"Has she money?"
"Hang it all, do you think I"m the kind of man to want a woman for her money?"
"I"ve known you about six days."
"Don"t hedge. Can"t six days tell you as much as six years--such six days as we"ve had?"
"Yes. It"s true. I would stake a good deal that you"re not that kind of man. I don"t know why I said it. Something hateful made me. The Contessa is very pretty. Could you--fall in love with her?"
"It would be an interesting experiment to try."
"If you think so, you must already have begun."
"No, not yet. I a.s.sure you I have an open mind. But it"s an odd coincidence meeting her like this. I was making the fact that she has a house at Monte Carlo an excuse for going down there--sooner or later--as an end to my journey. Now, she is to be in Chamounix, and she intends to invite us both, it seems, to visit her in Aix-les-Bains, where she has taken a villa."
The Boy looked at me suddenly, with a slight start. "She is going to Chamounix?"
"So she says."
"And--she will invite you to visit her at her villa in Aix-les-Bains."
"You, too. You said yesterday you wanted to go to Aix, as you had never been; and we planned an expedition by the mule-path up Mont Revard."
"I know. But--but would you visit the Contessa?"
"We might amuse ourselves. She would be well chaperoned, no doubt by the Baronessa. There"s a brother of the Baron"s in the background.
Probably he"ll turn up at Aix. Certainly he will if his relatives have any control over his actions. He"s no other, it turns out, than Paolo di Nivoli, the young Italian whose airship invention has been made a fuss about lately. It would be rather a joke to try and cut him out with the Contessa--if one could."
"Oh--cut him out." The Boy seemed thoughtful. "Though you aren"t in love with her?"
"Yes."
"I see."
"Will you go if I do--that is, if she really asks us?"
I expected him to flash out a refusal, but he brooded under a deep shadow of eyelashes for a while, looking half cross, half mischievous, and finally said: "I"ll think it over."
[Ill.u.s.tration]
CHAPTER XVI
A Man from the Dark
"Desperate, proud, fond, sick, ... rejected by men."
--WALT WHITMAN.
As we drank our _cafe double_, tap, tap, came at the door; a message from the Contessa di Ravello asking if we would not take coffee with her and her friends in their private sitting-room.
I would have preferred to finish my talk with the Little Pal, which had reached an entertaining point in the announcement that he seemed to know me less well since he had heard my name--that names, and past histories, and circ.u.mstances were barriers between lives. But the Boy, reluctant a short time ago to be drawn into the Contessa"s society, was now apparently willing to give up the tete-a-tete.
We left our coffee, and went to drink the Contessa"s, which reached our lips chilled by the silent enmity of her friends. But, whether because their example had been a warning, or because he had suffered a "change, into something new and strange," the Boy was no longer a wet blanket. He did not show the self which I had learned to know in some of its phases, but he was shyly conciliatory with the Contessa, the blue eyes hinting that, if she were persistent, his admiration might be won. Still, he often answered in monosyllables or briefly, when she spoke to him, a smile curving his short upper lip. I could not understand what his manner meant, nor, I am sure, could she; but she was evidently bent on solving the puzzle.
"Do you play tennis?" she asked him.
"Yes."
"Ah, so do I, and well, too, though I"m not English. Lord Lane will tell you that. And you dance, I know."
"Yes."
"You love it? I do."
"I used to."
"That sounds as if you were a hundred, instead of--nineteen, is it not?"
"I"m not quite ninety-nine."
"I should like to dance with you. We are the right size for each other in the dance, are we not?"
"I"d try not to disappoint you."
"Oh, we must have a dance. You love music, I know. One sees it by your eyes. Once, when I asked Lord Lane if he sang or played, he said that he "had no drawing-room tricks." Rude of him, _n"est-ce pas_? But you?
Is it that you play?"
"The violin will talk for me, if I coax it."
"Ah, I was sure. We are going to be congenial. But the singing? I see by your face that you sing, though you won"t say so. Here is a piano.
I will accompany you, if you like, and if we know the same things.
Perhaps our voices would be well together."
I was surprised to see the Boy get up and go to the piano. "I will sing if you like; but I accompany myself, always," he said. "I don"t sing things that many people know."
For a moment he sat at the piano, as if thinking. Then he, who had never told me that he sang, never even spoken of singing, turned into a young angel, and gripped my heart with a voice as strangely haunting as his eyes and his little brown face. Had he been a girl, I suppose his voice would have been called a deep contralto. As he was a boy--I do not know how to cla.s.sify it.
I can say only that, while the mellow music rippled from his parted lips, it seemed as if the gates of Paradise had fallen ajar. He sang an old ballad that I had never heard. It was all about "Douglas Gordon," whose story flowed with the tide of a plaintive accompaniment which I think he must have arranged himself: for somehow, it was like him. All the sadness, all the sweetness in this sweet, sad, old world seemed concentrated in the Boy"s angel voice, and listening, I was Douglas Gordon, and he was putting my life-sorrow into words. He took my heart and broke it, yet I would not have had him stop. Then, suddenly, he did stop, and the Contessa was in tears. "Bravo! bravo!"
she cried, diamonds raining over two spasmodic dimples. "Again; something else."
He sang Christina Rossetti"s "Perchance you may remember, perchance you may forget," and the thrill of it was in the marrow of my bones. I had scarcely known before what music could do with me, and the voice of the little Gaeta, following the song, jarred on my ears as she praised the Boy, and pleaded for more.
"I can"t sing again to-night," said he. "I"m sorry, but I can sing only when I feel in the mood."
"But you will come with Lord Lane, and stay at my villa, which I have taken at Aix--yes, if only for a few days? The Baron and Baronessa will be with me, too. You are going that way. Lord Lane has told me.