It hadn't been his job, d.a.m.n it, it hadn't been his job at all. It was now, though, with Ted perfectly helpless on the fire-escape where any crazy person could take pot-shots at him as if he were a plaster pipe in a shooting gallery. The idea of escape had somehow never seriously occurred to him--what had happened in the evening already had impressed him so with a sense of inane fatality that he could not even conceive of the possibility of any-thing's coming right. In any event, Ted, tied up the way he was, was too heavy and clumsy to carry down even the most ordinary flight of stairs--and if he were going to be shot, he somehow preferred to gasp his last breaths out on a comfortably carpeted floor rather than clinging like a disreputable spider to the iron web of a fire-escape.

Oliver sighed--Nancy's firmness had admittedly quite ruined all the better things in life--but even the merest sort of mere existence had got to be, at times, a rather pleasant convention--how pleasant, he felt, he had never quite realized somehow until just now. Then, with a vague idea of getting whatever was to happen over with as quickly and decently as possible, he settled his tie once more and trotted meekly through the dining-room and beyond the curtains.

XL

"Why, Mr. Piper!" was Oliver's first and wholly inane remark.

It was not what he had intended to say at all--something rather more dramatic and on the lines of "Shoot if you must this old grey head, but if you will only listen to a reasonable explanation--" had been uppermost in his mind. But the sight of Peter's father crouched over what must be Mrs. Severance's body, his weak hands fumbling for her wrist and heart, his voice thin with a senile sorrow as if he had been stricken at once and in an instant with a palsy of incurable age, brought the whole world of Southampton and house-parties and reality that Oliver thought he had lost touch with forever, back to him so vividly that all he could do was gape at the tableau on the floor.

Mr. Piper looked up and for a second of relief Oliver thought that the staring eyes had not recognized him at all. Then he realized from the look in them that who or what he was made singularly little difference now to Mr. Piper. "Water!" croaked Mr. Piper. "Water! I've shot her.

Oh, poor Rose, poor Rose!" and he was plucking at her dress again with absorbed, incapable fingers.

Oliver looked around him. The gun. There must have been a gun. Where? Oh _there_--and as he picked it up from under a chair he did so with much inward reverence in spite of the haste he took to it, for he felt as if it were all the next forty years of his life made little into something cold and small and of metal that he was lifting like a doll from the floor.

"Water," said Mr. Piper again and quite horribly. "Water for Rose."

It was only when he had gone back to the kitchen and started looking for gla.s.ses that he realized that Mrs. Severance might very possibly be dying out there in the other room. Till then the mere fact that he was not dying himself had been too large in his vision to give him time to develop proper sympathy for others. When he did, though, he hurried bunglingly, in spite of a nervous flash in which after accidentally touching the revolver in his pocket he almost threw it through the pane of the nearest window before he considered. A moment, though, and he was back with a spilling tumbler.

"Water," said Mr. Piper with querulous satisfaction. "Give her water."

Oliver hesitated. "Where's she shot?" he said sharply.

"I don't know. Oh, I don't know. But I shot her. I shot her. Poor Rose."

It was certainly odd, there being no blood about, thought Oliver detachedly. Internal wounds? Possibly, but even so. He dipped his fingers in the gla.s.s of water, bent over Mrs. Severance and sprinkled the drops as near her closed eyelids as possible. No sound came from her and not a muscle of her body moved, but the delicate skin of the eyelids shivered momentarily. Oliver drew a long breath and stepped back.

"She's dead," said Mr. Piper. "She's dead." And he began to weep, very quietly with a mouselike sound and the slow horrible tears of age. "No use trying water on her," said Oliver loudly, and again he thought he saw the skin of the eyelids twitch a little. "Is there any brandy here--anything like that, Mr. Piper?"

"K-kitchen," said Mr. Piper with a sniff and one of his hands came away from Mrs. Severance to fumble for a key.

"I'll go get it," said Oliver, still rather loudly, and took one step away. Then he bent down again swiftly and poured the whole contents of the tumbler he was holding into the little hollow of Mrs. Severance's throat just above the collar-bone. _"Oh!"_ said the dead Mrs. Severance in the tone of one who has turned on the cold in a shower unexpectedly, and she opened her eyes.

"Rose!" said Mr. Piper snifflingly. "You aren't dead? You aren't dead, dear? Rose! Rose!"

"Oh," said Mrs. Severance again, but this time tinily and with a flavor of third acts about her, and she started to relax rather beautifully into a Dying Gladiator pose.

"I'll get some more water, Mr. Piper," said Oliver briskly, and Mrs.

Severance began to sit up again.

"I--fainted--silly of me," she said with a consummate dazedness.

"Somebody was firing revolvers--"

"I tried--I tried--I--t-tried to s-shoot you, Rose," came from the damp little heap on the floor that was Mr. Piper.

"Really, Sargent--" said Mrs. Severance comfortably. Then she turned her head and made what Oliver was always to consider her most perfect remark. "You must think us very queer people indeed, Mr. Crowe?" she said smiling questioningly up at him.

Oliver's smile in answer held relief beyond words. It wasn't the ordinary cosmos again--quite yet--but at least from now on he felt perfectly sure that no matter how irregular anyone's actions might become, in speech at least, every last least one of the social conventions would be scrupulously observed.

"I think--if you could help me, Sargent--" said Mrs. Severance delicately.

"Oh yes, yes, yes," from Mr. Piper very eagerly and with Oliver's and his a.s.sistance Mrs. Severance's invalid form was aided into a deep chair.

"And I think, now," she went on, "that if I could have just a little--"

She let the implication float in the air like a pretty bubble.

"Perhaps--it might help us all--"

"Oh _certainly,_ dear," from Mr. Piper. "I--"

"In the kitchen, you said, Mr. Piper. And you must let _me,"_ from Oliver with complete decision. He hadn't bargained for that. Mr. Piper might not notice Ted on the fire-escape--but then again he might--and if he did he would certainly investigate--mute bound bodies were not ordinary or normal adjuncts of even the most illegal of Riverside Drive apartments. And then. Oliver's hand went down over the revolver in his pocket--if necessary he stood perfectly ready to hold up Mr. Piper at the point of his own pistol to preserve the inviolability of that kitchen.

But Mrs. Severance saved him the bother.

"If you would be so kind?" she said simply. "It's in the small cupboard---the brown one--Sargent, you have the key?"

"Oh, yes, Rose." Mr. Piper was looking, Oliver thought, rather more embarra.s.sed than it was fair for any man to have to look and live.

His eyes kept going pitifully and always to Mrs. Severance and then creeping, away. He produced the key, however, and gave it to Oliver silently and Oliver took the first opportunity when he was through the curtains of giving whatever fates had presided over the insanities of the evening a long cheer with nine Mrs. Severances on the end.

He carefully stayed in the kitchen fifteen minutes--devoting most of the time to a cautious examination of Ted, who seemed to be gradually recovering consciousness. At least he stirred a little when poked by Oliver's foot.

"Sleeps just like a baby--oh, the sweet little fellow--the dear little fellow--" hummed Oliver wildly as he made a few last additions to the curious network of string and towels with which he had wound Ted into the fire-escape as if he had been making him a coc.o.o.n.

"Well--well--_well_--what a night we're having! What a night we're having and what _will_ we have next?" Then he remembered the reason for his journey and removed a bottle of brandy from the brown cup-board, found appropriate gla.s.ses and, in the ice-chest, club-soda and ginger ale. He poured himself a drink reminiscent of Paris--not that he felt he needed it for the reaction from bracing himself to die like a Pythias had left him elvishly grotesque in mind--gathered the bottles tenderly in his arms like small gla.s.s babies and went back to the living-room.

XLI

And this time he was forced to pay internal high compliment to Mr. Piper as well as to Mrs. Severance. The pitiful grey image, its knees rumpled from the floor, its features streaked like a cheap paper mask with ludicrous dreadful tears, had turned back into the President of the Commercial Bank with branches in Bombay and Melbourne and all the business-capitals of the world. Not that Mr. Piper was at ease again, exactly--to be at ease under the circ.u.mstances would merely have proved him brightly inhuman--but he looked as Oliver thought he might have on one of the Street's Black Mondays when only complete firmness and complete audacity in one could keep even the Commercial afloat at a time when the Stock Exchange had turned into a floor-full of well-dressed maniacs and houses that everyone had thought as solid as granite went to pieces like sand castles.

Oliver set down the bottles and opened them with a feeling both that he had never known Mr. Piper at all before, only Peter's father, and, spookily, that neither Peter's father nor the terrible old man who had wept on the floor beside Mrs. Severance could have any real existence--this was such a complete and unemotional Mr. Piper he had before him, a Mr. Piper, too, in spite of all the oddities of the present situation, so obviously at home in his own house.

None of them said anything in particular until the mixture in the gla.s.ses had sunk about half-way down. Then Mr. Piper remarked in a pleasant voice, "I don't often permit myself--seldom even before the country adopted prohibition--but the present circ.u.mstances seem to be--er--unusual enough--to warrant--" smiled cheerfully and lifted his gla.s.s again. When he had set it down he looked at Mrs. Severance, then at Oliver, and then started to speak.

Oliver listened with some tenseness, knowing only that whatever he might possibly have imagined might happen, what would happen, to judge from the previous events of the evening, would be undoubtedly so entirely different that prophecy was no use at all. But, even so, he was not entirely prepared for the unexpectedness of Mr. Piper's first sentence.

"I feel that I owe you very considerable apologies, Oliver," the President of the Commercial began with a good deal of stateliness. "In fact I really owe you so many that it leaves me at rather a loss 'as to just how to begin." He smiled a little shyly.

"Rose has explained everything," he said, and Oliver looked at Mrs.

Severance with stupefied wonder--_how?_

"But even so, there remains the difficulty--of my putting myself into words."

"Silly boy," said Mrs. Severance easily, and Oliver noted with fresh amazement that the term seemed to come from her as naturally and almost conventionally as if she had every legal American right to use it. "Let me, dear." And Oliver felt his head begin to go round like a pinwheel.

But then--but she really _couldn't_ be married to Mr. Piper--and yet somehow she seemed so much more married to him than Mrs. Piper ever had been--Oliver's thoughts played fantastically for an instant over the proposition that she and Mr. Piper had been secretly converted to Mohammedanism together and he looked at Mr. Piper's grey head almost as if he expected to see a large red fez suddenly drop down upon it from the ceiling.