CHAPTER V

MISS TEMPLETON

SHE was in full evening dress, with her splendid shoulders and arms bare, and her brilliant hair uncovered and elaborately dressed. Her tightly clinging gown was black, embroidered in an orchid design of rose color and gold. A long black lace scarf, thrown over one arm, was her only apology for a wrap. She was just then, as Barrison was obliged to confess to himself, one of the handsomest women he had ever seen in his life. He realized now that she was younger than he had thought.

Also she looked far less artificial and flamboyant than she had looked at luncheon. Jim’s orange-shaded reading lamp was kinder to her than that intrusively glaring sunbeam had been. There was even a softness and a dignity about her, he thought. Perhaps, though, it was merely a pose, put on for the occasion as she had put on her dinner dress.

Moving slowly and with a very real grace, she came a few steps into the room and inclined her handsome head very slightly.

“Mr. Barrison?”

He bowed and drew a high-backed, brocaded chair into a more inviting position. “Won’t you sit down?”

“Thank you. I am Grace Templeton.”

“I know,” he said, smiling courteously. “I feel enormously honored.”

“Ah, yes. You saw me at lunch to-day.”

“I have seen you before.”

“Really!” Her eyes lit up with genuine pleasure. She was inordinately vain of her stage reputation. She thrilled to the admiration of her anonymous audiences. Jim, looking at her, marveled at that imperishable thirst for adulation which, gratified, could bring a woman joy at such a moment. For he felt sure that it was no ordinary crisis which had brought Miss Templeton to consult him that night.

She sank into the chair he proffered, and the high, square back made a fine frame for the gilded perfection of her hair. He thought, quite coolly, that no one ever had a whiter throat or more exquisitely formed arms and wrists. Her manner was admirable; not a trace now of that primitive and untamed ferocity of mood which had blazed in her whole face and figure not so many hours before.

She was very beautiful, very sedate, very self-contained. Barrison was able to admire her frankly—but never for a second did he lift the vigilance of the watch he had determined to keep upon her. In his own mind he marked her “dangerous”—and not the less so because just at present she was behaving so extremely, so unbelievably well.

“You are surprised to see me here, Mr. Barrison,” she said, making it a statement rather than a question.

“I confess that I am.”

“I wanted your help, and—when I want a thing I ask for it.”

She paused a moment, looking at him steadily. “Won’t you please sit down yourself?” she said. “And move your lamp. I like to see the face of the person I am talking to.”

Barrison did what she wished silently. In half a minute more they confronted each other across the library table, with the reading light set somewhat aside. Miss Templeton drew a deep breath and leaned forward with her lovely arms upon the table.

“When I heard that you were to be called in as an expert to help in—our—play”—she paused, with a faint smile that was rather touching—“you see, it was ‘our play’ then—I made up my mind to consult you. For I was troubled even then. But the best laid schemes——” She broke off, with a little gesture that somehow made her look younger. “Oh, well—I found myself, in an hour, in a minute, in a position I was not used to: I was dismissed!” She made him feel the outrageousness of this.

“My mind was naturally disturbed,” she went on. “It is a shocking thing, Mr. Barrison, to find yourself cast adrift when you have been counting on a thing, believing in it——”

“I should scarcely have thought that it would be so awful,” Jim ventured, “for you, who surely need not remain in such a predicament any longer than you care to.”

She flashed him a grateful glance. “That is nice of you. But I truly think that it is worse in a case like mine. One grows accustomed to things. It is somewhat appalling to find oneself without them, to find them snatched away before one’s eyes. You see, I have never been ‘fired’ before.” She uttered the last words with a surprisingly nice laugh. “It was rather terrible, truly. I asked Alan Mortimer to-day who you were,” she said quietly. “When I knew, I determined that I would come to see you.”

“And so——” he suggested encouragingly.

She was, if this were cleverness, much too clever to change her gentle, rather grave attitude. “And so,” she said, as she leaned upon the table, “I have come to speak to you of the things which a woman does not speak of as a rule.”

Jim Barrison was slightly alarmed. “But why come to me?” he protested, though not too discourteously. “We are strangers, and—surely you do not need a detective in your trouble, whatever it is?”

“Why not?” she demanded swiftly. “In your career, Mr. Barrison, have you never found yourself close to the big issues of life, the deep and tragic things? Does not the detective’s profession show him the most emotional and terrible and human conditions in all the world? It is as a detective that I want you to help me, Mr. Barrison.”

“I—I shall be only too glad,” stammered Barrison, with a full-grown premonition of trouble. He wished the woman had been less subtle; he had no mind to have his sympathies involved.

She seemed to guess at something of his worry, for she lifted her black-fringed eyes to his and laughed—not gayly, but sadly. “It’s all said very quickly,” she told him. “Alan Mortimer used to be in love with me; he is not now.”

Barrison found himself dumb. What on earth could a man say to a woman under such circumstances? He was no ladies’ man, and such homely sympathy as he had sometimes had to proffer to women in distress seemed highly out of place here. Miss Templeton, in her beauty and her strangeness, struck him as belonging to a class in herself. Resourceful as he was, he had not the right word just then. She did not appear to miss it, though. She went on, almost at once, with the kind of mournful calmness which nearly always wins masculine approbation:

“Understand, there was no question of marriage. I do not claim anything at all except that—he did care for me.” She put her hand to her throat as if she found it difficult to continue, and added proudly: “I am the sort of woman, Mr. Barrison, who demands nothing of a man—except love. I believed that he gave me that. There were other women; there was one woman especially. She wanted him to marry her. She did not love him, as I understand love, but she did want to marry him. She had lived a selfish, restless life for a good many years—she is as old as I, though no one knows it—but she had never settled down. She is the type that eventually settles down; I am not. She wants to be protected and supported; I don’t. She is a born parasite—what we call a grafter; I am not. Perhaps you can guess whom I mean.”

“Perhaps I can,” conceded Barrison, remembering what Carlton had said about Kitty Legaye and Alan Mortimer.

“Ah!” She smiled faintly. “Very well. Here am I, flung aside from my part—and from him. She is left in possession, so to speak. That is almost enough to send a woman’s small world into chaos, is it not? But there was something more left for me to endure. Another woman came into the little play that I thought was fully—too fully—cast. I don’t mean Mr. Carlton’s play; I mean the one that goes on night and day as long as men and women have red blood in their veins and say what they feel instead of what is written in their parts! Another woman was engaged—or practically engaged—to take my place.”

“Yes, I know. Miss Merivale.”

“Miss Merivale.” She repeated the name slowly and without heat. “She is fresh and young and charming. I do not hate her as I do the other, but I am more afraid of her. She is just what he cannot find in the rest of us. She will win him. Yes, I know quite well that she will win him.”

“But I don’t think she wants to win him,” said Barrison, recollecting the scene in which the “tag” had been prematurely spoken. He had a mental picture of Sybil, scarlet of cheek and indignant of eyes, shrinking from Mortimer’s kiss.

But Miss Templeton looked at him almost scornfully.

“He can make her want to,” she declared positively. “Don’t contradict me, because I know!” Miss Templeton paused a moment and then continued: “Mr. Barrison, do not detectives occasionally undertake the sort of work that necessitates their following a person and—reporting on what he does—that sort of thing?”

“Yes, Miss Templeton.”

“And would you undertake work of that kind?” Her fine eyes pleaded eloquently.

“No, Miss Templeton; I’m afraid not.”

“But why not? You’ve said detectives do it.”

“Plenty of them.”

“Do you mind telling me, then, why not?”

Jim hesitated; then he decided to be frank. “You see,” he said gently, “I don’t do this entirely as a means of livelihood.”

“You mean you’re an amateur, not a professional?”

“I am a professional. But, since I can pick and choose to a certain extent, I usually choose such cases as strike me as most useful and most interesting.”

“And my case doesn’t strike you as either?”

“I don’t see yet that you have a case, Miss Templeton. I don’t see what there is for a detective to do.”

“Then I’ll explain. I want you to follow—shadow, do you call it?—Mr. Mortimer every day and every night. I want to know what he does, whom he sees, where he goes. I will pay—anything——”

Barrison put up his hand to check her. “Yes, I know,” he said quietly. “I quite understood what you wanted me to do. But your determination, or whim, or whatever we may call it, does not constitute a case.”

“I can make you see why. I can tell you the reasons——”

“I’m afraid that I don’t want to hear them, Miss Templeton. I simply can’t do what you ask me to. I’m sorry. There are detectives who will; you’d better go to them. I don’t like cases of that sort, and I don’t take them. Again—I’m sorry. Try not to think me too rude and ungracious.”

She sat with down-bent head, and he could not see her face. He felt unaccountably sorry, as he had told her he felt. He could not have felt more grieved if he had hurt some one who had trusted him.

Suddenly she flung up her head, and there was another look on her face—a harder, older look.

“All right,” she said, in a metallic tone, “you won’t help me. I’m sure I don’t know why I should help you. But—if you won’t shadow Alan Mortimer these next two weeks, you take a tip from me: Shadow Kitty Legaye.”