The Embezzler (22 page)

Mrs. Chauncey Prime was, to say the least, a discombobulating houseguest to her less affluent in-laws. She came with a motorcar, three daughters, a chauffeur and a maid, and another maid followed by rail with the trunks. She brought presents for all, which simply filled the Percy Primes' modest villa with tissue paper, and, as Guy put it, her very apologies seemed to contain further strains on his mother's limited household. But poor Guy's greatest disgust must have been having our strenuous tennis singles turned into a giggley foursome and our mountain hikes into chattering strolls before tea. I will have to admit that he behaved like a brick.

He was even nice to his sister Bertha, then a large, easily perspiring girl with the shrill temper of the sensitive adolescent. She had developed an unfortunate crush on me and was inclined to be grabby about my company when the four of us did things together. On our walks Guy would lead her ahead so that I might be alone with Alix, and in tennis doubles he always picked his sister for a partner. He even made the supreme sacrifice of looking after Bertha at dances so that I might be free to devote myself to Alix. I could appreciate the extent of his unselfishness in that he had once told me that to be seen dancing with a plain woman was a disgrace amounting to torment.

Yet nothing seemed to work with Alix. From the very beginning of her visit, which coincided with a spell of foggy weather, her spirits wilted. With each day she lost more of the chirping gaiety that had characterized her in New York. If I asked her what was wrong, she would only respond with a feverish cheerfulness that nothing was. And worse, despite all Guy's valiant efforts, I could never seem now to be alone with her. When he took Bertha ahead on a walk, Alix hurried to catch up with them. When we danced together she affected to be too intently following the music to pay attention to what I said. One evening I got her away from the others after supper and took her for a stroll in the small neat garden where Guy's mother occasionally puttered. When we were quite out of sight and earshot of the house I turned on her. "Would you rather I went away?"

The look of immediate distress in those bulging blue eyes would have silenced anyone but a lover. "Oh, Rex, how can you say that?"

"Because I'm obviously making you miserable."

"No!"

"What is it then? We were happy in New York. Why can't we be happy up here?"

"Oh, we
were
happy in New York, weren't we?" Alix clasped her hands, as if begging me to confirm something that she no longer quite dared to believe. "I wish New York could have gone on forever!"

"Well, we can always go back there. But what is it about Maine that changes things?" I seized her hands, and she was so troubled that she allowed it, but when I moved closer to kiss her, she jumped back. "What is it, dearest?" I implored. "What is it up here that changes everything?"

Her voice dropped to a whisper. "Guy."

"Guy!" Mine rose to a shout. "Has Guy been bothering you?"

"Oh, no, he's been kind, terribly kind. He's been darling, actually. That's the trouble."

A hideous suspicion lit up my darkness. "You don't mean he's been making love to you?"

Alix seemed even more distressed at this. "Oh, Rex, silly, please stop imagining things, or I shan't be able to talk to you at all. Guy has been perfect with me. But he never was before, don't you see? He was always the jolly cousin who pulled my pigtails and made fun of me as a stupid little girl. And I adored that! We all adored Guy. And now he's so different, so serious, so
respectful.
I hate it!"

"Shall I tell him to leave you alone?"

"In his own house? How can you?"

"Oh, I can."

"But don't you see, Rex, he's right. He's absolutely right!"

I shook my head in confusion. "Right to be respectful?"

"No, no, no. Right to be serious. He thinks it's not fair for you to be engaged to me without my being engaged to you. And it's not!"

I breathed in relief. "Well, there's a very simple way out of that one."

"No!" Alix's tone was near panic. "That's what
he
says, don't you see? That's what I don't want! To be engaged!" In her fear she actually caught my arm. "I don't see how I can tell you this, but I don't want to be all those things that Guy says I ought to be. A woman and a wife and so on. Oh, Rex, help me! Rex, be my one friend!"

It was not the lowest moment of my life, but I think it was probably the lowest moment up until then. At last I began to have a suspicion of how ill the poor girl was. But I was young and in love, and it followed that I was hopeful. Could not Alix be led gently out of her shadowland by a man who loved her enough? Patience was what was needed, and I had plenty of time. Had I not promised myself that I would not marry until I could afford a bride? And even now, decades later, I do not know that a psychiatrist would say that my optimism was unreasonable. Alix and I, given time, might have found happiness. I am convinced that Guy's later supposition that she was in love with
him
was the merest fatuity. Even if she told him to stop playing John Alden, I see no reason to infer that she meant anything but that Miles Standish should speak for himself. I doubt that she had even read Longfellow. As a matter of fact, I doubt that she had ever read anything but Gustav Kobbé's
The Complete Opera Book.

I assured her now, as gently as I knew how, that she did not have to become engaged before she wanted to, that she was perfectly free, if such was her choice, to live and die in single bliss. When she seemed calm again we went back to the house, and later that night, in our shared bedroom, I tried to persuade Guy to alter his behavior towards her without telling him of her psychic disturbance. I was not very successful.

"You mean I'm to pull her pigtails?" he asked in understandable bewilderment. "But she doesn't have them any more."

"All I mean is that she liked being treated the way you used to treat her."

"Being kicked around?"

"If you want to put it that way."

"Look, pal, I don't want to put it any way. I only meant to oil the wheels for you, and I seem to have been using glue. You say Alix finds me too respectful?"

"Well, too courteous, perhaps."

"And she wants to turn back the clock to the days when I used to pie her bed and drop ice down her neck?"

"Maybe not quite that far back."

"If you'll let me offer a word of advice, my friend, I think you're going about it the wrong way. This idea of having to be able to support Alix before you marry her is tommyrot. By the time you're able to pay for a girl like that, she'll be an old maid. And what's the point? Money isn't what she needs; she's up to her neck in it. It's a husband she wants!"

"I wish you wouldn't talk about Alix's money," I protested.

"How can I help it? Can you think of a palm tree without palms? Let's face it, old boy. You've got to supply the imagination that Uncle Chauncey lacks. He can't understand that you're just the son-in-law he wants, and he never will, until you
are
that son-in-law. He'll be tickled pink some day to see Alix married to the senior partner of de Grasse Brothers. But you have to put the cart before the horse."

"Really, Guy, you're too absurd."

"I tell you I know what I'm talking about! Alix's castle must be taken by storm."

"I think you'd better let me do things my own way."

"Very well then." Guy shrugged without the least show of bad temper. "You're on your own, boy. From now on I shall leave you and Alix strictly to your own devices."

Which I accepted. It seemed to me, all in all, probably the best course of action. In the days that followed, Guy abandoned our foursome and resumed his place as the shining center of the glittering youth at the Swimming Club. Bertha hung on to Alix and myself, but, as three could not play tennis, she had sullenly to spend some of her time on the big dark veranda where her mother and aunt knitted and chatted most of the day. When Guy came home he hardly spoke to Alix, beyond a few civil words. Indeed, he played his new role so well that his father criticized him for neglecting his houseguests.

Yet Alix's humor did not improve. Left more alone with me, she became even more uncommunicative. She must have understood that I had spoken to Guy, and this, I supposed, had made her wretchedly self-conscious. It reached the point in three days' time when she could not tolerate the least personal remark. She would raise her hands to her ears and repeat over and over again: "Let us please,
please
talk about the weather!" I finally welcomed Bertha's company. At least, Alix relaxed when she was with us.

I began at last to make out dimly what it was that she feared. It was not so much what Guy said or did as what she conceived him to be expecting of her. So long as he had treated her, however mockingly, as a child, it helped her to think of herself as a child. But now, whether he talked to her or not, he still constituted an audience, and presumably an impatient one, sitting out in front before the closed curtains. And what was the play but the oldest of romances, the princess and the swineherd? When the curtains parted, should the audience not see her, in a golden robe and a golden coronet, ready to play her part in a golden plot that led to a golden destiny? What was next to happen must have come to Alix like the clapping and stamping of that audience out front as she shivered behind the still-lowered curtain, knowing that she had no lines.

We were sitting late one afternoon on the porch, I reading (yes, I could always read) while Alix, with her remarkable talent for doing nothing, was simply looking at the view, when Guy joined us. For a few moments I was only vaguely conscious of his sitting there, staring from one of us to the other.

"You two take the cake!" he exclaimed at last.

"What cake?" I asked.

"Here you are on a beautiful day in a beautiful place, young, healthy and without a care in the world, and what do you make of your opportunities? Sit here and mope!
Tempus fugit,
I tell you."

"And what should we be doing?" I demanded, still thinking that he was going to suggest a walk or a game of tennis.

"Why, anything else!" Guy threw up his hands. "I never saw two people more in love who did less about it."

"Shut up!" I cried.

"What
should
we do about it?" Alix demanded now in a high, strained voice. She was staring with a fixed horror at her cousin.

"Elope, you dumbbells! Elope and wait for a 'come home, all is forgiven' letter. I promise you'll get one, if I have to send it myself!"

Alix gave a little cry and fled into the house. I turned hotly to Guy who raised his hand immediately to silence me. "I know, I know," he said coolly. "You're going to suggest I mind my own business. But this
is
my business. You have made it my business. Don't worry. She'll come around. Someone had to do
something.
"

Alix came down for dinner, seemingly collected, and our life resumed its usual if unsatisfactory flow. On the next to last day of my vacation, however, she complained of a migraine and retired to her room. That evening her mother showed me a wireless that she had received from her husband. "The Wandering Albatross" was en route to Bar Harbor.

"But isn't that a change of plans?" I exclaimed.

"Oh my, yes. They weren't planning to go further than Iles-boro."

"You meant they were
sent
for?"

"My dear boy, I don't
know!
"

I could see that she was agitated, even frightened, and I went to look for Guy. I found him in his room, smoking a pipe and reading, and the picture of his ease unreasonably provoked me.

"Your uncle and Commodore Thompson are coming to Bar Harbor!" I cried. "Do you suppose your father sent for them?"

"My dear fellow, why would he?"

"Because he suspects that a scheming pauper has designs on his niece!"

"My father is many things, Rex, but he is not obvious. Sending for Uncle Chauncey would be obvious."

His suavity at such a moment infuriated me. "Did
you,
then?"

Guy was on his feet in a moment. "Is that what you think of me?"

I turned away sullenly. "I don't know what I think of anybody," I muttered. "Why should you want a cousin of yours to marry anyone like me? It doesn't make sense."

"I'll try to remember you're under a strain," he said coldly, "and that you no longer realize what you're saying."

"Well, who did send for him, then?"

"Why did he have to be sent for? Couldn't he have come on his own? Daddy may have written him, quite innocently, that you were here. Couldn't he put two and two together?"

"You assume then," I asked wretchedly, "that he is coming because of Alix?"

Guy shrugged. "Why else would he come? He loathes Bar Harbor. That much we all know."

"And you assume too, I suppose, that she will pack her bags and jump on the yacht as soon as he gives her a nod?"

"Do you think she won't?"

"Oh, I'm not thinking any more. Except that it was a bad day when I first got mixed up with you Primes."

"Thanks, pal."

I did not fall asleep until the morning, and when I awoke it was past nine o'clock. With an immediate sense of disaster I looked over at Guy's bed and saw that it was empty. Jumping up and going out to the porch, I found him, in his pajamas, peering out at the harbor through a pair of binoculars. As both hillside and water were enveloped in fog I asked him irritably what he was looking at. He handed me the glasses and pointed. Out in the middle of the bay there was a large clearing, and framed in that clearing, like a marine print, long and low and as ominously white as Moby Dick, lay a great steam yacht.

"'The Wandering Albatross.'"

"No kidding," I said grimly.

"Admit she's a beauty."

"As beautiful as death! Has your uncle come ashore?"

"Oh, no. Newport is the only dry land Uncle Chauncey ever touches in cruising. People go to Uncle Chauncey. He doesn't go to them."

"People?" When Guy simply shrugged I repeated harshly, "People? Meaning whom?"