291Chapter XXIII
“Why you should hold me responsible,” Barbara was saying, “I can’t begin to imagine. Surely I’ve done everything I could to simplify matters, to straighten them out, and to give you a chance to rectify your folly. I’ve effaced myself; I’ve broken my heart; I’ve promised Aunt Marion to go in for a job for which I’m not fitted and don’t care a rap; and yet you come here, accusing me––”
“But, Barbe, I’mnotaccusing you! If I’m accusing anyone it’s myself. Only I can’t speak without your taking me up––”
“There you go! Oh, Rash, dear, if you’d only been able to control yourself nothing of this would have happened—not from the first.”
She was pacing up and down the little reception room, and rubbing her hands together, while the twisting of the fish-tail of her hydrangea-colored robe, like an eel in agony, emphasized her agitation. Rashleigh was seated, his elbows on his knees, his head bowed between his hands, of which the fingers clutched and tore at the masses of his hair. Only when he spoke did he lift his woe-begone black eyes.
“Well, I didn’t control myself,” he admitted, impatiently; “that’s settled. Why go back to it? The question is––”
“Yes; why go back to it? That’s you all over, Rash. You can do what no one else in his senses292would ever think of doing; and when you’ve upset the whole apple cart it must never be referred to again. I’m to accept, and keep silence. Well, I’vekeptsilence. I’ve gone all winter like a muzzled dog. I’ve wheedled that girl, and kow-towed to her, and made her think I was fond of her—which I am in a way—you may not believe it, but I am—and what’s the result? She gets sick of the whole business; runs away; and you come here and throw the whole blame on me.”
He tried to speak with special calmness. “Barbe, listen to me. What I said was this––”
She came to a full stop in front of him, her arms outspread. “Oh, Rash, dear, I know perfectly well what you said. You don’t have to go all over it again. I’m not deaf. If you would only not be so excitable––”
He jumped to his feet. “I’m excitable, I know, Barbe. I confess it. Everybody knows it. What I’m trying to tell you is that I’m not excitednow.”
She laughed, a little mocking laugh, and started once more to pace up and down. “Oh, very well! You’re not excited now. Then that’s understood. You never are excited. You’re as calm as a mountain.” She paused again, though at a distance. “Now?What is it you’re going to do? That’s what you’ve come to ask me, isn’t it? Are you going to run after her? Are you going to let her go? Are you going to divorce her, if she gives you the opportunity? If you divorce her are you going to––?”
“But, Barbe, I can’t decide all these questions now. What I want to do is tofindher.”
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“Well, I haven’t got her here? Why don’t you go after her? Why don’t you apply to the police? Why don’t you––?”
“Yes, but that’s just what I want to discuss with you. I don’tlikeapplying to the police. If I do it’ll get into the papers, and the whole thing become so odious and vulgar––”
“And it’s such an exquisite idyll now!”
He threw back his head. “She’san exquisite idyll—in her way.”
“There! That’s what I wanted to hear you say! I’ve thought you were in love with her––”
He remembered the penciled lines in Hans Andersen. “If I have been, it’s as you may be in love with an innocent little child––”
She laughed again, wildly, almost hysterically. “Oh, Rash, don’t try to get that sort of thing off on me. I know how men love innocent little children. You can see the way they do it any night you choose to hang round the stage-door of a theatre where the exquisite idylls are playing in musical comedy.”
“Don’t Barbe! Not when you’re talking about her! I know she’s an ignorant little thing; but to me she’s like a wild-flower––”
“Wild-flowers can be cultivated, Rash.”
“Yes, but the wild-flower she’s most like is the one you see in the late summer all along the dusty highways––”
She put up both palms in a gesture of protestation. “Oh, Rash, please don’t be poetical. It gets on my nerves. I can’t stand it. I like you in every mood but your sentimental one.” She came to a halt beside294the mantelpiece, on which she rested an elbow, turning to look at him. “Now tell me, Rash! Suppose I wasn’t in the world at all. Or suppose you’d never heard of me. And suppose you found yourself married to this girl, just as you are—nominally—legally—but not really. Would you—would you make it—really?”
They exchanged a long silent look. His eyes had not left hers when he said: “I—I might.”
“Good! Now suppose she wasn’t in the world at all, or that you’d never heard of her. And suppose that you and I were—were on just the same terms that we are to-day. Would you—would you want to marry me? Answer me truly.”
“Why, yes; of course.”
“Now suppose that she and I were standing together, and you were led in to choose between us. And suppose you were absolutely free and untrammelled in your choice, with no question as to her feelings or mine to trouble you. Which would you take? Answer me just as truly and sincerely as you can.”
He took time to think, wheeling away from her, and walking up and down the little room with his hands behind his back. It occurred to neither that Barbara having broken the “engagement,” and returned the ring, the choice before him was purely hypothetical. Their relations were no more affected by the note she had written him that morning than by the ceremony through which he and Letty had walked in the previous year.
To Barbara the suspense was almost unbearable. In a minute or two, and with a word or two, she would295know how life for the future was to be cast. She would have before her the possibility of some day becoming a happy wife—or a great career like her aunt’s.
Pausing in his walk he confronted her just as he stood, his hands still clasped behind his back. Her own attitude, with elbow resting on the mantelpiece, was that of a woman equal to anything.
He spoke slowly. “Just as truly and sincerely as I can answer you—I don’t know.”
She stirred slightly, but otherwise gave no sign of her impatience. “And is there anything that would help you to find out?”
He shook his head. “Nothing that I can think of, unless––”
“Yes? Unless—what?”
“Unless it’s something that would unlock what’s locked in my subconsciousness.”
“And what would that be?”
“I haven’t the faintest idea.”
She moved from the mantelpiece with a gesture of despair. “Rash, you’re absolutely and hopelessly impossible.”
“I know that,” he admitted, humbly.
With both fists clenched she stood in front of him. “I could kill you.”
He hung his head. “Not half so easily as I could kill myself.”
Letty’s judgment on Miss Henrietta Towell was different from yours and mine. She found her just what she had expected to see from the warnings long ago issued by Mrs. Judson Flack in putting her296daughter on her guard. In going about the city she, Letty, was always to be suspicious of elderly ladies, respectably dressed, enticingly mannered, and with what seemed like maternal intentions. The more any one of these traits was developed, the more suspicious Letty was to be. With these instructions carefully at heart she would have been suspicious of Henrietta Towell in any case; but with Steptoe’s description to fall back upon she couldn’t but feel sure.
By the time Miss Towell had arrived at the hospital Letitia Rashleigh had sufficiently recovered to be dressed and seated in the armchair placed beside the bed in the small white ward. On one low bedpost the jacket had been hung, and on the other the battered black hat.
“There’s nothing the matter with her,” the nurse explained to Miss Towell, before entering the ward. “She had fainted in the subway, but I think it was only from fatigue, and perhaps from lack of food. She’s quite well nourished, only she didn’t seem to have eaten any supper, and was evidently tired from a long and frightening walk. She gives us no explanation of herself, and is disinclined to talk, and if it hadn’t been that she had your address in her pocket––”
“I think I know how she got that. From her name I judge that she’s a relative of the family in which I used to be employed; but as they were all very wealthy people––”
“Even very wealthy people often have poor relations.”
“Yes, of course; but I was with this family for so many years that if there’d been any such connection297I think I must have heard of it. However, it makes no difference to me, and I shall be glad to be of use to her, especially as she has in her possession an article—a thimble it is—which once belonged to me.”
At the bedside the nurse made the introduction. “This is the lady whose address you had in your pocket. She very kindly said she’d come and see what she could do for you.”
Having placed a chair for Miss Towell the nurse withdrew to attend to other patients in the ward, of whom there were three or four.
Letty regarded the newcomer with eyes that seemed lustreless in spite of their tiny gold flames. Having a shrewd idea of what she would mean to her visitor she felt it unnecessary to express gratitude. In a certain sense she hated her at sight. She hated her bugles and braid and the shape of her bonnet, as the criminal about to be put to death might hate the executioner’s mask and gaberdine. The more Miss Towell was sweet-spoken and respectable, the more Letty shrank from these tokens of hypocrisy in one who was wicked to the core. “She wouldn’t seem so wicked, not at first,” Steptoe had predicted, “but time’d tell.” Well, Letty didn’t need time to tell, since she could see for herself already. She could see from the first words addressed to her.
“You needn’t tell me anything about yourself, dear, that you don’t want me to know. If you’re without a place to go to, I shall be glad if you’ll come home with me.”
It was the invitation Letty had expected, and to which she meant to respond. Knowing, however,298what was behind it she replied more ungraciously than she would otherwise have done. “Oh, I don’t mind talking about myself. I’m a picture-actress, only I’ve been out of a job. I haven’t worked for over six months. I’ve been—I’ve been visiting.”
Miss Towell lowered her eyes, and spoke with modesty. “I suppose you were visiting people who knew—who knew the person who—who gave you my address and the thimble?”
This question being more direct than she cared for Letty was careful to answer no more than, “Yes.”
Miss Towell continued to sit with eyes downcast, and as if musing. Two or three minutes went by before she said, softly: “How is he?”
Letty replied that he was very well, and in the same place where he had been so long. Another interval of musing was followed by the simple statement: “We differed about religion.”
This remark had no modifying effect on Letty’s estimate of Miss Towell’s character, since religion was little more to her than a word. Neither was she interested in dead romance between Steptoe and Miss Towell, all romance being summed up in her prince. That flame burned with a pure and single purpose to wed him to the princess with whom he was in love, while the little mermaid became first foam, and then a spirit of the air. It took little from the poetry of this dissolution that it could be achieved only by trundling over Brooklyn Bridge, and through a nexus of dreary streets. In Letty’s outlook on her mission the end glorified the means, however shady or degraded.
It was precisely this spirit—mistaken, if you choose299to call it so—which animated Judith of Bethulia, Monna Vanna, and Boule de Suif. Letty didn’t class herself with these heroines; she only felt as they did, that there was something to be done. On that something a man’s happiness depended; on it another woman’s happiness depended too; on it her own happiness depended, since if it wasn’t done she would feel herself a clog to be cursed. To be cursed by the prince would mean anguish far more terrible than any punishment society could mete out to her.
“If you feel equal to it we might go now, dear,” Miss Towell suggested, on waking from her dreams of what might have been. “I wish I could take you in a taxi; but I daresay you won’t mind the tram.”
Letty rose briskly. “No, I shan’t mind it at all.” She looked Miss Towell significantly in the eyes, hoping that her words would carry all the meaning she was putting into them. “I shan’t mind—anything you want me to do, no matter what.”
Miss Towell smiled, sweetly. “Thank you, dear. That’ll be very nice. I shan’t ask you to do much, because it’s your problem, you know, and you must work it out. I’ll stand by; but standing by is about all we can do for each other, when problems have to be faced. Don’t you think it is?”
As this language meant nothing to Letty, she thanked the nurse, smiled at the other patients, and, trudging at Miss Towell’s side with her quaintly sturdy grace, went forth to her great sacrifice.
Allerton had drawn from his conversation with Barbara this one practical suggestion. As he had300months before consulted his lawyer, Mr. Nailes, as to ways of losing Letty after she had been found, he might consult him as to ways of finding her now that she had been lost. Mr. Nailes would not go to the police. He would apply to some discreet house of detectives who would do the work discreetly.
“Then, I presume, you’ve changed your mind about this marriage,” was Mr. Nailes’ not unnatural inference, “and mean to go on with it.”
“N-not exactly.” Allerton was still unable to define his intentions. “I only don’t want her to disappear—like this.”
Mr. Nailes pondered. He was a tall, raw-boned man, of raw-boned countenance, to whom the law represented no system of divine justice, but a means by which Eugene Nailes could make money, as his father had made it before him. Having inherited his father’s practice he had inherited Rashleigh Allerton, the two fathers having had a long-standing business connection. Mr. Nailes had no high opinion of Rashleigh Allerton—in which he was not peculiar—but a client with so much money was entitled to his way. At the same time he couldn’t have been human without urging a point of common sense.
“If youdon’twant to—to continue your—your relation with this—this lady, doesn’t it strike you that now might be a happy opportunity––?”
Allerton did what he did rarely; he struck the table with his fist. “I want to find her.”
The words were spoken with so much force that to Mr. Nailes they were conclusive. It was far from his intention to compel anyone to common sense, and301least of all a man whose folly might bring increased fees to the firm of Nailes, Nailes, and Nailes.
It was agreed that steps should be taken at once, and that Mr. Nailes would report in the evening. Gravely was the name Allerton was sure she would use, and the only one that needed to be mentioned. It needed only to be mentioned too that Mr. Nailes was acting for a client who preferred to remain anonymous.
It was further agreed that Mr. Nailes should report at Allerton’s office at ten that evening, in person if there was anything to discuss, by telephone if there was nothing. This was convenient for Mr. Nailes, who lived in the neighborhood of Washington Square, while it protected Rash from household curiosity. At ten that night he was, therefore, in the unusual position of pacing the rooms he had hardly ever seen except by daylight.
Not Letty’s disappearance was uppermost in his mind, for the moment, but his own inhibitions.
“My God, what’s the matter with me?” he was muttering to himself. “Am I going insane? Have I been insane all along? Whycan’tI say which of these two women I want, when I can have either?”
He placed over against each other the special set of spells which each threw upon his heart.
Barbara was of his own world; she knew the people he knew; she had the same interests, and the same way of showing them. Moreover, she had in a measure grown into his life. Their friendship was not only intimate it was one of long standing. Though she worried, hectored, and exasperated him, she had fits302of generous repentance, in which she mothered him adorably. This double-harness of comradeship had worked for so many years that he couldn’t imagine wearing it with another.
And yet Letty pulled so piteously at his heart that he fairly melted in tenderness toward her. Everything he knew as appeal was summed up in her soft voice, her gentle manner, her humility, her unquestioning faith in himself. No one had ever had faith in him before. To Barbe he was a booby when he was not a baby. To Letty he was a hero, strong, wise, commanding. It wasn’t merely his vanity that she touched; it was his manliness. Barbe suppressed his manliness, because she herself was so imperious. Letty depended on it, and therefore drew it out. Because she believed him a man, he could be a man; whereas with Barbe, as with everyone else, he was a creature to be liked, humored, laughed at, and good-naturedly despised. He was sick of being liked, humored, and laughed at; he rebelled with every atom in him that was masculine at being good-naturedly despised. To find anyone who thought him big and vigorous was to his starved spirit, as the psalmist says, sweeter also than honey and the honeycomb. In having her weakness to hold up he could for the first time in his life feel himself of use.
If there was no Barbe in the world he could have taken Letty as the mate his soul was longing for. Yet how could he deal such a blow at Barbe’s loyalty? She had protected him during all his life, from boyhood upwards. Between him and derision she had stood like a young lioness. How could he deny her now?—no303matter what frail, gentle hands were clinging around his heart?
“How can I? How can I? How can I?”
He was torturing himself with this question when the telephone rang, and he knew that Letty had not been found.
“No; nothing,” were the words of Mr. Nailes. “No one of the name has been reported at any of the hospitals, or police stations, or any other public institution. They’ve applied at all the motion-picture studios round New York; but still with no result. This, of course, is only the preliminary search, as much as they’ve been able to accomplish in one afternoon and evening. You mustn’t be disappointed. To-morrow is likely to be more successful.”
Rash was, therefore, thrown back on another phase of his situation. Letty was lost. She was not only lost, but she had run away from him. She had not only run away from him, but she had done it so that he might be rid of her. She had not only done it so that he might be rid of her, but....
His spirit balked. His imagination could work no further. Horror staggered him. A mother who knows that her child is in the hands of kidnappers who will have no mercy might feel something like the despair and helplessness which sent him chafing and champing up and down the suite of rooms, cursing himself uselessly.
Suddenly he paused. He was in front of the cabinet which had come via Bordentown from Queen Caroline Murat. Behind its closed door there was still the bottle on the label of which a kilted Highlander304was dancing. He must have a refuge from his thoughts, or else he would go mad. He was already as near madness as a man could come and still be reckoned sane.
He opened the door of the cabinet. The bottle and the glass stood exactly where he had placed them on that morning when he had tried to begin going to the devil, and had failed. Now there was no longer that same mysterious restraint. He was not thinking of the devil; he was thinking only of himself. He must still the working of his mind. Anything would do that would drug his faculties, and so....
It was after midnight when he dragged himself out of a stupor which had not been sleep. Being stupor, however, it was that much to the good. He had stopped thinking. He couldn’t think. His head didn’t ache; it was merely sore. He might have been dashing it against the wall, as figuratively he had done. His body was sore too—stiff from long sitting in the same posture, and bruised as if from beating. All that was nothing, however, since misery only stunned him. To be stunned was what he had been working for.
Out in the air the wind of the May night was comforting. It soothed his nerves without waking the dormant brain. Instead of looking for a taxi he began walking up the Avenue. Walking too was a relief. It allowed him to remain as stupefied as at first, and yet stirred the circulation in his limbs. He meant to walk till he grew tired, after which he would jump on an electric bus.
But he did not grow tired. He passed the great305milestones, Fourteenth Street, Twenty-third Street, Forty-second Street, Fifty-ninth Street, and not till crossing the last did he begin to feel fagged. He was then so near home that the impulse of doggedness kept him on foot. He was a strong walker, and physically in good condition, without being wholly robust. Had it not been for the kilted Highlander he would hardly have felt fatigue; but as it was, the corner of East Sixty-seventh Street found him as spent as he cared to be.
Advancing toward his door he saw a man coming in the other direction. There was nothing in that, and he would scarcely have noticed him, only for the fact that at this hour of the night pedestrians in the quarter were rare. In addition to that the man, having reached the foot of Allerton’s own steps, stood there waiting, as if with intention.
Through the obscurity Rash could see only that the man was well built, flashily dressed, and that he wore a sweeping mustache. In his manner of standing and waiting there was something significant and menacing. Arrived at the foot of the steps Allerton could do no less than pause to ask if the stranger was looking for anyone.
“Is your name Allerton?”
“Yes; it is.”
“Then I want my girl.”
It was some seconds before Rash could get his dulled mind into play. Moreover, the encounter was of a kind which made him feel sick and disgusted.
“Whom do you mean?” he managed to ask, at last.
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“You know very well who I mean. I mean Letty Gravely. I’m her father; and by God, if you don’t give her up—with big damages––”
“I can’t give her up, because she’s not here.”
“Not here? She was damn well here the day before yesterday.”
“Yes; she was here the day before yesterday; but she disappeared last night.”
“Ah, cut that kind o’ talk. I’m wise, I am. You can’t put that bunk over on me. She’s in there, and I’m goin’ to get her.”
“I wish she was in there; but she’s not.”
“How do I know she’s not?”
“I’m afraid you’ll have to take my word for it.”
“Like hell I’ll take your word for it. I’m goin’ to see for myself.”
“I don’t see how you’re going to do that.”
“I’m goin’ in with you.”
“That wouldn’t do you any good. Besides, I can’t let you.”
The man became more bullying. “See here, son. This game is my game. Did j’ever see a thing like this?”
Watching the movement of his hand Rash saw the handle of a revolver displayed in a side pocket.
“Yes, I’ve seen a thing like that; but even if it was loaded—which I don’t believe it is—you’ve too much sense to use it. You might shoot me, of course; but you wouldn’t find the girl in the house, because she isn’t there.”
“Well, I’m goin’ to see. You march. Up you go, and open that door, and I’ll follow you.”
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“Oh, no, you won’t.” Allerton looked round for the policeman who occasionally passed that way; but though a lighted car crashed down Madison Avenue there was no one in sight. He might have called in the hope of waking the men upstairs, but that seemed cowardly. Though in a physical encounter with a ruffian like this he could hardly help getting the worst of it—especially in his state of half intoxication—it was the encounter itself that he loathed, even more than the defeat. “Oh, no, you won’t,” he repeated, taking one step upward, and turning to defend his premises. “I don’t mean that you shall come into this house, or ever see the girl again, if I can prevent it.”
“Oh, you don’t, don’t you?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Then take that.”
The words were so quickly spoken, and the blow in his face so unexpected, that Rash staggered backwards. Being on a step he had little or no footing, and having been drinking his balance was the more quickly lost.
“And that!”
A second blow in the face sent him down like a stone, without a struggle or a cry.
He fell limply on his back, his feet slipping to the sidewalk, his body sagging on the steps like a bit of string, accidentally dropped there. The hat, which fell off, remained on the step beside the head it had been covering.
The man leaped backward, as if surprised at his own deed. He looked this way and that, to see if308he had been observed. A lighted car crashed up Madison Avenue, but otherwise the street remained empty. Creeping nearer the steps he bent over his victim, whose left hand lay helpless and outstretched. Timidly, gingerly, he put his fingers to the pulse, starting back from it with a shock. He spoke but two words, but he spoke them half aloud.
“Dead! God!”
Then he walked swiftly away into Madison Avenue, where he soon found a car going southward.
309Chapter XXIV
Barbara was late for breakfast. Miss Walbrook, the aunt, was scanning the morning paper, her refined, austere Americanism being as noticeable in the dining-room as elsewhere in the house. Everything was slender and strong; everything was American, unless it was the Persian rug. On the paneled walls there were but three portraits, a Boston ancestress, in lace cap and satins, painted by Copley; a Philadelphia ancestor in the Continental uniform, painted by Gilbert Stuart; and her New York grandmother, painted by Thomas Sully, looking over her shoulder with the wild backward glance that artist gives to the girl Victoria in the Metropolitan Museum. In a flat cabinet along a wall was the largest collection of old American glass to be found in the country.
Barbara rushed in, with apologies for being late. “I didn’t sleep a wink. It doesn’t seem to me as if I should ever sleep again. Where’s my cup?”
“Wildgoose will bring it. As the coffee had grown cold he took that and the cup to keep warm. What’s the matter?”
Wildgoose stepped in with the missing essentials. A full-fed, round-faced, rubicund man of fifty-odd he looked a perennial twenty-five. Barbara began to minister to herself.
“Oh, everything’s the matter. I told you yesterday that that girl had run away. Well, I begin to wish she’d run back again.”
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Miss Walbrook, the elder, had this in common with Miss Henrietta Towell, that she believed it best for everyone to work out his own salvation. Barbara had her personal life to live, and while her aunt would help her to live it, she wouldn’t guide her choice. She continued, therefore, to scan the paper till her niece should say something more.
She said it, not because she wanted to give information, but because she was temperamentally outspoken. “I begin to wish there were no men in the world. If women are men in a higher stage of development, why didn’t men die out, so that we could be rid of them? Isn’t that what we generally get from the survival of the fittest?”
Miss Walbrook’s thin, clear smile suggested the edge of a keenly tempered blade. “I’ve never said that women were men in a higher stage of development. I’ve said that in their parallel states of development women had advanced a stage beyond men. You may say of every generation born that women begin where men leave off. I suppose that that’s what’s meant by the myth of Eve springing from Adam’s side. It was to be noticed even then, in the prehistoric, in the age that formed the great legends. Adam was asleep, when Eve as a vital force leaped away from him. If it wasn’t for Eve’s vitality the human race would still be in the Stone Age.”
Barbara harked back to what for her was the practical. “Some of us are in the Stone Age as it is. I’m sure Rash Allerton is as nearly an elemental as one can be, and still belong to clubs and drive in motorcars.”
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Miss Walbrook risked her principles of non-interference so far as to say: “It’s part of our feminine lack of development that we’re always inclined to look back on the elemental with pity, and even with regret. The woman was never born who didn’t have in her something of Lot’s wife.”
“Thank you, Aunt Marion. In a way that lets me out. If I’m no weaker than the rest of my sex––”
“Than many of the rest of your sex.”
“Very well, then; than many of the rest of my sex; if I’m no weaker than that I don’t have to lose my self-respect.”
“You don’t have to lose your self-respect; you only risk—your reason.”
Barbara stared at her. “That’s the very thing I’m afraid of. I’d give anything for peace of mind. How did you know?”
“Oh, it doesn’t call for much astuteness. I don’t suppose there’s a married woman in the world in full command of her wits. You’ve noticed how foolish most of them are. That’s why. It isn’t that they were born foolish. They’ve simply been addled by enforced adaptation to mates of lower intelligence. Oh, I’m not scolding. I’m merely stating a natural, observed, psychological fact. The woman who marries says good-bye to the orderly working of her faculties. For that she may get compensations, with which I don’t intend to find fault. But compensations or no, to a clear-thinking woman like––”
“Like yourself, Aunt Marion.”
“Very well; like myself, if you will; but to a clear-thinking312woman it’s as obvious as daylight that her married sisters are partially demented. They may not know it; the partially demented never do. And it’s no good telling them, because they don’t believe you. I’m only saying it to you to warn you in advance. If you part with your reason, it’s something to know that you do it of your own free will.”
Once more Barbara confined herself to the case in hand. “Still, I don’t believe every man is as trying as Rash Allerton.”
“Not in his particular way, perhaps. But if it’s not in one way then it’s in another.”
“Even he wouldn’t be so bad if he could control himself. At the minute when he’s tearing down the house he wants you to tell him that he’s calm.”
“If he didn’t want you to tell him that it would be something equally preposterous. There’s little to choose between men.”
Barbara grew thoughtful. “Still, if people didn’t marry the human race would die out.”
“And would there be any harm in that? It’s not a danger, of course; but if it was, would anyone in his senses want to stop it? Looking round on the human race to-day one can hardly help saying that the sooner it dies out the better. Since we can’t kill it off, it’s well to remember––”
“To remember what, Aunt Marion?”
Miss Walbrook reflected as to how to express herself cautiously. “To remember that—in marrying—and having children—children who will have to face the highly probable miseries of the next generation—Well, I’m glad there’ll be no one to reproach me313with his being in the world, either as his mother or his ancestress.”
“They say Rash’s father and mother didn’t wanthimin the world, and I sometimes wish they’d had their way. If he wasn’t here—or if he was dead—I believe I could be happier. I shouldn’t be forever worrying about him. I shouldn’t have him on my mind. I often wonder if it’s—if it’s love I feel for him—or only an agonizing sense of responsibility.”
The door being open Walter Wildgoose waddled to the threshold, where he stood with his right hand clasped in his left. “Mr. Steptoe at Mr. Allerton’s to speak to Miss Barbara on the telyphone, please.”
Barbara gasped. “Oh, Lord! I wonder what it is now!”
Left to herself Miss Walbrook resumed her scanning of the paper, but she resumed it with the faintest quiver of a smile on her thin, cleanly-cut lips. It was the kind of smile which indicates patient hope, or the anticipation of something satisfactory.
“Oh!”
The exclamation was so loud as to be heard all the way from the telephone, which was in another part of the house. Miss Walbrook let the paper fall, sat bolt upright, and listened.
“Oh! Oh!”
It was like a second, and repeated, explosion. Miss Walbrook rose to her feet; the paper rustled to the floor.
“Oh! Oh!”
The sound was that which human beings make when the thing told them is more than they can bear.314Barbara cried out as if someone was beating her with clubs, and she was coming to her knees.
She was not coming to her knees. When her aunt reached her she was still standing by the little table in the hall which held the telephone, on which she had hung up the receiver. She supported herself with one hand on the table, as a woman does when all she can do is not to fall senseless.
“It’s—it’s Rash,” she panted, as she saw her aunt appear. “Somebody has—has killed him.”
Miss Walbrook stood with hands clasped, like one transfixed. “He’s dead?—after all?”
Barbara nodded, tearlessly. She could stammer out the words, but no more. “Yes—all but!”
In the flat at Red Point there was another and dissimilar breakfast scene. For the first time in her life Letty was having coffee and toast in bed. The window was open, and between the muslin curtains, which puffed in the soft May wind, she could see the ocean with steamers and ships on it.
The room was tiny, but it was spotless. Everything was white, except where here and there it was tied up with a baby-blue ribbon. Anything that could be tied with a baby-blue ribbon was so tied.
Letty thought she had never seen anything so dainty, though her experienced eye could detect the fact that nothing had really cost money. As an opening to the career on which she had embarked the setting was unexpected, while the method of her treatment was bewildering. In the black recesses of her heart Miss Henrietta Towell might be hiding all315those feline machinations which Mrs. Judson Flack had led Letty to believe a part of the great world’s stock-in-trade; but it couldn’t be denied that she hid them well. Letty didn’t know what to make of it. “There’s quite a trick to it,” Steptoe had warned her; but the explanation seemed inadequate to the phenomena.
Sipping her coffee and crunching her toast she was driven to ponder on the ways of wickedness. She had expected them to be more obvious. All her information was to the effect that an unprotected girl in a world of males was a lamb among lions, a victim with no way of escape. That she was a lamb among lions, and a victim with no way of escape, she was still prepared to believe; only the preliminaries puzzled her. Instead of being crude, direct, indelicate, they were subtle and misleading. After twenty-four hours in Miss Towell’s spare room there was still no hint of anything but coddling.
“You see, my dear,” Miss Towell had said, “if I don’t nurse you back to real ’ealth, him that gave you the thimble might be displeased with me.”
It was not often that Miss Towell dropped anhor added one; but in moments of emotion early habit was too strong for her.
Coming into the room now, on some ermine’s errand of neatness, she threw a glance at Letty, and said: “You don’tlooklike a Rashleigh, do you, dear? But then you never can tell anything about families from looks, can you?”
It was her nearest approach as yet to the personal, and Letty considered as to how she was to meet it. “I’m not a Rashleigh—not really—only by—by marriage.316Rashleigh isn’t my real name. It’s—it’s the name I’m going by in pictures.”
“Oh!”
Miss Towell’s exclamation was the subdued one of acquiescence. She knew that ladies in pictures often preferred names other than their own, and if Letty was not a Rashleigh it “explained things.” That is, it explained how anyone called Rashleigh could be wandering about in this friendless way, though it made ’Enery Steptoe’s intervention the more mysterious. It was conceivable that he might act on behalf of a genuine Rashleigh, however out at elbow; but that he should take such pains for a spurious one, and go to the length of sending the sacred silver thimble as a pledge, rendered the situation puzzling.
Schooled by her religious precepts to taking her duties as those of a minute at a time Miss Towell made no effort to force the girl’s confidence, and especially since Letty, like most young people in trouble, was on her guard against giving it. So long as she preferred to be shut up within herself, shut up within herself she should remain. Miss Towell felt that, for the moment at least, her own responsibility was limited to making the child feel that someone cared for her.
At the same time she couldn’t have been a lonely woman with a love-story behind her without the impulse to dwell a little longingly on the one romantic incident in her experience. Though it had never come to anything, the fact that it had once opened its shy little flower made a sweet bright place to which her thoughts could retire.
The references came spasmodically and without context,317as the little white lady busied herself in waiting on Letty or in the care of her room.
“I haven’t seen him since a short time after the mistress went away.”
Letty felt herself coloring. Though not prudish there were words she couldn’t get used to. Besides which she had never thought that Steptoe.... But Miss Towell pursued her memories.
“It always worried him that I should hold views different from his but I couldn’t submit to dictation, now, could I, dear?”
Once more Letty felt herself awkwardly placed. The only interpretation she could put on Miss Towell’s words referring to moral reformation on her hostess’s part she said, as non-committally as might be: “He’s a good deal of a stickler.”
“He’s been so long in a high position that he becomes—well, I won’t be ’arsh—but he becomes a little harbitrary. That’s where it was. He was a little harbitrary. With a mistress who allowed him a great deal of his own way—well, you can hardly blame him, can you, dear?”
Letty forced herself to accept the linguistic standard of the world. “I suppose if she hadn’t allowed him a great deal of his own way he’d have looked somewhere else.”
“That he could easily have done. He had temptations enough—a man like him. Why, dear, there was a lady in Park Avenue did everything she could that wasn’t positively dishonorable to win him away––”
“He must have been younger and better looking than he is now,” Letty hazarded, bluntly.
318
“Oh, it wasn’t a question of looks. Of course if she’d considered that, why, any foolish young fellow—but she knew what she would have got.”
Not being at her ease in this kind of conversation, and finding the effort to see Steptoe as Lothario difficult, Letty became blunt again. “He must have had an awful crush on the first one.”
“It wasn’t her exactly; it was the boy.”
“Oh, there was a boy?”
“Why of course, dear! Didn’t you know that?”
“Whose boy was it?”
“Why, the mistress’s boy; but I don’t thinkhe––” Letty understood the pronoun as applying to Steptoe—“I don’t thinkheever realized that he wasn’t his very own.” Straightening the white cover on the chest of drawers Miss Towell shook her head. “It was a sad case.”
“What made it sad?”
“A lovely boy he was. Had a kind word for everyone, even for the cat. But somehow his father and mother—well, they were people of the world, and they hadn’t wanted a child, and when he came—and he so delicate always—I could have cried over him.”
Letty’s heart began to swell; her lip trembled. “I know someone like that myself.”
“Do you, dear? Then I’m sure you understand.”
Partly because the minute was emotional, and partly from a sense that she needed to explain herself, Letty murmured, more or less indistinctly: “It’s on his account that I’m here.”
Failing to see the force of this Miss Towell was content to say: “I’m glad you were led to me, dear.319There’s always a power to shepherd us along, if we’ll only let ourselves be guided.”
To Letty the moment had arrived when plainness of speech was imperative. Leaning across the tray, which still stood on her lap, she gazed up at her hostess with eager, misty eyes. “Hesaid you’d teach me all the ropes.”
Miss Towell paused beside the bed, to look inquiringly at the tense little face. “The ropes of what, dear?”
“Of what—” it was hard to express—“of what you—you used to be yourself. You don’t seem like it now,” she added, desperately, “but you were, weren’t you?”
“Oh, that!” The surprise was in the discovery that an American girl of Letty’s age could entertain so sensible a purpose. “Why, of course, dear! I’ll tell you all I know, and welcome.”
“There’s quite a trick to it, isn’t there?”
“Well, it’s more than a trick. There are two or three things which you simplyhaveto be.”
“Oh, I know that. That’s what frightens me.”
“You needn’t be afraid, once you’ve made up your mind to it.” She leaned above the bed to relieve Letty of the tray. “For instance—you don’t mind my asking questions do you?”
“Oh, no! You can ask me anything.”
“Then the first thing is this: Are you pretty good as a needle-woman?”
Letty was astounded. “Why—why you don’t have tosew, do you?”
“Certainly, dear. That’s one of the most important320things you’d be called on to do. You’d never get anywhere if you weren’t quick with your needle and thread. And then there’d be hair-dressing. You have to know something about that. I don’t say that you must be a professional; but for the simpler occasions—after that there’s packing. That’s something we often overlook, and where French girls have us at a disadvantage. They pack so beautifully.”
Letty was entirely at sea. “Pack what?”
“Pack trunks, dear.”
“What for?”
“For travel; for moving from town to country; or from country to town; or making visits; you see you’re always on the go. Oh, it’s more than a trick; it’s quite an art; only—” She smiled at Letty as she stood holding the tray, before carrying it out—“only, I shouldn’t have supposed you’d be thinking of that when you act in moving pictures.”
“I—I thought I might do both.”
“Now, I should say that that’s one thing you couldn’t do, dear. If you took up this at all you’d find it so absorbing––”
“And you’re very unhappy too, aren’t you? I’ve always heard you were.”
“Well, that would depend a good deal on yourself. There’s nothing in the thing itself to make you unhappy; but sometimes there are other women––”
Letty’s eyes were flaming. “They say they’re awful.”
“Oh, not always. It’s a good deal as you carry yourself. I made it a point to keep my position and respect the position of others. It wasn’t always easy,321especially with Mary Ann Courage and Janie Cakebread; but––”
Letty’s head fell back on the pillow. Her eyes closed. A merry-go-round was spinning in her head. Where was she? How had she come there? What was she therefor?Where was the wickedness she had been told to look for everywhere? Having gone in search of it, and expected to find it lying in wait from the first minute of passing the protecting door, she had been shuffled along from one to another, with exasperating kindness, only to be brought face to face with Jane Cakebread and Mary Ann Courage at the end.
Miss Towell having borne away the tray, Letty struggled out of bed, and put on the woollen dressing gown thrown over a chair by the bedside. This was no place for her. Beehive Valley was not far off, and her forty-five cents would more than suffice to take her there. She would see the casting director. She would get a job. With food to eat and a place to sleep as a starting point she would find her own way to wickedness, releasing the prince in spite of all the mishaps which kept her as she was.
But she trembled so that having wrapped the dressing gown about her she was obliged to sit down again. She would have to be crafty. She must get this woman to help her with her dressing, without suspecting what she meant to do. How could she manage that? She must try to think.
She was trying to think when she heard the ring of the telephone. It suggested an idea. Some time—not this time, of course—when the telephone rang and322the woman was answering it, she, Letty, would be able to slip away. The important thing was to do her hair and get her clothes on.
“Yes?... Yes?” There was a little catch to the breath, a smothered laugh, a smothered sigh. “Oh, so this is you!... Yes, I got it.... Seeing it again gave me quite a turn.... I never expected that you’d keep it all this time, but.... Yes, she’s here.... No; she didn’t come exactly of her own accord, but I—I found her.... I could tell you about it easier if you were—it’s so hard on the telephone when there’s so much to say—but perhaps you don’t care to.... Yes, she’s quite well—only a little tired—been worked up somehow—but a day or so in bed.... Oh, very sensible ... and she wants me to teach her how to be a lady’s maid....”
So that was it! Steptoe had been treacherous. Letty would never believe in anyone again. She could make these reflections hurriedly because the voice at the telephone was silent.
“Oh!”
It was the same exclamation as that of Barbara Walbrook, but in another tone—a tone of distress, sharp, sympathetic. Pulling the dressing gown about her, frightened, tense, Letty knew that something had gone wrong.
“Oh! Oh!... last night, did you say?... early this morning....”
Letty crept to where her hostess was seated at the telephone. “What is it?”
But Miss Towell either didn’t hear the question or was too absorbed to answer it. “Oh, ’Enery,tryto323remember that God is his life—that there can be no death to be afraid of when––”
Letty snatched the receiver from the other woman’s hands, and fell on her knees beside the little table. “Oh, what is it? What is it? It’s me; Letty! Something’s happened. I’ve got to know.”
Amazed and awed by the force of this intrusion Miss Towell stood up, and moved a little back.
Over the wire Steptoe’s voice sounded to Letty like the ghost of his voice, broken, dead.
“I think if I was madam I’d come back.”
“But what’s happened? Tell me that first.”
“It’s Mr. Rash.”
“Yes, I know it’s Mr. Rash. But what is it? Tell me quickly, for God’s sake.”
“’E’s been ’it.”
Her utterance was as nearly as possible a cry. “But he hasn’t beenkilled?”
“Madam’d find ’im alive—if she ’urried.”
When Letty rose from her knees she was strong. She was calm, too, and competent. She further surprised Miss Towell by the way in which she took command.
“I must hurry. They want me at once. Would you mind helping me to dress?”