Steven took her hand and in an encouraging gesture touched it gently with his lips, and Rue smiled her gratitude and went down the curving stairway, clinging a little to the polished railing, her short train swishing gently on the steps. Would Brule be pleased with her appearance?
But it wasn’t Brule who waited for her in the library.
It was Andy Crittenden. Dr Andrew Crittenden.
She stopped short on the threshold. Expecting Brule, it was disconcerting to see instead a tall, lean figure whose youthfully graceful shoulders and blond hair she instantly recognized. He was standing with his back to the doorway, pouring himself a drink from the bottle and siphon which stood on a tray on a table. But she knew instantly that it was Andy Crittenden, for he was as familiar a figure as was Brule. How many hundreds of times had she bobbed to her feet when he entered a hospital room, swiftly, yet with an appearance of cool leisure and a charming smile as was his way. Brule was reverenced by the nurses, sometimes hated, always feared, instantly obeyed. But Andy was adored; they hung on his words; they invented excuses for seeking those words. He was young, his eyebrows had a humorous lift; his orders were terse and brisk and not pompous. And he had a way with women, a charm that went straight to the nurses’ hearts. Except, that is, with Rue. She hated men who had a way with women. She hated men whom nurses from their feminine-burdened world adored. And she hated Andy Crittenden after she had nursed Crystal.
But he was like a son to Brule except in years; he shared Brule’s offices; he had been from the first Brule’s protégé and friend. Even after Crystal’s death and the things Brule must have guessed, Brule still was Andy’s best friend. He sent him patients, he permitted Andy to pinch-hit for him when Brule himself had other and more important irons in the fire; if Brule had a confidant, Rue thought, it must be Andy Crittenden. Brule, then, was as sensitive to Andy’s charm as any of Andy’s fluttering female patients. There was nothing Rue could do about it; and she had been trained in a hard school to keep quiet when she could do nothing. She had to admit — for Rue had the habit of honesty — that Andy was a good doctor, he might even have had the brilliant career that had already begun for him without Brule’s help. She had nursed for Andy as she had for Brule, and she gave him grudgingly a professional respect. And because of Brule she’d had to accord him a surface friendliness.
He emptied his glass and poured another, while Rue, a small straight figure, watched him with implacable eyes. Drinking too much, too, she thought; a man as young as Andy Crittenden didn’t need two stiff highballs to brace himself for — well, for what? Why was he there? And where was Brule?
He put down the glass and then sensed her presence and turned. He wore tails and a white tie, and all the nurses in the hospital would probably have swooned away from sheer admiration. Rue’s mouth tightened. He said: “Ah, there you are. I was waiting for you.”
She came into the room toward him. Odd how a beautiful gown gave you poise and an ability to appear gracious whether you felt gracious or not. “For me?”
He was ill at ease. He said: “Yes, of course. Didn’t Brule telephone?”
Andy always knew more of Brule’s affairs than she, his wife, knew. Was it possible that she was jealous of Andy? No, certainly not. She had other and fully sufficient reasons for her hatred.
He noted her hesitation. He said quickly: “I expect he didn’t have time. He was hurrying off. He said he had a patient. He meant to telephone to you himself. He can’t make it tonight. He — he sent me instead. If you don’t mind.”
“You mean he can’t go?” It was a disappointment; she’d been depending upon Brule’s assurance and support.
“Brule ought to have telephoned. He — it’s one of those things — he said he couldn’t help it. He was awfully sorry. Do you mind awfully if I — take you instead?”
“Thank you. It’s kind of you. But I think I won’t go tonight. I — I didn’t really feel up to it anyway. I — was only going because Brule wanted me to go. I —” To her own astonishment and with a slight feeling of shame she resorted to the old and tried excuse. “I’ve had a headache all day…”
He was watching her, his blue eyes narrowed and keen.
“You look well,” he said rather dryly. “I never saw you look better. Or knew you to have a headache.”
Before she realized his intention he came to her, touched her cheek with the back of his hand then put cool strong fingers on her pulse. Never lie to a doctor, thought Rue absurdly as she forced herself to meet his eyes openly. For a sharp, still instant they stood there facing each other.
Then Andy released her wrist.
“I want you to go,” he said abruptly. “There’s a special reason. I’ve got to talk to you.”
L
ater, in the warm motor, purring quietly along Michigan Boulevard, she wondered a little that she had given in so easily. Was it habit, because she had for five years obeyed Brule and obeyed Andy’s least and smallest order? Was it because she forgot for the moment that she was now Mrs Brule Hatterick, enviable in her security, in her luxury, in her position?
Her sable wrap was light and warm about her shoulders; she pulled on her long white gloves slowly. The tonneau was warm and deliciously comfortable in contrast to the glimpses of cold, wind-swept streets through which they passed. The Wrigley Building rose white, wraithlike under its floodlights; on the other side was the lighted entrance of Tribune Square below tier after tier of offices, lighted only here and there, which rose into the dark night. There was a bitterly cold wind off the lake, and flurries of snow which looked unutterably desolate swept along empty streets. The bridge was up, and they waited for it.
Andy, beside her, took off his opera hat, smoothed it thoughtfully and replaced it. His white scarf came up to his chin, his profile was clear in the half-light. From the river below, lost in the darkness, a freight boat tooted hoarsely.
Andy leaned over and rolled up the glass between the tonneau and the front seat where Kendal, the chauffeur, sat, straight-necked and imperturbable.
How well Andy knew the car! How instantly his gloved hand had found the correct lever when he closed the window!
Rue wondered what he wanted to say to her. Evidently he didn’t want the chauffeur to overhear. It was something about Brule of course. Was Andy intending to take her to task for some unconscious failure in her role?
Even in the car, which Crystal had used almost exclusively, there was a lingering, faint scent of roses. Rue moved restlessly and looked out the window. The scent of roses always reminded her strongly of Crystal; it was almost as if it were intentional on Crystal’s part. Crystal, that tall, thin woman with ash-blonde hair, into whose place Rue had stepped.
How many times, Rue wondered, had Andy, top-hatted and white-tied and correct, escorted Crystal? Well, if he had anything to say, let him say it.
The barge, unseen in the shadows below, tooted again. Other cars had halted around them; their motors throbbed, and the medicinal smell of alcohol from radiators drifted upon the cold air.
Andy said suddenly in the semidarkness: “I think we’d better go to the opera, if only for the first act. Then we can leave and go somewhere we can talk. Unheard.”
Rue turned with a jerk.
“Why, really, Andy! As if anything you have to tell me can’t be said openly.”
Andy interrupted her.
“You are quite wrong. You don’t seem to understand… The bridge is going down again. We’ll not be late.”
Rue gave a small, rather nervous laugh.
“What is wrong, Andy? You sound quite forbidding. Is it — have I been neglecting Brule?”
“No,” said Andy. “You’ve not been neglecting Brule. It’s just that I think it’s best for you to be seen at the opera as if nothing had happened.”
“As if —” Again Rue turned abruptly toward him. “What on earth do you mean? What has happened? Brule —”
“Oh, Brule’s all right. Nothing has happened. It was just a chance expression. Don’t pay any attention to what I say.”
Incoherence was not one of Andy Crittenden’s traits. He had as a rule wit and decision. But he was also obstinate; as obstinate as Brule but not in Brule’s unpleasant manner.
It meant now that whatever he had to say he found difficult and that he would take his own good time about saying it. Well, then she could be as obstinate.
Besides, he could have nothing very serious to say; she hastily canvassed the possibilities; he might have a message from Brule to her, and that held unpredictable potentiality. Otherwise there was nothing.
The bridge went down, and the stream of motors moved smoothly forward across the bridge, with the huge, lighted bulk of the merchandise mart glowing above the river at their right. Into the stream of traffic along Michigan with the lighted store windows looking bright and cold. There were few pedestrians, and those they saw were hurrying, bent against the savage wind.
Andy sat frowning, saying nothing. They turned on Randolph Street, passed, now, crowds and lighted moving-picture theaters. There was Henrici’s, in a curious way the very heart of Chicago; it had been there and it would be there, catching the flow and pulse of the life of a great city. The theaters were lighted; already girls in fluffy long skirts with their youthful, very dressed-up escorts, were pouring into the Sherman Hotel on their way to the College Inn. They crossed under the stark, dark beams of the elevated, and a string of lighted cars rumbled and rattled swiftly over their heads. Kendal turned again on Wacker Drive; cars were thicker here, and became increasingly numerous until as they crossed Washington Boulevard they were obliged to crawl along, a foot at a time, in a flood of other long, chauffeur-driven cars, which gave glimpses of women, furred and jeweled, unassailable in their security against the cold, against the traffic hazards, against anything that was unsafe.
Well, she was safe. Cinderella. Married to the king of her world. Who could be safer?
She saw herself, suddenly, scurrying along Randolph, almost exactly a year ago now; taking the streetcar, transferring to a bus, clutching her little leather bag, aware that her nurse’s cape gave her a kind of immunity. She had gone that way the day she went from the hospital to nurse Crystal.
Now she was riding so softly, so safely; so warmed and protected and secure, in her own car.
They were almost there. She fumbled with the fastening of her glove, and Andy saw it and turned, taking off his own gloves.
“Let me,” he said and fastened the glove swiftly and with the certain deftness of his surgeon’s fingers.
The car drew up at last before the entrance to the Civic Opera. Women, their gowns shimmering in all colors below their furs, were crossing the wide walk quickly, so the wind would not disturb their elaborately coifed hair. Men were assisting their ladies’ progress with one hand and clutching their top hats with the other. The walk before the Civic Opera entrance was always windy, always cold.
An attendant opened the car door. The cold wind struck against her silk-clad ankles and thin little silver sandals. Andy paused to speak to Kendal. A newsboy was near, shouting his wares above the din of motors and cars and the shouted orders of the mounted policemen. Andy turned, saw the newsboy and lingered to buy a paper and, in the cold and wind and under the great lights, to glance quickly and anxiously along the headlines. He frowned and threw the paper down and led her into the warm, bright confusion of the lobby.
He knew, even, the number of the box which the Hattericks shared and had shared for years with two other families, and established Rue in her pink plush chair expertly. No one else was in the box that night, and Rue was glad. The overture had begun; the rustle and murmur was dying down, although new arrivals constantly drew the attention of the battery of opera glasses and delicate small lorgnettes.
In Chicago, and in spite of sundry vicissitudes, the opera is still fashionable. Below the great, modernly rectangular proscenium, the orchestra seats were ablaze with color and jewels; behind them and above, the boxes were like velvet jewel cases themselves, flatteringly in the softest pink, only a little shaded by Chicago’s soot, And, like jewel cases, they set off beauty and color and glitter.
“Everyone is here,” said Andy. “Hello — there’s Alicia.” There was a note of surprise in his voice which Rue was aware of even as she turned to follow his look.
“Over there,” he said. “With the Streeters.”
“Oh, I see. How lovely she is.”
Alicia Pelham was lovely; Rue thought she was the loveliest woman she had ever seen, so utterly beautiful that it was actually difficult to talk to her — you were so transfixed with admiration. Alicia was probably in her late thirties and certainly more beautiful than she had been at any time, for her beauty was the kind that richens and glows with maturity. Her black hair was shot with unashamed gray, triumphant because of her small, unlined and classically beautiful face. Her eyes were deep, brilliant gray like jewels, except that only an emerald approached their brilliancy and hardness, and an emerald is green. She was tall and white-skinned, with jet-black eyelashes which accented and never veiled the brilliancy of her eyes. Her face was pointed and small; her lips deeply crimson over incredibly white and perfect teeth. She smiled seldom and faintly; yet she was a brilliant conversationalist.
She had been for years Crystal’s best friend. She had no money in later years, and Crystal had calmly supplied her with a sum which met Alicia’s living expenses, and Alicia as calmly had accepted it, as well as a substantial legacy at the time of Crystal’s death. They had been schoolmates; they had gone to debut parties together; Alicia had been Crystal’s bridesmaid at her wedding, but Alicia had never married. Not, Rue knew, for lack of offers. Alicia Pelham could have had almost any man she wanted by lifting one of her slender, long, white fingers.
She had never married; she lived in her own small, perfectly furnished apartment; she had many friends; she went constantly; her name was almost never out of the society columns. Somehow she managed, with no visible source of income, to clothe herself beautifully; probably the dressmakers were glad to have Miss Alicia Pelham’s patronage. She wore jewels too; emeralds as a rule, which were supposed to have come from the wreck of the Pelham fortune. She opened bazaars; she greeted distinguished guests; her small, perfectly cooked dinners were famous among a chosen few. Somehow she managed to have pictures done by the very latest and most fashionable painter; the cleverest writers, visiting the city, somehow turned up to lunch with her at the Foreign Club; the best-known actresses and singers and playwrights appeared at her small after-the-theater suppers.
Always an intimate of the Hatterick household, she had at last become engaged to Steven Hendrie. The engagement had lasted for two years. Rue thought, privately, that Alicia was not too anxious to give up her own independent, utterly free life; her little trips abroad with friends who, Rue imagined, obligingly paid the expenses; her own desirability as a single, unattached woman guest at those dinners where a single woman is so urgently needed to fill in. Perhaps, after all those years, Alicia was simply and comprehensibly loath to give up her own manner of life. Certainly there was no rift between her and Steven. Certainly Steven was a man any woman would have been proud to marry. Rue’s heart warmed at the thought of-Steven.
She looked at Andy. He was still frowning at Alicia. And he looked, she realized suddenly, terribly worried. In the shadow of the motor she had not perceived that. Now, in the light, she saw the tenseness of his mouth, the small sharp line between his eyebrows that, in the old days, had meant he was frightened about a patient. Something quick and cold and uneasy clutched at her. All his talk in the car, then, had not been just talk. There really was something troublesome that he knew and wanted to tell her. She had been wrong to permit herself to be confused or annoyed. She said suddenly, reversing unconsciously to her old manner of address:
“Doctor Crittenden —”
She had not called him that since her marriage.
He turned quickly.
“Andy, I mean. I — there is something wrong. I didn’t understand. You must tell me.”
He hesitated and glanced over his shoulder at the pink curtains over the door into the box.
“All right,” he said. “If you must have it. No one can hear; it’s as good a place as any. Something pretty awful has happened. I — I don’t know how to tell you. I’ve been trying to find some way. I —”
Waves of music crashed around them. Rue put her hands on the railing of the box. He said unexpectedly:
“It’s about Crystal.”
“Crystal?”
“Yes. It’s — God, Rue, I hate to tell you this. But you’ve got to know. You see, they’ve been inquiring. They came to see me. Because I was her doctor, you see. I was the attendant physician.”
“I don’t understand you.” It was herself, but her voice sounded strange and muted by the music.
“Of course you don’t. You see — well, it’s the police. They came to my office this afternoon. Rue, don’t scream — don’t faint — you look so white. I oughtn’t to have told you here. But there’s not much time —”
Rue gripped the railing with gloved, numb hands. What monstrous thing was he trying to tell her? She heard him say, clear and close to her ear:
“They say Crystal was murdered. And you see, you were her nurse. And you married Brule.”
It was sheer luck, though Rue was quite unconscious of it, that the lights were lowered just then. Vaguely she knew that Andy had taken her hand; had moved his chair closer to her, was trying to tell her more, was warning her, was saying low and urgently:
“Rue, be careful. Don’t say anything. What a fool I am! I oughtn’t to have told you here. Rue, Rue —”
“I was with her when she died.” Her own words were dragged from some enormous, dizzying cavern.
“Look here. We’ve made an appearance here. The house is dark. No one will notice. Let’s go. Come —”
He was propelling her to her feet, quietly to the rear of the box; the curtain was up, and a tremendous, lovely wave of sound swept the house. No one would see. No one would notice their departure. They were outside the box. They were walking swiftly along the heavily carpeted floors. Here was the elevator. The attendant looked at them curiously. Andy said tersely, as if his voice were a wire stretched tight:
“There’s a drugstore somewhere near, isn’t there?”
The boy said yes, and gestured. Bright lights and the cold wind sweeping her skirt tight against her body, entangling her feet in her own train. Andy had a tight grip on her arm. How cold and sharp the wind was! How bright and exposed the long, platformlike walk seemed.
Then they reached the drugstore, bright and shining and smelling of food. It was warm there; too warm. The heat and the lights were unutterably confusing. She was sitting at a small, white-topped table. A boy came to ask for their order, and his face swam hazily against the warmth and lightness.