"I am going to try you out in "Phantom Love." You remember you said if I wrote a part especially for you that nothing in heaven or earth could prevent your taking it."
"And _have_ you written a part especially for me?"
"I certainly have. A young Southern girl who moves through the play like a strain of exquisite music. The only trouble is that the role promises to be more appealing than the star"s."
"That"s the loveliest thing I ever heard of anybody doing!" cried Eleanor, breathless with grat.i.tude. "Does Papa Claude know?"
"Of course he knows. We worked it out together. I am going to find him a small apartment, so he can be ready for you when you come. It shouldn"t be later than November the first."
Eleanor wore such a look as Joan of Arc must have worn when she first heard the heavenly voices. Her shapely bare arms hung limp at her sides, and her white face, with its contrasting black hair, shone like a delicate cameo against the darkness.
Harold, leaning forward with elbows on his knees, kept lightly touching and retouching his mustache.
"In the first act," he continued softly, "I"ve put you in the Red Cross Uniform--the little blue and white one, you know, that you used to break hearts in out at the camp hospital. In the second act you are to be in riding togs, smart in every detail, something very chic, that will show your figure to advantage; in the last act I want you exactly as you are this minute--this soft clingy gold gown, and the gold slippers, and your hair high and plain like that, with the band of dull gold around it. I wouldn"t change an inch of you, not from your head to your blessed little feet!"
As he talked Eleanor forgot him completely. She was busy visualizing the different costumes, even going so far as to see herself slipping through folds of crimson velvet to take insistent curtain calls. Already in imagination she was rich and famous, dispensing munificent bounty to the entire Martel family. Then a disturbing thought p.r.i.c.ked her dream and brought her rudely back to the present. As long as her grandmother regarded her going to New York as a foolish whim, a pa.s.sing craze, she might be wheedled into yielding; but at the first suggestion of a professional engagement, her opposition would become active and violent, Eleanor sighed helplessly and looked at Harold.
"What shall I do if grandmother refuses to send me?" she asked desperately.
"You can let me send you," he said quietly. "It"s folly to keep up this pretense any longer, Eleanor. You love me, don"t you?"
"I--I like you," faltered Eleanor, "better than almost anybody. But I am never going to marry; I don"t think I shall ever care for anybody--that way."
He watched her with an amused practised glance. "We won"t talk about it now," he said lightly. "We will talk instead of your career. You remember that night at Ran"s when you recited for me? I can hear you now saying those lines:
"Or if thou think"st I am too quickly won I"ll frown and be perverse, and say thee nay."
For days I was haunted by the beauty and subtlety of your voice, the unconscious grace of your poses, your little tricks of coquetry, and the play of your eyebrows."
"Did you really see all that in me the first night?"
"I saw more. I saw that, if taken in time, you were destined to be a great actress. I swore then and there that you should have your chance, and that I should be the one to give it to you."
"But----"
"No. Don"t answer me now. You are like a little bud that"s afraid to open its petals. Once you get out of this chilling atmosphere of criticism and opposition, you will burst into glorious bloom."
"But it would mean a terrible break with the family. I don"t believe I can----"
"Yes, you can. I know you better than you know yourself. If Madam Bartlett persists in refusing to send you to New York, you are going to be big enough to let me do it."
He was holding her hand now, and talking with unusual earnestness.
Eleanor thought she had never seen a greater exhibition of magnanimity.
That he was willing to give all and ask for nothing, to be patient with her vacillations, and understand and sympathize with what everybody else condemned in her, touched her greatly. She turned to him impulsively.
"I"ll do whatever you say," she said. "You and Papa Claude go ahead and make the arrangements, and I promise you I"ll come."
Harold Phipps should have left it there; but Eleanor was never more irresistible than when she was in a yielding mood, and now, when she lifted starry eyes of grat.i.tude, he tumbled off his pedestal of n.o.ble detachment, and drew her suddenly into his arms.
In an instant her soft mood vanished. She scrambled hastily to her feet and got out of the car.
"I am going in," she said abruptly. "I"m cold."
Harold laughingly followed. "Cold?" he repeated in his laziest tone. "My dear girl, you could understudy the North Pole! However, it was my mistake; I"m sorry. Shall we go in and dance?"
For the next half-hour he and Eleanor were the most observed couple on the floor. The "ubiquitous youngsters," seeing his air of proprietorship, forbore to break in, and it was not until the last dance that Pink Bailey, looking the immature college boy he was, presented himself apologetically to take Eleanor home.
"Bring your car around, and she will be ready," said Harold loftily. Then he turned to Eleanor, "I shall expect a letter every day. You must keep me posted how things are going."
They were standing on the club-house steps now, and she was looking dreamily off across the golf links.
"Did you hear me?" he said impatiently.
"Oh, I was listening to the whip-poor-wills. They always take me back to Valley Mead. Write every day? Heavens, no. I hate to write letters."
"But you"ll write to me, you little ingrate! I shall send you such nice letters that you"ll have to answer them."
A vagrant breeze, with a hint of autumn, blew Eleanor"s scarf across his shoulder, and he tenderly replaced it about her throat.
"Are you cold?" he asked solicitously.
Eleanor, under cover of the crowd that was surging about them, felt a sudden access of boldness.
"Not so cold as some people think," she said mischievously; then, without waiting for further good-by, she sped down the steps and into the waiting car.
CHAPTER 23
Of all the mult.i.tudinous ways in which Dan Cupid, Unlimited, does business, none is more nefarious than his course by correspondence. Once he has induced two guileless clients to plunge into the traffic of love letters, the rest is easy. Wild speculation in love stock, false valuations, hysterical desire to buy in the cheapest and sell in the dearest market, invariably follow. Before the end of the month Harold Phipps and Eleanor Bartlett were gambling in the love market with a recklessness that would have staggered the most hardened old speculator.
Harold, instead of being handicapped by his absence at the most critical point in his love affair, took advantage of it to exhibit one of his most brilliant accomplishments. He sent Eleanor a handsome tooled-leather portfolio to hold his letters, which he wrote on loose-leaf sheets and mailed unfolded. They were letters that deserved preservation, prose poems composed with infinite pains and copied with meticulous care. If the potpourri was at times redolent of the dried flowers of other men"s loves, Eleanor was blissfully unaware of it. When he wrote of the lonesome October of his most immemorial year, or spoke of her pilgrim soul coming to him at midnight in the silence of the sleep-time, she thrilled with admiration for his genius.
Such literary masterpieces deserved adequate answers, and she found herself trying to make up in quant.i.ty what she lacked in quality. His letters always began, "Dearest Helose," or "Melisande," or "Baucis," or "Isolde"; and, rather than acknowledge her ignorance of these cla.s.sic allusions, she looked them up and sent her answers to "Dear Abelard," or "Pelleas," or "Philemon," or "Tristan," as the case demanded. She indited her missives with a dainty gold pen engraved with an orchid, which Harold had requested her never to profane by secular use.
The correspondence, while throbbing with emotion, was not by any means devoid of practical details. Harold lost no opportunity of urging Eleanor to remain firm in her resolve to go to New York. It would be sheer folly, he pointed out, to give up the chance of a professional debut, a chance that might not come again in years. He pointed out that her grandfather had changed all his plans on the strength of her coming, and would be utterly heartbroken if she failed to keep her promise. He delicately intimated that her failure to take the part he had so laboriously written for her might seal the fate of "Phantom Love" and prove the downfall of both its creators.
His conclusion to all these specious arguments was that the only way out of the tangle was for her to consent to a nominal engagement to him that would bind her to nothing, and yet would give him the right to send her to New York if Madam Bartlett refused to do so. In answer to Eleanor"s doubts and misgivings, he a.s.sured her in polyphonic prose that he knew her far better than she knew herself, and that he would be "content to wait at the feet of little Galatea, asking nothing, giving all, until the happy day when she should wake to life and love and the consciousness that she was wholly and happily his."
And Galatea read his letters with increasing ardor and slept with them under her pillow. It was all so secret and romantic, this glorious adventure rushing to fulfilment, under the prosy surface of everyday life. Of course she did not want to be married--not for ages and ages; but to be engaged, to be indefinitely adored by a consummate lover like Harold Phipps, who so beautifully shared her ambition, was an exciting and tempting proposition. Like most girls of her type, when her personal concerns became too complex for reason, she abandoned herself to impulse.
She merely shut her eyes and allowed herself to drift toward a destination that was not of her choosing. Like a peripatetic Sleeping Beauty, she moved through the days in a sort of trance, waiting liberation from her thraldom, but fearing to put her fate to the test by laying the matter squarely and finally before her grandmother.
It was easy enough to drop out of her old round of festivities. She had been away all summer, and new groups had formed with which she took no trouble to ally herself. Her friends seemed inordinately young and foolish. She wondered how she had ever endured the trivial chatter of Kitty Mason and the school-boy antics of Pink Bailey and Johnnie Rawlings. After declining half a dozen invitations she was left in peace, free to devote all her time to composing her letters, to poring over plays and books about the theater, or to sitting listless absorbed in day-dreams.
The one old friend who refused to be disposed of was Quinby Graham. On one pretext or another he managed to come to the house almost every day, and he seldom left it without managing to see her. Sometimes when she was in the most arduous throes of composition, the maid would come to her door and say: "Mr. Quin"s downstairs, and he says can you come to the steps a minute--he"s got something to show you?" Or Miss Isobel would pause on the threshold to say: "Quinby is looking for you, Eleanor. I think it is something about a new tire for your automobile."