CHAPTER LII
CHAPTER I
The proud lady in the new runabout was homeward bound from a shopping raid. It was her first voyage down-town alone with the thing. She guided the old family horse up to her curb in a graceful sweep, but, like a new elevator-boy, could not come to a stop at the stopping-place.
She could go forward or back, but she could not exactly negotiate her own stepping-block. As she blushingly struggled for it she heard the scream of a child in desperate terror. It inspired an equal terror, for it came from her own house.
She had left her two children at home, expecting playmate guests. She had extracted from them every imaginable promise to be good and to abstain from danger. But she knew how easily they romped into perils. She heard the cry again, and clutched her breast in a little death of fear as she half leaped, half toppled from her carriage and ran up the walk, leaving the horse to his own devices.
The poor woman was wondering which of her beloved had fallen on the shears or into the fire. Which of the dogs had gone mad, and bitten whom. While she stumbled up the steps she heard the outcry repeated and she paused.
That voice was the voice of neither of her own children. The thought that a neighbor’s child might have perished in her home was almost more fearful still. As she fumbled at the door-knob she heard the thud of a little falling body. Then there was a most dreadful silence.
She hastened to the big living-room. She thrust back the somber hanging, and stepped on the arm of her own son.
He was lying in a crumpled heap on the floor. He did not move, though his wrist rolled under her foot.
She flinched away, sickened, only to behold a yet ghastlier spectacle: her daughter hung across the arm of a couch, her hair over her face, and one limp hand touching the floor. At her feet was a young nephew in a contorted huddle with his head under the table. The son of a neighbor was stretched out on a chair, his face flung far back and his eyes staring.
And on the panther-skin by the fireplace a young girl whom Mrs. Vickery had never seen before lay sidelong, singularly beautiful in death.
Before this vision of inconceivable horror the mother stood petrified, her throat in the grip of such fright that she could not utter a sound. Then her knees yielded and she sank to the side of her boy, clutched him to her breast, and cried:
“Eugene! my little ’Gene!”
She pressed her palsied lips to his cheek. Thank God, it was still warm. He moved, he thrust her arms away, and mumbled. She bent to catch the words:
“Lea’ me alone! I’m dead!”
With a sigh of infinite relief she spilled him back to the rug, where he lay motionless. She called sharply to the girl on the couch:
“Dorothy! Dorothy!”
A tremor ran through the child—she seemed to struggle with herself. From her cataract of curls came a sound as of torn canvas, a sound dangerously like one of those explosions of snicker that Dorothy frequently emitted in church during the long prayer. But she did not look up.
Half angry, half ecstatic, Mrs. Vickery rose and moved among the littered corpses, like Edith looking for King Harold’s body on Hastings field. She passed by her nephew, Tommy Jerrems, and Mrs. Burbage’s boy, Clyde, and proceeded to the eerie stranger on the panther-skin.
This child would have looked deader if she had not been breathing so hard, and if her exquisite face had not been so scarlet in the tangle of her hair, which was curiously adorned with bottle-straw and excelsior from a packing-case in the cellar and with artificial flowers from a last-summer’s hat of Mrs. Vickery’s in the attic.
Mrs. Vickery bent above the panting ruins, lifted one relaxed hand, and inquired, “And who are you, little girl?”
“Don’t touch me, please; I’m all wet!”
Mrs. Vickery forgot her imagination long enough to expostulate, “Why, no, you’re not, my dear!”
And now the eyes opened with the answer: “Oh yes, I am, if you please. I’ve just drownded myself in the pool here—if you please.”
“Oh!” Mrs. Vickery assented. “Well, hadn’t you better get up before you catch cold?”
The answer to this question was another—a poser.
“But how can I get up, if you please, until you lower the curtain?”
Mrs. Vickery had been a parent often enough and long enough to obey the solemn behests of children without impertinent whys. She could not imagine what incantational power might reside in the roller window-shade, but she hurried to it and pulled it down.
The little girl scrambled to her feet with a smile of brave regret: “Thank you ever so much! That’s not a ’maginary curtain, but only a real one. Still, it will have to do, I s’pose.” Then she addressed the other victims of fate, all of whom were craning their necks to peek: “Now, ladies and gent’men, take your curtain calls.”
On every hand, as at a little local Judgment Day, the dead arose. They joined hands in a line at her signal. Then she hissed from the side of her mouth, “Now raise it, please.” The curtain shot up with a slap. “Thank you. And if you wouldn’t mind applaudin’ a little.”
The reaction from her terror had rendered Mrs. Vickery almost hysterical, but she managed to keep her face straight and her hands busy while the line bowed and bowed.
Once more the directress whispered to Mrs. Vickery, “Pull the curtain down a minute, please, and let it go up again.” When this was done she said, “If you got any flowers handy, they’d be nice.”
Mrs. Vickery unpinned a small bouquet of violets she had presented herself with at the florist’s and tossed it at the foot of the swaying line.
The directress hissed from the other side of her mouth, “Pick ’em up, ’Gene, and give ’em to me.”
Eugene stooped so hastily and with such rigidity of knee that an over-tried button at the back of his knickers shot across the room. Dorothy, who had not ceased to giggle, whooped with joy at this, and received a glare of rebuke from the star. This did not silence Dorothy.
