"Well, then, open the door. I want to come in."
After a moment the door was opened and Ethel stood there in a very becoming peignoir. She looked extremely disconcerted and did her best to block the way into the room.
But that wouldn"t do for Peter. "What"s all this?" he asked. "We lock our door now, do we?"
"Yes, sometimes," said Ethel. "Why aren"t you at the theatre?" She shot a surrept.i.tious glance towards the window, which was open.
"I"ve been having a talk with mother," said Peter. "h.e.l.lo! I see you"ve been trigging up your room. Frightfully swagger now, isn"t it. New art, eh? You"re coming on, my dear, there"s no mistake about that. I"m afraid you find us all appallingly provincial, don"t you?"
The broad grin on Peter"s face was no new thing to Ethel. He had always pulled her leg and treated her as though she were a sort of freak. All the same, she liked his coming in and was flattered to know that he thought it worth while to bother about her. But she began to edge him to the door. He had come at a most unpropitious moment.
"Oh ho!" said Peter. "So this"s what higher education does for you? A nice mixture--cigarettes and candies--I must say. Now I know why you locked your door. With a marshmallow in one hand and an Egyptian Beauty in the other you lie on your sofa in the latest thing in peignoirs and see life through the pages of,--what?" He picked up a book from the table. "Good Lord!" he added; "you don"t mean to say you stuff this piffle into you?" It was a collection of plays by Strindberg.
"Oh, go to the theatre!" said Ethel. "You"re being horridly Oxford now and I hate it."
"You"ll get a lot more of it before I"ve done with you," said Peter.
"All the same, you look very nice, my dear. I"m very proud of you, and I hope you will do me the honour to be seen about with me sometimes. But how about taking some of that powder off your nose? If you begin trying to hide it at sixteen it"ll be lost altogether at twenty." He made a sudden pounce at her and holding both her hands so that she could not scratch, rubbed all the powder away from her little proud nose and made for the door, just missing the cushion which came flying after him, and took himself and his big laugh along the pa.s.sage.
Immensely relieved at being left alone, Ethel locked the door again and went over to her dressing-table, where she repaired damage with quick, deft fingers. With another glance at the window,--a glance in which there was some impatience,--she arranged herself on the settee to wait.
IX
No wonder Peter had made remarks about this room. It was deliciously characteristic of its owner. Large and airy; all its furniture was white and its hangings were of creamy cretonne covered with little rosebuds.
The narrow bed was tucked away in a corner so that the writing-desk, the sofa and the revolving book-stand--on which stood a bowl of mammoth chrysanthemums--might dominate the room. Several mezzotints of Watts"
pictures hung on the walls and a collection of framed ill.u.s.trations of the Arabian Nights, by Dulac. The whole effect was one of nave sophistication.
Through the open window the various sounds of the city"s activity floated rather pleasantly. There was even a note of cheerfulness in the insistent bells of the trolley-cars on Madison Avenue and the chugging of a taxicab on the other side of the street. Before many minutes had gone by a rope ladder dangled outside the window, and this was followed immediately afterwards by the lithe and wiry figure of a boy. Wearing a rather sheepish expression he remained sitting on the sill, swinging his legs. "h.e.l.lo!" said he. "How are you feeling?"
"There"s some improvement to-night," said Ethel. "Won"t you come in?
Were you waiting for a signal?"
"You bet!"
He was a nice boy, with a frank, honest face, a blunt nose and a laughing mouth. His hair was dark and thick, and his shoulders square.
He was eighteen and he looked every day of it. He lived next door and was the son of a man who owned a line of steamships and a French mother, who was not on speaking terms with Mrs. Guthrie, owing to the fact that the Doctor had been obliged to remonstrate about her parrot. This expensive prodigy gave the most lifelike and frequent imitations of cats, trolley-cars, newsboys, sirens and other superfluous and distressing disturbances on the window-sill of the room which was next to his laboratory. So this boy and girl--unconsciously playing all over again the story of the Montagues and Capulets--met surrept.i.tiously night after night, the boy coming over the roof and using the rope ladder--which had played its part in all the great romances. Was there any harm in him? Well, he was eighteen.
"What"ll you have first?" asked Ethel, in her best hostess manner--"candies or cigarettes?"
"Both," said the boy; and with a lump in his cheek and an expression of admiration in both eyes he started a cigarette. He was about to sit on the settee at Ethel"s feet, but she pointed to a chair and into this he subsided, crossing one leg over the other and hitching his trousers rather high so that he might display to full advantage a pair of very smart socks, newly purchased.
"I hope you locked your bedroom door," said Ethel, "and please don"t forget to whisper. There"s no chance of our being caught, but we may as well be careful."
The boy nodded and made a little face. "If father found out about this,"
he said; "oh, Gee! What did you do with Ellen after she bounced in last night?"
"Oh, I gave her one of my hats. I told her that if she kept quiet there was a frock waiting for her. She"s safe. Now, amuse me!"
For some minutes the boy remained silent, worrying his brain as to how to comply with the girl"s rather difficult and peremptory request. He knew that she was not easy to amuse. He was a little frightened at the books she read and looked up to her with a certain amount of awe. He liked her best when she said nothing and was content to sit quite quiet and look pretty. After deep and steady thought he took a chance. "Do you know this one?" he asked, and started whistling a new ragtime through his teeth.
It was new to Ethel. She liked it. Its rhythm set her feet moving. "Oh, that"s fine," she said. "What are the words?"
The boy was a gentleman. He shook his head, thereby stimulating her curiosity a hundred-fold.
"Oh don"t be silly. I shall know them sooner or later, whatever they are--besides, I"m not a child."
The boy lied chivalrously. "Well, honestly, I don"t know them,--something about "Row, row, row"--I don"t know the rest."
She knew that he did know. She liked him for not telling her the truth, but she made a mental note to order the song the following morning.
And so, for about an hour, these two young things who imagined that this was life carried on a desultory conversation, while the boy gradually filled the room with cigarette smoke, and remained reluctantly a whole yard away from the sofa. It was all very childish and simple, but to them it was romance with a very big R. They were making believe that they had thrown the world back about a hundred years or so. He was a knight and she a lady in an enemy"s castle; and, although their mothers didn"t speak, they liked to ignore the fact that Mrs. Guthrie would have had no objection to his coming to tea as often as he desired and taking Ethel for walks in broad daylight whenever he wished for a little mild exercise. But,--he was eighteen, and so presently, repulsed by her tongue but enticed by her eyes, he left his chair and found himself sitting on the settee at Ethel"s feet, holding her hand, which thrilled him very much. She was kinder than usual that night, sweeter and more girlish. Her stockings were awfully pretty, too, and her hair went into more than usually delicious ripples round her face.
"You"re a darling," he said suddenly. "I love to come here like this. I hope you"ll be ill for a month." And he slid forward with gymnastic clumsiness and put his arm round her shoulder. He was just going to kiss her and so satisfy an overwhelming craving when there was a soft knock on the door and Dr. Guthrie"s voice followed it. "Are you awake, Ethel?"
The boy sprang to his feet, stood for a moment with a look of peculiar shame on his face, turned on his heels, made for the window, went through it like a rabbit and up the troubadour ladder, which disappeared after him.
Ethel held her breath and remained transfixed. Again the knock came and the question was repeated. But she made no answer, and presently, when the sound of footsteps died away, she got up--a little peevish and more than a little irritable--kicked a small pile of cigarette ash which the boy had dropped upon her carpet, and said to herself: "_Just_ as he was going to kiss me! Goodness, how _annoying_ father is!"
X
The following morning Belle took Nicholas Kenyon for a walk. Dressed in a suit of blue flannel with white bone b.u.t.tons, with a pair of white spats gleaming over patent leather shoes and a grey hat stuck at an angle of forty-five, Kenyon looked as fresh and as dapper as though he had been to bed the night before at ten o"clock. He had, as a matter of fact, come home with the milk; but he was one of those men who possess the enviable gift of looking healthy and untired after the sort of nights which make the ordinary man turn to chemistry and vibro-ma.s.sage.
Belle had sported a new hat for the occasion.
This fact Kenyon realized with that queer touch of intuition which was characteristic of him. "By Jove!" he said. "That"s something like a hat, Belle. Hearty congratulations. You suit it to perfection."
Belle beamed upon him. "But you would say that anyhow, wouldn"t you?"
"Perfectly true; but in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred I shouldn"t mean it."
They turned into Madison Avenue. It was an exquisite morning. The whole city was bathed in sun, but the refreshing tang of late autumn was in the air. Most of the large houses were still closed, their owners lingering in the country or abroad. All the same there was the inevitable amount of traffic in the streets and apparently the usual number of pa.s.sers-by. The city can be--according to the strange little creatures who write society news--"utterly deserted" and yet contain all its teeming millions.
"And what may that be?" asked Kenyon, pointing to the heavy white b.u.t.tresses of a church which backed on the street.
"Oh, that"s the Roman Catholic Cathedral."
"Roman Catholic, eh? I noticed churches everywhere as we drove up from the docks,--more churches than pubs apparently, and yet I suppose it would be quite absurd to imagine that New Yorkers imbibe their alcohol entirely in the form of religion."
"Quite," said Belle, dryly. "Although we have a hundred religions and only five c.o.c.ktails."
"I see you also go in for antique furniture."
Belle laughed. "You have a quick eye," she said. "There"s so much genuine Old English stuff in this city that if it were sent to England there wouldn"t be room for it on sh.o.r.e. Tell me; what are your plans?"
"Well," said Kenyon, "I"m going to accept your father"s perfectly charming hospitality for a fortnight and then take rooms in a bachelor apartment-house, of which Graham has told me, for the winter."
"You"re going to settle down here?" cried Belle.