Evening Star Newspaper, December 16, 1929, Page 36

This Strange Adventure By Mary Roberts Rinehart ©opsright. 1929, by North American Newspaper Alliance and Metropolitan Newspaper Servies | FIRST INSTALLMENT. HE house was very small. was a narrow hall, a frigid par- Jor, a dining room and kitchen on the first floor. On the sec- ond there was a front bed room, behind it the one the little girls used, There |} ‘They had had the trunk in the board- ng house before they moved to the little house on Grove street. Only there it was covered with a cloth and had served as a table. Even the neighbors, who did not speak to her, admitted that Stella Ci fax was a handsome woman. Missie and & rear room which in times of at- |yt T#% % FRIvSome wORAR, MESe WS fluence was used by a maid of all Work, | pljen had inherited some of it. and in all times, good and bad, housed the trunks, the broken chalirs, the ofl lamps in case the gas company turned off the gas—which was not infrequently —and all the other flotsam and jetsam of that curious heterogeneous Eroup which w Missie was_ always back rocm. About i ually a superstition of horror. It con- tained ghosts. At any time its door might open and some bony hand pro- trude itself to clutch at her. And, after long time, she knew that it contained a leg. Neither she nor Ellen was supposed to go_into it. o “You girls keep out of that room. was their mother's order. “You're not going in there to open trunks and mess things up.” But one day the door was open &nd Missie saw the leg. It was deadly white and very horrible. She never spoke of it. She was quite sure that no one knew it but herself. But after that it was not a hand that threatened her, but a dead white foot. Not for a long time did she know that it was only A plaster cast, from the time her father nad broken his leg when a horse ran away with him. She never did know why it had been preserved. She was a highly imaginative child. Ellen, the stepsister, was matter of fact in the extreme. Ellen would stop on the landing in the dark on her way to bed and look longingly back and down into the lights below, and Missie would stand inside their small bed room wait- ing to hear a shriek. But Ellen never shrieked. The parlor was seldom used. It was furnished with rosewood, upholstered in black horsehair. There an old square piano, also, and a long gilt mir- ror. The furniture, Missie knew, had been bought by her father at an auc- afraid of that| the Colfax family | Servants came e built up grad-| Gown She must bave been 36 or so when they ure was still fine, according to the standards of the time. She was neat about herself, almost fastidious, but she was no housekeeper. nd went; they slept in the back room among the lumber, crept dawn to a frigid kitchen, and while they were a sort of order pre- vailed. But there were long intervals when there was no servant, when soiled clothes piled up and dishes were fit- fully washed, and the food Stella pre- pared came to the table almost unfit tion sale, and she knew, too, that her mother hated it. has no style,” she would com- “It's real, at least, my dear” her father would say, and smile that strange smile of his which even then Missie re- sented. It was a patronizing, superior smile, and it seemed to be reserved for her mother. He never used it to Missie. Missie was his own child. It appeared that there was this odd difference be- tween Ellen and Missle; it was puzzling, for Missle had a father-and Ellen had your father?” Dead, most likely.” ‘The mother was often “her” between them. Ellen looked at her with candid, prac- tcal eyes “She says she's lying. Gradually there sprung up in Missie a fierce loyalty to her mother. he'd dead. But maybe to_eat. During these periods Lambert stayed away from home as much as possible. He was a fastidious man, and the in- fatuation which had brought about his wild marriage was long over. At the best, his attitude toward his wife was one of affectionate contempt; at his worst, he became a sneering, jibing monster, riding roughshod over her pride and her small vanities. It was a queer preparation for life for the little girls; periods of enough varied by longer periods of semi-priva- tion. Weeks of coldness between the man and woman and then brief pas- sionate days when, for some reason be- yond the children's understanding, the bond between husband and wife was re-established and peace entered the little house. Lambert's family had cast him off, ex- cept for one member. Now and then, generally on Summer evenings, when they were “sitting out” and could not escape, there would come pompously Her father she knew very littlc about. | down the strect the handsome, elderly He was tall and fair, and the household served him almost cringingly. He was never awakened in the morning, and it was necessary to keep everything very quiet until he roused. When he did rouse, everything was instant excite- ment. Ellen watched the breakfast. Missie carried up the hot water, for there was no bath room in the house, and her mother went upstairs and laid out his fresh clothes and put the studs and | buttons in his shirt. When he finally | started down the street to that mys-| terious spot ealled the office, he was | handsome, Tesplendent, even amiable. Lven then Missie realized that the house revolved around her father. The cream from the top of the milk was saved for his: coffee, the best of the steak, if he was late, as he often was. And however flovenly she might be dur- ing the day. her mother was alway: dressed for his return. She would lace herself into her corsets, do her heavy hair in great coils on top of her head, powder her face—although the little girls were not supnosed to know that she ured powder. Then she would tie her bustle around her waist over her long cambric petticoats, and over that would go the voluminous skirt, the basque which fitted close to her lovely figure. She was a vry handsome woman, ‘was Stella Colfax in those days; a com- mon woman in many ways, given to quick angers. A passionate woman, too; Jealous, possessive. There was undoubt ed provocation behind Lambert Colfax's desertion of her later on. That she was passionately in love with him until the day of her death there is no doubt. From what depths he had taken her neither one of the girls was ever to know. There had been some obscure first mzrriage, but Stella's past was locked in a trunk in the room at the head of the stairs, a vast square trunk, from which. when times were parlous she occasionally brought some queer exotic. fabric which she made, skillfully enough, into frocks for the children. and immaculate figure of a man, his soft hat in his hand, the ends of his white lawn tie fluttering in the breeze. And Stella would say: “Here's that old sponge again! If you glve_ bim anything, Lambert Col- R} no extra fare, Coast of Florida. both Coasts. Southern Now in operation. Coast only. begin mingham Leaves Now in_service of Florida. Lv. Washington, 1. he | perhaps Lambort would say, in his suave, moved into the little house, and her fig- | Even then Missie realized that the house revolved around her father. Will leave Washingt Will leave Washingto same fast service to .through sleepers to Brunswi for Sea Island Beach, starting Dec. 19th, Washington, 3:30 P.M. effective Jan. 4th. THE EVENING | | Col. Archibalu Kennedy is my uncle,” | jeering voice. “What do you know of the_ties of blood, my dear?” “I know a lot about rent and grocery bills. And as to blood—the Colfaxes have no blood; they have skimmed milk in_their veins. But when old Archibald went away he generally carried with him a banknote or two, and sometimes the rent had to | “g0 0 Jd Until she was a grown woman, the | word “rent” had a connotation of drama for Missic. In good months she or Ellen, and sometimes both, walked into M Elliott’s grocery store down on the cor-| ner—the same grocery one went to to telephon= for the doctor—and handed | him the bills and sajd: “Mother wants a receipt, please.”” Then Mr. Elliott went to his dirty, littered desk, and finally found his pad of blank receipts and filled one out. The bad days were dif- ferent, however. Then it was a note they carricel, written in an uncertain hand by Stella. And Mr. Elliott would scowl and give them until the next Tuesday. ‘There always followed, to Missie, a sense of impermanence. Indeed, it ho ered over the entire feminine portion of the household. Only Lambert remained the same as ever, dr as carefully, slept as late, poured the cream as lav- ishly, and went down the street as debonairly as ever. Only once there was very nearly a debacle. Tuesday came, or whatever the day was, and Mr. Elliott rang the doorbell that evening and said he had stood as much as flesh and blood could bear. king man,” he said. eyeing 4 get up early and I work late, and what I can't pay for I do without. Which is more than 1 ean say for a lot of folks.” | And Lambert heard him through, still | ou the money. It was after he had gone that the scene occurred, with Stella crying that he was hard and cruel, and that he| might have told her he had the money, | and Lambert imperturable as ever “And that's what comes of my little with that patronizing smile, and then | reached down in his pocket and brought STAR, WASHINGTON, the ve, and about nothing.” m':nd es'tgll looked at him with the sort of helplessness Missie was always to remember in connection with her | father, and turned and went out of the room. | Outside of the casual contacts of the public school they had no friends. Old ber of the Colfax family who ever vis- | ited the little house, and Stella apps ently had neither family nor Life for Missie. until she was 10, was limites few books. The privae libraries of the seventies and early eighties were largely limited to editions of the classics and ponderous theological works, but even these were lacking. There were evenings when Lambert came up the street, and when Stella sat sullen and red-eyed across the table from him. And there were nights when he did not come home for supper, and the little girls, studying at the dining room table, could hear Stella upstairs, moving restlessly about, or rocking dog- gedly back and forth in her rocking chair. “1 wish she would stop that,” Ellen would say. “What's she worrying about, anyhow Ellen was three years older than Missie. She was a pretty child, blonde and with lovely, calculating blue eyes; & prettier child than Missie, with her straight hair, her faintly irregular fea- tures, her candid look. Stella, who wor- shiped beauty dressed Ellen carefully if oddly. But it was on Missie that Stella lavished such maternity as she had. Missie was her love child. “I know. She’s worrying father.” “I wish he'd stay away for good.” There was one cold Fall daw when, after a quarrel with Colfax, Stella walk- ed out of the house and took Missie with her. They walked a long time, and finally fetched up on a bench in the new park along the river bank. At first Missie was content to sit and be quiet; the river was busy in those days. Great stern-wheeled white packets traveled up and down, and smaller, dingier tow- boats, pushing ahead of them long lines of barges loaded with coal. Whistles sounded, bells rang, mysterious figures came and went, and these figures Missie fitted into stories of her own invention, and was content. But as dusk fell she grew cold; her small hands were red and blotche still Stella sat and stared at the river. “Aren't we going home, soon. mom about stonily. “Not ever?"” “Never. Now listen to me. crying and listen. Your father's a bad man; he's hard and cruel and bad. He's got another woman.” Missie was stunned and puzsled. “Who's the other woman, mother?” Quick Relief for to the little house. There Werc | the notes “We're not going home,” said Stella, ; Stop that ! D. C. MONDAY, DECEMBER 16. “Never mind about that,” sald Stella short! It wes after dark when they left, and Stel gesture had been a vain one after all. For when they got back—where else could they go?—the: found that Lambert had not been bac! to akupper. and that Ellen was reading a Archibald Kennedy was the only mem- | bool After that they were alone, the three of them, more than ever. There was no longer a servant, even at intervals and Mr. Elliott was increasingly gruff about in the fine slanting hand. Ellen was doing most of the cooking and was showing a certain practical ef- 1929. clency in it. But there were more and ‘more evenings when the supper dried up on the stove and when Stella, sitting down at last, ate little and sullenly. She must have begun o age at that time, for in the pitiless glare of the gas jet over the table even Missie noticed fine wrinkles at the corners of her hand- some mouth. It was this aging which ruined her one genuine attempt to get away. 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