Laura had spent some thoughtful hours upon her black lace dress with results that astonished her family: it became a ball-gown—and a splendidly effective one. She arranged her dark hair in a more elaborate fashion than ever before, in a close coronal of faintly lustrous braids; she had no jewellery and obviously needed none. Her last action but one before she left her room was to dispose of the slender chain and key she always wore round her neck; then her final glance at the mirror—which fairly revealed a lovely woman—ended in a deprecatory little “face” she made at herself. It meant: “Yes, old lady, you fancy yourself very passable in here all by yourself, don’t you? Just wait: you’ll be standing beside Cora in a moment!”
And when she did stand beside Cora, in the latter’s room, a moment later, her thought seemed warranted. Cora, radiant-eyed, in high bloom, and exquisite from head to foot in a shimmering white dancing-dress, a glittering crescent fastening the silver fillet that bound her vivid hair, was a flame of enchantment. Mrs. Madison, almost weeping with delight, led her daughters proudly, an arm round the waist of each, into her husband’s room. Propped with pillows, he reclined in an armchair while Miss Peirce prepared his bed, an occupation she gave over upon this dazzling entrance, departing tactfully.
“Look at these,” cried the mother; “—from our garden, Jim, dear! Don’t we feel rich, you and I?”
“And—and—Laura,” said the sick man, with the slow and imperfect enunication caused by his disease; “Laura looks pretty—too.”
“Isn’t she adorable!” Cora exclaimed warmly. “She decided to be the portrait of a young duchess, you see, all stately splendour—made of snow and midnight!”
“Hear! hear!” laughed Laura; but she blushed with pleasure, and taking Cora’s hand in hers lifted it to her lips.
“And do you see Cora’s crescent?” demanded Mrs. Madison. “What do you think ofthatfor magnificence? She went down town this morning with seven dollars, and came back with that and her party gloves and a dollar in change! Isn’t she a bargainer? Even for rhinestones they are the cheapest things you ever heard of. They look precisely like stones of the very finest water.” They did—so precisely, indeed, that if the resemblance did not amount to actual identity, then had a jeweller of the town been able to deceive the eye of Valentine Corliss, which was an eye singularly learned in such matters.
“They’re—both smart girls,” said Madison, “both of them. And they look—beautiful, to-night—both. Laura is—amazing!”
When they had gone, Mrs. Madison returned from the stairway, and, kneeling beside her husband, put her arms round him gently: she had seen the tear that was marking its irregular pathway down his flaccid, gray cheek, and she understood.
“Don’t. Don’t worry, Jim,” she whispered. “Those bright, beautiful things!—aren’t they treasures?”
“It’s—it’s Laura,” he said. “Cora will be all right. She looks out for—herself. I’m—I’m afraid for—Laura. Aren’t you?”
“No, no,” she protested. “I’m not afraid for either of them.” But she was: the mother had always been afraid for Cora.
. . . . At the dance, the two girls, attended up the stairway to the ballroom by a chattering covey of black-coats, made a sensational entrance to a gallant fanfare of music, an effect which may have been timed to the premonitory tuning of instruments heard during the ascent; at all events, it was a great success; and Cora, standing revealed under the wide gilt archway, might have been a lithe and shining figure from the year eighteen-hundred-and-one, about to dance at the Luxembourg. She placed her hand upon the sleeve of Richard Lindley, and, glancing intelligently over his shoulder into the eyes of Valentine Corliss, glided rhythmically away.
People looked at her; they always did. Not only the non-dancers watched her; eyes everywhere were upon her, even though the owners gyrated, glided and dipped on distant orbits. The other girls watched her, as a rule, with a profound, an almost passionate curiosity; and they were prompt to speak well of her to men, except in trustworthy intimacy, because they did not enjoy being wrongfully thought jealous. Many of them kept somewhat aloof from her; but none of them ever nowadays showed “superiority” in her presence, or snubbed her: that had been tried and proved disastrous in rebound. Cora never failed to pay her score—and with a terrifying interest added, her native tendency being to take two eyes for an eye and the whole jaw for a tooth. They let her alone, though they asked and asked among themselves the never-monotonous question: “Why do men fall in love with girls like that?” a riddle which, solved, makes wives condescending to their husbands.
Most of the people at this dance had known one another as friends, or antagonists, or indifferent acquaintances, for years, and in such an assembly there are always two worlds, that of the women and that of the men. Each has its own vision, radically different from that of the other; but the greatest difference is that the men are unaware of the other world, only a few of them—usually queer ones like Ray Vilas—vaguely perceiving that there are two visions, while all the women understand both perfectly. The men splash about on the surface; the women keep their eyes open under water. Or, the life of the assembly is like a bright tapestry: the men take it as a picture and are not troubled to know how it is produced; but women are weavers. There was a Beauty of far-flung renown at Mrs. Villard’s to-night: Mary Kane, a creature so made and coloured that young men at sight of her became as water and older men were apt to wonder regretfully why all women could not have been made like Mary. She was a kindly soul, and never intentionally outshone her sisters; but the perfect sumptuousness of her had sometimes tried the amiability of Cora Madison, to whom such success without effort and without spark seemed unfair, as well as bovine. Miss Kane was a central figure at the dance, shining tranquilly in a new triumph: that day her engagement had been announced to Mr. George Wattling, a young man of no special attainments, but desirable in his possessions and suitable to his happiness. The pair radiated the pardonable, gay importance of newly engaged people, and Cora, who had never before bestowed any notice upon Mr. Wattling, now examined him with thoughtful attention.
Finding him at her elbow in a group about a punch bowl, between dances, she offered warm felicitations. “But I don’t suppose you care whetherIcare for you to be happy or not,” she added, with a little plaintive laugh;—“you’ve always hated me so!”
Mr. Wattling was startled: never before had he imagined that Cora Madison had given him a thought; but there was not only thought, there was feeling, in this speech. She seemed to be concealing with bravery an even deeper feeling than the one inadvertently expressed. “Why, what on earth makes you think that?” he exclaimed.
“Think it? Iknowit!” She gave him a strange look, luminous yet mysterious, a curtain withdrawn only to show a shining mist with something undefined but dazzling beyond. “I’ve always known it!” And she turned away from him abruptly.
He sprang after her. “But you’re wrong. I’ve never——”
“Oh, yes, you have.” They began to discuss it, and for better consideration of the theme it became necessary for Cora to “cut” the next dance, promised to another, and to give it to Mr. Wattling. They danced several times together, and Mr. Wattling’s expression was serious. The weavers of the tapestry smiled and whispered things the men would not have understood—nor believed.
Ray Vilas, seated alone in a recessed and softly lighted gallery, did not once lose sight of the flitting sorceress. With his elbows on the railing, he leaned out, his head swaying slowly and mechanically as she swept up and down the tumultuously moving room, his passionate eyes gaunt and brilliant with his hunger. And something very like a general thrill passed over the assembly when, a little later, it was seen that he was dancing with her. Laura, catching a glimpse of this couple, started and looked profoundly disturbed.
The extravagance of Vilas’s passion and the depths he sounded, in his absurd despair when discarded, had been matters of almost public gossip; he was accounted a somewhat scandalous and unbalanced but picturesque figure; and for the lady whose light hand had wrought such havoc upon him to be seen dancing with him was sufficiently startling to elicit the universal remark—evidently considered superlative—that it was “just like Cora Madison!” Cora usually perceived, with an admirably clear head, all that went on about her; and she was conscious of increasing the sensation, when after a few turns round the room, she allowed her partner to conduct her to a secluding grove of palms in the gallery. She sank into the chair he offered, and, fixing her eyes upon a small lamp of coloured glass which hung overhead, ostentatiously looked bored.
“At your feet, Cora,” he said, seating himself upon a stool, and leaning toward her. “Isn’t it appropriate that we should talk to music—we two? It shouldn’t be that quick step though—not dance-music—should it?”
“Don’t know ‘m sure,” murmured Cora.
“You were kind to dance with me,” he said huskily. “I dared to speak to you——”
She did not change her attitude nor the direction of her glance. “I couldn’t cut you very well with the whole town looking on. I’m tired of being talked about. Besides, I don’t care much who I dance with—so he doesn’t step on me.”
“Cora,” he said, “it is the prelude to `L’Arlesienne’ that they should play for you and me. Yes, I think it should be that.”
“Never heard of it.”
“It’s just a rustic tragedy, the story of a boy in the south of France who lets love become his whole life, and then—it kills him.”
“Sounds very stupid,” she commented languidly.
“People do sometimes die of love, even nowadays,” he said, tremulously—“in the South.”
She let her eyes drift indifferently to him and perceived that he was trembling from head to foot; that his hands and knees shook piteously; that his lips quivered and twitched; and, at sight of this agitation, an expression of strong distaste came to her face.
“I see.” Her eyes returned to the lamp. “You’re from the South, and of course it’s going to kill you.”
“You didn’t speak the exact words you had in your mind.’”
“Oh, what words did I have `in my mind’?” she asked impatiently.
“What you really meant was: `If it does kill you, what of it?’”
She laughed, and sighed as for release.
“Cora,” he said huskily, “I understand you a little because you possess me. I’ve never—literally never—had another thought since the first time I saw you: nothing but you. I think of you—actually every moment. Drunk or sober, asleep or—awake, it’s nothing but you, you,you! It will never be different: I don’t know why I can’t get over it—I only know I can’t. You own me; you burn like a hot coal in my heart. You’re through with me, I know. You drained me dry. You’re like a child who eats so heartily of what he likes that he never touches it again. And I’m a dish you’re sick of. Oh, it’s all plain enough, I can tell you. I’m not exciting any more—no, just a nauseous slave!”
“Do you want people to hear you?” she inquired angrily, for his voice had risen.
He tempered his tone. “Cora, when you liked me you went a pretty clipping gait with me,” he said, trembling even more than before. “But you’re infinitely more infatuated with this Toreador of a Corliss than you were with me; you’re lost in him; you’re slaving for him as I would for you. How far are you going with——”
“Do you want me to walk away and leave you?” she asked, suddenly sitting up straight and looking at him with dilating eyes. “If you want a `scene’——”
“It’s over,” he said, more calmly. “I know now how dangerous the man is. Of course you will tell him I said that.” He laughed quietly. “Well—between a dangerous chap and a desperate one, we may look for some lively times! Do you know, I believe I think about as continuously of him, lately, as I do of you. That’s why I put almost my last cent into his oil company, and got what may be almost my last dance with you!”
“I wouldn’t call it `almost’ your last dance with me!” she returned icily. “Not after what you’ve said. I had a foolish idea you could behave—well, at least decently.”
“Did Corliss tell you that I insulted him in his rooms at the hotel?”
“You!” She laughed, genuinely. “I see him letting you!”
“He did, however. By manner and in speech I purposely and deliberately insulted him. You’ll tell him every word of this, of course, and he’ll laugh at it, but I give myself the pleasure of telling you. I put the proposition of an `investment’ to him in a way nobody not a crook would have allowed to be smoothed over—and he allowed it to be smoothed over. He ate it! I felt he was a swindler when he was showing Richard Lindley his maps and papers, and now I’ve proved it to myself, and it’s worth the price.” Often, when they had danced, and often during this interview, his eyes lifted curiously to the white flaming crescent in her hair; now they fixed themselves upon it, and in a flash of divination he cried: “You wear it for me!”
She did not understand. “Finished raving?” she inquired.
“I gave Corliss a thousand dollars,” he said, slowly. “Considering the fact that it was my last, I flatter myself it was not unhandsomely done—though I may never need it. It has struck me that the sum was about what a man who had just cleaned up fifty thousand might regard as a sort of `extra’—`for lagniappe’—and that he might have thought it an appropriate amount to invest in a present some jewels perhaps—to place in the hair of a pretty friend!”
She sprang to her feet, furious, but he stood in front of her and was able to bar the way for a moment.
“Cora, I’ll have a last word with you if I have to hold you,” he said with great rapidity and in a voice which shook with the intense repression he was putting upon himself. “We do one thing in the South, where I came from. We protect our women——”
“This looks like it! Keeping me when——”
“I love you,” he said, his face whiter than she had ever seen it. “I love you! I’m your dog! You take care of yourself if you want to take care of anybody else! As sure as——”
“My dance, Miss Madison.” A young gentleman on vacation from the navy had approached, and, with perfect unconsciousness of what he was interrupting, but with well-founded certainty that he was welcome to the lady, urged his claim in a confident voice. “I thought it would never come, you know; but it’s here at last and so am I.” He laughed propitiatingly.
Ray yielded now at once. She moved him aside with her gloved forearm as if he were merely an awkward stranger who unwittingly stood between her and the claiming partner. Carrying the gesture farther, she took the latter’s arm, and smilingly, and without a backward glance, passed onward and left the gallery. The lieutenant, who had met her once or twice before, was her partner for the succeeding dance as well, and, having noted the advantages of the place where he had discovered her, persuaded her to return there to sit through the second. Then without any fatiguing preamble, he proposed marriage. Cora did not accept, but effected a compromise, which, for the present, was to consist of an exchange of photographs (his to be in uniform) and letters.
She was having an evening to her heart. Ray’s attack on Corliss had no dimming effect; her thought of it being that she was “used to his raving”; it meant nothing; and since Ray had prophesied she would tell Corliss about it, she decided not to do so.
The naval young gentleman and Valentine Corliss were the greatest of all the lions among ladies that night; she had easily annexed the lieutenant, and Corliss was hers already; though, for a purpose, she had not yet been seen in company with him. He was visibly “making an impression.” His name, as he had said to Richard Lindley, was held in honour in the town; and there was a flavour of fancied romance in his absence since boyhood in unknown parts, and his return now with a `foreign air’ and a bow that almost took the breath of some of the younger recipients. He was, too, in his way, the handsomest man in the room; and the smiling, open frankness of his look, the ready cordiality of his manner, were found very winning. He caused plenty of flutter.
Cora waited till the evening was half over before she gave him any visible attention. Then, during a silence of the music, between two dances, she made him a negligent sign with her hand, the gesture of one indifferently beckoning a creature who is certain to come, and went on talking casually to the man who was with her. Corliss was the length of the room from her, chatting gayly with a large group of girls and women; but he immediately nodded to her, made his bow to individuals of the group, and crossed the vacant, glistening floor to her. Cora gave him no greeting whatever; she dismissed her former partner and carelessly turned away with Corliss to some chairs in a corner.
“Do you see that?” asked Vilas, leaning over the balcony railing with Richard Lindley. “Look! She’s showing the other girls—don’t you see? He’s the New Man; she let ’em hope she wasn’t going in for him; a lot of them probably didn’t even know that she knew him. She sent him out on parade till they’re all excited about him; now she shows ’em he’s entirely her property—and does it so matter-of-factly that it’s rubbed in twice as hard as if she seemed to take some pains about it. He doesn’t dance: she’ll sit out with him now, till they all read the tag she’s put on him. She says she hates being talked about. She lives on it!—so long as it’s envious. And did you see her with that chap from the navy? Neptune thinks he’s dallying with Venus perhaps, but he’ll get——”
Lindley looked at him commiseratingly. “I think I never saw prettier decorations. Have you noticed, Ray? Must have used a thousand chrysanthemums.”
“Toreador!” whispered the other between his teeth, looking at Corliss; then, turning to his companion, he asked: “Has it occurred to you to get any information about Basilicata, or about the ancestral domain of the Moliterni, from our consul-general at Naples?”
Richard hesitated. “Well—yes. Yes, I did think of that. Yes, I thought of it.”
“But you didn’t do it.”
“No. That is, I haven’t yet. You see, Corliss explained to me that——”
His friend interrupted him with a sour laugh. “Oh, certainly! He’s one of the greatest explainers ever welcomed to our city!”
Richard said mildly: “And then, Ray, once I’ve gone into a thing I—I don’t like to seem suspicious.”
“Poor old Dick!” returned Vilas compassionately. “You kind, easy, sincere men are so conscientiously untruthful with yourselves. You know in your heart that Cora would be furious with you if you seemed suspicious, and she’s been so nice to you since you put in your savings to please her, that you can’t bear to risk offending her. She’s twisted you around her little finger, and the unnamed fear that haunts you is that you won’t be allowed to stay there—even twisted!”
“Pretty decorations, Ray,” said Richard; but he grew very red.
“Do you know what you’ll do,” asked Ray, regarding him keenly, “if this Don Giovanni from Sunny It’ is shown up as a plain get-rich-quick swindler?”
“I haven’t considered——”
“You would do precisely,” said Ray, “nothing! Cora’d see to that. You’d sigh and go to work again, beginning at the beginning where you were years ago, and doing it all over. Admirable resignation, but not for me! I’m a stockholder in his company and in shape to `take steps’! I don’t know if I’d be patient enough to make them legal—perhaps I should. He may be safe on the legal side. I’ll know more about that when I find out if there is a Prince Moliterno in Naples who owns land in Basilicata.”
“You don’t doubt it?”
“I doubt everything! In this particular matter I’ll have less to doubt when I get an answer from the consul-general.I’ve written, you see.”
Lindley looked disturbed. “You have?”
Vilas read him at a glance. “You’re afraid to find out!” he cried. Then he set his hand on the other’s shoulder. “If there ever was a God’s fool, it’s you, Dick Lindley. Really, I wonder the world hasn’t kicked you around more than it has; you’d never kick back! You’re as easy as an old shoe. Cora makes you unhappy,” he went on, and with the very mention of her name, his voice shook with passion,—“but on my soul I don’t believe you know what jealousy means: you don’t even understand hate; you don’t eat your heart——”
“Let’s go and eat something better,” suggested Richard, laughing. “There’s a continuous supper downstairs and I hear it’s very good.”
Ray smiled, rescued for a second from himself. “There isn’t anything better than your heart, you old window-pane, and I’m glad you don’t eat it. And if I ever mix it up with Don Giovanni T. Corliss—`T’ stands for Toreador—I do believe it’ll be partly on your——” He paused, leaving the sentence unfinished, as his attention was caught by the abysmal attitude of a figure in another part of the gallery: Mr. Wade Trumble, alone in a corner, sitting upon the small of his small back, munching at an unlighted cigar and otherwise manifesting a biting gloom. Ray drew Lindley’s attention to this tableau of pain. “Here’s a three of us!” he said. He turned to look down into the rhythmic kaleidoscope of dancers. “And there goes the girl we alloughtto be morbid about.”
“Who is that?”
“Laura Madison. Why aren’t we? What a self-respecting creature she is, with that cool, sweet steadiness of hers—she’s like a mountain lake. She’s lovely and she plays like an angel, but so far as anybody’s ever thinking about her is concerned she might almost as well not exist. Yet she’s really beautiful to-night, if you can manage to think of her except as a sort of retinue for Cora.”
“Sheisrather beautiful to-night. Laura’s always a very nice-looking girl,” said Richard, and with the advent of an idea, he added: “I think one reason she isn’t more conspicuous and thought about is that she is so quiet,” and, upon his companion’s greeting this inspiration with a burst of laughter, “Yes, that was a brilliant deduction,” he said; “but I do think she’s about the quietest person I ever knew. I’ve noticed there are times when she’ll scarcely speak at all for half an hour, or even more.”
“You’re not precisely noisy yourself,” said Ray. “Have you danced with her this evening?”
“Why, no,” returned the other, in a tone which showed this omission to be a discovery; “not yet. I must, of course.”
“Yes, she’s really `rather’ beautiful. Also, she dances `rather’ better than any other girl in town. Go and perform your painful duty.”
“Perhaps I’d better,” said Richard thoughtfully, not perceiving the satire. “At any rate, I’ll ask her for the next.”
He found it unengaged. There came to Laura’s face an April change as he approached, and she saw he meant to ask her to dance. And, as they swam out into the maelstrom, he noticed it, and remarked that itwasrather warm, to which she replied by a cheerful nod. Presently there came into Richard’s mind the thought that he was really an excellent dancer; but he did not recall that he had always formed the same pleasing estimate of himself when he danced with Laura, nor realize that other young men enjoyed similar self-help when dancing with her. And yet he repeated to her what Ray had said of her dancing, and when she laughed as in appreciation of a thing intended humorously, he laughed, too, but insisted that she did dance “very well indeed.” She laughed again at that, and they danced on, not talking. He had no sense of “guiding” her; there was no feeling of effort whatever; she seemed to move spontaneously with his wish, not to his touch; indeed, he was not sensible of touching her at all.
“Why, Laura,” he exclaimed suddenly, “you dancebeautifully!”
She stumbled and almost fell; saved herself by clutching at his arm; he caught her; and the pair stopped where they were, in the middle of the floor. A flash of dazed incredulity from her dark eyes swept him; there was something in it of the child dodging an unexpected blow.
“Did I trip you?” he asked anxiously.
“No,” she laughed, quickly, and her cheeks grew even redder. “I tripped myself. Wasn’t that too bad—just when you were thinking that I danced well! Let’s sit down. May we?”
They went to some chairs against a wall. There, as they sat, Cora swung by them, dancing again with her lieutenant, and looking up trancedly into the gallant eyes of the triumphant and intoxicated young man. Visibly, she was a woman with a suitor’s embracing arm about her. Richard’s eyes followed them.
“Ah, don’t!” said Laura in a low voice.
He turned to her. “Don’t what?”
“I didn’t mean to speak out loud,” she said tremulously. “But I meant: don’t look so troubled. It doesn’t mean anything at all—her coquetting with that bird of passage. He’s going away in the morning.”
“I don’t think I was troubling about that.”
“Well, whatever it was”—she paused, and laughed with a plaintive timidity—“why, just don’t trouble about it!”
“Do I look very much troubled?” he asked seriously.
“Yes. And you don’t look very gay when you’re not!” She laughed with more assurance now. “I think you’re always the wistfulest looking man I ever saw.”
“Everybody laughs at me, I believe,” he said, with continued seriousness. “Even Ray Vilas thinks I’m an utter fool. Am I, doyouthink?”
He turned as he spoke and glanced inquiringly into her eyes. What he saw surprised and dismayed him.
“For heaven’s sake, don’t cry!” he whispered hurriedly.
She bent her head, turning her face from him.
“I’ve been very hopeful lately,” he said. “Cora has been so kind to me since I did what she wanted me to, that I——” He gave a deep sigh. “But if you’rethatsorry for me, my chances with her must be pretty desperate.”
She did not alter her attitude, but with her down-bent face still away from him, said huskily: “It isn’t you I’m sorry for. You mustn’t ever give up; you must keep on trying and trying. If you give up, I don’t know what will become of her!”
A moment later she rose suddenly to her feet. “Let’s finish our dance,” she said, giving him her hand. “I’m sure I won’t stumble again.”
The two girls let themselves into the house noiselessly, and, turning out the hall-light, left for them by their mother, crept upstairs on tiptoe; and went through the upper hall directly to Laura’s room—Cora’s being nearer the sick-room. At their age it is proper that a gayety be used three times: in anticipation, and actually, and in after-rehearsal. The last was of course now in order: they went to Laura’s room to “talk it over.” There was no gas-fixture in this small chamber; but they found Laura’s oil-lamp burning brightly upon her writing-table.
“How queer!” said Laura with some surprise, as she closed the door. “Mother never leaves the lamp lit for me; she’s always so afraid of lamps exploding.”
“Perhaps Miss Peirce came in here to read, and forgot to turn it out,” suggested Cora, seating herself on the edge of the bed and letting her silk wrap fall from her shoulders. “Oh, Laura, wasn’t he gorgeous. . . .”
She referred to the gallant defender of our seas, it appeared, and while Laura undressed and got into a wrapper, Cora recounted in detail the history of the impetuous sailor’s enthrallment;—a resume predicted three hours earlier by a gleeful whisper hissed across the maritime shoulder as the sisters swung near each other during a waltz: “proposed!”
“I’ve always heard they’re horribly inconstant,” she said, regretfully. “But, oh, Laura, wasn’t he beautiful to look at! Do you think he’s more beautiful than Val? No—don’t tell me if you do. I don’t want to hear it! Val was so provoking: he didn’t seem to mind it at all. He’s nothing but a big brute sometimes: he wouldn’t even admit that he minded, when I asked him. I was idiot enough to ask; I couldn’t help it; he was so tantalizing and exasperating—laughing at me. I never knew anybody like him; he’s so sure of himself and he can be so cold. Sometimes I wonder if he really cares about anything, deep down in his heart—anything except himself. He seems so selfish: there are times when he almost makes me hate him; but just when I get to thinking I do, I find I don’t—he’s so deliciously strong, and there’s such abigluxury in being understood: I always feel heknowsme clear to the bone, somehow! But, oh,” she sighed regretfully, “doesn’t a uniform become a man? They ought to all wear ’em. It would look silly on such a little goat as that Wade Trumble, though: nothing could make him look like a whole man. Did you see him glaring at me? Beast! I was going to be so nice and kittenish and do all my prettiest tricks for him, to help Val with his oil company. Val thinks Wade would come in yet, if I’D only get him in the mood to have another talk with Val about it; but the spiteful little rat wouldn’t come near me. I believe that was one of the reasons Val laughed at me and pretended not to mind my getting proposed to. Hemusthave minded; he couldn’t have helped minding it, really. That’s his way; he’s somean—he won’t show things. He knowsme. I can’t keep anything from him; he readsmelike a signboard; and then about himself he keeps me guessing, and I can’t tell when I’ve guessed right. Ray Vilas behaved disgustingly, of course; he was horrid and awful. I might have expected it. I suppose Richard was wailinghistiresome sorrows on your poor shoulder——”
“No,” said Laura. “He was very cheerful. He seemed glad you were having a good time.”
“He didn’t look particularly cheerful at me. I never saw so slow a man: I wonder when he’s going to find out about that pendant. Val would have seen it the instant I put it on. And, oh, Laura! isn’t George Wattling funny? He’s justsoft! He’s good-looking though,” she continued pensively, adding, “I promised to motor out to the Country Club with him to-morrow for tea.”
“Oh, Cora,” protested Laura, “no! Please don’t!”
“I’ve promised; so I’ll have to, now.” Cora laughed. “It’ll do Mary Kane good. Oh, I’m not going to bother much withhim—he makes me tired. I never saw anything so complacent as that girl when she came in to-night, as if her little Georgie was the greatest capture the world had ever seen. . . .”
She chattered on. Laura, passive, listened with a thoughtful expression, somewhat preoccupied. The talker yawned at last.
“It must be after three,” she said, listlessly, having gone over her evening so often that the colours were beginning to fade. She yawned again. “Laura,” she remarked absently, “I don’t see how you can sleep in this bed; it sags so.”
“I’ve never noticed it,” said her sister. “It’s a very comfortable old bed.”
Cora went to her to be unfastened, reverting to the lieutenant during the operation, and kissing the tire-woman warmly at its conclusion. “You’re always so sweet to me, Laura,” she said affectionately. “I don’t know how you manage it. You’re so good”—she laughed—“sometimes I wonder how you stand me. If I were you, I’m positive I couldn’t stand me at all!” Another kiss and a hearty embrace, and she picked up her wrap and skurried silently through the hall to her own room.
It was very late, but Laura wrote for almost an hour in her book (which was undisturbed) before she felt drowsy. Then she extinguished the lamp, put the book away and got into bed.
It was almost as if she had attempted to lie upon the empty air: the mattress sagged under her weight as if it had been a hammock; and something tore with a ripping sound. There was a crash, and a choked yell from a muffled voice somewhere, as the bed gave way. For an instant, Laura fought wildly in an entanglement of what she insufficiently perceived to be springs, slats and bedclothes with something alive squirming underneath. She cleared herself and sprang free, screaming, but even in her fright she remembered her father and clapped her hand over her mouth that she might keep from screaming again. She dove at the door, opened it, and fled through the hall to Cora’s room, still holding her hand over her mouth.
“Cora! Oh, Cora!” she panted, and flung herself upon her sister’s bed.
Cora was up instantly; and had lit the gas in a trice. “There’s a burglar!” Laura contrived to gasp. “In my room! Under the bed!”
“What!”
“I fell on him! Something’s the matter with the bed. It broke. I fell on him!”
Cora stared at her wide-eyed. “Why, it can’t be. Think how long I was in there. Your bed broke, and you just thought there was some one there. You imagined it.”
“No, no, no!” wailed Laura. “Iheardhim: he gave a kind of dreadful grunt.”
“Are you sure?”
“Sure? He wriggled—oh! I couldfeelhim!”
Cora seized a box of matches again. “I’m going to find out.” “Oh, no, no!” protested Laura, cowering.
“Yes, I am. If there’s a burglar in the house I’m going to find him!”
“We mustn’t wake papa.”
“No, nor mamma either. You stay here if you want to——”
“Let’s call Hedrick,” suggested the pallid Laura; “or put our heads out of the window and scream for——”
Cora laughed; she was not in the least frightened. “That wouldn’t wake papa, of course! If we had a telephone I’d send for the police; but we haven’t. I’m going to see if there’s any one there. A burglar’s a man, I guess, and I can’t imagine myself being afraid of anyman!”
Laura clung to her, but Cora shook her off and went through the hall undaunted, Laura faltering behind her. Cora lighted matches with a perfectly steady hand; she hesitated on the threshold of Laura’s room no more than a moment, then lit the lamp.
Laura stifled a shriek at sight of the bed. “Look, look!” she gasped.
“There’s no one under it now, that’s certain,” said Cora, and boldly lifted a corner of it. “Why, it’s been cut all to pieces from underneath! You’re right; there was some one here. It’s practically dismembered. Don’t you remember my telling you how it sagged? And I was only sitting on the edge of it! The slats have all been moved out of place, and as for the mattress, it’s just a mess of springs and that stuffing stuff. He must have thought the silver was hidden there.”
“Oh, oh, oh!” moaned Laura. “Hewriggled——ugh!”
Cora picked up the lamp. “Well, we’ve got to go over the house——”
“No, no!”
“Hush! I’ll go alone then.”
“Youcan’t.”
“I will, though!”
The two girls had changed places in this emergency. In her fright Laura was dependent, clinging: actual contact with the intruder had unnerved her. It took all her will to accompany her sister upon the tour of inspection, and throughout she cowered behind the dauntless Cora. It was the first time in their lives that their positions had been reversed. From the days of Cora’s babyhood, Laura had formed the habit of petting and shielding the little sister, but now that the possibility became imminent of confronting an unknown and dangerous man, Laura was so shaken that, overcome by fear, she let Cora go first. Cora had not boasted in vain of her bravery; in truth, she was not afraid of any man.
They found the fastenings of the doors secure and likewise those of all the windows, until they came to the kitchen. There, the cook had left a window up, which plausibly explained the marauder’s mode of ingress. Then, at Cora’s insistence, and to Laura’s shivering horror, they searched both cellar and garret, and concluded that he had escaped by the same means. Except Laura’s bed, nothing in the house had been disturbed; but this eccentricity on the part of a burglar, though it indeed struck the two girls as peculiar, was not so pointedly mysterious to them as it might have been had they possessed a somewhat greater familiarity with the habits of criminals whose crimes are professional.
They finally retired, Laura sleeping with her sister, and Cora had begun to talk of the lieutenant again, instead of the burglar, before Laura fell asleep.
In spite of the short hours for sleep, both girls appeared at the breakfast-table before the meal was over, and were naturally pleased with the staccato of excitement evoked by their news. Mrs. Madison and Miss Peirce were warm in admiration of their bravery, but in the same breath condemned it as foolhardy.
“I never knew such wonderful girls!” exclaimed the mother, almost tearfully. “You crazy little lions! To think of your not even waking Hedrick! And you didn’t have even a poker and were in your bare feet—and went down in thecellar——”
“It was all Cora,” protested Laura. “I’m a hopeless, disgusting coward. I never knew what a coward I was before. Cora carried the lamp and went ahead like a drum-major. I just trailed along behind her, ready to shriek and run—or faint!”
“Could you tell anything about him when you fell on him?” inquired Miss Peirce. “What was his voice like when he shouted?”
“Choked. It was a horrible, jolted kind of cry. It hardly sounded human.”
“Could you tell anything about whether he was a large man, or small, or——”
“Only that he seemed very active. He seemed to be kicking. Hewriggled——ugh!”
They evolved a plausible theory of the burglar’s motives and line of reasoning. “You see,” said Miss Peirce, much stirred, in summing up the adventure, “he either jimmies the window, or finds it open already, and Sarah’s mistaken and shedidleave it open! Then he searched the downstairs first, and didn’t find anything. Then he came upstairs, and was afraid to come into any of the rooms where we were. He could tell which rooms had people in them by hearing us breathing through the keyholes. He finds two rooms empty, and probably he made a thorough search of Miss Cora’s first. But he isn’t after silver toilet articles and pretty little things like that. He wants really big booty or none, so he decides that an out-of-the-way, unimportant room like Miss Laura’s is where the family would be most apt to hide valuables, jewellery and silver, and he knows that mattresses have often been selected as hiding-places; so he gets under the bed and goes to work. Then Miss Cora and Miss Laura come in so quietly—not wanting to wake anybody—that he doesn’t hear them, and he gets caught there. That’s the way it must have been.”
“But why,” Mrs. Madison inquired of this authority, “why do you suppose he lit the lamp?”
“To see by,” answered the ready Miss Peirce. It was accepted as final.
Further discussion was temporarily interrupted by the discovery that Hedrick had fallen asleep in his chair.
“Don’t bother him, Cora,” said his mother. “He’s finished eating—let him sleep a few minutes, if he wants to, before he goes to school. He’s not at all well. He played too hard, yesterday afternoon, and hurt his knee, he said. He came down limping this morning and looking very badly. He oughtn’t to run and climb about the stable so much after school. See how utterly exhausted he looks!—Not even this excitement can keep him awake.”
“I think we must be careful not to let Mr. Madison suspect anything about the burglar,” said Miss Peirce. “It would be bad for him.”
Laura began: “But we ought to notify the police——”
“Police!” Hedrick woke so abruptly, and uttered the word with such passionate and vehement protest, that everybody started. “I suppose you want tokillyour father, Laura Madison!”
“How?”
“Do you suppose he wouldn’t know something had happened with a squad of big, heavy policemen tromping all over the house? The first thing they’d do would be to search the whole place——”
“Oh, no,” said Mrs. Madison quickly. “It wouldn’t do at all.”
“I should think not! I’m glad,” continued Hedrick, truthfully, “thatidea’s out of your head! I believe Laura imagined the whole thing anyway.”
“Have you looked at her mattress,” inquired Cora, “darling little boy?”
He gave her a concentrated look, and rose to leave. “Nothin’ on earth but imagina——” He stopped with a grunt as he forgetfully put his weight on his left leg. He rubbed his knee, swallowed painfully, and, leaving the word unfinished, limped haughtily from the room.
He left the house, gloomily swinging his books from a spare length of strap, and walking with care to ease his strains and bruises as much as possible. He was very low in his mind, that boy. His fortunes had reached the ebb-tide, but he had no hope of a rise. He had no hope of anything. It was not even a consolation that, through his talent for surprise in waylayings, it had lately been thought necessary, by the Villard family, to have Egerton accompanied to and from school by a man-servant. Nor was Hedrick more deeply depressed by the certainty that both public and domestic scandal must soon arise from the inevitable revelation of his discontinuing his attendance at school without mentioning this important change of career at home. He had been truant a full fortnight, under brighter circumstances a matter for a lawless pride—now he had neither fear nor vainglory. There was no room in him for anything but dejection.
He walked two blocks in the direction of his school; turned a corner; walked half a block; turned north in the alley which ran parallel to Corliss Street, and a few moments later had cautiously climbed into an old, disused refuse box which stood against the rear wall of the empty stable at his own home. He pried up some loose boards at the bottom of the box, and entered a tunnel which had often and often served in happier days—when he had friends—for the escape of Union officers from Libby Prison and Andersonville. Emerging, wholly soiled, into a box-stall, he crossed the musty carriage house and ascended some rickety steps to a long vacant coachman’s-room, next to the hayloft. He closed the door, bolted it, and sank moodily upon a broken, old horsehair sofa.
This apartment was his studio. In addition to the sofa, it contained an ex-bureau, three chair-like shapes, a once marble-topped table, now covered with a sheet of zinc, two empty bird cages, and a condemned whatnot. The walls were rather over-decorated in coloured chalks, the man-headed-snake motive predominating; they were also loopholed for firing into the hayloft. Upon the table lay a battered spy-glass, minus lenses, and, nearby, two boxes, one containing dried corn-silk, the other hayseed, convenient for the making of amateur cigarettes; the smoker’s outfit being completed by a neat pile of rectangular clippings from newspapers. On the shelves of the whatnot were some fragments of a dead pie, the relics of a “Fifteen-Puzzle,” a pink Easter-egg, four seashells, a tambourine with part of a girl’s face still visible in aged colours, about two thirds of a hot-water bag, a tintype of Hedrick, and a number of books: several by Henty, “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea,” “100 Practical Jokes, Easy to Perform,” “The Jungle Book,” “My Lady Rotha,” a “Family Atlas,” “Three Weeks,” “Pilgrim’s Progress,” “A Boy’s Life in Camp,” and “The Mystery of the Count’s Bedroom.”
The gloomy eye of Hedrick wandered to “The Mystery of the Count’s Bedroom,” and remained fixed upon it moodily and contemptuously. His own mystery made that one seem tame and easy: Laura’s bedroom laid it all over the Count’s, in his conviction; and with a soul too weary of pain to shudder, he reviewed the bafflements and final catastrophe of the preceding night.
He had not essayed the attempt upon the mattress until assured that the house was wrapped in slumber. Then, with hope in his heart, he had stolen to Laura’s room, lit the lamp, feeling safe from intrusion, and set to work. His implement at first was a long hatpin of Cora’s. Lying on his back beneath the bed, and, moving the slats as it became necessary, he sounded every cubic inch of the mysterious mattress without encountering any obstruction which could reasonably be supposed to be the ledger. This was not more puzzling than it was infuriating, since by all processes of induction, deduction, and pure logic, the thing was necessarily there. It was nowhere else. Therefore it was there. Ithadto be there! With the great blade of his Boy Scout’s knife he began to disembowel the mattress.
For a time he had worked furiously and effectively, but the position was awkward, the search laborious, and he was obliged to rest frequently. Besides, he had waited to a later hour than he knew, for his mother to go to bed, and during one of his rests he incautiously permitted his eyes to close. When he woke, his sisters were in the room, and he thought it advisable to remain where he was, though he little realized how he had weakened his shelter. When Cora left the room, he heard Laura open the window, sigh, and presently a tiny clinking and a click set him a-tingle from head to foot: she was opening the padlocked book. The scratching sound of a pen followed. And yet she had not come near the bed. The mattress, then, was a living lie.
With infinite caution he had moved so that he could see her, arriving at a coign of vantage just as she closed the book. She locked it, wrapped it in an oilskin cover which lay beside it on the table, hung the key-chain round her neck, rose, yawned, and, to his violent chagrin, put out the light. He heard her moving but could not tell where, except that it was not in his part of the room. Then a faint shuffling warned him that she was approaching the bed, and he withdrew his head to avoid being stepped upon. The next moment the world seemed to cave in upon him.
Laura’s flight had given him opportunity to escape to his own room unobserved; there to examine, bathe and bind his wounds, and to rectify his first hasty impression that he had been fatally mangled.
Hedrick glared at “The Mystery of the Count’s Bedroom.”
By and by he got up, brought the book to the sofa and began to read it over.