Choose the One You'll Marry (11 page)

“Am I forgiven?” he inquired, as he accepted the cigarette she offered him, and stood smiling down at her.

“Forgiven?” For a startled moment she thought perhaps he
had
seen her at the Ritz and was apologizing
—
quite unnecessarily, of course—for being with Charmian. “I don’t know what you mean. I didn’t have to forgive you for anything.”

“Oh, yes. You were quite cross with me, just before we said goodbye at the studio.”

“Oh—that?” She remembered their final conversation and laughed and colored. “I wasn’t cross, exactly. I just wanted to warn you not to talk quite so—so indiscreetly.”

“There was no one there to hear.
”

“Indeed there was. Charmian was listening with all ears.”

“But she has nothing to do with the Aunt Henrietta mystery. It couldn’t have mattered if she did hear,” he protested, half laughing.

“Yes, it could,” Ruth insisted. “Even if Aunt Henrietta
isn’t
the person she’s pretending to be—”

She stopped suddenly, for she saw that Angus was looking beyond her and that an odd, warning expression had come into his face. Chill descended on her, and she would, in that moment, have given almost anything to recall her last words. For, even before she turned to see for herself, she knew what had happened.

Aunt Henrietta was standing in the doorway, pale and with her eyes open wide.

CHAPTER SIX

For a space
of perhaps five seconds there was silence, during which Ruth discovered exactly what is meant by wishing that the ground would open and swallow one. Then Aunt Henrietta advanced into the room, shook hands calmly with Angus, and said, “I’m so glad to hear you can take Ruth out for the evening, after all. I’m sure she’s going to enjoy herself.”

“Yes—indeed,” murmured Ruth, wishing that her voice would not sound so scared and breathless.

Angus showed more self-possession—but then he, of course, had not uttered the offending words. He stood smiling down easily at Aunt Henrietta while he made some conventional comment about the program conference that he had managed to bypass.

But even he neither referred to nor tried to explain away the unfortunate half sentence that Aunt Henrietta must undoubtedly have overheard. For a few minutes they all worked hard to keep the conversational ball rolling. Then Angus glanced at this watch and explained they should be going, as he had managed to get tickets for a popular play that was running at the moment.

“Good night, Aunt Henrietta.” Ruth forced herself to look the older woman in the face, though it took a great effort to do so, and she was afraid that her own expression must betray something at least of her uneasiness.

“Good night, my dear. I expect I shall be in bed when you come in.” Aunt Henrietta was still continuing to keep up appearances splendidly. “But if my light is still on, look in and say good-night.”

“Yes,” promised Ruth, hoping profoundly that all would be dark. “Yes, indeed I will.”

And then she and Angus were able to escape at last and to go out to his car, which was waiting, parked outside the apartment.

“Oh, Angus—” she began, almost before they were out in the street.

“Wait until we’re really safely out of earshot this time,” he warned her. “And don’t agitate yourself too much about it.”

“But I
am
agitated!” Ruth exclaimed remorsefully, as soon as she was in the car. “How can
I
be anything else? Oh, why was I so silly as to say that in her own apartment? How could I have been so careless? And just when I’d been telling you not to be indiscreet, too.”

Angus grinned and looked not only amused but, perhaps justifiably, satisfied with himself.

“What must she think?” Ruth went on unhappily.

“That you’ve discovered her pretense, I suppose.”

“But I wouldn’t have had her know it for the world!”

“Why not?” inquired Angus, with the less emotional outlook of the male. “If she’s practicing some form of deceit, however amiable, she must know she runs the risk of being discovered. It can’t be all that much a shock to her.”

“Of
course
it’s a shock.” Ruth was cross with him for taking it all too lightly, as she thought,
she’s been so kind to me—and this is the way I repay her.

“Can’t be helped, darling.” Angus was cheerfully philosophical, now that they were away from the awkward situation and he himself was not too deeply involved. “Let’s forget about it and enjoy the evening.”

Ruth tried to do so—for, after all, it was his evening—and she managed to listen with interest while he explained that he was going to take her to a favorite little Greek restaurant for a meal first, and that they were then going on to see the latest Lucas Manning play.

“It sounds like a lovely program,” she said, forcing a happy smile. But no sooner were they seated in the restaurant than she simply had to revert to the subject, which was occup
y
ing most of her thoughts still.

“You know, I think she means to—to have it out with me when I go back this evening,” she said suddenly.

“Who does? Oh, Aunt Henrietta?” Angus shook his head skeptically. “
I
doubt it. My guess is that she’ll prefer not to challenge your remark. And if she doesn’t challenge it, then you’ll
know
she’s a fraud.”

But Ruth did not want to know she was a fraud and said so, rather indignantly.

“
And anyway, I’m sure she meant to talk to me about it. That’s why she asked me to go in and say good-night to her if her light was still on.”

“
Then, if you want to avoid an awkward half hour, the obvious remedy is for us to stay out until she’s almost certain to be asleep,” replied Angus lightly.

“Y-yes,” agreed Ruth, but somewhat uncertainly. For now she was beginning to change her mind about wanting to avoid a frank talk with Aunt Henrietta. Unless one had a frank talk, how was one to remove this wall of uncomfortable suspicion between them?

But at this point Angus, in the nicest way possible, showed that his interest in the topic of Aunt Henrietta was exhausted. With an air of smiling determination, he asked Ruth what she had done with herself after leaving the studios that afternoon.

“I walked around and looked at the shops. Then I ran into Michael and he took me out to tea. At the Ritz,” she added, unable to resist the opportunity of seeing how he took this.

“The Ritz?” Angus looked very faintly uncomfortable. “Why—how odd. I was there myself this afternoon. But I didn’t see you. I suppose you had just gone.”

“No,” Ruth said. “We hadn’t gone. I did see you.”

He bit his lip and laughed a little vexedly.

“With Charmian?” He made a virtue of necessity and spoke with careless candor.

“Yes,” Ruth agreed, and tried so hard to look indifferent that she ended by looking faintly sulky and annoyed.

“Oh, darling—” He leaned his arms on the table and smiled full at her “—don’t tell me you were cross about it?”

“No, of course not.” She spoke with unnecessary emphasis. “I had no reason to—to be cross.”

“I wish you felt you had,” he told her whimsically.

“I—I don’t know what you mean.”

“Don’t you? I wish you liked me well enough to feel cross when you see me with another girl.”

“O-oh—” Ruth bit her lip. “Well, at least I did wonder why you were with her. After—after you’d broken your engagement, I mean.”

He shrugged.

“You know the old story about remaining good friends,” he said a trifle cynically.

“But I didn’t have the impression that you remained good friends,” she pointed out gravely, which made him laugh.

“It’s just a way of saving one’s pride, I suppose,” he admitted. “I’ve stayed on perfectly affable terms with Charmian, because I won’t give her the satisfaction of thinking that I’d lose an hour’s sleep over her.”

“And do you?” inquired Ruth with real curiosity.

“Do I what?”

“Lose any sleep over her.”

“Not since I met you,” he told her, with that charming air of paying a compliment that might mean anything—or nothing. “Anyway, I work too hard to lie awake at night about anything,” he added with practical candor.

“So that it didn’t stir old fires when you asked her to go out to tea with you?”

“I didn’t ask her, as a matter of fact. The suggestion came from her,” said Angus, as though he recalled that fact with some surprise.

“Oh?” Ruth felt a prickle of uneasy curiosity. “I suppose—” she glanced down and absently traced a pattern on the cloth with her forefinger “—she wanted to discuss the program further?”

“Lord, no! We’d both had enough of the program by then. We didn’t even mention it.”

“No?” With great difficulty, Ruth stopped herself from asking what they
had
mentioned. And she was almost immediately rewarded by having Angus tell her.

“We talked shop mostly, in a lighthearted sort of way,” he said, as though it required some effort to remember what they had discussed. “And she asked me about one or two things that had happened since we—well, since we used to see more of each other.”

“Since your engagement, you mean?” Ruth saw no reason why the word should be avoided. “Did she ask anything about me?” she inquired coolly, for she remembered Charmian’s amiable promise to make trouble. And although the suggestion had been that this would not be in Angus’s direction, there was no knowing what she might decide to do on the spur of the moment.

“Certainly not.” For some odd reason, Angus sounded shocked at the idea, which secretly amused Ruth. “But she did ask about your Aunt Henrietta,” he added, in sudden recollection, and all amusement left Ruth.

“Aunt Henrietta?” she repeated sharply. “What had Charmian to ask about her, for heaven’s sake?”

“Oh, it was nothing, really.” He shrugged half
-
impatiently. “Just the merest curiosity. She did overhear what you and I said, it seems—”

“I knew she did!” exclaimed Ruth with gloomy conviction.

“But it doesn’t
matter,
dear child.” Angus sounded faintly irritated, an unusual circumstance with him. “She merely asked what I’d meant when I said Harling wasn’t your cousin, any more than Aunt Henrietta was the person she was pretending to be.”

“Then she did ask about me,” Ruth pointed out, in the interest of strict accuracy.

“But only in relation to Harling.
He
was what interested Charmian,” Angus explained dryly.

“I have no doubt,” Ruth agreed—but pacifically, because she very much wanted to hear how the rest of the conversation had gone. “What did you tell her, Angus?”

“Oh, substantially the truth,” he said with a shrug. “I pointed out that there was no real relationship between you and Harling—that there was merely a long-standing family friendship with Aunt Henrietta. If indeed she were Aunt Henrietta.”

“Oh, Angus!” Ruth was alarmed afresh. “Did you add that?”

“In order to complete the explanation, yes,” he said
curtly, and she felt she simply could not reproach him.

She bit her lip hard, in order to keep back a nervous exclamation. And then she managed to say quite calmly, “Did Charmian show any further curiosity?”

“About Harling?”

“No. About Aunt Henrietta.”

“I’ve told you—it was Harling in whom she was interested.”

“Yes, I know. But it’s an interesting—a provocative—statement in itself. That you think someone is pretending to be someone else, I mean. Didn’t she ask what you meant?”

For a moment Angus looked as though he very much regretted ever having embarked on this subject, and possibly he would have fobbed off anyone else with a careless denial. But it was not easy to tell Ruth less than the truth. Particularly when she regarded one in that wide
-
eyed trusting way.

“We seem to be haunted by this subject this evening.”
He laughed vexedly. “And I meant to talk of much more interesting things.” For a moment his hand rested lightly on hers, so that she felt a little quiver of excitement that had nothing whatever to do with Aunt Henrietta’s affairs.

“I’m—sorry. I don’t mean to be a bore about it—”

“You couldn’t be a bore if you tried,” he assured her.

“Thank you.” She smiled at him. “But before we leave the subject finally—and I really
will
after this—please tell me what else Charmian asked about Aunt Henrietta.”

“You are the most persistent thing under the sun, aren’t you?” he said, but he smiled at her. “She asked me why I thought Harling’s aunt was not the person she pretended to be.”

“And you—told her?”

“Yes. Why not? Aunt Henrietta and her secrets—if any—are nothing to me. Except an intriguing story.”

“Oh, Angus—I wish you hadn’t,” said Ruth, with a moderation she was far from feeling.

“It couldn’t possibly matter.” He was slightly on the defensive, and she saw it would not take much to push him into genuine annoyance. “Believe me, Charmian wasn’t even very much interested. Aunt Henrietta is nothing to
her, any more than she is to me. And anyway,” he added, with an air of broad-mindedness,
“
I could be wrong about that woman I saw years ago.”

“You mean—” Ruth brightened up considerably “—that you’re
not
really sure you did meet Aunt Henrietta before, in another identity?”

Again he gave that slightly vexed laugh. “As a matter of fact, I am sure, my pet,” he said obstinately. “But Charmian isn’t to know that. And as I said before, she isn’t really interested. It was just a good story that stirred her curiosity for a minute or two. I expect she’s forgotten all about it by now.”

Ruth didn’t expect anything of the sort. But Angus had already been very patient, she realized. To continue to flog the subject would be to come perilously near nagging. Consequently she smiled and said in a very placatory manner, “Well, anyway, thank you very much indeed for telling me the whole thing so frankly.”

He made a slight grimace.

“I wouldn’t have dared to do anything else,” he told her. “You have the most extraordinary effect on one, Ruth.”

“
I
have? What do you mean, exactly?”

“Oh—I don’t know. One simply has to tell you the exact truth, somehow.”

Ruth looked surprised.

“Don’t you tell other people the exact truth?” she inquired, and for some reason-or other this seemed to amuse him greatly, for he laughed immoderately.

“No, of course not,” He spoke with an air of careless defiance. “I tell more or less the truth. I’m not a constitutional liar, if that’s what you’re thinking. But, like most people, I suppose, I—what shall I say—sometimes dress it up a bit—alter the emphasis here and there. It’s a social custom rather than a crime, you know.”

“Do you mean,” inquired Ruth, genuinely shocked, “that you deliberately give people a false impression sometimes?”

“Oh,
no
—dear me, how solemn we’re getting about this!” He laughed. “As a general rule, I stick to the facts. But there
are
occasions when one tells less than the exact
truth, as a matter of—well, expediency. Don’t you agree?”

“No,” said Ruth simply and finally.

He still looked amused, but oddly impressed, too, by the unadorned negative.

“Never, Ruth?”

“Well, I’m not going to pretend that in the whole of my life I haven’t descended to a minor untruth,” she conceded. “But, equally, I wouldn’t pretend to myself that it was anything
but
a descent—a slight letting down of one’s principles.”

He smiled still, but his eyes were serious, and he regarded her with a touch of cynical tenderness.

“No wonder I love you,” he said.

Ruth swallowed, blinked her long lashes, and reminded herself that this was his way of making himself agreeable. Aloud she said, a little dryly, “This is one of the occasions when you’re dressing up the truth, I take it.”

“No,” he replied slowly, “it isn’t.”

This time it was he who left the short statement unadorned, and for a moment or two there was a pregnant silence between them. Then Ruth gave a shaky little laugh and said, “I think, as you remarked before, that we’re getting rather too solemn about things.”

“You mean you don’t want me to say I love you?”

“I—Angus—I don’t know—” She was a good deal agitated and could not help showing it. For, reasonably experienced though she was, she still had no idea what value to attach to Angus’s statements.

Did he mean that he loved her and wanted to marry her? Or that he loved her but didn’t want to marry her? Or that he just thought her a darling and so, in his parlance, he loved her?”

“I hadn’t—quite expected—anything like this,” she said uncertainly.

“No?” He still had that air of half-tender amusement. “Don’t tell me it was a complete surprise. Don’t men usually start making love to you when they’ve known you for a while?”

“Certainly not!” Ruth was indignant, but Angus only laughed.