CHAPTER XIX

GLIMMERS IN THE DARKNESS

HE raised his eyes to find Miss Templeton regarding him from the other side of the table with a rather curious expression.

“I had no idea that you would be interested in the Wrenn girl,” she said. “I thought that my information would point rather toward her father. Why are you interested in her?”

Barrison hesitated. Charming as he found this woman, he had no mind to confide in her just yet. He countered with another question, one which had, as a matter of fact, trembled on his lips ever since he had come into the room. It was an impertinent question, and he knew that she would have a perfect right to resent it. Yet there was an indefinable attitude about her—not familiarity, but something suggesting intimacy—when she spoke to him, that made him somewhat bolder than his good taste could justify.

“Miss Templeton,” he said, “you have just told me that you cared so much for Alan Mortimer that you waited for six years to get in the same company with him. I know that only a few days ago you were still sufficiently interested in him to be——”

He really did not know how to put it, but she did.

“Jealous?” she suggested promptly, and without emotion. “Oh, yes, I was—in a way—insanely jealous. You see, it had become an obsession with me; I don’t imagine I really loved him any longer, but I was being cheated of something I had worked for and sacrificed for. Probably, not being a woman, you wouldn’t understand.”

“Probably not,” said Jim. “And—will you forgive me for adding this?—I understand even less your mood to-day. Last night you were deeply moved at the play; I saw that. Perhaps”—he paused; he did not know whether to speak of the revolver or not—“you were even on the verge of—some scene—some violent expression of emotion, some——”

She glanced at him, startled. “How did you know that? But, suppose it were true. Will you go on, if you please?”

“No; I am merely offending you.”

“You don’t—offend me.” Her tone was singular. “I should really like you to go on. There was something else that you did not understand. What was it?”

“It is in the present tense,” he answered. “It’s something that I cannot understand now. Miss Templeton, you have done me the honor of asking me here to-day, and of talking to me with a certain measure of confidence. You have been most gracious and charming, a perfect hostess. I have enjoyed myself completely. And yet—last night, the man who has occupied your thoughts and, let us say, your hopes for years past—was tragically murdered.”

She was silent for a second or two. “Is that what you don’t understand?” she demanded abruptly.

“Yes. I cannot reconcile the two women I know to exist: The angry, passionate, jealous woman who looked—excuse me—as though she could have done murder herself, a short fortnight ago, and the woman who has been talking to me to-day about her fruitless quest for the Blue Bird of Happiness.”

“I think that is rather stupid of you, then,” she answered composedly. “Can’t you see it’s all part of the same thing? The quest for love—for the unattainable—but, Mr. Barrison, that is something else which puzzles you, which, in a way, jars on you. I can see it quite well. It is to you a strange and rather a horrible thing that I should be calm to-day, giving you lunch—and eating it, too!—talking of all sorts of things, while he, the man I used to be in love with, is lying dead. Isn’t that it?”

“That is certainly part of it.”

After a moment, she pushed back her chair and rose restlessly.

“No, don’t get up!” she exclaimed, as he, too, rose. “Sit still, and let me prowl about as I choose. I am not used to expressing myself, Mr. Barrison, except in my actions. Words always bother me, and I never seem able to make myself clear in them. Let me see if I can make you see this thing, not as I do, but a little less confusedly. In the desert, a man sometimes follows a mirage for a long time; longs for it, prays for it, worships it from afar. He is dying of thirst, you see, and his feeling about it is so acute it is almost savage. The mirage isn’t real, the water that he thinks he sees is just a cloud effect, but he wants it, and while he is hunting it, he is not entirely sane. One day he finds it is not real. All that everlasting journeying for nothing; all that thirst for something that never has existed! Men do strange things when they find out that the water they were traveling toward is nothing but a mirage. Some of them kill themselves. But suppose, just when that man was losing his reason with the disappointment and the weariness—suppose just then some traveler, some Good Samaritan, or—just a traveler like himself, or—some—never mind!” She choked whatever it was that she had meant to say. “Suppose, then, some one appears and offers him a real gourd of real water! Does he think much more about the mirage? He only wonders that he ever dreamed and suffered in search for it. But—it had taken the sight of the real clear water to make him see that the other was just a feverish dream.”

She paused in her restless pacing up and down the room, and looked at him. “Do you understand better now?”

“No,” said Barrison flatly. “It is very pretty, and, I suppose, symbolic, but I have not the least idea, if you will pardon me for saying so, what you are driving at.”

“Think it over,” said Miss Templeton, lighting another cigarette. “One more touch of symbolism for you. Suppose the—traveler—who showed him the real gourd of water should spill it, or drink it all himself, or—refuse to share it, after all? What do you think would be likely to happen then?”

“I should think the thirsty man would be quite likely to shoot him!” said Jim laughing a little.

She smiled at him. “Ah,” she said, “you see you understand more than you pretend. Yes, that’s just what might happen——Oh, by the by, Mr. Barrison, there was something else that I sent for you to say. You know I warned you in regard to Kitty Legaye?”

“Yes, but it is out of the question,” said Barrison. “I am sure that Mortimer’s murder was an overwhelming surprise to her.”

“Maybe so,” she said thoughtfully. “But I am sure that, when I rushed out of the theater last night in that darkness and confusion, I saw Miss Legaye’s face at the window of a taxicab at the front of the house.”

“At the front of the house! But that would be impossible!”

“I only tell you what I am certain I saw.”

“Would you be prepared to swear that?”

She considered this a moment. “No,” she admitted finally. “I would not be prepared to go quite as far as that. I felt very sure at the time, and I feel almost as sure now. But a glimpse like that is sometimes not much to go by. I only tell you for what it is worth. And now, Mr. Barrison, I have an engagement, and I am going to turn you out. You forgive me?”

“I am disposed to forgive you anything,” said Jim, with formal gallantry, “after the help you have given me—to say nothing of the pleasure I have had!”

She made a faint little face at him. “That sounds like something on the stage!” she protested. “I wish you would think over my—my——”

“Allegory?” he suggested.

“I was going to say my confession. I am sure, the more carefully you remember it, the simpler it will become. Especially remember your own suggestion as to what would happen to the niggardly rescuer who might refuse to be a rescuer, after all!”

Barrison saw fit to ignore this. He shook hands cordially and conventionally.

“Good-by,” he said. “And thanks.”

“Good-by,” she returned briefly.

As he went downstairs, his face was a shade hot. There were two reasons for it. For one thing, Miss Templeton’s attitude—the allegory of the mirage and the gourd of water—what did she mean by it? Was it possible that she—that she—Jim Barrison was not conceited about women, but he could hardly avoid being impressed with a subtle flattery in her manner, a flattery dignified by what certainly looked like rather touching sincerity. And on his part—well, he was not yet prepared to tell himself baldly just what he did feel.

Several years ago, Barrison had imagined himself in love with a beautiful, heartless girl who had baffled him in one of his big cases. She had gone out of his life forever, and he had imagined himself henceforth immune. Yet this woman, with her curious paradoxes of temperament, her extraordinary frankness, and her strange reserves, her cold-blooded dismissal of a past passion, and her emotional yearning for joy and the fullness of life—well, he knew in his heart of hearts, whether he put it in words or not, that she thrilled him as no woman in the world had ever thrilled him yet.