The Devil To Pay Read Online Free PDF

sticking to the roof of her mouth.
    A pseudopod of sunlight tried to climb into her bed, but it was too weak; and soon it vanished altogether under the cold swollen clouds of the real day. Val shivered again and crept out of bed, by habit looking around for Roxie. But Roxie was gone—Roxie and Mrs. Thomson the housekeeper and all the rest; and, as in the dream, Val felt that the end of the world had come.
    She was sitting helplessly before her dressing table in the bathroom, looking at the eight-ounce crystal bottle of Indiscret , when Rhys knocked, and came in, and said: “What’s the exact moment, puss, that bacon becomes cinders?”
    Val jumped up. “Pop! You haven’t been trying to make breakfast? Don’t do another thing. I’ll be down in a jiffy.”
    Rhys held her at arm’s length. “I’m glad you’re taking it this way, puss.”
    “ Will you go downstairs?”
    “If Pink goes, we’ll have to get a cook.”
    “Don’t need one. I can cook like a fiend.”
    “You’re not going to be slave to a stove, Val. We’ll be able to afford it.”
    Val sniffed. “Yes, until the money’s eaten up. How did you make out with the real estate?”
    He shrugged. “I got a fair price for the Santa Monica and Malibu places, but this one represents a considerable loss.”
    “Did that movie man take the yacht?”
    “Literally—the pirate!”
    Val kissed his brown chin. “Please don’t worry, darling; I ’ ll show you how to economize! Now get out.”
    But when she was alone again Val looked a little ill. To give up all these lovely, precious things was like facing the amputation of an arm. Val thought of the auction sale to come, mobs of curious people trampling over everything, handling their most intimate possessions, and stopped thinking.
    She burned the toast and charred the bacon and over-fried the eggs and underboiled the coffee, and Rhys gobbled it all and maintained with a plausibility that almost fooled her that he had never eaten such a delicious breakfast in his life. The only thing that really tasted good was the orange juice, and Pink had prepared that before he left. Walter was right—she was useless! And that made her think of Walter, and thinking of Walter made her lips quiver, and after she pushed Rhys out of the departed Mrs. Thomson’s no longer spotless kitchen Val sat down and wept into the dish-washing machine. It was a sort of requiem, for Val was positive it was the last time they would ever be able to afford such a wonderful thing.
    It was even worse later. The auction people turned up and completed the details of the task begun a week before—cataloguing the furniture and art-objects. They ran all over the house like oblivious ants. The telephones rang incessantly—the purchaser of the yacht with a complaint, a multitude of lawyers with questions about this piece of property and that, insistent reporters; Rhys kept dashing from one telephone to another, almost cheerful, followed everywhere by Pink, who looked like a house-dog which has just been kicked.
    Valerie was left to her own devices in the midst of this hurly-burly; she had nothing to do but get out of the way of hurrying strangers. A man practically dumped her on the floor retrieving the antique Cape Cod rocker in which her mother had sung her to sleep; Val felt like giving him the one-two Pink had taught her, but the man was away with his loot before she could get her hands on him. She drifted about, fingering the things she had grown up with—the heavy old silver, those precious little vessels made of old porcelain backed with pewter which Rhys had picked up on his honeymoon in Shanghai, the laces and velvets and lamps, the lovely old hunting prints. She fingered the books and stared at the pictures and spent a difficult moment before the grand old piano on which she had learned to play—never very well!—Chopin and Beethoven and Bach.
    And Walter, darn him, didn’t even call up once! Val used up two handkerchiefs, artfully,