"There!" she murmured in a matter-of-fact tone, stepping back.
His face, turned to the light, appeared paler; his eyes looked studiously beyond her.
"It will be jolly on the steamer, won"t it?" she went on.
"Jolly? Oh, yes," he a.s.sented, with false enthusiasm, when a black and white apparition appeared before them, no less a person than Sir Charles.
The governor, as the bearer of particular news, had been looking for her. Mr. Heatherbloom hardly appreciated the preamble or the importance of what followed. Sir Charles imparted a bit of confidential information they were not to breathe to any one until he had verified the particulars. Word had just been brought to him that the _Nevski_ had gone on a reef near a neighboring island and was a total wreck. A pa.s.sing steamer had stood by, taken off the prince and his crew and landed them. Still Mr. Heatherbloom but vaguely heard; he felt little interest at the moment in his excellency or his boat. Betty Dalrymple"s face, however, showed less indifference to this startling intelligence.
"The _Nevski_ a wreck?" she murmured.
"It must all seem like an evil dream to you now," Mr. Heatherbloom spoke absently. "Your having ever been on her!"
"Not all an evil one," she answered. They stood again on the ball-room floor. "Much good has come from it. I no longer hate the prince. I only blame myself a great deal for many things--"
He seemed to hear only her first words. ""Good come from it?" I don"t understand."
"But for the _Nevski_, and what happened to me, I should have gone on thinking, as I did, about you."
"And--would that have made such a difference?" quickly.
She raised her eyes. "What do you think?"
"Betty!"
The music had begun. He who had heretofore danced perfectly, now guided wildly.
"Take care!" she whispered.
But discretion seemed to have left him; he spoke he knew not what--wild mad words that would not be suppressed. They came in contact with another couple and were brought to an abrupt stop. Flaming poppies shone on her cheeks; her eyes were brightly beaming. But she laughed and they went on. He swept her out of the crowded ball-room now, on to the broad veranda where a few other couples also moved in the starlight. On her curved lips a smile rested; it seemed to draw his head lower.
"Betty, do you mean it?" Again the words were wrested from him, would come. "What your eyes said just now?"
She lifted them again, gladly, freely--not only that--
"Yes; I mean it--mean it," said her lips. "Of course! Foolish boy! I have long meant it--"
"Long?" he cried.
"You heard what the Russian woman said--"
"About there being some one? Then it was--"
"Guess." The sweet laughing lips were close; his swept them pa.s.sionately. He found the answer; the world seemed to go round.
But later, that night, there was no joy on Mr. Heatherbloom"s face. In his room in the old negro woman"s house, he indited a letter. It was brought to Betty Dalrymple the next morning as the early sunshine entered her chamber overlooking the governor"s park.
"Darling: Forgive me. I am sailing at dawn on the old tub, for South America--"
Here the note fell from the girl"s hand. Long she looked out of the window. Then she went back to the bit of paper, took it and held it against her breast before she again read. She seemed to know now what would be in it; the strange depression that had come over her after he had left last night was accounted for. Of course, he would not go back to New York with her; he would, or could, accept nothing, in the way she wished, from her or her aunt. It was necessary for him still to be Mr.
Heatherbloom; he had not yet "found himself" fully; the beginning he had spoken of was only begun. The influential friends of his father in the financial world had become impossible aids; he had to continue as he had planned, to go his own way, and his, alone. It would have been easy for him, as his father"s son and the prospective nephew of the influential Miss Van Rolsen, to have obtained one of those large salaried positions, or "sinecures", with little to do. But that would be only beginning at the end once more.
Again she essayed to read. The letter would have been a little incomprehensible to any one except herself, but she understood. There were three "darlings"; inexcusable tautology! She kissed them all, but she kissed oftenest the end: "You will forgive me for forgetting myself--G.o.d knows I didn"t intend to--and you will wait; have faith? It is much to ask--too much; but if you will, I think my father"s son and he whom you have honored by caring for, may yet prove a little worthy--"
The words brought a sob to her throat; she threw herself back on the bed. "A little?" she cried, still holding the note tight in her hand.
But after a spell of weeping, once more she got up and looked out of the window. The sunshine was very bright, the birds sang to her. Did she take heart a little? A great wave of sadness bowed her down, but courage, too, began to revive in her.
"Have faith?" She looked up at the sky; she would do as he asked--unto the grave, if need be. Then, very quietly, she dressed and went down-stairs.
EPILOGUE
It is very gay at the Hermitage, in Moscow, just after Easter, and so it was natural that Sonia Turgeinov should have been there on a certain bright afternoon some three years later. The theater, at which she once more appeared, was closed for the afternoon, and at this season following Holy Week and fasting, fashionables and others were wont to congregate in the s.p.a.cious cafe and grounds, where a superb orchestra discourses cla.s.sical or dashing selections. The musicians played now an American air.
"Some one at a table out there on the balcony sent a request by the head waiter for it," said a member of Sonia Turgeinov"s party--a Parisian artist, not long in Moscow.
"An American, no doubt," she answered absently, sipping her wine. The three years had treated her kindly; the few outward changes could be superficially enumerated: A little more embonpoint; a tendency toward a slight drooping at the corners of the mobile lips, and moments when the shadows seemed to stay rather longer in the deep eyes.
"That style of music should appeal to you, Madam," observed the Frenchman. "You who have been among those favored artists to visit the land of the free. Did you have to play in a tent, and were you literally showered with gold?"
"Both," she laughed. "It is a land of many surprises."
"I have heard _es ist alles_ "the almighty dollar"," said a musician from Berlin, one of the gay company.
"Exaggeration, _mein Herr_!" she retorted, with a wave of the hand. "It is also a _komischer romantischer_ land." For a moment she seemed thinking.
"Isn"t that his excellency, Prince Boris Strogareff?" inquired abruptly a young man with a beyond-the-Volga physiognomy.
She started. "The prince?" An odd look came into her eyes. "Do you believe in telepathic waves, Monsieur?" she said gaily to the Frenchman.
"Not to any great extent, Madam. _Mais pourquoi?"_
"Nothing. But I don"t see this prince you speak of."
"He has disappeared now," replied her countryman, a fellow-player recently come from Odessa. "It is his first dip again into the gaieties of the world. For several years," with the proud accents of one able to impart information concerning an important personage, "he has been living in seclusion on his vast estates near the Caspian Sea--ruling a kingdom greater than many a European princ.i.p.ality. But have you never met the prince?" To Sonia Turgeinov. "He used to be a patron of the arts, according to report, before the sad accident that befell him."
"I think," observed Sonia Turgeinov, with brows bent as if striving to recollect, "I did meet him once. But a poor actress is forced to meet so many princes and n.o.bles, nowadays," she laughed, "that--"
"True! Only one would not easily forget the prince, the handsomest man in Asia."
She yawned slightly.
"What was this "sad accident" you were speaking of, _mein Herr_?
observed the German, with a mind trained to conversational continuity.
"The prince was cruising somewhere and his yacht was wrecked," said the young Roscius from Odessa. "A number of the crew were drowned; his excellency, when picked up, was unconscious. A blow on the head from a falling timber, or from being dashed on the rocks, I"m not sure which.