Part 1 (1/2)

The Twenty-Fourth of June.

by Grace S. Richmond.

CHAPTER I

THE CURTAIN RISES ON A HOME

None of it might ever have happened, if Richard Kendrick had gone into the house of Mr. Robert Gray, on that first night, by the front door.

For, if he had made his first entrance by that front door, if he had been admitted by the maidservant in proper fas.h.i.+on and conducted into Judge Calvin Gray's presence in the library, if he had delivered his message, from old Matthew Kendrick, his grandfather, and had come away again, ushered out of that same front door, the chances are that he never would have gone again. In which case there would have been no story to tell.

It all came about--or so it seems--from its being a very rainy night in late October, and from young Kendrick's wearing an all-concealing motoring rain-coat and cap. He had been for a long drive into the country, and had just returned, mud-splashed, when his grandfather, having taken it into his head that a message must be delivered at once, requested his grandson to act as his messenger.

So the young man had impatiently bolted out with the message, had sent his car rus.h.i.+ng through the city streets, and had become a still muddier and wetter figure than before when he stood upon the porch of the old Gray homestead, well out in the edge of the city, and put thumb to the bell.

His hand was stayed by the shrill call of a small boy who dashed up on the porch out of the dusk. ”You can't get in that way,” young Ted Gray cried. ”Something's happened to the lock--they've sent for a man to fix it. Come round to the back with me--I'll show you.”

So this was why Richard Kendrick came to be conducted by way of the tall-pillared rear porch into the house through the rear door of the wide, central hall. There was no light at this end of the hall, and the old-fas.h.i.+oned, high-backed settee which stood there was in shadow.

With a glance at the caller's muddy condition the young son of the house decided it the part of prudence to a.s.sign him this waiting-place, while he himself should go in search of his uncle. The lad had seen the big motor-car at the gate; quite naturally he took its driver for a chauffeur.

Ted looked in at the library door; his uncle was not there. He raced off upstairs, not noting the change which had already taken place in the visitor's appearance with the removal of the muddy coat and cap.

Richard Kendrick now looked a particularly personable young man, well built, well dressed, of the brown-haired, gray-eyed, clear-skinned type.

The eyes were very fine; the nose and mouth had the lines of distinction; the chin was--positive. Altogether the young man did not look the part he had that day been playing--that of the rich young idler who drives a hundred and fifty miles in a powerful car, over the worst kind of roads, merely for the sake of diversion and a good luncheon.

While he waited Richard considered the hall, at one end of which he sat in the shadow. There was something very homelike about this hall. The quaint landscape paper on the walls, the perceptibly worn and faded crimson Turkey carpeting on the floors, the wide, spindle-bal.u.s.trade staircase with the old clock on its landing; more than all, perhaps, on an October night like this, the warm glow from a lamp with crystal pendants which stood on the table of polished mahogany near the front door--all these things combined to give the place a quite distinctive look of home.

There were one or two other touches in the picture worth mentioning, the touches which spoke of human life. An old-fas.h.i.+oned hat-tree just opposite the rear door was hung full with hats. A heavy ulster lay over a chair close by, and two umbrellas stood in the corner. And over hat-rack, hats, ulster, and chair, with one end of silken fringe caught upon one of the umbrella ribs, had been flung by some careless hand, presumably feminine, a long silken scarf of the most intense rose-colour, a hue so vivid, as the light caught it from the landing above, that it seemed almost to be alive.

From various parts of the house came sounds--of voices and of footsteps, more than once of distant laughter. Far above somewhere a child's high call rang out. Nearer at hand some one touched the keys of a piano, playing s.n.a.t.c.hes of Schumann--_Der Nussbaum, Mondnacht, Die Lotosblume_.

Richard recognized the airs which thus reached his ears, and was sorry when they ceased.

Now there might be nothing in all this worth describing if the effect upon the observer had not been one to him so unaccustomed. Though he had lived to the age of twenty-eight years, he had never set foot in a place which seemed so curiously like a vague dream he had somewhere at the back of his head. For the last two years he had lived with his grandfather in the great pile of stone which they called home. If this were no real home, the young man had never had one. He had spent periods of his life in various sorts of dwelling-places; in private rooms at schools and college--always the finest of their kind--in clubs, on s.h.i.+ps, in railway trains; but no time at all in any place remotely resembling the house in which he now waited, a stranger in every sense of the word, more strange to the everyday, fine type of home known to the American of good birth and breeding than may seem credible as it is set down.

”Hold on there!” suddenly shouted a determined male voice from somewhere above Richard. A door banged, there was a rush of light-running feet along the upper hall, closely followed by the tread of heavier ones. A burst of the gayest laughter was succeeded by certain deep grunts, punctuated by little noises as of panting breath and half-stifled merriment. It was easy to determine that a playful scuffle of some sort was going on overhead, which seemed to end only after considerable inarticulate but easily translatable protest on the part of the weaker person involved.

Then came an instant's silence, a man's ringing laugh of triumph; next, in a girl's voice, a little breathless but of a quality to make the listener p.r.i.c.k up ears already alert, these most unexpected words:

”'O, it is _excellent_ To have a giant's strength; but it is _tyrannous_ To use it like a giant!'”

”Is it, indeed, Miss Arrogance?” mocked the deeper voice. ”Well, if you had given it back at once, as all laws of justice, not to mention propriety, demanded, I should not have had to force it away from you.

Oh, I say, did I really hurt that wrist, or are you shamming?”

”Shamming! You big boys have no idea how brutally violent you are when you want some little thing you ought not to have. It aches like anything,” retorted the other voice, its very complaints uttered in such melodious tones of contralto music that the listener found himself wis.h.i.+ng with all his might to know if the face of its owner could by any possibility match the loveliness of her voice. Dark, he fancied she must be, and young, and strong--of education, of a gay wit, yet of a temper--all this the listener thought he could read in the voice.

”Poor little wilful girl! Did she get hurt, then, trying to have her own way? Come in here, jade, and I'll fix it up for you,” the deeper tones declared.

Footsteps again; a door closed. Silence succeeded for a minute; then the Schumann music began again, a violin accompanying. And suddenly, directly opposite the settee, a door swung slowly open, the hand upon the k.n.o.b invisible. A picture was presented to the stranger's eyes as if somebody had meant to show it to him. He could but look. Anybody, seeing the picture, would have looked and found it hard to turn his eyes away.