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CHAPTER XXVI – WHITE AND CORAL

Spring in Paris, which comes in a fashion so divine that even the most calloused and indifferent are impressed by its beauty, awakened no answering response in the heart of the young man who, from his hotel window, looked out on the desecrated gardens of the Tuileries – on the distant spires of the churches whose names he did not know – on the square block of old palaces. He had missed the boat across the Channel taken by Letty Lane, and the delay had made him lose what little trace of her he had. In the early hours of the morning he had flung himself in at the St. James, taken the indifferent room they could give him in the crowded season, and excited as he was he slept and did not waken until noon. Blair thought it would be a matter of a few hours only to find the whereabouts of the celebrated actress, but it was not such an easy job. He had not guessed that she might be traveling incognito, and at none of the hotels could he hear news of her, nor did he pass her in the crowded, noisy, rustling, crying streets, though he searched motors for her with eager eyes, and haunted restaurants and cafés, and went everywhere that he thought she might be likely to be.

At the end of the third day, unsuccessful and in despair, having hardly slept and scarcely eaten, the unhappy young lover found himself taking a slight luncheon in the little restaurant known as the Perouse down on the Quais. His head on his hand, for the present moment the joy of life gone from him, he looked out through the windows at the Seine, at the bridge and the lines of flowering trees. He was the only occupant of the upper room where, of late, he had ordered his luncheon.

The tide of life rolled slowly in this quieter part of the city, and as Blair sat there under the window there passed a piper playing a shrill, sweet tune. It was so different from any of the loud metropolitan clamors, with which his ears were full, that he got up, walked to the window and leaned out. It was a pastoral that met his eyes. A man piping, followed by little pattering goats; the primitive, unlooked-for picture caught his tired attention, and, just then, opposite the Quais, two women passed – flower sellers, their baskets bright with crocuses and giroflés. The bright picture touched him and something of the springlike beauty that the day wore and that dwelt in the May light, soothed him as nothing had for many hours.

He paid his bill, took courage, picked up his hat and gloves and stick and walked out briskly, crossing the bridge to the Rue de Rivoli, determined that night should not fall until he found the woman he sought. Nor did it, though the afternoon wore on and Dan, pursuing his old trails, wandered from worldly meeting place to worldly meeting place. Finally, toward six o’clock, he saw the lengthening shadows steal into the woods of the Bois de Boulogne, and in one of the smaller alleys, where the green-trunked trees of the forests were full of purple shadows and yellow sun discs, flickering down, he picked up a small iron chair and sat himself down, with a long sigh, to rest.

While he sat there watching the end of the allée as it gave out into the broader road, a beautiful red motor rolled up to the conjunction of the two ways and Letty Lane, in a summer frock, got out alone. She had a flowing white veil around her head and a flowing white scarf around her shoulders. As the day on the Thames, she was all in white – like a dove. But this time her costume was made vivid and picturesque by the coral parasol she carried, a pair of coral-colored kid shoes, around her neck and falling on their long chain, she wore his coral beads. He saw that he observed her before she did him. All this Dan saw before he dashed into the road, came up to her with something like a cry on his lips, bareheaded, for his hat and his stick and his gloves were by his chair in the woods.

Letty Lane’s hands went to her heart and her face took on a deadly pallor. She did not seem glad to see him. Out of his passionate description of the hours that he had been through, of how he had looked for her, of what he thought and wanted and felt, the actress made what she could, listening to him as they both stood there under the shadows of the green trees. Scanning her face for some sign that she loved him, for it was all he cared for, Dan saw no such indication there. He finished with:

“You know what Ruggles told you was a lie. Of course, I’ve got money enough to give you everything you want. He’s a lunatic and ought to be shut up.”

“It may have been a lie, all right,” she said with forced indifference; “I’ve had time to think it over. You are too young. You don’t know what you want.” She stopped his protestations: “Well, then, I am too old and I don’t want to be tied down.”

When he pressed her to tell him whether or not she had ceased to care for him, she shook her head slowly, marking on the ground fine tracery with the end of her coral parasol. He had been obliged to take her back to the red motor, but before they were in earshot of her servants, he said:

“Now, you know just what you have done to me, you and Ruggles between you. For my father’s sake and the things I believed in I’ve kept pretty straight as things go.” He nodded at her with boyish egotism, throwing all the blame on her. “I want you to understand that from now, right now, I’m going to the dogs just as fast as I can get there, and it won’t be a very gratifying result to anybody that ever cared.”

She saw the determination on his fine young face, worn by his sleepless nights, already matured and changed, and she believed him.

“Paris,” he nodded toward the gate of the woods which opened upon Paris, “is the place to begin in – right here. A man,” he went on, and his lips trembled, “can only feel like this once in his life. You know all the talk there is about young love and first love. Well, that’s what I’ve got for you, and I’m going to turn it now – right now – into just what older people warn men from, and do their best to prevent. I have seen enough of Paris,” he went on, “these days I have been looking for you, to know where to go and what to do, and I am setting off for it now.”

She touched his arm.

“No,” she murmured. “No, boy, you are not going to do any such thing!”

This much from her was enough for him. He caught her hand and cried: “Then you marry me. What do we care for anybody else in the world?”

“Go back and get your hat and stick and gloves,” she commanded, keeping down the tears.

“No, no, you come with me, Letty; I’m not going to let you run to your motor and escape me again.”

“Go; I’ll wait here,” she promised. “I give you my word.”

As he snatched up the inanimate objects from the leaf-strewn ground where he had thrown them in despair, he thought how things can change in a quarter of an hour. For he had hope now, as he hurried back, as he walked with her to her car, as he saw the little coral shoes stir in the leaves when she passed under the trees. The little coral shoes trod on his heart, but now it was light under her feet!

Jubilant to have overcome the fate which had tried to keep her hidden from him in Paris, he could hardly believe his eyes that she was before them again, and, as the motor rolled into the Avenue des Acacias, he asked her the question uppermost in his mind:

“Are you alone in Paris, Letty?”

“Don’t you count?”

“No – no – honestly, you know what I mean.”

“You haven’t any right to ask me that.”

“I have – I have. You gave me a right. You’re engaged to me, aren’t you? Gosh, you haven’t forgotten, have you?”

“Don’t make me conspicuous in the Bois, Dan,” she said; “I only let you come with me because you were so terribly desperate, so ridiculous.”

“Are you alone?” he persisted. “I have got to know.”

“Higgins is with me.”

“Oh, God,” he cried wildly, “how can you joke with me? Don’t you understand you’re breaking my heart?”

But she did not dare to be kind to him, knowing it would unnerve her for the part she had promised to play.

He sat gripping his hands tightly together, his lips white. “When I leave you now,” he said brokenly, “I am going to find that devil of a Hungarian and do him up. Then I am going to tackle Ruggles.”

“Why, what’s poor Mr. Ruggles got to do with it?”

Dan cried scornfully: “For God’s sake, don’t keep this up! You know the rot he told you? I made him confess. He has had this mania all along about money being a handicap; he was bent on trying this game with some girl to see how it worked.” He continued more passionately. “I don’t care a rap what you marry me for, Letty, or what you have done or been. I think you’re perfect and I’ll make you the happiest woman in the world.”

She said: “Hush, hush! Listen, dear; listen, little boy. I am awfully sorry, but it won’t do. I never thought it would. You’ll get over it all right, though you don’t, you can’t believe me now. I can’t be poor, you know; I really couldn’t be poor.”

He interrupted roughly: “Who says you’ll be? What are you talking about? Why, I’ll cover you with jewels, sweetheart, if I have to rip the earth open to get them out.”

She understood that Dan believed Ruggles’ story to have been a cock-and-bull one.

“You talk as though you could buy me, Dan. Wait, listen.” She put him back from her. “Now, if you won’t be quiet, I’m going to stop my car.”

He repeated: “Tell me, are you alone in Paris? Tell me. For three days I have wandered and searched for you everywhere; I have hardly eaten a thing, I don’t believe I have slept a wink.” And he told her of his weary search.

She listened to him, part of the time her white-gloved hand giving itself up to the boy; part of the time both hands folded together and away from him, her arms crossed on her breast, her small shoes of coral kid tapping the floor of the car. Thus they rolled leisurely along the road by the Bois. Through the green-trunked trees the sunlight fell divinely. On the lake the swans swam, pluming their feathers; there were children there in their ribbons and furbelows. The whole world went by gay and careless, while for Dan the problem of his existence, his possibility for happiness or pain was comprised within the little room of the motor car.

“Are you alone in Paris, Letty?”

And she said: “Oh, what a bore you are! You’re the most obstinate creature. Well, I am alone, but that has nothing to do with you.”

A glorious light broke over his face; his relief was tremendous.

“Oh, thank God!” he breathed.

“Poniotowsky” – and she said his name with difficulty – “is coming to-night from Carlsbad.”

The boy threw back his bright head and laughed wildly.

“Curse him! The very name makes me want to commit a crime. He will go over my body to you. You hear me, Letty. I mean what I say.”

People had already remarked them as they passed. The actress was too well-known to pass unobserved, but she was indifferent to their curiosity or to the existence of any one but this excited boy.

Blair, who had not opened a paper since he came to Paris, did not know that Letty Lane’s flight from London had created a scandal in the theatrical world, that her manager was suing her, and that to be seen with her driving in the Bois was a conspicuous thing indeed. She thought of it, however.

“I am going to tell the man to drive you to the gate on the other side of the park where it’s quieter, we won’t be stared at, and then I want you to leave me and let me go to the Meurice alone. You must, Dan, you must let me go to the hotel alone.”

He laughed again in the same strained fashion and forced her hand to remain in his.

“Look here. You don’t suppose I am going to let you go like this, now that I have seen you again. You don’t suppose I am going to give you up to that infamous scoundrel? You have got to marry me.”

Bringing all her strength of character to bear, she exclaimed: “I expect you think you are the only person who has asked me to marry him, Dan. I am going to marry Prince Poniotowsky. He is perfectly crazy about me.”

Until that moment she had not made him think that she was indifferent to him, and the idea that such a thing was possible, was too much for his overstrained heart to bear. Dan cried her name in a voice whose appeal was like a hurt creature’s, and as the hurt creature in its suffering sometimes springs upon its torturer, he flung his arms around her as she sat in the motor, held her and kissed her, then set her free, and as the motor flew along, tore open the door to spring out or to throw himself out, but clinging to him she prevented his mad act. She stopped the car along the edge of the quiet, wooded allée. Blair saw that he had terrified her. She covered her beating heart with her hands and gasped at him that he was “crazy, crazy,” and perhaps a little late his dignity and self-possession returned.

“I am mad,” he acknowledged more calmly, “and I am sorry that I frightened you. But you drive me mad.”

Without further word he got out and left her agitated, leaning toward him, and Blair, less pale and thoroughly the man, lifted his hat to her and, with unusual grace, bowed good night and good-by. Then, rushing as he had come, he walked off down through the allée, his gray figure in his gray clothes disappearing through the vista of meeting trees.

For a moment she stared after him, her eyes fastened on the tall slender beautiful young man. Blair’s fire and ardor, his fresh youthfulness, his protection and his chivalry, his ardent devotion, touched her profoundly. Tears fell, and one splashed on her white glove. Was he really going to ruin his life? The old ballad, The Earl of Moray, ran through her head:

“And long may his lady look from the castle wall.”

Dan had neither title nor, according to Ruggles, had he any money, and she could marry the prince; but Dan, as he walked so fast away, misery snapping at his heels as he went, stamping through the woods, seemed glorious to Letty Lane and the only one she wanted in the world. What if anything should happen to him really? What if he should really start out to do the town according to the fashion of his Anglo-Saxon brothers, but more desperately still? She took a card from the case in the corner of the car, scribbled a few words, told the man to drive around the curve and meet the outlet of the path by which Dan had gone. When she saw him within reaching distance she sent the chauffeur across the woods to give Mr. Blair her scribbled word and consoled herself with the belief that Dan wouldn’t “go to the dogs or throw himself in the river until he had seen her again.”

CHAPTER XXVII – AT MAXIM’S

At the Meurice, Miss Lane gave strict orders to admit only Mr. Blair to her apartments. She described him. No sooner had she drunk her cup of tea, which Higgins gave her, than she began to expect Dan.

He didn’t come.

Her dinner, without much appetite, she ate alone in her salon; saw a doctor and made him prescribe something for the cough that racked her chest; looked out to the warm, bright gardens of the Tuileries fading into the pallid loveliness of sunset, indifferent to everything in the world – except Dan Blair. She believed she would soon be indifferent to him, too; then everything would be done with. Now she wondered had he really gone – had he done what he threatened? Why didn’t he come? At twelve o’clock that night, as she lay among the cushions of her sofa, dozing, the door of her parlor was pushed in. She sprang up with a cry of delight; but when Poniotowsky came up to her she exclaimed:

“Oh, you!” And the languor and boredom with which she said his name made the prince laugh shortly.

“Yes, I. Who did you think it was?” Cynically and rather cruelly he looked down at Letty Lane and admired the picture she made: small, exquisite, her blond head against the dark velvet of the lounge, her gray eyes intensified by the fatigue under them.

“Just got in from Carlsbad; came directly here. How-de-do? You look, you know – ” he scrutinized her through his single eye-glass – “most frightfully seedy.”

“Oh, I’m all right.” She left the sofa, for she wanted to prevent his nearer approach. “Have you had any supper? I’ll call Higgins.”

“No, no, sit down, please, will you? I want to know why you sent to Carlsbad for me? Have you come to your senses?”

He was as mad about the beautiful creature as a man of his temperament could be. Exhausted by excess and bored with life, she charmed and amused him, and in order to have her with him always, to be master of her caprices, he was willing to make any sacrifice.

“Have you sent off that imbecile boy?” And at her look he stopped and shrugged. “You need a rest, my child,” he murmured practically, “you’re neurasthenic and very ill. I’ve wired to have the yacht at Cherbourg – It’ll reach there by noon to-morrow.”

She was standing listlessly by the table. A mass of letters sent by special messenger from London after her, telegrams and cards lay there in a pile. Looking down at the lot, she murmured: “All right, I don’t care.”

He concealed his triumph, but before the look had faded from his face she saw it and exclaimed sharply:

“Don’t be crazy about it, you know. You’ll have to pay high for me; you know what I mean.”

He answered gallantly: “My dear child, I’ve told you that you would be the most charming princess in Hungary.”

Once more she accepted indifferently: “All right, all right, I don’t care tuppence – not tuppence” – and she snapped her fingers; “but I like to see you pay, Frederigo. Take me to Maxim’s.”

He demurred, saying she was far too ill, but she turned from him to call Higgins, determined to go if she had to go alone, and said to him violently: “Don’t think I’ll make your life easy for you, Frederigo. I’ll make it wretched; as wretched – ” and she held out her fragile arms, and the sleeves fell back, leaving them bare – “as wretched as I am myself.”

But she was lovely, and he said harshly: “Get yourself dressed. I’ll go change and meet you at the lift.”

She made him take a table in the corner, where she sat in the shadow on the sofa, overlooking the brilliant room. Maxim’s was no new scene to either of them, no novelty. Poniotowsky scarcely glanced at the crowd, preferring to feast his eyes on his companion, whose indifference to him made his abstraction easy. She was his property. He would give her his title; she had demanded it from the first. The Hungarian was a little overdressed, with his jeweled buttons, his large boutonnière, his faultless clothes, his single eye-glass through which he stared at Letty Lane, whose delicate beauty was in fine play: her cheeks faintly pink, her starry eyes humid with a dew whose luster is of the most precious quality. Her unshed tears had nothing to do with Poniotowsky – they were for the boy. Her heart sickened, thinking where he might be; and more than that, it cried out for him. She wanted him.

Oh, she would have been far better for Dan than anything he could find in this mad city, than anything to which in his despair he would go for consolation. She had kept her word, however, to that old man, Mr. Ruggles; she had got out of the business with a fatal result, as far as the boy was concerned. She thought Dan would drift here probably as most Americans on their wild nights do for a part of the time, and she had come to see.

She wore a dress of coral pink, tightly fitting, high to her little chin, and seemed herself like a coral strand from neck to toe, clad in the color she affected, and which had become celebrated as the Letty Lane pink. Her feathered hat hid her face, and she was completely shielded as she bent down drawing pictures with her bare finger on the cloth. After a little while she said to Poniotowsky without glancing at him:

“If you stare any longer like that, Frederigo, you’ll break your eye-glass. You know how I hate it.”

Used as he was to her sharpness, he nevertheless flushed and sat back and looked across the room, where, to their right, protected from them as they were from him by the great door, a young man sat alone. Whether or not he had come to Maxim’s intending to join a congenial party, should he find one, or to choose for a companion some one of the women who, at the entrance of the tall blond boy, stirred and invited him with their raised lorgnons and their smiles, will not be known. Dan Blair was alone, pale as the pictures Letty Lane had drawn on the cloth, and he, too, feasted his eyes on the Gaiety girl.

“By Jove!” said the Hungarian under his breath, and she eagerly asked: “What? Whom? Whom do you see?”

Turning his back sharply he evaded her question and she did not pursue the idea, and as a physical weakness overwhelmed her, when Poniotowsky after a second said, “Come, chérie, for heaven’s sake, let’s go” – she mechanically rose and passed out.

Several young men supping together came over eagerly to speak to her and claim acquaintance with the Gaiety girl, and walked along out to the motor. There Letty Lane discovered she had dropped her handkerchief, and sent the prince back for it.

As though he had been waiting for the reappearance of Poniotowsky, Dan Blair stood close to the little table which Letty Lane had left, her handkerchief in his hand. As Poniotowsky came up Dan thrust the small trifle of sheer linen into his waistcoat pocket.

“I will trouble you for Miss Lane’s handkerchief,” said Poniotowsky, his eyes cold.

“You may,” said Dan as quietly, his blue eyes like sparks from a star, “trouble me for hell!” And lifting from the table Poniotowsky’s own half-emptied glass of champagne, the boy flung the contents full in the Hungarian’s face.

The wine dashed against Poniotowsky’s lips and in his eyes. Blair laughed out loud, his hands in his pockets. The insult was low and noiseless; the little glass shattered as it fell so softly that with the music its gentle crash was unheard.

Poniotowsky wiped his face tranquilly and bowed.

“You shall hear from me after I have taken Miss Lane home.”

“Tell her,” said the boy, “where you left the handkerchief, that’s all.”