May Eve; or, What You Must/Part 1
A STORY IN THREE PARTS—PART I.
(From the Boston Courier, Sunday, April 18.)
The tableaux on the evening of the thirtieth at the house of Mrs. J. Forsyth Morgenson promise to be of exceptional beauty. No expense has been spared to make them historically correct and artistically pleasing. Mrs. Morgenson herself has arranged the closing series, “The Seven Ages of Woman.” Miss Sylvia Wrexmere has consented to appear as the bride.
(From the Boston Courier, Sunday, April. 18.)
The theatricals of the Hasty Pudding Club, which come the thirtieth of the month, are to be of exceptional interest this year. The most successful song is said to come early in the first act, and is to be sung by Mr. Henry Eveleth. Mr. Eveleth is the son of the late Hamlin Eveleth, the owner of the deserted Eveleth mansion in Brookline.
(From the Boston Courier, April 28.)
Henry Pryor, alias William Bryant, alias Henry Myers, known to the police as “Boston Harry,” or “Snappy Harry,” escaped from Sing Sing this morning. He has not yet been recaptured. A reward of five hundred dollars, offered by the prison authorities, has been raised to one thousand dollars by the board of directors of the Wheeling Bank. Pryor has served three years of a seventeen-year sentence, the result of his complicity in the Wheeling bank robbery. It will be recalled that Snappy Harry was mixed up, fifteen years ago, when he was a boy, in the Fenton burglary in Brookline. He was finally found and captured, after a desperate struggle, at a tramps' roost in the old Eveleth house in Brookline. Pryor escaped sentence at the time by turning State's evidence. His accomplice, John Farrell, was sent to prison for twenty-five years. Pryor's subsequent career put him among the most skilful bank robbers in the country. Five years ago he planned the Wheeling affair, and was captured with the goods a few days after the robbery. His record at Sing Sing has been exemplary. The escape is one of the most carefully planned in the history of the institution. An injury to his right arm, which the Sing Sing officials think now he inflicted on himself, was made an excuse for three days in the infirmary. He was not missed until nine this morning. At that time some splashes of blood near an unused entrance to one of the wards were first observed. An investigation revealed, etc., etc. etc.
CHAPTER I.
MRS. ROBERT HENRY ILLINGTON—and she was born Doris Ianthe Wrexmere, if that interests you—was talking with her sister. Mrs. Illington's face was delicately oval in shape; it was delicately olive in color. Its only salience of tint was the red-lipped mouth that framed curvingly her delicious smile; its only brilliance of expression the friendly sparkle that played in her agate eyes. She was clever—she had written some exceptionally good verse; there had actually been one volume published. But what in her expression had threatened, before marriage, to hint unbecomingly of intellectuality, had toned itself down in her single year of wedlock; had disappeared entirely with her swift maternity. Her figure, which had been almost breakably slender, was beginning to round; there was a suggestion that it might be, in time, a little sumptuous. She lay on a broad couch that was covered with a white rug. Her slender shape would have been smothered in her negligee and the coquettish wrappings that softly supplemented it, if they had not all been filmy. Instead, the lines of her limbs outlined themselves with a delicate precision, as if under a fine fall of snow. Her baby snuggled at her breast. Every other instant she stroked its tiny head, drawing her taper fingers from brow to nape, ruffling the invisible down that softened with a golden shadow its egg-like nudity.
It was a big room, with some of its wide windows opening onto the Charles. They framed, in heavy mahogany, squares and rectangles of light that were part the golden river and part, separated dimly by a film of horizon, the orange-tawny sky. A slip of a moon—a thin scroll of silver—was limned against, was cut into, and inset in the rich sky. It was not moored—it drifted—drifted. A few black clouds floated in this suffusing sea, and from the end of one of them, like a gem at a slipper-tip, hung the brilliant evening star.
The light came in the window in long, slanting lines, arousing kindred and rival lights everywhere—purple lights in the big, old-fashioned things; the hulking mahoganies that sulked in dusky corners; green lights in the gilt frames of pool-like mirrors; golden lights in tall brass candlesticks; rainbow lights in the silver on the dressing-case, and the baby's blue bassinet.
“When are you going to marry, Silver-Rose?” Mrs. Illington was saying in her friendly, sweet tones.
Silver-Rose laughed. “Oh, I don't know—never, perhaps,” she was answering, as girls invariably have answered that question since the beginning of girls.
It was not necessary for her to pretend that she might not marry, at that very moment, if she cared. Everybody knew that she could. Everybody knew—and by everybody I mean the newspaper-reading public of the United States—about her memorable coming-out dance at seventeen, her immediate belle-ship, the steady progress of her triumphs abroad, the curious cachet given to her by the infatuation of an incipient royal personage.
When she steered clear of the complications of that pertinent international episode, society had smiled complacently, had called her discreet; but when, soon after her return to Boston, she had been entered regularly at Radcliffe College, it drew a long breath of consternation, and began to call her eccentric. But she had gone calmly on, acquiring her A. B. with one hand, while she drove the social four-in-hand with the other. Lately, the appearance on the scene of the Earl of Montfort, and his assiduous wooings, had dragged her again under the calcium-light. The Wrexmeres had been originally English; there were, in the family, many English affiliations; it was looked upon as a desirable alliance. All the newspapers told her so.
She did not look like her sister. She was tall and slight, a little willowy, if you like; a girlish combination of angles, that promised exquisite curves; and of curves that had emerged, wonderfully, from virginal angles. She carried herself proudly. She was a blonde—but such a blonde—delicate, diaphanous, ethereal. Snowflakes and rose-leaves, moonshine and honey, silver and gold, fire and dew—they had all been called upon for her coloring. And across her face there seemed to flit an endless variety of expressions—every expression, at least, that was elusive, evasive, evanescent. The line of her features was as pure as a silver profile cut from the crescent moon. And her face emerged, magically, from under hair that was always threatening to flood it—hair that was sheer, primitive, glittering gold; there was not in it anywhere a ghost of flaxen, not a suggestion of yellow, not a hint of red—hair that crisped into wires of spun light in the sunshine, and was like honey dropping from the comb in the shadow. Her eyes were a blue that was, I think, a little unusual—the limpid, dazzling blue of the depths of an iceberg; and yet, somehow, they were never cold; they were brilliant when she talked, and dreamy, perhaps a little heavy-lidded, when she meditated. For the rest—and I hope you are not bored—there were purple shadows hovering on her delicate eyelids; her cheeks were faintly pink, mayflowers growing under snow; her mouth was a dewy nest of rose-petals, curling from a wide center to tiny scooped corners. And the turn of her chin was nicked by a faint cleft.
It is interesting to me to conjecture what Silver-Rose might have been if she had lived at different periods of history. In medieval times, for instance, I picture her as a blonde—slender Marguerite of Valois, holding courts of love, queening them haply, delicately critical of poems that purled of love in the prim, restricted forms of old-time rhymes. In Elizabethan England I think she would have figured a shadowy prototype behind one of those enigmatic sonnet-sequences that were like twilight mists, trailing golden dramatic days. Later, in tea-drinking times, she must have appeared powdered and patched and poodled, an ombre-playing, China-hunting target for the gentle Spectator's quiet wit. And, last of all, early in the nineteenth century, I see her an album beauty, full of sensibility, with sloping shoulders and a pursed, prunes-and-prisms mouth, another L. E. L. adored of minor poets, and daintily, quaintly minor herself.
Her name was Sylvia Rosamund Wrexmere. When she was little, she bloomed on the family-tree simply as Rose. But a little later, when two English cousins, who were Rosalie and Rosabel, came to stay at their house, there was a confusion—almost, indeed, a war of the roses. Rosalie was the oldest daughter of the oldest Wrexmere sister; it was decided that she should remain Rose. Rosabel was the youngest child of the youngest Wrexmere sister—there was no other possible name for her but Rosebud, and Sylvia Rosamund, it was decided, should be Sylvia, and only Sylvia. But in the end this did not do. They were a family hotly Lancastrian in their sympathies. There had not been for generations a branch, however obscure, that did not wear and flaunt its rose. Finally it was agreed that. she should be Sylvia-Rose. But the children soon shortened this to Silver-Rose; and Silver-Rose it continued to be until the end of the chapter.
“Doesn't this, for instance, tempt you, Silver-Rose?” Doris asked. She made no gesture, but her fingers still caressed her baby's downy head.
Silver-Rose sighed. She looked fixedly at the little spot on the thin, pink skull where the skin throbbed up and down. “I don't think it does, Dor,” she said languidly; “although Bobs is a love—and I'm his slave.”
“You know, dear”—Doris smiled her affectionate smile—“it won't be like this—it can't be like this—always. I mean the supremacy, the newspaper talk, and the way people run after you. And, besides, there are loads of pretty girls growing up as fast as they can grow. We're bound to hear from them sooner or later, you know. Anyway, we'll see them.” She stared at her sister questioningly, but Silver-Rose, indifferent, made no response.
“I don't want you to be left to braid St. Catherine's tresses,” Doris continued to coax; “but you will, my dear, if you're not careful. A woman is not Tennyson's brook, you must remember. Men will come and men will go; and after awhile they won't come back. Mama and papa don't seem at all to realize. You simply hypnotize them, lovey; that's what it is. That's the danger of being a belle. You wait too long, and then, very often, in the end you don't do half so well for yourself. Now, isn't it so, dearest chuck?”
Her sister roused herself a little. “None of these arguments seem to appeal to me, Dor,” she said lightly.
Now how am I to describe her voice? I am tempted to use that quaint old word “dulcet.” I am tempted to say that it was honey-sweet and dew-clear. I am tempted to compare it to the ringing of lily-bells. Whatever it was, it went with her face, and just as inevitably as you longed, after once seeing her, to see her again, just so inevitably, after you had heard her speak, you listened avidly for the sound of her voice again.
Doris reflected for a moment. “Silver-Rose”—she pounced suddenly upon her sister—“have you any intention, up your sleeve, of going on the stage?”
Silver-Rose's surprised amusement burst out in a sudden spurt of laughter.
Oh, you should have heard her laugh! It was the rippling of a brook, gurgling over stones and pulling at long, purpling grasses. It was witchery. It was magic. It was music!
“You see,” her sister went on, half-apologetically, “I sowed my wild oats in 'The Wind on the Harp,' and I've always wondered what form yours would take. When you studied with Coquelin, that winter, that's when I had my first suspicion—I confess I was worried. I was relieved, you may fancy, when you decided to go to Radcliffe, although I thought it was a funny stunt. Indeed, I congratulated myself then that you were safe. But you've been acting there so much, and you act constantly more and more. My dear Silver-Rose, you're acting-mad. And last year, when there was so much talk—I mean when you were the young wife in 'The Land of Heart's Desire'” she broke off, and bent on her sister a look that was inquiry and apology in equal parts.
“Oh, no, my dear”—Silver-Rose hastened, laughingly, to lay her sister's fears at rest—“I love acting, but I haven't, as it happens, the ability, and I have as little the desire to be an actress. There's nothing—unlike most people—that I yearn to elevate—not even the masses, and certainly not the stage.”
“I pinned a great deal of my suspicion of you to your upper lip,” Doris volunteered.
“My upper lip?” her sister repeated, in a mystified way.
“Yes, your upper lip. It's the upper lip of the actor—haven't you ever noticed that? On each side of the center, it lifts, just naturally, into the little pink peaks that actresses either create or intensify in their make-ups.”
CHAPTER II.
Silver-Rose was now biting viciously with her little white teeth at this same upper lip, pulling it out of shape, and pressing the color out of it. “What nonsense!” she commented.
“Will you tell me, then, if it isn't the acting, for what you went to college?” Doris demanded.
“Oh, did you think I went there for the chance to act?” Silver-Rose laughed a little. “No, that was not it. Incidentally, I enjoyed the acting very much, but I went there for a change.”
“A change?” Doris iterated, puzzled.
“Of course, a change. Did it ever occur to you, Doris, what a frightful bore our life has always been?”
“No. No, I confess I've never looked at it in that light,” Doris said slowly.
“Then look at it now in that light for a moment, Dor; from the point of view of its continuity in sameness, its inevitability in atmosphere. What has it always been ever since we can remember? Winters in Boston, alternating with winters in Egypt or on the Riviera; and summers in Newport. And the people, always the same people, or the same kind of people, no matter in what country we happened to be. People of the same birth, the same breeding, the same unoriginal social instincts; people always playing a game, and always playing the same game. People never who really live, who think, who work. When I went to college, for the first time in my life I met somebody different. I went into a different atmosphere, with different ideas and ideals. There prevailed a kind of socialism—a socialism in which only mind or character could dominate. There were girls there who were working their way through college—girls from little back-country towns, who, from our point of view, had never even lived. And they beat me fairly at the things I had been studying all my life. I had to work hard to be of the elect. Oh, it was a stunning experience. Ever since my babyhood, I have been playing with the same box of blocks—but I got a new set at Radcliffe. I don't think there's much romance in. life, Doris— anyway, not in our life. Radcliffe's been my romance.”
“Oh, my grief!” Doris said distressedly, a plexus of wrinkles coming to the surface on her smooth brow. “'People who live, who think, who work,'” she quoted her sister. “Oh, I hope you're not going to be high-minded, and mess round with the worthy poor. Oh, please don't take your Settlement work too seriously. I'd rather you'd go on the stage,” she ended magnanimously.
“You need not worry,” her sister reassured her. “I'm all kinds of a failure at Settlement work. I'm opposed to its very tenets. I think the bargain too one-sided. I've too profound a respect for the 'worthy poor' to suggest the exchange. I'll take all their half gives me with great pleasure, but I maintain that we haven't anything really worth while to bring to the exchange. And they're so indisputably happy. I wouldn't, for the world, inoculate them with the virus of our discontent. But I shan't go on the stage, either; don't let that alarm you.”
Doris sighed relievedly. “That's nice,” she said contentedly; “now I don't mind—after this the deluge. How did the tableaux come off this afternoon?” She was content; her change of subject indicated that.
“Oh, well enough,” Silver-Rose said indifferently. “There was a frightful mob, and it was unbearably hot.”
“And was the bridal-veil becoming?”
“People said so, of course. I was not so especially pleased myself. One thing I am determined, I shall not wear white if I'm ever married. I dislike myself in white—perhaps because it is always expected of me, and I'm unspeakably tired of it.”
“Then you do intend marriage?”
“I have been trained to intend it.”
“Oh, by the way,” Doris exclaimed suddenly, ignoring her sister's cynicism, “in the top drawer of my dresser there's a little bundle. The Hamptons brought it back; it's a gift from Elizabeth.”
“From Elizabeth?” her sister repeated electrically. She rushed to the dresser, tore open the drawer, and possessed herself of the small tissued and ribboned package there. Then she walked over to the window, sitting down there to its revelations.
“Oh, how lovely!” she said, after a pause.
It was a tiny copy of the Mona Lisa, painted in color on some thin metal, framed again in metal; a square of dulled green-golds, elaborately chaste in design. Over her crossed beautiful hands the delicate head poised itself lightly, and under her soft hair the alluring eyes gazed insolently and indifferently into those of Silver-Rose. All the passion of the south, all the calculation of the north, blended subtly in her look. The triumphant lips trembled on the verge of an inscrutable smile.
“Heavens, how beautiful!” Silver-Rose said, half to herself. “What a woman! What a woman!” She walked slowly over to one of the long mirrors, her eyes fixed on it. She watched her lilylike reflection grow proudly out from among its shadows, Then she looked at the picture again.
“And they call me beautiful,” she mused, in a kind of dispassionate disillusionment.
Doris laughed.
“But you must confess that I'm fearfully, outrageously, on the surface, Doris,” Silver-Rose said hotly—she, somehow, tacitly accepted her sister's laugh as a defense; “a pink and white obviosity.”
“You do very well,” Doris asserted patronizingly; “and, thank fortune! your eyelashes aren't white.”
“They might just as well be white,” Silver-Rose claimed morosely; “everybody thinks I darken them.”
“You're a rose in ice, dear,” Doris said tenderly; “but you'll melt—you'll melt. That's rather a pretty idea,” she reflected musingly; “the rose in ice. Get me paper and pencil, will you, dear?”
“I shall get you no such foolish thing. Of course you know the doctor said you were not to write for awhile.”
“So he did; dear old duck!” Doris resumed her dainty stroking of the baby's head.
“That summer before they were married,” Silver-Rose said dreamily, “I used to go with Elizabeth twice a week to the Louvre. "We always met Lewis at the Mona Lisa. Then they would leave me with my book and the pictures, and they would go for an hour's walk.”
“I am so glad that Lewis has made good; but, just the same, Elizabeth ran a fearful risk when she married him. Everybody distrusted him; and you can't wonder at the awful forms the hostility took. He always produced a curious effect on me—a kind of cold paralysis—that sneer in his eye, and that ironic twist to his voice. You can't tell me, moreover, there's no fire where there's so much smoke.”
“I was always on Lewis' side,” Silver-Rose asserted dreamily.
“Yes, Mrs. Whitfield has never forgiven you your part in it—although she's inconsistent enough to forgive Elizabeth. I must say that your faith was colossal. Didn't Elizabeth's ever waver?”
“Waver?” Silver-Rose laughed a short, quick laugh. “Waver? No—she loved him.”
“But suppose he had turned out”
“She would still have loved him. And with Elizabeth love means service, and service happiness.”
“Oh, Silver-Rose, you don't know; you don't know”
“Perhaps not, but I think I do. Oh, I know I do. Doris, the happy people are the people who love, not the ones who are loved. And Elizabeth loves Lewis. Loves him? She worships him. He might beat her, cast her down, trample on her—she would serve him on her bruised knees.”
“And does he love her that way?” Doris asked curiously. She had the look of one listening to some fabulous tale.
“Oh, he's only a man, Doris dear. And then he has his art. And men of genius—painters, sculptors, musicians, poets—they are all alike—they all love in the same way; short intervals of loving snatched from between longer intervals of working. But Lewis loves Elizabeth as much as he could love anybody; and that's better than most men's best. Oh, they are such a pair! He's a man—and she's a woman. They're glorious together. How I live, Doris, when I'm with them!”
“It must have been awfully hard for them at first;” Doris sighed compassionately.
“Hard! Oh, you don't know. And they simply wouldn't accept the kind of help one could offer. Elizabeth's hair is white, but she's magnificent—magnificent with her color, those gray eyes, her dark lashes, and her tragic brow. Her figure is glorious, and she carries herself—Doris, she would overtop any queen you've ever seen.”
“Take care,” Doris said. “I flatter myself that my collection of queens is an unusual one.”
“Wait until you see Elizabeth.”
“Things are going very smoothly now, aren't they?”
“Oh, beautifully! At first Elizabeth did some translating—that helped to tide things over. But now Lewis can't begin to fill the orders he gets—and even if he had the time, he wouldn't paint everybody. He's always been infernally fastidious, and now he can afford to be anything he wants. He keeps a studio in London. His portrait of the Duchess of Ux made his English reputation, and he'll undoubtedly have to come to New York next winter. He'll simply pluck fortunes there.”
“Did he ever finish the portrait he began of you?” Doris asked.
“No, he says he'll finish it this summer, if I'll go over.”
“And shall you go?”
“I haven't decided yet whether I shall sail on the Sappho or not.”
“When does the Sappho sail?”
“To-morrow.”
“To-morrow,” Doris laughed. “Oh, Silver-Rose, oh, Silver-Rose!” she murmured indulgently. “But then, anyway,” she continued contentedly, “you couldn't get a stateroom.”
“Oh, yes, the Somersets are going over. They'll take care of me. I can decide to go at the very last moment—they've been good enough to say—and share with Muriel.”
“What did you wear in the picture?” Doris reverted.
“White. White crape; an old thing I'd had a long time. That reminds me, I shall have to take it with me, I suppose. Lewis wouldn't let me wear anything else. There were some pearls, I think—oh, yes, a little cap that Elizabeth had. Lewis says if I wish to look well, I must always wear white—and crape, preferably.”
There was a little pause. “Then you do believe in love?” Doris flung at her sister what evidently was the core of her meditation.
Silver-Rose moved restlessly. “Oh, yes, I believe in love,” she affirmed; “who doesn't?”
“How much?” Doris continued relentlessly; “and what are you waiting for, Silver-Rose?”
Silver-Rose started to speak. Her eyes sparkled with sudden brilliance behind the softening sweep of her long lashes. Then she hesitated, and the blue flames died out of them. They grew dreamy, and the lids, heavy with purple stains, drooped. It was a long moment before she spoke again, and then she clasped her hands behind her head and gazed, unseeingly, at the silver curl of the moon, floating out of the afterglow.
“I'll tell you about it, Doris dear,” she said simply; and her voice began to seem less girlishly tinkling, to grow bell-like, as she proceeded; “because I think you'll understand—you're the only one, except Elizabeth, who will; and I have never, strangely enough—never told Elizabeth. But all my life I have been expecting something to happen to me—a something glorious and indescribable. I have had a feeling, ever since I can remember, that there would, some day, come into my experience a single big moment—a huge climax of some kind, a sudden chance at great happiness; a door, as it were, opening into a golden future. I don't know what it will be. I don't know when it will come. And it is possible, of course, that I utterly deceive myself, that it will never come at all. But I don't believe that. I never pay any attention to such doubts when they occur to me. I always put them quickly out of my mind. My belief in the past has been dim, vague, shadowy; but of late years it has grown into a conviction, a certainty, a surety that it would be impossible for anybody to shake or break. I feel that fate has a definite something in reserve for me—a something deeper and sweeter and richer than comes, ordinarily, into the lives of women. That I am sure of, but all I can do is wait for it, and wait in patience, to be forever keenly on the look-out. Three things I know. It will come, my chance of happiness; it will come. I shall know it when it does come, and I shall be ready for it—ready for it at any cost.” Her voice was very sweet when she stopped, but her words were almost inaudible.
CHAPTER III.
“But—but”—Doris panted fiercely for words—“suppose—suppose he's ineligible,” she ended lamely.
“I don't care if he's a chimney-sweep,” Silver-Rose said softly.
“Oh, I understand now,” Doris accused her ardently; “you little dreamer of dreams! Chimney-sweeps are picturesque enough. They come into poetry and fairy-tales. 'Hans Andersen' is full of them. But suppose he's a motorman?”
But if her ridicule hit, it left invisible wounds. “It makes no difference who he is,” Silver-Rose pronounced inflexibly. But the dreams began to float out of her eyes.
“Couldn't he possibly, sisterkin, be an earl?” Doris insinuated softly.
Silver-Rose looked directly at her. “I am afraid not,” she said, sighing. “I had to tell one so this afternoon.”
“Well, let's hope he'll be a prince,” Doris suggested fondly; “a Prince Hal in the flesh,” she added, smiling. “Come here and kiss me, Silver-Rose.”
Silver-Rose went and kissed her.
“I suppose I ought to be going,” she said vaguely, after awhile; “there's that errand in Allston. I must do that. I wouldn't disappoint Pepi for the world; and I want to talk with her about it. It's a good chance, and she's the brightest girl I've ever met at the Settlement.”
“You can't go alone. Is Beau coming?”
“No, he's not even going to be at the dance to-night; mother's in despair.”
“Wait for Rob, won't you, dear? He'll be delighted.”
“I can't.
“I'll send Delia with you.”
“Heavens, no! My dear, I can take care of myself. If college has done anything for me—and for it I'm devoutly grateful—it's emancipated me from ridiculous forms and ceremonies. I've decided that a woman ought to be able to take care of herself. And, besides, it's only the fringes of night.”
“But, Silver-Rose, don't you think”
“You might as well understand now as ever,” Silver-Rose maintained with languid obstinacy, “that I won't have Delia.”
“Let me telephone for the brougham.”
“No, dear.”
“Or the runabout. You can chauffeuse yourself, and you will.”
“No, I'm going in an electric.”
“'And when she was bad she was horrid,'” Doris quoted mechanically.
“But when she was good, you remember, she was very good indeed,” Silver-Rose excused herself; “there are compensations, Dor, for everything.”
Silver-Rose was putting on before the glass a broad, green hat wreathed with tiny rose-buds. She was adjusting the trim jacket of her green walking-suit. Her hands fluttered for a second with a globe of chiffon, that bunched fluffily under her chin. She pulled into place a long, foreign-looking chain—cut-gold, with tiny gods of green jade strung on it at irregular intervals. She drew on, last of all, her heavy walking-gloves,
“Come over and kiss me, Silver-Rose,” Doris commanded imperiously, “again, dear,” she added; “there's no prophesying about you, you know. You may sail to-morrow. If it were a week before the Sappho went I'd have no fears of losing you, but as there are only a few hours, you're as likely as not to run away—with a good-by over the telephone.”
Silver-Rose kissed her sister, not twice but many times. She kissed the tiny segment of the baby's head that his position permitted her lips to touch. “Good-by, dear,” she said again. And her slender figure flitted through the open doorway,into the dark beyond.
Doris lay quiet for a moment, her eyelids down. Suddenly something flickered silver under the fringes of her lashes. A delicate diamond of a tear trailed over her olive cheek. It moved slowly there, cutting a shining swath through its smooth down. Several followed its wake. One splashed on the baby's head. Another came, and another, and another. The baby waked and cried. Doris sat up.
Out in the street, the air was suffused with the amethystine rain of the stars. The little new moon was rocking toward the horizon. The streets were quiet, twinkling with lights, hollow tunnels packed with sweetness, distilled by the young trees. Silver-Rose strolled up Beacon Street to Massachusetts Avenue. There she waited for a car. Many open cars, crowded with people, she permitted to go by. Finally a closed one came. She looked a little disappointed, but she signaled to the conductor.
Her entrance made the sensation that she had come to expect, that she had trained herself calmly to face, and, perhaps, as she had undoubtedly made herself believe, to scorn. The listlessness of the half-dozen women sitting there in the various positions of preoccupation, passed off as if they had had an electric shock. They all eyed her more or less furtively. The effect of her exquisite blondness was to make them look ten years older. A slender, middle-aged woman in the corner watched with fluttering, weak eyes her every movement. A stout, jaded woman, who had been leaning back with closed eyes, sat upright and smoothed her hair, in instinctive answer to the challenge of so much beauty. But the sallow woman opposite, with the stringy black hair and prominent teeth, scrutinized her openly for a moment, and then turning to her companion, a waxy little creature with a gentle expression, whispered hissingly: “Paint!”
The beautiful, cleanly lengths of the boulevard spun by. The car stopped and a man entered. If the attention of any in the car was, by chance, still furtively spent on Silver-Rose, it was immediately deflected in the direction of the newcomer. Apparently, they recognized him universally to be the governor of the Commonwealth. His glance fell on Silver-Rose, and as he bowed his face lighted up with his wonderful smile. Then he found a seat in the corner, on the same side with her.
He was an extraordinarily handsome man, then in his vigorous prime. His six feet of height, his perfect proportions, his noble shoulders, would have distinguished him anywhere. But, in addition, his head was really beautiful. His hair and mustache had silvered prematurely, deepening the tone of his complexion, which halted, in consequence, just short of floridity; and they were, in turn, italicized by his piercing dark eyes and his darker brows and lashes. His features were patrician, even a little ascetic, his expression gracious. That night, perhaps because of the excessive, untimely heat, perhaps because of arduous gubernatorial labors, he looked tired and worn. After awhile he leaned back weariedly and closed his eyes. Silver-Rose had always admired him, his distinction of look and manner, his air of physical and moral cleanliness. He stood, moreover, for the higher order of citizenship, and she would have adored him, if only for that. She was as much tempted as any of her car-associates to examine him slyly, as he leaned back with his tired lids closed. And occasionally she yielded to the temptation.
The car stopped again and another man, a younger man, entered. He stood in the doorway a second, glancing perfunctorily up the length of the car before he sat down in the farther corner of the opposite seat. Silver-Rose looked at him indifferently and then away. The car stopped, and other people got in and others got out. Then, idly, she looked at him again and again. And suddenly her pulses stirred a little. She had discovered that he was wearing a false mustache and imperial. She examined him furtively with more and more interest.
He was a tall man and rather slender, but muscular in a graceful way. He wore a slouch hat and a long coat. He looked like an Italian. This fact was hinted by his hair that, while close-cropped, was yet like ebon velvet. It was iterated in his brown eyes—eyes, curiously enough, full of light but sleepy looking. It was reiterated in his brown skin, where glowed almost imperceptibly a furtive Southern copper. And it was repeated again and again in the look of his features, their soft emergence the one from the other.
Silver-Rose had played men's parts many times at Radcliffe. She had had occasion to apply to her rose-leaf skin most of the combinations of hirsute falsity. She had several times worn a smudge of mustache and a peak of imperial exactly like the ones the young man in the corner was wearing. She knew just how jauntily, if turgidly, they went on, and just how irksomely they came off. For a second she could almost smell the sickly odor of spirit-gum and, in imagination, her upper lip began to smart. She wondered why so personable a youth should have to go disguised. She wondered if it were merely a freak, or if there were some grim necessity and, if so, what it was. But her vague conjectures were suddenly swept away, and as completely as a bubble by a cloudburst.
The bandaged hand was slowly raising itself, and very deliberately it pointed in the direction of the sleeping governor.
In the meantime the roving glance of the newcomer had fallen on the man in the corner, diagonally opposite to him. He had undoubtedly recognized him to be the governor of the State. Then it had alighted carelessly on Silver-Rose, and he had started imperceptibly. Immediately it began to play feverishly up and down the car, embracing each of its occupants in turn. Finally he slouched back in his corner, pulled his hat over his eyes, and appeared to meditate. After a pause his right arm, which had been hanging by his side, came to rest on his crossed knees. The hand slipped out of the sleeve; it was bandaged—and curiously bandaged—in an awkward, muffling roll of cloth that made it twice the size of the other. It shot through Silver-Rose's mind that she had seen somewhere such an arm before, and with kinetoscopic quickness there flashed before her mental vision a picture of the deranged degenerate whose fanatical act had stripped the country the year before of its great and gracious head. Suddenly, in spite of herself, she trembled a little. She turned her head away for a minute until her mind regained control of her body. Then she looked again. And this time her hair began electrically to lift away from her prickling scalp, her heart melted to water, and her blood froze to ice.
The bandaged hand was slowly raising itself, and very deliberately it pointed in the direction of the sleeping governor.
CHAPTER IV.
For a moment, convinced in the conclusion to which she had jumped, and caught full in the swirl of her terrors, Silver-Rose tried to scream. But as in bad dreams, in which sometimes she had been tied and throttled by similar malign conditions, she could no more have commanded her paralyzed limbs or her atrophied voice than she could have compelled time itself to roll away into eternity. A sudden hope, like a liberating knife, cut cleanly through her strangling thoughts; perhaps this, too, was a bad dream.
A heroic impulse arose to the surface out of the torrent of her terrors; and still mute, her eyes fixed on the arm in the corner, she leaned forward until she was sure that her slender body protected the heart of the sleeping governor.
And then—adding thereby a hundredfold to her numb sense of expectancy, a thousandfold to her blind consciousness of tragedy lurking hideously close—the man in the corner arose and came steadily down the car.
Surely now he would
In hopeless, muscle-bound stupor she watched his approach. He stopped just in front of her cowering self. He bent over her. He spoke.
“Miss Wrexmere?” he interrogated. His voice was a trained one, a little deep; a little, at the moment, imperious, a little, strangely enough, whimsical. And his use of it, his hold on accent was perfect, although there was the silken impediment of something foreign, almost, not quite, submerged in it. Miss Wrexmere bowed automatically.
He dropped very unconstrainedly into the vacant seat beside her. His voice fell a little.
“Miss Wrexmere,” he began again quietly and evenly, “I don't know exactly how I am to tell you what I have to tell you, how to appeal to you in the way I must. But I am at this moment in great peril, and it looks very much as if I should be in dire distress before long unless you will be good enough to aid me. Those men who entered the car a few minutes ago—the ones who were sitting just opposite me—will arrest me when I leave it, unless you will be good enough to put them off the scent, to talk with me as if you knew me well, or, if you prefer, to let me talk to you as if I knew you well. They know who you are, but they are not quite sure of me. The fact of your recognition will turn their suspicions away. You will think that I am taking a fearful risk with you. I can only beg you to forgive that, and to believe, if you can, that I would be the last man in the world to do so, if I were not fairly desperate; and I am that. I ask you, I implore you, to save me.” He stopped for an instant and gazed entreatingly at her.
Silver-Rose could not have spoken at that moment if .her very life had depended on it. But she could listen, and she heard his words coming to her, as if from a great distance. And as she listened, her runaway mind eased itself of its gallop; it slowed up gradually; at length it stood still. And her hair no longer stirred like some unnatural separate member, the machinery of her body started again, her blood thawed and warmed, her heart burst the shackles that bound it. But she was as weak as a rag.
“I will be honest with you,” the young man went on, as she was still silent; “I will acknowledge that there is reason for this surveillance, but it is not a criminal matter, and, moreover, it is all a mistake. I am absolutely innocent. I can only, of course, give you my word of honor in regard to that. But I can't tell you how much I hope that you will accept it, how much depends on your accepting it.” Again he stopped, and looked entreatingly at her.
Still Silver-Rose did not speak. But she was beginning to examine the evidence that her companion submitted to her, was preparing to sit in judgment upon him. Her eyes fell keenly on the bandaged arm. Ah, thank God she was mistaken! There was, there could be, no weapon there. And he was very handsome, very interesting. Moreover, his look, his carriage, his manner, his voice were those of the gentleman. And the feeling that was finding torrentlike expression now, whatever its origin, was undoubtedly sincere. She recalled the recent visit to the United States of a prince of a reigning European house. She wondered vaguely if he had been in any way connected with that.
“It won't be a fair struggle,” he went on again, and still very quietly. “I am handicapped, you see.” He moved slightly his bandaged arm. “And it's two to one, in addition. But it will be a struggle; I shan't be taken alive if strength of arm or speed of foot counts in the matter. But I'm afraid that they won't count. It's not for myself that I am so willing to seem a coward” He stopped abruptly, and, for a second, his eyes again begged of her what no man's eyes had ever before begged—protection.
Silver-Rose met his glance squarely. She was a girl, it happened, who lived by her impulses, who had much faith in that old-fashioned feminine dower of intuition, whose decisions were swift and inflexible. Moreover—and perhaps this counted for more with her than she would have acknowledged—she was beginning to feel that the situation was a romantic one. She began to make up her mind that she trusted this interesting young man and his interesting situation. From the realization of that to the decision to help him was a single leap. “You may talk to me, if you wish,” she permitted quietly.
He breathed a long sigh of relief. “I can tell you this much,” he said, “and in all honor. My business in America is in connection with affairs of state. I am at present in a sort of diplomatic tangle. It is most necessary for me to be at liberty for the time being. After a few days”—he shrugged his shoulders.
“But how do you know—how can you tell that those men are after you?” Silver-Rose asked shrewdly.
“Oh, the suspect always knows; but they are beginning not to want me, thanks to you.”
Silver-Rose did not look in their direction. “What is your country—is that permitted?” she asked.
“I was born in Italy,” he apprised her briefly.
“How do you happen to know who I am?” she continued.
“Oh, I have seen you many times,” he informed her; “to be exact,” he corrected himself scrupulously, “four times, if that interests you.”
“Do you call four many?”
“Not actually many, perhaps; but when you make a gallery of your mind in order to carry in it the four definite pictures—when you oust everything else from it to dedicate it to that purpose—and when in order to study them you betake yourself there at every opportunity, four becomes an indefinite many.”
Silver-Rose's face was impassive. “Where did you see me?” she went on examiningly.
“Once in the Louvre, once in a room in the Latin Quarter, once at a dance in Washington, once—but I prefer not to tell you about that—if you'll indulge me.”
“How am I to know that you are telling me the truth?” she turned inquiring eyes directly into his.
He did not reply for a second. “Four years ago, one day in August,” he said quietly, “you were standing near the Mona Lisa. You wore a summer affair of white linen—the skirt swept on the ground. Where you stood, at the psychological instant of my first sight of you, it was coiled about your feet in front. You wore with it a long coat, also of white. And your hat was—frankly, enormous. It, too, was white, and it was trimmed with white, a fluffy kind of stuff. By the way, you should al-always wear white. Afterward I followed you for an hour or more about the Louvre. Occasionally you would open the book you carried and read for a moment.” He stopped abruptly.
“What was I reading?” Silver-Rose pursued him relentlessly.
“It took all my ingenuity to find that out without attracting your attention. At one time I nearly gave it up. I particularly wanted you not to notice me, of course. I'm very glad now that I didn't do that. It was 'The Land of Heart's Desire.' Afterward I bought it and read it, and I should thank you, I think, for that pleasure,” he ended perfunctorily.
“You wore it with a long coat, also of white.”
“You wore it with a long coat, also of white.”
“When did you see me next?” she asked, coolly ignoring his gratitudes and platitudes.
“Oh, the next time you were posing for Mr. Langwall. Previously, I had had you followed there from your hotel, somewhere near the Arc. You went to the Langwalls', I found out, a great deal. I had what seems to me a very reasonable desire to see what your hair was like—to see you without your hat or veil on. One day I bribed the concierge to let me bring some bundles up to the studio while you were there posing. You wore white that time, too—a long thing that clung. After all, I did not see your head bared—there was a heart-shaped net of pearls on your hair. I don't blame you,” he interpolated excusingly; “I fancy it isn't safe to go even among friends with so much gold frankly in sight. Yes, you should always wear white,” he concluded meditatively.
Silver-Rose grew softly pink. For an instant she had the look of one casting about for subjects meet for conversation. “Apropos of the Louvre,” she interrupted her own gropings at length, and in the hurried manner of one a little at odds with herself, “I have here a picture of the Mona Lisa.” She opened the package, and held it out to him.
He examined it curiously. “I have never seen the Mona Lisa—really,” he said absently.
“Ah,” she laughed triumphantly, “now I've caught you. I thought it would be only a question of time. However, you were lucky in your guesses. You said—I can't forbear rubbing it in—when you first saw me I was in the room with the Mona Lisa. And now you say that you have never seen it.”
He did not seem at all cast down. He looked at her reflectively. “I said also, did I not,” he asseverated quietly, “that you stood near it?”
They were both silent for a moment, but if there be degrees of silence, Silver-Rose was the more silent.
“Ah,” he said at length, “mine enemies have left the car. You have saved me. I suppose now that I should leave you. Do you expect me to do so? I am at your mercy?” He made a motion as if to rise, but his eyes, fixed on hers, were centers- of whimsical storm and stress, so ardently did they implore and command.
“You need not go,” she accorded him briefly; “at least not at present,” she qualified.
“Where are you going?” he asked abruptly.
Silver-Rose stared at him a little. Then she smiled deliciously. “Almost to the end of the world,” she admitted. “I have, in other words, an engagement in Allston.”
“Is it” he examined her costume carefully. “No—of course—no—there would be even more splendor. Surely it isn't a formal affair.”
“Oh, no,” she laughed lightly; “that comes later. I want to see one of my Settlement girls. I return to Brookline immediately.”
“Oh, I see. And will there be somebody later to take care of you?”
“No,” Silver-Rose admitted composedly, “not through plan of mine. I emancipated myself for the first time to-night.”
“Then,” he asserted comfortably, “you simply must let me take care of you until you reach your own door.”
“I thought I was taking care of you,” she reminded him.
“Put it that way, if you wish. Take care of me, then, until you reach your own door.”
“But what,” she queried in amused inflexibility, brushing aside his sophistries—“what becomes of my emancipation? And what, moreover, excuses your protection? What could possibly happen to a woman in Boston?”
“I pray everything,” he vowed fervently, “cloudburst, earthquake, attack by Indians, sluggers, footpads, Mafia—anything to insure your need of my company. And then, let me point out to you, the circus is in town. What's to prevent a stray lion or tiger from pouncing out upon you from some sheltered bit of road? I now recall that beasts invariably escape from circuses. It has been settled, indisputably, that they prefer, to all other victims, blond young women, especially if they be reasonably, comely—and I have no scruples in telling you that I think the 'reasonably' lets you in.”
Silver-Rose pondered this with an appearance of seriousness. “You speak wonderfully idiomatic English for an Italian,” she commented.
“Oh,” he said, “I am in no sense an Italian. My father was an American, and I have lived much of my life in England. My mother only was an Italian. Come,” he wheedled, “repeal the emancipation-act.”
“I will put it off,” Silver-Rose decided; “but remember you raise my hopes very high. Indeed, I shall think meanly of you if you don't satisfy them. Let's bargain about it. I demand an adventure from you; and, in return, I give you the pleasure of my company.”
“We'll see what can be done,” he promised gravely. His dark eyes studied her face a second. “I feel that I have known you for a hundred years now,” he said abruptly.
She laughed. “I can never quite make up my mind, when people say that—and people often do, you know—whether it is a compliment or the reverse. Now, do tell me,” she begged in her turn; “please tell me why you say it.”
“It will embarrass me no end to tell you,” he rejoined, “because I don't myself quite know why I say that. But, you see, the truth is exactly this: Although I've seen you very seldom, I've thought of you a great deal. I've had ideas about you. I've had theories about you. And, wonderfully enough, you don't disappoint me. You're not the faintest atom in the world what I expected. At least, it's my impression you're not. I've forgotten all about what I expected. You're so much better; you're the—you're a—oh, you're you. You must pardon this incoherence,” he suddenly pulled himself up. “I don't know what you'll think of me. I have a very effervescent appearance to myself.”
“When was the third time you saw me?” she asked composedly.
“Oh, the third time—at a dance in Washington.” A far-away look came into his eyes. It was evident he was describing one of the pictures stowed away in his mind. “There was afterward a lot of talk about the gown you wore. It was white; shiny—satin, should one say? I'm a little helpless here. And there was about the corsage, and running over your bare arms, a broad band of dark fur—bear, the papers said. It made your hair very dazzling; I saw it this time. There were no pearls in it or anywhere. But there were diamonds—like fireflies—sprinkled at intervals in the fur; and you carried a fan. A big fan, a wonder of a fan, a perfect epic of a fan, of scarlet feathers and carved ivory sticks. Oh, yes, the papers had enough to say, and one of them a picture; I wanted to call the editor out.”
“Yes, I remember”—her eyes glinted with fun; “mama scolded me about that gown. Doris, my sister, wrote a rhyme about me. She said I was a cross between Maggie Cline and Yvette Guilbert. I haven't forgiven her that yet; and anonymous people kept sending me the picture for weeks after. And the fourth time?” she inquired with elaborate casualness.
“You mustn't ask me about that.”
“I hope you didn't catch me in the act of powdering my nose, or—oh, heavens! much worse, of darkening my brows.”
He looked at her quickly. “You had done both when I saw you.”
“Here we are,” Silver-Rose interrupted him bruskly. “We must get out, now.”
TO BE CONTINUED.