The Little Lady of the Big House / Маленькая хозяйка большого дома. Книга для чтения на английском языке

As he went down he turned over and explored the cement wall of tank with his hands. Midway, possibly ten feet under the surface he estimated, his hands encountered an opening in the wall. He felt about, learned it was unscreened[245], and boldly entered. Almost before he was in, he found he could come up; but he came up slowly, breaking surface in pitchy blackness and feeling about him without splashing.

His fingers touched a cool smooth arm that shrank convulsively at contact while the possessor of it cried sharply with the startle of fright. He held on tightly and began to laugh, and Paula laughed with him. A line from “The First Chanty” flashed into his consciousness – “Hearing her laugh in the gloom greatly I loved her.”

“You did frighten me when you touched me,” she said. “You came without a sound, and I was a thousand miles away, dreaming…”

“What?” Graham asked.

“Well, honestly, I had just got an idea for a gown – a dusty, musty, mulberry-wine velvet, with long, close lines, and heavy, tarnished gold borders and cords and things. And the only jewelery a ring – one enormous pigeon-blood ruby that Dick gave me years ago when we sailed the All Away.”

“Is there anything you don’t do?” he laughed.

She joined with him, and their mirth sounded strangely hollow in the pent and echoing dark.

“Who told you?” she next asked.

“No one. After you had been under two minutes I knew it had to be something like this, and I came exploring.”

“It was Dick’s idea. He had it built into the tank afterward. You will find him full of whimsies. He delighted in scaring old ladies into fits by stepping off into the tank with their sons or grandsons and hiding away in here. But after one or two nearly died of shock – old ladies, I mean – he put me up, as to-day, to fooling hardier persons like yourself[246]. – Oh, he had another accident. There was a Miss Coghlan, friend of Ernestine, a little seminary girl. They artfully stood her right beside the pipe that leads out, and Dick went off the high dive and swam in here to the inside end of the pipe. After several minutes, by the time she was in collapse over his drowning, he spoke up the pipe to her in most horrible, sepulchral tones. And right there Miss Coghlan fainted dead away.”

“She must have been a weak sister,” Graham commented; while he struggled with a wanton desire for a match so that he could strike it and see how Paula Forrest looked paddling there beside him to keep afloat.

“She had a fair measure of excuse,” Paula answered. “She was a young thing – eighteen; and she had a sort of school-girl infatuation for Dick. They all get it.[247] You see, he’s such a boy when he’s playing that they can’t realize that he’s a hard-bitten, hard-working, deep-thinking, mature, elderly benedict. The embarrassing thing was that the little girl, when she was first revived and before she could gather her wits, exposed all her secret heart[248]. Dick’s face was a study while she babbled her —”

“Well? – going to stay there all night?” Bert Wainwright’s voice came down the pipe, sounding megaphonically close.

“Heavens!” Graham sighed with relief; for he had startled and clutched Paula’s arm. “That’s the time I got my fright. The little maiden is avenged. Also, at last, I know what a lead-pipe cinch is[249].”

“And it’s time we started for the outer world,” she suggested. “It’s not the coziest gossiping place in the world. Shall I go first?”

“By all means – and I’ll be right behind; although it’s a pity the water isn’t phosphorescent. Then I could follow your incandescent heel like that chap Byron wrote about – don’t you remember?”

He heard her appreciative gurgle in the dark, and then her: “Well, I’m going now.”

Unable to see the slightest glimmer, nevertheless, from the few sounds she made he knew she had turned over and gone down head first, and he was not beyond visioning with inner sight the graceful way in which she had done it – an anything but graceful feat as the average swimming woman accomplishes it.

“Somebody gave it away to you[250],” was Bert’s prompt accusal, when Graham rose to the surface of the tank and climbed out.

“And you were the scoundrel who rapped stone under water,” Graham challenged. “If I’d lost I’d have protested the bet. It was a crooked game, a conspiracy, and competent counsel, I am confident, would declare it a felony. It’s a case for the district attorney.”

“But you won,” Ernestine cried.

“I certainly did, and, therefore, I shall not prosecute you, nor any one of your crooked gang – if the bets are paid promptly. Let me see – you owe me a box of cigars —”

“One cigar, sir!”

“A box! A box!”

“Cross-tag!” Paula cried. “Let’s play cross-tag! – You’re IT![251]

Suiting action to word, she tagged Graham on the shoulder and plunged into the tank. Before he could follow,