FROM FOUR TO FIVE
The Princess Mistchenka and Rue Carew had retired to their respective rooms for that hour between four and five in the afternoon, which the average woman devotes to cat-naps or to that aimless feminine fussing which must ever remain a mystery to man.
The afternoon had turned very warm; Neeland, in his room, lay on the lounge in his undershirt and trousers, having arrived so far toward bathing and changing his attire.
No breeze stirred the lattice blinds hanging over both open windows; the semi-dusk of the room was pierced here and there by slender shafts of sunlight which lay almost white across the carpet and striped the opposite wall; the rue Soleil d"Or was very silent in the July afternoon.
And Neeland lay there thinking about all that had happened to him and trying to bring it home to himself and make it seem plausible and real; and could not.
For even now the last ten days of his life seemed like a story he had read concerning someone else. Nor did it seem to him that he personally had known all those people concerned in this wild, exaggerated, grotesque story. They, too, took their places on the printed page, appearing, lingering, disappearing, reappearing, as chapter succeeded chapter in a romance too obvious, too palpably sensational to win the confidence and credulity of a young man of today.
Fed to repletion on noisy contemporary fiction, his finer perception blunted by the daily and raucous yell of the New York press, his imagination too long over-strained by Broadway drama and now flaccid and incapable of further response to its leering or shrieking appeal, the din of twentieth-century art fell on nerveless ears and on a brain benumbed and sceptical.
And so when everything that he had found grotesque, illogical, laboured, obvious, and clamorously redundant in literature and the drama began to happen and continued to happen in real life to him--and went on happening and involving himself and others all around him in the pleasant July sunshine of 1914, this young man, made intellectually _blase_, found himself without sufficient capacity to comprehend it.
There was another matter with which his mind was struggling as he lay there, his head cradled on one elbow, watching the thin blue spirals from his cigarette mount straight to the ceiling, and that was the metamorphosis of Rue Carew.
Where was the thin girl he remembered--with her untidy chestnut hair and freckles, and a rather sweet mouth--dressed in garments the only mission of which was to cover a flat chest and frail body and limbs whose too rapid growth had outstripped maturity?
To search for her he went back to the beginning, where a little girl in a pink print dress, bare-legged and hatless, loitered along an ancient rail fence and looked up shyly at him as he warned her to keep out of range of the fusillade from the bushes across the pasture.
He thought of her again at the noisy party in Gayfield on that white night in winter; visualised the tall, shy, overgrown girl who danced with him and made no complaint when her slim foot was trodden on. And again he remembered the sleigh and the sleighbells clashing and tinkling under the moon; the light from her doorway, and how she stood looking back at him; and how, on the mischievous impulse of the moment, he had gone back and kissed her----
At the memory an odd sensation came over him, scaring him a little.
How on earth had he ever had the temerity to do such a thing to her!
And, as he thought of this exquisite, slender, clear-eyed young girl who had greeted him at the Paris terminal--this charming embodiment of all that is fresh and sweet and fearless--in her perfect hat and gown of _mondaine_ youth and fashion, the memory of his temerity appalled him.
Imagine his taking an unencouraged liberty now!
Nor could he dare imagine encouragement from the Rue Carew so amazingly revealed to him.
Out of what, in heaven"s name, had this lovely girl developed? Out of a shy, ragged, bare-legged child, haunting the wild blackberry tangles in Brookhollow?
Out of the frail, charmingly awkward, pathetic, freckled mill-hand in her home-made party clothes, the rather sweet expression of whose mouth once led him to impudent indiscretion?
Out of what had she been evolved--this young girl whom he had left just now standing beside her boudoir door with the Princess Naa"s arm around her waist? Out of the frightened, white-lipped, shabby girl who had come dragging her trembling limbs and her suitcase up the dark stairway outside his studio? Out of the young thing with sagging hair, crouched in an armchair beside his desk, where her cheap hat lay with two cheap hatpins sticking in the crown? Out of the fragile figure buried in the bedclothes of a stateroom berth, holding out to him a thin, bare arm in voiceless adieu?
And Neeland lay there thinking, his head on his elbow, the other arm extended--from the fingers of which the burnt-out cigarette presently fell to the floor.
He thought to himself:
"She is absolutely beautiful; there"s no denying that. It"s not her clothes or the way she does her hair, or her voice, or the way she moves, or how she looks at a man; it"s the whole business. And the whole bally business is a miracle, that"s all. Good Lord! And to think I ever had the nerve--the _nerve_!"
He swung himself to a sitting posture, sat gazing into s.p.a.ce for a few moments, then continued to undress by pulling off one shoe, lighting a cigarette, and regarding his other foot fixedly.
That is the manner in which the vast majority of young men do their deepest thinking.
However, before five o"clock he had scrubbed himself and arrayed his well constructed person in fresh linen and outer clothing; and now he sauntered out through the hallway and down the stairs to the rear drawing-room, where a tea-table had been brought in and tea paraphernalia arranged. Although the lamp under the kettle had been lighted, n.o.body was in the room except a West Highland terrier curled up on a lounge, who, without lifting his snow-white head, regarded Neeland out of the wisest and most penetrating eyes the young man had ever encountered.
Here was a personality! Here was a dog not to be approached lightly or with flippant familiarity. No! That small, long, short-legged body with its thatch of wiry white hair was fairly instinct with dignity, wisdom, and uncompromising self-respect.
"That dog," thought Neeland, venturing to seat himself on a chair opposite, "is a Presbyterian if ever there was one. And I, for one, haven"t the courage to address him until he deigns to speak to me."
He looked respectfully at the dog, glanced at the kettle which had begun to sizzle a little, then looked out of the long windows into the little walled garden where a few slender fruit trees grew along the walls in the rear of well-kept flower beds, now gay with phlox, larkspur, poppies, and heliotrope, and edged with the biggest and bluest pansies he had ever beheld.
On the wall a Peac.o.c.k b.u.t.terfly spread its brown velvet and gorgeously eyed wings to the sun"s warmth; a blackbird with brilliant yellow bill stood astride a peach twig and poured out a bubbling and incessant melody full of fluted grace notes. And on the gra.s.s oval a kitten frisked with the ghosts of last month"s dandelions, racing after the drifting fluff and occasionally keeling over to attack its own tail, after the enchanting manner of all kittens.
A step behind him and Neeland turned. It was Marotte, the butler, who presented a thick, sealed envelope to him on his salver, bent to turn down the flame under the singing silver kettle, and withdrew without a sound.
Neeland glanced at the letter in perplexity, opened the envelope and the twice-folded sheets of letter paper inside, and read this odd communication:
Have I been fair to you? Did I keep my word? Surely you must now, in your heart, acquit me of treachery--of any premeditated violence toward you.
I never dreamed that those men would come to my stateroom. That plan _had_ been discussed, but was abandoned because it appeared impossible to get hold of you.
And also--may I admit it without being misunderstood?--I absolutely refused to permit any attempt involving your death.
When the trap shut on you, there in my stateroom, it shut also on me.
I was totally unprepared; I was averse to murder; and also I had given you my word of honour.
Judge, then, of my shame and desperation--my anger at being entrapped in a false position involving the loss in your eyes of my personal honour!
It was unbearable: and I did what I could to make it clear to you that I had not betrayed you. But my comrades do not yet know that I had any part in it; do not yet understand why the ship was not blown to splinters. They are satisfied that I made a mistake in the rendezvous.
And, so far, no suspicion attaches to me; they believe the mechanism of the clock failed them. And perhaps it is well for me that they believe this.
It is, no doubt, a matter of indifference to you how the others and I reached safety. I have no delusions concerning any personal and kindly feeling on your part toward me. But one thing you can not--dare not--believe, and that is that I proved treacherous to you and false to my own ideas of honour.
And now let me say one more thing to you--let me say it out of a--friendship--for which you care nothing--could not care anything.
And that is this: your task is accomplished. You could not possibly have succeeded. There is no chance for recovery of those papers. Your mission is definitely ended.
Now, I beg of you to return to America. Keep clear of entanglement in these events which are beginning to happen in such rapid succession in Europe. They do not concern you; you have nothing to do with them, no interest in them. Your entry into affairs which can not concern you would be insulting effrontery and foolish bravado.
I beg you to heed this warning. I know you to be personally courageous; I suppose that fear of consequences would not deter you from intrusion into any affair, however dangerous; but I dare hope that perhaps in your heart there may have been born a little spark of friendliness--a faint warmth of recognition for a woman who took some slight chance with death to prove to you that her word of honour is not lightly given or lightly broken.
So, if you please, our ways part here with this letter sent to you by hand.
I shall not forget the rash but generous boy I knew who called me
Scheherazade.
CHAPTER XXVIII