"What about this?" he asked. And stood up and stripped the cover off. The initialled "J.R.," just below the lock in blood-red paint, stood out conspicuously. "Haven't you anything in here? I should think you would, a trunk this size." And meaning only to be helpful to her, pasted his hand against the top of it in indication.
She was suddenly looking, with an almost taut scrutiny, at one of the dresses, holding it upraised before her. As closely, as arrestedly, as if she were nearsighted or were seeking to find some microscopic flaw in its texture.
"Oh no," she said. "Nothing. Only rags."
"How is it I've never seen you open it? You never have, have you?"
She continued to peer at this thing in her hands. "No," she said. "I never have."
"I should imagine you would unpack. You intend to stay, don't you?" He was trying to be humorous, nothing more.
She didn't answer this time. She blinked her eyes, at the second of the two phrases, but it might have had nothing to do with that; it might simply have occurred simultaneously to it.
"Why not?" he persisted. "Why haven't you?" But with no intent whatever, simply to have an answer.
This time she took note of the question. "I--I can't," she said, somewhat unsurely.
She seemed to intend no further explanation, at least unsolicited, so he asked her: "Why?"
She waited a moment. "It's the--key. It's--ah, missing. I haven't got it. I lost it on the boat."
She had come over to the trunk while she was speaking, and was rather hastily trying to rearrange the slip cover over it, almost as if nettled because it had been disarrayed. Though this might have been an illusion due simply to the nervous quickness of her hands.
"Why didn't you tell me ?" he protested heartily, thinking merely he was doing her a service. "I'll have a locksmith come in and make you a new one. It won't take any time at all. Wait a minute, let me look at it--"
He drew the slip cover partly back again, while she almost seemed to be trying to hold it in place in opposition. Again the vivid "J.R." peered forth, but only momentarily.
He thumbed the pear-shaped brass plaque. "That should be easy enough. It's a fairly simple type of lock."
The slip cover, in her hands, swept across it like a curtain a moment later, blotting out lock and initials alike.
"I'll go out and fetch one in right now," he offered, and started forthwith for the door. "He can take the impression, and have the job done by the time we return from our--"
"You can't," she called after him with unexpected harshness of voice, that might simply have been due to the fact of her having to raise it slightly to reach him.
"Why not ?" he asked, and stopped where he was.
She let her breath out audibly. "It's Sunday."
He turned in the doorway and came slowly back again, frustrated. "That's true," he admitted. "I forgot."
"I did too, for a moment," she said. And again exhaled deeply. In a way that, though it was probably no more than an expression of annoyance at the delay, might almost have been mistaken for unutterable relief, so misleadingly like it did it sound.
12
The rite of the bath was in progress, or at least in preparation, somewhere in the background. He could tell by the sounds reaching him, though he was removed from any actual view of what was going on, being two rooms away, in the sitting room attached to their bedroom, engrossed in his newspaper. He could hear buckets of hot water, brought up in relays from the top of the kitchen stove downstairs by Aunt Sarah, being emptied into the tub with a hollow drumlike sound. Then a great stirring-up, so that it would blend properly with the cold water allowed to flow into it in its natural state from the tap. Then the testing, which was done with one carefully pointed foot, and usually followed by abrupt withdrawals and squeals of "Too cold!" or "Too hot!" as well as loud contradictions on the part of the assistant, Aunt Sarah: "No it ain't! Don't be such a baby ! Leave it in a minute, how you going to tell, you snatch it back like that? Your husban's sitting right out there; ain't you ashamed to have him know what a scairdy-cat you is ?"
"Well, he doesn't have to get in it, I do," came the plaintive answer.
Over and above this watery commotion, and cued by its semimusical tone, the canary, Dicky Bird, was singing jauntily, from the room midway between, the bedroom.
Aunt Sarah passed through the room where he sat, an empty waterbucket in each hand.
"She sure a pretty little thing," she commented. "White as milk and soft as honey. Got a fo'm like--unh-umh !"
His face suddenly suffused with color. It took quite some time for the heightened tide to descend again. He pretended the remark had not been addressed to himself, took no note of it.
She went down the stairs.
The canary's bravura efforts rose to a triumphant, sustained, almost earsplitting trill, then suddenly broke off short. That had been, even he had to admit to himself, quite a considerable amount of noise for so small a bird to emit, just then.
A strange, almost complete silence had succeeded it.
Then the rolling, somehow-undulating sound usually produced by total immersion in a body of water.
After that only an occasional watery ripple.
Aunt Sarah returned, stopped en route to shake out and inspect a fleecy towel, also warmed by courtesy of the kitchen stove, that she was taking in with her. She went on into the bedroom.
"Hullo there," he heard her say, from in there. "How my bird? How my yallo baby ?" Suddenly her voice deepened to strident urgency. "Mr. Lou! Mr. Lou !"
He went in running.
"He dead."
"He can't be. He was singing only a minute ago."
"He dead, I tell you! Look here, see for yourself--" She had removed him from the cage, was holding him pillowed on the palm of her hand.
"Maybe he needs water and seed again, like that last--" But the two receptacles were filled; Aunt Sarah had made that her responsibility ever since then.
"It ain't that."
She gave the edge of her hand a slight dip.
Something dropped over the edge of it, hung there suspended, while the body of the bird remained in position.
"His neck's done been broken."
"Maybe he fell off the perch--" Durand tried to suggest inanely, for lack of any other explanation that came to mind.
She scowled at him belligerently.
"They don't fall! What they got wings for?"
He repeated: "But he was singing only a few minutes ago--"
"What he was a few minutes ago and what he is now is two different things!"
"--and no one's been in here. No one but you and Miss Julia--"
In the silence, and incredibly, Julia could be heard in the adjoining bathroom, lightly whistling a bar or two to herself.
Then, as though belatedly realizing how unladylike she was guilty of being, she checked herself, and the water gave a playful little splash for finale.
13
It was quite by chance that he happened to go through the street in which his former lodgings were. He had no concern with them, would have passed them by with no more than a glance of fond recollection; his errand and his destination lay elsewhere entirely, and it only happened that this was the shortest way to it.
And it was equally by chance that Madame Tellier, his erstwhile landlady, happened to come out and stand for a moment in the entrance just as he was in the act of walking by.
She greeted him effusively, with shrieks of delight that could be heard for doors away in either direction, flung her arms about him like a second mother, asked about his health, his happiness, his enjoyment of married life.
"Oh, but we miss you, Louis! Your old rooms are rented again--to a pair of cold Northerners (I charge them double)--but it's not the same." She creased her rather large nose distastefully. Suddenly she was all alight again, gave her fingers a crackling snap of selfreminder. "I just remembered! I have a letter waiting for you. It's been here several days now, and I haven't seen Tom since it came, to ask where your new address is, or I would have forwarded it. He still comes around now and then to work for me, you know. Wait here, I'll bring it out to you."