The Parting Glass (4 page)

Clyde fidgeted for a moment, and then leaned
forward in his chair to look entreatingly across at her as he
spoke. “It isn’t something I can get hold of,” he said. “I don’t
know if it’s just something I thought up myself—like something you
dreamed, and then when you wake up you’re not sure if it really
happened or not. I just have this feeling that—
whatever
I
did—if I ever did try to kiss her, or if I said something—tried to
tell her—whatever it was, I just have a feeling that
she didn’t
object
, do you understand?”

Andrew Royal fell back a step, staring at him
in mixed astonishment and indignation. “Then why the devil didn’t
you ever
say
so?”

“Do you think I
would?
” demanded
Clyde, returning the look.

Andrew Royal swung abruptly away and took a
turn up and down the room, rubbing the back of his neck. Mrs. Meade
could tell he was attempting to control his feelings, and correctly
attributed this forbearance to the fact of her presence.

He turned just as abruptly and came back.
“Now, listen,” he said. “I can see what you’re trying to do. But
you stand to lose your character here, besides a decent amount of
money, and you’re going to let it go without saying even
that
to defend yourself?”

“Yes,” said Clyde. “I am.”

His face was set in a way that told Mrs.
Meade he could be as stubbornly settled as a rock when he chose,
and the badgering of a dozen Andrew Royals would not move him.

“I think I understand,” she said. Clyde
looked at her, and his glance fell somewhat confusedly from the
gentle penetration in her own blue-gray eyes. “You were beginning
to fall for her, weren’t you.”

He admitted it, in a very low husky tone. “I
thought—that she liked me a little,” he said, “and that—but it’s no
use now. I can never say anything to her; she’d only think worse of
me.”

“I would not be so sure of that,” said Mrs.
Meade. “Because there is just one thing that is certain—
Dorene
knows the truth about what happened yesterday afternoon
.”

* * *

“Well,” Royal admitted, after he had locked
Clyde in the cell again and come back to see Mrs. Meade to the
door, “I won’t deny it, looks like you’re right again. It’s pretty
clear to me—he’s keeping his mouth shut to protect the girl’s good
name, and ruining his own while he’s at it.”

“Wouldn’t any gentleman do the same?” said
Mrs. Meade.

“Well…yes,” said Royal, in a kind of
indistinct growl. “But what burns me is that he
has
to. With
anybody else he could have just apologized for losing his head and
it’d have been forgot well enough—but not with Aunt Asher, oh,
no!”

“But it still doesn’t quite fit,” said Mrs.
Meade, shaking her head in impulsive dissatisfaction. “There’s one
thing I still can’t account for. What about the three taps?”

“Three tap—oh, blast the three taps!” said
Royal. “Who knows what they were. Probably was in some other room
and didn’t have anything to do with it at all.”

“Perhaps,” said Mrs. Meade, “but when I was
sitting there in my rocking-chair yesterday afternoon, and heard
them—without the least idea that anything was about to go wrong—my
impression was that they came from across the hall. And yet that
would mean something else entirely, wouldn’t it?”

“What’s eating you now?” said Royal
inelegantly, putting his head on one side and squinting at her from
under a bushy eyebrow. “Earlier you said you thought there was more
to the story than folks figured. You’ve got what you wanted now;
you’ve heard the rest. And you’re not satisfied?”

“We’ve heard more of the story, yes,” Mrs.
Meade corrected him, “but I believe we still have not heard the
whole
story. It can’t be complete if there is something left
out. And the three taps—”

“The three taps,” said Royal under his
breath. “Well, what about them?”

“Just this,” said Mrs. Meade. “When two
people are in a room together, what occasion would one of them have
to rap on the door? Isn’t that usually what happens just before
someone is
admitted
to a room? Couldn’t it mean that, for at
least a part of that hour which is unaccounted for, either Clyde or
Dorene was not in the room at all?”

Andrew Royal gave a groan rather like a
long-suffering cow. “Mrs. Meade, have you got to make everything so
complicated?”

Mrs. Meade started slightly, as if at
something she was thinking. “Of course,” she said half to herself.
“That was it. I knew there was something odd.”

“What was?”

“Did you notice—Clyde said that Dorene
offered him a drink
before he went?
And yet it couldn’t have
been very far into the hour at all.
Did
he leave—? But no,
that doesn’t fit—” She was speaking to herself again, in fragments
of half-formed thought, her forehead knit with perplexity.

“Sounds more like she wished he would leave,”
said the sheriff.

“Perhaps,” said Mrs. Meade, “you are not so
very far wrong.”

She was thinking back—to a dinner-table
conversation, an expression in Dorene Leighton’s eyes, a murmur
overheard through a door set ajar. She nodded her head slowly.

And then she quoted, unexpectedly, “‘And all
the harm I’ve ever done, alas, it was to none but me…’”

“What?” said Andrew Royal, even more
surprised than before.

“Nothing,” said Mrs. Meade. “Nothing, only it
seemed rather apt…for both of them, perhaps.” She paused, and then
spoke slowly. “Has it ever occurred to you, Andrew, that this
entire incident may have been an elaborate production that someone
has put on to cover up something very simple?”

“If that’s what happened,” said Royal, who
had run out of objections, “then they’ve done a doggoned good job
of it.”

* * *

Miss Asher, a workbasket containing her
embroidery in her hand, opened the door to her room. She paused on
the threshold. Dorene was sitting by the window at the other side
of the room, looking out of it. She did not move nor turn her head
at her aunt’s entrance, as if she had not even heard. She seemed a
quiet, colorless shadow herself, sitting there in the
late-afternoon shade.

Miss Asher closed the door. “There you are,”
she said. “I was looking for you.”

Dorene looked down, and stretched out her
folded hands on her lap, listlessly. “I was in my room,” she said
in a voice to match. “I heard Mrs. Meade come upstairs, a little
while ago, and I thought that she might come over to see me. So I
came in here.” She looked out the window again. “I—didn’t want to
see her just then.”

“That’s just as well,” said Miss Asher
grimly. She crossed to the bureau and put down her workbasket.

Dorene said, with a little difficulty,
“She’s—been very kind to me.”

Miss Asher shot a sharp sideways glance at
her. Dorene was still staring drearily out of the window. There was
another moment of silence. Then as if the girl’s silence itself had
irritated her, Miss Asher turned to face her niece with impatience,
but no abating of her own dignity. “You must stop this foolishness,
Dorene. You will forget about it all soon enough.”

“Will I?” It was spoken very low.

Miss Asher pressed her lips firmly together
to restrain her irritation, and then after a moment she spoke
again. “Sheriff Royal is coming here again tomorrow morning to
settle about the money,” she said. “You and I will see him
together. And you will not make an exhibition of yourself as you
did yesterday.” Another pause. “You
know
that you have no
other choice, Dorene.”

Dorene did not answer. Miss Asher gave her
another look of disapproval, and then turned back to the bureau and
opened a drawer.

* * *

When Mr. Hollister, his clinking sample case
in his hand, climbed the stairs that afternoon and pushed open the
door to his room, he halted for a second in understandable surprise
at the spectacle within—that of a genteel-looking middle-aged lady
standing near a chair with her hand just stretched out to touch the
heavy gray overcoat draped over the back of it, an almost comical
expression of alarm and dismay on her face.

“Oh
dear
me,” exclaimed the lady,
regarding the newcomer with a flustered and apologetic manner. “I
am terribly sorry—you must pardon me, Mr. Hollister; I believe I
must have entered the wrong room. I came up to see Miss Leighton,
you see, but I must have gone past her door and opened the wrong
one. I had thought she was out, until I saw your coat on the chair
here just now, and realized my mistake.” She advanced to meet him,
with her hands clasped in a rather helpless manner and an abashed
half-smile. “You will forgive me, I hope, Mr. Hollister?”

“Why, certainly, ma’am,” said Hollister,
taking off his hat from the top and making a little bow, in one
glib motion on which he rather prided himself. “Nothing like an
honest mistake, is what I always say.”

“I really can’t think how I came to make it!
I suppose I must have misread the number on the door—I’m afraid my
eyes are not what they once were.”

Hollister scented a professional opportunity.
“Do you get pain in ’em regularly, ma’am?”

“Well, not
regularly
,” said Mrs.
Meade, adapting herself to the situation, “but sometimes—”

That was all the encouragement Hollister
needed. “Then let me introduce to you,” he said, putting his sample
case down on the bureau and beginning to energetically undo the
buckles, “the re
mark
able qualities of Pollard’s Proven
Remedial Tonic. It might be just the thing you need. You’ll go a
long way before you find anything as helpful as Pollard’s Proven,
ma’am. Its remarkable remedial qualities have caused comment from
coast to coast.”

“Have they really?” said Mrs. Meade, looking
appropriately intrigued.

“Oh, yes; yes indeed.” He had been extracting
a number of small identical black medicine bottles from the case,
and set them up in a row along the edge of the bureau with the
labels outward as if to create the impression of a shelf in a
druggist’s window. “Pollard’s Proven is your resort for just about
anything that may be wrong with you, ma’am. It relieves headache,
earache, toothache, back-ache, throat-ache, congestion,
inflammation, and cold-in-the-head.”

“Dear me, it must be powerful,” said Mrs.
Meade.

“It is that, ma’am. Powerful’s an excellent
choice of words, ma’am.” Mr. Hollister spoke so feelingly, it was
evident he had never had such an understanding and appreciative
potential customer. “It may be just the thing what’ll help you with
your eyesight.”

Mrs. Meade did not inquire which of Pollard’s
Proven Remedial Qualities would be able to do that, which
undoubtedly raised her another point in the commercial gentleman’s
favor. Mr. Hollister had arranged himself smilingly beside his
merchandise with his hand resting on the bureau, looking like he
was posing for a photograph which would be handed down to
posterity, so perhaps making any intelligent remark without
betraying her state of mind was beyond her just then.

She retreated into her prior apologetic
manner. “I feel I ought to buy a bottle, just to make up for the
trouble I’ve given you, Mr. Hollister!”

“Oh, it’s no—I mean, don’t let that be your
reason, ma’am,” said Hollister, catching himself on the brink of
repudiating a sale. “Let Pollard’s Proven speak for itself.”

So on that grand note the transaction was
formalized, and following a small exchange of currency, accompanied
by many exchanged courtesies, Mrs. Meade departed in possession of
a bottle of Pollard’s Proven Remedial Tonic, and an additional
piece of information of which Mr. Hollister was entirely
unaware.

* * *

The blinds in the hotel parlor were mostly
closed, so that the mid-morning sunlight they admitted in thin
strips was not enough to dispel the shadows behind the stiff
mahogany-and-horsehair furniture, but it illuminated the fine
particles of dust floating in the air that are to be found in all
closed-up rooms. The dim lighting, the rather stark-looking potted
plants standing up in the corners and the dust together gave the
parlor somewhat of a funereal air. The impression was completed by
the presence of Miss Asher, who was sitting bolt upright on the
sofa when Mrs. Meade entered the room. Dorene Leighton sat in a
chair near her aunt. She wore pale gray, and the shadows beneath
her eyes were nearly the same color. Her eyes rested numbly on the
floor; she seemed to have dwindled even smaller, as if all the
spirit and life had gone out of her already small form. Mrs. Meade
looked at her for a moment, and then turned toward Miss Asher, who
had not moved except to turn a sharp disapproving eye in the
direction of the intruder.

“Good morning,” said Mrs. Meade in a low
pleasant voice that did not disturb the hush of the parlor. “Is
Sheriff Royal here yet? I had hoped to speak to him.”

“No, he is not,” said Miss Asher, in a tone
which said that the icebergs at the North Pole had no intention of
melting anytime soon either.

Mrs. Meade did not reply. With a gentle,
polite smile that held the faintest breath of cool breeze itself,
she sat down opposite the two ladies to wait.

Fortunately the wait was not long. In a
moment or two there came a little noise outside, and the door
opened. Andrew Royal escorted Clyde Renfrew into the room, giving
him a little shove and regarding him with a grim expression and
mutter that were probably for Miss Asher’s benefit. Clyde’s
dejection of the previous day had been replaced by a kind of
determined resignation, whether assumed for the encounter or not.
He ventured a glance at Dorene as he sat down. Dorene was very
white, her eyes fixed on the carpet straight in front of her.