The Classic Mystery Collection - Arthur Conan Doyle [5083]
He got up heavily and went to the door. "Granger is leaving," he said, "I may be able to get his dinner coat for you. How well do you know her?" he asked, with his hand on the knob.
"If you mean Dolly--?"
"Alison."
"Fairly well," I said cautiously. "Not as well as I would like to. I dined with her last week in Washington. And--I knew her before that."
Forbes touched the bell instead of going out, and told the servant who answered to see if Mr. Granger's suitcase had gone. If not, to bring it across the hail. Then he came back to his former position on the bed.
"You see, we feel responsible for Allie--near relation and all that," he began pompously. "And we can't talk to the people here at the house--all the men are in love with her, and all the women are jealous. Then--there's a lot of money, too, or will be."
"Confound the money!" I muttered. "That is--nothing. Razor slipped."
"I can tell you," he went on, "because you don't lose your head over every pretty face--although Allie is more than that, of course. But about a month ago she went away--to Seal Harbor, to visit Janet MacLure. Know her?"
"She came home to Richmond yesterday, and then came down here --Allie, I mean. And yesterday afternoon Dolly had a letter from Janet--something about a second man--and saying she was disappointed not to have had Alison there, that she had promised them a two weeks' visit! What do you make of that? And that isn't the worst. Allie herself wasn't in the room, but there were eight other women, and because Dolly had put belladonna in her eyes the night before to see how she would look, and as a result couldn't see anything nearer than across the room, some one read the letter aloud to her, and the whole story is out. One of the cats told Granger and the boy proposed to Allie to-day, to show her he didn't care a tinker's dam where she had been."
"Good boy!" I said, with enthusiasm. I liked the Granger fellow --since he was out of the running. But Sam was looking at me with suspicion.
"Blake," he said, "if I didn't know you for what you are, I'd say you were interested there yourself."
Being so near her, under the same roof, with even the tie of a dubious secret between us, was making me heady. I pushed Forbes toward the door.
"I interested!" I retorted, holding him by the shoulders. "There isn't a word in your vocabulary to fit my condition. I am an island in a sunlit sea of emotion, Sam, a--an empty place surrounded by longing--a--"
"An empty place surrounded by longing!" he retorted. "You want your dinner, that's what's the matter with you--"
I shut the door on him then. He seemed suddenly sordid. Dinner, I thought! Although, as matter of fact, I made a very fair meal when, Granger's suitcase not having gone, in his coat and some other man's trousers, I was finally fit for the amenities. Alison did not come down to dinner, so it was clear she would not go over to the club-house dance. I pled my injured arm and a ficticious, vaguely located sprain from the wreck, as an excuse for remaining at home. Sam regaled the table with accounts of my distrust of women, my one love affair--with Dorothy; to which I responded, as was expected, that only my failure there had kept me single all these years, and that if Sam should be mysteriously missing during the bathing hour to-morrow, and so on.
And when the endless meal was over, and yards of white veils had been tied over pounds of hair--or is it, too, bought by the yard? --and some eight ensembles with their abject complements had been packed into three automobiles and a trap, I drew a long breath and faced about. I had just then only one object in life--to