Seven Keys to Baldpate

"Mr. Magee," she said, when she had made out his figure by the window, "you've been a true friend, as I might say, to a couple of mad females who ought to have been at home by their own firesides, and I'm going to ask one more favor of you. Find out when the next train goes to Reuton, and see that I'm at the station an hour or two before it pulls out."

"I'll do that, Mrs. Norton," smiled Magee. "By the way, is Norton the name?"

"Yes," answered the woman, "that's my name. Of course, it ain't hers. I can't tell that."

"No matter," said Mr. Magee, "she'll probably change it soon. Can't you tell me something about her – just a tiny bit of information. Just a picture of where she is now, and what she's doing with that small fortune I gave her."

"Where is she now?" repeated Mrs. Norton. "She's home and in bed in my second floor front, unless she's gone clear crazy. And that's where I wish I was this minute – in bed – though it's a question in my mind if I'll ever be able to sleep again, what with the uproar and confusion my house is probably in by this time, leaving it in charge of a scatter-brained girl. Norton always used to say if you want a thing done right, do it yourself, and though he didn't always live up to the sentiment, letting me do most things he wanted done right, there was a lot of truth in his words. I certainly must get back to Reuton, just as quick as the railroad will take me."

"Why did you come?" prodded Mr. Magee. "Why did you leave your house on this strange mission?"

"The Lord knows," replied the woman. "I certainly never intended to, but she begged and pleaded, and the first thing I knew, I was on a train. She has winning ways, that girl – maybe you've noticed?"

"I have," assented Billy Magee.

"I thought so. No, Mr. Magee, I can't tell you nothing about her. I ain't allowed to – even you that has been so kind. She made me promise. 'He'll know soon enough,' she kept saying. But I will tell you, as I told you before, there's no occasion to worry about her – unless you was to think was she held up and murdered with all that money on her, the brave little dear. If you was considering offering yourself for the job of changing her name, Mr. Magee, I say go in and do it. It sure is time she settled down and gave up this – this – gave it all up before something awful happens to her. You won't forget – the very next train, Mr. Magee?"

"The very next," Magee agreed.

In through the dining-room door stamped Quimby, grave of face, dazed at being roused from sleep, and with him an important little man whose duty it was to investigate at Upper Asquewan Falls such things as had happened that night at Baldpate. Even from his slumber he rose with the air of a judge and the manner of a Sherlock Holmes. For an hour he asked questions, and in the end he prepared to go in a seemingly satisfied state of mind.

Quimby's face was very awed when he came down-stairs after a visit to the room above.

"Poor fellow!" he said to Magee. "I'm sorry – he was so young." For such as Quimby carry no feud beyond the gates. He went over and took Kendrick's hand.

"I never had a chance," he said, "to thank you for all you tried to do for me and my invention."

"And it came to nothing in the end?" Kendrick asked.

"Nothing," Quimby answered. "I – I had to creep back to Baldpate Mountain finally – broke and discouraged. I have been here ever since. All my blue prints, all my models – they're locked away forever in a chest up in the attic."

"Not forever, Quimby," Kendrick replied. "I always did believe in your invention – I believe in it still. When I get back into the harness – I'm sure I can do something for you."

Quimby shook his head. He looked to be half asleep.

"It don't seem possible," he said. "No – it's all been buried so long – all the hope – all the plans – it don't seem possible it could ever come to life again."

"But it can, and it will," cried Kendrick. "I'm going to lay a stretch of track in Reuton with your joints. That's all you need – they'll have to use 'em then. We'll force the Civic into it. We can do it, Quimby – we surely can."

Quimby rubbed his hand across his eyes.

"You'll lay a stretch of track – " he repeated. "That's great news to me, Mr. Kendrick. I – I can't thank you now." His voice was husky. "I'll come back and take care of – him," he said, jerking his head toward the room up-stairs. "I got to go now – this minute – I got to go and tell my wife. I got to tell her what you've said."

CHAPTER XIX

EXEUNT OMNES, AS SHAKESPEARE HAS IT

At four in the morning Baldpate Inn, wrapped in the arms of winter, had all the rare gaiety and charm of a baseball bleechers on Christmas Eve. Looking gloomily out the window, Mr. Magee heard behind him the steps on the stairs and the low cautions of Quimby, and two men he had brought from the village, who were carrying something down to the dark carriage that waited outside. He did not look round. It was a picture he wished to avoid.

So this was the end – the end of his two and a half days of solitude – the end of his light-hearted exile on Baldpate Mountain. He thought of Bland, lean and white of face, gay of garb, fleeing through the night, his Arabella fiction disowned in the real tragedy that had followed. He thought of Cargan and Max, also fleeing, wrathful, sneering, by Bland's side. He thought of Hayden, jolting down the mountain in that black wagon. So it ended.

So it ended – most preposterous end – with William Hallowell Magee madly, desperately, in love. By the gods – in love! In love with a fair gay-hearted girl for whom he had fought, and stolen, and snapped his fingers at the law as it blinked at him in the person of Professor Bolton. Billy Magee, the calm, the unsusceptible, who wrote of a popular cupid but had always steered clear of his shots. In love with a girl whose name he did not know; whose motives were mostly in the fog. And he had come up here – to be alone.

For the first time in many hours he thought of New York, of the fellows at the club, of what they would say when the jocund news came that Billy Magee had gone mad on a mountainside, He thought of Helen Faulkner, haughty, unperturbed, bred to hold herself above the swift catastrophies of the world. He could see the arch of her patrician eyebrows, the shrug of her exquisite shoulders, when young Williams hastened up the avenue and poured into her ear the merry story. Well – so be it. He had never cared for her. In her superiority he had found a challenge, in her icy indifference a trap, that lured him on to try his hand at winning her. But he had never for a moment caught a glimmering of what it was really to care – to care as he cared now for the girl who had gone from him – somewhere – down the mountain.

Quimby dragged into the room, the strain of a rather wild night in Upper Asquewan Falls in his eyes.

"Jake Peters asked me to tell you he ain't coming back," he said. "Mis' Quimby is getting breakfast for you down at our house. You better pack up now and start down, I reckon. Your train goes at half past six."

Mrs. Norton jumped up, proclaiming that she must be aboard that train at any cost. Miss Thornhill, the professor and Kendrick ascended the stairs, and in a moment Magee followed.

He stepped softly into number seven, for the tragedy of the rooms was still in the air. Vague shapes seemed to flit about him as he lighted a candle. They whispered in his ear that this was to have been the scene of achievement; that here he was to have written the book that should make his place secure. Ah, well, fate had decreed it otherwise. It had set plump in his path the melodrama he had come up to Baldpate to avoid. Ironic fate, she must be laughing now in the sleeve of her kimono. Feeling about in the shadows Magee gathered his things together, put them in his bags, and with a last look at number seven, closed the door forever on its many excitements.

A shivering group awaited him at the foot of the stair. Mrs. Norton's hat was on at an angle even the most imaginative milliner could not have approved. The professor looked older than ever; even Miss Thornhill seemed a little less statuesque and handsome in the dusk. Quimby led the way to the door, they passed through it, and Mr. Magee locked it after them with the key Hal Bentley had blithely given him on Forty-fourth Street, New York.

So Baldpate Inn dropped back into the silence to slumber and to wait. To wait for the magic of muslin, the lilt of waltzes, the tinkle of laughter, the rhythm of the rockers of the fleet on its verandas, the formal tread of the admiral's boots across its polished floors, the clink of dimes in the pockets of its bell-boys. For a few brief hours strange figures had replaced the unromantic Quimby in its rooms, they had come to talk of money and of love, to plot and scheme, and as they came in the dark and moved most swiftly in the dark, so in the dark they went away, and Baldpate's startling winter drama took reluctantly its final curtain.

Down the snowy road the five followed Quimby's lead; Mr. Magee picturing in fancy one who had fled along this path but a short time before; the others busy with many thoughts, not the least of which was of Mrs. Quimby's breakfast. At the door of the kitchen she met them, maternal, concerned, eager to pamper and to serve, just as Mr. Magee remembered her on that night that now seemed so long ago. He smiled down into her eyes, and he had an engaging smile, even at four-thirty in the morning.

"Well, Mrs. Quimby," he cried, "here is the prodigal straight from that old husk of an inn. And believe me, he's pretty anxious to sit down to some food that woman, starter of all the trouble since the world began, had a hand in."

"Come right in, all of you," chirruped Mrs. Quimby, ushering them into a pleasant odor of cookery. "Take off your things and sit down. Breakfast's most ready. My land, I guess you must be pretty nigh starved to death. Quimby told me who was cooking for you, and I says to Quimby: 'What,' I says, 'that no account woman-hater messing round at a woman's job, like that,' I says. 'Heaven pity the people at the inn,' I says. 'Mr. Peters may be able to amuse them with stories of how Cleopatra whiled away the quiet Egyptian evenings,' I says, 'and he may be able to throw a little new light on Helen of Troy, who would object to having it thrown if she was alive and the lady I think her, but,' I says, 'when it comes to cooking, I guess he stands about where you do, Quimby.' You see, Quimby's repertory consists of coffee and soup, and sometimes it's hard to tell which he means for which."

"So Mr. Peters has taken you in on the secret of the book he is writing against your sex?" remarked Billy Magee.

"Not exactly that," Mrs. Quimby answered, brushing back a wisp of gray hair, "but he's discussed it in my presence, ignoring me at the time. You see, he comes down here and reads his latest chapters to Quimby o' nights, and I've caught quite a lot of it on my way between the cook-stove and the sink."

"I ain't no judge of books," remarked Mrs. Norton from a comfortable rocking-chair, "but I'll bet that one's the limit."

"You're right, ma'am," Mrs. Quimby told her. "I ain't saying that some of it ain't real pretty worded, but that's just to hide the falsehood underneath. My land, the lies there is in that book! You don't need to know much about history to know that Jake Peters has made it over to fit his argument, and that he ain't made it over so well but what the old seams show here and there, and the place where the braid was is plain as daylight."

After ten more minutes of bustle, Mrs. Quimby announced that they could sit down, and they were not slow to accept the invitation. The breakfast she served them moved Mr. Magee to remark:

"I want to know where I stand as a judge of character. On the first night I saw Mrs. Quimby, without tasting a morsel of food cooked by her, I said she was the best cook in the county."

The professor looked up from his griddle cakes.

"Why limit it to the county?" he asked. "I should say you were too parsimonious in your judgment."

Mrs. Quimby, detecting in the old man's words a compliment, flushed an even deeper red as she bent above the stove. Under the benign influence of the food and the woman's cheery personality, the spirits of the crowd rose. Baldpate Inn was in the past, its doors locked, its seven keys scattered through the dawn. Mrs. Quimby, as she continued to press food upon them, spoke with interest of the events that had come to pass at the inn.

"It's so seldom anything really happens around here," she said, "I just been hungering for news of the strange goings-on up there. And I must say Quimby ain't been none too newsy on the subject. I threatened to come up and join in the proceedings myself, especially when I heard about the book-writing cook Providence had sent you."

"You would have found us on the porch with outstretched arms," Mr. Magee assured her.

It was on Kendrick that Mrs. Quimby showered her attentions, and when the group rose to seek the station, amid a consultation of watches that recalled the commuter who rises at dawn to play tag with a flippant train, Mr. Magee heard her say to the railroad man in a heartfelt aside:

"I don't know as I can ever thank you enough, Mr. Kendrick, for putting new hope into Quimby. You'll never understand what it means, when you've given up, and your life seems all done and wasted, to hear that there's a chance left."