Dorothy, kindly, stooping to stroke the sable visitor, who instinctively dodged the caress, and then scratched her hand.
“The ugly brute!” she exclaimed. “Don’t touch him, Harlan.”
Throughout the meal the cat sat at a respectful distance, with his greenish yellow eyes fixed unwaveringly upon them. He was entirely black, save for a white patch under his chin, which, in the half-light, carried with it an uncanny suggestion of a shirt front. Dorothy at length became restless under the calm scrutiny.
“I don’t like him,” she said. “Put him out.”
“Thought you liked cats,” remarked Harlan, reaching for another sandwich.
“I do, but I don’t like this one. Please put him out.”
“What, in all this storm? He’ll get wet.”
“He wasn’t wet when he came in,” objected Dorothy. “He must have some warm, dry place of his own outside.”
“Come, kitty,” said Harlan, pleasantly.
“Kitty” merely blinked, and Harlan rose.
“Come, kitty.”
With the characteristic independence of cats, the visitor yawned. The conversation evidently bored him.
“Come, kitty,” said Harlan, more firmly, with a low swoop of his arm. The cat arched his back, erected an enlarged tail, and hissed threateningly. In a dignified but effective manner, he eluded all attempts to capture him, even avoiding Dorothy and her broom.
“There’s something more or less imperial about him,” she remarked, wiping her flushed cheeks, when they had finally decided not to put the cat out. “As long as he’s adopted us, we’ll have to keep him. What shall we name him?”
“Claudius Tiberius,” answered Harlan. “It suits him down to the ground.”
“His first name is certainly appropriate,” laughed Dorothy, with a rueful glance at her scratched hand. Making the best of a bad bargain, she spread an old grey shawl, nicely folded, on the floor by the stove, and requested Claudius Tiberius to recline upon it, but he persistently ignored the invitation.
“This is jolly enough,” said Harlan. “A cosy little supper in our own house, with a gale blowing outside, the tea kettle singing over the fire, and a cat purring on the hearth.”
“Have you heard Claudius purr?” asked Dorothy, idly.
“Come to think of it, I haven’t. Perhaps something is wrong with his purrer. We’ll fix him to-morrow.”
From a remote part of the house came twelve faint, silvery tones. The kitchen clock struck next, with short, quick strokes, followed immediately by a casual record of the hour from the clock on the mantel beneath Uncle Ebeneezer’s portrait. Then the grandfather’s clock in the hall boomed out twelve, solemn funereal chimes. Afterward, the silence seemed acute.
“The end of the honeymoon,” said Dorothy, a little sadly, with a quick, inquiring look at her husband.
“The end of the honeymoon!” repeated Harlan, gathering her into his arms. “To-morrow, life begins!”
Several hours later, Dorothy awoke from a dreamless sleep to wonder whether life was any different from a honeymoon, and if so, how and why.
II
The Day Afterward
By the pitiless light of early morning, the house was even uglier than at night. With an irreverence essentially modern, Dorothy decided, while she was dressing, to have all the furniture taken out into the back yard, where she could look it over at her leisure. She would make a bonfire of most of it, or, better yet, have it cut into wood for the fireplace. Thus Uncle Ebeneezer’s cumbrous bequest might be quickly transformed into comfort.
“And,” thought Dorothy, “I’ll take down that hideous portrait over the mantel before I’m a day older.”
But when she broached the subject to Harlan, she found him unresponsive and somewhat disinclined to interfere with the existing order of things. “We’ll be here only for the Summer,” he said, “so what’s the use of monkeying with the furniture and burning up fifty or sixty beds? There’s plenty of wood in the cellar.”
“I don’t like the furniture,” she pouted.
“My dear,” said Harlan, with patronising kindness, “as you grow older, you’ll find lots of things on the planet which you don’t like. Moreover, it’ll be quite out of your power to cremate ’em, and it’s just as well to begin adjusting yourself now.”
This bit of philosophy irritated Mrs. Carr unbearably. “Do you mean to say,” she demanded, with rising temper, “that you won’t do as I ask you to?”
“Do you mean to say,” inquired Harlan, wickedly, in exact imitation of her manner, “that you won’t do as I ask you to? Four weeks ago yesterday, if I remember rightly, you promised to obey me!”
“Don’t remind me of what I’m ashamed of!” flashed Dorothy. “If I’d known what a brute you were, I’d never have married you! You may be sure of that!”
Claudius Tiberius insinuated himself between Harlan’s feet and rubbed against his trousers, leaving a thin film of black fur in his wake. Being fastidious about his personal appearance, Harlan kicked Claudius Tiberius vigorously, grabbed his hat and went out, slamming the door, and whistling with an exaggerated cheerfulness.
“Brute!” The word rankled deeply as he went downhill with his hands in his pockets, whistling determinedly. So Dorothy was sorry she had married him! After all he’d done for her, too. Giving up a good position in New York, taking her half-way around the world on a honeymoon, and bringing her to a magnificent country residence in a fashionable locality for the Summer!
Safely screened by the hill, he turned back to look at the “magnificent country residence,” then swore softly under his breath, as, for the first time, he took in the full meaning of the eccentric architecture.
Perched high upon the hill, with intervening shrubbery carefully cut down, the Judson mansion was not one to inspire confidence in its possessor. Outwardly, it was grey and weather-worn, with the shingles dropping off in places. At the sides, the rambling wings and outside stairways, branching off into space, conveyed the impression that the house had been recently subjected to a powerful influence of the centrifugal sort. But worst of all was the front elevation, with its two round windows, its narrow, long window in the centre, and the low windows on either side of the front door—the grinning, distorted semblance of a human face.
The bare, uncurtained windows loomed up boldly in the searching sunlight, which spared nothing. The blue smoke rising from the kitchen chimney appeared strangely like a plume streaming out from the rear.
