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CHAPTER XX – A HAND CLASP

It was one o’clock. Blair called a hansom and told the driver to take him to the Carlton, and leaning back in the vehicle he breathed a long sigh. He looked like his father, but he didn’t know it. He felt old. He was a man and a tired one and a free one, and the sense of this liberty began to refresh him like a breeze over parched sand. He thought over what he had left for a second, stopped longest in pitying Galorey, then went into the Carlton restaurant to order some supper, for he began to feel the need of food. He had not time to drink his wine and partake of the cold pheasant before he saw that opposite him the two people who had taken their table were Letty Lane and Poniotowsky. The woman’s slender back was turned to Blair, and his heart gave a leap of pain at the sight of the man with her, and the cruel suffering began again.

Dan gave up the idea of eating: drank a whole bottle of champagne, then pushed it away from him violently. “Hold up,” he told himself, “you’re getting dangerous; this drinking won’t do.” So he sat drumming on the table looking into the air. When those two got up to go, however, he would go with them; that was sure. He could never see them go out together again; no – no – no! As his brain grew a bit clearer he saw that they were having a heated discussion between them, and as the room emptied finally, save for themselves, Dan, though he could not hear what Poniotowsky said, understood that he was urging something which the girl did not wish to grant. When they left he rose as well, and at the door of the restaurant the actress and her companion paused, and Dan saw her face, deadly pale. There were tears in her eyes.

“For God’s sake!” he heard her murmur, and she impatiently drew her cloak around her shoulders. Poniotowsky put out his hand to help her, but she drew back from him, exclaiming violently: “Oh, no – no!” Before he was aware what he was doing, Dan was holding his hand out to Miss Lane.

How she turned to him! God of dreams! How she took in one cold hand his hand; just the grasp a man needs to lead him to offer the service of his life. Her hand was icy – it thrilled him to his marrow.

“Oh – you – ” she breathed. “Hello!”

No words could have been more commonplace, less in the category of dramatic or poetic welcome, but they were music to the boy, and when the actress looked at him with a ghost of a smile on her trembling lips, Dan was sure there was some kind of blessing in the greeting.

“I am going to see you home,” he said with determination, and she caught at it:

“Yes, yes, do! Will you?”

The third member of the party had not spoken. A servant fetched him a light to which he bent, touching his cigar. Then he lifted his head – a handsome one – with its cold and indifferent eyes, to Letty Lane.

“Good night, Miss Lane.” A deep color crept under his dark skin.

“Come,” said the actress eagerly, “come along; my motor is out there and I am crazy tired. That is all there is about it. Come along.”

Snatched from a marriage contract, still bitter from his jealous anger, this – to be alone with her – by the side of this white, fragrant, wonderful creature – to have been turned to by her, to be alone with her, the Duchess of Breakwater out of his horizon, Poniotowsky gone – Oh, it was sweet to him! They had rolled out from the Carlton down toward the Square and he put his arm around her waist, his voice shook:

“You are dead tired! And when I saw that brute with you to-night I could have shot him.”

“Take your arm away, please.”

“Why?”

“Take it away. I don’t like it. Let my hand go. What’s the matter with you? I thought I could trust you.”

He said humbly: “You can – certainly you can.”

“I am tired – tired – tired!”

Under his breath he said: “Put your head on my shoulder, Letty, darling.”

And she turned on him nearly as violently as she had on Poniotowsky, and burst into tears, crouching almost in the corner of the motor, away from him, both her hands upon her breast.

“Oh, can’t you see how you bother me? Can’t you see I want to rest and be all alone? You are like them all – like them all. Can’t I rest anywhere?”

The very words she used were those he had thought of when he saw her dance at the theater, and his heart broke within him.

“You can,” he stammered, “rest right here. God knows I want you to rest more than anything. I won’t touch you or breathe again or do anything you don’t want me to.”

She covered her face with her hands and sat so without speaking to him. The light in her motor shone over her like a kindly star, as, wrapped in her filmy things she lay, a white rose blown into a sheltered nook. After a little she wiped her eyes and said more naturally:

“You look perfectly dreadfully, boy! What have you been doing with yourself?”

They had reached the Savoy. It seemed to Dan they were always just driving up to where some one opened a door, out of which she was to fly away from him. He got out before her and helped her from the car.

“Well, I’ve got a piece of news to tell you. I have broken my engagement with the duchess.”

This brought her back far enough into life to make her exclaim: “Oh, I am glad! That’s perfectly fine! I don’t know when I’ve heard anything that pleased me so much. Come and see me to-morrow and tell me all about it.”

CHAPTER XXI – RUGGLES RETURNS

Dan did not fall asleep until morning, and then he dreamed of Blairtown and the church and a summer evening and something like the drone of the flies on the window-pane soothed him, and came into his waking thoughts, for at noon he was violently shaken by the shoulder and a man’s voice called him as he opened his eyes and looked into Ruggles’ face.

“Gee Whittaker!” Ruggles exclaimed. “You are one of the seven sleepers! I’ve been here something like seventeen minutes, whistling and making all kinds of barnyard noises.”

As Dan welcomed him, rubbing the sleep from his eyes, Ruggles told him that he had come over “the pond” just for the wedding.

“There isn’t going to be any wedding, Josh! Got out of all that last night.”

Ruggles had the breakfast card in his hand, which the waiter had brought in, and Dan, taking it from his friend, ordered a big breakfast.

“I’m as hungry as the dickens, Rug, and I guess you are, too.”

“What was the matter with the duchess?” Ruggles asked. “Were you too young for her, or not rich enough?”

Significantly the boy answered: “One too many, Josh,” and Ruggles winced at the response.

“Here are the fellows with my trunks and things,” he announced as the porters came in with his luggage. “Just drop them there, boys; they’re going to fix some kind of a room later.”

Blair’s long silk-lined coat lay on a chair where he had flung it, his hat beside it, and Ruggles went over to the corner and lifted up a fragrant glove. It was one of Letty Lane’s gloves which Dan had found in the motor and taken possession of. The young man had gone to his dressing-room and begun running his bath, and Ruggles, laying the glove on the table, said to himself:

“I knew he would get rid of the duchess, all right.”

But when Dan came back into the room later in his dressing-gown for breakfast, Ruggles said:

“You’ll have to send her back her glove, Dannie.”

At the sight of it beside the breakfast tray, Dan blushed scarlet. He picked up the fragrant object.

“That’s all right; I’ll take care of it.”

“Is Mandalay running the same as ever?” Ruggles asked over his bacon and eggs.

“Same as ever.”

Ruggles saw he had not returned in vain, and that he was destined to take up his part of the business just as he had laid it out for himself to Lord Galorey. “It’s up to me now: I’ll have to take care of the actress, and I’m darned if I haven’t got a job. If Dan colors up like that at the sight of her glove, I wonder what he does when he holds her hand!”

CHAPTER XXII – WHAT WILL YOU TAKE?

When Dan, on the minute of two, went to the Savoy, Higgins, as was her custom, did not meet him. Miss Lane met him herself. She was reading a letter by the table, and when Dan was announced she put it back in its envelope. Blair had seen her only in soft clinging evening dresses, in white visionary clothes, or in her dazzling part costume, where the play dress of the dancer displayed her beauty and her charms. To-day she wore a tailor-made gown, and in her dark cloth dress, in her small hat, she seemed a new woman – some one he hadn’t known and did not know, and he experienced the thrill a man always feels when the woman he loves appears in an unaccustomed dress and suggests a new mystery.

“Oh, I say! You’re not going out, are you?”

In the lapel of her close little coat was a flower he had given her. He wanted to lean forward and kiss it as it rested there. She assured him:

“I have just come in; had an early lunch and took a long walk – think of it! I haven’t taken a walk alone since I can remember!”

Her walk had given her only the ghost of a flush, which rose over her delicate skin, fading away like a furling flag. Her frailness, her slenderness, the air of good-breeding her dress gave her, added to Dan’s deepening emotions. She seemed infinitely dear, and a thing to be protected and fostered.

“Can’t you sit down for a minute? I’ve come to make you a real call.”

“Of course,” she laughed. “But, first, I must answer this letter.”

His jealousy rose and he caught hold of her hand that held the envelope. “Look here, you are not to write it if it is to that damned scoundrel. I took you away from him last night and you are never to see him again.”

For the first time the two really looked at each other. Her lips parted as though she would reprove him, and the boy murmured:

“That’s all right. I mean what I say – never to see him again! Will you promise me? Promise me – I can’t bear it! I won’t have it!”

A film of emotion crossed his clear young eyes and her slender hands were held fast in his clasp. His face was beautiful in its tenderness and in a righteous anger as he bent it on her. Instead of reproving him as she had done before, instead of snatching away her hands, she swayed, and at the sight of her weakness his eyes cleared, and the film lifted like a curtain. She was not fainting, but, as her face turned toward his, he saw it transformed, and Dan caught her in her dark dress, the flowers in her bodice, to his heart. He held her as if he had snatched her from a wreck and in a safe embrace lifted her high to the shore of a coral strand. He kissed her, first timidly, wonderingly, with the sacrament of first love on his lips. Then he kissed her as his heart bade him, and when he set her free she was crying, but the tears on his face were not all her tears.

“Little boy, how crazy, how perfectly crazy! Oh, Dan – Dan!”

She clung to him, looking up at him just as his boy-dreams had told him a girl would look some day. Her face was suffused and softened, her lips – her coral-red, fine, lovely lips were trembling, and her eyes were as gray, as profound as those seas his imagination had longed to explore. Made poet for the first time in his life, as his arms were around her, he whispered: “You are all my dreams come true. If any man comes near you I’ll kill him just as sure as fate. I’ll kill him!”

“Hush, hush! I told you you were crazy. We’re both perfectly mad. I have tried my best not to come to this with you. What would your father say? Let me go, let me go; I’ll call Higgins.”

The boy laughed aloud, the laugh of happy youth. He held her so close that she might as well have tried to loose herself from an iron image of the Spanish Inquisition as from his young arms. This slender, delicious, willowy thing he held was Letty Lane, the adored star London went mad over: the triumph of it! It flashed through him as his pulses beat and his heart was high with the conquest, but it was to the woman only that he whispered:

“I’ve said a lot of stuff and I am likely to say a lot more, but I want you to say something to me. Don’t you love me?”

The word on his lips to him was as strange, as wonderful, as though it had been made for him.

“I guess I must love you, Dan. I guess I must have for a long time.”

“God, I’m so glad! How long?”

“Why, ever since you used to come to the soda-fountain and ask for chocolate. You don’t know how sweet you were when you were a little boy.”

She put her slender hand against his hot cheek. “And you are nothing but a little boy now! I think I must be crazy!”

As he protested, as she listened intently to what his emotion taught him to say to her, she whispered close to his ear:

“What will you take, little boy?”

And he answered: “I’ll take you – you!”

At a slight sound in the next room Letty Lane started as though the interruption really brought her to her senses, put her hand to her disheveled hair, and before she could prevent it, Dan had called Mrs Higgins to “come in,” and the woman, in response, came into the sitting-room. The boy went up to her and took her hands eagerly, and said:

“It’s all right, all right, Mrs. Higgins. Just think of it! She belongs to me!”

“Oh, don’t be a perfect lunatic, Dan,” the actress exclaimed, half laughing, half crying, “and don’t listen to him, Higgins. He’s just crazy.”

But the old woman’s eyes went bright at the boy’s face and tone. “I never was so glad of anything in my life.”

“As of what?” asked her mistress sharply, and the tone was so cold and so suddenly altered that Dan felt a chill of despair.

“Why, at what Mr. Blair says, Miss.”

“Then,” said her mistress, “you ought to be ashamed of yourself. He’s only twenty-two, he doesn’t know anything about life. You must be crazy. He’s as mad as a March hare and he ought to be in school.”

Then, to their consternation, she burst into a passion of weeping; threw herself on Higgins’ breast and begged her to send Dan away – to send everybody away – and to let her die in peace.

In utter despair the boy obeyed the dresser’s motion to go, and his transport was changed into anxiety and dread. He hung about down-stairs in the Savoy for the rest of the afternoon, finally sending up to Higgins for news in sheer desperation, and the page fetched Blair a note in Letty Lane’s own hand. His eyes blurred so as he opened the sheet, he could hardly read the scrawl which said:

“It was perfectly sweet of you to wait down there. I’m all right – just tired out! Better get on a boat and go to Greenland’s Icy Mountains and cool off. But if you don’t, come in to-morrow and have lunch with me.

LETTY.”

CHAPTER XXIII – IN THE SUNSET GLOW

He lived through a week of bliss and of torture. One minute she promised to marry him, give up the stage, go around the world on a yacht, whose luxuries, Dan planned, should rival any boat ever built, or they would motor across Asia and see, one by one, the various coral strands and the golden sands of the East. He could not find terms to express how he would spend upon her this fortune of his, which, for the first time, began to have value in his eyes. Money had been lavished on her, still she seemed dazzled. Then she would push it all away from her in disgust – tell him she was sick of everything – that she didn’t want any new jewels or any new clothes, and that she never wanted to see the stage again or any place again; that there was nowhere she wanted to go, nothing she wanted to see – that he must get some fresh girl to whom he could show life, not one whom he must try to make forget it. Then, again, she would say that she loved the stage and her art – wouldn’t give it up for any one in the world – that it was fatal to marry an actress – that it was mad for him to think of marrying her, anyway – that she didn’t want to marry any one and be tied down – that she wanted to be her own mistress and free.

He found her a creature of a thousand whims and caprices, quick to cry, quick to laugh, divine in everything she did. He never knew what she would want him to do next, or how her mood would change, and after one of their happiest hours, when she had been like a girl with him, she would burst into tears, beg him to leave the room, telling him that she was tired – tired – tired, and wanted to go to sleep and never to wake up again. Between them was the figure of Poniotowsky, though neither spoke of him. She appeared to have forgotten him. Dan would rather have cut out his tongue than to speak his name, and yet he was there in the mind of each. During the fortnight Dan spent thousands of pounds on her, bought her jewels which she alternately raved over or but half looked at. He had made his arrangements with Galorey peacefully, coolly and between the two men it had been understood that the world should think the engagement broken by the duchess, and Dan’s attention to Letty Lane, already the subject of much comment, already conspicuous, was enough to justify any woman in taking offense.

One day, the pearl of warm May days, when England even in springtime touches summer, Blair was so happy as to persuade his sweetheart to go with him for a little row on the river. The young fellow waited for her in the boat he had secured, and she, motoring out with Higgins, had appeared, running down to the edge of the water like a girl, gay as a child let out from school, in a simple frock, in a marvelously fetching hat, white gloves, white parasol, white shoes, and as Dan helped her into the boat, pushed it out, pushed away with her on the crest of the sun-flecked waters, spring was in his heart, and he found the moment almost too great to bear.

The actress had been a girl with him all day, giving herself to his moods, doing what he liked without demur, talking of their mutual past, telling him one amusing story after another, proving herself an ideal companion, fresh, varied, reposeful; and no one to have seen Letty Lane with the boy on that afternoon would have dreamed that she ever had known another love. They had moored their boat down near Maidenhead, and he had helped her up the bank to the little inn, where tea had been made for them, and served to him by her own beautiful white hands. He had called for strawberries, and, like a shepherd in a pastoral, had fed them to her, and as they lingered the sunset came creeping steadily in through the windows where they sat.

As they neither called for their account nor to have the tea things taken away, after a while the woman stealthily opened the door and, unknown, looked at one of the prettiest pictures ever within her walls. Letty Lane sat on the window-seat, her golden head, her white form against the glow, and the boy by her side had his arms around her, and her head was on his breast. They were both young. They might have been white birds blown in there, nesting in the humble inn, and the woman of the house, who had not heard the waters of the Thames flow softly for nothing, judged them gently and sighed with pleasure as she shut the door.

Here at Maidenhead Dan had left his boat and the motor took them back. Nothing spoiled his bliss that day, and he said her name a thousand times that night in his dreams. Jealousies – and, when he would let himself think, they were not one, they were many – faded away. The duties that a life with her would involve did not disturb him. For many a long year, come what might, be what would, he would recall the glowing of that sunset reflected under the inn windows, the singing of the thrushes and the flash of the white dress and the fine little white shoes which he had held in the palm of his ardent hand, which he had kissed, as he told her with all his heart that she should rest her tired feet for ever.

There grew in him that day a reverence for her, determined as he was to bring into her life by his wealth and devotion everything of good. His loving plans for her forming in his brain somewhat chaotic and very much fevered, brought him nearer than he had ever been before to the picture of his mother. His father it wasn’t easy for Dan to think of in connection with the actress. He didn’t dare to dwell on the subject, but he had never known his mother, and that pale ideal he could create as he would. In thinking of her he saw only tenderness for Letty Lane – only love; and in his room the night after the row on the river, the night after the long idyl in the sunset-room of the inn, something like a prayer came to his young lips, and, when its short form was finished, a smile brought it to an end as he remembered the line in Letty Lane’s own opera:

“She will teach you how to pray in an Eastern form of prayer.”

The ring he had given the Duchess of Breakwater had been her own choice, a ruby. He had asked her, through Galorey, to keep it and to wear it later, when she could think of him kindly, in an ornament of some kind or another. The duchess had not refused. The ring he bought for Letty Lane, although there was no engagement announced between them, was the largest, purest diamond he could with decency ask her to put on her hand! It sparkled like a great drop of clear water from some fountain on a magic continent. In another shop strands of pink coral set through with diamonds caught his fancy and he bought her yards of them, ropes of them, smiling to think how his boyhood’s dreams were come true.

He never saw Ruggles except at meals, hardly spoke to the poor man at all, and the boy’s absorbed face, his state of mind, made the older man feel like death. He repeated to himself that he was too late – too late, and usually wound up his reflections by ejaculating:

“Gosh almighty, I’m glad I haven’t got a son!”