Watchfires by Louis Auchincloss Read Free Book Online

other people. Juley Bleeker was simply filling a void in her life."
    "Juley! You call that bounder Juley?"
    Joanna's expression congealed into stubbornness. Her timid eyes gazed at him now as through the grille of a barred gate that they both knew he could not batter down.
    "He has been a guest in this house. Papa has received him."
    "You don't mean he's called when Annie's been here!"
    "You needn't shout, Dexter. As a matter of fact he was here this morning."
    "And Annie received him under her father's roof? At a time when her husband was not present!"
    "What's so wrong with that? I was present."
    Dexter stared at her almost with incredulity. "After Annie had told you about my note? After you
knew
about her and Bleeker?"
    His tone finally seemed to alert her at least to the possibility of something serious. "Oh, it was all just silliness."
    "Silliness! What in the name of God is New York coming to?" He turned away in disgust from her expression of placid stupidity. "I give up. Tell Annie I'm here, will you?"
    When Joanna, only too glad to be gone, had left the gallery, he sauntered nervously up and down the floor, casting restless glances at the pictures. For several minutes he did not distinguish among them, but then at last something struck him, and he drew up suddenly to regard more closely a large bright canvas over the legend, "The Abbess Detected."
    It was one of those meticulously executed, brightly colored, anecdotal French paintings in which Mr. Handy delighted, showing a pretty abbess in a chamber more like a boudoir than a cell, sitting down to a delicious-looking repast of steak and red wine set out on a marble-topped
guéridon,
while two young nuns, unobserved, stifled their giggles behind a half-open door. On a calendar, over the abbess's head, in large print, was the word "Vendredi."
    Moving down the wall, struck now with an idea, Dexter paused next before a large canvas showing Catherine de Medici, haughty and terrible in widow's weeds, emerging from the Louvre to make a scornful survey of the corpses of Saint Bartholomew's Day, followed by a reluctant troupe of younger ladies-in-waiting, whose averted looks and hands clapped to their lips offered a marked contrast to the phlegm of the ruthless queen-mother. But what Dexter particularly noted was the artist's sensuous treatment of the stripped corpses.
    Moving to the end of the gallery, he paused finally before a canvas depicting a satyr teased by wood nymphs. One was pulling his hair; two others had hold of his arms; a fourth was propelling him from behind, apparently in a joint effort to plunge him into a sylvan pool. All the figures were nude. It was perfectly evident that the satyr, whose human torso was finely muscular, was only pretending to resist and that the game would end, the moment he chose, on a less innocent note.
    He turned away abruptly from the picture, indignant that it should have so aroused his senses. Was there not a common denominator of fleshly appetite and lust in all of Mr. Handy's pictures? Might this not explain the blindness of Joanna, the giddiness of Annie? Might it not even be typical of New York society as a whole? What was their world but a bushel of lewdnesses tied together by a string of moral aphorisms? Did anyone but Dexter Fairchild really care about good and evil?
    "Oh, Dexter, that
look!
" He heard Annie's cry, and there she was, absurdly beautiful, in a black and white dress, standing in the doorway. And now she was rustling towards him, too thin, too pale, too smiling, too laughing. Her hands gripped his shoulders as she held herself back to contemplate him. "Why, my dear, you're as grave as a Gothic tympanum of Judgment Day! Please! Can't you smile?"
    "I don't consider this a smiling matter, Annie."
    She dropped her hands at once to her sides and pouted, playing the little girl reproved. "Shall we discuss it, then, in sackcloth and ashes?"
    "Try to be serious, my dear."
    "This early in the afternoon? Can't I at