Camille, at the time, had decided that he was as mad as a hatter, as mad as two hatters, as mad as Lincoln and Bennett, but none the less the most adorable old dear in the world. And now, as she hacked at one of the partridges, she wondered whether he would be coming down with more tales of Shri’s high jinks.
Behind her something moved. She half turned and, catching a side view of Archibald, exclaimed at him:
“I rang and rang! This salad is—”
“Beg pardon, mem. Mr. Mike wanted a taxi, and just now I had to let Doctor Dix in. Would you wish some soup, mem? There’s a filet of sole and—”
“For Heaven’s sake! I can’t eat backward! Get me some coffee. Isn’t Mr. Vulper coming down?”
“I’ll see, mem.”
He turned and went, and the girl took up again the paper, in which she found a fashion article that, like the salad, lacked brains. Before she had finished, Archibald was again behind her.
“Well?” she asked, without looking up.
After a moment, getting no other answer than the inarticulate sound that some people make when eating, she turned and saw that the servant looked like a ghost with a stomachache. Quite white, he was opening and closing his mouth. Calmly she surveyed him.
“What is the matter with you?”
Archibald swallowed.
“It’s Mr. Vulper, mem.”
“Well, what about him?”
He swallowed again.
“Oh, mem, I don’t rightly know. But Doctor Dix, he—”
Camille was on her feet so quickly that she overturned the chair. She ran through the drawing room, out into the hall, and up the stairs to the study at the head of them. There, in a chair, one arm pendant, his head hanging over it, the old man lay. Bending over him was Dix. As Camille entered, the physician straightened, looked at her.
“Cardiac paralysis,” he announced.
Camille’s hands had gone to her throat. In her riding costume, she always looked like a handsome boy. Now she looked like a thoroughly frightened one. From her eyes two round tears leaped like beads. Ever since she could remember, the dead man had been good to her. Though no relative whatever, he had been father and mother to this girl who now, in all the world, had no one—except a trust company, which is without a soul.
A sense of desolation, immense, unescapable, swept over her. She had so taken him for granted! The fact that he was old had never troubled her. It was natural for him to be old. She could not remember that he had ever been anything else. And now he had gone. The memory of little negligences to him came and hurt her. But behind it, behind everything, was the consciousness, selfish, yet human, that she was alone.
Dix, who had moved from the chair to the table and who had in his hand a paper, was talking at her, though about what she did not know. But gradually she realized that what he was saying concerned a will. As if she cared! But he was showing it to her—a sheet of paper, torn in two, half covered with the dead man’s writing, across which was crawled, “Shri Shankira.”
Utterly unstrung, at sight of that, for a second she stared, then she screamed.
For that one second, before her had passed a vision of apes, of peacocks, of apricot temples, and of some priest of Siva, recovering there from a catalepsy, self-induced, during which his entity, exteriorized, had crossed the seas, gibbered at Vulper, and—
It was then that she screamed.
“He killed him?”
Dix, tossing the paper aside, turned sharply to her.
“What do you mean?”
But now, though still unstrung, the girl’s common sense was asserting itself.
“I thought you meant that Shri had done it.”
“I meant nothing of the kind,” Dix impatiently retorted. “This Shri business he wrote himself. Only an hour ago, I warned him, and for the twentieth time, that at his age chloral was fatal. It was that that did it. I can’t be sorry enough. Apart from which, he had intended to leave you everything. Now it will all go to Mike, and you’ll be put in the street. Where is Mike?”
“Mike? He’s gone.”
Dix, moving from the table, looked in at the open safe, looked closer, fumbled it with his eyes, plucked at his beard, and turned.
“There was a pile of money there and a package. They’ve disappeared.”
That disappearance he momentarily considered. Then he dismissed it.
“Bah! He may have thrown them out of the window. He was quite capable of it.”
But there were other things to be attended to, and, seeing that the girl, for the time being at least, was totally unstrung, he went back to the table and rang.
III
“Don’t say you won’t change your mind,” Glendenning, with his equine air, was protesting at Camille, whose being put into the street was, of course, entirely figurative.
After the funeral and the rush of reporters who, from the inexperienced girl, had pulled more than they had expected—the will unsigned and destroyed, the sudden demise, the missing manuscript, the missing money, the missing heir, out of all of which they made very good copy—after that, the public administrator had stepped in, and notices had appeared announcing that “the People of the State of New York, by the grace of God free and independent, sent greeting to Michael Vulper, whose residence could not, after diligent inquiry, be ascertained, and citing him” and so forth and so forth.
But the greeting of the free and independent people had been ignored; so also had the citation. On the verbiage of both, Mike had appeared to be obscurely, but disdainfully turning his back. Yet, everything being possible, it may have been that neither had reached him; precisely as it may also have been that he was otherwise engaged.
Meanwhile, around the corner, on Riverside Drive, Camille had taken an apartment, furnished it after a fashion of her own, which was partly New York and partly Peking, put herself and the servants into it, and later had gone with Kate Delafield to Aiken.
There
