Certainly she saw the young man on the train, for her alert glance saw pretty well everything. She saw him, and she thought she had never set eyes on a handsomer man.

He was very tall, and slenderly and strongly built. He was dressed with fastidious perfection, and he had an air of marked distinction. In short, he was a man whom any one would look at--and remember; but Lexy, the unromantic girl, thought him inferior to the blue-eyed Mr. Houseman. She preferred young Houseman’s blunt, sunburned face to the dark and haughty one of this stranger. She simply was not interested in dark and haughty strangers, however distinguished and handsome. She looked at this one, and then returned to her magazines.

She had a weakness for detective stories, and she was reading one now--reading it in the proper spirit, uncritical and absorbed. Whenever the train stopped at a station, she glanced up, and more than once, as she turned her head, she caught the stranger’s eye. She wondered, later on, why she hadn’t had some sort of premonition. People in stories always did. They always recognized at once the other people who were going to be in the story with them; but Lexy did not. Even toward the end of the journey, when she and the stranger were the only ones left in the car, she was not aware of any interest in him.

Even when he, too, got out at Wyngate, Lexy was not specially interested. It was only a little after five o’clock, but it was dark already on that rainy afternoon, and the only thing that interested her just then was the sight of a solitary taxi drawn up beside the platform. Bag in hand, she hurried toward it, but the stranger got there before her. When she arrived, he was speaking to the driver.

There was no other taxi or vehicle of any sort in sight, no other lights were visible except those of the station. It was a strange and unknown world upon which she looked in the rainy dusk, and she felt a justifiable annoyance with the ungallant stranger. He jumped into the cab and slammed the door.

“Driver!” cried Lexy. “Will you please come back for me?”

But before the driver could answer, the door of the cab opened, and the stranger sprang out.

“I _beg_ your pardon!” he said, standing hat in hand before Lexy. “I’m most awfully sorry! Give you my word I didn’t notice. I should have noticed, of course. Absent-minded sort of beggar, you know! Please take the cab, won’t you? I don’t in the least mind waiting. Please take it! Allow me!”

He tried to take her bag. His manner was not at all haughty. On the contrary, it was a very agreeable manner, and the impulsive Lexy liked him.

“Why can’t we both go?” said she.

“Oh, no!” he protested. “Please take the cab! Give you my word I don’t mind waiting.”

“It’s a dismal place to wait in,” said Lexy. “We can both go, just as well as not.”

The driver approved of Lexy’s idea. It saved him trouble.

“Where do you want to go, miss?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” said Lexy. “I suppose there’s a hotel, isn’t there?”

“I say!” exclaimed the stranger. “Just what I’d been asking him, you know! He says there’s no hotel, but a very decent boarding house.”

“Mis’ Royce’s,” added the driver. “She takes boarders.”

“All right!” said Lexy cheerfully. “Miss Royce’s it is!”

The stranger took her bag, and put it into the taxi. He would have assisted Lexy, but she was already inside; so he, too, got in. He closed the door, and off they went.

“I _am_ sorry, you know,” he said, “shoving ahead like that; but I didn’t notice--”

“Well, please stop being sorry now,” requested Lexy firmly.

“Right-o!” said he. “You won’t mind my saying you’ve been wonderfully nice about it?”

“No, I don’t mind that a bit,” replied Lexy. “I like to be wonderfully nice.”

There was a moment’s silence.

“Will you allow me to introduce myself?” said the stranger. “Grey, you know--George Grey--Captain Grey, you know.”

“Captain of a ship?” asked Lexy, with interest. She thought she would like to talk about ships.

“Oh, no!” said he, rather shocked. “Army--British army--stationed in India.”

“I knew you were an Englishman.”

“Did you really?” said he, as if surprised. “People do seem to know. My first visit to your country--six months’ leave--so I’ve come here to see my sister--Mrs. Quelton. She’s married to an American doctor.”

Lexy thought there was something almost pathetic in his chivalrous anxiety to explain himself.

“I’m Alexandra Moran,” she said.

“Thank you!” said Captain Grey. “Thank you very much, Miss Moran!”

There was no opportunity for further polite conversation, for the taxi had stopped and the driver came around to the door.

“Better make a run fer it!” he said. “I’ll take yer bags.”

So Captain Grey took Lexy’s arm, and they did make a run for it, through the fine, chilly rain, along a garden path and up on a veranda. The door was opened at once.

“Miss Royce?” asked Captain Grey.

“Mrs. Royce,” said the other. “Come right in. My, how it does rain!”

They followed her into a dimly lit hall. She opened a door on the right, and lit the gas in what was obviously the “best parlor”--a dreadful room, stiff and ugly, and smelling of camphor and dampness. Captain Grey remained in the hall to settle with the driver, and Lexy decided to let her share of the reckoning wait for a more auspicious occasion. She went into the parlor with Mrs. Royce.

“You and your husband just come from the city?” inquired the landlady.

“He’s not my husband,” replied Lexy, with a laugh. “I never set eyes on him before. There was only one taxi, and we were both looking for a hotel. The driver said you took boarders, and that’s how we happened to come together.”

“I don’t take boarders much, ’cept in the summer time,” said Mrs. Royce. She was a stout, comfortable sort of creature, gray-haired, and very neat in her dark dress and clean white apron. She had a kindly, good-humored face, too, but she had a landlady’s eye. “People don’t come here much, this time of year,” she went on. “Nothing to bring ’em here.”

These last words were a challenge to Lexy to explain her business, and she was prepared.

“I passed through here the other day in a motor,” she said, “on my way to Adams Corners, and I thought it looked like such a nice, quiet place for me to work in. I’m a writer, you know, and I thought Wyngate would just suit me.”

“I was born and raised out to Adams Corners,” said Mrs. Royce. “Guess there’s no one living out there that I don’t know.”

“Then perhaps you know Miss Craigie?”

“Miss Margaret Craigie? I should say I did! If you’re a friend of hers--”

“Only an acquaintance,” said Lexy cautiously.

“Set down!” suggested Mrs. Royce, very cordial now. “I’ll light a nice wood fire. A writer, are you? Well, well! And the gentleman--I wonder, now, what brings him here!”

“He told me he’d come to see his sister,” said Lexy. “Mrs. Quelton, I think he said.”

“Quelton!” cried the landlady. “You didn’t say Quelton? Not the doctor’s wife?”

“Yes,” said the captain’s voice from the doorway. “Nothing happened to her, has there? Nothing gone wrong?”

Mrs. Royce stared at him with the most profound interest, and he stared back at her, somewhat uneasily.

“No,” said she, at last. “No--only--well, I’m sure!”

There was a silence.

“Could we possibly have a little supper?” asked Lexy politely.

“Yes, indeed you can!” said Mrs. Royce. “Right away!” But still she lingered. “Mrs. Quelton’s brother!” she said. “Well, I never!”

Then she tore herself away, leaving Lexy and Captain Grey alone in the parlor.

“Seems to bother her,” he said. “I wonder why!”

Lexy was also wondering, and longing to ask questions, but she felt that it wouldn’t be good manners.

“People in small places like this are always awfully curious,” she observed.

“Yes,” said he; “and Muriel may be a bit eccentric, you know. I rather imagine she is, from her letters. I’ve never seen her.”

“Never seen your own sister!”

Lexy would certainly have asked questions now, manners or no manners, only that Mrs. Royce entered the room again, to fulfill her promise to make a “nice wood fire.” Amazing, the difference it made in the room! The ugliness and stiffness vanished in the ruddy glow. It seemed a delightful room, now, homely and welcoming and safe.

“It’s real cozy here,” said Mrs. Royce, “on a night like this. I’m sorry the dining room’s so kind of chilly.”

“Oh, can’t we have supper here, by the fire?” cried Lexy. “Please! We’ll promise not to get any crumbs on your nice carpet, Mrs. Royce!”

“I guess you can,” replied the landlady benevolently.