Chapter XVIII: Warren Gets a Tip

Ridgeley Warren had been to the station to bid a friend _bon voyage_. He presented himself armed with a box of chocolates, the latest novel and three brand-new witticisms culled from a roof-garden program the previous evening. The pretty girl had accepted his offerings with marked graciousness and had laughed convulsively at each of the jokes, thereby intensifying Warren's habitual sense of being on good terms with himself and all the world. His spirits unclouded by the pang of parting, he strolled toward the exit, trying to decide where to dine, when his own name reached his ears coupled with a fervent ejaculation, "Mr. Warren! Thank heaven!"

Warren spun on his heel to encounter Julia advancing with extended hand. Julia was not one of Warren's favorites, but her pleasure at the sight of him was contagious. "Gosh!" he exclaimed agreeably, "this _is_ luck."

It was while shaking hands with Julia that Warren became aware of Mrs. Knox's imposing figure in the background. And scarcely had he lifted his hat in recognition of her presence, when his eye fell on Forbes, a pale and woebegone object, committed to the clumsy guardianship of a station porter.

Warren turned on Julia blithely. "Don't tell me you've sprung a surprise on us. Don't say that I should have come with my pockets full of rice."

"Oh, Mr. Warren, be serious, please." There was gentle reproach in Julia's uplifted eyes. "It seems really providential meeting you here. Now you can take charge of Burton till he finds some suitable person to look after him."

"What's become of the nice little chap who has been on the job all summer?"

"Oh, Mr. Warren!" Julia's gesture indicated the futility of attempting immediate explanations. "It's a long, a dreadful story, and it will take time to make you understand."

"Hm! I'm not usually considered so dense."

"But this isn't like anything else. It's incredible. I can hardly believe it myself. Let's go to some quiet place where we can have dinner and talk things over."

"Yes, for heaven's sake, let us have dinner," snapped Mrs. Knox. An unusually early hour of rising, together with a mid-day fast, had reduced her to an unwonted state of nervous irritability. Forbes, too, seemed wrapped in impenetrable gloom. It was not a cheerful party.

Warren's curiosity was aroused. He found a taxi, bundled the dejected trio inside and gave the driver directions. He was rather shocked to see how ill Forbes looked on nearer view, but he concealed that emotion under his usual cloak of levity, and told humorous stories all the way to their destination, covering the lack of responsiveness on the part of his audience by roars of appreciative laughter.

The staid hotel which Warren had selected, though yielding to modern demands sufficiently to institute a roof dining-room, discouraged such innovations as would be likely to attract the light-minded, and Warren's party had no difficulty in securing a table. Warren assumed the prerogative of host and ordered with a lavishness productive of a marked unbending on the part of Mrs. Knox. Julia, too, was hungry enough to look forward to a good dinner with unwonted anticipation, and she smiled on him appreciatively. Only Forbes remained moodily aloof.

It was over the soup that Warren said cheerily, "Well, now, what's it all about?" He was beginning to realize that something unusual must have occurred to bring Julia and her aunt to town in August, as well as to account for Forbes' strange, dispirited silence.

Mrs. Knox immediately protested. "Oh, Mr. Warren, don't spoil a good meal by bringing up that abominable affair."

"Oh, yes, let it wait, please, Mr. Warren," sighed Julia. "Actually when one realizes what wickedness there is in the world--deceit and imposture and things of that sort--it seems fairly heartless to enjoy one's self."

"Then we'll wait for explanations till dinner is over," Warren conceded, with undiminished buoyancy. But although he made himself entertaining in his usual fashion, his mind was busy with the problem Julia had suggested. Who was the girl hitting, with her talk of deceit and imposture? She could not refer to Miss Kent, naturally, and Howard was equally out of the question. Could it be that Hephzibah's existence had come to her attention? Was it possible that Forbes had been playing a lone hand and had thereby become involved in an entanglement from which his betrothed had magnanimously rescued him? The unrelieved melancholy of Forbes' face and manner rendered this explanation entirely plausible.

When the coffee was brought on and the men lighted cigarettes, Warren felt, not unnaturally, that his hungry curiosity had a right to satisfaction. "Well, I'm as ready to be shocked as I ever shall be," he said. "Let's hear what has happened. Don't tell me that the staid Miss Kent was on the point of eloping with old Forbes."

To Warren's surprise, this apparently innocent witticism caused Forbes to flush darkly. He noticed, too, that Julia's expression lost something of its pensive sweetness, but even then he was unprepared for the acidity of the tone with which she answered him.

"There is no Miss Kent."

"Eh?" Warren looked rather stupid.

"Strictly speaking," admitted Julia, "there is a person who calls herself by that name. But the nice old lady who was Burton's father's friend has been dead a dozen years."

Warren knocked the ashes from his cigarette with painstaking deliberation. "Must be a rather lively old ghost," he commented, striving to live up to his principle of never showing surprise, "according to all Forbes tells."

"Oh, poor Burton," Julia cried, with a glance of angelic commiseration in the direction of her grimly silent lover. "Wouldn't you have thought that Burton's misfortune would have appealed to the better instincts of the most depraved? But instead, they take advantage of his blindness to trick him in the most infamous fashion. The person who calls herself Agatha Kent--I suppose it really is her name, though any one so absolutely deceitful is as likely to lie about one thing as another--"

"Well?" trumpeted Warren, his strained patience showing itself in the unnecessary loudness of his challenge.

"Do hush, Mr. Warren, everybody's looking at us. This Kent woman isn't a nice motherly person. She isn't old at all, not a bit older than I am."

Warren sucked at his cigarette for a moment and blew the smoke through his nose. He needed a little time in order to preserve the imperturbable demeanor on which he prided himself. He looked at Julia to be sure she was in earnest, looked at Forbes to see if he were not going to deny this incredible story, and then expressed his feelings by a low whistle.

"Not a nice motherly person," he repeated inanely. "About as old as you are."

"She may even be a little younger," Julia admitted generously.

Warren's air of incredulity deepened. He threw the uncommunicative Forbes a challenging glance.

"Do you mean that Forbes has been spending all his time with her for the past three months and never suspected that she wasn't an old woman?"

"So he claims." Julia's inflection was decidedly tart.

Forbes made one of his rare contributions to the conversation. "I wouldn't have believed such a thing possible myself, but blindness makes one an easy victim."

"Poor Burton!" murmured Julia, melting at once. "To think that any girl should have the heart to take such advantage of another's misfortune."

"But I can't see what she was getting at," Warren demurred. "I've heard that occasionally ladies represent themselves as younger than they really are, and the reason for that seems plain enough. But why the devil should a young girl want to make herself out an old maid of seventy?"

"Purely mercenary at the start," Julia opined. "As I understand it, Burton saw her advertisement for a boarder, and wrote her, supposing she was his father's old friend. And she decided to pass herself off as her great-aunt so as to get as much out of Burton as she could."

"That young woman must have plenty of nerve. It's plain she needed the money, as far as that goes. Place is terribly run-down."

"Oh, shockingly," Mrs. Knox corroborated him, in her deepest tones. "All the furniture I could see through the windows seemed mere wrecks."

"On its last legs," Warren agreed. He waited for a moment and then asked casually, "Well, what's the fuss about? What harm did it do?"

The two women uttered a simultaneous ejaculation of horror. "A piece of barefaced fraud," cried Mrs. Knox.

"She has been getting money under false pretenses," flared Julia. "I believe she can be arrested like any other swindler, and punished."

Warren shrugged his shoulders. "I can't see where the harm comes in," he persisted stubbornly. "She made Forbes comfortable all summer, so comfortable that now he looks like a baby that's being weaned. She took his money, but judging from the meals I ate there, she gave him his money's worth. If she'd been an old party, passing herself off as a youthful beauty, Forbes would have a right to kick. But under the circumstances is seems to me you're making a mountain out of a mole-hill."

Warren's amiable defense of the guilty was not well received. Aunt Estelle regarded him with open hostility, and Julia seemed pained by his moral obtuseness. A flicker of interest lighted Forbes' impassive face and suggested to Warren that his line of argument appealed more strongly to his masculine listener than to the women. Although he held no brief for Agatha Kent, he pressed his advantage.

"We don't know, any of us, what we might do if we were up against it. I've often thought I would commit highway robbery if I were hungry enough. I'll say this for the girl, anyway: She must be a peach of an actress. If she could knock around with a man all summer, walk with him and talk with him and pet him a little, when he was down in the mouth, and yet never let him suspect that she wasn't old enough to be his grandmother--"

"Really, Mr. Warren," Julia said with asperity, "I can't see any point in continuing this conversation. I had hoped you might be able to make some helpful suggestions regarding Burton, for of course I understand that you can't be burdened with him for more than a few days. But if you are going to spend the evening defending that brazen, red-haired--"

"What!" roared Warren. This time he _had_ done it. The head waiter looked in his direction apprehensively.

Aunt Estelle took the protest from Julia's lips. "Pardon me, Mr. Warren, but I must remind you that my niece and I dislike to be made conspicuous by such demonstrations."

Warren ignored the reproof. "What did you call her?" he demanded of Julia, whose only answer was an offended stare.

"Did you say she was red-haired?"

"I--I did. Though why you should attach any importance to anything so trivial, I confess I don't understand."

Warren did not attempt to enlighten her. He indicated to the waiter that he was ready for his check and his manner was offensively jubilant. "I'm afraid," he said genially, "that you'll have to make some plan for disposing of old Forbes besides committing him to my tender mercies. I've just remembered that I'm going out of town in the morning, early train."

Julia looked startled. "But what is Burton to do, then?"

"Just what he would have done if you hadn't run across me. Though if you'd like my candid advice--"

"Yes, please," said Julia, and tried to look winning. It did not suit her that Warren should slip away in this cavalier fashion, leaving her with a blind man on her hands. She had important plans for the remainder of the week. Twenty-four hours was all she could possibly spare for Forbes.

"Then I advise you to marry him offhand. You have taken him away from one young woman who was devoting herself to making him comfortable. I should say that the least you could do was to follow her example."

Julia's gasp of rage made Warren think of a cat whose tail has been trodden on. From across the table Forbes promptly requested him to mind his own business.

"Just a bit of good advice, old man," Warren soothed him. "Take it or leave it, as you please. Anything more I can do for you people before I go?"

A frigid silence indicated that any service he could offer would be unwelcome, whereupon Warren, having tipped the waiter with a liberality indicative of a jocund spirit, took his smiling departure, leaving dejection behind him.

After a talk with the night clerk, it was arranged that Forbes should remain at the hotel, an adaptable bell-boy agreeing to act as his valet in the morning. Before Mrs. Knox and Julia took refuge in another hostelry, the lovers had a moment to themselves.

Julia was in an unpleasant mood. The emphasis Warren had laid on Miss Kent's histrionic powers had awakened her ready suspicion. As she found herself alone for a moment with her lover, his look of weary dejection aroused her resentment.

"It's most extraordinary, Burton," she complained, "that you should never have suspected her of being younger than she pretended. I could see that Mr. Warren didn't believe it for a minute."

Forbes replied with perfect conviction that Warren was an ass.

"I should have thought that if you didn't find it out when you were holding her hands, you would have realized it the moment you took her in your arms."

"Damnation!" Forbes was goaded beyond endurance. "I never took her in my arms."

"She said you did," insisted Julia, eying him suspiciously. "In that preposterous letter she wrote me, you know. She said you often held her hands and patted them and that sort of thing."

"I did, I admit it. I supposed her a contemporary of my father's, you remember."

"And she said that once, under rather unusual circumstances, you took her in your arms."

"An absolute lie!" blazed Forbes. "But of course if you are going to doubt my word, Julia--"

Julia said no, that she did not doubt him. She added that when a person had lived a lie for months, one more little falsehood would not mean much. Then she gave him her hand to kiss, and was annoyed when he only pressed it and said good night. She had to remind herself that though there was no one near to witness the act of devotion, Burton could not know that he was unobserved, and his undemonstrative demeanor was undoubtedly due to his unwillingness to compromise her.

It was while the adaptable bell-boy was conducting his charge to his room, that enlightenment came. Forbes gave a convulsive start. "Damnation!" he exclaimed, for the second time in fifteen minutes.

"Yes, sir, our floor, sir!" The bell-boy eyed him expectantly. He had an adventurous spirit, though condemned to carry suit-cases and bring ice-water on request. It looked as if there might be something doing with a gentleman who jumped so high and swore so roundly in a public elevator.

Forbes had only realized that the letter Julia had quoted had contained no falsehood. He understood Warren's excitement over the discovery that Agatha Kent was red-haired. Agatha and Hephzibah were one and the same.

The circumstances which led to his taking her in his arms were unusual, indeed. In the close corridors of the city hotel he seemed to smell again the scent of sun-kissed fields. As the bell-boy gripped his arm, he felt against his heart the pressure of that lithe young body, shaken by sobs. His cheek had brushed another, smooth and fragrant. His pulses had answered the indefinable challenge of youth and beauty. They thrilled again at the mere memory.

Forbes did not fall asleep till nearly morning. He lay awake, trying to decide how far the situation was altered by the fact that Agatha Kent had saved his life.