CHAPTER XVIII

MISS TEMPLETON AT HOME

I THOUGHT you’d just as lief have lunch up here,” said Miss Templeton.

Barrison looked at her as though he had never seen her before. Indeed, he was not sure that he ever had.

It is an experience not unknown to most of us, that of finding ourselves confronting some one or something long familiar, as we thought, but presented all at once in a new guise. From the first, Jim had felt in Miss Templeton a personality deeper and truer than would be superficially descried through her paint and powder and conspicuous dresses. But, so far, his idea of her had had to be more or less theoretical and instinctive; he had not had very much to go by.

To-day, and for the first time, he saw in the flesh the woman whom he had half unconsciously idealized in the spirit: a very sweet, rather shy woman, whose starry eyes and clear skin looked the more strikingly lovely for being, to-day, unassisted by artifice.

She wore a nunlike gray frock, and her splendid gold hair was simply arranged. It would be hard to imagine a greater contrast than that which she presented with the Woman in Purple of but a brief fortnight ago.

Her parlor was a further surprise. Unconsciously, he found himself remembering Kitty Legaye’s dainty and bizarre apartment, and comparing the two. Who would have dreamed that it was in such surroundings as these that this woman would choose to live?

She had not, like Kitty, transformed her apartment with stuffs and ornamentations. Her individuality had somehow transfused itself through everything, superior to trappings or furnishings. She had left the room very much as it must have been when she took it. The curtains and the carpets were the same that the hotel manager had put there; but they seemed somehow of secondary importance. On that drab regulation background she had contrived to paint herself and what she lived for in colors that were, while subdued, unmistakable. No one could enter there without knowing that he was in the sanctum of a personality.

First and foremost, there were books; books on shelves, on the table, books everywhere. And they were not best sellers either, if one could judge by their plain heavy bindings.

“Italian history,” she said, seeing him glance curiously at a title. “I take up wild fads from time to time, and read about nothing else until the subject is exhausted, or until I am! At present I spend my time in the company of the Medici!”

He thought that she was the last woman on earth whom he would expect to care for such things, but that was to be the least of his surprises. All her books sounded one persistent note, romance, adventure, a passionate love for and yearning after the beautiful, the thrilling, the emotional in life. There were books of folklore and legends, medieval tales and modern essays on strange, far lands more full of color and wonder than ours. There were translations from different tongues, there were volumes full of Eastern myths, and others of sea tales and stories of the vast prairies and the Barbary Coast. There was not a single popular novel among them all. Every one was a treasure box of romance.

The pictures which she had collected to adorn her rooms were equally self-revealing. They ranged from photographs and engravings to Japanese prints; more than one looked as though it had come from a colored supplement. Here, again, the message was invariably adventurous or romantic.

Miss Templeton smiled as she saw her guest’s bewildered look.

“It’s a queer assortment, isn’t it?” she said. “But I can’t stand the flat, polite-looking things that people pretend to admire. Things have to be alive, to call me, somehow!”

All at once, it seemed to Jim that he had the keynote to her character. It was vitality. She was superbly alive—with the vivid faults as well as the vivid advantages of intense life.

Luncheon was served at once, and it proved almost as cosmopolitan in its items as the rest of Miss Templeton’s appurtenances. She had ordered soft-shell crabs to begin with, because she said that for the first twenty-five years of her life she had never had a chance to taste them, and now, since she could, she was making up for lost time, and ate them every day! With truly feminine logic, she had made her next course broiled ham and green corn, because she had been brought up on them in the Middle West. She had a new kind of salad she had recently heard of, solely because it was new; and she finished with chocolate ice cream for the reason, as she explained, that chocolate ice cream had always been her idea of a party, and when she wanted to feel very grand, she made a point of having it.

Barrison was no fool where women were concerned; he knew that she was purposely making herself attractive to him, and he knew that she was sufficiently fascinating to be dangerous. Her unexpectedness alone would make her interesting to a man of his type. But he could usually keep his head; he proposed to keep it now. So far as playing the game went, he was not altogether a bad hand at it himself, and Miss Templeton, he imagined, was not precisely a young or unsophisticated village maid. That there was danger merely made it the more exhilarating.

“Mr. Barrison,” she said at last, “of course you are asking yourself what it is that I have to tell you—why, in short, I asked you to lunch to-day.”

“I am asking myself nothing at the present moment,” he returned promptly, “except why, by the favor of the gods, I should be playing in such extraordinary luck! But, of course, I’ll be interested in anything you have to tell me.”

“Yes,” she said slowly. “I think you probably will be interested. You’ll forgive me if I begin with a little—a very little—personal history? It won’t be the ‘story of my life,’ don’t be frightened! But it’s essential to what I want to tell you afterward.”

“Please tell me anything and everything you care to,” he begged her, with the air of grave attention which a woman always delights to see in a man to whom she is speaking.

She sat, her chin resting on her clasped hands; her eyes abstracted, fixed on nothing tangible that he could see, as she spoke:

“You understand me a little better now, seeing me at home—in as much of a home as I can have—among the books and pictures that I love, don’t you? Never mind; perhaps you don’t. Though I don’t think I’m very hard to understand. I’m just a woman who’s always been hunting for something that——”

“The Blue Bird of Happiness?” he suggested gently. “You’ve read it, of course?”

“Naturally—and loved it. But—I don’t imagine that I could ever find my Blue Bird at home, as they did. It would have to be in some very far place, I’m sure, only to be won after tremendous effort!”

“After all, that Blue Bird they found at home flew away as soon as it was found!” he reminded her. “I can see that you hear the call of adventure more clearly than most people. Have you always dreamed of the ‘strange roads?’ Or has it been a part of—growing up?”

“You were going to say ‘growing older!’” she said, with a faint smile. “I think I’ve always been so. I seem always to have been struggling away from where I was—rotten, discontented nature, isn’t it? Will you hand me those cigarettes, please?”

Barrison proffered his own case, and she took and lighted one with a grave, almost a dreamy air. “You see,” she said, “I was brought up in a deadly little Illinois town. While I was still practically a baby, I got married. He was a vaudeville performer, and to me quite a glorious personage. The girls I knew thought so, too. He was better looking than any drummer who’d been there, and had better manners than the clerk at the drug store, who was the village beau.”

She spoke calmly, without sentiment, yet she did not sound cynical; her manner was too simple for that.

“Well, I didn’t find the Blue Bird there. I found nothing in that marriage with a glimmer of happiness in it, until I came in sight of the divorce court. That looked to me like the gate of heaven! Then I went into the movies.”

“The movies! I never knew that.”

“No, of course not. No one knows it. It’s all right to advertise leaving the legitimate stage for the screen; but if you’ve come the other way, and graduated from the screen to the stage, you’re not nearly so likely to tell the press man. Anyway, I was in an old-style picture company—I’m talking about six years ago—that was working on some blood-and-thunder short reels out in Arizona, when they hired a bunch of professional cow-punchers for some rough Western stuff in a feature picture. Alan Mortimer was one of them.”

“Alan Mortimer!”

“Yes, or, rather, Morton. He changed his name later on.” She looked at him. “Surely you must have guessed that I knew him before this engagement—this play? How did you suppose that we got to be so intimate in two weeks of rehearsals? I didn’t spend the summer at Nantucket!”

“That’s where Miss Legaye met him, isn’t it?”

“Yes. She always goes down there, and Dukane wanted him to be there while Jack Carlton was—he was working on the play, you know. But I hadn’t maneuvered and worked and planned for nothing. I’d got on in my profession, and played a few leading parts. I moved heaven and earth to get into his company—and I succeeded!”

“You mean—you wanted to see him again?”

Her eyes flashed suddenly. For a second she looked fierce and threatening, as she had looked that first day in the restaurant.

“Wanted? I had thought of nothing else for five—nearly six years! I used to be mad about him, you see. He made women feel like that.”

“I know he did.”

Barrison spoke naturally enough, but truth to tell, he was feeling a bit dazed. The Mortimer case was developing in a singular fashion. It was like one of those queer little Oriental toys where you open box inside box, to find in each case a smaller one awaiting you. He wondered whether he was ever to get to the end of this affair. The further you went in it, the more complicated it seemed to get. But she was speaking:

“I was very much in love with him. But I never had any illusions as to his real character. He was rather a blackguard, in more ways than one. It wasn’t only that he treated women badly—or, anyway, lightly. He was crooked. I am very sure of that. He gambled, and the men in the company wouldn’t play with him; they said he didn’t play straight. There was one elderly man with a daughter, who was his particular crony; they were both supposed to be shady in a lot of ways—I mean the two men. So far as I know, the girl was all right. Evidently they stuck together, too; perhaps they had to, knowing too much about each other! But I saw the older man at the theater two or three times during rehearsals.”

“What did he look like?” demanded Barrison, struck with a sudden idea.

“Oh, very respectable looking, like so many crooks! Elderly, as I say, and thin, and——”

“You surely don’t mean Mortimer’s old valet, Wrenn?”

She looked at him in a startled fashion.

“Why, yes, that’s the name. I don’t believe I should have remembered it if you hadn’t reminded me. The man was Wrenn, I am sure.”

Jim’s pulse was pounding. Light at last, if only a glimmer! He was really finding out something about Mortimer’s past, really coming upon things that might have led up, directly or indirectly, to his murder.

“Do you remember anything about the daughter?” he asked.

“Not very much. She rode for us in one or two scenes, but she was hard to use in the picture. I do remember that she was an awfully disagreeable sort of girl, and most unpopular. What I wanted to tell you particularly was that Mortimer had a crooked record behind him, and that at least one man near him—this Wrenn—knew it. That was one thing. The other——”

But Barrison could not help interrupting.

“Just a moment, if you don’t mind, Miss Templeton! This is all tremendously interesting to me—more interesting than you can possibly guess! It’s just possible that you’ve put me on the clew I’ve been looking for. Was there any man in that crowd called Blankey, or Blinkey, or anything like that?”

She shook her head wonderingly.

“Not that I know of,” she said. “But Alan had several particular pals, he and Wrenn. One of them may have been called that. I don’t know.”

Jim was slightly disappointed, but, after all, he had gained a good deal already; he could afford to be philosophical and patient.

“And you don’t remember anything about the girl at all?” he insisted. “Only that she was disagreeable, and could ride?”

“Wait a minute,” said Miss Templeton thoughtfully; “I’ve some old snapshots tucked away. There ought to be some group with that girl in it.”

Barrison smoked three cigarettes in frantic succession while she hunted. Finally, she put a little kodak photograph in his hand.

“There am I,” she said, “rather in the background, dressed up as a beautiful village lass—do you see? And that’s Alan. He was handsome, wasn’t he?” Her voice was quite steady as she said it, but it had rather a minor ring. “And there—that girl over there in the shirtwaist and habit skirt, is Wrenn’s daughter.”

As Barrison looked, he felt as certain as though he had seen her with his own eyes, that she—Wrenn’s daughter—was the woman who had been in Mortimer’s dressing room the night before.