FARRINGTON read the note three times, fished the discarded envelope out of his wastepaper basket, scrutinized it thoroughly, and then addressed himself again to the neat vertical script. What he read was this:
If Mr. Farrington will appear at the Sorona Tea House, on Bayfield Road, near Corydon, at four o’clock today—Tuesday—the matter referred to in his reply to our advertisement may be discussed. We serve only one client at a time and our consultations are all strictly confidential.
The note was unsigned, and the paper, the taste and quality of which were beyond criticism, bore no address. The envelope had not passed through the post office, but had been thrust by a private messenger into the R.F.D. box at Farrington’s gate.
Laurance Farrington had been established in the Berkshires for a year, and his house in the hills back of Corydon, with the Housatonic tumbling through his meadow, had been much described in newspapers and literary journals as the ideal home for a bachelor author. He had remodeled an old farmhouse to conform to his ideas of comfort, and incidentally he maintained a riding horse, a touring car and a runabout; and he had lately set up an Airedale kennel.
He was commonly spoken of as one of the most successful and prosperous of American novelists. He not only satisfied the popular taste but he was on cordial terms with the critics. He was thirty-one, and since the publication of The Fate of Catherine Gaylord, in his twenty-fourth year, he had produced five other novels and a score or more of short stories of originality and power.
An enviable man was Laurance Farrington. When he went back to college for commencement he shared attention with presidents and ex-presidents; and governors of states were not cheered more lustily. He was considered a very eligible young man and he had not lacked opportunities to marry. His friends marveled that, with all his writing of love and marriage, he had never, so far as any one knew, been in love or anywhere near it.
As Farrington read his note in the quiet of his study on this particular morning it was evident that his good fortune had not brought him happiness. For the first time he was finding it difficult to write. He had begun a novel that he believed would prove to be the best thing he had done; but for three months he had been staring at blank paper. The plot he had relied on proved, the moment he began to fit its parts together, to be absurdly weak; and his characters had deteriorated into feeble, spineless creatures over whom he had no control. It was inconceivable that the mechanism of the imagination would suddenly cease to work, or that the gift of expression would pass from him without warning; and yet this had apparently happened.
Reading somewhere that Sir Walter Scott had found horseback riding stimulating to the imagination, he galloped madly every afternoon, only to return tired and idealess; and the invitations of his neighbors to teas and dinners had been curtly refused or ignored. It was then that he saw in a literary journal this advertisement:
PLOTS SUPPLIED. Authors in need of assistance served with discretion. Address X Y Z, care of office, The Quill.
To put himself in a class of amateurs requiring help was absurd, but the advertisement piqued his curiosity. Baker, the editor of The Quill, wrote him just then to ask for an article on Tendencies in American Fiction; and in declining this commission Farrington subjoined a facetious inquiry as to the advertisement of X Y Z. In replying, Baker said that copy for the ad had been left at the business office by a stranger. A formal note accompanying it stated that a messenger would call later for answers.
“Of course,” the editor added jocularly, “this is only another scheme for extracting money from fledgling inkslingers—the struggling geniuses of Peoria and Ypsilanti. You’re a lucky dog to be able to sit on Olympus and look down at them.”
Farrington forced his unwilling pen to its task for another week, hoping to compel the stubborn fountains to break loose with their old abundance. His critical faculties were malevolently alert and keen, now that his creative sense languished. He hated what he wrote and cursed himself because he could do no better.
To add to his torture, the advertisement in The Quill recurred to him persistently, until, in sheer frenzy, he framed a note to X Y Z—an adroit feeler, which he hoped would save his face in case the advertisement had not been put forth in good faith.
Plots—he wrote—were the best thing he did; and as X Y Z seemed to be interested in the subject it might be amusing if not indeed profitable for them to meet and confer. This was the cheapest bravado; he had not had a decent idea of any sort for a year!
X Y Z was nothing if not prompt. The reply, naming the Sorona Tea House as a rendezvous, could hardly have reached him sooner; and the fact that it had been dipped into his mail box unofficially greatly stimulated his interest.
The Sorona Tea House stood on a hilltop two miles from Farrington’s home and a mile from Corydon, his post office and center of supplies. It had been designed to lure motorists to the neighborhood in the hope of interesting them in the purchase of property. It was off the main thoroughfares and its prosperity had been meager; in fact, he vaguely remembered that some one had told him the Sorona was closed. But this was not important; if closed it would lend itself all the better to the purposes of the conference.
He lighted his pipe and tramped over his fields with his favorite Airedale until luncheon. It was good to be out-doors; good to be anywhere, in fact, but nailed to a desk. The brisk October air, coupled with the prospect of finding a solution of his problems before the day ended, brought him to a better mood, and he sat down to his luncheon with a good appetite.
When three o’clock arrived he had experienced a sharp reaction. He was sure he was making a mistake; he was tempted to pack a suitcase and go for a weekend with some friends on Long Island who had been teasing him for a visit; but this would not be a decent way to treat X Y Z, who might be making a long journey to reach the tea house.
The question of X Y Z’s sex now became obtrusive. Was the plot specialist man or woman? The handwriting in the note seemed feminine and yet it might have been penned by a secretary. The use of our and we rather pointed to more than one person. Very likely this person who offered plots in so businesslike a fashion was a spectacled professor who had gone through all existing fiction, analyzing devices and making new combinations, and would prove an intolerable bore—a crank probably; possibly an old maid who had spent her life reading novels and was amusing herself in her old age by furnishing novelists with ideas. He smoked and pondered. He was persuaded that he had made an ass of himself in answering the advertisement and the sooner he was through with the business the better.
He allowed himself an hour to walk to the Sorona, and set off rapidly. He followed the road to the hilltop and found the tea house undeniably there.
The place certainly had a forsaken look. The veranda was littered with leaves, the doors and windows were closed, and no one was in sight. Depression settled on him as he noted the chairs and tables piled high in readiness for storing for the winter. He passed round to the western side of the house, and his heart gave a thump as he beheld a table drawn close to the veranda rail and set with a braver showing of napery, crystal and silver than he recalled from his few visits to the house in midsummer. A spirit lamp was just bringing the kettle to the boiling point: it puffed steam furiously. There were plates of sandwiches and cakes, cream and sugar, and cups—two cups!
“Good afternoon, Mr. Farrington! If you’re quite ready let’s sit down.”
He started, turned round and snatched off his hat.
A girl had appeared out of nowhere. She greeted him with a quick nod, as though she had known him always—as though theirs was the most usual and conventional of meetings. Then she walked to the table and surveyed it musingly.
“Oh, don’t trouble,” she said as he sprang forward to draw out her chair. “Let us be quite informal; and, besides, this is a business conference.”
Nineteen, he guessed—twenty, perhaps; not a day more. She wore, well back from her face, with its brim turned up boyishly, an unadorned black velvet hat. Her hair was brown, and wisps of it had tumbled down about her ears; and her eyes—they, too, were brown—a golden brown which he had bestowed on his favorite heroine. They were meditative eyes—just such eyes as he might have expected to find in a girl who set up as a plot specialist. There was a dimple in her right cheek. When he had dimpled a girl in a story he bestowed dimples in pairs. Now he saw the superiority of the single dimple, which keeps the interested student’s heart dancing as he waits for its appearance. Altogether she was a wholesome and satisfying young person, who sent scampering all his preconceived ideas of X Y Z.
“I’m so glad you were prompt! I always hate waiting for people,” she said.
“I should always have hated myself if I had been late,” he replied.
“A neat and courteous retort! You see the tea house is closed. That’s why I chose it. Rather more fun anyhow, bringing your own things.”
They were very nice things. He wondered how she had got them there.
“I hope,” he remarked leadingly, “you didn’t have to bring them far!”
She laughed merrily at his confusion as he realized that this was equivalent to asking her where she lived.
“Let’s assume that the fairies set the table. Do you take yours strong?”
He delayed answering that she might poise the spoonful of tea over the pot as long as possible. Hers was an unusual hand; in his tales he had tried often to describe that particular hand without ever quite hitting it. He liked its brownness—tennis probably; possibly she did golf too. Whatever sports she affected, he was quite sure that she did them well.
“I knew you would like tea, for the people in your novels drink such quarts; and that was a bully short story of yours, The Lost Tea Basket—killingly funny—the real Farrington cleverness!”
He blinked, knowing how dead the real Farrington cleverness had become. Her manner was that of any well-brought-up girl at a tea table, and her attitude toward him continued to be that of an old acquaintance. She took him as a matter of course; and though this was pleasant, it shut the door on the thousand and one questions he wished to ask her.
Just now she was urging him to try the sandwiches; she had made them herself, she averred, and he need not be afraid of them.
“Perhaps,” he suggested with an accession of courage, “you won’t mind telling me your name.”
“It was nice of you to come,” she remarked dreamily, ignoring his question, “without asking for credentials. I’ll be perfectly frank and tell you that I couldn’t give you references if you asked for them; you’re my first client! I almost said patient!” she added laughingly.
“If you had said patient you would have made no mistake! I’ve been out of sorts—my wits not working for months.”
“I thought your last book sounded a little tired,” she replied. “There were internal evidences of weariness. You rather worked the long arm of coincidence overtime, for example—none of your earlier bounce and zest. Even your last short story didn’t quite get over—a little too self-conscious probably; and the heroine must have identified the hero the first time she saw him in his canoe.”
She not only stated her criticisms frankly but she uttered them with assurance, as though she had every right to pass judgment on his performances. This was the least bit irritating. He was slightly annoyed—as annoyed as any man of decent manners dare be at the prettiest girl who has ever brightened his horizon. But this passed quickly.
Not only was she a pretty girl but he became conscious of little graces and gestures, and of a charming direct gaze, that fascinated him. And, for all her youth, she was very wise; he was confident of that.
“I must tell you that though I had dozens of letters, yours was the only one that appealed to me. A majority of them were frivolous, and some were from writers whose work I dislike. I had a feeling that if they were played out they never would be missed. But you were different; you are Farrington, and to have you fail would be a calamity to American literature.”
He murmured his thanks. Her sympathetic tone was grateful to his bruised spirit. He had gone too far now to laugh away his appeal to her. And as the moments passed his reliance on her grew.
They talked of the weather, the hills and the autumn foliage, while he speculated as to her identity.
“Of course you know the Berkshires well, Miss——”
“A man who can’t play a better approach than that certainly needs help!” she laughed.
He flushed and stammered.
“Of course I might have asked you directly if you lived in the Hills. But let us be reasonable. I’m at least entitled to your name; without that——”
“Without it you will be just as happy!”
“Oh, but you don’t mean that you won’t——”
“That’s exactly what I mean!” She smiled, her elbows on the table, the slim brown fingers interlaced under her firm rounded chin.
“That isn’t fair. You know me; and yet I’m utterly in the dark as to you——”
“Oh, names are not of the slightest importance. Of course X Y Z is rather awkward. Let’s find another name—something you can call me by as a matter of convenience if, indeed, we meet again.”
She bit into a macaroon dreamily while this took effect.
“Not meet again!” he exclaimed.
“Oh, of course it’s possible we may not. We haven’t discussed our business yet; but when we reach it you may not care for another interview.”
“On a strictly social basis I can’t imagine myself never seeing you again. As for my business, let it go hang!”
She lifted a finger with a mockery of warning.
“No business, no more tea; no more anything! You would hardly call the doctor or the lawyer merely to talk about the scenery. And by the same token you can hardly take the time of a person in my occupation without paying for it.”
“But, Miss——”
“There you go again! Well, if you must have a name, call me Arabella! And never mind about ‘Miss-ing’ me.”
“You’re the first Arabella I’ve ever known!” he exclaimed fervidly.
“Then be sure I’m the last!” she returned mockingly; then she laughed gayly. “Oh, rubbish! Let’s be sensible. I have a feeling that the girls in your stories are painfully stiff, and they’re a little too much alike. They’re always just coming down from Newport or Bar Harbor, and we are introduced to them as they enter their marble palaces on Fifth Avenue and ring for Walters to serve tea at once. You ought to cut out those stately, impossible queens and go in for human interest. I’ll be really brutal and say that I’m tired of having your heroine pale slightly as her lover—the one she sent to bring her an orchid known only to a cannibal tribe of the upper Amazon—appears suddenly at the door of her box at the Metropolitan, just as Wolfram strikes up his eulogy of love in Tannhauser. If one of the cannibals in his war dress should appear at the box door carrying the lover’s head in a wicker basket, that would be interesting; but for Mister Lover to come wearing the orchid in his button-hole is commonplace. Do you follow me?”
She saw that he flinched. No one had ever said such things to his face before.
“Oh, I know the critics praise you for your wonderful portrait gallery of women, but your girls don’t strike me as being real spontaneous American girls. Do you forgive me?”
He would have forgiven her if she had told him she had poisoned his tea and that he would be a dead man in five minutes.
“Perhaps,” he remarked boldly, “the fact that I never saw you until today will explain my failures!”
“A little obvious!” she commented serenely. “But we’ll overlook it this time. You may smoke if you like.”
She lighted a match for him and held it to the tip of his cigarette. This brought him closer to the brown eyes for an intoxicating instant. Brief as that moment was, he had detected on each side of her nose little patches of freckles that were wholly invisible across the table. He was ashamed to have seen them, but the knowledge of their presence made his heart go pitapat. His heart had always performed its physical functions with the utmost regularity, but as a center of emotions he did not know it at all. He must have a care. Arabella folded her hands on the edge of the table.
“The question before us now is whether you wish to advise with me as to plots. Before you answer you will have to determine whether you can trust me. It would be foolish for us to proceed if you don’t think I can help you. On the other hand, I can’t undertake a commission unless you intrust your case to me fully. And it wouldn’t be fair for you to allow me to proceed unless you mean to go through to the end. My system is my own; I can’t afford to divulge it unless you’re willing to confide in me.”
She turned her gaze upon the gold and scarlet foliage of the slope below, to leave him free to consider. He was surprised that he hesitated. As an excuse for tea-table frivolity this meeting was well enough; as a business proposition it was ridiculous. But this unaccountable Arabella appealed strongly to his imagination. If he allowed her to escape, if he told her he had answered the advertisement of X Y Z merely in jest, she was quite capable of telling him good-by and slipping away into the nowhere out of which she had come. No—he would not risk losing her; he would multiply opportunities for conferences that he might prolong the delight of seeing her.
“I have every confidence,” he said in a moment, “that you can help me. I can tell you in a word the whole of my trouble.”
“Very well, if you are quite sure of it,” she replied.
“The plain truth about me is,” he said earnestly—and the fear he had known for days showed now in his eyes——“the fact about me is that I’m a dead one! I’ve lost my stroke. To be concrete, I’ve broken down in the third chapter of a book I promised to deliver in January, and I can’t drag it a line further!”
“It’s as clear as daylight that you’re in a blue funk,” she remarked. “You’re scared to death. And that will never do! You’ve got to brace up and cheer up! And the first thing I would suggest is——”
“Yes, yes!” he whispered eagerly.
“Burn those three chapters and every note you’ve made for the book.”
“I’ve already burned them forty times!” he replied ruefully.
“Burn them again. Then in a week, say, if you follow my advice explicitly, it’s quite likely you’ll find a new story calling you.”
“Just waiting won’t do it! I’ve tried that.”
“But not under my care,” she reminded him with one of her enthralling smiles. “An eminent writer has declared that there are only nine basic plots known to fiction; the rest are all variations. Let it be our affair to find a new one—something that has never been tried before!”
“If you could do that you’d save my reputation. You’d pull me back from the yawning pit of failure!”
“Cease firing! You’ve been making hard work of what ought to be the grandest fun in the world. The Quill had a picture of you planted beside a beautiful mahogany desk, waiting to be inspired. There’s not much in this inspiration business. You’ve got to choose some real people, mix them up and let them go to it!”
“But,” Farrington frowned, “how are you ever going to get them together? You can’t pick out the interesting people you meet in the street and ask them to work up a plot for you.”
“No,” she asserted, “you don’t ask them; you just make them do it. You see”—taking up a cube of sugar and touching it to the tip of her tongue—“every living man and woman, old or young, is bitten with the idea that he or she is made for adventure.”
“Rocking-chair heroes,” he retorted, “who’d cry if they got their feet wet going home from church!”
“The tamer they are, the more they pine to hear the silver trumpet of romance under their windows,” she replied, her eyes dancing.
He was growing deeply interested. She was no ordinary person, this girl.
“I see one obstacle,” he replied dubiously. “Would you mind telling me just how you’re going to effect these combinations—assemble the parts, so to speak; or, in your more poetical manner, make the characters harken to the silver horn?”
“That,” she replied readily, “is the easiest part of all! You’ve already lost so much time that this is an emergency case and we’ll call them by telegraph!”
“You don’t mean that—not really!”
“Just that! We’ll have to decide what combination would be the most amusing. We should want to bring together the most utterly impossible people—people who’d just naturally hate each other if they were left in the same room. In that way you’d quicken the action.”
He laughed aloud at the possibilities; but she went on blithely:
“We ought to have a person of national distinction—a statesman preferred; some one who figures a lot in the newspapers. Let’s begin,” she suggested, “with the person in all the United States who has the least sense of humor.”
“The competition would be keen for that honor,” said Farrington, “but I suggest the Honorable Tracy B. Banning, the solemnest of all the United States senators—Idaho or Rhode Island—I forget where he hails from. It doesn’t matter.”
“I hoped you’d think of him,” she exclaimed, striking her hands together delightedly.
“He owns a house—huge, ugly thing—on the other side of Corydon.”
“Um! I think I’ve heard of it,” she replied indifferently.
She drew from her sweater pocket and spread on the table these articles: a tiny vanity box, a silver-backed memorandum book, two caramels and the stub of a lead-pencil. There was a monogram on the vanity box, and remembering this she returned it quickly to her pocket. He watched her write the Senator’s name in her book, in the same vertical hand in which the note making the appointment had been written. She lifted her head, narrowing her eyes with the stress of thought.
“If a man has a wife we ought to include her, perhaps.”
Farrington threw back his head and laughed.
“Seems to me his wife’s divorcing him—or the other way round. The press has been featuring them lately.”
“Representative of regrettable tendency in American life,” she murmured. “They go down as Mr. and Mrs.”
“Now it’s your turn,” he said.
“Suppose we put in a gay and cheerful character now to offset the Senator. I was reading the other day about the eccentric Miss Sallie Collingwood, of Portland, Maine; she’s rich enough to own a fleet of yachts, but she cruises up and down the coast in a disreputable old schooner—has a mariner’s license and smokes a pipe. Is she selected?”
“I can’t believe there’s anybody so worth while on earth!”
“That’s your trouble!” she exclaimed, as she wrote the name. “Your characters never use the wrong fork for the fish course; they’re all perfectly proper and stupid. Now it’s your turn.”
“It seems to me,” he suggested, “that you ought to name all the others. As I think of it, I really don’t know any interesting people. You’re right about the tameness of my characters, and my notebooks are absolutely blank.”
She merely nodded.
“Very well; I suppose it’s only fair for me to supply the rest of the eggs for the omelet. Let me see; there’s been a good deal in the papers about Birdie Coningsby, the son of the copper king, one of the richest young men in America. I’ve heard that he has red hair, and that will brighten the color scheme.”
“Excellent!” murmured Farrington. “He was arrested last week for running over a traffic cop in New Jersey. I judge that the adventurous life appeals to him.”
“I suppose our Senator represents the state; the church also should be represented. Why not a clergyman of some sort? A bishop rather appeals to me; why not that Bishop of Tuscarora who’s been warning New York against its sinful ways?”
“All right. He’s at least a man of courage; let’s give him a chance.”
“A detective always helps,” Arabella observed meditatively.
“Then by all means put in Gadsby! I’m tired of reading of his exploits. I think he’s the most conceited ass now before the public.”
“Gadsby is enrolled!”
She held up the memorandum for his inspection.
“That’s about enough to start things,” she remarked. “It’s a mistake to have too many characters in a novel. Of course others may be drawn in—we can count on that.”
“But the heroine—a girl that realizes America’s finest and best——”
“I think she should be the unknown quantity—left up in the air. But if you don’t agree with that——”
“I was thinking,” he said, meeting her eyes, “that possibly you——”
One of her most charming smiles rewarded this.
“As the chief plotter, I must stand on the sidelines and keep out of it. But if you think——”
“I think,” he declared, “that the plot would be a failure if you weren’t in it—very much in it.”
“Oh, we must pass that. But there might be a girl of some sort. What would you think of Zaliska?”
“The dancer! To offset the bishop!”
The mirth in her eyes kindled a quick response in his. She laughingly jotted down the name of the Servian dancer who had lately kicked her way into fame on Broadway.
“But do you think,” he interposed, “that the call of the silver horn is likely to appeal to her? She’d need a jazz band!”
“Oh, variety is the spice of adventure! We’ll give her a chance,” she answered. “I think we have done well. One name more needs to be inscribed—that of Laurance Farrington.”
She lifted her hand quickly as he demurred.
“You need experiences—adventures—to tone up your imagination. Perhaps Zaliska will be your fate; but there’s always the unknown quantity.”
They debated this at length. He insisted that he would be able to contribute nothing to the affair; that it was his lack of ideas which had caused him to appeal to her for help, and that it would be best for him to act the role of interested spectator.
“I’m sorry, but your objections don’t impress me, Mr. Farrington. If you’re not in the game you won’t be able to watch it in all its details. So down you go!”
For a moment she pondered, with a wrinkling of her pretty brows, the memorandum before her; then she closed the book and dropped it into her sweater pocket. He was immensely interested in her next step, wondering whether she really meant to bring together the widely scattered and unrelated people she had selected for parts in the drama that was to be enacted for his benefit.
She rose so quickly that he was startled, gave a boyish tug at her hat—there was something rather boyish about her in spite of her girlishness—and said with an air of determination:
“How would Thursday strike you for the first rehearsal? Very well, then. There may be some difficulty in reaching all of them by telegraph; but that’s my trouble. Just where to hold the meeting is a delicate question. We should have”—she bent her head for an instant—“an empty house with large grounds; somewhere in these hills there must be such a place. You know the country better than I. Maybe——”
“To give a house party without the owner’s knowledge or consent is going pretty far; there might be legal complications,” he suggested seriously.
“Timidity doesn’t go in the adventurous life. And besides,” she added calmly, “that matter doesn’t concern us in the least. If they all get arrested it’s so much the better for the plot. We can’t hope for anything as grand as that!”
“But how about you! What if you should be discovered and go to jail! Imagine my feelings!”
“Oh, you’re not to worry about me. That’s my professional risk.”
“Then, as to the place, what objection is there to choosing Senator Banning’s house? He’s in the cast anyhow. His place, I believe, hasn’t been occupied for a couple of years. The gates were nailed up the last time I passed there.”
She laughed at this suggestion rather more merrily than she had laughed before.
“That’s a capital idea! Particularly as we’ve chosen him for his lack of humor!”
“If he has any fun in him he’ll have a chance to show it,” said Farrington, “when he finds his house filled with people he never saw before.”
Questions of taste as to this procedure, hanging hazily at the back of his consciousness, were dispelled by Arabella’s mirthful attitude toward the plan. He could hardly tell this joyous young person that it would be transcending the bounds of girlish naughtiness to telegraph a lot of people she didn’t know to meet at the house of a gentleman who enjoyed national fame for his lack of humor. Arabella would only laugh at him. The delight that danced in her eyes was infectious and the spirit of adventure possessed him. He was impatient for the outcome: still, would she—dared she—do it?
She had drawn on a pair of tan gloves and struck her hands together lightly.
“This has been the nicest of little parties! I thank you—the first of my clients! But I must skip!”
He had been dreading the moment when she might take it into her head to skip. They had lingered long and the sun had dropped like a golden ball beyond the woodland.
“But you will let me help with the tea things?” he cried eagerly. “I can telephone from the crossroads for my machine.”
She ignored his offer. A dreamy look came into her eyes.
“I wonder,” she said with the air of a child proposing a new game, “whether anyone’s ever written a story about a person—man or girl—who undertakes to find some one; who seeks and seeks until it’s a puzzling and endless quest—and then finds that the quarry is himself—or herself! Do you care for that? Think it over. I throw that in merely as a sample. We can do a lot better than that.”
“Oh, you must put it in the bill!”
“Now,” she said, “please, when you leave, don’t look back; and don’t try to find me! In this business who seeks shall never find. We place everything on the knees of the gods. Thursday evening, at Mr. Banning’s, at eight o’clock. Please be prompt.”
Then she lifted her arms toward the sky and cried out happily:
“There, sir, is the silver trumpet of romance! I make you a present of it.”
He raised his eyes to the faint outline of the new moon that shone clearly through the tremulous dusk.
As he looked she placed her hands on the veranda railing and vaulted over it so lightly that he did not know she had gone until he heard her laughing as she sprang away and darted through the shrubbery below.
From the instant Arabella disappeared Farrington tortured himself with doubts. One hour he believed in her implicitly; the next he was confident that she had been playing with him and that he would never see her again.
He rose early Wednesday morning and set out in his runabout—a swift scouring machine—and covered a large part of Western Massachusetts before nightfall. Somewhere, he hoped, he might see her—this amazing Arabella, who had handed him the moon and run away! He visited the tea house; but every vestige of their conference had been removed. He was even unable to identify the particular table and chairs they had used. He drove to the Banning place, looked at the padlocked gates and the heavily shuttered windows, and hurried on, torn again by doubts. He cruised slowly through villages and past country clubs where girls adorned the landscape, hoping for a glimpse of her. It was the darkest day of his life, and when he crawled into bed at midnight he was seriously questioning his own sanity.
A storm fell on the hills in the night and the fateful day dawned cold and wet. He heard the rain on his windows gratefully. If the girl had merely been making sport of him he wanted the weather to do its worst. He cared nothing for his reputation now; the writing of novels was a puerile business, better left to women anyhow. The receipt of three letters from editors asking for serial rights to his next book enraged him. Idiots, not to know that he was out of the running forever!
He dined early, fortified himself against the persistent downpour by donning a corduroy suit and a heavy mackintosh, and set off for the Banning place at seven o’clock. Once on his way he was beset by a fear that he might arrive too early. As he was to be a spectator of the effects of the gathering, it would be well not to be first on the scene. As he passed through Corydon his engine changed its tune ominously and he stopped at a garage to have it tinkered. This required half an hour, but gave him an excuse for relieving his nervousness by finishing the run at high speed.
A big touring car crowded close to him, and in response to fierce honkings he made way for it. His headlights struck the muddy stern of the flying car and hope rose in him. This was possibly one of the adventurers hastening into the hills in response to Arabella’s summons. A moment later a racing car, running like an express train, shot by and his lamps played on the back of the driver huddled over his wheel.
When he neared the Banning grounds Farrington stopped his car, extinguished the lights and drove it in close to the fence.
It was nearly eight-thirty and the danger of being first had now passed. As he tramped along the muddy road he heard, somewhere ahead, another car, evidently seeking an entrance. Some earlier arrival had opened the gates, and as he passed in and followed the curving road he saw that the house was brilliantly lighted.
As he reached the steps that led up to the broad main entrance he became panic-stricken at the thought of entering a house the owner of which he did not know from Adam, on an errand that he felt himself incapable of explaining satisfactorily. He turned back and was moving toward the gates when the short, burly figure of a man loomed before him and heavy hands fell on his shoulders.
“I beg your pardon!” said Farrington breathlessly. An electric lamp flashed in his face, mud-splashed from his drive, and his captor demanded his business. “I was just passing,” he faltered, “and I thought perhaps——”
“Well, if you thought perhaps, you can just come up to the house and let us have a look at you,” said the stranger gruffly.
With a frantic effort Farrington wrenched himself free; but as he started to run he was caught by the collar of his raincoat and jerked back.
“None of that now! You climb right up to the house with me. You try bolting again and I’ll plug you.”
To risk a bullet in the back was not to be considered in any view of the matter, and Farrington set off with as much dignity as he could assume, his collar tightly gripped by his captor.
As they crossed the veranda the front door was thrown open and a man appeared at the threshold. Behind him hovered two other persons.
“Well, Gadsby, what have you found?”
“I think,” said Farrington’s captor with elation, “that we’ve got the man we’re looking for!”
Farrington was thrust roughly through the door and into a broad, brilliantly lighted hall.
Senator Banning was one of the most generously photographed of American statesmen, and the bewildered and chagrined Farrington was relieved to find his wits equal to identifying him from his newspaper pictures.
“Place your prisoner by the fireplace, where we can have a good look at him,” the Senator ordered. “And, if you please, Gadsby, I will question him myself.”
Rudely planted on the hearth, Farrington stared about him. Two of the persons on Arabella’s list had answered the summons at any rate. His eyes ran over the others. A short, stout woman, wearing mannish clothes and an air of authority, advanced and scrutinized him closely.
“A very harmless person, I should say,” she commented; and, having thus expressed herself sonorously, she sat down in the largest chair in the room.
The proceedings were arrested by a loud chugging and honking on the driveway.
Farrington forgot his own troubles now in the lively dialogue that followed the appearance on the scene of a handsome middle-aged woman, whose face betrayed surprise as she swept the room with a lorgnette for an instant, and then, beholding Banning, showed the keenest displeasure.
“I’d like to know,” she demanded, “the precise meaning of this! If it’s a trick—a scheme to compromise me—I’d have you know, Tracy Banning, that my opinion of you has not changed since I bade you farewell in Washington last April.”
“Before we proceed farther,” retorted Senator Banning testily, “I should like to ask just how you came to arrive here at this hour!”
She produced a telegram from her purse. “Do you deny that you sent that message, addressed to the Gassaway House at Putnam Springs? Do you suppose,” she demanded as the Senator put on his glasses to read the message, “that I’d have made this journey just to see you?”
“Arabella suffering from nervous breakdown; meet me at Corydon house Thursday evening,” read the Senator.
“Arabella ill!” exclaimed the indomitable stout lady. “She must have been seized very suddenly!”
“I haven’t seen Arabella and I never sent you this telegram,” declared the Senator. “I was brought here myself by a fraudulent message.” He drew a telegram from his pocket and read impressively:
Arabella has eloped. Am in pursuit. Meet me at your house in Corydon Thursday evening.
SALLIE COLLINGWOOD.
The stout lady’s vigorous repudiation of this telegram consumed much time, but did not wholly appease the Senator. He irritably waved her aside, remarking sarcastically:
“It seems to me, Sallie Collingwood, that your presence here requires some explanation. I agreed to give you the custody of Arabella while Frances and I were settling our difficulties, because I thought you had wits enough to take care of her. Now you appear to have relinquished your charge, and without giving me any notice whatever. I had supposed, even if you are my wife’s sister, that you would let no harm come to my daughter.”
“I’ll trouble you, Tracy Banning, to be careful how you speak to me!” Miss Collingwood replied. “Poor Arabella was crushed by your outrageous behavior, and if any harm has come to her it’s your fault. She remained with me on the Dashing Rover for two weeks; and last Saturday, when I anchored in Boston Harbor to file proceedings against the captain of a passenger boat who had foully tried to run me down off Cape Ann, she ran away. Last night a telegram from her reached me at Beverly saying you were effecting a reconciliation and asking me to be here tonight to join in a family jollification. Meantime I had wired to the Gadsby Detective Agency to search for Arabella and asked them to send a man here.”
“Reconciliation,” exploded the lady with the lorgnette, “has never been considered! And if I’ve been brought here merely to be told that you have allowed Arabella to walk off your silly schooner into the Atlantic Ocean——”
“You may as well calm yourself, Frances. There’s no reason for believing that either Tracy or I had a thing to do with this outrage.”
“Well, Bishop Giddings is with me; he, too, has been lured here by some one. We met on the train quite by chance and I shall rely on his protection.”
A black-bearded gentleman, who had followed Mrs. Banning into the hall and quietly peeled off a raincoat, was now disclosed in the garb of a clergyman—the Bishop of Tuscarora, Farrington assumed. He viewed the company quizzically, remarking:
“Well, we all seem to be having a good time!”
“A great outrage has been perpetrated on us,” trumpeted the Senator. “I’m amazed to see you here, Bishop. Some lawless person has opened this house and telegraphed these people to come here. When I found Gadsby on the premises I sent him out to search the grounds; and I strongly suspect”—he deliberated and eyed Farrington savagely—“that the culprit has been apprehended.”
A young man with fiery red hair, who had been nervously smoking a cigarette in the background, now made himself audible in a high piping voice:
“It’s a sell of some kind, of course. And a jolly good one!”
This provoked an outburst of wrath from the whole company with the exception of Farrington, who leaned heavily on the mantel in a state of helpless bewilderment. These people seemed to be acquainted; not only were they acquainted but they appeared to be bitterly hostile to one another.
Mrs. Banning had wheeled on the red-haired young man, whom Farrington checked off Arabella’s list as Birdie Coningsby, and was saying imperiously:
“Your presence adds nothing to my pleasure. If anything could increase the shame of my summons here you most adequately supply it.”
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Banning,” he pleaded; “but it’s really not my fault. When Senator Banning telegraphed asking me to arrive here tonight for a weekend I assumed that it meant that Arabella——”
“Before we go further, Tracy Banning,” interrupted the Senator’s wife, “I want to be sure that your intimacy with this young scamp has ceased and that this is not one of your contemptible tricks to persuade me that he is a suitable man for my child to marry. After all the scandal we suffered on account of that landgrab you were mixed up in with old man Coningsby, I should think you’d stop trying to marry his son to my poor, dear Arabella!”
The Bishop of Tuscarora planted a chair behind Mrs. Banning just in time to save her from falling to the floor.
“Somebody has played a trick on all of us,” said the detective. “My message was sent to my New York office and said that the Senator wished to see me here on urgent business. I got that message an hour after Miss Collingwood’s and I have six men looking for the lost girl.”
They compared notes with the result that each telegram was found to have been sent from a different railroad station between Great Barrington and Pittsfield. While this was in progress Farrington felt quite out of it and planned flight at the earliest moment. He pricked up his ears, however, as, with a loud laugh, the Bishop drew out his message and read it with oratorical effect:
Adventure waits! Hark to the silver bugle! Meet me at Tracy Banning’s on Corydon Road via Great Barrington at eight o’clock Thursday evening.
X Y Z.
Farrington clung to the mantel for physical and mental support. His mind was chaos; the Stygian Pit yawned at his feet. Beyond doubt, his Arabella of the tea table had dispatched messages to all the persons on her list; and, in the Bishop’s case at least, she had given the telegram her own individual touch. No wonder they were paying no attention to him; the perspiration was trailing in visible rivulets down his mud-caked face and his appearance fully justified their suspicions.
“All my life,” the Bishop of Tuscarora was explaining good-humoredly, “I have hoped that adventure would call me some day. When I got that telegram I heard the bugles blowing and set off at once. Perhaps if I hadn’t known Senator Banning for many years, and hadn’t married him when I was a young minister, I shouldn’t have started for his house so gayly. Meeting Mrs. Banning on the train and seeing she was in great distress, I refrained from showing her my summons. How could I? But I’m in the same boat with the rest of you—I can’t for the life of me guess why I’m here.”
Farrington had been slowly backing toward a side door, with every intention of eliminating himself from the scene, when a heavy motor, which had entered the grounds with long, hideous honks, bumped into the entrance with a resounding bang, relieved by the pleasant tinkle of the smashed glass of its windshield.
Gadsby, supported by the agile Coningsby, leaped to the door; but before they could fortify it against attack it was flung open and a small, light figure landed in the middle of the room, and a young lady, a very slight, graceful young person in a modish automobile coat, stared at them a moment and then burst out laughing.
“Zaliska!” screamed Coningsby.
“Well,” she cried, “that’s what I call some entrance! Lordy! But I must be a sight!”
She calmly opened a violet leather vanity box, withdrew various trifles and made dexterous use of them, squinting at herself in a mirror the size of a silver dollar.
Farrington groaned and shuddered, but delayed his flight to watch the effect of this last arrival.
Banning turned on Coningsby and shouted:
“This is your work! You’ve brought this woman here! I hope you’re satisfied with it!”
“My work!” piped Coningsby very earnestly in his queer falsetto. “I never had a thing to do with it; but if Zaliska is good enough for you to dine with in New York it isn’t square for you to insult her here in your own house.”
“I’m not insulting her. When I dined with her it was at your invitation, you little fool!” foamed the Senator.
Zaliska danced to him on her toes, planted her tiny figure before him and folded her arms.
“Be calm, Tracy; I will protect you!” she lisped sweetly.
“Tracy! Tracy!” repeated Mrs. Banning.
Miss Collingwood laughed aloud. She and the Bishop seemed to be the only persons present who were enjoying themselves. Outside, the machine that had brought Zaliska had backed noisily off the steps and was now retreating.
“Oh, cheer up, everybody!” said Zaliska, helping herself to a chair. “My machine’s gone back to town; but I only brought a suitcase, so I can’t stay forever. By the way, you might bring it in, Harold,” she remarked to Coningsby with a yawn.
Mrs. Banning alone seemed willing to cope with her.
“If you are as French as you look, mademoiselle, I suppose——”
“French, ha! Not to say aha! I sound like a toothpaste all right, but I was born in good old Urbana, Ohio. Your face registers sorrow and distress, madam. Kindly smile, if you please!”
“No impertinence, young woman! It may interest you to know that the courts haven’t yet freed me of the ties that bind me to Tracy Banning, and until I get my decree he is still my husband. If that has entered into your frivolous head kindly tell me who invited you to this house.”
The girl pouted, opened her vanity box, and slowly drew out a crumpled bit of yellow paper, which she extended toward her inquisitor with the tips of her fingers.
“This message,” Mrs. Banning announced, “was sent from Berkville Tuesday night.” And then her face paled. “Incredible!” she breathed heavily.
Gadsby caught the telegram as it fluttered from her hand.
“Read it!” commanded Miss Collingwood.
“MADEMOISELLE HELENE ZALISKA,
NEW ROCHELLE, N. Y.
Everything arranged. Meet me at Senator Banning’s country home, Corydon, Massachusetts, Thursday evening at eight.
ALEMBERT GIDDINGS,
Bishop of Tuscarora.”
The Bishop snatched the telegram from Gadsby and verified the detective’s reading with unfeigned astonishment. The reading of this message evoked another outburst of merriment from Miss Collingwood.
“Zaliska,” fluted young Coningsby, “how dare you!”
“Oh, I never take a dare,” said Zaliska. “I guessed it was one of your jokes; and I always thought it would be real sporty to be married by a bishop.”
“Yes,” said Miss Collingwood frigidly, “I suppose you’ve tried everything else!”
The Bishop met Mrs. Banning’s demand that he explain himself with all the gravity his good-natured countenance could assume.
“It’s too deep for me. I give it up!” he said. He crossed to Zaliska and took her hand.
“My dear young woman, I apologize as sincerely as though I were the guilty man. I never heard of you before in my life; and I wasn’t anywhere near Berkville day before yesterday. The receipt of my own telegram in New Hampshire at approximately the same hour proves that irrefutably.”
“Oh, that’ll be all right, Bishop,” said Zaliska. “I’m just as pleased as though you really sent it.”
Miss Collingwood had lighted her pipe—a performance that drew from Zaliska an astonished:
“Well, did you ever! Gwendolin, what have we here?”
“What I’d like to know,” cried Mrs. Banning, yielding suddenly to tears, “is what you’ve done with Arabella!”
The mention of Arabella precipitated a wild fusillade of questions and replies. She had been kidnapped, Mrs. Banning charged in tragic tones, and Tracy Banning should be brought to book for it.
“You knew the courts would give her to me and it was you who lured her away and hid her. This contemptible little Coningsby was your ideal of a husband for Arabella, to further your own schemes with his father. I knew it all the time! And you planned to meet him here, with this creature, in your own house! And he’s admitted that you’ve been dining with her. It’s too much! It’s more than I should be asked to suffer, after all—after all—I’ve—borne!”
“Look here, Mrs. Lady; creature is a name I won’t stand for!” flamed Zaliska.
“If you’ll all stop making a rotten fuss——” wheezed Coningsby.
“If we can all be reasonable beings for a few minutes——” began the Bishop.
Before they could finish their sentences Gadsby leaped to the doorway, through which Farrington was stealthily creeping, and dragged him back.
“It seems to me,” said the detective, depositing Farrington, cowed and frightened, in the center of the group, which closed tightly about him, “that it’s about time this bird was giving an account of himself. Everybody in the room was called here by a fake telegram, and I’m positive this is the scoundrel who sent ’em.”
“He undoubtedly enticed us here for the purpose of robbery,” said Senator Banning; “and the sooner we land him in jail the better.”
“If you’ll let me explain——” began Farrington, whose bedraggled appearance was little calculated to inspire confidence.
“We’ve already had too many explanations!” declared Mrs. Banning. “In all my visits to jails and penitentiaries I’ve rarely seen a man with a worse face than the prisoner’s. I shouldn’t be at all surprised if he turned out to be a murderer.”
“Rubbish!” sniffed Miss Collingwood. “He looks like somebody’s chauffeur who’s been joy-rolling in the mud.”
The truth would never be believed. Farrington resolved to lie boldly.
“I was on my way to Lenox and missed the road. I entered these grounds merely to make inquiries and get some gasoline. This man you call Gadsby assaulted me and dragged me in here; and, as I have nothing to do with any of you or your troubles, I protest against being detained longer.”
Gadsby’s derisive laugh expressed the general incredulity.
“You didn’t say anything to me about gasoline! You were prowling round the house, and when I nabbed you you tried to bolt. I guess we’ll just hold on to you until we find out who sent all those fake telegrams.”
“We’ll hold on to him until we find out who’s kidnapped Arabella!” declared Mrs. Banning.
“That’s a happy suggestion, Fanny,” affirmed the Senator, for the first time relaxing his severity toward his wife.
“What’s this outlaw’s name?” demanded Miss Collingwood in lugubrious tones.
Clever criminals never disclosed their identity. Farrington had no intention of telling his name. He glowered at them as he involuntarily lifted his hand to his mud-spattered face. Senator Banning jumped back, stepping heavily on Coningsby’s feet. Coningsby’s howl of pain caused Zaliska to laugh with delight.
“If you hold me here you’ll pay dearly for it,” said Farrington fiercely.
“Dear, dear; the little boy’s going to cry!” mocked the dancer. “I think he’d be nice if he had his face washed. By-the-way, who’s giving this party anyhow? I’m perfectly famished and just a little teeny-teeny bite of food would go far toward saving your little Zaliska’s life.”
“That’s another queer thing about all this!” exclaimed the Senator. “Some one has opened up the house and stocked it with provisions. The caretaker got a telegram purporting to be from me telling him I’d be down with a house party. However, the servants are not here. The scoundrel who arranged all this overlooked that.”
This for some occult reason drew attention back to Farrington, and Gadsby shook him severely, presumably in the hope of jarring loose some information. Farrington resented being shaken. He stood glumly watching them and awaiting his fate.
“It looks as though you’d all have to spend the night here,” remarked the Senator. “There are no trains out of Corydon until ten o’clock tomorrow. By morning we ought to be able to fix the responsibility for this dastardly outrage. In the meantime this criminal shall be locked up!”
“Shudders, and clank, clank, as the prisoner goes to his doom,” mocked Zaliska.
“The sooner he’s out of my sight the better,” Mrs. Banning agreed heartily. “If he’s hidden my poor dear Arabella away somewhere he’ll pay the severest penalty of the law for it. I warn him of that.”
“In some states they hang kidnappers,” Miss Collingwood recalled, as though the thought of hanging gave her pleasure.
“We’ll put the prisoner in one of the servants’ rooms on the third floor,” said the Senator; “and in the morning we’ll drive him to Pittsfield and turn him over to the authorities. Bring him along, Gadsby.”
Gadsby dragged Farrington upstairs and to the back of the house, with rather more force than was necessary. Banning led the way, bearing a poker he had snatched up from the fireplace. Pushing him roughly into the butler’s room, Gadsby told Farrington to hold up his hands.
“We’ll just have a look at your pockets, young man. No foolishness now!”
This was the last straw. Farrington fought. For the first time in his life he struck a fellow man, and enjoyed the sensation. He was angry, and the instant Gadsby thrust a hand into his coat pocket he landed on the detective’s nose with all the power he could put into the blow.
Banning dropped the poker and ran out, slamming the door after him. Two more sharp punches in the detective’s face caused him to jump for a corner and draw his gun. As he swung round, Farrington grabbed the poker and dealt the officer’s wrist a sharp thwack that knocked the pistol to the floor with a bang. In a second the gun was in Farrington’s hand and he backed to the door and jerked it open.
“Come in here, Senator!” he said as Banning’s white face appeared. “Don’t yell or attempt to make a row. I want you to put the key of that door on the inside. If you don’t I’m going to shoot your friend here. I don’t know who or what he is, but if you don’t obey orders I’m going to kill him. And if you’re not pretty lively with that key I’m going to shoot you too. Shooting is one of the best things I do—careful there, Mr. Gadsby! If you try to rush me you’re a dead man!”
To demonstrate his prowess he played on both of them with the automatic. Gadsby stood blinking, apparently uncertain what to do. The key in Banning’s hand beat a lively rat-tat in the lock as the frightened statesman shifted it to the inside. Farrington was enjoying himself; it was a sweeter pleasure than he had ever before tasted to find that he could point pistols and intimidate senators and detectives.
“That will do; thanks! Now Mr. Gadsby, or whatever your name is, I must trouble you to remove yourself. In other words, get out of here—quick! There’s a bed in this room and I’m going to make myself comfortable until morning. If you or any of you make any effort to annoy me during the night I’ll shoot you, without the slightest compunction. And when you go downstairs you may save your faces by telling your friends that you’ve locked me up and searched me, and given me the third degree—and anything you please; but don’t you dare come back! Just a moment more, please! You’d better give yourself first aid for nosebleed before you go down, Mr. Gadsby; but not here. The sight of blood is displeasing to me. That is all now. Good night, gentlemen!”
He turned the key, heard them conferring in low tones for a few minutes, and then they retreated down the hall. Zaliska had begun to thump the piano. Her voice rose stridently to the popular air: Any Time’s A Good Time When Hearts are Light and Merry.
Farrington sat on the bed and consoled himself with a cigarette. As a fiction writer he had given much study to human motives; but just why the delectable Arabella had mixed him up in this fashion with the company below was beyond him. Perversity was all he could see in it. He recalled now that she herself had chosen all the names for her list, with the exception of Banning and Gadsby; and, now that he thought of it, she had more or less directly suggested them.
To be sure he had suggested the Senator; but only in a whimsical spirit, as he might have named any other person whose name was familiar in contemporaneous history. Arabella had accepted it, he remembered, with alacrity. He had read in the newspapers about the Bannings’ marital difficulties, and he recalled that Coningsby, a millionaire in one of the Western mining states, had been implicated with Banning in a big irrigation scandal.
It was no wonder that Mrs. Banning had been outraged by her husband’s efforts to marry Arabella to the wheezing son of the magnate. In adding to the dramatis personæ Zaliska, whose name had glittered on Broadway in the biggest sign that thoroughfare had ever seen, Arabella had contributed another element to the situation which caused Farrington to grin broadly.
He looked at his watch. It was only nine-thirty, though it seemed that eternity had rolled by since his first encounter with Gadsby. He had taken a pistol away from a detective of reputation and pointed it at a United States Senator; and he was no longer the Farrington of yesterday, but a very different being, willing that literature should go hang so long as he followed this life of jaunty adventure.
After a brief rest he opened the door cautiously, crept down the back stairs to the second floor, and, venturing as close to the main stairway as he dared, heard lively talk in the hall below. Gadsby, it seemed, was for leaving the house to bring help and the proposal was not meeting with favor.
“I refuse to be left here without police protection,” Mrs. Banning was saying with determination. “We may all be murdered by that ruffian.”
“He’s undoubtedly a dangerous crook,” said the officer; “but he’s safe for the night. And in the morning we will take him to jail and find means of identifying him.”
“Then for the love of Mike,” chirruped Zaliska from the piano, “let’s have something to eat!”
Farrington chuckled. Gadsby and Banning had not told the truth about their efforts to lock him up. They were both cowards, he reflected; and they had no immediate intention, at least, of returning to molest him. In a room where Banning’s suitcase was spread open he acquired an electric lamp, which he thrust into his pocket. Sounds of merry activity from the kitchen indicated that Zaliska had begun her raid on the jam pots, assisted evidently by all the company.
One thought was uppermost in his mind—he must leave the house as quickly as possible and begin the search for Arabella. He wanted to look into her eyes again; he wanted to hear her laughter as he told of the result of her plotting. There was more to the plan she had outlined at the tea house than had appeared, and he meant to fathom the mystery; but he wanted to see her for her own sake. His pulses tingled as he thought of her—the incomparable girl with the golden-brown eyes and the heart of laughter!
He cautiously raised a window in one of the sleeping rooms and began flashing his lamp to determine his position. He was at the rear of the house and the rain purred softly on the flat roof of a one-story extension of the kitchen, fifteen feet below. The sooner he risked breaking his neck and began the pursuit of Arabella the better; so he threw out his rubber coat and let himself out on the sill.
He dropped and gained the roof in safety. Below, on one side, were the lights of the dining room, and through the open windows he saw his late companions gathered about the table. The popping of a cork evoked cheers, which he attributed to Zaliska and Coningsby. He noted the Bishop and Miss Collingwood in earnest conversation at one end of the room, and caught a glimpse of Banning staggering in from the pantry bearing a stack of plates, while his wife distributed napkins. They were rallying nobly to the demands upon their unwilling hospitality.
He crawled to the farther side of the roof, swung over and let go, and the moment he touched the earth was off with all speed for the road. It was good to be free again, and he ran as he had not run since his school-days, stumbling and falling over unseen obstacles in his haste. In a sunken garden he tumbled over a stone bench with a force that knocked the wind out of him; but he rubbed his bruised legs and resumed his flight.
Suddenly he heard some one running over the gravel path that paralleled the driveway. He stopped to listen, caught the glimmer of a light—the merest faint spark, as of some one flashing an electric lamp—and then heard sounds of rapid retreat toward the road.
Resolving to learn which member of the party was leaving, he changed his course and, by keeping the lights of the house at his back, quickly gained the stone fence at the roadside.
When he had climbed halfway over he heard some one stirring outside the wall between him and the gate; then a motor started with a whir and an electric headlight was flashed on blindingly. As the machine pushed its way through the tangle of wet weeds into the open road he clambered over, snapped his lamp at the driver, and cried out in astonishment as the light struck Arabella full in the face.
She ducked her head quickly, swung her car into the middle of the road, and stopped.
“Who is that?” she demanded sharply.
“Wait just a minute! I want to speak to you; I have ten thousand things to say to you!” he shouted above the steady vibrations of the racing motor.
She leaned out, flashed her lamp on him, and laughed tauntingly. She was buttoned up tightly in a leather coat, but wore no hat; and her hair had tumbled loose and hung wet about her face. Her eyes danced with merriment.
“Oh, it’s too soon!” she said, putting up her hand to shield her eyes from his lamp. “Not a word to say tonight; but tomorrow—at four o’clock—we shall meet and talk it over. You have done beautifully—superbly!” she continued. “I was looking through the window when they dragged you off upstairs. And I heard every word everybody said! Isn’t it perfectly glorious?—particularly Zaliska! What an awful mistake it would have been if we’d left her out! Back, sir! I’m on my way!”
Before he could speak, her car shot forward. He ran to his machine and flung himself into it; but Arabella was driving like a king’s messenger. Her car, a low-hung gray roadster, moved with incredible speed. The rear light rose until it became a dim red star on the crest of a steep hill, and a second later it blinked him good-by as it dipped down on the farther side.
He gained the hilltop and let the machine run its maddest. When he reached the bottom he was sure he was gaining on the flying car, but suddenly the guiding light vanished. He checked his speed to study the trail more carefully, found that he had lost it, turned back to a crossroad where Arabella had plunged more deeply into the hills, and was off again.
The road was a strange one and hideously soggy. The tail light of Arabella’s car brightened and faded with the varying fortunes of the two machines; but he made no appreciable gain. She was leading him into an utterly strange neighborhood, and after half a dozen turns he was lost.
Then his car landed suddenly on a sound piece of road and he stepped on the accelerator. The rain had ceased and patches of stars began to blink through the broken clouds, but as his hopes rose the light he was following disappeared; and a moment later he was clamping on the brakes.
The road had landed him at the edge of a watery waste, a fact of which he became aware only after he had tumbled out of his machine and walked off a dock. Some one yelled to him from a house at the water’s edge and threatened to shoot if he didn’t make himself scarce. And it was not Arabella’s voice!
He slipped and fell on the wet planks, and his incidental remarks pertaining to this catastrophe were translated into a hostile declaration by the owner of the voice. A gun went off with a roar and Farrington sprinted for his machine.
“If you’ve finished your target practice,” he called from the car with an effort at irony, “maybe you’ll tell what this place is!”
The reply staggered him:
“This pond’s on Mr. Banning’s place. It’s private grounds and ye can’t get through here. What ye doin’ down here anyhow?”
Farrington knew what he was doing. He was looking for Arabella, who had apparently vanished into thin air; but the tone of the man did not encourage confidences. He was defeated and chagrined, to say nothing of being chilled to the bone.
“You orto turned off a mile back there; this is a private road,” the man volunteered grudgingly, “and the gate ain’t going to be opened no more tonight.”
Farrington got his machine round with difficulty and started slowly back. His reflections were not pleasant ones. Arabella had been having sport with him. She had led him in a semicircle to a remote corner of her father’s estate, merely, it seemed, that he might walk into a pond or be shot by the guardian of the marine front of the property.
He had not thought Arabella capable of such malevolence; it was not like the brown-eyed girl who had fed him tea and sandwiches two days before to lure him into such a trap. In his bewildered and depressed state of mind he again doubted Arabella.
He reached home at one o’clock and took counsel of his pipe until three, brooding over his adventure.
Hope returned with the morning. In the bright sunlight he was ashamed of himself for doubting Arabella; and yet he groped in the dark for an explanation of her conduct. His reasoning powers failed to find an explanation of that last trick of hers in leading him over the worst roads in Christendom, merely to drop him into a lake in her father’s back yard. She might have got rid of him easier than that!
The day’s events began early. As he stood in the doorway of his garage, waiting for the chauffeur to extract his runabout from its shell of mud, he saw Gadsby and two strange men flit by in a big limousine. As soon as his car was ready he jumped in and set off, with no purpose but to keep in motion. He, the Farrington of cloistral habits, had tasted adventure; and it was possible that by ranging the county he might catch a glimpse of the bewildering Arabella, who had so disturbed the even order of his life.
He drove to Corydon, glanced into all the shops, and stopped at the post office on an imaginary errand. He bought a book of stamps and as he turned away from the window ran into the nautical Miss Collingwood.
“Beg pardon!” he mumbled, and was hurrying on when she took a step toward him.
“You needn’t lie to me, young man; you were in that row at Banning’s last night, and I want to know what you know about Arabella!”
This lady, who sailed a schooner for recreation, was less formidable by daylight. It occurred to him that she might impart information if handled cautiously. They had the office to themselves and she drew him into a corner of the room and assumed an air of mystery.
“That fool detective is at the telegraph office wiring all the police in creation to look out for Arabella. You’d better not let him see you. Gadsby is a brave man by daylight!”
“If Arabella didn’t spend last night at her father’s house I know nothing about her,” said Farrington eagerly. “I have reason to assume that she did.”
She eyed him with frank distrust.
“Don’t try to bluff me! You’re mixed up in this row some way; and if you’re not careful you’ll spend the rest of your life in a large, uncomfortable penitentiary. If that man at the telegraph office wasn’t such a fool——”
“You’re not in earnest when you say Miss Banning wasn’t at home last night!” he exclaimed.
“Decidedly I am! Do you suppose we’d all be chasing over the country this morning looking for my niece and offering rewards if we knew where she is? I live on a schooner to keep away from trouble, and this is what that girl has got me into! What’s your name anyhow?”
He quickly decided against telling his name. At that moment Gadsby’s burly frame became visible across Main Street, and Farrington shot out a side door and sprinted up an alley at his best speed. He struck the railroad track at a point beyond the station where it curved through the hills, and followed it for a mile before stopping to breathe.
As he approached a highway he heard a motor and flung himself down in the grass at the side of the track. The driver of the car checked its speed and one of his companions stood up and surveyed the long stretch of track. The blue glint of gun barrels caught Farrington’s eye.
There were three men in the machine and he guiltily surmised that they were deputy sheriffs or constables looking for him. He stuck his nose into the ground and did not lift his head again until the sounds of the motor faded away in the distance. Probably no roads were safe, and even in following the railroad he might walk into an ambush.
He abandoned the ties for flight over a wooded hill. It was hard going and the underbrush slapped him savagely in the face. A higher hill tempted him and a still higher one, and he came presently to the top of a young mountain. He sat for a time on a fallen tree and considered matters. In his perturbed state of mind it seemed to him that the faint clouds of dust he saw rising in the roads below were all evidences of pursuit. He picked out familiar landmarks and judged that his flight over the hills had brought him within four miles of his home.
Thoughts of home, and a tub, and clean clothes, pleased him, and he resolutely began the descent. The only way he could free himself from suspicion was by finding Arabella. And how could he find Arabella when he was likely at any moment to be run down by a country constable with a shotgun? And as for meeting Arabella at four o’clock, he realized now that he had stupidly allowed the girl to slip away from him without designating a meeting place.
So far as he knew, he was the only person who had seen Arabella since her escape from Miss Collingwood’s schooner. It might be well for him to volunteer to the Bannings such information as he had; but the more he thought of this the less it appealed to him. It would be difficult to give a plausible account of his meeting with Arabella at the tea house; and, moreover, he shrank from a betrayal of the light-hearted follower of the silver trumpet. As a gentleman he could give no version of the affair that would not place all the blame on himself; and this involved serious risks.
He approached his house from the rear, keeping as far as possible from the road, lingered at the barn, dodged from it to the garage, and crept furtively into his study by a side door as the clock struck two.
He had seen none of his employees on the farm and the house was ominously still. He rang the bell and in a moment the scared face of Beeching was thrust in.
“Beg pardon; are you home, sir?” asked the servant with a frightened gulp.
“Of course I’m home!” said Farrington with all the dignity his scratched face and torn clothes would permit.
“I missed you, sir,” said the man gravely. “I thought maybe you was off looking for Arabella.”
The book Farrington had been nervously fingering fell with a bang.
“What—what the devil do you know about Arabella?”
“She’s lost, sir. The kennel master and the chauffeur is off looking for her. It’s a most singular case.”
“Yes,” Farrington assented; “most remarkable. Have there been any—er—have any people been looking here for—for her?”
“Well, sir, the sheriff stopped a while ago to ask whether we’d seen such a girl; and there was a constable on horseback, and citizens in machines. Her father has offered a reward of ten thousand dollars. And there’s a man missing, they say, sir, a dangerous character they caught on the Banning place last night. There’s a thousand on him; it’s a kidnapping matter, sir.”
Farrington’s throat troubled him and he swallowed hard.
“It’s a shameful case,” he remarked weakly. “I hope they’ll kill the rascal when they catch him.”
“I hope so, sir,” said Beeching. “You seem quite worn out, sir. Shall I serve something?”
“You may bring the Scotch—quick—and don’t bother about the water. And, Beeching, if anyone calls I’m out!”
By the time he had changed his clothes and eaten a belated luncheon it was three o’clock. From time to time mad honking on the highway announced the continuance of the search for Arabella. He had screwed his courage to the point of telephoning Senator Banning that Arabella had been seen near her father’s place on the previous night. His spirits sank when the Corydon exchange announced that the Banning phone was out of order. The chauffeur, seeing Farrington’s roadster on Main Street, telephoned from Corydon to know what disposition should be made of it, and Farrington ordered him to bring it home.
He regained his self-respect as he smoked a cigar. He had met the issues of the night and day bravely; and if further adventures lay before him he felt confident that he would acquit himself well. And, in spite of the tricks she had played on him, Arabella danced brightly in his thoughts. He must find Arabella!
He thrust the revolver he had captured from Gadsby into his pocket and drove resolutely toward the Bannings’.
A dozen machines blocked the entrance, indicating a considerable gathering, and he steeled himself for an interview that could hardly fail to prove a stormy one. The door stood open and a company of twenty people were crowded about a table. So great was their absorption that Farrington joined the outer circle without attracting attention.
“Mister Sheriff,” Senator Banning was saying, “we shall make no progress in this affair until the man who escaped from custody here last night has been apprehended. You must impress a hundred—a thousand deputies into service if necessary, and begin a systematic search of every house, every hillside in Western Massachusetts. I suggest that you throw a line from here——”
They were craning their necks to follow his finger across the map spread out on the table, when Miss Collingwood’s voice was heard:
“I tell you again I saw that man in the post office this morning, and the clerk told me he is Laurance Farrington, the fool who writes such preposterous novels.”
“Madam,” said the sheriff irritably, “you’ve said that before; but it’s impossible! I know Mr. Farrington and he wouldn’t harm a flea. And the folks at his house told me an hour ago that he was away looking for the lost girl.”
“Only a bluff!” squeaked Coningsby. “He looked to me like a bad man.”
“Oh, I didn’t think he looked so rotten,” said Zaliska; “but if he’s Farrington I must say his books bore me to death!”
“Please remember this isn’t a literary club!” shouted Senator Banning. “What do we care about his books if he’s a kidnapper! What we’re trying to do is to plan a thorough search of Berkshire County—of the whole United States, if necessary.”
“So far as I’m concerned——” began Farrington in a loud voice; but as twenty other voices were raised at the same moment no one paid the slightest attention to him. Their indifference enraged him and he pushed his way roughly to the table and confronted Banning. “While you’ve wasted your time looking for me I’ve been—— Stand back! Don’t come a step nearer until I’ve finished or I’ll kill you!”
It was Gadsby who had caused the interruption, but the whole room was now in an uproar. With every one talking at once Coningsby’s high voice alone rose above the tempest. He wished he was armed; he would do terrible things!
“Let the man tell his story,” pleaded Mrs. Banning between sobs.
“I’ve spent the night and day looking for Arabella!” Farrington cried. “I have no other interest—no other aim in life but to find Arabella. All I can tell you is that I saw her at the Sorona Tea House Tuesday afternoon, and that last night she was on these grounds; in fact, she saw you all gathered here and heard everything that was said in this room.”
“Young man, you know too little or too much,” said Banning. “Gadsby, do your duty!”
The detective took a step forward, looked into the barrel of his own automatic, and paused, waving his hand to the sheriff and his deputies to guard the doors and windows.
“How do you know she was at the tea house?” asked Mrs. Banning. “It seems to me that’s the first question.”
“I met her there,” Farrington blurted. “I met her there by appointment!”
“Then you admit, you villain,” began Banning, choking with rage, “that you lured my daughter, an innocent child, to a lonely tea house; that you saw her last night; and that now—now!—you know nothing of her whereabouts! This, sir, is——”
“Oh, it’s really not so bad!” came in cheery tones from above. “It was I who lured Mr. Farrington to the tea house, and I did it because I knew he was a gentleman.”
Farrington had seen her first—the much-sought Arabella—stealing down the stairway to the landing, where she paused and leaned over the railing, much at ease, to look at them.
Her name was spoken in gasps, in whispers, and was thundered aloud only by Miss Collingwood.
“This was my idea,” said Arabella quietly as they all turned toward her. “I’ve been hiding in the old cottage by the pond, right here on father’s place—with John and Mary, who’ve known me since I was a baby. This is my house party—a scheme to get you all together. I thought that maybe, if papa and mama really thought I was lost, and if papa and Mr. Coningsby and Mademoiselle Zaliska all met under the same roof, they might understand one another better—and me.
“I telegraphed for Mr. Gadsby,” she laughed, “just to be sure the rest of you were kept in order! And I sent for Bishop Giddings because he’s an old friend, and I thought he might help to straighten things out.”
She choked and the tears brightened her eyes as she stood gazing down at them.
“You needn’t worry about me, Arabella,” said Coningsby; “for Zaliska and I were married by the Bishop at Corydon this morning.”
This seemed to interest no one in particular, though Miss Collingwood sniffed contemptuously.
Mrs. Banning had started toward Arabella, and at the same moment Senator Banning reached the stairway. Arabella tripped down three steps, then paused on tip-toe, with her hands outstretched, half-inviting, half-repelling them. She was dressed as at the tea house, but her youthfulness was lost for the moment in a grave wistfulness that touched Farrington deeply.
“You can’t have me,” she cried to her father and mother, “unless we’re all going to be happy together again!”
Half an hour later Senator Banning and his wife, and Arabella, wreathed in smiles, emerged from the library and found the sheriff and his deputies gone; but the members of the original house party still lingered.
“Before I leave,” said Gadsby, “I’d like to know just how Mr. Farrington got into the game. He refuses to tell how he came to see you at the tea house. I think we ought to know that.”
“Oh,” said Arabella, clapping her hands, “that’s another part of the story. If Mr. Farrington doesn’t mind——”
“Now that you’re found I don’t care what you tell,” Farrington declared.
“You may regret that,” said Arabella, coloring deeply. “I sat by Mr. Baker, of The Quill, at a dinner a little while ago, and we were talking about your books. And he said—he said your greatest weakness as a novelist was due to your never having—well”—she paused and drew closer under the protecting arm of her father—“you had never yourself been, as the saying is—in love—and he thought—— Well, this is shameful—but he and I—just as a joke—thought we d try to attract your attention by printing that plot advertisement. He said you were working too hard and seemed worried, and might bite; and then I thought it would be good fun to throw you into the lion’s den here to stir things up, as you did. And I had my car on the road last night ready to skip if things got too warm. Of course I couldn’t let you catch me; it would have spoiled all the fun! And it was I who shot off that gun last night to scare you—when old John was scolding you away from the place. But it was nasty of me, and not fair; and now, when everything else is all fixed and I’m so happy, I’m ashamed to look you in the face, knowing what a lot of trouble I’ve given you. And you’ll always hate me——”
“I shall always love you,” said Farrington, stepping forward boldly and taking her hands. “You’ve made me live for once in my life—you’ve made me almost human,” he laughed. “And you’ve made me a braver man than I know how to be! You pulled down the silver trumpet out of heaven and gave it to me, and made me rich beyond words; and without you I should be sure to lose it again!”