CHAPTER IV
TWO OR THREE INTRUDERS
YET luncheon was a gay enough meal. All the guests were old friends, and all were more or less congenial. Thaxton’s duties as host were in no way onerous, except when Willis Chase undertook to guy him as to his anomalous position as hotelkeeper—which Chase proceeded to do at intervals varying from two minutes to fifteen.
In the afternoon, Miss Gregg was forced to drive across to Stormcrest, to superintend the first touches of the decorators to her remaining rooms. Clive made some excuse for retiring shakily to his own rooms for a rest. Willis Chase had to go back to Stockbridge on urgent business—having found, on unpacking, that in his haste he had brought along all his evening clothes except the trousers.
Thus, for an hour or so, Vail had Doris Lane to himself. They idled about the grounds, Vail showing the girl his new sunken garden and his trout hatcheries. Throughout the dawdling tour they talked idly and blissfully, and withal a whit shyly, as do lovers on whom the Great Moment is making ready to dawn. At their heels paced Vail’s dark sable collie, Macduff.
The sky was hazy, the air was hot. Weather-wise Berkshire folk would have prophesied a torrid spell, the more unbearable for the bracing cool of the region’s normal air. But the hot wave had merely sent this mildly tepid day as a herald.
To the lounging young folk in the garden it carried no message. Yet at whiles they fell silent as they drifted aimlessly about the grounds. There was a witchery that both found hard to ignore.
Rousing herself embarrassedly from one of these sweet silences, Doris nodded toward the big brown collie, who had come to a standstill in front of a puffy and warty old toad, fly-catching at the edge of a rock shelf.
The dog, strolling along in bored majesty in front of his human escorts, had caught the acrid scent of the toad and was crouching truculently in front of it, making little slapping gestures at the phlegmatic creature with his white forepaws and then bounding back, as if he feared it might turn and rend him.
It was quite evident that Macduff regarded his encounter with that somnolent toad as one of the High Dramatic Moments of his career. Defiantly, yet with elaborate caution, he proceeded to harry it from a safe distance.
“What on earth makes him so silly?” asked Doris as she and Vail paused to watch the scene—the dog’s furry and fast-moving body taking up the entire narrow width of the path. “He must have seen a million toads, in his time.”
“What on earth made you cry, the evening we saw Bernhardt die, in Camille, when we were kids?” he countered, banteringly. “You knew she wasn’t really dead. You knew she’d get into her street clothes and scrub the ghastliness off her face and go out somewhere and eat a big supper. But you wept, very happily. And I had to give you my spare handkerchief. And it had a hole in it, I remember. I was hideously mortified. Every time I went to the theater with you, after that, I carried a stock of brand-new two-dollar handkerchiefs, to impress you. But you never cried, again, at a play. So that’s all the good they did me. Of course, the one time you cried, I had to be there with the last torn handkerchief I ever carried. Remember?”
“I remember I asked you why Mac is so silly about that toad,” she reproved him, “and you mask your ignorance of natural history and of dog-psychology by changing the subject.”
“I did not!” he denied, with much fervor. “I was leading up in a persuasive yet scholarly way to my explanation. You knew Bernhardt wasn’t dying. Yet you cried. Mac knows that toad is as harmless as they make them. Yet he is fighting a spectacular duel with it. You entered into the spirit of a play. He’s entering into the spirit of a perilous jungle adventure. You cried because an elderly Frenchwoman draped herself on a sofa and played dead. He is all het up, because he’s endowing that toad with a blend of the qualities of a bear and a charging rhinoceros. That’s the collie of it. Collies are forever inventing and playing thrillingly dramatic games. Just as you and I are always eager to see thrillingly dramatic plays. It isn’t really silly. Or if it is, then what are people who pay to get thrills out of plays they know aren’t true and out of novels that they know are lies? On the level, I think Mac has a bit the best of us.”
“Why doesn’t he bring the sterling drama to a climax by annihilating the toad so we can get past?” she demanded, adding, “Not that I’d let him. That’s why I’m waiting here, while he blocks the path, instead of going around him.”
“If that’s all you’re waiting for,” he reassured her, “your long wait has been for nothing. No rescue will be needed. Mac will never touch the toad.”
“Does Mac know he won’t, though?”
“He does,” returned Vail, with finality. “Every normal outdoors dog, in early puppyhood, undertakes to bite or pick up a toad. And no dog ever tried it a second time. A zoölogy sharp told me why. He said toads’ skins are covered with some sort of chemical that would make alum taste like sugar, by contrast. It’s horrible stuff, and it’s the toad’s only weapon. No dog ever takes a second chance of torturing his tongue with it. That’s why Mac keeps his mouth shut, every time he noses at the ugly thing. The toad is quite as safe from him as Bernhardt was from dying on the elaborate Camille sofa. Mac knows it. And the toad knows it. If toads know anything. So nobody’s the worse for the drama.... One side there, Mac! You’re a pest.”
At the command, the collie gave over his harrowing assault, and wandered unconcernedly down the path ahead of them, his plumed tail gently waving, his tulip ears alert for some new adventure.
“Remember old Chubb Beasley?” asked Thaxton. “He lived down on the Lee Road.”
“I do, indeed,” she made answer. “He used to be pointed out to us by our Sunday School teacher as the one best local example of the awful effects of drink. What about him?”
“He owned Macduff’s sire,” said Vail. “A great big gold-and-white collie—a beauty. Chubb used to go down to Lee, regularly, every Saturday, to spend his pay at the speak-easy booze joint in the back of Clow’s grocery. The old chap used to say: ‘If I c’d afford it, I’d have a batting average of seven night a week. As it is, I gotta do my ’umble best of a Sat’dy night.’ And he did it. He came home late every Saturday evening, in a condition where the width of the road bothered him more than the length of it. And always, his loyal old collie was waiting at the gate to welcome him and guide his tangled footsteps up the walk to the house.”
“Good old collie!” she applauded. “But—”
“One night, Beasley got to Clow’s just as the saloon was raided by the Civic Reform Committee. He couldn’t get a drink, and he spent the evening wandering around looking for one. He had to go back home, for the first Saturday night in years, dead cold sober. The collie was waiting for him at the gate, as usual. Chubb strode up to him on steady unwavering legs and without either singing or crying. He didn’t even walk with an accent. The faithful dog sprang at the poor old cuss and bit him. Didn’t know his own master.”
Macduff’s histrionic display, and the story it had evoked, dispersed the sweet spell that had hung over the man and the maid, throughout their leisurely walk. Subconsciously, both felt and resented the glamour’s vanishing, without being able to realize their own emotions or to guess why the ramble had somehow lost its dreamy charm.
They were at the well-defined stage of heart malady when a trifle will cloud the elusive sun, and when a shattered mood cannot be reconstructed at will.
Doris became vaguely aware that the afternoon was hot and that her nose was probably shiny. Instinctively, she turned toward the house.
Vail, unable to frame an excuse for prolonging the stroll, fell into step at her side, obsessed by a dull feeling that the walk had somehow been a failure and that he was making no progress at all in his suit.
As they made their way houseward across the rolling expanse of side-lawn, they saw a huge and dusty car drawn up under the porte-cochère. On the steps was a heap of luggage. A chauffeur stood by the car, stretching his putteed legs, and smoking a furtive cigarette; the machine’s bulk between him and the porch.
In the tonneau lolled a fat and asthmatic-looking old German police dog.
On the veranda, in two wicker chairs drawn forward from their wonted places, lolled a man and a woman swathed in yellow dust-coats. The man was enormous, paunchy, pendulous, sleek. The woman was small and dark and acerb. They were chatting airily, as Vail and Doris drew near.
In front of them wavered Vogel, the butler, trying to get in a word edgewise, as they talked. Back of the doorway, in the hall, could be seen the shadowy forms of the second man and a capped maid, listening avidly.
At sight of Thaxton, the butler abandoned his vain effort to interrupt the strangers and came in ponderous haste down the stone steps and across the lawn to meet his employer.
“Excuse me, sir,” began Vogel, worriedly, “but might I speak to you a minute?”
Doris, with a word of dismissal to her escort, moved on toward the house, entering by a French window and giving the queerly occupied front veranda a wide berth.
“Well?” impatiently asked Vail, vexed at the interruption and by the presence of the unrecognized couple on the porch. “Well, Vogel? What is it? And who are those people?”
For reply, the butler proffered him two cards. He presented them, on their tray, as if afraid they might turn and rend him.
“They are persons, sir,” he said, loftily. “Just persons, sir. Not people.”
Without listening to the distinction, Thaxton Vail was scanning the cards. He read, half aloud:
“Mr. Joshua Q. Mosely.” Then, “Mrs. Joshua Q. Mosely, 222 River Front Terrace, ... Tuesdays until Lent.”
“Interesting, if true. I should say, offhand, it ought to count them about three, decimal five,” gravely commented Vail. “But it’s nothing in my young life. I don’t know them.”
“No, sir,” agreed Vogel. “You would not be likely to, sir. Nobody would. They are persons. Most peculiar persons, too. I think they are a bit jiggled, sir, if I might say so. Unbalanced. Why, sir, they actually thought this was an hotel!”
“Huh?” interjected Vail, with much the same sound as might have been expected from him had some one dug an elbow violently into his stomach. “Huh? What’s that, Vogel? Hotel?”
“Yes, sir. That’s why I took the liberty of asking to speak to you alone. I fancied you would not wish Miss Lane to hear of such a ridiculous—”
“What do you mean?”
“Why, sir, they came here, some five minutes ago, and ordered Francis to conduct them to ‘the desk.’ He could not understand, sir, so he came to me, and I went out to see what it meant. They told me they wished rooms here; for themselves and for their chauffeur. And for that stout gray dog in the car. They were most unnecessarily unpleasant, sir, when I told them this was no hotel. They insist it is. They say they know all about it. And they demand to see the proprietor. I was arguing with them when I saw you coming. Would it be well, sir, if I should telephone the police station at Aura or—?”
“No,” groaned Vail. “I’ll see them. You needn’t wait.”
Bracing himself, and cursing his loved great-uncle’s eccentricity, and cursing a thousand times more vehemently the mischief-act of Osmun Creede, the unhappy householder walked up the veranda steps and confronted the two newcomers.
On the way he planned to carry off the situation with a high hand and to get rid of the couple as quickly as might be. Whistling to heel Macduff, the collie, who showed strong and hostile signs of seeking closer acquaintance with the fat police dog, he advanced on the couple.
“Good afternoon,” he said, briskly, as he bore down on the big man and the small woman. “I am Thaxton Vail. What can I do for you?”
“I am Joshua Q. Mosely,” answered the enormous man, making no move to rise from the easy chair from whose ample sides his fat bulk was billowing sloppily. “What are your rates?”
“Rates?” echoed Vail, dully.
“Yes,” replied Mosely. “Your rates—American plan—for an outside room and board for Mrs. M. and myself and a shakedown, somewhere, for Pee-air.... Pee-air is our chauffeur. How much?”
“Please explain,” said Vail, bluffing weakly.
“Yep,” nodded Joshua Q. Mosely. “He said you’d try to stall. Said you were queer that way. But he said if I stuck to it, I’d get in. Said he could prove you weren’t full up. So I’m sticking to it. How much for—?”
“Who are you talking about?” queried Vail. “Who’s ‘he’? And—”
“Here’s his card,” responded Joshua Q. Mosely, groping in an inner pocket. “Met him on the steps of the Red Lion—at Stockbridge, you know—this morning. They’d told us they hadn’t a room left there. Same thing at Haddon Hall. Same thing at Pittsfield. Same thing at Lenox. Same at Lee. Full everywhere. Gee, but you Berkshire hotel men must be making a big turnover, this season! Yep, here’s his card. Thought I’d lost it.”
He fished out a slightly crumpled oblong of stiff paper and handed it to Vail. Thaxton read: “Mr. Osmun Creede, ‘Canobie,’ Aura, Massachusetts.”
“We were coming out of the Red Lion,” resumed Joshua Q. Mosely. “Figured we’d have to drive all the way to Greenfield or maybe to Springfield, before we could get rooms. We didn’t want to do that. We wanted another day in this region and then make the thirty-mile run to Williamstown and back to North Adams and over the Mohawk Trail to—”
“Quite so,” cut in Vail. “What has all this to do with—?”
“I was coming to that. We were standing there on the steps, jawing about it, the wife and me, when up comes this Mr. Creede. He’d been sitting on the porch there and he’d overheard us. He hands me his card and he says: ‘You can get into Vailholme if you’re a mind to,’ he says. ‘Most excloosive hotel in the Berkshires. Not like any other place in America. Best food. Best rooms. They never advertise. So they aren’t full up,’ he says. ‘They try to keep folks away. But give Mr. Vail this card and tell him I’ll know who to go to with information if he refuses to take in people who can’t get accommodations elsewhere; and he’ll take you in.’ I thought maybe he was jollying me.”
“I—”
“He looked kind of funny while he talked to me,” prattled Mosely, unheeding. “So I asked the day clerk at the Red Lion about it. The clerk said he knew you run a hotel, because he’d read about it in the paper. And he guessed you weren’t full up. So here I came. And your—your head waiter, I s’pose he is, he told me you didn’t have but four folks stopping here with you just now. So that means you’ve got rooms left. What rates for—”
A despairing grunt from Vail checked at last the flow of monologue. Thaxton was aware of a deep yearning to hunt up Osmun Creede and murder him. Well did he understand the inner meaning of Creede’s hint as to the lodging of information in case Vail should refuse to obey the terms of the will whereby he held tenure of Vailholme. And he knew Osmun was quite capable of keeping his word.
Vailholme was dear to Thaxton. He was not minded to lose it through any legal loophole. He was profoundly ignorant of the law. But he remembered signing an agreement to fulfill all the conditions of his great-uncle’s will before assuming ownership of the property.
“I am obliged,” he said, haltingly, “to take in any travelers who can pay my prices. Probably that is what Mr. Creede meant. But I have no adequate provision—or provisions—for guests. I don’t think you’d care for it, here; even for a single day. Why not go on to North Adams, to the—”
“No, thanks, friend,” disclaimed Joshua Q. Mosely, with a leer of infinite cunning. “This isn’t the first time the wife and I have been steered away from excloosive joints. We know the signs. And we want to stop here. So here we stop. For the night, anyhow. We know our rights. And we know the law. Now, once more, what’s your rates for us? Put a price on the—”
“Your chauffeur will have to bunk in at one of the rooms over the garage,” said Vail, morbidly aware that the butler and a maid and the second man were still listening from the hallway. “And I can’t give you and Mrs. Mosely a room with a bath. I’ll have to give you one without. And you’ll have to eat at the only table I have—the table where I and my four personal guests will dine.”
“That’s all right,” pleasantly agreed the tourist. “We’re democratic, Mrs. M. and me. We’ll put up with the best we can get. How much?”
“For all three of you,” said Thaxton, “the lump price will be—let’s see—the lump price will be two hundred dollars a day.”
Joshua Q. Mosely gobbled. His lean little wife arose and faced him.
“It’s just like all these other excloosive places, Josh!” she shrilled. “He’s trying to lose us. Don’t you let him! We’ll stay. It’ll be worth two hundred dollars just to spite the stuck-up chap. We’ll stay, young man. Get that? We’ll stay. If you knew anything about Golden City, you’d know two hundred dollars is no more to my husband than a plugged nickel would be worth to one of you Massachusetts snobs. We’re ‘doing’ the Berkshires. And we’re prepared to be done while we’re doing it. We can afford to. Have us shown up to that room.”
Lugubriously Vail stepped to the hall door.
“Vogel,” he said, as a vanishing swarm of servants greeted his advent, “show these people up to the violet room. Have Francis help their chauffeur up with the luggage. Then have Gavroche take the chauffeur to one of the garage rooms.”
He spoke with much authority; and forcibly withal. But he dared not meet the fishy eye of his butler. And he retreated to the veranda again, as soon as he had delivered the order.
“It’s all up,” he announced to Willis Chase, three minutes later, as this first of his unwelcome guests alighted from a Stockbridge taxi, bearing a bagful of the forgotten sections of his apparel. “Here’s where I decamp. If I can’t get some inn to put me up for the night, I’ll take a train for New York.”
“And leave us to our fate?” queried Chase, disgustedly.
“Precisely that. And I hope it’ll be a miserable fate. What do you suppose has happened?”
Briefly, bitterly, he told of the arrival of the Moselys. Willis Chase smiled in pure rapture. Then his face fell as he asked concernedly:
“And you say you’re getting out and deserting us?”
“Why not? It’ll be horrible. Fancy those two unspeakable vulgarians sitting down to dinner with one! Fancy having to meet Vogel’s righteous wrath! Fancy—”
“Fancy walking out on us!” retorted Chase. “Fancy leaving a girl like Doris Lane to the mercies of the Moselys’ society at dinner! Fancy what she’ll think of you for deserting her and her aunt, like a quitter, when your place is at the head of your own table! Fancy leaving a disorganized household that’ll probably go on strike! We’ve paid our board. Are you going to welsh on us? Poor old Clive Creede is sick and all shot to pieces. He came here to you for refuge. Going to leave him to—?”
“No,” groaned Thaxton. “I suppose not. You’re right. I can’t. I’ve got to stay and see it out. If I valued Vailholme any less than I value my right arm, though, I’d let Uncle Oz’s fool conditions go to blazes. Say! Let’s go for a walk. It’s hot as Tophet and I’m tired. But it’ll be better than meeting Vogel till I have to. Let me put that off as long as I can. Something tells me he is going to be nasty. And that means he’ll probably organize a strike. Come along, Macduff!” he bade the collie. “Stop nosing at that obese German dog in the car and come here!”
“Why can’t real-life butlers be like the dear old stage butlers?” sighed Chase, sympathetically, as he and Vail slunk, with guilty haste, down the veranda steps and across the lawn. “Now if only Vogel were on the stage, he’d come to you, with an antique ruffled shirt and with his knees wabbling, and he’d say: ‘Master, I’ve saved up a little out of my wages, this past ninety years that I’ve served your house. I know you’re in trouble. Here’s my savings, Master! Maybe they’ll help. And I’ll keep on working my poor hands to the bone for you, without any wages, God bless your bonny face!’ That’s what he’d say. And he’d snivel a bit as he said it. So would the audience.”
“Faster!” urged Vail, with a covert look over his shoulder. “He’s standing on the steps, looking after us. Hit the pace!”