147Chapter XIII
Making her nod suffice for a good-night, Letty, with the red volume of Hans Andersen under her arm, passed out into the hall. It was not easy to carry herself with the necessary nonchalance, but she got strength by saying inwardly: “Here’s where I begin to walk on blades.” The knowledge that she was doing it, and that she was doing it toward an end, gave her a dignity of carriage which Allerton watched with sharpened observation.
Reaching the little back spare room she found the door open, and Steptoe sweeping up the hearth before a newly lighted fire. Beppo, whose basket had been established here, jumped from his shelter to paw up at her caressingly. With the hearth-brush in his hand Steptoe raised himself to say:
“Madam’ll excuse me, but I thought as the evenin’ was chilly––”
“He doesn’t want me to stay.”
She brought out the fact abruptly, lifelessly, because she couldn’t keep it back. The calm she had been able to maintain downstairs was breaking up, with a quivering of the lip and two rolling tears.
Slowly and absently Steptoe dusted his left hand with the hearth-brush held in his right. “If madam’s goin’ to decide ’er life by what another person wants she ain’t never goin’ to get nowhere.”
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There were tears now in the voice. “Yes, but when it’s—him.”
“’Im or anybody else, we all ’ave to fight for what we means to myke of our own life. It’s a poor gyme in which I don’t plye my ’and for all I think it’ll win.”
“Do you mean that I should—act independent?”
“’Aven’t madam an independent life?”
“Havin’ an independent life don’t make it easier to stay where you’re not wanted.”
“Oh, if madam’s lookin’ first for what’s easy––”
“I’m not. I’m lookin’ first for what he’lllike.”
Hanging the hearth-brush in its place he took the tongs to adjust a smoking log. “I’ve been lookin’ for what ’e’d like ever since ’e was born; and now I see that gettin’ so much of what ’e liked ’asn’t been good for ’im. If madam’d strike out on ’er own line, whether ’e liked it or not, and keep at it till ’e ’ad to like it––”
“Oh, but when it’s—” she sought for the right word—“when it’s so humiliatin’––”
“Humiliatin’ things is not so ’ard to bear, once you’ve myde up your mind as they’re to be borne.” He put up the tongs, to busy himself with the poker. “Madam’ll find that humiliation is a good deal like that there quinine; bitter to the tyste, but strengthenin’. I’ve swallered lots of it; and look at me to-dye.”
“I know as well as he does that it’s all been a crazy mistake––”
“I was readin’ the other day—I’m fond of a good book, I am—occupies the mind like—but I was readin’ about a circus man in South Africa, what ’e myde a mistyke and took the wrong tryle—and just when ’e was a-givin’ ’imself up for lost among the tigers and149the colored savages ’e found ’e’d tumbled on a mine of diamonds. Big ’ouse in Park Lyne in London now, and ’is daughter married to a Lord.”
“Oh, I’ve tumbled into the mine of diamonds all right. The question is––”
“If madam really tumbled, or was led by the ’and of Providence.”
She laughed, ruefully. “If that was it the hand of Providence ’d have to have some pretty funny ways.”
“I’ve often ’eard as the wyes of Providence was strynge; but I ain’t so often ’eard as Providence ’ad got to myke ’em strynge to keep pyce with the wyes of men. Now if the ’and of Providence ’ad picked out madam for Mr. Rash, it’d ’ave to do somethink out of the common, as you might sye, to bring together them as man had put so far apart.” He looked round the room with the eye of a head-waiter inspecting a table in a restaurant. “Madam ’as everythink? Well, if there’s anythink else she’s only got to ring.”
Bowing himself out he went down the stairs to attend to those duties of the evening which followed the return of the master of the house. In the library and dining-room he saw to the window fastenings, and put out the one light left burning in each room. In the hall he locked the door with the complicated locks which had helped to guarantee the late Mrs. Allerton against burglars. There was not only a bolt, a chain, and an ordinary lock, but there was an ingenious double lock which turned the wrong way when you thought you were turning it the right, and could otherwise baffle the unskilful. Occupied with this task he could peep over his shoulder, through the unlighted150front drawing-room, and see his adored one standing on the hearthrug, his hands clasped behind him, and his head bent, in an attitude of meditation.
Steptoe, having much to say to him, felt the nervousness of a prime minister going into the presence of a sovereign who might or might not approve his acts. It was at once the weakness and the strength of his position that his rule was based on an unwritten constitution. Being unwritten it allowed of a borderland where powers were undefined. Powers being undefined his scope was the more easily enlarged, though now and then he found that the sovereign rebelled against the mayor of the palace and had to be allowed his way.
But the sovereign was nursing no seeds of the kind of discontent which Steptoe was afraid of. As a matter of fact he was thinking of the way in which Letty had left the room. The perspective, the tea-gown, the effectively dressed hair, enabled him to perceive the combination of results which Madame Simone had calledde l’élégance naturelle. She had that; he could see it as he hadn’t seen it hitherto. It must have given what value there was to her poor little rôles in motion pictures. Now that his eye had caught it, it surprised, and to some degree disturbed, him. It was more than the show-girl’s inane prettiness, or the comely wax-work face of the girl on the cover of a magazine. With due allowance for her Anglo-Saxonism and honesty, she was the type of woman to whom “things happen.” Things would happen to her, Allerton surmised, beyond anything she could experience in his cumbrous and antiquated house.151This queer episode would drop behind her as an episode and no more, and in the multitude of future incidents she would almost forget that she had known him. He hoped to God that it would be so, and yet....
He was noting too that she hadn’t taxed him, in the way of calling on his small supply of nervous energy. Rather she had spared it, and he felt himself rested. After a talk with Barbara he was always spent. Her emotional furies demanded so much of him that they used him up. This girl, on the contrary, was soothing. He didn’t know how she was soothing; but she was. He couldn’t remember when he had talked to a woman with so little thought of what he was to say and how he was to say it, and heaven only knew that the things to be said between them were nerve-racking enough. But they had come out of their own accord, those nerve-racking things, probably, he reasoned, because she was a girl of inferior class with whom he didn’t have to be particular.
She was quick, too, to catch the difference between his speech and her own. She was quick—and pathetic. Her self-correction amused him, with a strain of pity in his amusement. If a girl like that had only had a chance.... And just then Steptoe broke in on his musing by entering the room.
The first subject to be aired was that of the changes in the household staff, and Steptoe raised it diplomatically. Mrs. Courage and Jane had taken offense at the young lydy’s presence, and packed themselves off in dishonorable haste. Had it not been that two men friends of his own were ready to come at an hour’s notice the house would have been servantless152till he had procured strangers. No condemnation could be too severe for Mrs. Courage and Jane, for not content with leaving the house in dudgeon they had insulted the young lydy before they went.
“Sooner or lyter they would ’a’ went any’ow. For this long time back they’ve been too big for their boots, as you might sye. If Mr. Rash ’ad married the other young lydy she wouldn’t ’a’ stood ’em a week. It don’t do to keep servants too long, not when they’ve got no more than a menial mind, which Jynie and Mrs. Courage ’aven’t. The minute they ’eard that this young lydy was in the ’ouse.... And beautiful the wye she took it, Mr. Rash. I never see nothink finer on the styge nor in the movin’ pictures. Like a young queen she was, a-tellin’ ’em that she ’adn’t come to this ’ouse to turn out of it them as ’ad ’ad it as their ’ome, like, and that she’d put it up to them. If they went she’d stye; but if they styed she’d go––”
“She’s going anyhow.”
Steptoe moved away to feel the fastenings of the back windows. “That’ll be a relief to us, sir, won’t it?” he said, without turning his head.
“It’ll make things easier—certainly.”
“I was just ’opin’ that it mightn’t be—well, not too soon.”
“What do you mean by too soon?”
“Well, sir, I’ve been thinkin’ it over through the dye, just as you told me to do this mornin,’ and I figger out—” on a table near him he began to arrange the disordered books and magazines—“I figger out that if she was to go it’d better be in a wye agreeable153to all concerned. It wouldn’t do, I syes to myself, for Mr. Rash to bring a young woman into this ’ouse and ’ave ’er go awye feelin’ anythink but glad she’d come.”
“That’ll be some job.”
“It’ll be some job, sir; but it’ll be worth it. It ain’t only on the young lydy’s account; it’ll be on Mr. Rash’s.”
“On Mr. Rash’s—how?”
The magazines lapping over each other in two long lines, he straightened them with little pats. “What I suppose you mean to do, sir, is to get out o’ this matrimony and enter into the other as you thought as you wasn’t goin’ to enter into.”
“Well?”
“And when you’d entered into the other you wouldn’t want it on your mind—on your conscience, as you might sye—that there was a young lydy in the world as you’d done a kind o’ wrong to.”
Allerton took three strides across the corner of the room, and three strides back to the fireplace again. “How am I going to escape that? She says she won’t let me give her any money.”
“Oh, money!” Steptoe brushed money aside as if it had no value. “She wouldn’t of course. Not ’er sort.”
“But whatis’er sort. She seemed one thing yesterday, and to-day she’s another.”
“That’s somethink like what I mean. That young lydy ’as growed more in twenty-four hours than lots’d grow in twenty-four years.” He considered how best to express himself further. “Did Mr. Rash ever154notice that it isn’t bein’ born of a certain kind o’ family as’ll myke a man a gentleman? Of course ’e did. But did ’e ever notice that a man’ll oftennotbe born of a certain kind o’ family, and yet be a gentleman all the syme?”
“I know what you’re driving at; but it depends on what you mean by a gentleman.”
“And I couldn’t ’ardly sye—not no more than I could tell you what the smell of a flower was, not even while you was a-smellin’ of it. You know a gentleman’s a gentleman, and you may think it’s this or that what mykes ’im so, but there ain’t no wye to put it into words. Now you, Mr. Rash, anybody’d know you was a gentleman what merely looked at you through a telescope; but you couldn’t explyne it, not if you was took all to pieces like the works of a clock. It ain’t nothink you do and nothink you sye, because if we was to go by that––”
“Good Lord, stop! We’re not talking about me.”
“No, Mr. Rash. We’re talkin’ about the queer thing it is what mykes a gentleman, and I sye that I can’t sye. But Iknow. Now, tyke Eugene. ’E’s just a chauffeur. But no one couldn’t be ten minutes with Eugene and not know ’e’s a gentleman through and through. Obligin’—good-mannered—modest—polite to the very cat ’e is—and always with that nice smile—wouldn’tyousye as Eugene was a gentleman, if anybody was to arsk you, Mr. Rash?”
“If they asked me from that point of view—yes—probably. But what has that to do with it?”
“It ’as this to do with it that when you arsk me what sort that young lydy is I ’ave to reply as she’s155not the sort to accept money from strynge gentlemen, because it ain’t what she’s after.”
“Then what on earthisshe after? Whatever it is she can have it, if I can only find out what it is.”
Steptoe answered this in his own way. “It’s very ’ard for the poor to see so much that’s good and beautiful in the world, and know that they can’t ’ave none of it. I felt that myself before I worked up to where I am now. ’Ere in New York a poor boy or a poor girl can’t go out into the street without seein’ the things they’re cryvin’ for in their insides flaunted at ’em like—shook in their fyces—while the law and the police and the church and everythink what mykes our life says to ’em, ‘There’s none o’ this for you.’”
“Well, money would buy it, wouldn’t it?”
“Money’d buy it if money knew what to buy. But it don’t. Mr. Rash must ’ave noticed that there’s nothink ’elplesser than the people with money what don’t know ’ow to spend it. I used to be that wye myself when I’d ’ave a little cash. I wouldn’t know what to blow myself to what wouldn’t be like them vulgar new-rich. But the new-rich is vulgar only because our life ’as put the ’orse before the cart with ’em, as you might sye, in givin’ them the money before showin’ ’em what to do with it.”
Having straightened the lines of magazines to the last fraction of an inch he found a further excuse for lingering by moving back into their accustomed places the chairs which had been disarranged.
“You ’ave to get the syme kind of ’ang of things as you and me’ve got, Mr. Rash, to know what it is156you want, and ’ow to spend your money wise like. Pleasure isn’t just in ’avin’ things; it’s in knowin’ what’s good to ’ave and what ain’t. Now this young lydy’d be like a child with a dime sent into a ten-cent store to buy whatever ’e’d like. There’s so many things, and all the syme price, that ’e’s kind of confused like. First ’e thinks it’ll be one thing, and then ’e thinks it’ll be another, and ’e ends by tykin’ the wrong thing, because ’e didn’t ’ave nothink to tell ’im ’ow to choose. Mr. Rash wouldn’t want a young lydy to whom ’e’s indebted, as you might sye, to be like that, now would ’e?”
“It doesn’t seem to me that I’ve got anything to do with it. If I offer her the money, and can get her to take it––”
“That’s where she strikes me as wiser than Mr. Rash, for all she don’t know but so little. That much she knows by hinstinck.”
“Then what am I going to do?”
“That’d be for Mr. Rash to sye. If it was me––”
The necessity for getting an armchair exactly beneath a portrait seemed to cut this sentence short.
“Well, if it was you—what then?”
“Before I’d give ’er money I’d teach ’er the ’ang of our kind o’ life, like. That’s what she’s aichin’ and cryvin’ for. A born lydy she is, and ’ankerin’ after a lydy’s wyes, and with no one to learn ’em to ’er––”
“But, good heavens, I can’t do that.”
“No, Mr. Rash, but I could, if you was to leave ’er ’ere for a bit. I could learn ’er to be a lydy in the course of a few weeks, and ’er so quick to pick up.157Then if you was to settle a little hincome on ’er she wouldn’t––”
Allerton took the bull by the horns. “She wouldn’t be so likely to go to the bad. That’s what you mean, isn’t it?”
Moving behind Allerton, who continued to stand on the hearthrug, Steptoe began poking the embers, making them safe for the night.
“Did Mr. Rash ever notice that goin’ to the bad, as ’e calls it, ain’t the syme for them as ’ave nothink as it looks to them as ’ave everythink? When you’re ’ungry for food you heats the first thing you can lie your ’ands on; and when you’re ’ungry for life you do the first thing as’ll promise you the good you’re lookin’ for. What people like you and me is hapt to call goin’ to the bad ain’t mostly no more than a ’ankerin’ for good which nothink don’t seem to feed.”
Allerton smiled. “That sounds to me as if it might be dangerous doctrine.”
“What excuses the poor’ll often seem dyngerous doctrine to the rich, Mr. Rash. Our kind is awful afryde of their kind gettin’ a little bit of what they’re longin’ for, and especially ’ere in America. When we’ve took from them most of the means of ’aving a little pleasure lawful, we call it dyngerous if they tyke it unlawful like, and we go to work and pass laws agynst them. Protectin’ them agynst theirselves we sye it is, and we go at it with a gun.”
“But we’re talking of––”
“Of the young lydy, sir. Quite so. It’s on ’er account as I’m syin’ what I’m syin’. You arsk me if158I think she’ll go to the bad in cyse we turn ’er out, and I sye that––”
Allerton started. “There’s no question of our turning her out. She’s sick of it.”
“Then that’d be my point, wouldn’t it, sir? If she goes because she’s sick of it, why, then, natural like, she’ll look somewhere else for what—for what she didn’t find with us. You may call it goin’ to the bad, but it’ll be no more than tryin’ to find in a wrong wye what life ’as denied ’er in a right one.”
Allerton, who had never in his life been asked to bear moral responsibility, was uneasy at this philosophy, changing the subject abruptly.
“Where did she get the clothes?”
“Me and ’er, Mr. Rash, went to Margot’s this mornin’ and bought a bunch of ’em.”
“The deuce you did! And you used my name?”
“No, sir,” Steptoe returned, with dignity, “I used mine. I didn’t give no ’andle to gossip. I pyde for the things out o’ some money I ’ad in ’and—my own money, Mr. Rash—and ’ad ’em all sent to me. I thought as we was mykin’ a mistyke the young lydy’d better look proper while we was mykin’ it; and I knew Mr. Rash’d feel the syme.”
The situation was that in which thefainéantking accepts the act of the mayor of the palace because it is Hobson’s choice. Moreover, he was willing that she should have the clothes. If she wouldn’t take money she would at least apparently take them, which, in a measure, would amount to the same thing. He was dwelling on this bit of satisfaction when Steptoe continued.
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“And as long as the young lydy remynes with us, Mr. Rash, I thought it’d be discreeter like not to ’ave no more women pokin’ about, and tryin’ to find out what ’ad better not be known. It mykes it simpler as she ’erself arsks to be called Miss Gravely––”
“Oh, she does?”
“Yes, sir; and that’s what I’ve told William and Golightly, the waiter and the chef, is ’er nyme. It mykes it all plyne to ’em––”
“Plain? Why, they’ll think––”
“No, sir. They won’t think. When it comes to what’s no one’s business but your own women thinks; men just haccepts. They tykes things for granted, and don’t feel it none of their affair. Mr. Rash’ll ’ave noticed that there’s a different kind of honor among women from what there is among men. I don’t sye but what the women’s is all right, only the men’s is easier to get on with.”
There being no response to these observations Steptoe made ready to withdraw. “And shall you stye ’ome for breakfast, sir?”
“I’ll see in the morning.”
“Very good, sir. I’ve locked up the ’ouse and seen to everythink, if you’ll switch off the lights as you come up. Good-night, Mr. Rash.”
“Good-night.”
160Chapter XIV
While this conversation was taking place Letty, in the back spare room, was conducting a ceremonial too poignant for tears. There were tears in her heart, but her eyes only smarted.
Taking off the blue-black tea-gown, she clasped it in her arms and kissed it. Then, on one of the padded silk hangers, she hung it far in the depths of the closet, where it wouldn’t scorch her sight in the morning.
Next she arrayed herself in a filmy breakfast thing, white with a copper-colored sash matching some of the tones in her hair and eyes, and simple with an angelic simplicity. Standing before the long mirror she surveyed herself mournfully. But this robe too she took off, kissed, and laid away.
Lastly she put on the blue-green costume, with the turquoise and jade embroidery. She put on also the hat with the feather which shaded itself from green into monkshood blue. She put on a veil, and a pair of white gloves. For once she would look as well as she was capable of looking, though no one should see her but herself.
Viewing her reflection she grew frightened. It was the first time she had ever seen her personal potentialities. She had long known that with “half a chance” she could emerge from the cocoon stage of the old gray rag and be at least the equal of the average; but161she hadn’t expected so radical a change. She was not the same Letty Gravely. She didn’t know what she was, since she was neither a “star” nor a “lady,” the two degrees of elevation of which she had had experience. All she could feel was that with the advantages here presented she had the capacity to be either. Since, apparently, the becoming a lady was now excluded from her choice of careers, “stardom” would still have been within her reach, only that she was not to get the necessary “half a chance.” That was the bitter truth of it. That was to be the result of her walking on blades. All the same, as walking on blades would help her prince she was resolved to walk on them. For her mother’s sake, even for Judson Flack’s, she had done things nearly as hard, when she had not had this incentive.
The incentive nerved her to take off the blue-green costume, kissing it a last farewell, and laying it to rest, as a mother a dead baby in its coffin. Into the closet went the bits of lingerie from the consignment just arrived from Paris, and the other spoils of the day. When everything was buried she shut the door upon it, as in her heart she was shutting the door on her poor little fledgling hopes. Nothing remained to torment her vision, or distract her from what she had to do. The old gray rag and the battered black hat were all she had now to deal with.
She slept little that night, since she was watching not for daylight but for that first stirring in the streets which tells that daylight is approaching. Having neither watch nor clock the stirring was all she had to go by. When it began to rumble and creak162and throb faintly in and above the town she got up and dressed.
So far had she travelled in less than forty-eight hours that the old gray rag, and not the blue-green costume, was now the disguise. In other words, once having tasted the prosperous she had found it the natural. To go back to poverty was not merely hard; it was contrary to all spontaneous dictates. Dimly she had supposed that in reverting to the harness she had worn she would find herself again; but she only discovered that she was more than ever lost.
Very softly she unlocked her door to peep out at the landing. The house was ghostly and still, but it was another sign of her development that she was no longer afraid of it. Space too had become natural, while dignity of setting had seemed to belong to her ever since she was born. Turning her back on these conditions was far more like turning her back on home than it had been when she walked away from Judson Flack’s.
She crept out. It was so dark that she was obliged to wait till objects defined themselves black against black before she could see the stairs. She listened too. There were sounds, but only such sounds as all houses make when everyone is sleeping. She guessed, it was pure guessing, that it must be about five o’clock.
She stole down the stairs. The necessity for keeping her mind on moving noiselessly deadened her thought to anything else. She neither looked back to what she was leaving behind, nor forward to what she was going to. Once she had reached the street it would be time enough to think of both. She had the163fact in the back of her consciousness, but she kept it there. Out in the street she would feel grief for the prince and his palace, and terror at the void before her; but she couldn’t feel them yet. Her one impulse was to escape.
At the great street door she could see nothing; but she could feel. She found the key and turned it easily. As the door did not then yield to the knob she fumbled till she touched the chain. Slipping that out of its socket she tried the door again, but it still refused to open. There must be something else! Rich houses were naturally fortresses! She discovered the bolt and pulled it back.
Still the door was fixed like a rock. She couldn’t make it out. A lock, a chain, a bolt! Surely that must be everything! Perhaps she had turned the key the wrong way. She turned it again, but only with the same result. She found she could turn the key either way, and still leave the door immovable.
Perhaps she didn’t pull it hard enough. Doors sometimes stuck. She pulled harder; she pulled with her whole might and main. She could shake the door; she could make it rattle. The hanging chain dangled against the woodwork with a terrifying clank. If anyone was lying awake she would sound like a burglar—and yet she must get out.
Now that she was balked, to get out became an obsession. It became more of an obsession the more she was balked. It made her first impatient, and then frantic. She turned the key this way and that way. She pulled and tugged. The perspiration came out on her forehead. She panted for breath; she almost164sobbed. She knew there was a “trick” to it. She knew it was a simple trick because she had seen Steptoe perform it on the previous day; but she couldn’t find out what it was. The effort made her only the more desperate.
She was not crying; she was only gasping—in raucous, exhausted, nervous sobs. They came shorter and harder as she pitted her impotence against this unyielding passivity. She knew it was impotence, and yet she couldn’t desist; and she couldn’t desist because she grew more and more frenzied. It was the kind of frenzy in which she would have dashed herself wildly, vainly against the force that blocked her with its pitiless resistance, only that the whole hall was suddenly flooded with a blaze of light.
It was light that came so unexpectedly that her efforts were cut short. Even her hard gasps were silenced, not in relief but in amazement. She remained so motionless that she could practically see herself, thrown against this brutal door, her arms spread out on it imploringly.
Seconds that seemed like minutes went by before she found strength to detach herself and turn.
Amazement became terror. On the halfway landing of the stairs stood a figure robed in scarlet from head to foot, with flying indigo lapels. He was girt with an indigo girdle, while the mass of his hair stood up as in tongues of forked black flame. The countenance was terrible, in mingled perplexity and wrath.
She saw it was the prince, but a prince transformed by condemnation.
“What on earth does this mean?”
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He came down the rest of the stairs till he stood on the lowest step. She advanced toward him pleadingly.
“I was—I was trying to get out.”
“What for?”
“I—I—I must get away.”
“Well, even so; is this the way to do it? I thought someone was tearing the house down. It woke me up.”
“I was goin’ this way because—because I didn’t want you to know what’d become of me.”
“Yes, and have you on my mind.”
“I hoped I’d be takin’ myself off your mind.”
“If you want to take yourself off my mind there’s a perfectly simple means of doing it.”
“I’ll do anything—but take money.”
“And taking money is the only thing I ask of you.”
“I can’t. It’d—it’d—shame me.”
“Shame you? What nonsense!”
She reflected fast. “There’s two ways a woman can take money from a man. The man may love her and marry her; or perhaps he don’t marry her, but loves her just the same. Then she can take it; but when––”
“When she only renders him a—a great service––”
“Ah, but that’s just what I didn’t do. You said you wanted me to send you to the devil—and now you ain’t a-goin’ to go.”
He grew excited. “But, good Lord, girl, you don’t expect me to go to the devil just to keep my word to you.”
“I don’t want you to do anything just to keep your word to me,” she returned, fiercely. “I only want you to let me get away.”
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He came down the remaining step, beginning to pace back and forth as he always did when approaching the condition he called “going off the hooks.” Letty found him a marvelous figure in his scarlet robe, and with his mass of diabolic black hair.
“Yes, and if I let you get away, where would you get awayto?”
“Oh, I’ll find a place.”
“A place in jail as a vagrant, as I said the other day.”
“I’d rather be in jail,” she flung back at him, “than stay where I’m not wanted.”
“That’s not the question.”
“It’s the biggest question of all for me. It’d be the biggest for you too if you were in my place.” She stretched out her hands to him. “Oh, please show me how to work the door, and let me go.”
He flared as he was in the habit of flaring whenever he was opposed. “You can go when we’ve settled the question of what you’ll have to live on.”
“I’ll have myself to live on—just as I had before I met you in the Park.”
“Nothing is the same for you or for me as before I met you in the Park.”
“No, but we want to make it the same, don’t we? You can’t—can’t marry the other girl till it is.”
“I can’t marry the other girl till I know you’re taken care of.”
“Money wouldn’t take care of me. That’s where you’re makin’ your mistake. You rich people think that money will do anything. So it will for you; but it don’t mean so awful much to me.” Her eyes, her167lips, her hands besought him together. “Think now! What would I do with money if I had it? It ain’t as if I was a lady. A lady has ways of doin’ nothin’ and livin’ all the same; but a girl like me don’t know anything about them. I’d go crazy if I didn’t work—or I’d die—or I’d do somethin’ worse.”
It was because his nerves were on edge that he cried out: “I don’t care a button what you do. I’m thinking of myself.”
She betrayed the sharpness of the wound only by a deepening of the damask flush. “I’m thinkin’ of you, too. Wouldn’t you rather have everything come right again—so that you could marry the other girl—and know that I’d done it for youfree—and not that you’d just bought me off?”
“You mean, wouldn’t I rather that all the generosity should be on your side––”
“I don’t care anything about generosity. I wouldn’t be doin’ it for that. It’d be because––”
He flung out his arms. “Well—why?”
“Because I’d like to do somethingforyou––”
“Do something for me by making me a cad.” He was beside himself. “That’s what it would come to. That’s what you’re playing for. I should be a cad. You dress yourself up again in this ridiculous rig––”
“It’s not a ridic’lous rig. It’s my own clothes––”
“Your own clothesnoware—are what I saw you in when I came home last evening. You can’t go back to that thing. We can’t go back in any way.” He seemed to make a discovery. “It’s no use trying to be what we were in the Park, because we can’t be.168Whatever we do must be in the way of—of going on to something else.”
“Well, that’d be something else, if you’d just let me go, and do the desertion stunt you talked to me about––”
“I’ll not let you do it unless I pay you for it.”
“But it’d be payin’ me for it if—if you’d just let me do it. Don’t you see Iwantto?”
“I can see that you want to keep me in your debt. I can see that I’d never have another easy moment in my life. Whatever I did, and whoever I married, I should have to owe it toyou.”
“Well, couldn’t you—when I owe so much to you?”
“There you go! What do you owe to me? Nothing but getting you into an infernal scrape––”
“Oh, no! It’s not been that at all. You’d have to be me to understand what ithasbeen. It’ll be something to think of all the rest of my life—whatever I do.”
“Yes, and I know how you’ll think of it.”
“Oh, no, you don’t. You couldn’t. It’s nothin’ to you to come into this beautiful house and see its lovely kind of life; but for me––”
“Oh, don’t throw that sort of thing at me,” he flamed out, striding up and down. “Steptoe’s been putting that into your head. He’s strong on the sentimental stuff. You and he are in a conspiracy against me. That’s what it is. It’s a conspiracy. He’s got something up his sleeve—I don’t know what—and he’s using you as his tool. But you don’t come it over me. I’m wise, I am. I’m a fool too. I know it well enough. But I’m not such a fool as to––”
169
She was frightened. He was going “off the hooks.” She knew the signs of it. This rapid speech, one word leading to another, had always been her mother’s first sign of super-excitement, until it ended in a scream. If he were to scream she would be more terrified than she had ever been in her life. She had never heard a man scream; but then she had never seen a man grow hysterical.
His utterance was the more clear-cut and distinct the faster it became.
“I know what it is. Steptoe thinks I’m going insane, and he’s made you think so too. That’s why you want to get away. You’re afraid of me. Well, I don’t wonder at it; but you’re not going. See? You’re not going. You’ll go when I send you; but you’ll not go before. See? I’ve married you, haven’t I? When all is said and done you’re my wife. My wife!” He laughed, between gritted teeth. “My wife! That’s my wife!” He pointed at her. “Rashleigh Allerton who thought so much of himself has marriedthat—and she’s trying to do the generous by him––”
Going up to him timidly, she laid her hand on his arm. “Say, mister, would you mind countin’ ten?”
The appeal took him so much by surprise that, both in his speech and in his walk, he stopped abruptly. She began to count, slowly, and marking time with her forefinger. “One—two—three—four—five—six—seven—eight—nine—ten.”
He stared at her as if it was she who had gone “off the hooks.” “What do you mean by that?”
“Oh, nothin’. Now you can begin again.”
170
“Begin what?”
“What you was—what you were sayin’.”
“What I was saying?” He rubbed his hand across his forehead, which was wet with cold perspiration. “Well, what was I saying?”
He was not only dazed, but a pallor stole over his skin, the more ghastly in contrast with his black hair and his scarlet dressing-gown.
“Isn’t there no place you can lay down? I always laid momma down after a spell of this kind. It did her good to sleep and she always slept.”
He said, absently: “There’s a couch in the library. I can’t go back to bed.”
“No, you don’t want to go back to bed,” she agreed, as if she was humoring a child. “You wouldn’t sleep there––”
“I haven’t slept for two nights,” he pleaded, in excuse for himself, “not since––”
Taking him by the arm she led him into the library, which was in an ell behind the back drawing-room. It was a big, book-lined room with worn, shiny, leather-covered furnishings. On the shiny, leather-covered couch was a cushion which she shook up and smoothed out. Over its foot lay an afghan the work of the late Mrs. Allerton.
“Now, lay down.”
He stretched himself out obediently, after which she covered him with the afghan. When he had closed his eyes she passed her hand across his forehead, on which the perspiration was still thick and cold. She remembered that a bottle of Florida water and a paper fan were among the luxuries of the back spare room.
171
“Don’t you stir,” she warned him. “I’m goin’ to get you something.”
Absorbed in her tasks as nurse she forgot to make the sentimental reflections in which she would otherwise have indulged. Back to the room from which she had fled she hurried with no thought that she was doing so. From the grave of hope she disinterred a half dozen of the spider-web handkerchiefs to which a few hours previously she had bid a touching adieu. With handkerchiefs, fan, and Florida water, she flew back to her patient, who opened his eyes as she approached.
“I don’t want to be fussed over––” he was beginning, fretfully.
“Lie still,” she commanded. “I know what to do. I’m used to people who are sick—up here.”
“Up here” was plainly the forehead which she mopped softly with a specimen from Margot’s Parisian consignment. He closed his eyes. His features relaxed to an expression of relief. Relief gave place to repose when he felt her hand with the cool scented essence on his brow. It passed and passed again, lightly, soothingly, consolingly. Drowsily he thought that it was Barbara’s hand, but a Barbara somehow transformed, and grown tenderer.
He was asleep. She sat fanning him till a feeble daylight through an uncurtained window warned her to switch off the electricity. Coming back to her place, she continued to fan him, quietly and deftly, with no more than a motion of the wrist. She had the nurse’s wrist, slender, flexible; the nurse’s hand, strong, shapely, with practical spatulated finger-tips. After172all, he was in some degree the drowning unconscious prince, and she the little mermaid.
“He’ll be ashamed when he wakes up. He’ll not like to find me sittin’ here.”
It was broad daylight now. He was as sound asleep as a child. Since she couldn’t disturb him by rising she rose. Since she couldn’t disturb him even by kissing him she kissed him. But she wouldn’t kiss his lips, nor so much as his cheek or his brow. Very humbly she knelt and kissed his feet, outlined beneath the afghan. Then she stole away.
173Chapter XV
The interlacing of destinies is such that you will not be surprised to learn that the further careers of Letty Gravely, of Barbara Walbrook, of Rashleigh Allerton now turned on Mademoiselle Odette Coucoul, whose name not one of the three was ever destined to hear.
On his couch in the library Allerton slept till after nine, waking in a confusion which did not preclude a sense of refreshment. At the same minute Madame Simone was finishing her explanations to Mademoiselle Coucoul as to what was to be done to the seal-brown costume, which Steptoe had added to Letty’s wardrobe, in order to conceal the fact that it was a model of a season old, and not the new creation its purchasers supposed. Taking in her instructions with Gallic precision mademoiselle was already at work when Miss Tina Vanzetti paused at her door. The door was that of a small French-paneled room, once the boudoir of the owner of the Flemish chateau, but set apart now by Madame Simone for jobs requiring deftness.
Miss Vanzetti, whose Neapolitan grandfather had begun his American career as a boot-black in Brooklyn, was of the Americanized type of her race. She could not, of course, eliminate her Latinity of eye and tress nor her wild luxuriance of bust, but English was her mother-tongue, and the chewing of gum174her national pastime. She chewed it now, slowly, thoughtfully, as she stood looking in on Mademoiselle Odette, who was turning the skirt this way and that, searching out the almost invisible traces of use which were to be removed.
“So she’s give you that to do, has she? Some stunt, I’ll say. Gee, she’s got her gall with her, old Simone, puttin’ that off on the public as something new. If I had a dollar for every time Mamie Gunn has walked in and out to show it to customers I’d buy a set of silver fox.”
Mademoiselle’s smile was radiant, not because she had radiance to shed, but because her lips and teeth framed themselves that way. She too was of her race, alert, vivacious, and as neat as a trivet, as became a former midinette of the rue de la Paix and a daughter of Batignolles.
“Madame she t’ink it all in de beezeness,” she contented herself with saying.
With her left hand Miss Vanzetti put soft touches to the big black coils of her back hair. “See that kid that all these things is goin’ to? Gee, but she’s beginnin’ to step out. I know her. Spotted her the minute she come in to try on. Me and she went to the same school. Lived in the same street. Name of Letty Gravely.”
Seeing that she was expected to make a response mademoiselle could think of nothing better than to repeat in her pretty staccato English: “Name of Let-ty Grav-el-ly.”
“Stepfather’s name was Judson Flack. Company-promoter he called himself. Mother croaked three or175four years ago, just before we moved to Harlem. Never saw no more of her till she walked in here with the old white slaver what’s payin’ for the outfit. Gee, you needn’t tell me! S’pose she’ll hit the pace till some fella chucks her. Gee, I’m sorry. Awful slim chance a girl’ll get when some guy with a wad blows along and wants her.” The theme exhausted Miss Vanzetti asked suddenly: “Why don’t you never come to the Lantern?”
In her broken English mademoiselle explained that she didn’t know the American dances, but that a fella had promised to teach her the steps. She had met him at the house of a cousin who was married to a waiter chez Bouquin. Ver’ beautiful fella, he was, and had invited her to a chop suey dinner that evening, with the dance at the Lantern to wind up with. Most ver’ beautiful fella, single, and a detective.
“Good for you,” Miss Vanzetti commanded. “If you don’t dance you might as well be dead, I’ll say. Keeps you thin, too; and the music at the Lantern is swell.”
The incident is so slight that to get its significance you must link it up with the sound of the telephone which, as a simultaneous happening, was waking Judson Flack from his first real sleep after an uncomfortable night. Nothing but the fear lest by ignoring the call the great North Dakota Oil Company whose shares would soon be on the market, would be definitely launched without his assistance dragged him from his bed.
“Hello?”
A woman’s voice inquired: “Is this Hudson 283-J?”