It was cooler outdoors, after dinner, in the dusk of that evening; nevertheless three members of the Madison family denied themselves the breeze, and, as by a tacitly recognized and habitual house-rule, so disposed themselves as to afford the most agreeable isolation for the younger daughter and the guest, who occupied wicker chairs upon the porch. The mother and father sat beneath a hot, gas droplight in the small “library”; Mrs. Madison with an evening newspaper, her husband with “King Solomon’s Mines”; and Laura, after crisply declining an urgent request from Hedrick to play, had disappeared upstairs. The inimical lad alone was inspired for the ungrateful role of duenna.
He sat upon the topmost of the porch steps with the air of being permanently implanted; leaning forward, elbows on knees, cheeks on palms, in a treacherous affectation of profound reverie; and his back (all of him that was plainly visible in the hall light) tauntingly close to a delicate foot which would, God wot! willingly have launched him into the darkness beyond. It was his dreadful pleasure to understand wholly the itching of that shapely silk and satin foot.
The gas-light from the hall laid a broad orange path to the steps—Cora and her companion sat just beyond it, his whiteness gray, and she a pale ethereality in the shadow. She wore an evening gown that revealed a vague lilac through white, and shimmered upon her like a vapour. She was very quiet; and there was a wan sweetness about her, an exhalation of wistfulness. Cora, in the evening, was more like a rose than ever. She was fragrant in the dusk. The spell she cast was an Undine’s: it was not to be thought so exquisite a thing as she could last. And who may know how she managed to say what she did in the silence and darkness? For it was said—without words, without touch, even without a look—as plainly as if she had spoken or written the message: “If I am a rose, I am one to be worn and borne away. Are you the man?”
With the fall of night, the street they faced had become still, save for an infrequent squawk of irritation on the part of one of the passing automobiles, gadding for the most part silently, like fireflies. But after a time a strolling trio of negroes came singing along the sidewalk.
“In the evening, by the moonlight, you could hearthose banjos ringing;In the evening, by the moonlight, you could hearthose darkies singing.How the ole folks would injoy it; they would sitall night an’ lis-sun,As we sang I-I-N the evening BY-Y-Y the moonlight.’
“Ah,thattakes me back!” exclaimed Corliss. “That’s as it used to be. I might be a boy again.”
“And I suppose this old house has many memories for you?” said Cora, softly.
“Not very many. My, old-maid aunt didn’t like me overmuch, I believe; and I wasn’t here often. My mother and I lived far down the street. A big apartment-house stands there now, I noticed as I was walking out here this afternoon—the `Verema,’ it is called, absurdly enough!”
“Ray Vilas lives there,” volunteered Hedrick, not altering his position.
“Vilas?” said the visitor politely, with a casual recollection that the name had been once or twice emphasized by the youth at dinner. “I don’t remember Vilas among the old names here.”
“It wasn’t, I guess,” said Hedrick. “Ray Vilas has only been here about two years. He came from Kentucky.”
“A great friend of yours, I suppose.”
“He ain’t a boy,” said Hedrick, and returned to silence without further explanation.
“How cool and kind the stars are to-night,” said Cora, very gently.
She leaned forward from her chair, extending a white arm along the iron railing of the porch; bending toward Corliss, and speaking toward him and away from Hedrick in as low a voice as possible, probably entertaining a reasonable hope of not being overheard.
“I love things that are cool and kind,” she said. “I love things that are cool and strong. I love iron.” She moved her arm caressingly upon the railing. “I love its cool, smooth touch. Any strong life must have iron in it. I like iron in men.”
She leaned a very little closer to him.
“Have you iron in you, Mr. Corliss?” she asked.
At these words the frayed edge of Hedrick’s broad white collar was lifted perceptibly from his coat, as if by a shudder passing over the back and shoulders beneath.
“If I have not,” answered Corliss in a low voice, “I will have—now!”
“Tell me about yourself,” she said.
“Dear lady,” he began—and it was an effective beginning, for a sigh of pleasure parted her lips as he spoke—“there is nothing interesting to tell. I have spent a very commonplace life.”
“I think not. You shouldn’t call any life commonplace that has escapedthis!” The lovely voice was all the richer for the pain that shook it now. “This monotony, this unending desert of ashes, this death in life!”
“This town, you mean?”
“This prison, I mean! Everything. Tell me what lies outside of it. You can.”
“What makes you think I can?”
“I don’t need to answer that. You understand perfectly.”
Valentine Corliss drew in his breath with a sound murmurous of delight, and for a time they did not speak.
“Yes,” he said, finally, “I think I do.”
“There are meetings in the desert,” he went on, slowly. “A lonely traveller finds another at a spring, sometimes.”
“And sometimes they find that they speak the same language?”
His answer came, almost in a whisper:
“`Even as you and I.’”
“`Even as you and I,’” she echoed, even more faintly.
“Yes.”
Cora breathed rapidly in the silence that followed; she had every appearance of a woman deeply and mysteriously stirred. Her companion watched her keenly in the dusk, and whatever the reciprocal symptoms of emotion he may have exhibited, they were far from tumultuous, bearing more likeness to the quiet satisfaction of a good card-player taking what may prove to be a decisive trick.
After a time she leaned back in her chair again, and began to fan herself slowly.
“You have lived in the Orient, haven’t you, Mr. Corliss?” she said in an ordinary tone.
“Not lived. I’ve been East once or twice. I spend a greater part of the year at Posilipo.”
“Where is that?”
“On the fringe of Naples.”
“Do you live in a hotel?”
“No.” A slight surprise sounded in his voice. “I have a villa there.”
“Do you know what that seems to me?” Cora asked gravely, after a pause; then answered herself, after another: “Like magic. Like a strange, beautiful dream.”
“Yes, it is beautiful,” he said.
“Then tell me: What do you do there?”
“I spend a lot of time on the water in a boat.”
“Sailing?”
“On sapphires and emeralds and turquoises and rubies, melted and blown into waves.”
“And you go yachting over that glory?”
“Fishing with my crew—and loafing.”
“But your boat is really a yacht, isn’t it?”
“Oh, it might be called anything,” he laughed.
“And your sailors are Italian fishermen?”
Hedrick slew a mosquito upon his temple, smiting himself hard. “No, they’re Chinese!” he muttered hoarsely.
“They’re Neapolitans,” said Corliss.
“Do they wear red sashes and earrings?” asked Cora.
“One of them wears earrings and a derby hat!”
“Ah!” she protested, turning to him again. “You don’t tell me. You let me cross-question you, but you don’t tell me things! Don’t you see? I want to know whatlifeis! I want to know of strange seas, of strange people, of pain and of danger, of great music, of curious thoughts! What are the Neapolitan women like?”
“They fade early.”
She leaned closer to him. “Before the fading have you—have you loved—many?”
“All the pretty ones I ever saw,” he answered gayly, but with something in his tone (as there was in hers) which implied that all the time they were really talking of things other than those spoken. Yet here this secret subject seemed to come near the surface.
She let him hear a genuine little snap of her teeth. “Ithoughtyou were like that!”
He laughed. “Ah, but you were sure to see it!”
“You could ‘a’ seen a Neapolitan woman yesterday, Cora,” said Hedrick, obligingly, “if you’d looked out the front window. She was working a hurdy-gurdy up and down this neighbourhood all afternoon.” He turned genially to face his sister, and added: “Ray Vilas used to say there were lots of pretty girls in Lexington.”
Cora sprang to her feet. “You’re not smoking,” she said to Corliss hurriedly, as upon a sudden discovery. “Let me get you some matches.”
She had entered the house before he could protest, and Hedrick, looking down the hall, was acutely aware that she dived desperately into the library. But, however tragic the cry for justice she uttered there, it certainly was not prolonged; and the almost instantaneous quickness of her reappearance upon the porch, with matches in her hand, made this one of the occasions when her brother had to admit that in her own line Cora was a miracle.
“So thoughtless of me,” she said cheerfully, resuming her seat. She dropped the matches into Mr. Corliss’s hand with a fleeting touch of her finger-tips upon his palm. “Of course you wanted to smoke. I can’t think why I didn’t realize it before. I must have——”
A voice called from within, commanding in no, uncertain tones.
“Hedrick! I should like to see you!” Hedrick rose, and, looking neither to the right nor, to the left, went stonily into the house, and appeared before the powers.
“Call me?” he inquired with the air of cheerful readiness to proceed upon any errand, no matter how difficult.
Mr. Madison countered diplomacy with gloom.
“I don’t know what to do with you. Why can’t you let your sister alone?”
“Has Laura been complaining of me?”
“Oh, Hedrick!” said Mrs. Madison.
Hedrick himself felt the justice of her reproof: his reference to Laura was poor work, he knew. He hung his head and began to scrape the carpet with the side of his shoe.
“Well, what’d Cora say I been doing to her?”
“You know perfectly well what you’ve been doing,” said Mr. Madison sharply.
“Nothing at all; just sitting on the steps. What’d shesay?”
His father evidently considered it wiser not to repeat the text of accusation. “You know what you did,” he said heavily.
“Oho!” Hedrick’s eyes became severe, and his sire’s evasively shifted from them.
“You keep away from the porch,” said the father, uneasily.
“You mean what I said about Ray Vilas?” asked the boy.
Both parents looked uncomfortable, and Mr. Madison, turning a leaf in his book, gave a mediocre imitation of an austere person resuming his reading after an impertinent interruption.
“That’s what you mean,” said the boy accusingly. “Ray Vilas!”
“Just you keep away from that porch.”
“Because I happened to mention Ray Vilas?” demanded Hedrick.
“You let your sister alone.”
“I got a right to know what she said, haven’t I?”
There was no response, which appeared to satisfy Hedrick perfectly. Neither parent met his glance; the mother troubled and the father dogged, while the boy rejoiced sternly in some occult triumph. He inflated his scant chest in pomp and hurled at the defeated pair the well-known words:
“I wish she wasmydaughter—about five minutes!”
New sounds from without—men’s voices in greeting, and a ripple of response from Cora somewhat lacking in enthusiasm—afforded Mr. Madison unmistakable relief, and an errand upon which to send his deadly offspring.
Hedrick, after a reconnaissance in the hall, obeyed at leisure. Closing the library door nonchalantly behind him, he found himself at the foot of a flight of unillumined back stairs, where his manner underwent a swift alteration, for here was an adventure to be gone about with ceremony. “Ventre St. Gris!” he muttered hoarsely, and loosened the long rapier in the shabby sheath at his side. For, with the closing of the door, he had become a Huguenot gentleman, over forty and a little grizzled perhaps, but modest and unassuming; wiry, alert, lightning-quick, with a wrist of steel and a heart of gold; and he was about to ascend the stairs of an unknown house at Blois in total darkness. He went up, crouching, ready for anything, without a footfall, not even causing a hideous creak; and gained the top in safety. Here he turned into an obscure passage, and at the end of it beheld, through an open door, a little room in which a dark-eyed lady sat writing in a book by the light of an oil lamp.
The wary Huguenot remained in the shadow and observed her.
Laura was writing in an old ledger she had found in the attic, blank and unused. She had rebound it herself in heavy gray leather; and fitted it with a tiny padlock and key. She wore the key under her dress upon a very thin silver chain round her neck. Upon the first page of the book was written a date, now more than a year past, the month was June—and beneath it:
“Love came to me to-day.”
Nothing more was written upon that page.
Laura, at this writing, looked piquantly unfamiliar to her brother: her eyes were moist and bright; her cheeks were flushed and as she bent low, intently close to the book, a loosened wavy strand of her dark hair almost touched the page. Hedrick had never before seen her wearing an expression so “becoming” as the eager and tremulous warmth of this; though sometimes, at the piano, she would play in a reverie which wrought such glamour about her that even a brother was obliged to consider her rather handsome. She looked more than handsome now, so strangely lovely, in fact, that his eyes watered painfully with the protracted struggle to read a little of the writing in her book before she discovered him.
He gave it up at last, and lounged forward blinking, with the air of finding it sweet to do nothing.
“Whatch’ writin’?” he asked in simple carelessness.
At the first sound of his movement she closed the book in a flash; then, with a startled, protective gesture, extended her arms over it, covering it.
“What is it, Hedrick?” she asked, breathlessly.
“What’s the padlock for?”
“Nothing,” she panted. “What is it you want?”
“You writin’ poetry?”
Laura’s eyes dilated; she looked dangerous.
“Oh, I don’t care about your old book,” said Hedrick, with an amused nonchalance Talleyrand might have admired. “There’s callers, and you have to come down.”
“Who sent you?”
“A man I’ve often noticed around the house,” he replied blightingly. “You may have seen him—I think his name’s Madison. His wife and he both sent for you.”
One of Laura’s hands instinctively began to arrange her hair, but the other remained upon the book. “Who is it calling?”
“Richard Lindley and that Wade Trumble.”
Laura rose, standing between her brother and the table. “Tell mother I will come down.”
Hedrick moved a little nearer, whereupon, observing his eye, she put her right hand behind her upon the book. She was not deceived, and boys are not only superb strategic actors sometimes, but calamitously quick. Appearing to be unaware of her careful defence, he leaned against the wall and crossed his feet in an original and interesting manner.
“Of courseyouunderstand,” he said cosily. “Cora wants to keep this Corliss in a corner of the porch where she can coo at him; so you and mother’ll have to raise a ballyhoo for Dick Lindley and that Wade Trumble. It’d been funny if Dick hadn’t noticed anybody was there and kissed her. What on earth does he want to stay engaged to her for, anyway?”
“You don’t know that she is engaged to Mr. Lindley, Hedrick.”
“Get out!” he hooted. “What’s the use talking like that to me? A blind mackerel could see she’s let poor old Lindley think he’s High Man with her these last few months; but he’ll have to hit the pike now, I reckon, ‘cause this Corliss is altogether too pe-rin-sley for Dick’s class. Lee roy est mort. Vive lee roy!”
“Hedrick, won’t you please run along? I want to change my dress.”
“What for? There was company for dinner and you didn’t change then.”
Laura’s flushed cheeks flushed deeper, and in her confusion she answered too quickly. “I only have one evening gown. I—of course I can’t wear it every night.”
“Well, then,” he returned triumphantly, “what do you want to put it on now for?”
“Pleaserun along, Hedrick,” she pleaded.
“You didn’t for this Corliss,” he persisted sharply. “You know Dick Lindley couldn’t see anybody but Cora to save his life, and I don’t suppose there’s a girl on earth fool enough to dress up for that Wade Trum——”
“Hedrick!” Laura’s voice rang with a warning which he remembered to have heard upon a few previous occasions when she had easily proved herself physically stronger than he. “Go and tell mother I’m coming,” she said.
He began to whistle “Beulah Land” as he went, but, with the swift closing of the door behind him, abandoned that pathetically optimistic hymn prematurely, after the third bar.
Twenty minutes later, when Laura came out and went downstairs, a fine straight figure in her black evening gown, the Sieur de Marsac—that hard-bitten Huguenot, whose middle-aged shabbiness was but the outward and deceptive seeming of the longest head and the best sword in France—emerged cautiously from the passageway and stood listening until her footsteps were heard descending the front stairs. Nevertheless, the most painstaking search of her room, a search as systematic as it was feverish, failed to reveal where she had hidden the book.
He returned wearily to the porch.
A prophet has always been supposed to take some pleasure, perhaps morbid, in seeing his predictions fulfilled; and it may have been a consolation to the gloomy heart of Hedrick, sorely injured by Laura’s offensive care of her treasure, to find the grouping upon the porch as he had foretold: Cora and Mr. Corliss sitting a little aloof from the others, far enough to permit their holding an indistinct and murmurous conversation of their own. Their sequestration, even by so short a distance, gave them an appearance of intimacy which probably accounted for the rather absent greeting bestowed by Mr. Lindley upon the son of the house, who met him with some favour.
This Richard Lindley was a thin, friendly looking young man with a pleasing, old-fashioned face which suggested that if he were minded to be portrayed it should be by the daguerreotype, and that a high, black stock would have been more suitable to him than his businesslike, modern neck-gear. He had fine eyes, which seemed habitually concerned with faraway things, though when he looked at Cora they sparkled; however, it cannot be said that the sparkling continued at its brightest when his glance wandered (as it not infrequently did this evening) from her lovely head to the rose in Mr. Corliss’s white coat.
Hedrick, resuming a position upon the top step between the two groups, found the conversation of the larger annoying because it prevented him from hearing that of the smaller. It was carried on for the greater part by his mother and Mr. Trumble; Laura sat silent between these two; and Lindley’s mood was obviously contemplative. Mr. Wade Trumble, twenty-six, small, earnest, and already beginning to lose his hair, was talkative enough.
He was one of those people who are so continuously aggressive that they are negligible. “What’s the matter here? Nobody pays any attention to me. I’M important!” He might have had that legend engraved on his card, it spoke from everything else that was his: face, voice, gesture—even from his clothes, for they also clamoured for attention without receiving it. Worn by another man, their extravagance of shape and shade might have advertised a self-sacrificing effort for the picturesque; but upon Mr. Trumble they paradoxically confirmed an impression that he was well off and close. Certainly this was the impression confirmed in the mind of the shrewdest and most experienced observer on that veranda. The accomplished Valentine Corliss was quite able to share Cora’s detachment satisfactorily, and be very actively aware of other things at the same time. For instance: Richard Lindley’s preoccupation had neither escaped him nor remained unconnected in his mind with that gentleman’s somewhat attentive notice of the present position of a certain rose.
Mr. Trumble took up Mrs. Madison’s placid weather talk as if it had been a flaunting challenge; he made it a matter of conscience and for argument; for he was a doughty champion, it appeared, when nothings were in question, one of those stern men who will have accuracy in the banal, insisting upon portent in talk meant to be slid over as mere courteous sound.
“I don’t know about that, now,” he said with severe emphasis. “I don’t know about that at all. I can’t say I agree with you. In fact, I do not agree with you: it was hotter in the early part of July, year before last, than it has been at any time this summer. Several degrees hotter—several degrees.”
“I fear I must beg to differ with you,” he said, catching the poor lady again, a moment later. “I beg to differ decidedly. Other places get a great deal more heat. Look at Egypt.”
“Permit me to disagree,” he interrupted her at once, when she pathetically squirmed to another subject. “There’s more than one side to this matter. You are looking at this matter from a totally wrong angle. . . . Let me inform you that statistics. . . .” Mrs. Madison’s gentle voice was no more than just audible in the short intervals he permitted; a blind listener would have thought Mr. Trumble at the telephone. Hedrick was thankful when his mother finally gave up altogether the display of her ignorance, inaccuracy, and general misinformation, and Trumble talked alone. That must have been the young man’s object; certainly he had struggled for it; and so it must have pleased him. He talked on and on and on; he passed from one topic to another with no pause; swinging over the gaps with a “Now you take,” or, “And that reminds me,” filling many a vacancy with “So-and-so and so-and-so,” and other stencils, while casting about for material to continue. Everything was italicized, the significant and the trivial, to the same monotone of emphasis. Death and shoe-laces were all the same to him.
Anything was all the same to him so long as he talked.
Hedrick’s irritation was gradually dispelled; and, becoming used to the sound, he found it lulling; relaxed his attitude and drowsed; Mr. Lindley was obviously lost in a reverie; Mrs. Madison, her hand shading her eyes, went over her market-list for the morrow and otherwise set her house in order; Laura alone sat straight in her chair; and her face was toward the vocalist, but as she was in deep shadow her expression could not be guessed. However, one person in that group must have listened with genuine pleasure—else why did he talk?
It was the returned native whose departure at last rang the curtain on the monologue. The end of the long sheltered seclusion of Cora and her companion was a whispered word. He spoke it first:
“To-morrow?”
“To-morrow.”
Cora gave a keen, quick, indrawn sigh—not of sorrow—and sank back in her chair, as he touched her hand in farewell and rose to go. She remained where she was, motionless and silent in the dark, while he crossed to Mrs. Madison, and prefaced a leave-taking unusually formal for these precincts with his mannered bow. He shook hands with Richard Lindley, asking genially:
“Do you still live where you did—just below here?”
“Yes.”
“When I passed by there this afternoon,” said Corliss, “it recalled a stupendous conflict we had, once upon a time; but I couldn’t remember the cause.”
“I remember the cause,” said Mr. Lindley, but, stopping rather short, omitted to state it. “At all events, it was settled.”
“Yes,” said the other quietly. “You whipped me.”
“Did I so?” Corliss laughed gayly. “We mustn’t let it happen again!”
Mr. Trumble joined the parting guest, making simultaneous adieus with unmistakable elation. Mr. Trumble’s dreadful entertainment had made it a happy evening for him.
As they went down the steps together, the top of his head just above the level of his companion’s shoulder, he lifted to Corliss a searching gaze like an actor’s hopeful scrutiny of a new acquaintance; and before they reached the street his bark rang eagerly on the stilly night: “Nowthereis a point on which I beg to differ with you. . . .”
Mrs. Madison gave Lindley her hand. “I think I’ll go in. Good-night, Richard. Come, Hedrick!”
Hedrick rose, groaning, and batted his eyes painfully as he faced the hall light. “What’d you and this Corliss fight about?” he asked, sleepily.
“Nothing,” said Lindley.
“You said you remembered.”
“Oh, I remember a lot of useless things.”
“Well, what was it? I want to know what you fought about.”
“Come, Hedrick,” repeated his mother, setting a gently urgent hand on his shoulder.
“I won’t,” said the boy impatiently, shaking her off and growing suddenly very wideawake and determined. “I won’t move a step till he tells me what they fought about. Not a step!”
“Well—it was about a `show.’ We were only boys, you know—younger than you, perhaps.”
“A circus?”
“A boy-circus he and my brother got up in our yard. I wasn’t in it.”
“Well, what did you fight about?”
“I thought Val Corliss wasn’t quite fair to my brother. That’s all.”
“No, it isn’t! How wasn’t he fair?”
“They sold tickets to the other boys; and I thought my brother didn’t get his share.”
“This Corliss kept it all?”
“Oh, something like that,” said Lindley, laughing.
“Probably I was in the wrong.”
“And he licked you?”
“All over the place!”
“I wish I’d seen it,” said Hedrick, not unsympathetically, but as a sportsman. And he consented to be led away.
Laura had been standing at the top of the steps looking down the street, where Corliss and his brisk companion had emerged momentarily from deep shadows under the trees into the illumination of a swinging arc-lamp at the corner. They disappeared; and she turned, and, smiling, gave the delaying guest her hand in good-night.
His expression, which was somewhat troubled, changed to one of surprise as her face came into the light, for it was transfigured. Deeply flushed, her eyes luminous, she wore that shining look Hedrick had seen as she wrote in her secret book.
“Why, Laura!” said Lindley, wondering.
She said good-night again, and went in slowly. As she reached the foot of the stairs, she heard him moving a chair upon the porch, and Cora speaking sharply:
“Please don’t sit close to me!” There was a sudden shrillness in the voice of honey, and the six words were run so rapidly together they seemed to form but one. After a moment Cora added, with a deprecatory ripple of laughter not quite free from the same shrillness:
“You see, Richard, it’s so—it’s so hot, to-night.”
Half an hour later, when Lindley had gone, Cora closed the front doors in a manner which drew an immediate cry of agony from the room where her father was trying to sleep. She stood on tiptoe to turn out the gas-light in the hall; but for a time the key resisted the insufficient pressure of her finger-tips: the little orange flame, with its black-green crescent over the armature, so maliciously like the “eye” of a peacock feather, limned the exquisite planes of the upturned face; modelled them with soft and regular shadows; painted a sullen loveliness. The key turned a little, but not enough; and she whispered to herself a monosyllable not usually attributed to the vocabulary of a damsel of rank. Next moment, her expression flashed in a brilliant change, like that of a pouting child suddenly remembering that tomorrow is Christmas. The key surrendered instantly, and she ran gayly up the familiar stairs in the darkness.
The transom of Laura’s door shone brightly; but the knob, turning uselessly in Cora’s hand, proved the door itself not so hospitable. There was a brief rustling within the room; the bolt snapped, and Laura opened the door.
“Why, Laura,” said Cora, observing her sister with transient curiosity, “you haven’t undressed. What have you been doing? Something’s the matter with you. I know what it is,” she added, laughing, as she seated herself on the edge of the old black-walnut bed. “You’re in love with Wade Trumble!”
“He’s a strong man,” observed Laura. “A remarkable throat.”
“Horrible little person!” said Cora, forgetting what she owed the unfortunate Mr. Trumble for the vocal wall which had so effectively sheltered her earlier in the evening. “He’s like one of those booming June-bugs, batting against the walls, falling into lamp-chimneys——-”
“He doesn’t get very near the light he wants,” said Laura.
“Me? Yes, he would like to, the rat! But he’s consoled when he can get any one to listen to his awful chatter. He makes up to himself among women for the way he gets sat on at the club. But he has his use: he shows off the other men so, by contrast. Oh, Laura!” She lifted both hands to her cheeks, which were beautiful with a quick suffusion of high colour. “Isn’t he gorgeous!”
“Yes,” said Laura gently, “I’ve always thought so.”
“Now what’s the use of that?” asked Cora peevishly, “withme? I didn’t mean Richard Lindley. Youknowwhat I mean.”
“Yes—of course—I do,” Laura said.
Cora gave her a long look in which a childlike pleading mingled with a faint, strange trouble; then this glance wandered moodily from the face of her sister to her own slippers, which she elevated to meet her descending line of vision.
“And you know I can’t help it,” she said, shifting quickly to the role of accuser. “So what’s the use of behaving like the Pest?” She let her feet drop to the floor again, and her voice trembled a little as she went on: “Laura, you don’t know what I had to endure from him to-night. I really don’t think I can stand it to live in the same house any longer with that frightful little devil. He’s been throwing Ray Vilas’s name at me until—oh, it was ghastly to-night! And then—then——” Her tremulousness increased. “I haven’t said anything about it all day, but Imethim on the street downtown, this morning——”
“You met Vilas?” Laura looked startled. “Did he speak to you?”
“`Speak to me!’” Cora’s exclamation shook with a half-laugh of hysteria. “He made an awfulscene! He came out of the Richfield Hotel barroom on Main Street just as I was going into the jeweller’s next door, and he stopped and bowed like a monkey, square in front of me, and—and he took off his hat and set it on the pavement at my feet and told me to kick it into the gutter! Everybody stopped and stared; and I couldn’t get by him. And he said—he said I’d kicked his heart into the gutter and he didn’t want it to catch cold without a hat! And wouldn’t I please be so kind as to kick——” She choked with angry mortification. “It was horrible! People were stopping and laughing, and a rowdy began to make fun of Ray, and pushed him, and they got into a scuffle, and I ran into the jeweller’s and almost fainted.”
“He is insane!” said Laura, aghast.
“He’s nothing of the kind; he’s just a brute. He does it to make people say I’m the cause of his drinking; and everybody in this gossipy old towndoessay it—just because I got bored to death with his everlasting do-you-love-me-to-day-as-well-as-yesterday style of torment, and couldn’t help liking Richard better. Yes, every old cat in town says I ruined him, and that’s what he wants them to say. It’s so unmanly! I wish he’d die! Yes, Idowish he would! Why doesn’t he kill himself?”
“Ah, don’t say that,” protested Laura.
“Why not? He’s threatened to enough. And I’m afraid to go out of the house because I can’t tell when I’ll meet him or what he’ll do. I was almost sick in that jeweller’s shop, this morning, and so upset I came away without getting my pendant. There’sanotherthing I’ve got to go through, I suppose!” She pounded the yielding pillow desperately. “Oh, oh, oh! Life isn’t worth living—it seems to me sometimes as if everybody in the world spent his time trying to think up ways to make it harder for me! I couldn’t have worn the pendant, though, even if I’d got it,” she went on, becoming thoughtful. “It’s Richard’s silly old engagement ring, you know,” she explained, lightly. “I had it made up into a pendant, and heaven knows how I’m going to get Richard to see it the right way. He was so unreasonable tonight.”
“Was he cross about Mr. Corliss monopolizing you?”
“Oh, you know how he is,” said Cora. “He didn’t speak of it exactly. But after you’d gone, he asked me——” She stopped with a little gulp, an expression of keen distaste about her mouth.
“Oh, he wants me to wear my ring,” she continued, with sudden rapidity: “and how the dickenscanI when I can’t even tell him it’s been made into a pendant! He wants to speak to father; he wants toannounceit. He’s sold out his business for what he thinks is a good deal of money, and he wants me to marry him next month and take some miserable little trip, I don’t know where, for a few weeks, before he invests what he’s made in another business. Oh!” she cried. “It’s ahorriblething to ask a girl to do: to settle down—just housekeeping, housekeeping, housekeeping forever in this stupid, stupid town! It’s so unfair! Men are just possessive; they think it’s loving you to want to possess you themselves. A beautiful `love’! It’s so mean! Men!” She sprang up and threw out both arms in a vehement gesture of revolt. “Damn 'em, I wish they’d let mealone!”
Laura’s eyes had lost their quiet; they showed a glint of tears, and she was breathing quickly. In this crisis of emotion the two girls went to each other silently; Cora turned, and Laura began to unfasten Cora’s dress in the back.
“Poor Richard!” said Laura presently, putting into her mouth a tiny pearl button which had detached itself at her touch. “This was his first evening in the overflow. No wonder he was troubled!”
“Pooh!” said Cora. “As if you and mamma weren’t good enough for him to talk to! He’s spoiled. He’s so used to being called `the most popular man in town’ and knowing that every girl on Corliss Street wanted to marry him——” She broke off, and exclaimed sharply: “I wish they would!”
“Cora!”
“Oh, I suppose you mean that’s the reasonIwent in for him?”
“No, no,” explained Laura hurriedly. “I only meant, stand still.”
“Well, it was!” And Cora’s abrupt laugh had the glad, free ring fancy attaches to the merry confidences of a buccaneer in trusted company.
Laura knelt to continue unfastening the dress; and when it was finished she extended three of the tiny buttons in her hand. “They’re always loose on a new dress,” she said. “I’ll sew them all on tight, to-morrow.”
Cora smiled lovingly. “You good old thing,” she said. “You looked pretty to-night.”
“That’s nice!” Laura laughed, as she dropped the buttons into a little drawer of her bureau. It was an ugly, cheap, old bureau, its veneer loosened and peeling, the mirror small and flawed—a piece of furniture in keeping with the room, which was small, plain and hot, its only ornamental adjunct being a silver-framed photograph of Mrs. Madison, with Cora, as a child of seven or eight, upon her lap.
“You really do look ever so pretty,” asserted Cora.
“I wonder if I look as well as I did the last time I heard I was pretty,” said the other. “That was at the Assembly in March. Coming down the stairs, I heard a man from out of town say, `That black-haired Miss Madison is a pretty girl.’ And some one with him said, `Yes; you’ll think so until you meet her sister!’”
“You are an old dear!” Cora enfolded her delightedly; then, drawing back, exclaimed: “Youknowhe’s gorgeous!” And with a feverish little ripple of laughter, caught her dress together in the back and sped through the hall to her own room.
This was a very different affair from Laura’s, much cooler and larger; occupying half the width of the house; and a rather expensive struggle had made it pretty and even luxurious. The window curtains and the wall-paper were fresh, and of a quiet blue; there was a large divan of the same colour; a light desk, prettily equipped, occupied a corner; and between two gilt gas-brackets, whose patent burners were shielded by fringed silk shades, stood a cheval-glass six feet high. The door of a very large clothes-pantry stood open, showing a fine company of dresses, suspended from forms in an orderly manner; near by, a rosewood cabinet exhibited a delicate collection of shoes and slippers upon its four shelves. A dressing-table, charmingly littered with everything, took the place of a bureau; and upon it, in a massive silver frame, was a large photograph of Mr. Richard Lindley. The frame was handsome, but somewhat battered: it had seen service. However, the photograph was quite new.
There were photographs everywhere—photographs framed and unframed; photographs large and photographs small, the fresh and the faded; tintypes, kodaks, “full lengths,” “cabinets,” groups—every kind of photograph; and among them were several of Cora herself, one of her mother, one of Laura, and two others of girls. All the rest were sterner. Two or three were seamed across with cracks, hastily recalled sentences to destruction; and here and there remained tokens of a draughtsman’s over-generous struggle to confer upon some of the smooth-shaven faces additional manliness in the shape of sweeping moustaches, long beards, goatees, mutton-chops, and, in the case of one gentleman of a blond, delicate and tenor-like beauty, neck-whiskers;—decorations in many instances so deeply and damply pencilled that subsequent attempts at erasure had failed of great success. Certainly, Hedrick had his own way of relieving dull times.
Cora turned up the lights at the sides of the cheval-glass, looked at herself earnestly, then absently, and began to loosen her hair. Her lifted hands hesitated; she re-arranged the slight displacement of her hair already effected; set two chairs before the mirror, seated herself in one; pulled up her dress, where it was slipping from her shoulder, rested an arm upon the back of the other chair as, earlier in the evening, she had rested it upon the iron railing of the porch, and, leaning forward, assumed as exactly as possible the attitude in which she had sat so long beside Valentine Corliss. She leaned very slowly closer and yet closer to the mirror; a rich colour spread over her; her eyes, gazing into themselves, became dreamy, inexpressibly wistful, cloudily sweet; her breath was tumultuous. “`Even as you and I’?” she whispered.
Then, in the final moment of this after-the-fact rehearsal, as her face almost touched the glass, she forgot how and what she had looked to Corliss; she forgot him; she forgot him utterly: she leaped to her feet and kissed the mirrored lips with a sort of passion.
“Youdarling!” she cried. Cora’s christening had been unimaginative, for the name means only, “maiden.” She should have been called Narcissa.
The rhapsody was over instantly, leaving an emotional vacuum like a silence at the dentist’s. Cora yawned, and resumed the loosening of her hair.
When she had put on her nightgown, she went from one window to another, closing the shutters against the coming of the morning light to wake her. As she reached the last window, a sudden high wind rushed among the trees outside; a white flare leaped at her face, startling her; there was a boom and rattle as of the brasses, cymbals, and kettle-drums of some fatal orchestra; and almost at once it began to rain.
And with that, from the distance came a voice, singing; and at the first sound of it, though it was far away and almost indistinguishable, Cora started more violently than at the lightning; she sprang to the mirror lights, put them out; threw herself upon the bed, and huddled there in the darkness.
The wind passed; the heart of the storm was miles away; this was only its fringe; but the rain pattered sharply upon the thick foliage outside her windows; and the singing voice came slowly up the street.
It was a strange voice: high-pitched and hoarse—and not quite human, so utter was the animal abandon of it.
“I love a lassie, a bonnie, bonnie lassie,” it wailed and piped, coming nearer; and the gay little air—wrought to a grotesque of itself by this wild, high voice in the rain—might have been a banshee’s love-song.