"T-true!--Mrs. Ruthven!"
"Yes, true, Gerald! I--I don"t care whether you know it; I don"t care, as long as you stay away. I"m sick of it all, I tell you. Do you think I was educated for this?--for the wife of a chevalier of industry--"
"M-Mrs. Ruthven!" he gasped; but she was absolutely reckless now--and beneath it all, perhaps, lay a certainty of the boy"s honour. She knew he was to be trusted--was the safest receptacle for wrath so long repressed. She let prudence go with a parting and vindictive slap, and opened her heart to the astounded boy. The tempest lasted a few seconds; then she ended as abruptly as she began.
To him she had always been what a pretty young matron usually is to a well-bred but hare-brained youth just untethered. Their acquaintance had been for him a combination of charming experiences diluted with grat.i.tude for her interest and a harmless _soupcon_ of sentimentality.
In her particular case, however, there was a little something more--a hint of the forbidden--a troubled enjoyment, because he knew, of course, that Mrs. Ruthven was on no footing at all with the Gerards. So in her friendship he savoured a piquancy not at all distasteful to a very young man"s palate.
But now!--he had never, never seen her like this--nor any woman, for that matter--and he did not know where to look or what to do.
She was sitting back in the limousine, very limp and flushed; and the quiver of her under lip and the slightest dimness of her averted brown eyes distressed him dreadfully.
"Dear Mrs. Ruthven," he blurted out with clumsy sympathy, "you mustn"t think such things, b-because they"re all rot, you see; and if any fellow ever said those things to me I"d jolly soon--"
"Do you mean to say you"ve never heard us criticised?"
"I--well--everybody is--criticised, of course--"
"But not as we are! Do you read the papers? Well, then, do you understand how a woman must feel to have her husband continually made the b.u.t.t of foolish, absurd, untrue stories--as though he were a performing poodle! I--I"m sick of that, too, for another thing. Week after week, month by month, unpleasant things have been acc.u.mulating; and they"re getting too heavy, Gerald--too crushing for my shoulders... . Men call me restless. What wonder! Women link my name with any man who is k-kind to me! Is there no excuse then for what they call my restlessness? ... What woman would not be restless whose private affairs are the gossip of everybody? Was it not enough that I endured terrific publicity when--when trouble overtook me two years ago? ... I suppose I"m a fool to talk like this; but a girl must do it some time or burst!--and to whom am I to go? ... There was only one person; and I can"t talk to--that one; he--that person knows too much about me, anyway; which is not good for a woman, Gerald, not good for a good woman... . I mean a pretty good woman; the kind people"s sisters can still talk to, you know... . For I"m nothing more interesting than a _divorcee_, Gerald; nothing more dangerous than an unhappy little fool... . I wish I were... . But I"m still at the wheel! ... A man I know calls it hard steering but a.s.sures me that there"s anchorage ahead... . He"s a splendid fellow, Gerald; you ought to know him--well--some day; he"s just a clean-cut, human, blundering, erring, unreasonable,lovable man whom any woman, who is not a fool herself, could manage... . Some day I should like to have you know him--intimately. He"s good for people of your sort--even good for a restless, purposeless woman of my sort. Peace to him!--if there"s any in the world... . Turn your back; I"m sniveling."
A moment afterward she had calmed completely; and now she stole a curious side glance at the boy and blushed a little when he looked back at her earnestly. Then she smiled and quietly withdrew the hand he had been holding so tightly in both of his.
"So there we are, my poor friend," she concluded with a shrug; "the old penny shocker, you know, "Alone in a great city!"--I"ve dropped my handkerchief."
"I want you to believe me your friend," said Gerald, in the low, resolute voice of unintentional melodrama.
"Why, thank you; are you so sure you want that, Gerald?"
"Yes, as long as I live!" he declared, generous emotion in the ascendant. A pretty woman upset him very easily even under normal circ.u.mstances. But beauty in distress knocked him flat--as it does every wholesome boy who is worth his salt.
And he said so in his own nave fashion; and the more eloquent he grew the more excited he grew and the deeper and blacker appeared her wrongs to him.
At first she humoured him, and rather enjoyed his fresh, eager sympathy; after a little his increasing ardour inclined her to laugh; but it was very splendid and chivalrous and genuine ardour, and the inclination to laugh died out, for emotion is contagious, and his earnestness not only flattered her legitimately but stirred the slackened tension of her heart-strings until, tightening again, they responded very faintly.
"I had no idea that _you_ were lonely," he declared.
"Sometimes I am, a little, Gerald." She ought to have known better.
Perhaps she did.
"Well," he began, "couldn"t I come and--"
"No, Gerald."
"I mean just to see you sometimes and have another of these jolly talks--"
"Do you call this a jolly talk?"--with deep reproach.
"Why--not exactly; but I"m awfully interested, Mrs. Ruthven, and we understand each other so well--"
"I don"t understand _you_", she was imprudent enough to say.
This was delightful! Certainly he must be a particularly sad and subtle dog if this clever but misunderstood young matron found him what in romance is known as an "enigma."
So he protested with smiling humility that he was quite transparent; she insisted on doubting him and contrived to look disturbed in her mind concerning the probable darkness of that past so dear to any young man who has had none.
As for Alixe, she also was mildly flattered--a trifle disdainfully perhaps, but still genuinely pleased at the honesty of this crude devotion. She was touched, too; and, besides, she trusted him; for he was clearly as transparent as the spring air. Also most women lugged a boy about with them; she had had several, but none as nice as Gerald. To tie him up and tack his license on was therefore natural to her; and if she hesitated to conclude his subjection in short order it was that, far in a corner of her restless soul, there hid an ever-latent fear of Selwyn; of his opinions concerning her fitness to act mentor to the boy of whom he was fond, and whose devotion to him was unquestioned.
Yet now, in spite of that--perhaps even partly because of it, she decided on the summary taming of Gerald; so she let her hand fall, by accident, close to his on the cushioned seat, to see what he"d do about it.
It took him some time to make up his mind; but when he did he held it so gingerly, so respectfully, that she was obliged to look out of the window. Clearly he was quite the safest and nicest of all the unfledged she had ever possessed.
"Please, don"t," she said sadly.
And by that token she took him for her own.
She was very light-hearted that evening when she dropped him at the Stuyvesant Club and whizzed away to her own house, for he had promised not to play again on her premises, and she had promised to be nice to him and take him about when she was shy of an escort. She also repeated that he was truly an "enigma" and that she was beginning to be a little afraid of him, which was an economical way of making him very proud and happy. Being his first case of beauty in distress, and his first harmless love-affair with a married woman, he looked about him as he entered the club and felt truly that he had already outgrown the young and callow innocents who haunted it.
On her way home Alixe smilingly reviewed the episode until doubt of Selwyn"s approval crept in again; and her amused smile had faded when she reached her home.
The house of Ruthven was a small but ultra-modern limestone affair, between Madison and Fifth; a pocket-edition of the larger mansions of their friends, but with less excuse for the overelaboration since the dimensions were only twenty by a hundred. As a matter of fact its narrow ornate facade presented not a single quiet s.p.a.ce the eyes might rest on after a tiring attempt to follow and codify the arabesques, foliations, and intricate vermiculations of what some disrespectfully dubbed as "near-aissance."
However, into this limestone bonbon-box tripped Mrs. Ruthven, mounted the miniature stairs with a whirl of her scented skirts, peeped into the drawing-room, but continued mounting until she whipped into her own apartments, separated from those of her lord and master by a locked door.
That is, the door had been locked for a long, long time; but presently, to her intense surprise and annoyance, it slowly opened, and a little man appeared in slippered feet.
He was a little man, and plump, and at first glance his face appeared boyish and round and quite guiltless of hair or of any hope of it.
But, as he came into the electric light, the hardness of his features was apparent; he was no boy; a strange idea that he had never been a.s.sailed some people. His face was puffy and pallid and faint blue shadows hinted of closest shaving; and the line from the wing of the nostrils to the nerveless corners of his thin, hard mouth had been deeply bitten by the acid of unrest.
For the remainder he wore pale-rose pajamas under a silk-and-silver kimona, an obi pierced with a jewelled scarf-pin; and he was smoking a cigarette as thin as a straw.
"Well!" said his young wife in astonished displeasure, instinctively tucking her feet--from which her maid had just removed the shoes--under her own chamber-robe.
"Send her out a moment," he said, with a nod of his head toward the maid. His voice was agreeable and full--a trifle precise and overcultivated, perhaps.
When the maid retired, Alixe sat up on the lounge, drawing her skirts down over her small stockinged feet.
"What on earth is the matter?" she demanded.
"The matter is," he said, "that Gerald has just telephoned me from the Stuyvesant that he isn"t coming."
"Well?"
"No, it isn"t well. This is some of your meddling."