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Title: The scarlet car, the Princess Aline
Author: Davis, Richard Harding
Language: English
As this book started as an ASCII text book there are no pictures available.
*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The scarlet car, the Princess Aline" ***
ALINE ***
[Illustration: Miss Forbes]
The Scarlet Car
The Princess Aline
BY
RICHARD HARDING DAVIS
ILLUSTRATED
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
NEW YORK 1910
THE SCARLET CAR
COPYRIGHT, 1906, BY
RICHARD HARDING DAVIS
COPYRIGHT, 1907, 1910, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
THE PRINCESS ALINE
COPYRIGHT, 1895, BY
HARPER & BROTHERS
COPYRIGHT, 1910, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
[Illustration]
THE SCARLET CAR
THE PRINCESS ALINE
CONTENTS
THE SCARLET CAR
PAGE
THE JAIL-BREAKERS 3
THE TRESPASSERS 39
THE KIDNAPPERS 70
THE PRINCESS ALINE
ILLUSTRATIONS
Miss Forbes _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
In the two circles of light the men surveyed each other 56
“You’ve broken the bone,” he said 66
“Next to her stood the Princess Aline of Hohenwald” 142
“A man was talking in English, with an accent” 152
“This is she. Do you wonder I travelled four thousand
miles to see her?” 164
THE SCARLET CAR
TO
NED STONE
THE SCARLET CAR
I
THE JAIL-BREAKERS
For a long time it had been arranged they all should go to the Harvard
and Yale game in Winthrop’s car. It was perfectly well understood. Even
Peabody, who pictured himself and Miss Forbes in the back of the car,
with her brother and Winthrop in front, condescended to approve. It was
necessary to invite Peabody because it was his great good fortune to be
engaged to Miss Forbes. Her brother Sam had been invited, not only
because he could act as chaperon for his sister, but because since they
were at St. Paul’s, Winthrop and he, either as participants or
spectators, had never missed going together to the Yale-Harvard game.
And Beatrice Forbes herself had been invited because she was herself.
When at nine o’clock on the morning of the game, Winthrop stopped the
car in front of her door, he was in love with all the world. In the
November air there was a sting like frost-bitten cider, in the sky there
was a brilliant, beautiful sun, in the wind was the tingling touch of
three ice-chilled rivers. And in the big house facing Central Park,
outside of which his prancing steed of brass and scarlet chugged and
protested and trembled with impatience, was the most wonderful girl in
all the world. It was true she was engaged to be married, and not to
him. But she was not yet married. And to-day it would be his privilege
to carry her through the State of New York and the State of Connecticut,
and he would snatch glimpses of her profile rising from the rough fur
collar, of her wind-blown hair, of the long, lovely lashes under the
gray veil.
“‘Shall be together, breathe and ride, so, one day more am I deified;’”
whispered the young man in the Scarlet Car; “‘who knows but the world
may end to-night?’”
As he waited at the curb, other great touring-cars, of every speed and
shape, in the mad race for the Boston Post Road, and the town of New
Haven, swept up Fifth Avenue. Some rolled and puffed like tugboats in a
heavy seaway, others glided by noiseless and proud as private yachts.
But each flew the colors of blue or crimson.
Winthrop’s car, because her brother had gone to one college, and he had
played right end for the other, was draped impartially. And so every
other car mocked or cheered it, and in one a bareheaded youth stood up,
and shouted to his fellows: “Look! there’s Billy Winthrop! Three times
three for old Billy Winthrop!” And they lashed the air with flags, and
sent his name echoing over Central Park.
Winthrop grinned in embarrassment, and waved his hand. A bicycle cop,
and Fred, the chauffeur, were equally impressed.
“Was they the Harvoids, sir?” asked Fred.
“They was,” said Winthrop.
Her brother Sam came down the steps carrying sweaters and steamer-rugs.
But he wore no holiday countenance.
“What do you think?” he demanded indignantly. “Ernest Peabody’s inside
making trouble. His sister has a Pullman on one of the special trains,
and he wants Beatrice to go with her.”
In spite of his furs, the young man in the car turned quite cold. “Not
with us?” he gasped.
Miss Forbes appeared at the house door, followed by Ernest Peabody. He
wore an expression of disturbed dignity; she one of distressed
amusement. That she also wore her automobile coat caused the heart of
Winthrop to leap hopefully.
“Winthrop,” said Peabody, “I am in rather an embarrassing position. My
sister, Mrs. Taylor Holbrooke”—he spoke the name as though he were
announcing it at the door of a drawingroom—“desires Miss Forbes to go
with her. She feels accidents are apt to occur with motor cars—and there
are no other ladies in your party—and the crowds——”
Winthrop carefully avoided looking at Miss Forbes.
“I should be very sorry,” he murmured.
“Ernest!” said Miss Forbes, “I explained it was impossible for me to go
with your sister. We would be extremely rude to Mr. Winthrop. How do you
wish us to sit?” she asked.
She mounted to the rear seat, and made room opposite her for Peabody.
“Do I understand, Beatrice,” began Peabody, in a tone that instantly
made every one extremely uncomfortable, “that I am to tell my sister you
are not coming?”
“Ernest!” begged Miss Forbes.
Winthrop bent hastily over the oil valves. He read the speedometer,
which was, as usual, out of order, with fascinated interest.
“Ernest,” pleaded Miss Forbes, “Mr. Winthrop and Sam planned this trip
for us a long time ago—to give us a little pleasure——”
“Then,” said Peabody in a hollow voice, “you have decided?”
“Ernest,” cried Miss Forbes, “don’t look at me as though you meant to
hurl the curse of Rome. I have. Jump in. Please!”
“I will bid you good-by,” said Peabody; “I have only just time to catch
our train.”
Miss Forbes rose and moved to the door of the car.
“I had better not go with any one,” she said in a low voice.
“You will go with me,” commanded her brother. “Come on, Ernest.”
“Thank you, no,” replied Peabody. “I have promised my sister.”
“All right, then,” exclaimed Sam briskly, “see you at the game. Section
H. Don’t forget. Let her out, Billy.”
With a troubled countenance Winthrop bent forward and clasped the
clutch.
“Better come, Peabody,” he said.
“I thank you, no,” repeated Peabody. “I must go with my sister.”
As the car glided forward Brother Sam sighed heavily.
“My! but he’s got a mean disposition,” he said. “He has quite spoiled
_my_ day.”
He chuckled wickedly, but Winthrop pretended not to hear, and his sister
maintained an expression of utter dejection.
But to maintain an expression of utter dejection is very difficult when
the sun is shining, when you are flying at the rate of forty miles an
hour, and when in the cars you pass foolish youths wave Yale flags at
you, and take advantage of the day to cry: “Three cheers for the girl in
the blue hat!”
And to entirely remove the last trace of the gloom that Peabody had
forced upon them, it was necessary only for a tire to burst. Of course,
for this effort, the tire chose the coldest and most fiercely wind-swept
portion of the Pelham Road, where from the broad waters of the Sound
pneumonia and the grip raced rampant, and where to the touch a steel
wrench was not to be distinguished from a piece of ice. But before the
wheels had ceased to complain, Winthrop and Fred were out of their fur
coats, down on their knees, and jacking up the axle.
“On an expedition of this sort,” said Brother Sam, “whatever happens,
take it as a joke. Fortunately,” he explained, “I don’t understand
fixing inner tubes, so I will get out and smoke. I have noticed that
when a car breaks down there is always one man who paces up and down the
road and smokes. His hope is to fool passing cars into thinking that the
people in his car stopped to admire the view.”
Recognizing the annual football match as intended solely to replenish
the town coffers, the thrifty townsfolk of Rye, with bicycles and red
flags, were, as usual, and regardless of the speed at which it moved,
levying tribute on every second car that entered their hospitable
boundaries. But before the Scarlet Car reached Rye, small boys of the
town, possessed of a sporting spirit, or of an inherited instinct for
graft, were waiting to give a noisy notice of the ambush. And so,
forewarned, the Scarlet Car crawled up the main street of Rye as
demurely as a baby-carriage, and then, having safely reached a point
directly in front of the police station, with a loud and ostentatious
report, blew up another tire.
“Well,” said Sam crossly, “they can’t arrest _us_ for speeding.”
“Whatever happens,” said his sister, “take it as a joke.”
Two miles outside of Stamford, Brother Sam burst into open mutiny.
“Every car in the United States has passed us,” he declared. “We won’t
get there, at this rate, till the end of the first half. Hit her up,
can’t you, Billy?”
“She seems to have an illness,” said Winthrop unhappily. “I think I’d
save time if I stopped now and fixed her.”
Shamefacedly Fred and he hid themselves under the body of the car, and a
sound of hammering and stentorian breathing followed. Of them all that
was visible was four feet beating a tattoo on the road. Miss Forbes got
out Winthrop’s camera, and took a snapshot of the scene.
“I will call it,” she said, “The Idle Rich.”
Brother Sam gazed morosely in the direction of New Haven. They had
halted within fifty yards of the railroad tracks, and as each special
train, loaded with happy enthusiasts, raced past them he groaned.
“The only one of us that showed any common-sense was Ernest,” he
declared, “and you turned him down. I am going to take a trolley to
Stamford, and the first train to New Haven.”
“You are not,” said his sister; “I will not desert Mr. Winthrop, and you
cannot desert me.”
Brother Sam sighed, and seated himself on a rock.
“Do you think, Billy,” he asked, “you can get us to Cambridge in time
for next year’s game?”
The car limped into Stamford, and while it went into dry-dock at the
garage, Brother Sam fled to the railroad station, where he learned that
for the next two hours no train that recognized New Haven spoke to
Stamford.
“That being so,” said Winthrop, “while we are waiting for the car, we
had better get a quick lunch now, and then push on.”
“Push,” exclaimed Brother Sam darkly, “is what we are likely to do.”
After behaving with perfect propriety for half an hour, just outside of
Bridgeport the Scarlet Car came to a slow and sullen stop, and once more
the owner and the chauffeur hid their shame beneath it, and attacked its
vitals. Twenty minutes later, while they still were at work, there
approached from Bridgeport a young man in a buggy. When he saw the mass
of college colors on the Scarlet Car, he pulled his horse down to a
walk, and as he passed raised his hat.
“At the end of the first half,” he said, “the score was a tie.”
“Don’t mention it,” said Brother Sam.
“Now,” he cried, “we’ve got to turn back, and make for New York. If we
start quick, we may get there ahead of the last car to leave New Haven.”
“I am going to New Haven, and in this car,” declared his sister. “I must
go—to meet Ernest.”
“If Ernest has as much sense as he showed this morning,” returned her
affectionate brother, “Ernest will go to his Pullman and stay there. As
I told you, the only sure way to get anywhere is by railroad train.”
When they passed through Bridgeport it was so late that the electric
lights of Fairview Avenue were just beginning to sputter and glow in the
twilight, and as they came along the shore road into New Haven, the
first car out of New Haven in the race back to New York leaped at them
with siren shrieks of warning, and dancing, dazzling eyes. It passed
like a thing driven by the Furies; and before the Scarlet Car could
swing back into what had been an empty road, in swift pursuit of the
first came many more cars, with blinding searchlights, with a roar of
throbbing, thrashing engines, flying pebbles, and whirling wheels, and
behind these, stretching for a twisted mile, came hundreds of others;
until the road was aflame with flashing will-o’-the-wisps, dancing
fire-balls, and long, shifting shafts of light.
Miss Forbes sat in front, beside Winthrop, and it pleased her to
imagine, as they bent forward, peering into the night, that together
they were facing so many fiery dragons, speeding to give them battle, to
grind them under their wheels. She felt the elation of great speed, of
imminent danger. Her blood tingled with the air from the wind-swept
harbor, with the rush of the great engines, as by a hand-breadth they
plunged past her. She knew they were driven by men and half-grown boys,
joyous with victory, piqued by defeat, reckless by one touch too much of
liquor, and that the young man at her side was driving, not only for
himself, but for them.
Each fraction of a second a dazzling light blinded him, and he swerved
to let the monster, with a hoarse, bellowing roar, pass by, and then
again swept his car into the road. And each time for greater confidence
she glanced up into his face.
Throughout the mishaps of the day he had been deeply concerned for her
comfort, sorry for her disappointment, under Brother Sam’s indignant
ironies patient, and at all times gentle and considerate. Now, in the
light from the onrushing cars, she noted his alert, laughing eyes, the
broad shoulders bent across the wheel, the lips smiling with excitement
and in the joy of controlling, with a turn of the wrist, a power equal
to sixty galloping horses. She found in his face much comfort. And in
the fact that for the moment her safety lay in his hands, a sense of
pleasure. That this was her feeling puzzled and disturbed her, for to
Ernest Peabody it seemed, in some way, disloyal. And yet there it was.
Of a certainty, there was the secret pleasure in the thought that if
they escaped unhurt from the trap in which they found themselves, it
would be due to him. To herself she argued that if the chauffeur were
driving, her feeling would be the same, that it was the nerve, the
skill, and the coolness, not the man, that moved her admiration. But in
her heart she knew it would not be the same.
At West Haven Green Winthrop turned out of the track of the racing
monsters into a quiet street leading to the railroad station, and with a
half-sigh, half-laugh, leaned back comfortably.
“Those lights coming up suddenly make it hard to see,” he said.
“Hard to breathe,” snorted Sam; “since that first car missed us, I
haven’t drawn an honest breath. I held on so tight that I squeezed the
hair out of the cushions.”
When they reached the railroad station, and Sam had finally fought his
way to the stationmaster, that half-crazed official informed him he had
missed the departure of Mrs. Taylor Holbrooke’s car by just ten minutes.
Brother Sam reported this state of affairs to his companions.
“God knows we asked for the fish first,” he said; “so now we’ve done our
duty by Ernest, who has shamefully deserted us, and we can get something
to eat, and go home at our leisure. As I have always told you, the only
way to travel independently is in a touring-car.”
At the New Haven House they bought three waiters, body and soul, and, in
spite of the fact that in the very next room the team was breaking
training, obtained an excellent but chaotic dinner; and by eight they
were on their way back to the big city.
The night was grandly beautiful. The waters of the Sound flashed in the
light of a cold, clear moon, which showed them, like pictures in silver
print, the sleeping villages through which they passed, the ancient
elms, the low-roofed cottages, the town-hall facing the common. The post
road was again empty, and the car moved as steadily as a watch.
“Just because it knows we don’t care now when we get there,” said
Brother Sam, “you couldn’t make it break down with an axe.”
From the rear, where he sat with Fred, he announced he was going to
sleep, and asked that he be not awakened until the car had crossed the
State line between Connecticut and New York. Winthrop doubted if he knew
the State line of New York.
“It is where the advertisements for Besse Baker’s twenty-seven stores
cease,” said Sam drowsily, “and the bill-posters of Ethel Barrymore
begin.”
In the front of the car the two young people spoke only at intervals,
but Winthrop had never been so widely alert, so keenly happy, never
before so conscious of her presence.
And it seemed as they glided through the mysterious moonlit world of
silent villages, shadowy woods, and wind-swept bays and inlets, from
which, as the car rattled over the planks of the bridges, the wild duck
rose in noisy circles, they alone were awake and living.
The silence had lasted so long that it was as eloquent as words. The
young man turned his eyes timorously, and sought those of the girl. What
he felt was so strong in him that it seemed incredible she should be
ignorant of it. His eyes searched the gray veil. In his voice there was
both challenge and pleading.
“‘Shall be together,’” he quoted, “‘breathe and ride. So, one day more
am I deified; who knows but the world may end to-night?’”
The moonlight showed the girl’s eyes shining through the veil, and
regarding him steadily.
“If you don’t stop this car quick,” she said, “the world _will_ end for
all of us.”
He shot a look ahead, and so suddenly threw on the brake that Sam and
the chauffeur tumbled awake. Across the road stretched the great bulk of
a touring-car, its lamps burning dully in the brilliance of the moon.
Around it, for greater warmth, a half-dozen figures stamped upon the
frozen ground, and beat themselves with their arms. Sam and the
chauffeur vaulted into the road, and went toward them.
“It’s what you say, and the way you say it,” the girl explained. She
seemed to be continuing an argument. “It makes it so very difficult for
us to play together.”
The young man clasped the wheel as though the force he were holding in
check were much greater than sixty horse-power.
“You are not married yet, are you?” he demanded.
The girl moved her head.
“And when you are married, there will probably be an altar from which
you will turn to walk back up the aisle?”
“Well?” said the girl.
“Well,” he answered explosively, “until you turn away from that altar, I
do not recognize the right of any man to keep me quiet, or your right
either. Why should I be held by your engagement? I was not consulted
about it. I did not give my consent, did I? I tell you, you are the only
woman in the world I will ever marry, and if you think I am going to
keep silent and watch some one else carry you off without making a fight
for you, you don’t know me.”
“If you go on,” said the girl, “it will mean that I shall not see you
again.”
“Then I will write letters to you.”
“I will not read them,” said the girl.
The young man laughed defiantly.
“Oh, yes, you will read them!” He pounded his gauntleted fist on the rim
of the wheel. “You mayn’t answer them, but if I can write the way I
feel, I will bet you’ll read them.”
His voice changed suddenly, and he began to plead. It was as though she
were some masculine giant bullying a small boy.
“You are not fair to me,” he protested. “I do not ask you to be kind, I
ask you to be fair. I am fighting for what means more to me than
anything in this world, and you won’t even listen. Why should I
recognize any other men? All I recognize is that _I_ am the man who
loves you, that ‘I am the man at your feet.’ That is all I know, that I
love you.”
The girl moved as though with the cold, and turned her head from him.
“I love you,” repeated the young man.
The girl breathed like one who has been swimming under water, but, when
she spoke, her voice was calm and contained.
“Please!” she begged, “don’t you see how unfair it is? I can’t go away;
I _have_ to listen.”
The young man pulled himself upright, and pressed his lips together.
“I beg your pardon,” he whispered.
There was for some time an unhappy silence, and then Winthrop added
bitterly: “‘Methinks the punishment exceeds the offence.’”
“Do you think you make it easy for _me_?” returned the girl.
She considered it most ungenerous of him to sit staring into the
moonlight, looking so miserable that it made her heart ache to comfort
him, and so extremely handsome that to do so was quite impossible. She
would have liked to reach out her hand and lay it on his arm, and tell
him she was sorry, but she could not. He should not have looked so
unnecessarily handsome.
Sam came running toward them with five grizzly bears, who balanced
themselves apparently with some slight effort upon their hind legs. The
grizzly bears were properly presented as: “Tommy Todd, of my class, and
some more like him. And,” continued Sam, “I am going to quit you two and
go with them. Tom’s car broke down, but Fred fixed it, and both our cars
can travel together. Sort of convoy,” he explained.
His sister signalled eagerly, but with equal eagerness he retreated from
her.
“Believe me,” he assured her soothingly, “I am just as good a chaperon
fifty yards behind you, and wide awake, as I am in the same car and fast
asleep. And, besides, I want to hear about the game. And, what’s more,
two cars are much safer than one. Suppose you two break down in a lonely
place? We’ll be right behind you to pick you up. You will keep
Winthrop’s car in sight, won’t you, Tommy?” he said.
The grizzly bear called Tommy, who had been examining the Scarlet Car,
answered doubtfully that the only way he could keep it in sight was by
tying a rope to it.
“That’s all right, then,” said Sam briskly, “Winthrop will go slow.”
So the Scarlet Car shot forward with sometimes the second car so far in
the rear that they could only faintly distinguish the horn begging them
to wait, and again it would follow so close upon their wheels that they
heard the five grizzly bears chanting beseechingly:
“Oh, bring this wagon home, John,
It will not hold us a-all.”
For some time there was silence in the Scarlet Car, and then Winthrop
broke it by laughing.
“First, I lose Peabody,” he explained, “then I lose Sam, and now, after
I throw Fred overboard, I am going to drive you into Stamford, where
they do not ask runaway couples for a license, and marry you.”
The girl smiled comfortably. In that mood she was not afraid of him.
She lifted her face, and stretched out her arms as though she were
drinking in the moonlight.
“It has been such a good day,” she said simply, “and I am really so very
happy.”
“I shall be equally frank,” said Winthrop. “So am I.”
For two hours they had been on the road, and were just entering
Fairport. For some long time the voices of the pursuing grizzlies had
been lost in the far distance.
“The road’s up,” said Miss Forbes.
She pointed ahead to two red lanterns.
“It was all right this morning,” exclaimed Winthrop.
The car was pulled down to eight miles an hour, and, trembling and
snorting at the indignity, nosed up to the red lanterns.
They showed in a ruddy glow the legs of two men.
“You gotta stop!” commanded a voice.
“Why?” asked Winthrop.
The voice became embodied in the person of a tall man with a long
overcoat and a drooping mustache.
“’Cause I tell you to!” snapped the tall man.
Winthrop threw a quick glance to the rear. In that direction for a mile
the road lay straight away. He could see its entire length, and it was
empty. In thinking of nothing but Miss Forbes, he had forgotten the
chaperon. He was impressed with the fact that the immediate presence of
a chaperon was desirable. Directly in front of the car, blocking its
advance, were two barrels with a two-inch plank sagging heavily between
them. Beyond that the main street of Fairport lay steeped in slumber and
moonlight.
“I am a selectman,” said the one with the lantern. “You been exceedin’
our speed limit.”
The chauffeur gave a gasp that might have been construed to mean that
the charge amazed and shocked him.
“That is not possible,” Winthrop answered. “I have been going very
slow—on purpose—to allow a disabled car to keep up with me.”
The selectman looked down the road.
“It ain’t kep’ up with you,” he said pointedly.
“It has until the last few minutes.”
“It’s the last few minutes we’re talking about,” returned the man who
had not spoken. He put his foot on the step of the car.
“What are you doing?” asked Winthrop.
“I am going to take you to Judge Allen’s. I am chief of police. You are
under arrest.”
Before Winthrop rose moving pictures of Miss Forbes appearing in a dirty
police station before an officious Dogberry, and, as he and his car were
well known along the post road, appearing the next morning in the New
York papers. “William Winthrop,” he saw the printed words, “son of
Endicott Winthrop, was arrested here this evening, with a young woman
who refused to give her name, but who was recognized as Miss Beatrice
Forbes, whose engagement to Ernest Peabody, the Reform candidate on the
Independent ticket——”
And, of course, Peabody would blame her.
“If I have exceeded your speed limit,” he said politely, “I shall be
delighted to pay the fine. How much is it?”
“Judge Allen ’ll tell you what the fine is,” said the selectman gruffly.
“And he may want bail.”
“Bail?” demanded Winthrop. “Do you mean to tell me he will detain us
here?”
“He will, if he wants to,” answered the chief of police combatively.
For an instant Winthrop sat gazing gloomily ahead, overcome apparently
by the enormity of his offence. He was calculating whether, if he rammed
the two-inch plank, it would hit the car or Miss Forbes. He decided
swiftly it would hit his new two-hundred-dollar lamps. As swiftly he
decided the new lamps must go. But he had read of guardians of the
public safety so regardless of private safety as to try to puncture
runaway tires with pistol bullets. He had no intention of subjecting
Miss Forbes to a fusillade.
So he whirled upon the chief of police:
“Take your hand off that gun!” he growled. “How dare you threaten me?”
Amazed, the chief of police dropped from the step and advanced
indignantly.
“Me?” he demanded. “I ain’t got a gun. What you mean by——”
With sudden intelligence, the chauffeur precipitated himself upon the
scene.
“It’s the other one,” he shouted. He shook an accusing finger at the
selectman. “He pointed it at the lady.”
To Miss Forbes the realism of Fred’s acting was too convincing. To learn
that one is covered with a loaded revolver is disconcerting. Miss Forbes
gave a startled squeak, and ducked her head.
Winthrop roared aloud at the selectman.
“How dare you frighten the lady!” he cried. “Take your hand off that
gun.”
“What you talkin’ about?” shouted the selectman. “The idea of my havin’
a gun! I haven’t got a——”
“All right, Fred!” cried Winthrop. “Low bridge.”
There was a crash of shattered glass and brass, of scattered barrel
staves, the smell of escaping gas, and the Scarlet Car was flying
drunkenly down the main street.
“What are they doing now, Fred?” called the owner. Fred peered over the
stern of the flying car.
“The constable’s jumping around the road,” he replied, “and the long
one’s leaning against a tree. No, he’s climbing the tree. I can’t make
out _what_ he’s doing.”
“_I_ know!” cried Miss Forbes; her voice vibrated with excitement.
Defiance of the law had thrilled her with unsuspected satisfaction; her
eyes were dancing. “There was a telephone fastened to the tree, a hand
telephone. They are sending word to some one. They’re trying to head us
off.”
Winthrop brought the car to a quick halt.
“We’re in a police trap!” he said. Fred leaned forward and whispered to
his employer. His voice also vibrated with the joy of the chase.
“This’ll be our _third_ arrest,” he said. “That means——”
“I know what it means,” snapped Winthrop. “Tell me how we can get out of
here.”
“We can’t get out of here, sir, unless we go back. Going south, the
bridge is the only way out.”
“The bridge!” Winthrop struck the wheel savagely with his knuckles. “I
forgot their confounded bridge!” He turned to Miss Forbes. “Fairport is
a sort of island,” he explained.
“But after we’re across the bridge,” urged the chauffeur, “we needn’t
keep to the post road no more. We can turn into Stone Ridge, and strike
south to White Plains. Then——”
“We haven’t crossed the bridge yet,” growled Winthrop. His voice had
none of the joy of the others; he was greatly perturbed. “Look back,” he
commanded, “and see if there is any sign of those boys.”
He was now quite willing to share responsibility. But there was no sign
of the Yale men, and, unattended, the Scarlet Car crept warily forward.
Ahead of it, across the little reed-grown inlet, stretched their road of
escape, a long wooden bridge, lying white in the moonlight.
“I don’t see a soul,” whispered Miss Forbes.
“Anybody at that draw?” asked Winthrop. Unconsciously his voice also had
sunk to a whisper.
“No,” returned Fred. “I think the man that tends the draw goes home at
night; there is no light there.”
“Well, then,” said Winthrop, with an anxious sigh, “we’ve got to make a
dash for it.”
The car shot forward, and, as it leaped lightly upon the bridge, there
was a rapid rumble of creaking boards.
Between it and the highway to New York lay only two hundred yards of
track, straight and empty.
In his excitement, the chauffeur rose from the rear seat.
“They’ll never catch us now,” he muttered. “They’ll never catch us!”
But even as he spoke there grated harshly the creak of rusty chains on a
cogged wheel, the rattle of a brake. The black figure of a man with
waving arms ran out upon the draw, and the draw gaped slowly open.
When the car halted there was between it and the broken edge of the
bridge twenty feet of running water.
At the same moment from behind it came a patter of feet, and Winthrop
turned to see racing toward them some dozen young men of Fairport. They
surrounded him with noisy, raucous, belligerent cries. They were, as
they proudly informed him, members of the Fairport “Volunteer Fire
Department.” That they might purchase new uniforms, they had arranged a
trap for the automobiles returning in illegal haste from New Haven. In
fines they had collected $300, and it was evident that already some of
that money had been expended in bad whiskey. As many as could do so
crowded into the car, others hung to the running boards and step, others
ran beside it. They rejoiced over Winthrop’s unsuccessful flight and
capture with violent and humiliating laughter.
For the day, Judge Allen had made a temporary court in the club-room of
the fire department, which was over the engine-house; and the
proceedings were brief and decisive. The selectman told how Winthrop,
after first breaking the speed law, had broken arrest, and Judge Allen,
refusing to fine him and let him go, held him and his companions for a
hearing the following morning. He fixed the amount of bail at $500 each;
failing to pay this, they would for the night be locked up in different
parts of the engine-house, which, it developed, contained on the
ground-floor the home of the fire-engine, on the second floor the
club-room, on alternate nights, of the firemen, the local G. A. R., and
the Knights of Pythias, and in its cellar the town jail.
Winthrop and the chauffeur the learned judge condemned to the cells in
the basement. As a concession, he granted Miss Forbes the freedom of the
entire club-room to herself.
The objections raised by Winthrop to this arrangement were of a nature
so violent, so vigorous, at one moment so specious and conciliatory, and
the next so abusive, that his listeners were moved by awe, but not to
pity.
In his indignation, Judge Allen rose to reply, and as, the better to
hear him, the crowd pushed forward, Fred gave way before it, until he
was left standing in sullen gloom upon its outer edge. In imitation of
the real firemen of the great cities, the vamps of Fairport had cut a
circular hole in the floor of their club-room, and from the engine-room
below had reared a sliding pole of shining brass. When leaving their
club-room, it was always their pleasure to scorn the stairs and, like
real firemen, slide down this pole. It had not escaped the notice of
Fred, and since his entrance he had been gravitating toward it.
As the voice of the judge rose in violent objurgation, and all eyes were
fixed upon him, the chauffeur crooked his leg tightly about the brass
pole, and, like the devil in the pantomime, sank softly and swiftly
through the floor.
The irate judge was shaking his finger in Winthrop’s face.
“Don’t you try to teach me no law,” he shouted; “I know what I can do.
Ef _my_ darter went gallivantin’ around nights in one of them
automobiles, it would serve her right to get locked up. Maybe this young
woman will learn to stay at home nights with her folks. She ain’t goin’
to take no harm here. The constable sits up all night downstairs in the
fire-engine-room, and that sofa’s as good a place to sleep as the hotel.
If you want me to let her go to the hotel, why don’t you send to your
folks and bail her out?”
“You know damn well why I don’t,” returned Winthrop. “I don’t intend to
give the newspapers and you and these other idiots the chance to annoy
her further. This young lady’s brother has been with us all day; he left
us only by accident, and by forcing her to remain here alone you are
acting outrageously. If you knew anything of decency, or law, you’d——”
“I know this much!” roared the justice triumphantly, pointing his
spectacle-case at Miss Forbes. “I know her name ain’t Lizzie Borden, and
yours ain’t Charley Ross.”
Winthrop crossed to where Miss Forbes stood in a corner. She still wore
her veil, but through it, though her face was pale, she smiled at him.
His own distress was undisguised.
“I can never forgive myself,” he said.
“Nonsense!” replied Miss Forbes briskly. “You were perfectly right. If
we had sent for any one, it would have had to come out. Now, we’ll pay
the fine in the morning and get home, and no one will know anything of
it excepting the family and Mr. Peabody, and they’ll understand. But if
I ever lay hands on my brother Sam!”—she clasped her fingers together
helplessly. “To think of his leaving you to spend the night in a cell——”
Winthrop interrupted her.
“I will get one of these men to send his wife or sister over to stay
with you,” he said.
But Miss Forbes protested that she did not want a companion. The
constable would protect her, she said, and she would sit up all night
and read. She nodded at the periodicals on the club table.
“This is the only chance I may ever have,” she said, “to read the
_Police Gazette_!”
“You ready there?” called the constable.
“Good-night,” said Winthrop.
Under the eyes of the grinning yokels, they shook hands.
“Good-night,” said the girl.
“Where’s your young man?” demanded the chief of police.
“My what?” inquired Winthrop.
“The young fellow that was with you when we held you up that first
time.”
The constable, or the chief of police as he called himself, on the
principle that if there were only one policeman he must necessarily be
the chief, glanced hastily over the heads of the crowd.
“Any of you holding that shoffer?” he called.
No one was holding the chauffeur.
The chauffeur had vanished.
The cell to which the constable led Winthrop was in a corner of the
cellar in which formerly coal had been stored. This corner was now
fenced off with boards, and a wooden door with chain and padlock.
High in the wall, on a level with the ground, was the opening, or
window, through which the coal had been dumped. This window now was
barricaded with iron bars. Winthrop tested the door by shaking it, and
landed a heavy kick on one of the hinges. It gave slightly, and emitted
a feeble groan.
“What you tryin’ to do?” demanded the constable. “That’s town property.”
In the light of the constable’s lantern, Winthrop surveyed his cell with
extreme dissatisfaction.
“I call this a cheap cell,” he said.
“It’s good enough for a cheap sport,” returned the constable. It was so
overwhelming a retort that after the constable had turned the key in the
padlock, and taken himself and his lantern to the floor above, Winthrop
could hear him repeating it to the volunteer firemen. They received it
with delighted howls.
For an hour, on the three empty boxes that formed his bed, Winthrop sat,
with his chin on his fist, planning the nameless atrocities he would
inflict upon the village of Fairport. Compared to his tortures, those of
Neuremberg were merely reprimands. Also he considered the particular
punishment he would mete out to Sam Forbes for his desertion of his
sister, and to Fred. He could not understand Fred. It was not like the
chauffeur to think only of himself. Nevertheless, for abandoning Miss
Forbes in the hour of need, Fred must be discharged. He had, with some
regret, determined upon this discipline, when from directly over his
head the voice of Fred hailed him cautiously.
“Mr. Winthrop,” the voice called, “are you there?”
To Winthrop the question seemed superfluous. He jumped to his feet, and
peered up into the darkness.
“Where are _you_?” he demanded.
“At the window,” came the answer. “We’re in the back yard. Mr. Sam wants
to speak to you.”
On Miss Forbes’s account, Winthrop gave a gasp of relief. On his own,
one of savage satisfaction.
“And _I_ want to speak to _him_!” he whispered.
The moonlight, which had been faintly shining through the iron bars of
the coal chute, was eclipsed by a head and shoulders. The comfortable
voice of Sam Forbes greeted him in a playful whisper.
“Hullo, Billy! You down there?”
“Where the devil did you think I was?” Winthrop answered at white heat.
“Let me tell you if I was not down here I’d be punching your head.”
“That’s all right, Billy,” Sam answered soothingly. “But I’ll save you
just the same. It shall never be said of Sam Forbes he deserted a
comrade——”
“Stop that! Do you know,” Winthrop demanded fiercely, “that your sister
is a prisoner upstairs?”
“I do,” replied the unfeeling brother, “but she won’t be long. All the
low-comedy parts are out now arranging a rescue.”
“Who are? Todd and those boys?” demanded Winthrop. “They mustn’t think
of it! They’ll only make it worse. It is impossible to get your sister
out of here with those drunken firemen in the building. You must wait
till they’ve gone home. Do you hear me?”
“Pardon _me_!” returned Sam stiffly, “but this is _my_ relief
expedition. I have sent two of the boys to hold the bridge, like
Horatius, and two to guard the motors, and the others are going to
entice the firemen away from the engine-house.”
“Entice them? How?” demanded Winthrop. “They’re drunk, and they won’t
leave here till morning.”
Outside the engine-house, suspended from a heavy cross-bar, was a steel
rail borrowed from a railroad track, and bent into a hoop. When hit with
a sledge-hammer it proclaimed to Fairport that the “consuming element”
was at large.
At the moment Winthrop asked his question, over the village of Fairport
and over the bay and marshes, and far out across the Sound, the great
steel bar sent forth a shuddering boom of warning.
From the room above came a wild tumult of joyous yells.
“Fire!” shrieked the vamps, “fire!”
The two men crouching by the cellar window heard the rush of feet, the
engine banging and bumping across the sidewalk, its brass bell clanking
crazily, the happy vamps shouting hoarse, incoherent orders.
Through the window Sam lowered a bag of tools he had taken from
Winthrop’s car.
“Can you open the lock with any of these?” he asked.
“I can kick it open!” yelled Winthrop joyfully. “Get to your sister,
quick!”
He threw his shoulder against the door, and the staples flying before
him sent him sprawling in the coal-dust. When he reached the head of the
stairs, Beatrice Forbes was descending from the club-room, and in front
of the door the two cars, with their lamps unlit and numbers hidden,
were panting to be free.
And in the north, reaching to the sky, rose a roaring column of flame,
shameless in the pale moonlight, dragging into naked day the sleeping
village, the shingled houses, the clock-face in the church steeple.
“What the devil have you done?” gasped Winthrop.
Before he answered, Sam waited until the cars were rattling to safety
across the bridge.
“We have been protecting the face of nature,” he shouted. “The only way
to get that gang out of the engine-house was to set fire to something.
Tommy wanted to burn up the railroad station, because he doesn’t like
the New York and New Haven, and Fred was for setting fire to Judge
Allen’s house, because he was rude to Beatrice. But we finally formed
the Village Improvement Society, organized to burn all advertising
signs. You know those that stood in the marshes, and hid the view from
the trains, so that you could not see the Sound. We chopped them down
and put them in a pile, and poured gasolene on them, and that fire is
all that is left of the pickles, flyscreens, and pills.”
It was midnight when the cars drew up at the door of the house of
Forbes. Anxiously waiting in the library were Mrs. Forbes and Ernest
Peabody.
“At last!” cried Mrs. Forbes, smiling her relief; “we thought maybe Sam
and you had decided to spend the night in New Haven.”
“No,” said Miss Forbes, “there _was_ some talk about spending the night
at Fairport, but we pushed right on.”
II
THE TRESPASSERS
With a long, nervous shudder, the Scarlet Car came to a stop, and the
lamps bored a round hole in the night, leaving the rest of the
encircling world in a chill and silent darkness.
The lamps showed a flickering picture of a country road between high
banks covered with loose stones, and overhead, a fringe of pine boughs.
It looked like a colored photograph thrown from a stereopticon in a
darkened theatre.
From the back of the car the voice of the owner said briskly: “We will
now sing that beautiful ballad entitled ‘He Is Sleeping in the Yukon
Vale To-night.’ What are you stopping for, Fred?” he asked.
The tone of the chauffeur suggested he was again upon the defensive.
“For water, sir,” he mumbled.
Miss Forbes in the front seat laughed, and her brother in the rear seat
groaned in dismay.
“Oh, for water?” said the owner cordially. “I thought maybe it was for
coal.”
Save a dignified silence, there was no answer to this, until there came
a rolling of loose stones and the sound of a heavy body suddenly
precipitated down the bank, and landing with a thump in the road.
“He didn’t get the water,” said the owner sadly.
“Are you hurt, Fred?” asked the girl.
The chauffeur limped in front of the lamps, appearing suddenly, like an
actor stepping into the lime-light.
“No, ma’am,” he said. In the rays of the lamp, he unfolded a road map
and scowled at it. He shook his head aggrievedly.
“There _ought_ to be a house just about here,” he explained.
“There _ought_ to be a hotel and a garage, and a cold supper, just about
here,” said the girl cheerfully.
“That’s the way with those houses,” complained the owner. “They never
stay where they’re put. At night they go around and visit each other.
Where do you think you are, Fred?”
“I think we’re in that long woods, between Loon Lake and Stoughton on
the Boston Pike,” said the chauffeur, “and,” he reiterated, “there
_ought_ to be a house somewhere about here—where we get water.”
“Well, get there, then, and get the water,” commanded the owner.
“But I can’t get there, sir, till I get the water,” returned the
chauffeur.
He shook out two collapsible buckets, and started down the shaft of
light.
“I won’t be more nor five minutes,” he called.
“I’m going with him,” said the girl. “I’m cold.”
She stepped down from the front seat, and the owner with sudden alacrity
vaulted the door and started after her.
“You coming?” he inquired of Ernest Peabody. But Ernest Peabody being
soundly asleep made no reply. Winthrop turned to Sam. “Are _you_
coming?” he repeated.
The tone of the invitation seemed to suggest that a refusal would not
necessarily lead to a quarrel.
“I am _not_!” said the brother. “You’ve kept Peabody and me twelve hours
in the open air, and it’s past two, and we’re going to sleep. You can
take it from me that we are going to spend the rest of this night here
in this road.”
He moved his cramped joints cautiously, and stretched his legs the full
width of the car.
“If you can’t get plain water,” he called, “get club soda.”
He buried his nose in the collar of his fur coat, and the odors of
camphor and raccoon skins instantly assailed him, but he only yawned
luxuriously and disappeared into the coat as a turtle draws into its
shell. From the woods about him the smell of the pine needles pressed
upon him like a drug, and before the footsteps of his companions were
lost in the silence he was asleep. But his sleep was only a review of
his waking hours. Still on either hand rose flying dust clouds and
twirling leaves; still on either side raced gray stone walls, telegraph
poles, hills rich in autumn colors; and before him a long white road,
unending, interminable, stretching out finally into a darkness lit by
flashing shop-windows, like open fireplaces, by street lamps, by
swinging electric globes, by the blinding searchlights of hundreds of
darting trolley cars with terrifying gongs, and then a cold white mist,
and again on every side, darkness, except where the four great lamps
blazed a path through stretches of ghostly woods.
As the two young men slumbered, the lamps spluttered and sizzled like
bacon in a frying-pan, a stone rolled noisily down the bank, a white
owl, both appalled and fascinated by the dazzling eyes of the monster
blocking the road, hooted, and flapped itself away. But the men in the
car only shivered slightly, deep in the sleep of utter weariness.
In silence the girl and Winthrop followed the chauffeur. They had passed
out of the light of the lamps, and in the autumn mist the electric torch
of the owner was as ineffective as a glowworm. The mystery of the forest
fell heavily upon them. From their feet the dead leaves sent up a clean,
damp odor, and on either side and overhead the giant pine-trees
whispered and rustled in the night wind.
“Take my coat, too,” said the young man. “You’ll catch cold.” He spoke
with authority and began to slip the loops from the big horn buttons. It
was not the habit of the girl to consider her health. Nor did she permit
the members of her family to show solicitude concerning it. But the
anxiety of the young man did not seem to offend her. She thanked him
generously. “No; these coats are hard to walk in, and I want to walk,”
she exclaimed. “I like to hear the leaves rustle when you kick them,
don’t you? When I was so high, I used to pretend it was wading in the
surf.”
The young man moved over to the gutter of the road where the leaves were
deepest and kicked violently. “And the more noise you make,” he said,
“the more you frighten away the wild animals.”
The girl shuddered in a most helpless and fascinating fashion.
“Don’t!” she whispered. “I didn’t mention it, but already I have seen
several lions crouching behind the trees.”
“Indeed?” said the young man. His tone was preoccupied. He had just
kicked a rock, hidden by the leaves, and was standing on one leg.
“Do you mean you don’t believe me?” asked the girl, “or is it that you
are merely brave?”
“Merely brave!” exclaimed the young man. “Massachusetts is so far north
for lions,” he continued, “that I fancy what you saw was a grizzly bear.
But I have my trusty electric torch with me, and if there is anything a
bear cannot abide, it is to be pointed at by an electric torch.”
“Let us pretend,” cried the girl, “that we are the babes in the wood,
and that we are lost.”
“We don’t have to pretend we’re lost,” said the man; “and as I remember
it, the babes came to a sad end. Didn’t they die, and didn’t the birds
bury them with leaves?”
“Sam and Mr. Peabody can be the birds,” suggested the girl.
“Sam and Peabody hopping around with leaves in their teeth would look
silly,” objected the man. “I doubt if I could keep from laughing.”
“Then,” said the girl, “they can be the wicked robbers who came to kill
the babes.”
“Very well,” said the man with suspicious alacrity, “let us be babes. If
I have to die,” he went on heartily, “I would rather die with you than
live with any one else.”
When he had spoken, although they were entirely alone in the world and
quite near to each other, it was as though the girl could not hear him,
even as though he had not spoken at all. After a silence, the girl said:
“Perhaps it would be better for us to go back to the car.”
“I won’t do it again,” begged the man.
“We will pretend,” cried the girl, “that the car is a van and that we
are gypsies, and we’ll build a camp-fire, and I will tell your fortune.”
“You are the only woman who can,” muttered the young man.
The girl still stood in her tracks.
“You said—” she began.
“I know,” interrupted the man, “but you won’t let me talk seriously, so
I joke. But some day——”
“Oh, look!” cried the girl. “There’s Fred.”
She ran from him down the road. The young man followed her slowly, his
fists deep in the pockets of the great-coat, and kicking at the
unoffending leaves.
The chauffeur was peering through a double iron gate hung between square
brick posts. The lower hinge of one gate was broken, and that gate
lurched forward, leaving an opening. By the light of the electric torch
they could see the beginning of a driveway, rough and weed-grown, lined
with trees of great age and bulk, and an unkempt lawn, strewn with
bushes, and beyond, in an open place bare of trees and illuminated
faintly by the stars, the shadow of a house, black, silent, and
forbidding.
“That’s it,” whispered the chauffeur. “I was here before. The well is
over there.”
The young man gave a gasp of astonishment.
“Why,” he protested, “this is the Carey place! I should say we _were_
lost. We must have left the road an hour ago. There’s not another house
within miles.” But he made no movement to enter. “Of all places!” he
muttered.
“Well, then,” urged the girl briskly, “if there’s no other house, let’s
tap Mr. Carey’s well and get on.”
“Do you know who he is?” asked the man.
The girl laughed. “You don’t need a letter of introduction to take a
bucket of water, do you?” she said.
“It’s Philip Carey’s house. He lives here.” He spoke in a whisper, and
insistently, as though the information must carry some special
significance. But the girl showed no sign of enlightenment. “You
remember the Carey boys?” he urged. “They left Harvard the year I
entered. They _had_ to leave. They were quite mad. All the Careys have
been mad. The boys were queer even then, and awfully rich. Henry ran
away with a girl from a shoe factory in Brockton and lives in Paris, and
Philip was sent here.”
“_Sent_ here?” repeated the girl. Unconsciously her voice also had sunk
to a whisper.
“He has a doctor and a nurse and keepers, and they live here all the
year round. When Fred said there were people hereabouts, I thought we
might strike them for something to eat, or even to put up for the night,
but, Philip Carey! I shouldn’t fancy——”
“I should think not!” exclaimed the girl.
For a minute the three stood silent, peering through the iron bars.
“And the worst of it is,” went on the young man irritably, “he could
give us such good things to eat.”
“It doesn’t look it,” said the girl.
“I know,” continued the man in the same eager whisper. “But—who was it
telling me? Some doctor I know who came down to see him. He said Carey
does himself awfully well, has the house full of bully pictures, and the
family plate, and wonderful collections—things he picked up in the
East—gold ornaments, and jewels, and jade.”
“I shouldn’t think,” said the girl in the same hushed voice, “they would
let him live so far from any neighbors with such things in the house.
Suppose burglars——”
“Burglars! Burglars would never hear of this place. How could they? Even
his friends think it’s just a private mad-house.”
The girl shivered and drew back from the gate.
Fred coughed apologetically.
“_I’ve_ heard of it,” he volunteered. “There was a piece in the _Sunday
Post_. It said he eats his dinner in a diamond crown, and all the walls
is gold, and two monkeys wait on table with gold——”
“Nonsense!” said the man sharply. “He eats like any one else and dresses
like any one else. How far is the well from the house?”
“It’s purty near,” said the chauffeur.
“Pretty near the house, or pretty near here?”
“Just outside the kitchen; and it makes a creaky noise.”
“You mean you don’t want to go?”
Fred’s answer was unintelligible.
“You wait here with Miss Forbes,” said the young man. “And I’ll get the
water.”
“Yes, sir!” said Fred, quite distinctly.
“No, sir!” said Miss Forbes, with equal distinctness. “I’m not going to
be left here alone—with all these trees. I’m going with you.”
“There may be a dog,” suggested the young man, “or, I was thinking if
they heard me prowling about, they might take a shot—just for luck. Why
don’t you go back to the car with Fred?”
“Down that long road in the dark?” exclaimed the girl. “Do you think I
have no imagination?”
The man in front, the girl close on his heels, and the boy with the
buckets following, crawled through the broken gate, and moved cautiously
up the gravel driveway.
Within fifty feet of the house the courage of the chauffeur returned.
“You wait here,” he whispered, “and if I wake ’em up, you shout to ’em
that it’s all right, that it’s only me.”
“Your idea being,” said the young man, “that they will then fire at me.
Clever lad. Run along.”
There was a rustling of the dead weeds, and instantly the chauffeur was
swallowed in the encompassing shadows.
Miss Forbes leaned toward the young man.
“Do you see a light in that lower story?” she whispered.
“No,” said the man. “Where?”
After a pause the girl answered: “I can’t see it now, either. Maybe I
didn’t see it. It was very faint—just a glow—it might have been
phosphorescence.”
“It might,” said the man. He gave a shrug of distaste. “The whole place
is certainly old enough and decayed enough.”
For a brief space they stood quite still, and at once, accentuated by
their own silence, the noises of the night grew in number and
distinctness. A slight wind had risen and the boughs of the pines rocked
restlessly, making mournful complaint; and at their feet the needles
dropping in a gentle desultory shower had the sound of rain in
springtime. From every side they were startled by noises they could not
place. Strange movements and rustlings caused them to peer sharply into
the shadows; footsteps, that seemed to approach, and then, having marked
them, skulk away; branches of bushes that suddenly swept together, as
though closing behind some one in stealthy retreat. Although they knew
that in the deserted garden they were alone, they felt that from the
shadows they were being spied upon, that the darkness of the place was
peopled by malign presences.
The young man drew a cigar from his case and put it unlit between his
teeth.
“Cheerful, isn’t it?” he growled. “These dead leaves make it damp as a
tomb. If I’ve seen one ghost, I’ve seen a dozen. I believe we’re
standing in the Carey family’s graveyard.”
“I thought you were brave,” said the girl.
“I am,” returned the young man, “very brave. But if you had the most
wonderful girl on earth to take care of in the grounds of a mad-house at
two in the morning, you’d be scared too.”
He was abruptly surprised by Miss Forbes laying her hand firmly upon his
shoulder and turning him in the direction of the house. Her face was so
near his that he felt the uneven fluttering of her breath upon his
cheek.
“There is a man,” she said, “standing behind that tree.”
By the faint light of the stars he saw, in black silhouette, a shoulder
and head projecting from beyond the trunk of a huge oak, and then
quickly withdrawn. The owner of the head and shoulder was on the side of
the tree nearest to themselves, his back turned to them, and so deeply
was his attention engaged that he was unconscious of their presence.
“He is watching the house,” said the girl. “Why is he doing that?”
“I think it’s Fred,” whispered the man. “He’s afraid to go for the
water. That’s as far as he’s gone.” He was about to move forward when
from the oak-tree there came a low whistle. The girl and the man stood
silent and motionless. But they knew it was useless; that they had been
overheard. A voice spoke cautiously.
“That you?” it asked.
With the idea only of gaining time, the young man responded promptly and
truthfully. “Yes,” he whispered.
“Keep to the right of the house,” commanded the voice.
The young man seized Miss Forbes by the wrist and moving to the right
drew her quickly with him. He did not stop until they had turned the
corner of the building and were once more hidden by the darkness.
“The plot thickens,” he said. “I take it that that fellow is a keeper,
or watchman. He spoke as though it were natural there should be another
man in the grounds, so there’s probably two of them, either to keep
Carey in or to keep trespassers out. Now, I think I’ll go back and tell
him that Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water, and
that all they want is to be allowed to get the water, and go.”
“Why should a watchman hide behind a tree?” asked the girl. “And why——”
She ceased abruptly with a sharp cry of fright. “What’s that?” she
whispered.
“What’s what?” asked the young man startled. “What did you hear?”
“Over there,” stammered the girl. “Something—that—groaned.”
“Pretty soon this will get on my nerves,” said the man. He ripped open
his great-coat and reached under it. “I’ve been stoned twice, when there
were women in the car,” he said, apologetically, “and so now at night I
carry a gun.” He shifted the darkened torch to his left hand, and,
moving a few yards, halted to listen. The girl, reluctant to be left
alone, followed slowly. As he stood immovable there came from the leaves
just beyond him the sound of a feeble struggle, and a strangled groan.
The man bent forward and flashed the torch. He saw stretched rigid on
the ground a huge wolf-hound. Its legs were twisted horribly, the lips
drawn away from the teeth, the eyes glazed in an agony of pain. The man
snapped off the light. “Keep back!” he whispered to the girl. He took
her by the arm and ran with her toward the gate.
“Who was it?” she begged.
“It was a dog,” he answered. “I think——”
He did not tell her what he thought.
“I’ve got to find out what the devil has happened to Fred!” he said.
“You go back to the car. Send your brother here on the run. Tell him
there’s going to be a rough-house. You’re not afraid to go?”
“No,” said the girl.
A shadow blacker than the night rose suddenly before them, and a voice
asked sternly but quietly: “What are you doing here?”
The young man lifted his arm clear of the girl, and shoved her quickly
from him. In his hand she felt the pressure of the revolver.
“Well,” he replied truculently, “and what are you doing here?”
“I am the night watchman,” answered the voice. “Who are you?”
It struck Miss Forbes if the watchman knew that one of the trespassers
was a woman he would be at once reassured, and she broke in quickly:
“We have lost our way,” she said pleasantly. “We came here——”
She found herself staring blindly down a shaft of light. For an instant
the torch held her, and then from her swept over the young man.
“Drop that gun!” cried the voice. It was no longer the same voice; it
was now savage and snarling. For answer the young man pressed the torch
in his left hand, and, held in the two circles of light, the men
surveyed each other. The new-comer was one of unusual bulk and height.
The collar of his overcoat hid his mouth, and his derby hat was drawn
down over his forehead, but what they saw showed an intelligent, strong
face, although for the moment it wore a menacing scowl. The young man
dropped his revolver into his pocket.
“My automobile ran dry,” he said; “we came in here to get some water. My
chauffeur is back there somewhere with a couple of buckets. This is Mr.
Carey’s place, isn’t it?”
“Take that light out of my eyes!” said the watchman.
“Take your light out of my eyes,” returned the young man. “You can see
we’re not—we don’t mean any harm.”
The two lights disappeared simultaneously, and then each, as though
worked by the same hand, sprang forth again.
“What did you think I was going to do?” the young man asked. He laughed
and switched off his torch.
But the one the watchman held in his hand still moved from the face of
the girl to that of the young man.
“How’d you know this was the Carey house?” he demanded. “Do you know Mr.
Carey?”
“No, but I know this is his house.”
For a moment from behind his mask of light the watchman surveyed them in
silence. Then he spoke quickly:
“I’ll take you to him,” he said, “if he thinks it’s all right, it’s all
right.”
The girl gave a protesting cry. The young man burst forth indignantly:
“You will _not_!” he cried. “Don’t be an idiot! You talk like a
Tenderloin cop. Do we look like second-story workers?”
“I found you prowling around Mr. Carey’s grounds at two in the morning,”
said the watchman sharply, “with a gun in your hand. My job is to
protect this place, and I am going to take you both to Mr. Carey.”
[Illustration: In the two circles of light the men surveyed each other]
Until this moment the young man could see nothing save the shaft of
light and the tiny glowing bulb at its base; now into the light there
protruded a black revolver.
“Keep your hands up, and walk ahead of me to the house,” commanded the
watchman. “The woman will go in front.”
The young man did not move. Under his breath he muttered impotently, and
bit at his lower lip.
“See here,” he said, “I’ll go with you, but you sha’n’t take this lady
in front of that madman. Let her go to her car. It’s only a hundred
yards from here; you know perfectly well she——”
“I know where your car is, all right,” said the watchman steadily, “and
I’m not going to let you get away in it till Mr. Carey’s seen you.” The
revolver motioned forward. Miss Forbes stepped in front of it and
appealed eagerly to the young man.
“Do what he says,” she urged. “It’s only his duty. Please! Indeed, I
don’t mind.” She turned to the watchman. “Which way do you want us to
go?” she asked.
“Keep in the light,” he ordered.
The light showed the broad steps leading to the front entrance of the
house, and in its shaft they climbed them, pushed open the unlocked
door, and stood in a small hallway. It led into a greater hall beyond.
By the electric lights still burning they noted that the interior of the
house was as rich and well cared for as the outside was miserable. With
a gesture for silence the watchman motioned them into a small room on
the right of the hallway. It had the look of an office, and was
apparently the place in which were conducted the affairs of the estate.
In an open grate was a dying fire; in front of it a flat desk covered
with papers and japanned tin boxes.
“You stay here till I fetch Mr. Carey and the servants,” commanded the
watchman. “Don’t try to get out, and,” he added menacingly, “don’t make
no noise.” With his revolver he pointed at the two windows. They were
heavily barred. “Those bars keep Mr. Carey in,” he said, “and I guess
they can keep you in, too. The other watchman,” he added, “will be just
outside this door.” But still he hesitated, glowering with suspicion;
unwilling to trust them alone. His face lit with an ugly smile.
“Mr. Carey’s very bad to-night,” he said; “he won’t keep his bed and
he’s wandering about the house. If he found you by yourselves, he
might——”
The young man, who had been staring at the fire, swung sharply on his
heel.
“Get-to-hell-out-of-here!” he said.
The watchman stepped into the hall and was cautiously closing the door
when a man sprang lightly up the front steps. Through the inch crack
left by the open door the trespassers heard the new-comer’s eager
greeting.
“I can’t get him right!” he panted. “He’s snoring like a hog.”
The watchman exclaimed savagely:
“He’s fooling you.” He gasped. “I didn’t mor’ nor slap him. Did you
throw water on him?”
“I drowned him!” returned the other. “He never winked. I tell you we
gotta walk, and damn quick!”
“Walk!” The watchman cursed him foully. “How far could we walk? _I’ll_
bring him to,” he swore. “He’s scared of us, and he’s shamming.” He gave
a sudden start of alarm. “That’s it, he’s shamming. You fool! You
shouldn’t have left him.”
There was the swift patter of retreating footsteps, and then a sudden
halt, and they heard the watchman command: “Go back, and keep the other
two till I come.”
The next instant from the outside the door was softly closed upon them.
It had no more than shut when to the surprise of Miss Forbes the young
man, with a delighted and vindictive chuckle, sprang to the desk and
began to drum upon it with his fingers. It was as though he were
practising upon a type-writer.
“He missed _these_,” he muttered jubilantly. The girl leaned forward.
Beneath his fingers she saw, flush with the table, a roll of little
ivory buttons. She read the words “Stables,” “Servants’ hall.” She
raised a pair of very beautiful and very bewildered eyes.
“But if he wanted the servants, why didn’t the watchman do that?” she
asked.
“Because he isn’t a watchman,” answered the young man. “Because he’s
robbing this house.”
He took the revolver from his encumbering great-coat, slipped it in his
pocket, and threw the coat from him. He motioned the girl into a corner.
“Keep out of the line of the door,” he ordered.
“I don’t understand,” begged the girl.
“They came in a car,” whispered the young man. “It’s broken down, and
they can’t get away. When the big fellow stopped us and I flashed my
torch, I saw their car behind him in the road with the front off and the
lights out. He’d seen the lamps of our car, and now they want it to
escape in. That’s why he brought us here—to keep us away from our car.”
“And Fred!” gasped the girl. “Fred’s hurt!”
“I guess Fred stumbled into the big fellow,” assented the young man,
“and the big fellow put him out; then he saw Fred was a chauffeur, and
now they are trying to bring him to, so that he can run the car for
them. You needn’t worry about Fred. He’s been in four smash-ups.”
The young man bent forward to listen, but from no part of the great
house came any sign. He exclaimed angrily.
“They must be drugged,” he growled. He ran to the desk and made vicious
jabs at the ivory buttons.
“Suppose they’re out of order!” he whispered.
There was the sound of leaping feet. The young man laughed nervously.
“No, it’s all right,” he cried. “They’re coming!”
The door flung open and the big burglar and a small, rat-like figure of
a man burst upon them; the big one pointing a revolver.
“Come with me to your car!” he commanded. “You’ve got to take us to
Boston. Quick, or I’ll blow your face off.”
Although the young man glared bravely at the steel barrel and the lifted
trigger, poised a few inches from his eyes, his body, as though weak
with fright, shifted slightly and his feet made a shuffling noise upon
the floor. When the weight of his body was balanced on the ball of his
right foot, the shuffling ceased. Had the burglar lowered his eyes, the
manœuvre to him would have been significant, but his eyes were following
the barrel of the revolver.
In the mind of the young man the one thought uppermost was that he must
gain time, but, with a revolver in his face, he found his desire to gain
time swiftly diminishing. Still, when he spoke, it was with
deliberation.
“My chauffeur—” he began slowly.
The burglar snapped at him like a dog. “To hell with your chauffeur!” he
cried. “Your chauffeur has run away. You’ll drive that car yourself, or
I’ll leave you here with the top of your head off.”
The face of the young man suddenly flashed with pleasure. His eyes,
looking past the burglar to the door, lit with relief.
“There’s the chauffeur now!” he cried.
The big burglar for one instant glanced over his right shoulder.
For months at a time, on Soldiers’ Field, the young man had thrown
himself at human targets, that ran and dodged and evaded him, and the
hulking burglar, motionless before him, was easily his victim.
He leaped at him, his left arm swinging like a scythe, and, with the
impact of a club, the blow caught the burglar in the throat.
The pistol went off impotently; the burglar with a choking cough sank in
a heap on the floor.
The young man tramped over him and upon him, and beat the second burglar
with savage, whirlwind blows. The second burglar, shrieking with pain,
turned to fly, and a fist, that fell upon him where his bump of honesty
should have been, drove his head against the lintel of the door.
At the same instant from the belfry on the roof there rang out on the
night the sudden tumult of a bell; a bell that told as plainly as though
it clamored with a human tongue, that the hand that rang it was driven
with fear; fear of fire, fear of thieves, fear of a madman with a knife
in his hand running amuck; perhaps at that moment creeping up the belfry
stairs.
From all over the house there was the rush of feet and men’s voices, and
from the garden the light of dancing lanterns. And while the smoke of
the revolver still hung motionless, the open door was crowded with
half-clad figures. At their head were two young men. One who had drawn
over his night-clothes a serge suit, and who, in even that garb, carried
an air of authority; and one, tall, stooping, weak of face and
light-haired, with eyes that blinked and trembled behind great
spectacles, and who, for comfort, hugged about him a gorgeous kimono.
For an instant the new-comers stared stupidly through the smoke at the
bodies on the floor breathing stertorously, at the young man with the
lust of battle still in his face, at the girl shrinking against the
wall. It was the young man in the serge suit who was the first to move.
“Who are you?” he demanded.
“These are burglars,” said the owner of the car. “We happened to be
passing in my automobile, and——”
The young man was no longer listening. With an alert, professional
manner he had stooped over the big burglar. With his thumb he pushed
back the man’s eyelids, and ran his fingers over his throat and chin. He
felt carefully of the point of the chin, and glanced up.
“You’ve broken the bone,” he said.
“I just swung on him,” said the young man. He turned his eyes, and
suggested the presence of the girl.
At the same moment the man in the kimono cried nervously: “Ladies
present, ladies present. Go put your clothes on, everybody; put your
clothes on.”
For orders the men in the doorway looked to the young man with the stern
face.
He scowled at the figure in the kimono.
“You will please go to your room, sir,” he said. He stood up, and bowed
to Miss Forbes. “I beg your pardon,” he asked, “you must want to get out
of this. Will you please go into the library?”
He turned to the robust youths in the door, and pointed at the second
burglar.
“Move him out of the way,” he ordered.
The man in the kimono smirked and bowed.
“Allow me,” he said; “allow me to show you to the library. This is no
place for ladies.”
The young man with the stern face frowned impatiently.
“You will please return to your room, sir,” he repeated.
With an attempt at dignity the figure in the kimono gathered the silk
robe closer about him.
“Certainly,” he said. “If you think you can get on without me—I will
retire,” and lifting his bare feet mincingly, he tiptoed away. Miss
Forbes looked after him with an expression of relief, of repulsion, of
great pity.
The owner of the car glanced at the young man with the stern face, and
raised his eyebrows interrogatively.
The young man had taken the revolver from the limp fingers of the
burglar and was holding it in his hand. Winthrop gave what was half a
laugh and half a sigh of compassion.
“So, that’s Carey?” he said.
There was a sudden silence. The young man with the stern face made no
answer. His head was bent over the revolver. He broke it open, and
spilled the cartridges into his palm. Still he made no answer. When he
raised his head, his eyes were no longer stern, but wistful, and filled
with an inexpressible loneliness.
“No, _I_ am Carey,” he said.
The one who had blundered stood helpless, tongue-tied, with no presence
of mind beyond knowing that to explain would offend further.
The other seemed to feel for him more than for himself. In a voice low
and peculiarly appealing, he continued hurriedly.
[Illustration: “You’ve broken the bone,” he said]
“He is my doctor,” he said. “He is a young man, and he has not had many
advantages—his manner is not—I find we do not get on together. I have
asked them to send me some one else.” He stopped suddenly, and stood
unhappily silent. The knowledge that the strangers were acquainted with
his story seemed to rob him of his earlier confidence. He made an
uncertain movement as though to relieve them of his presence.
Miss Forbes stepped toward him eagerly.
“You told me I might wait in the library,” she said. “Will you take me
there?”
For a moment the man did not move, but stood looking at the young and
beautiful girl, who, with a smile, hid the compassion in her eyes.
“Will you go?” he asked wistfully.
“Why not?” said the girl.
The young man laughed with pleasure.
“I am unpardonable,” he said. “I live so much alone—that I forget.” Like
one who, issuing from a close room, encounters the morning air, he drew
a deep, happy breath. “It has been three years since a woman has been in
this house,” he said simply. “And I have not even thanked you,” he went
on, “nor asked you if you are cold,” he cried remorsefully, “or hungry.
How nice it would be if you would say you are hungry.”
The girl walked beside him, laughing lightly, and, as they disappeared
into the greater hall beyond, Winthrop heard her cry: “You never robbed
your own ice-chest? How have you kept from starving? Show me it, and
we’ll rob it together.”
The voice of their host rang through the empty house with a laugh like
that of an eager, happy child.
“Heavens!” said the owner of the car, “isn’t she wonderful!” But neither
the prostrate burglars, nor the servants, intent on strapping their
wrists together, gave him any answer.
As they were finishing the supper filched from the ice-chest, Fred was
brought before them from the kitchen. The blow the burglar had given him
was covered with a piece of cold beefsteak, and the water thrown on him
to revive him was thawing from his leather breeches. Mr. Carey expressed
his gratitude, and rewarded him beyond the avaricious dreams even of a
chauffeur.
As the three trespassers left the house, accompanied by many pails of
water, the girl turned to the lonely figure in the doorway and waved her
hand.
“May we come again?” she called.
But young Mr. Carey did not trust his voice to answer. Standing erect,
with folded arms, in dark silhouette in the light of the hall, he bowed
his head.
Deaf to alarm bells, to pistol shots, to cries for help, they found her
brother and Ernest Peabody sleeping soundly.
“Sam is a charming chaperon,” said the owner of the car.
With the girl beside him, with Fred crouched, shivering, on the step, he
threw in the clutch; the servants from the house waved the emptied
buckets in salute, and the great car sprang forward into the awakening
day toward the golden dome over the Boston Common. In the rear seat
Peabody shivered and yawned, and then sat erect.
“Did you get the water?” he demanded, anxiously.
There was a grim silence.
“Yes,” said the owner of the car patiently. “You needn’t worry any
longer. We got the water.”
III
THE KIDNAPPERS
During the last two weeks of the “whirlwind” campaign, automobiles had
carried the rival candidates to every election district in Greater New
York.
During these two weeks, at the disposal of Ernest Peabody—on the Reform
Ticket “the people’s choice for Lieutenant-Governor”—Winthrop had placed
his Scarlet Car, and, as its chauffeur, himself.
Not that Winthrop greatly cared for Reform or Ernest Peabody. The
“whirlwind” part of the campaign was what attracted him; the crowds, the
bands, the fireworks, the rush by night from hall to hall, from Fordham
to Tompkinsville. And while, inside the different Lyceums, Peabody
lashed the Tammany Tiger, outside, in his car, Winthrop was making
friends with Tammany policemen, and his natural enemies, the bicycle
cops. To Winthrop, the day in which he did not increase his acquaintance
with the traffic squad was a day lost.
But the real reason for his efforts in the cause of Reform was one he
could not declare. And it was a reason that was guessed perhaps by only
one person. On some nights Beatrice Forbes and her brother Sam
accompanied Peabody. And while Peabody sat in the rear of the car,
mumbling the speech he would next deliver, Winthrop was given the chance
to talk with her. These chances were growing cruelly few. In one month
after election day Miss Forbes and Peabody would be man and wife. Once
before the day of their marriage had been fixed, but, when the Reform
Party offered Peabody a high place on its ticket, he asked, in order
that he might bear his part in the cause of reform, that the wedding be
postponed. To the postponement Miss Forbes made no objection. To one
less self-centred than Peabody, it might have appeared that she almost
too readily consented.
“I knew I could count upon your seeing my duty as I saw it,” said
Peabody, much pleased; “it always will be a satisfaction to both of us
to remember you never stood between me and my work for reform.”
“What do you think my brother-in-law-to-be has done now?” demanded Sam
of Winthrop, as the Scarlet Car swept into Jerome Avenue. “He’s
postponed his marriage with Trix just because he has a chance to be
Lieutenant-Governor. What is a Lieutenant-Governor anyway, do you know?
I don’t like to ask Peabody.”
“It’s not his own election he’s working for,” said Winthrop. He was
conscious of an effort to assume a point of view both noble and
magnanimous. “He probably feels the ‘cause’ calls him. But, good
Heavens!”
“Look out!” shrieked Sam; “where are you going?”
Winthrop swung the car back into the avenue.
“To think,” he cried, “that a man who could marry—a girl, and then would
ask her to wait two months. Or two days! Two months lost out of his
life, and she might die; he might lose her; she might change her mind.
Any number of men can be Lieutenant-Governors; only one man can be——”
He broke off suddenly, coughed, and fixed his eyes miserably on the
road. After a brief pause, Brother Sam covertly looked at him. Could it
be that “Billie” Winthrop, the man liked of all men, should love his
sister, and that she should prefer Ernest Peabody? He was deeply,
loyally indignant. He determined to demand of his sister an immediate
and abject apology.
At eight o’clock on the morning of election day, Peabody, in the Scarlet
Car, was on his way to vote. He lived at Riverside Drive, and the
polling-booth was only a few blocks distant. During the rest of the day
he intended to use the car to visit other election districts, and to
keep him in touch with the Reformers at the Gilsey House. Winthrop was
acting as his chauffeur, and in the rear seat was Miss Forbes. Peabody
had asked her to accompany him to the polling-booth, because he thought
women who believed in reform should show their interest in it in public,
before all men. Miss Forbes disagreed with him, chiefly because whenever
she sat in a box at any of the public meetings the artists from the
newspapers, instead of immortalizing the candidate, made pictures of her
and her hat. After she had seen her future lord and master cast his vote
for reform and himself, she was to depart by train to Tarrytown. The
Forbes’s country place was there, and for election day her brother Sam
had invited out some of his friends to play tennis.
As the car darted and dodged up Eighth Avenue, a man who had been hidden
by the stairs to the Elevated, stepped in front of it. It caught him,
and hurled him, like a mail-bag tossed from a train, against one of the
pillars that support the overhead tracks. Winthrop gave a cry and fell
upon the brakes. The cry was as full of pain as though he himself had
been mangled. Miss Forbes saw only the man appear, and then disappear,
but Winthrop’s shout of warning, and the wrench as the brakes locked,
told her what had happened. She shut her eyes, and for an instant
covered them with her hands. On the front seat Peabody clutched
helplessly at the cushions. In horror his eyes were fastened on the
motionless mass jammed against the pillar. Winthrop scrambled over him,
and ran to where the man lay. So, apparently, did every other inhabitant
of Eighth Avenue; but Winthrop was the first to reach him, and kneeling
in the car tracks, he tried to place the head and shoulders of the body
against the iron pillar. He had seen very few dead men; and to him, this
weight in his arms, this bundle of limp flesh and muddy clothes, and the
purple-bloated face with blood trickling down it, looked like a dead
man.
Once or twice when in his car Death had reached for Winthrop, and only
by the scantiest grace had he escaped. Then the nearness of it had only
sobered him. Now that he believed he had brought it to a fellow man,
even though he knew he was in no degree to blame, the thought sickened
and shocked him. His brain trembled with remorse and horror.
But voices assailing him on every side brought him to the necessity of
the moment. Men were pressing close upon him, jostling, abusing him,
shaking fists in his face. Another crowd of men, as though fearing the
car would escape of its own volition, were clinging to the steps and
running boards.
Winthrop saw Miss Forbes standing above them, talking eagerly to
Peabody, and pointing at him. He heard children’s shrill voices calling
to new arrivals that an automobile had killed a man; that it had killed
him on purpose. On the outer edge of the crowd men shouted: “Ah, soak
him!” “Kill him!” “Lynch him!”
A soiled giant without a collar stooped over the purple, blood-stained
face, and then leaped upright, and shouted: “It’s Jerry Gaylor, he’s
killed old man Gaylor.”
The response was instant. Every one seemed to know Jerry Gaylor.
Winthrop took the soiled person by the arm.
“You help me lift him into my car,” he ordered. “Take him by the
shoulders. We must get him to a hospital.”
“To a hospital? To the Morgue!” roared the man. “And the police station
for yours. You don’t do no get-away.”
Winthrop answered him by turning to the crowd. “If this man has any
friends here, they’ll please help me put him in my car, and we’ll take
him to Roosevelt Hospital.”
The soiled person shoved a fist and a bad cigar under Winthrop’s nose.
“Has he got any friends?” he mocked. “Sure, he’s got friends, and
they’ll fix you, all right.”
“Sure!” echoed the crowd.
The man was encouraged.
“Don’t you go away thinking you can come up here with your buzz wagon
and murder better men nor you’ll ever be and——”
“Oh, shut up!” said Winthrop.
He turned his back on the soiled man, and again appealed to the crowd.
“Don’t stand there doing nothing,” he commanded. “Do you want this man
to die? Some of you ring for an ambulance and get a policeman, or tell
me where is the nearest drug store.”
No one moved, but every one shouted to every one else to do as Winthrop
suggested.
Winthrop felt something pulling at his sleeve, and turning, found
Peabody at his shoulder, peering fearfully at the figure in the street.
He had drawn his cap over his eyes and hidden the lower part of his face
in the high collar of his motor coat.
“I can’t do anything, can I?” he asked.
“I’m afraid not,” whispered Winthrop. “Go back to the car and don’t
leave Beatrice. I’ll attend to this.”
“That’s what I thought,” whispered Peabody eagerly. “I thought she and I
had better keep out of it.”
“Right!” exclaimed Winthrop. “Go back and get Beatrice away.”
Peabody looked his relief, but still hesitated.
“I can’t do anything, as you say,” he stammered, “and it’s sure to get
in the ‘extras,’ and they’ll be out in time to lose us thousands of
votes, and though no one is to blame, they’re sure to blame me. I don’t
care about myself,” he added eagerly, “but the very morning of
election—half the city has not voted yet—the Ticket——”
“Damn the Ticket!” exclaimed Winthrop. “The man’s dead!”
Peabody, burying his face still deeper in his collar, backed into the
crowd. In the present and past campaigns, from carts and automobiles he
had made many speeches in Harlem, and on the West Side lithographs of
his stern, resolute features hung in every delicatessen shop, and that
he might be recognized was extremely likely.
He whispered to Miss Forbes what he had said, and what Winthrop had
said.
“But you _don’t_ mean to leave him,” remarked Miss Forbes.
“I must,” returned Peabody. “I can do nothing for the man, and you know
how Tammany will use this. They’ll have it on the street by ten. They’ll
say I was driving recklessly; without regard for human life. And,
besides, they’re waiting for me at head-quarters. Please hurry. I am
late now.”
Miss Forbes gave an exclamation of surprise.
“Why, I’m not going,” she said.
“You must go! _I_ must go. You can’t remain here alone.”
Peabody spoke in the quick, assured tone that at the first had convinced
Miss Forbes his was a most masterful manner.
“Winthrop, too,” he added, “wants you to go away.”
Miss Forbes made no reply. But she looked at Peabody inquiringly,
steadily, as though she were puzzled as to his identity, as though he
had just been introduced to her. It made him uncomfortable.
“Are you coming?” he asked.
Her answer was a question.
“Are you going?”
“I am!” returned Peabody. He added sharply: “I must.”
“Good-by,” said Miss Forbes.
As he ran up the steps to the station of the Elevated, it seemed to
Peabody that the tone of her “good-by” had been most unpleasant. It was
severe, disapproving. It had a final, fateful sound. He was conscious of
a feeling of self-dissatisfaction. In not seeing the political
importance of his not being mixed up with this accident, Winthrop had
been peculiarly obtuse, and Beatrice, unsympathetic.
Until he had cast his vote for Reform, he felt distinctly ill-used.
For a moment Beatrice Forbes sat in the car motionless, staring
unseeingly at the iron steps by which Peabody had disappeared. For a few
moments her brows were tightly drawn. Then, having apparently quickly
arrived at some conclusion, she opened the door of the car and pushed
into the crowd.
Winthrop received her most rudely.
“You mustn’t come here!” he cried.
“I thought,” she stammered, “you might want some one?”
“I told—” began Winthrop, and then stopped, and added—“to take you away.
Where is he?”
Miss Forbes flushed slightly.
“He’s gone,” she said.
In trying not to look at Winthrop, she saw the fallen figure, motionless
against the pillar, and with an exclamation, bent fearfully toward it.
“Can I do anything?” she asked.
The crowd gave way for her, and with curious pleased faces, closed in
again eagerly. She afforded them a new interest.
A young man in the uniform of an ambulance surgeon was kneeling beside
the mud-stained figure, and a police officer was standing over both. The
ambulance surgeon touched lightly the matted hair from which the blood
escaped, stuck his finger in the eye of the prostrate man, and then with
his open hand slapped him across the face.
“Oh!” gasped Miss Forbes.
The young doctor heard her, and looking up, scowled reprovingly. Seeing
she was a rarely beautiful young woman, he scowled less severely; and
then deliberately and expertly, again slapped Mr. Jerry Gaylor on the
cheek. He watched the white mark made by his hand upon the purple skin,
until the blood struggled slowly back to it, and then rose.
He ignored every one but the police officer.
“There’s nothing the matter with _him_,” he said. “He’s dead drunk.”
The words came to Winthrop with such abrupt relief, bearing so
tremendous a burden of gratitude, that his heart seemed to fail him. In
his suddenly regained happiness, he unconsciously laughed.
“Are you sure?” he asked eagerly. “I thought I’d killed him.”
The surgeon looked at Winthrop coldly.
“When they’re like that,” he explained with authority, “you can’t hurt
’em if you throw them off _The Times_ Building.”
He condescended to recognize the crowd. “You know where this man lives?”
Voices answered that Mr. Gaylor lived at the corner, over the saloon.
The voices showed a lack of sympathy. Old man Gaylor dead was a novelty;
old man Gaylor drunk was not.
The doctor’s prescription was simple and direct.
“Put him to bed till he sleeps it off,” he ordered; he swung himself to
the step of the ambulance. “Let him out, Steve,” he called. There was
the clang of a gong and the rattle of galloping hoofs.
The police officer approached Winthrop. “They tell me Jerry stepped in
front of your car; that you wasn’t to blame. I’ll get their names and
where they live. Jerry might try to hold you up for damages.”
“Thank you very much,” said Winthrop.
With several of Jerry’s friends, and the soiled person, who now seemed
dissatisfied that Jerry was alive, Winthrop helped to carry him up one
flight of stairs and drop him upon a bed.
“In case he needs anything,” said Winthrop, and gave several bills to
the soiled person, upon whom immediately Gaylor’s other friends closed
in. “And I’ll send my own doctor at once to attend to him.”
“You’d better,” said the soiled person morosely, “or he’ll try to shake
you down.”
The opinions as to what might be Mr. Gaylor’s next move seemed
unanimous.
From the saloon below, Winthrop telephoned to the family doctor, and
then rejoined Miss Forbes and the police officer. The officer gave him
the names of those citizens who had witnessed the accident, and in
return received Winthrop’s card.
“Not that it will go any further,” said the officer reassuringly.
“They’re all saying you acted all right and wanted to take him to
Roosevelt. There’s many,” he added with sententious indignation, “that
knock a man down, and then run away without waiting to find out if
they’ve hurted ’em or killed ’em.”
The speech for both Winthrop and Miss Forbes was equally embarrassing.
“You don’t say?” exclaimed Winthrop nervously. He shook the policeman’s
hand. The handclasp was apparently satisfactory to that official, for he
murmured “Thank you,” and stuck something in the lining of his helmet.
“Now, then!” Winthrop said briskly to Miss Forbes, “I think we have done
all we can. And we’ll get away from this place a little faster than the
law allows.”
Miss Forbes had seated herself in the car, and Winthrop was cranking up,
when the same policeman, wearing an anxious countenance, touched him on
the arm. “There is a gentleman here,” he said, “wants to speak to you.”
He placed himself between the gentleman and Winthrop and whispered:
“He’s ‘Izzy’ Schwab, he’s a Harlem police-court lawyer and a Tammany
man. He’s after something, look out for him.”
Winthrop saw, smiling at him ingratiatingly, a slight, slim youth, with
beady, rat-like eyes, a low forehead, and a Hebraic nose. He wondered
how it had been possible for Jerry Gaylor to so quickly secure counsel.
But Mr. Schwab at once undeceived him.
“I’m from _The Journal_,” he began, “not regular on the staff, but I
send ’em Harlem items, and the court reporter treats me nice, see! Now
about this accident; could you give me the name of the young lady?”
He smiled encouragingly at Miss Forbes.
“I could not!” growled Winthrop. “The man wasn’t hurt, the policeman
will tell you so. It is not of the least public interest.”
With a deprecatory shrug, the young man smiled knowingly.
“Well, mebbe not the lady’s name,” he granted, “but the name of the
_other_ gentleman who was with you, when the accident occurred.” His
black, rat-like eyes snapped. “I think _his_ name would be of public
interest.”
To gain time Winthrop stepped into the driver’s seat. He looked at Mr.
Schwab steadily.
“There was no other gentleman,” he said. “Do you mean my chauffeur?” Mr.
Schwab gave an appreciative chuckle.
“No, I don’t mean your chauffeur,” he mimicked. “I mean,” he declared
theatrically in his best police-court manner, “the man who to-day is
hoping to beat Tammany, Ernest Peabody!”
Winthrop stared at the youth insolently.
“I don’t understand you,” he said.
“Oh, of course not!” jeered “Izzy” Schwab. He moved excitedly from foot
to foot. “Then who _was_ the other man,” he demanded, “the man who ran
away?”
Winthrop felt the blood rise to his face. That Miss Forbes should hear
this rat of a man sneering at the one she was to marry, made him hate
Peabody. But he answered easily:
“No one ran away. I told my chauffeur to go and call up an ambulance.
That was the man you saw.”
As when “leading on” a witness to commit himself, Mr. Schwab smiled
sympathetically.
“And he hasn’t got back yet,” he purred, “has he?”
“No, and I’m not going to wait for him,” returned Winthrop. He reached
for the clutch, but Mr. Schwab jumped directly in front of the car.
“Was he looking for a telephone when he ran up the Elevated steps?” he
cried.
He shook his fists vehemently.
“Oh, no, Mr. Winthrop, it won’t do—you make a good witness. I wouldn’t
ask for no better, but, you don’t fool ‘Izzy’ Schwab.”
“You’re mistaken, I tell you,” cried Winthrop desperately. “He may look
like—like this man you speak of, but no Peabody was in this car.”
“Izzy” Schwab wrung his hands hysterically.
“No, he wasn’t!” he cried, “because he run away! And left an old man in
the street—dead, for all he knowed—nor cared neither. Yah!” shrieked the
Tammany heeler. “_Him_ a Reformer, yah!”
“Stand away from my car,” shouted Winthrop, “or you’ll get hurt.”
“Yah, you’d like to, wouldn’t you?” returned Mr. Schwab, leaping nimbly
to one side. “What do you think _The Journal_ ’ll give me for that
story, hey? ‘Ernest Peabody, the Reformer, Kills an Old Man, AND RUNS
AWAY.’ And hiding his face, too! I seen him. What do you think that
story’s worth to Tammany, hey? It’s worth twenty thousand votes!” The
young man danced in front of the car triumphantly, mockingly, in a
frenzy of malice. “Read the extras, that’s all,” he taunted. “Read ’em
in an hour from now!”
Winthrop glared at the shrieking figure with fierce, impotent rage;
then, with a look of disgust, he flung the robe off his knees and rose.
Mr. Schwab, fearing bodily injury, backed precipitately behind the
policeman.
“Come here,” commanded Winthrop softly. Mr. Schwab warily approached.
“That story,” said Winthrop, dropping his voice to a low whisper, “is
worth a damn sight more to you than twenty thousand votes. You take a
spin with me up Riverside Drive where we can talk. Maybe you and I can
‘make a little business.’”
At the words, the face of Mr. Schwab first darkened angrily, and then
lit with such exultation that it appeared as though Winthrop’s efforts
had only placed Peabody deeper in Mr. Schwab’s power. But the rat-like
eyes wavered, there was doubt in them, and greed, and, when they turned
to observe if any one could have heard the offer, Winthrop felt the
trick was his. It was apparent that Mr. Schwab was willing to arbitrate.
He stepped gingerly into the front seat, and as Winthrop leaned over him
and tucked and buckled the fur robe around his knees, he could not
resist a glance at his friends on the sidewalk. They were grinning with
wonder and envy, and as the great car shook itself, and ran easily
forward, Mr. Schwab leaned back and carelessly waved his hand. But his
mind did not waver from the purpose of his ride. He was not one to be
cajoled with fur rugs and glittering brass.
“Well, Mr. Winthrop,” he began briskly. “You want to say something? You
must be quick—every minute’s money.”
“Wait till we’re out of the traffic,” begged Winthrop anxiously, “I
don’t want to run down any more old men, and I wouldn’t for the world
have anything happen to you, Mr.—” He paused politely.
“Schwab—Isadore Schwab.”
“How did you know _my_ name?” asked Winthrop.
“The card you gave the police officer.”
“I see,” said Winthrop. They were silent while the car swept swiftly
west, and Mr. Schwab kept thinking that for a young man who was afraid
of the traffic, Winthrop was dodging the motor cars, beer vans, and iron
pillars, with a dexterity that was criminally reckless.
At that hour Riverside Drive was empty, and after a gasp of relief, Mr.
Schwab resumed the attack.
“Now, then,” he said sharply, “don’t go any further. What is this you
want to talk about?”
“How much will _The Journal_ give you for this story of yours?” asked
Winthrop.
Mr. Schwab smiled mysteriously.
“Why?” he asked.
“Because,” said Winthrop, “I think I could offer you something better.”
“You mean,” said the police-court lawyer cautiously, “you will make it
worth my while not to tell the truth about what I saw?”
“Exactly,” said Winthrop.
“That’s all! Stop the car,” cried Mr. Schwab. His manner was commanding.
It vibrated with triumph. His eyes glistened with wicked satisfaction.
“Stop the car?” demanded Winthrop, “what do you mean?”
“I mean,” said Mr. Schwab dramatically, “that I’ve got you where I want
you, thank you. You have killed Peabody dead as a cigar butt! Now I can
tell them how his friends tried to bribe me. Why do you think I came in
your car? For what money _you_ got? Do you think you can stack up your
roll against the _New York Journal’s_, or against Tammany’s?” His shrill
voice rose exultantly. “Why, Tammany ought to make me judge for this!
Now, let me down here,” he commanded, “and next time, don’t think you
can take on ‘Izzy’ Schwab and get away with it.”
They were passing Grant’s Tomb, and the car was moving at a speed that
Mr. Schwab recognized was in excess of the speed limit.
“Do you hear me?” he demanded, “let me down!”
To his dismay Winthrop’s answer was in some fashion to so juggle with
the shining brass rods that the car flew into greater speed. To “Izzy”
Schwab it seemed to scorn the earth, to proceed by leaps and jumps. But,
what added even more to his mental discomfiture was, that Winthrop
should turn, and slowly and familiarly wink at him.
As through the window of an express train, Mr. Schwab saw the white
front of Claremont, and beyond it the broad sweep of the Hudson. And
then, without decreasing its speed, the car like a great bird swept down
a hill, shot under a bridge, and into a partly paved street. Mr. Schwab
already was two miles from his own bailiwick. His surroundings were
unfamiliar. On the one hand were newly erected, untenanted flat houses
with the paint still on the window panes, and on the other side,
detached villas, a roadhouse, an orphan asylum, a glimpse of the Hudson.
“Let me out,” yelled Mr. Schwab, “what you trying to do? Do you think a
few blocks’ll make any difference to a telephone? You think you’re
damned smart, don’t you? But you won’t feel so fresh when I get on the
long distance. You let me down,” he threatened, “or, I’ll——”
With a sickening skidding of wheels, Winthrop whirled the car round a
corner and into the Lafayette Boulevard, that for miles runs along the
cliff of the Hudson.
“Yes,” asked Winthrop, “_what_ will you do?” On one side was a high
steep bank, on the other many trees, and through them below, the river.
But there were no houses, and at half-past eight in the morning those
who later drive upon the boulevard were still in bed.
“_What_ will you do?” repeated Winthrop.
Miss Forbes, apparently as much interested in Mr. Schwab’s answer as
Winthrop, leaned forward. Winthrop raised his voice above the whir of
flying wheels, the rushing wind, and scattering pebbles.
“I asked you into this car,” he shouted, “because I meant to keep you in
it until I had you where you couldn’t do any mischief. I told you I’d
give you something better than _The Journal_ I would give you, and I am
going to give you a happy day in the country. We’re now on our way to
this lady’s house. You are my guest, and you can play golf, and bridge,
and the piano, and eat and drink until the polls close, and after that
you can go to the devil. If you jump out at this speed, you will break
your neck. And if I have to slow up for anything, and you try to get
away, I’ll go after you—it doesn’t matter where it is—and break every
bone in your body.”
“Yah! you can’t!” shrieked Mr. Schwab. “You can’t do it!” The madness of
the flying engines had got upon his nerves. Their poison was surging in
his veins. He knew he had only to touch his elbow against the elbow of
Winthrop, and he could throw the three of them into eternity. He was
travelling on air, uplifted, defiant, carried beyond himself.
“I can’t do what?” asked Winthrop.
The words reached Schwab from an immeasurable distance, as from another
planet, a calm, humdrum planet on which events moved in commonplace,
orderly array. Without a jar, with no transition stage, instead of
hurtling through space, Mr. Schwab found himself luxuriously seated in a
cushioned chair, motionless, at the side of a steep bank. For a mile
before him stretched an empty road. And beside him in the car, with arms
folded calmly on the wheel, there glared at him a grim, alert young man.
“I can’t do what?” growled the young man.
A feeling of great loneliness fell upon “Izzy” Schwab. Where were now
those officers, who in the police courts were at his beck and call?
Where the numbered houses, the passing surface cars, the sweating
multitudes of Eighth Avenue? In all the world he was alone, alone on an
empty country road, with a grim, alert young man.
“When I asked you how you knew my name,” said the young man, “I thought
you knew me as having won some races in Florida last winter. This is the
car that won. I thought maybe you might have heard of me when I was
captain of a football team at—a university. If you have any idea that
you can jump from this car and not be killed, or that I cannot pound you
into a pulp, let me prove to you you’re wrong—now. We’re quite alone. Do
you wish to get down?”
“No,” shrieked Schwab, “I won’t!” He turned appealingly to the young
lady. “You’re a witness,” he cried. “If he assaults me, he’s liable. I
haven’t done nothing.”
“We’re near Yonkers,” said the young man, “and if you try to take
advantage of my having to go slow through the town, you know now what
will happen to you.”
Mr. Schwab having instantly planned, on reaching Yonkers, to leap from
the car into the arms of the village constable, with suspicious alacrity
assented. The young man regarded him doubtfully.
“I’m afraid I’ll have to show you,” said the young man. He laid two
fingers on Mr. Schwab’s wrist; looking at him, as he did so, steadily
and thoughtfully, like a physician feeling a pulse. Mr. Schwab screamed.
When he had seen policemen twist steel nippers on the wrists of
prisoners, he had thought, when the prisoners shrieked and writhed, they
were acting. He now knew they were not.
“Now, will you promise?” demanded the grim young man.
“Yes,” gasped Mr. Schwab. “I’ll sit still. I won’t do nothing.”
“Good,” muttered Winthrop.
A troubled voice that carried to the heart of Schwab a promise of
protection, said: “Mr. Schwab, would you be more comfortable back here
with me?”
Mr. Schwab turned two terrified eyes in the direction of the voice. He
saw the beautiful young lady regarding him kindly, compassionately; with
just a suspicion of a smile. Mr. Schwab instantly scrambled to safety
over the front seat into the body of the car. Miss Forbes made way for
the prisoner beside her and he sank back with a nervous, apologetic
sigh. The alert young man was quick to follow the lead of the lady.
“You’ll find caps and goggles in the boot, Schwab,” he said hospitably.
“You had better put them on. We are going rather fast now.” He extended
a magnificent case of pigskin, that bloomed with fat black cigars. “Try
one of these,” said the hospitable young man. The emotions that swept
Mr. Schwab he found difficult to pursue, but he raised his hat to the
lady. “May I, Miss?” he said.
“Certainly,” said the lady.
There was a moment of delay while with fingers that slightly trembled,
Mr. Schwab selected an amazing green cap and lit his cigar; and then the
car swept forward, singing and humming happily, and scattering the
autumn leaves. The young lady leaned toward him with a book in a leather
cover. She placed her finger on a twisting red line that trickled
through a page of type.
“We’re just here,” said the young lady, “and we ought to reach home,
which is just about there, in an hour.”
“I see,” said Schwab. But all he saw was a finger in a white glove, and
long eyelashes tangled in a gray veil.
For many minutes or, for all Schwab knew, for many miles, the young lady
pointed out to him the places along the Hudson, of which he had read in
the public school history, and quaint old manor houses set in glorious
lawns; and told him who lived in them. Schwab knew the names as
belonging to down-town streets, and up-town clubs. He became nervously
humble, intensely polite, he felt he was being carried as an honored
guest into the very heart of the Four Hundred, and when the car jogged
slowly down the main street of Yonkers, although a policeman stood idly
within a yard of him, instead of shrieking to him for help, “Izzy”
Schwab looked at him scornfully across the social gulf that separated
them, with all the intolerance he believed becoming in the upper
classes.
“Those bicycle cops,” he said confidentially to Miss Forbes, “are too
chesty.”
The car turned in between stone pillars, and under an arch of red and
golden leaves, and swept up a long avenue to a house of innumerable
roofs. It was the grandest house Mr. Schwab had ever entered, and when
two young men in striped waistcoats and many brass buttons ran down the
stone steps and threw open the door of the car, his heart fluttered
between fear and pleasure.
Lounging before an open fire in the hall were a number of young men, who
welcomed Winthrop delightedly, and to all of whom Mr. Schwab was
formally presented. As he was introduced he held each by the hand and
elbow and said impressively, and much to the other’s embarrassment,
“_What_ name, please?”
Then one of the servants conducted him to a room opening on the hall,
from whence he heard stifled exclamations and laughter, and some one
saying “Hush.” But “Izzy” Schwab did not care. The slave in brass
buttons was proffering him ivory-backed hair-brushes, and obsequiously
removing the dust from his coat collar. Mr. Schwab explained to him that
he was not dressed for automobiling, as Mr. Winthrop had invited him
quite informally. The man was most charmingly sympathetic. And when he
returned to the hall every one received him with the most genial,
friendly interest. Would he play golf, or tennis, or pool, or walk over
the farm, or just look on? It seemed the wish of each to be his escort.
Never had he been so popular.
He said he would “just look on.” And so, during the last and decisive
day of the “whirlwind” campaign, while in Eighth Avenue voters were
being challenged, beaten, and bribed, bonfires were burning, and
“extras” were appearing every half-hour, “Izzy” Schwab, the Tammany
henchman, with a secret worth twenty thousand votes, sat a prisoner, in
a wicker chair, with a drink and a cigar, guarded by four young men in
flannels, who played tennis violently at five dollars a corner.
It was always a great day in the life of “Izzy” Schwab. After a
luncheon, which, as he later informed his friends, could not have cost
less than “two dollars a plate and drink all you like,” Sam Forbes took
him on at pool. Mr. Schwab had learned the game in the cellars of Eighth
Avenue at two and a half cents a cue, and now, even in Columbus Circle
he was a star. So, before the sun had set Mr. Forbes, who at pool rather
fancied himself, was seventy-five dollars poorer, and Mr. Schwab just
that much to the good. Then there followed a strange ceremony called
tea, or, if you preferred it, whiskey and soda; and the tall footman
bent before him with huge silver salvers laden down with flickering
silver lamps, and bubbling soda bottles, and cigars, and cigarettes.
“You could have filled your pockets with twenty-five cent Havanas, and
nobody would have said nothing!” declared Mr. Schwab, and his friends,
who never had enjoyed his chance to study at such close quarters the
truly rich, nodded enviously.
At six o’clock Mr. Schwab led Winthrop into the big library and asked
for his ticket of leave.
“They’ll be counting the votes soon,” he begged. “I can’t do no harm
now, and I don’t mean to. I didn’t see nothing, and I won’t say nothing.
But it’s election night, and—and I just _got_ to be on Broadway.”
“Right,” said Winthrop, “I’ll have a car take you in, and if you will
accept this small check——”
“No!” roared “Izzy” Schwab. Afterward he wondered how he came to do it.
“You’ve give me a good time, Mr. Winthrop. You’ve treated me fine, all
the gentlemen have treated me nice. I’m not a blackmailer, Mr.
Winthrop.” Mr. Schwab’s voice shook slightly.
“Nonsense, Schwab, you didn’t let me finish,” said Winthrop, “I’m likely
to need a lawyer any time; this is a retaining fee. Suppose I exceed the
speed limit—I’m liable to do that——”
“You bet you are!” exclaimed Mr. Schwab violently.
“Well, then, I’ll send for _you_, and there isn’t a police magistrate,
nor any of the traffic squad, you can’t handle, is there?”
Mr. Schwab flushed with pleasure.
“You can count on me,” he vowed, “and your friends, too, and the
ladies,” he added gallantly. “If ever the ladies want to get bail, tell
’em to telephone for ‘Izzy’ Schwab. Of course,” he said reluctantly, “if
it’s a retaining fee——”
But when he read the face of the check he exclaimed in protest: “But,
Mr. Winthrop, this is more than _The Journal_ would have give me!”
They put him in a car belonging to one of the other men, and all came
out on the steps to wave him “good-by,” and he drove magnificently into
his own district, where there were over a dozen men who swore he tipped
the French chauffeur a five-dollar bill “just like it was a cigarette.”
All of election day since her arrival in Winthrop’s car Miss Forbes had
kept to herself. In the morning, when the other young people were out of
doors, she remained in her room, and after luncheon, when they gathered
round the billiard table, she sent for her cart and drove off alone. The
others thought she was concerned over the possible result of the
election, and did not want to disturb them by her anxiety. Winthrop,
thinking the presence of Schwab embarrassed her, recalling as it did
Peabody’s unfortunate conduct of the morning, blamed himself for
bringing Schwab to the house. But he need not have distressed himself.
Miss Forbes was thinking neither of Schwab nor Peabody, nor was she
worried or embarrassed. On the contrary, she was completely happy.
When that morning she had seen Peabody running up the steps of the
Elevated, all the doubts, the troubles, questions, and misgivings that
night and day for the last three months had upset her, fell from her
shoulders like the pilgrim’s heavy pack. For months she had been telling
herself that the unrest she felt when with Peabody was due to her not
being able to appreciate the importance of those big affairs in which he
was so interested; in which he was so admirable a figure. She had, as
she supposed, loved him, because he was earnest, masterful, intent of
purpose. His had seemed a fine character. When she had compared him with
the amusing boys of her own age, the easy-going joking youths to whom
the betterment of New York was of no concern, she had been proud in her
choice. She was glad Peabody was ambitious. She was ambitious for him.
She was glad to have him consult her on those questions of local
government, to listen to his fierce, contemptuous abuse of Tammany. And
yet early in their engagement she had missed something, something she
had never known, but which she felt sure should exist. Whether she had
seen it in the lives of others, or read of it in romances, or whether it
was there because it was nature to desire to be loved, she did not know.
But long before Winthrop returned from his trip round the world, in her
meetings with the man she was to marry, she had begun to find that there
was something lacking. And Winthrop had shown her that this something
lacking was the one thing needful. When Winthrop had gone abroad he was
only one of her brother’s several charming friends. One of the amusing
merry youths who came and went in the house as freely as Sam himself.
Now, after two years’ absence, he refused to be placed in that category.
He rebelled on the first night of his return. As she came down to the
dinner of welcome her brother was giving Winthrop, he stared at her as
though she were a ghost, and said, so solemnly that every one in the
room, even Peabody, smiled: “Now I know why I came home.” That he
refused to recognize her engagement to Peabody, that on every occasion
he told her, or by some act showed her, he loved her; that he swore she
should never marry any one but himself, and that he would never marry
any one but her, did not at first, except to annoy, in any way impress
her.
But he showed her what in her intercourse with Peabody was lacking. At
first she wished Peabody could find time to be as fond of her, as
foolishly fond of her, as was Winthrop. But she realized that this was
unreasonable. Winthrop was just a hot-headed impressionable boy, Peabody
was a man doing a man’s work. And then she found that week after week
she became more difficult to please. Other things in which she wished
Peabody might be more like Winthrop, obtruded themselves. Little things
which she was ashamed to notice, but which rankled; and big things, such
as consideration for others, and a sense of humor, and not talking of
himself. Since this campaign began, at times she had felt that if
Peabody said “I” once again, she must scream. She assured herself she
was as yet unworthy of him, that her intelligence was weak, that as she
grew older and so better able to understand serious affairs, such as the
importance of having an honest man at Albany as Lieutenant-Governor,
they would become more in sympathy. And now, at a stroke, the whole
fabric of self-deception fell from her. It was not that she saw Peabody
so differently, but that she saw herself and her own heart, and where it
lay. And she knew that “Billy” Winthrop, gentle, joking, selfish only in
his love for her, held it in his two strong hands.
For the moment, when as she sat in the car deserted by Peabody this
truth flashed upon her, she forgot the man lying injured in the street,
the unscrubbed mob crowding about her. She was conscious only that a
great weight had been lifted. That her blood was flowing again, leaping,
beating, dancing through her body. It seemed as though she could not too
quickly tell Winthrop. For both of them she had lost out of their lives
many days. She had risked losing him for always. Her only thought was to
make up to him and to herself the wasted time. But throughout the day
the one-time welcome, but now intruding, friends and the innumerable
conventions of hospitality required her to smile and show an interest,
when her heart and mind were crying out the one great fact.
It was after dinner, and the members of the house party were scattered
between the billiard-room and the piano. Sam Forbes returned from the
telephone.
“Tammany,” he announced, “concedes the election of Jerome by forty
thousand votes, and that he carries his ticket with him. Ernest Peabody
is elected his Lieutenant-Governor by a thousand votes. Ernest,” he
added, “seems to have had a close call.” There was a tremendous chorus
of congratulations in the cause of Reform. They drank the health of
Peabody. Peabody himself, on the telephone, informed Sam Forbes that a
conference of the leaders would prevent his being present with them that
evening. The enthusiasm for Reform perceptibly increased.
An hour later Winthrop came over to Beatrice and held out his hand. “I’m
going to slip away,” he said. “Good-night.”
“Going away!” exclaimed Beatrice.
Her voice showed such apparently acute concern that Winthrop wondered
how the best of women could be so deceitful, even to be polite.
“I promised some men,” he stammered, “to drive them down-town to see the
crowds.”
Beatrice shook her head.
“It’s far too late for that,” she said. “Tell me the real reason.”
Winthrop turned away his eyes.
“Oh! the real reason,” he said gravely, “is the same old reason, the one
I’m not allowed to talk about. It’s cruelly hard when I don’t see you,”
he went on, slowly dragging out the words, “but it’s harder when I do;
so I’m going to say ‘good-night’ and run into town.”
He stood for a moment staring moodily at the floor, and then dropped
into a chair beside her.
“And, I believe, I’ve not told you,” he went on, “that on Wednesday I’m
running away for good, that is, for a year or two. I’ve made all the
fight I can and I lose, and there is no use in my staying on here
to—well—to suffer, that is the plain English of it. So,” he continued
briskly, “I won’t be here for the ceremony, and this is ‘good-by’ as
well as ‘good-night.’”
“Where are you going for a year?” asked Miss Forbes.
Her voice now showed no concern. It even sounded as though she did not
take his news seriously, as though as to his movements she was possessed
of a knowledge superior to his own. He tried to speak in matter-of-fact
tones.
“To Uganda!” he said.
“To Uganda?” repeated Miss Forbes. “Where is Uganda?”
“It is in East Africa; I had bad luck there last trip, but now I know
the country better, and I ought to get some good shooting.”
Miss Forbes appeared indifferently incredulous. In her eyes there was a
look of radiant happiness. It rendered them bewilderingly beautiful.
“On Wednesday,” she said. “Won’t you come and see us again before you
sail for Uganda?”
Winthrop hesitated.
“I’ll stop in and say ‘good-by’ to your mother if she’s in town, and to
thank her. She’s been awfully good to me. But you—I really would rather
not see you again. You understand, or rather, you don’t understand,
and,” he added vehemently, “you never will understand.” He stood looking
down at her miserably.
On the driveway outside there was a crunching on the gravel of heavy
wheels and an aurora-borealis of lights.
“There’s your car,” said Miss Forbes. “I’ll go out and see you off.”
“You’re very good,” muttered Winthrop. He could not understand. This
parting from her was the great moment in his life, and although she must
know that, she seemed to be making it unnecessarily hard for him. He had
told her he was going to a place very far away, to be gone a long time,
and she spoke of saying “good-by” to him as pleasantly as though it was
his intention to return from Uganda for breakfast.
Instead of walking through the hall where the others were gathered, she
led him out through one of the French windows upon the terrace, and
along it to the steps. When she saw the chauffeur standing by the car,
she stopped.
“I thought you were going alone,” she said.
“I am,” answered Winthrop. “It’s not Fred; that’s Sam’s chauffeur; he
only brought the car around.”
The man handed Winthrop his coat and cap, and left them, and Winthrop
seated himself at the wheel. She stood above him on the top step. In the
evening gown of lace and silver she looked a part of the moonlight
night. For each of them the moment had arrived. Like a swimmer standing
on the bank gathering courage for the plunge, Miss Forbes gave a
trembling, shivering sigh.
“You’re cold,” said Winthrop, gently. “You must go in. Good-by.”
“It isn’t that,” said the girl. “Have you an extra coat?”
“It isn’t cold enough for——”
“I meant for me,” stammered the girl in a frightened voice. “I thought
perhaps you would take me a little way, and bring me back.”
At first the young man did not answer, but sat staring in front of him,
then, he said simply:
“It’s awfully good of you, Beatrice. I won’t forget it.”
It was a wonderful autumn night, moonlight, cold, clear and brilliant.
She stepped in beside him and wrapped herself in one of his greatcoats.
They started swiftly down the avenue of trees.
“No, not fast,” begged the girl, “I want to talk to you.”
The car checked and rolled forward smoothly, sometimes in deep shadow,
sometimes in the soft silver glamour of the moon; beneath them the
fallen leaves crackled and rustled under the slow moving wheels. At the
highway Winthrop hesitated. It lay before them arched with great and
ancient elms; below, the Hudson glittered and rippled in the moonlight.
“Which way do you want to go?” said Winthrop.
His voice was very grateful, very humble.
The girl did not answer.
There was a long, long pause.
Then he turned and looked at her and saw her smiling at him with that
light in her eyes that never was on land or sea.
“To Uganda,” said the girl.
THE PRINCESS ALINE
I
H. R. H. the Princess Aline of Hohenwald came into the life of Morton
Carlton—or “Morney” Carlton, as men called him—of New York City, when
that young gentleman’s affairs and affections were best suited to
receive her. Had she made her appearance three years sooner or three
years later, it is quite probable that she would have passed on out of
his life with no more recognition from him than would have been
expressed in a look of admiring curiosity.
But coming when she did, when his time and heart were both unoccupied,
she had an influence upon young Mr. Carlton which led him into doing
several wise and many foolish things, and which remained with him
always. Carlton had reached a point in his life, and very early in his
life, when he could afford to sit at ease and look back with modest
satisfaction to what he had forced himself to do, and forward with
pleasurable anticipations to whatsoever he might choose to do in the
future. The world had appreciated what he had done, and had put much to
his credit, and he was prepared to draw upon this grandly.
At the age of twenty he had found himself his own master, with excellent
family connections, but with no family, his only relative being a
bachelor uncle, who looked at life from the point of view of the Union
Club’s windows, and who objected to his nephew’s leaving Harvard to take
up the study of art in Paris. In that city (where at Julian’s he was
nicknamed the Junior Carlton, for the obvious reason that he was the
older of the two Carltons in the class, and because he was well-dressed)
he had shown himself a harder worker than others who were less careful
of their appearance and of their manners. His work, of which he did not
talk, and his ambitions, of which he also did not talk, bore fruit
early, and at twenty-six he had become a portrait-painter of
international reputation. Then the French government purchased one of
his paintings at an absurdly small figure, and placed it in the
Luxembourg, from whence it would in time depart to be buried in the hall
of some provincial city; and American millionaires, and English Lord
Mayors, members of Parliament, and members of the Institute, masters of
hounds in pink coats, and ambassadors in gold lace, and beautiful women
of all nationalities and conditions sat before his easel. And so when he
returned to New York he was welcomed with an enthusiasm which showed
that his countrymen had feared that the artistic atmosphere of the Old
World had stolen him from them forever. He was particularly silent, even
at this date, about his work, and listened to what others had to say of
it with much awe, not unmixed with some amusement, that it should be he
who was capable of producing anything worthy of such praise. We have
been told what the mother duck felt when her ugly duckling turned into a
swan, but we have never considered how much the ugly duckling must have
marvelled also.
“Carlton is probably the only living artist,” a brother artist had said
of him, “who fails to appreciate how great his work is.” And on this
being repeated to Carlton by a good-natured friend, he had replied
cheerfully, “Well, I’m sorry, but it is certainly better to be the only
one who doesn’t appreciate it than to be the only one who does.”
He had never understood why such a responsibility had been intrusted to
him. It was, as he expressed it, not at all in his line, and young girls
who sought to sit at the feet of the master found him making love to
them in the most charming manner in the world, as though he were not
entitled to all the rapturous admiration of their very young hearts, but
had to sue for it like any ordinary mortal. Carlton always felt as
though some day some one would surely come along and say: “Look here,
young man, this talent doesn’t belong to you; it’s mine. What do you
mean by pretending that such an idle good-natured youth as yourself is
entitled to such a gift of genius?” He felt that he was keeping it in
trust, as it were; that it had been changed at birth, and that the
proper guardian would eventually relieve him of his treasure.
Personally Carlton was of the opinion that he should have been born in
the active days of knights-errant—to have had nothing more serious to do
than to ride abroad with a blue ribbon fastened to the point of his
lance, and with the spirit to unhorse any one who objected to its color,
or to the claims of superiority of the noble lady who had tied it there.
There was not, in his opinion, at the present day any sufficiently
pronounced method of declaring admiration for the many lovely women this
world contained. A proposal of marriage he considered to be a mean and
clumsy substitute for the older way, and was uncomplimentary to the many
other women left unasked, and marriage itself required much more
constancy than he could give. He had a most romantic and old-fashioned
ideal of women as a class, and from the age of fourteen had been a
devotee of hundreds of them as individuals; and though in that time his
ideal had received several severe shocks, he still believed that the
“not impossible she” existed somewhere, and his conscientious efforts to
find out whether every woman he met might not be that one had led him
not unnaturally into many difficulties.
“The trouble with me is,” he said, “that I care too much to make
Platonic friendship possible, and don’t care enough to marry any
particular woman—that is, of course, supposing that any particular one
would be so little particular as to be willing to marry me. How
embarrassing it would be, now,” he argued, “if when you were turning
away from the chancel after the ceremony you should look at one of the
bridemaids and see the woman whom you really should have married! How
distressing that would be! You couldn’t very well stop and say: ‘I am
very sorry, my dear, but it seems I have made a mistake. That young
woman on the right has a most interesting and beautiful face. I am very
much afraid that she is the one.’ It would be too late then; while now,
in my free state, I can continue my search without any sense of
responsibility.”
“Why”—he would exclaim—“I have walked miles to get a glimpse of a
beautiful woman in a suburban window, and time and time again when I
have seen a face in a passing brougham I have pursued it in a hansom,
and learned where the owner of the face lived, and spent weeks in
finding some one to present me, only to discover that she was
self-conscious or uninteresting or engaged. Still I had assured myself
that she was not the one. I am very conscientious, and I consider that
it is my duty to go so far with every woman I meet as to be able to
learn whether she is or is not the one, and the sad result is that I am
like a man who follows the hounds but is never in at the death.”
“Well,” some married woman would say, grimly, “I hope you will get your
deserts some day; and you _will_, too. Some day some girl will make you
suffer for this.”
“Oh, that’s all right,” Carlton would answer, meekly. “Lots of women
have made me suffer, if that’s what you think I need.”
“Some day,” the married woman would prophesy, “you will care for a woman
so much that you will have no eyes for any one else. That’s the way it
is when one is married.”
“Well, when that’s the way it is with _me_,” Carlton would reply, “I
certainly hope to get married; but until it is, I think it is safer for
all concerned that I should not.”
Then Carlton would go to the club and complain bitterly to one of his
friends.
“How unfair married women are!” he would say. “The idea of thinking a
man could have no eyes but for one woman! Suppose I had never heard a
note of music until I was twenty-five years of age, and was then given
my hearing. Do you suppose my pleasure in music would make me lose my
pleasure in everything else? Suppose I met and married a girl at
twenty-five. Is that going to make me forget all the women I knew before
I met her? I think not. As a matter of fact, I really deserve a great
deal of credit for remaining single, for I am naturally very
affectionate; but when I see what poor husbands my friends make, I
prefer to stay as I am until I am sure that I will make a better one. It
is only fair to the woman.”
Carlton was sitting in the club alone. He had that sense of superiority
over his fellows and of irresponsibility to the world about him that
comes to a man when he knows that his trunks are being packed and that
his state-room is engaged. He was leaving New York long before most of
his friends could get away. He did not know just where he was going, and
preferred not to know. He wished to have a complete holiday, and to see
Europe as an idle tourist, and not as an artist with an eye to his own
improvement. He had plenty of time and money; he was sure to run across
friends in the big cities, and acquaintances he could make or not, as he
pleased, _en route_. He was not sorry to go. His going would serve to
put an end to what gossip there might be of his engagement to numerous
young women whose admiration for him as an artist, he was beginning to
fear, had taken on a more personal tinge. “I wish,” he said, gloomily,
“I didn’t like people so well. It seems to cause them and me such a lot
of trouble.”
He sighed, and stretched out his hand for a copy of one of the English
illustrated papers. It had a fresher interest to him because the next
number of it that he would see would be in the city in which it was
printed. The paper in his hands was the _St. James Budget_, and it
contained much fashionable intelligence concerning the preparations for
a royal wedding which was soon to take place between members of two of
the reigning families of Europe. There was on one page a half-tone
reproduction of a photograph, which showed a group of young people
belonging to several of these reigning families, with their names and
titles printed above and below the picture. They were princesses,
archdukes, or grand dukes, and they were dressed like young English men
and women, and with no sign about them of their possible military or
social rank.
One of the young princesses in the photograph was looking out of it and
smiling in a tolerant, amused way, as though she had thought of
something which she could not wait to enjoy until after the picture was
taken. She was not posing consciously, as were some of the others, but
was sitting in a natural attitude, with one arm over the back of her
chair, and with her hands clasped before her. Her face was full of a
fine intelligence and humor, and though one of the other princesses in
the group was far more beautiful, this particular one had a much more
high-bred air, and there was something of a challenge in her smile that
made any one who looked at the picture smile also. Carlton studied the
face for some time, and mentally approved of its beauty; the others
seemed in comparison wooden and unindividual, but this one looked like a
person he might have known, and whom he would certainly have liked. He
turned the page and surveyed the features of the Oxford crew with lesser
interest, and then turned the page again and gazed critically and
severely at the face of the princess with the high-bred smile. He had
hoped that he would find it less interesting at a second glance, but it
did not prove to be so.
“‘The Princess Aline of Hohenwald,’” he read. “She’s probably engaged to
one of those Johnnies beside her, and the Grand-Duke of Hohenwald behind
her must be her brother.” He put the paper down and went in to luncheon,
and diverted himself by mixing a salad dressing; but after a few moments
he stopped in the midst of this employment, and told the waiter, with
some unnecessary sharpness, to bring him the last copy of the _St. James
Budget_.
“Confound it!” he added, to himself.
He opened the paper with a touch of impatience and gazed long and
earnestly at the face of the Princess Aline, who continued to return his
look with the same smile of amused tolerance. Carlton noted every detail
of her tailor-made gown, of her high mannish collar, of her tie, and
even the rings on her hand. There was nothing about her of which he
could fairly disapprove. He wondered why it was that she could not have
been born an approachable New York girl instead of a princess of a
little German duchy, hedged in throughout her single life, and to be
traded off eventually in marriage with as much consideration as though
she were a princess of a real kingdom.
“She looks jolly too,” he mused, in an injured tone; “and so very
clever; and of course she has a beautiful complexion. All those German
girls have. Your Royal Highness is more than pretty,” he said, bowing
his head gravely. “You look as a princess should look. I am sure it was
one of your ancestors who discovered the dried pea under a dozen
mattresses.” He closed the paper, and sat for a moment with a perplexed
smile of consideration. “Waiter,” he exclaimed, suddenly, “send a
messenger-boy to Brentano’s for a copy of the _St. James Budget_, and
bring me the Almanach de Gotha from the library. It is a little fat red
book on the table near the window.” Then Carlton opened the paper again
and propped it up against a carafe, and continued his critical survey of
the Princess Aline. He seized the Almanach, when it came, with some
eagerness.
“Hohenwald (Maison de Grasse),” he read, and in small type below it:
“1. Ligne cadette (régnante) grand-ducale: Hohenwald et de Grasse.
“Guillaume-Albert-Frederick-Charles-Louis, Grand-Duc de Hohenwald et
de Grasse, etc., etc., etc.”
“That’s the brother, right enough,” muttered Carlton.
And under the heading “Sœurs” he read:
“4. _Psse Aline._—Victoria-Beatrix-Louise-Helene, Alt. Gr.-Duc. Née à
Grasse, Juin, 1872.”
“Twenty-two years old,” exclaimed Carlton. “What a perfect age! I could
not have invented a better one.” He looked from the book to the face
before him. “Now, my dear young lady,” he said, “I know all about _you_.
You live at Grasse, and you are connected, to judge by your names, with
all the English royalties; and very pretty names they are, too—Aline,
Helene, Victoria, Beatrix. You must be much more English than you are
German; and I suppose you live in a little old castle, and your brother
has a standing army of twelve men, and some day you are to marry a
Russian Grand-Duke, or whoever your brother’s Prime Minister—if he has a
Prime Minister—decides is best for the politics of your little toy
kingdom. Ah! to think,” exclaimed Carlton, softly, “that such a lovely
and glorious creature as that should be sacrificed for so insignificant
a thing as the peace of Europe when she might make some young man
happy?”
He carried a copy of the paper to his room, and cut the picture of the
group out of the page and pasted it carefully on a stiff piece of
card-board. Then he placed it on his dressing-table, in front of a
photograph of a young woman in a large silver frame—which was a sign,
had the young woman but known it, that her reign for the time being was
over.
Nolan, the young Irishman who “did for” Carlton, knew better than to
move it when he found it there. He had learned to study his master since
he had joined him in London, and understood that one photograph in the
silver frame was entitled to more consideration than three others on the
writing-desk or half a dozen on the mantel-piece. Nolan had seen them
come and go; he had watched them rise and fall; he had carried notes to
them, and books and flowers; and had helped to depose them from the
silver frame and move them on by degrees down the line, until they went
ingloriously into the big brass bowl on the side table. Nolan approved
highly of this last choice. He did not know which one of the three in
the group it might be; but they were all pretty, and their social
standing was certainly distinguished.
Guido, the Italian model who ruled over the studio, and Nolan were
busily packing when Carlton entered. He always said that Guido
represented him in his professional and Nolan in his social capacity.
Guido cleaned the brushes and purchased the artists’ materials; Nolan
cleaned his riding-boots and bought his theatre and railroad tickets.
“Guido,” said Carlton, “there are two sketches I made in Germany last
year, one of the Prime Minister, and one of Ludwig the actor; get them
out for me, will you, and pack them for shipping. Nolan,” he went on,
“here is a telegram to send.”
Nolan would not have read a letter, but he looked upon telegrams as
public documents, the reading of them as part of his perquisites. This
one was addressed to Oscar Von Holtz, First Secretary, German Embassy,
Washington, D. C., and the message read:
“Please telegraph me full title and address Princess Aline of
Hohenwald. Where would a letter reach her?
“MORTON CARLTON.”
The next morning Nolan carried to the express office a box containing
two oil-paintings on small canvases. They were addressed to the man in
London who attended to the shipping and forwarding of Carlton’s pictures
in that town.
There was a tremendous crowd on the _New York_. She sailed at the
obliging hour of eleven in the morning, and many people, in consequence,
whose affection would not have stood in the way of their breakfast, made
it a point to appear and to say good-by. Carlton, for his part, did not
notice them; he knew by experience that the attractive-looking people
always leave a steamer when the whistle blows, and that the next most
attractive-looking, who remain on board, are ill all the way over. A man
that he knew seized him by the arm as he was entering his cabin, and
asked if he were crossing or just seeing people off.
“Well, then, I want to introduce you to Miss Morris and her aunt, Mrs.
Downs; they are going over, and I should be glad if you would be nice to
them. But you know her, I guess?” he asked, over his shoulder, as
Carlton pushed his way after him down the deck.
“I know who she is,” he said.
Miss Edith Morris was surrounded by a treble circle of admiring friends,
and seemed to be holding her own. They all stopped when Carlton came up,
and looked at him rather closely, and those whom he knew seemed to mark
the fact by a particularly hearty greeting. The man who had brought him
up acted as though he had successfully accomplished a somewhat difficult
and creditable feat. Carlton bowed himself away, leaving Miss Morris to
her friends, and saying that she would probably have to see him later,
whether she wished it or not. He then went to meet the aunt, who
received him kindly, for there were very few people on the passenger
list, and she was glad they were to have his company. Before he left she
introduced him to a young man named Abbey, who was hovering around her
most anxiously, and whose interest, she seemed to think it necessary to
explain, was due to the fact that he was engaged to Miss Morris. Mr.
Abbey left the steamer when the whistle blew, and Carlton looked after
him gratefully. He always enjoyed meeting attractive girls who were
engaged, as it left him no choice in the matter, and excused him from
finding out whether or not that particular young woman was the one.
Mrs. Downs and her niece proved to be experienced sailors, and faced the
heavy sea that met the _New York_ outside of Sandy Hook with unconcern.
Carlton joined them, and they stood together leaning with their backs to
the rail, and trying to fit the people who flitted past them to the
names on the passenger list.
“The young lady in the sailor suit,” said Miss Morris, gazing at the top
of the smoke-stack, “is Miss Kitty Flood, of Grand Rapids. This is her
first voyage, and she thinks a steamer is something like a yacht, and
dresses for the part accordingly. She does not know that it is merely a
moving hotel.”
“I am afraid,” said Carlton, “to judge from her agitation, that hers is
going to be what the professionals call a ‘dressing-room’ part. Why is
it,” he asked, “that the girls on a steamer who wear gold anchors and
the men in yachting-caps are always the first to disappear? That man
with the sombrero,” he went on, “is James M. Pollock, United States
Consul to Mauritius; he is going out to his post. I know he is the
consul, because he comes from Fort Worth, Texas, and is therefore
admirably fitted to speak either French or the native language of the
island.”
“Oh, we don’t send consuls to Mauritius,” laughed Miss Morris.
“Mauritius is one of those places from which you buy stamps, but no one
really lives or goes there.”
“Where are you going, may I ask?” inquired Carlton.
Miss Morris said that they were making their way to Constantinople and
Athens, and then to Rome; that as they had not had the time to take the
southern route, they purposed to journey across the Continent direct
from Paris to the Turkish capital by the Orient Express.
“We shall be a few days in London, and in Paris only long enough for
some clothes,” she replied.
“The trousseau,” thought Carlton. “Weeks is what she should have said.”
The three sat together at the captain’s table, and as the sea continued
rough, saw little of either the captain or his other guests, and were
thrown much upon the society of each other. They had innumerable friends
and interests in common; and Mrs. Downs, who had been everywhere, and
for long seasons at a time, proved as alive as her niece, and Carlton
conceived a great liking for her. She seemed to be just and kindly
minded, and, owing to her age, to combine the wider judgment of a man
with the sympathetic interest of a woman. Sometimes they sat together in
a row and read, and gossiped over what they read, or struggled up the
deck as it rose and fell and buffeted with the wind; and later they
gathered in a corner of the saloon and ate late suppers of Carlton’s
devising, or drank tea in the captain’s cabin, which he had thrown open
to them. They had started knowing much about one another, and this and
the necessary proximity of the ship hastened their acquaintance.
The sea grew calmer the third day out, and the sun came forth and showed
the decks as clean as bread-boards. Miss Morris and Carlton seated
themselves on the huge iron riding-bits in the bow, and with their
elbows on the rail looked down at the whirling blue water, and rejoiced
silently in the steady rush of the great vessel, and in the uncertain
warmth of the March sun. Carlton was sitting to leeward of Miss Morris,
with a pipe between his teeth. He was warm, and at peace with the world.
He had found his new acquaintance more than entertaining. She was even
friendly, and treated him as though he were much her junior, as is the
habit of young women lately married or who are about to be married.
Carlton did not resent it; on the contrary, it made him more at his ease
with her, and as she herself chose to treat him as a youth, he permitted
himself to be as foolish as he pleased.
“I don’t know why it is,” he complained, peering over the rail, “but
whenever I look over the side to watch the waves a man in a greasy cap
always sticks his head out of a hole below me and scatters a barrelful
of ashes or potato peelings all over the ocean. It spoils the effect for
one. Next time he does it I am going to knock out the ashes of my pipe
on the back of his neck.” Miss Morris did not consider this worthy of
comment, and there was a long lazy pause.
“You haven’t told us where you go after London,” she said; and then,
without waiting for him to reply, she asked, “Is it your professional or
your social side that you are treating to a trip this time?”
“Who told you that?” asked Carlton, smiling.
“Oh, I don’t know. Some man. He said you were a Jekyll and Hyde. Which
is Jekyll? You see, I only know your professional side.”
“You must try to find out for yourself by deduction,” he said, “as you
picked out the other passengers. I am going to Grasse,” he continued.
“It’s the capital of Hohenwald. Do you know it?”
“Yes,” she said; “we were there once for a few days. We went to see the
pictures. I suppose you know that the old Duke, the father of the
present one, ruined himself almost by buying pictures for the Grasse
gallery. We were there at a bad time, though, when the palace was closed
to visitors, and the gallery too. I suppose that is what is taking you
there?”
“No,” Carlton said, shaking his head. “No, it is not the pictures. I am
going to Grasse,” he said, gravely, “to see the young woman with whom I
am in love.”
Miss Morris looked up in some surprise, and smiled consciously, with a
natural feminine interest in an affair of love, and one which was a
secret as well.
“Oh,” she said, “I beg your pardon; we—I had not heard of it.”
“No, it is not a thing one could announce exactly,” said Carlton; “it is
rather in an embyro state as yet—in fact, I have not met the young lady
so far, but I mean to meet her. That’s why I am going abroad.”
Miss Morris looked at him sharply to see if he were smiling, but he was,
on the contrary, gazing sentimentally at the horizon-line, and puffing
meditatively on his pipe. He was apparently in earnest, and waiting for
her to make some comment.
“How very interesting!” was all she could think to say.
“Yes, when you know the details, it is,—_very_ interesting,” he
answered. “She is the Princess Aline of Hohenwald,” he explained, bowing
his head as though he were making the two young ladies known to one
another. “She has several other names, six in all, and her age is
twenty-two. That is all I know about her. I saw her picture in an
illustrated paper just before I sailed, and I made up my mind I would
meet her, and here I am. If she is not in Grasse, I intend to follow her
to wherever she may be.” He waved his pipe at the ocean before him, and
recited, with mock seriousness:
“‘Across the hills and far away,
Beyond their utmost purple rim,
And deep into the dying day,
The happy Princess followed him.’
“Only in this case, you see,” said Carlton, “I am following the happy
Princess.”
“No; but seriously, though,” said Miss Morris, “what is it you mean? Are
you going to paint her portrait?”
“I never thought of that,” exclaimed Carlton. “I don’t know but what
your idea is a good one. Miss Morris, that’s a great idea.” He shook his
head approvingly. “I did not do wrong to confide in you,” he said. “It
was perhaps taking a liberty; but as you have not considered it as such,
I am glad I spoke.”
“But you don’t really mean to tell me,” exclaimed the girl, facing
about, and nodding her head at him, “that you are going abroad after a
woman whom you have never seen, and because you like a picture of her in
a paper?”
“I do,” said Carlton. “Because I like her picture, and because she is a
Princess.”
“Well, upon my word,” said Miss Morris, gazing at him with evident
admiration, “that’s what my younger brother would call a distinctly
sporting proposition. Only I don’t see,” she added, “what her being a
Princess has to do with it.”
“You don’t?” laughed Carlton easily. “That’s the best part of it—that’s
the plot. The beauty of being in love with a Princess, Miss Morris,” he
said, “lies in the fact that you can’t marry her; that you can love her
deeply and forever, and nobody will ever come to you and ask your
intentions, or hint that after such a display of affection you ought to
do something. Now, with a girl who is not a Princess, even if she
understands the situation herself, and wouldn’t marry you to save her
life, still there is always some one—a father, or a mother, or one of
your friends—who makes it his business to interfere, and talks about it,
and bothers you both. But with a Princess, you see, that is all
eliminated. You can’t marry a Princess, because they won’t let you. A
Princess has got to marry a real royal chap, and so you are perfectly
ineligible and free to sigh for her, and make pretty speeches to her,
and see her as often as you can, and revel in your devotion and
unrequited affection.”
Miss Morris regarded him doubtfully. She did not wish to prove herself
too credulous. “And you honestly want me, Mr. Carlton, to believe that
you are going abroad just for this?”
“You see,” Carlton answered her, “if you only knew me better you would
have no doubt on the subject at all. It isn’t the thing some men would
do, I admit, but it is exactly what any one who knows me would expect of
me. I should describe it, having had acquaintance with the young man for
some time, as being eminently characteristic. And besides, think what a
good story it makes! Every other man who goes abroad this summer will
try to tell about his travels when he gets back to New York, and, as
usual, no one will listen to him. But they will _have_ to listen to me.
‘You’ve been across since I saw you last. What did you do?’ they’ll ask,
politely. And then, instead of simply telling them that I have been in
Paris or London, I can say, ‘Oh, I’ve been chasing around the globe
after the Princess Aline of Hohenwald.’ That sounds interesting, doesn’t
it? When you come to think of it,” Carlton continued, meditatively, “it
is not so very remarkable. Men go all the way to Cuba and Mexico, and
even to India, after orchids, after a nasty flower that grows in an
absurd way on the top of a tree. Why shouldn’t a young man go as far as
Germany after a beautiful Princess, who walks on the ground, and who can
talk and think and feel? She is much more worth while than an orchid.”
Miss Morris laughed indulgently. “Well, I didn’t know such devotion
existed at this end of the century,” she said; “it’s quite nice and
encouraging. I hope you will succeed, I am sure. I only wish we were
going to be near enough to see how you get on. I have never been a
confidante when there was a real Princess concerned,” she said; “it
makes it so much more amusing. May one ask what your plans are?”
Carlton doubted if he had any plans as yet. “I have to reach the ground
first,” he said, “and after that I must reconnoitre. I may possibly
adopt your idea, and ask to paint her portrait, only I dislike confusing
my social and professional sides. As a matter of fact, though,” he said,
after a pause, laughing guiltily, “I have done a little of that already.
I prepared her, as it were, for my coming. I sent her studies of two
pictures I made last winter in Berlin. One of the Prime Minister, and
one of Ludwig, the tragedian at the Court Theatre. I sent them to her
through my London agent, so that she would think they had come from some
one of her English friends, and I told the dealer not to let any one
know who had forwarded them. My idea was that it might help me, perhaps,
if she knew something about me before I appeared in person. It was a
sort of letter of introduction written by myself.”
“Well, really,” expostulated Miss Morris, “you certainly woo in a royal
way. Are you in the habit of giving away your pictures to any one whose
photograph you happen to like? That seems to me to be giving new lamps
for old to a degree. I must see if I haven’t some of my sister’s
photographs in my trunk. She is considered very beautiful.”
“Well, you wait until you see this particular portrait, and you will
understand it better,” said Carlton.
The steamer reached Southampton early in the afternoon, and Carlton
secured a special compartment on the express to London for Mrs. Downs
and her niece and himself, with one adjoining for their maid and Nolan.
It was a beautiful day, and Carlton sat with his eyes fixed upon the
passing fields and villages, exclaiming with pleasure from time to time
at the white roads and the feathery trees and hedges, and the red roofs
of the inns and square towers of the village churches.
“Hedges are better than barbed-wire fences, aren’t they?” he said. “You
see that girl picking wild flowers from one of them? She looks just as
though she were posing for a picture for an illustrated paper. She
couldn’t pick flowers from a barbed-wire fence, could she? And there
would probably be a tramp along the road somewhere to frighten her; and
see—the chap in knickerbockers farther down the road leaning on the
stile. I am sure he is waiting for her; and here comes a coach,” he ran
on. “Don’t the red wheels look well against the hedges? It’s a pretty
little country, England, isn’t it?—like a private park or a model
village. I am glad to get back to it—I am glad to see the three-and-six
signs with the little slanting dash between the shillings and pennies.
Yes, even the steam-rollers and the man with the red flag in front are
welcome.”
“I suppose,” said Mrs. Downs, “it’s because one has been so long on the
ocean that the ride to London seems so interesting. It always pays me
for the entire trip. Yes,” she said, with a sigh, “in spite of the
patent-medicine signs they have taken to putting up all along the road.
It seems a pity they should adopt our bad habits instead of our good
ones.”
“They are a bit slow at adopting anything,” commented Carlton. “Did you
know, Mrs. Downs, that electric lights are still as scarce in London as
they are in Timbuctoo? Why, I saw an electric-light plant put up in a
Western town in three days once; there were over a hundred burners in
one saloon, and the engineer who put them up told me in confidence
that——”
What the chief engineer told him in confidence was never disclosed, for
at that moment Miss Morris interrupted him with a sudden sharp
exclamation.
“Oh, Mr. Carlton,” she exclaimed, breathlessly, “listen to this!” She
had been reading one of the dozen papers which Carlton had purchased at
the station, and was now shaking one of them at him, with her eyes fixed
on the open page.
“My dear Edith,” remonstrated her aunt, “Mr. Carlton was telling us——”
“Yes, I know,” exclaimed Miss Morris, laughing, “but this interests him
much more than electric lights. Who do you think is in London?” she
cried, raising her eyes to his, and pausing for proper dramatic effect.
“The Princess Aline of Hohenwald!”
“No?” shouted Carlton.
“Yes,” Miss Morris answered, mocking his tone. “Listen. ‘The Queen’s
Drawing-room’—em—e—m—‘on her right was the Princess of Wales’—em—m. Oh,
I can’t find it—no—yes, here it is. ‘Next to her stood the Princess
Aline of Hohenwald. She wore a dress of white silk, with train of silver
brocade trimmed with fur. Ornaments—emeralds and diamonds;
orders—Victoria and Albert, Jubilee Commemoration Medal, Coburg and
Gotha, and Hohenwald and Grasse.’”
“By Jove!” cried Carlton, excitedly. “I say, is that really there? Let
me see it, please, for myself.”
Miss Morris handed him the paper, with her finger on the paragraph, and
picking up another, began a search down its columns.
“You are right,” exclaimed Carlton, solemnly; “it’s she, sure enough.
And here I’ve been within two hours of her and didn’t know it?”
Miss Morris gave another triumphant cry, as though she had discovered a
vein of gold.
“Yes, and here she is again,” she said, “in the _Gentlewoman_: ‘The
Queen’s dress was of black, as usual, but relieved by a few violet
ribbons in the bonnet; and Princess Beatrice, who sat by her mother’s
side, showed but little trace of the anxiety caused by Princess Ena’s
accident. Princess Aline, on the front seat, in a light-brown jacket and
a becoming bonnet, gave the necessary touch to a picture which Londoners
would be glad to look upon more often.’”
Carlton sat staring forward, with his hands on his knees, and with his
eyes open wide from excitement. He presented so unusual an appearance of
bewilderment and delight that Mrs. Downs looked at him and at her niece
for some explanation. “The young lady seems to interest you,” said she,
tentatively.
[Illustration: “Next to her stood the Princess Aline of Hohenwald”]
“She is the most charming creature in the world, Mrs. Downs,” cried
Carlton, “and I was going all the way to Grasse to see her, and now it
turns out that she is here in England, within a few miles of us.” He
turned and waved his hands at the passing landscape. “Every minute
brings us nearer together.”
“And you didn’t feel it in the air!” mocked Miss Morris, laughing. “You
are a pretty poor sort of a man to let a girl tell you where to find the
woman you love.”
Carlton did not answer, but stared at her very seriously and frowned
intently. “Now I have got to begin all over again and readjust things,”
he said. “We might have guessed she would be in London, on account of
this royal wedding. It is a great pity it isn’t later in the season,
when there would be more things going on and more chances of meeting
her. Now they will all be interested in themselves, and, being extremely
exclusive, no one who isn’t a cousin to the bridegroom or an Emperor
would have any chance at all. Still, I can see her! I can look at her,
and that’s something.”
“It is better than a photograph, anyway,” said Miss Morris.
“They will be either at Buckingham Palace or at Windsor, or they will
stop at Brown’s,” said Carlton. “All royalties go to Brown’s. I don’t
know why, unless it is because it is so expensive; or maybe it is
expensive because royalties go there; but, in any event, if they are not
at the palace, that is where they will be, and that is where I shall
have to go too.”
When the train drew up at Victoria Station, Carlton directed Nolan to
take his things to Brown’s Hotel, but not to unload them until he had
arrived. Then he drove with the ladies to Cox’s, and saw them settled
there. He promised to return at once to dine, and to tell them what he
had discovered in his absence. “You’ve got to help me in this, Miss
Morris,” he said, nervously. “I am beginning to feel that I am not
worthy of her.”
“Oh yes, you are!” she said, laughing; “but don’t forget that ‘it’s not
the lover who comes to woo, but the lover’s _way_ of wooing,’ and that
‘faint heart’—and the rest of it.”
“Yes, I know,” said Carlton, doubtfully; “but it’s a bit sudden, isn’t
it?”
“Oh, I am ashamed of you! You are frightened.”
“No, not frightened, exactly,” said the painter. “I think it’s just
natural emotion.”
As Carlton turned into Albemarle Street he noticed a red carpet
stretching from the doorway of Brown’s Hotel out across the sidewalk to
a carriage, and a bareheaded man bustling about apparently assisting
several gentlemen to get into it. This and another carriage and Nolan’s
four-wheeler blocked the way; but without waiting for them to move up,
Carlton leaned out of his hansom and called the bareheaded man to its
side.
“Is the Duke of Hohenwald stopping at your hotel?” he asked. The
bareheaded man answered that he was.
“All right, Nolan,” cried Carlton. “They can take in the trunks.”
Hearing this, the bareheaded man hastened to help Carlton to alight.
“That was the Duke who just drove off, sir; and those,” he said,
pointing to three muffled figures who were stepping into a second
carriage, “are his sisters, the Princesses.”
Carlton stopped midway, with one foot on the step and the other in the
air.
“The deuce they are!” he exclaimed; “and which is—” he began, eagerly,
and then remembering himself, dropped back on the cushions of the
hansom.
He broke into the little dining-room at Cox’s in so excited a state that
two dignified old gentlemen who were eating there sat open-mouthed in
astonished disapproval. Mrs. Downs and Miss Morris had just come down
stairs.
“I have seen her!” Carlton cried, ecstatically; “only half an hour in
the town, and I’ve seen her already!”
“No, really?” exclaimed Miss Morris. “And how did she look? Is she as
beautiful as you expected?”
“Well, I can’t tell yet,” Carlton answered. “There were three of them,
and they were all muffled up, and which one of the three she was I don’t
know. She wasn’t labelled, as in the picture, but she was there, and I
saw her. The woman I love was one of that three, and I have engaged
rooms at the hotel, and this very night the same roof shelters us both.”
II
“The course of true love certainly runs smoothly with you,” said Miss
Morris, as they seated themselves at the table. “What is your next move?
What do you mean to do now?”
“The rest is very simple,” said Carlton. “To-morrow morning I will go to
the Row; I will be sure to find some one there who knows all about
them—where they are going, and who they are seeing, and what engagements
they may have. Then it will only be a matter of looking up some friend
in the Household or in one of the embassies who can present me.”
“Oh,” said Miss Morris, in the tone of keenest disappointment, “but that
is such a commonplace ending! You started out so romantically. Couldn’t
you manage to meet her in a less conventional way?”
“I am afraid not,” said Carlton. “You see, I want to meet her very much,
and to meet her very soon, and the quickest way of meeting her, whether
it’s romantic or not, isn’t a bit too quick for me. There will be
romance enough after I am presented, if I have my way.”
But Carlton was not to have his way; for he had overlooked the fact that
it requires as many to make an introduction as a bargain, and he had
left the Duke of Hohenwald out of his considerations. He met many people
he knew in the Row the next morning; they asked him to lunch, and
brought their horses up to the rail, and he patted the horses’ heads,
and led the conversation around to the royal wedding, and through it to
the Hohenwalds. He learned that they had attended a reception at the
German Embassy on the previous night, and it was one of the secretaries
of that embassy who informed him of their intended departure that
morning on the eleven o’clock train to Paris.
“To Paris!” cried Carlton, in consternation. “What! all of them?”
“Yes, all of them, of course. Why?” asked the young German. But Carlton
was already dodging across the tan-bark to Piccadilly and waving his
stick at a hansom.
Nolan met him at the door of Brown’s Hotel with an anxious countenance.
“Their Royal Highnesses have gone, sir,” he said. “But I’ve packed your
trunks and sent them to the station. Shall I follow them, sir?”
“Yes,” said Carlton. “Follow the trunks and follow the Hohenwalds. I
will come over on the Club train at four. Meet me at the station, and
tell me to what hotel they have gone. Wait; if I miss you, you can find
me at the Hôtel Continental; but if they go straight on through Paris,
you go with them, and telegraph me here and to the Continental.
Telegraph at every station, so I can keep track of you. Have you enough
money?”
“I have, sir—enough for a long trip, sir.”
“Well, you’ll need it,” said Carlton, grimly. “This is going to be a
long trip. It is twenty minutes to eleven now; you will have to hurry.
Have you paid my bill here?”
“I have, sir,” said Nolan.
“Then get off, and don’t lose sight of those people again.”
Carlton attended to several matters of business, and then lunched with
Mrs. Downs and her niece. He had grown to like them very much, and was
sorry to lose sight of them, but consoled himself by thinking he would
see them a few days at least in Paris. He judged that he would be there
for some time, as he did not think the Princess Aline and her sisters
would pass through that city without stopping to visit the shops on the
Rue de la Paix.
“All women are not princesses,” he argued, “but all princesses are
women.”
“We will be in Paris on Wednesday,” Mrs. Downs told him. “The Orient
Express leaves there twice a week, on Mondays and Thursdays, and we have
taken an apartment for next Thursday, and will go right on to
Constantinople.”
“But I thought you said you had to buy a lot of clothes there?” Carlton
expostulated.
Mrs. Downs said that they would do that on their way home.
Nolan met Carlton at the station, and told him that he had followed the
Hohenwalds to the Hôtel Meurice. “There is the Duke, sir, and the three
Princesses,” Nolan said, “and there are two German gentlemen acting as
equerries, and an English captain, a sort of A.D.C. to the Duke, and two
elderly ladies, and eight servants. They travel very simple, sir, and
their people are in undress livery. Brown and red, sir.”
Carlton pretended not to listen to this. He had begun to doubt but that
Nolan’s zeal would lead him into some indiscretion, and would end
disastrously to himself. He spent the evening alone in front of the Café
de la Paix, pleasantly occupied in watching the life and movement of
that great meeting of the highways. It did not seem possible that he had
ever been away. It was as though he had picked up a book and opened it
at the page and place at which he had left off reading it a moment
before. There was the same type, the same plot, and the same characters,
who were doing the same characteristic things. Even the waiter who
tipped out his coffee knew him; and he knew, or felt as though he knew,
half of those who passed, or who shared with him the half of the
sidewalk. The women at the next table considered the slim, good-looking
young American with friendly curiosity, and the men with them discussed
him in French, until a well-known Parisian recognized Carlton in
passing, and hailed him joyously in the same language, at which the
women laughed and the men looked sheepishly conscious.
On the following morning Carlton took up his post in the open court of
the Meurice, with his coffee and the _Figaro_ to excuse his loitering
there. He had not been occupied with these over-long before Nolan
approached him, in some excitement, with the information that their
Royal Highnesses—as he delighted to call them—were at that moment
“coming down the lift.”
Carlton could hear their voices, and wished to step around the corner
and see them; it was for this chance he had been waiting; but he could
not afford to act in so undignified a manner before Nolan, so he merely
crossed his legs nervously, and told the servant to go back to the
rooms.
“Confound him!” he said; “I wish he would let me conduct my own affairs
in my own way. If I don’t stop him, he’ll carry the Princess Aline off
by force and send me word where he has hidden her.”
The Hohenwalds had evidently departed for a day’s outing, as up to five
o’clock they had not returned; and Carlton, after loitering all the
afternoon, gave up waiting for them, and went out to dine at Laurent’s,
in the Champs Elysées. He had finished his dinner, and was leaning
luxuriously forward, with his elbows on the table, and knocking the
cigar ashes into his coffee-cup. He was pleasantly content. The trees
hung heavy with leaves over his head, a fountain played and overflowed
at his elbow, and the lamps of the fiacres passing and repassing on the
Avenue of the Champs Elysées shone like giant fire-flies through the
foliage. The touch of the gravel beneath his feet emphasized the free,
out-of-door charm of the place, and the faces of the others around him
looked more than usually cheerful in the light of the candles flickering
under the clouded shades. His mind had gone back to his earlier student
days in Paris, when life always looked as it did now in the brief
half-hour of satisfaction which followed a cold bath or a good dinner,
and he had forgotten himself and his surroundings. It was the voices of
the people at the table behind him that brought him back to the present
moment. A man was talking; he spoke in English, with an accent.
[Illustration: “A man was talking in English, with an accent”]
“I should like to go again through the Luxembourg,” he said; “but you
need not be bound by what I do.”
“I think it would be pleasanter if we all keep together,” said a girl’s
voice, quietly. She also spoke in English, and with the same accent.
The people whose voices had interrupted him were sitting and standing
around a long table, which the waiters had made large enough for their
party by placing three of the smaller ones side by side; they had
finished their dinner, and the women, who sat with their backs toward
Carlton, were pulling on their gloves.
“Which is it to be, then?” said the gentleman, smiling. “The pictures or
the dressmakers?”
The girl who had first spoken turned to the one next to her.
“Which would you rather do, Aline?” she asked.
Carlton moved so suddenly that the men behind him looked at him
curiously; but he turned, nevertheless, in his chair and faced them, and
in order to excuse his doing so beckoned to one of the waiters. He was
within two feet of the girl who had been called “Aline.” She raised her
head to speak, and saw Carlton staring open-eyed at her. She glanced at
him for an instant, as if to assure herself that she did not know him,
and then, turning to her brother, smiled in the same tolerant, amused
way in which she had so often smiled upon Carlton from the picture.
“I am afraid I had rather go to the Bon Marché,” she said.
One of the waiters stepped in between them, and Carlton asked him for
his bill; but when it came he left it lying on the plate, and sat
staring out into the night between the candles, puffing sharply on his
cigar, and recalling to his memory his first sight of the Princess Aline
of Hohenwald.
That night, as he turned into bed, he gave a comfortable sigh of
content. “I am glad she chose the dressmakers instead of the pictures,”
he said.
Mrs. Downs and Miss Morris arrived in Paris on Wednesday, and expressed
their anxiety to have Carlton lunch with them, and to hear him tell of
the progress of his love-affair. There was not much to tell; the
Hohenwalds had come and gone from the hotel as freely as any other
tourists in Paris, but the very lack of ceremony about their movements
was in itself a difficulty. The manner of acquaintance he could make in
the court of the Hôtel Meurice with one of the men over a cup of coffee
or a glass of bock would be as readily discontinued as begun, and for
his purpose it would have been much better if the Hohenwalds had been
living in state with a visitors’ book and a chamberlain.
On Wednesday evening Carlton took the ladies to the opera, where the
Hohenwalds occupied a box immediately opposite them. Carlton pretended
to be surprised at this fact, but Mrs. Downs doubted his sincerity.
“I saw Nolan talking to their courier to-day,” she said, “and I fancy he
asked a few leading questions.”
“Well, he didn’t learn much if he did,” he said.
“The fellow only talks German.”
“Ah, then he has been asking questions!” said Miss Morris.
“Well, he does it on his own responsibility,” said Carlton, “for I told
him to have nothing to do with servants. He has too much zeal, has
Nolan; I’m afraid of him.”
“If you were only half as interested as he is,” said Miss Morris, “you
would have known her long ago.”
“Long ago?” exclaimed Carlton. “I only saw her four days since.”
“She is certainly very beautiful,” said Miss Morris, looking across the
auditorium.
“But she isn’t there,” said Carlton. “That’s the eldest sister; the two
other sisters went out on the coach this morning to Versailles, and were
too tired to come to-night. At least, so Nolan says. He seems to have
established a friendship for their English maid, but whether it’s on my
account or his own I don’t know. I doubt his unselfishness.”
“How disappointing of her!” said Miss Morris. “And after you had
selected a box just across the way, too. It is such a pity to waste it
on us.” Carlton smiled, and looked up at her impudently, as though he
meant to say something; but remembering that she was engaged to be
married, changed his mind, and lowered his eyes to his programme.
“Why didn’t you say it?” asked Miss Morris, calmly, turning her glass to
the stage. “Wasn’t it pretty?”
“No,” said Carlton—“not pretty enough.”
The ladies left the hotel the next day to take the Orient Express, which
left Paris at six o’clock. They had bidden Carlton good-by at four the
same afternoon, and as he had come to their rooms for that purpose, they
were in consequence a little surprised to see him at the station,
running wildly along the platform, followed by Nolan and a porter. He
came into their compartment after the train had started, and shook his
head sadly at them from the door.
“Well, what do you think of this?” he said. “You can’t get rid of me,
you see. I’m going with you.”
“Going with us?” asked Mrs. Downs. “How far?”
Carlton laughed, and, coming inside, dropped onto the cushions with a
sigh. “I don’t know,” he said, dejectedly. “All the way, I’m afraid.
That is, I mean, I’m very glad I am to have your society for a few days
more; but really I didn’t bargain for this.”
“You don’t mean to tell me that _they_ are on this train?” said Miss
Morris.
“They are,” said Carlton. “They have a car to themselves at the rear.
They only made up their minds to go this morning, and they nearly
succeeded in giving me the slip again; but it seems that their English
maid stopped Nolan in the hall to bid him good-by, and so he found out
their plans. They are going direct to Constantinople, and then to
Athens. They had meant to stay in Paris two weeks longer, it seems, but
they changed their minds last night. It was a very close shave for me. I
only got back to the hotel in time to hear from the concierge that Nolan
had flown with all of my things, and left word for me to follow. Just
fancy! Suppose I had missed the train, and had had to chase him clear
across the continent of Europe with not even a razor——”
“I am glad,” said Miss Morris, “that Nolan has not taken a fancy to
_me_. I doubt if I could resist such impetuosity.”
The Orient Express, in which Carlton and the mistress of his heart and
fancy were speeding toward the horizon’s utmost purple rim, was made up
of six cars, one dining-car with a smoking-apartment attached, and five
sleeping-cars, including the one reserved for the Duke of Hohenwald and
his suite. These cars were lightly built, and rocked in consequence, and
the dust raised by the rapid movement of the train swept through cracks
and open windows, and sprinkled the passengers with a fine and
irritating coating of soot and earth. There was one servant to the
entire twenty-two passengers. He spoke eight languages, and never slept;
but as his services were in demand by several people in as many
different cars at the same moment he satisfied no one, and the
complaint-box in the smoking-car was stuffed full to the slot in
consequence before they had crossed the borders of France.
Carlton and Miss Morris went out upon one of the platforms and sat down
upon a tool-box. “It isn’t as comfortable here as in an observation-car
at home,” said Carlton, “but it’s just as noisy.”
He pointed out to her from time to time the peasants gathering twigs,
and the blue-bloused gendarmes guarding the woods and the fences
skirting them. “Nothing is allowed to go to waste in this country,” he
said. “It looks as though they went over it once a month with a
lawn-mower and a pruning-knife. I believe they number the trees as we
number the houses.”
“And did you notice the great fortifications covered with grass?” she
said. “We have passed such a lot of them.”
Carlton nodded.
“And did you notice that they all faced only one way?”
Carlton laughed, and nodded again. “Toward Germany,” he said.
By the next day they had left the tall poplars and white roads behind
them, and were crossing the land of low shiny black helmets and brass
spikes. They had come into a country of low mountains and black forests,
with old fortified castles topping the hills, and with red-roofed
villages scattered around the base.
“How very military it all is!” Mrs. Downs said. “Even the men at the
lonely little stations in the forests wear uniforms; and do you notice
how each of them rolls up his red flag and holds it like a sword, and
salutes the train as it passes?”
They spent the hour during which the train shifted from one station in
Vienna to the other driving about in an open carriage, and stopped for a
few moments in front of a café to drink beer and to feel solid earth
under them again, returning to the train with a feeling which was almost
that of getting back to their own rooms. Then they came to great steppes
covered with long thick grass, and flooded in places with little lakes
of broken ice; great horned cattle stood knee-deep in this grass, and at
the villages and way-stations were people wearing sheepskin jackets and
waistcoats covered with silver buttons. In one place there was a wedding
procession waiting for the train to pass, with the friends of the bride
and groom in their best clothes, the women with silver breastplates, and
boots to their knees. It seemed hardly possible that only two days
before they had seen another wedding party in the Champs Elysées, where
the men wore evening dress, and the women were bareheaded and with long
trains. In forty-eight hours they had passed through republics,
principalities, empires, and kingdoms, and from spring to winter. It was
like walking rapidly over a painted panorama of Europe.
On the second evening Carlton went off into the smoking-car alone. The
Duke of Hohenwald and two of his friends had finished a late supper, and
were seated in the apartment adjoining it. The Duke was a young man with
a heavy beard and eye-glasses. He was looking over an illustrated
catalogue of the Salon, and as Carlton dropped on the sofa opposite the
Duke raised his head and looked at him curiously, and then turned over
several pages of the catalogue and studied one of them, and then back at
Carlton, as though he were comparing him with something on the page
before him. Carlton was looking out at the night, but he could follow
what was going forward, as it was reflected in the glass of the car
window. He saw the Duke hand the catalogue to one of the equerries, who
raised his eyebrows and nodded his head in assent. Carlton wondered what
this might mean, until he remembered that there was a portrait of
himself by a French artist in the Salon, and concluded it had been
reproduced in the catalogue. He could think of nothing else which would
explain the interest the two men showed in him. On the morning following
he sent Nolan out to purchase a catalogue at the first station at which
they stopped, and found that his guess was a correct one. A portrait of
himself had been reproduced in black and white, with his name below it.
“Well, they know who I am now,” he said to Miss Morris, “even if they
don’t know me. That honor is still in store for them.”
“I wish they did not lock themselves up so tightly,” said Miss Morris.
“I want to see her very much. Cannot we walk up and down the platform at
the next station? She may be at the window.”
“Of course,” said Carlton. “You could have seen her at Buda-Pesth if you
had spoken of it. She was walking up and down then. The next time the
train stops we will prowl up and down and feast our eyes upon her.”
But Miss Morris had her wish gratified without that exertion. The
Hohenwalds were served in the dining-car after the other passengers had
finished, and were in consequence only to be seen when they passed by
the doors of the other compartments. But this same morning, after
luncheon, the three Princesses, instead of returning to their own car,
seated themselves in the compartment adjoining the dining-car, while the
men of their party lit their cigars and sat in a circle around them.
“I was wondering how long they could stand three men smoking in one of
the boxes they call cars,” said Mrs. Downs. She was seated between Miss
Morris and Carlton, directly opposite the Hohenwalds, and so near them
that she had to speak in a whisper. To avoid doing this Miss Morris
asked Carlton for a pencil, and scribbled with it in the novel she held
on her lap. Then she passed them both back to him, and said, aloud:
“Have you read this? It has such a pretty dedication.” The dedication
read, “Which is Aline?” And Carlton, taking the pencil in his turn, made
a rapid sketch of her on the fly-leaf, and wrote beneath it: “This is
she. Do you wonder I travelled four thousand miles to see her?”
Miss Morris took the book again, and glanced at the sketch, and then at
the three Princesses, and nodded her head. “It is very beautiful,” she
said, gravely, looking out at the passing landscape.
“Well, not beautiful exactly,” answered Carlton, surveying the hills
critically, “but certainly very attractive. It is worth travelling a
long way to see, and I should think one would grow very fond of it.”
Miss Morris tore the fly-leaf out of the book, and slipped it between
the pages. “May I keep it?” she said. Carlton nodded. “And will you sign
it?” she asked, smiling. Carlton shrugged his shoulders, and laughed.
“If you wish it,” he answered.
The Princess wore a gray cheviot travelling dress, as did her sisters,
and a gray Alpine hat. She was leaning back, talking to the English
captain who accompanied them, and laughing. Carlton thought he had never
seen a woman who appealed so strongly to every taste of which he was
possessed. She seemed so sure of herself, so alert, and yet so gracious,
so easily entertained, and yet, when she turned her eyes toward the
strange, dismal landscape, so seriously intent upon its sad beauty. The
English captain dropped his head, and with the pretence of pulling at
his mustache, covered his mouth as he spoke to her. When he had finished
he gazed consciously at the roof of the car, and she kept her eyes fixed
steadily at the object toward which they had turned when he had ceased
speaking, and then, after a decent pause, turned her eyes, as Carlton
knew she would, toward him.
[Illustration: “This is she. Do you wonder I travelled four thousand
miles to see her?”]
“He was telling her who I am,” he thought, “and about the picture in the
catalogue.”
In a few moments she turned to her sister and spoke to her, pointing out
at something in the scenery, and the same pantomime was repeated, and
again with the third sister.
“Did you see those girls talking about you, Mr. Carlton?” Miss Morris
asked, after they had left the car.
Carlton said it looked as though they were.
“Of course they were,” said Miss Morris. “That Englishman told the
Princess Aline something about you, and then she told her sister, and
she told the eldest one. It would be nice if they inherit their father’s
interest in painting, wouldn’t it?”
“I would rather have it degenerate into an interest in painters myself,”
said Carlton.
Miss Morris discovered, after she had returned to her own car, that she
had left the novel where she had been sitting, and Carlton sent Nolan
back for it. It had slipped to the floor, and the fly-leaf upon which
Carlton had sketched the Princess Aline was lying face down beside it.
Nolan picked up the leaf, and saw the picture, and read the inscription
below: “This is she. Do you wonder I travelled four thousand miles to
see her?”
He handed the book to Miss Morris, and was backing out of the
compartment, when she stopped him.
“There was a loose page in this, Nolan,” she said. “It’s gone; did you
see it?”
“A loose page, miss?” said Nolan, with some concern. “Oh, yes, miss; I
was going to tell you; there was a scrap of paper blew away when I was
passing between the carriages. Was it something you wanted, miss?”
“Something I wanted!” exclaimed Miss Morris, in dismay.
Carlton laughed easily. “It is just as well I didn’t sign it, after
all,” he said. “I don’t want to proclaim my devotion to any Hungarian
gypsy who happens to read English.”
“You must draw me another, as a souvenir,” Miss Morris said.
Nolan continued on through the length of the car until he had reached
the one occupied by the Hohenwalds, where he waited on the platform
until the English maid-servant saw him and came to the door of the
carriage.
“What hotel are your people going to stop at in Constantinople?” Nolan
asked.
“The Grande-Bretagne, I think,” she answered.
“That’s right,” said Nolan, approvingly. “That’s the one we are going
to. I thought I would come and tell you about it. And, by the way,” he
said, “here’s a picture somebody’s made of your Princess Aline. She
dropped it, and I picked it up. You had better give it back to her.
Well,” he added, politely, “I’m glad you are coming to our hotel in
Constantinople; it’s pleasant having some one to talk to who can speak
your own tongue.”
The girl returned to the car, and left Nolan alone upon the platform. He
exhaled a long breath of suppressed excitement, and then gazed around
nervously upon the empty landscape.
“I fancy that’s going to hurry things up a bit,” he murmured, with an
anxious smile; “he’d never get along at all if it wasn’t for me.”
For reasons possibly best understood by the German ambassador, the state
of the Hohenwalds at Constantinople differed greatly from that which had
obtained at the French capital. They no longer came and went as they
wished, or wandered through the show-places of the city like ordinary
tourists. There was, on the contrary, not only a change in their manner
toward others, but there was an insistence on their part of a difference
in the attitude of others toward themselves. This showed itself in the
reserving of the half of the hotel for their use, and in the haughty
bearing of the equerries, who appeared unexpectedly in magnificent
uniforms. The visitors’ book was covered with the autographs of all of
the important people in the Turkish capital, and the Sultan’s carriages
stood constantly before the door of the hotel, awaiting their pleasure,
until they became as familiar a sight as the street dogs, or as cabs in
a hansom-cab rank.
And in following out the programme which had been laid down for her, the
Princess Aline became even less accessible to Carlton than before, and
he grew desperate and despondent.
“If the worst comes,” he said to Miss Morris, “I shall tell Nolan to
give an alarm of fire some night, and then I will run in and rescue her
before they find out there is no fire. Or he might frighten the horses
some day, and give me a chance to stop them. We might even wait until we
reach Greece, and have her carried off by brigands, who would only give
her up to me.”
“There are no more brigands in Greece,” said Miss Morris; “and besides,
why do you suppose they would only give her up to you?”
“Because they would be imitation brigands,” said Carlton, “and would be
paid to give her up to no one else.”
“Oh, you plan very well,” scoffed Miss Morris, “but you don’t _do_
anything.”
Carlton was saved the necessity of doing anything that same morning,
when the English captain in attendance on the Duke sent his card to
Carlton’s room. He came, he explained, to present the Prince’s
compliments, and would it be convenient for Mr. Carlton to meet the Duke
that afternoon? Mr. Carlton suppressed an unseemly desire to shout, and
said, after a moment’s consideration, that it would. He then took the
English captain downstairs to the smoking-room, and rewarded him for his
agreeable message.
The Duke received Carlton in the afternoon, and greeted him most
cordially, and with as much ease of manner as it is possible for a man
to possess who has never enjoyed the benefits of meeting other men on an
equal footing. He expressed his pleasure in knowing an artist with whose
work he was so familiar, and congratulated himself on the happy accident
which had brought them both to the same hotel.
“I have more than a natural interest in meeting you,” said the Prince,
“and for a reason which you may or may not know. I thought possibly you
could help me somewhat. I have within the past few days come into the
possession of two of your paintings; they are studies, rather, but to me
they are even more desirable than the finished work; and I am not
correct in saying that they have come to me exactly, but to my sister,
the Princess Aline.”
Carlton could not withhold a certain start of surprise. He had not
expected that his gift would so soon have arrived, but his face showed
only polite attention.
“The studies were delivered to us in London,” continued the Duke. “They
are of Ludwig the tragedian, and of the German Prime Minister, two most
valuable works, and especially interesting to us. They came without any
note or message which would inform us who had sent them, and when my
people made inquiries, the dealer refused to tell them from whom they
had come. He had been ordered to forward them to Grasse, but, on
learning of our presence in London, sent them direct to our hotel there.
Of course it is embarrassing to have so valuable a present from an
anonymous friend, especially so for my sister, to whom they were
addressed, and I thought that, besides the pleasure of meeting one of
whose genius I am so warm an admirer, I might also learn something which
would enable me to discover who our friend may be.” He paused, but as
Carlton said nothing, continued: “As it is now, I do not feel that I can
accept the pictures; and yet I know no one to whom they can be returned,
unless I send them to the dealer.”
“It sounds very mysterious,” said Carlton, smiling; “and I am afraid I
cannot help you. What work I did in Germany was sold in Berlin before I
left, and in a year may have changed hands several times. The studies of
which you speak are unimportant, and merely studies, and could pass from
hand to hand without much record having been kept of them; but
personally I am not able to give you any information which would assist
you in tracing them.”
“Yes,” said the Duke. “Well, then, I shall keep them until I can learn
more; and if we can learn nothing, I shall return them to the dealer.”
Carlton met Miss Morris that afternoon in a state of great excitement.
“It’s come!” he cried—“it’s come! I am to meet her this week. I have met
her brother, and he has asked me to dine with them on Thursday night;
that’s the day before they leave for Athens; and he particularly
mentioned that his sisters would be at the dinner, and that it would be
a pleasure to present me. It seems that the eldest paints, and all of
them love art for art’s sake, as their father taught them to do; and,
for all we know, he may make me court painter, and I shall spend the
rest of my life at Grasse painting portraits of the Princess Aline, at
the age of twenty-two, and at all future ages. And if he does give me a
commission to paint her, I can tell you now in confidence that that
picture will require more sittings than any other picture ever painted
by man. Her hair will have turned white by the time it is finished, and
the gown she started to pose in will have become forty years behind the
fashion!”
On the morning following, Carlton and Mrs. Downs and her niece, with all
the tourists in Constantinople, were placed in open carriages by their
dragomans, and driven in a long procession to the Seraglio to see the
Sultan’s treasures. Those of them who had waited two weeks for this
chance looked aggrieved at the more fortunate who had come at the
eleventh hour on the last night’s steamer, and seemed to think these
latter had attained the privilege without sufficient effort. The
ministers of the different legations—as is the harmless custom of such
gentlemen—had impressed every one for whom they had obtained permission
to see the treasures with the great importance of the service rendered,
and had succeeded in making every one feel either especially honored or
especially uncomfortable at having given them so much trouble. This
sense of obligation, and the fact that the dragomans had assured the
tourists that they were for the time being the guests of the Sultan,
awed and depressed most of the visitors to such an extent that their
manner in the long procession of carriages suggested a funeral cortege,
with the Hohenwalds in front, escorted by Beys and Pashas, as chief
mourners. The procession halted at the palace, and the guests of the
Sultan were received by numerous effendis in single-button frock-coats
and freshly ironed fezzes, who served them with glasses of water, and a
huge bowl of some sweet stuff, of which every one was supposed to take a
spoonful. There was at first a general fear among the Cook’s tourists
that there would not be enough of this to go round, which was succeeded
by a greater anxiety lest they should be served twice. Some of the
tourists put the sweet stuff in their mouths direct and licked the
spoon, and others dropped it off the spoon into the glass of water, and
stirred it about and sipped at it, and no one knew who had done the
right thing, not even those who happened to have done it. Carlton and
Miss Morris went out on to the terrace while this ceremony was going
forward, and looked out over the great panorama of waters, with the Sea
of Marmora on one side, the Golden Horn on the other, and the Bosporus
at their feet. The sun was shining mildly, and the waters were stirred
by great and little vessels; before them on the opposite bank rose the
dark green cypresses which marked the grim cemetery of England’s dead,
and behind them were the great turtle-backed mosques and pencil-like
minarets of the two cities, and close at hand the mosaic walls and
beautiful gardens of Constantine.
“Your friends the Hohenwalds don’t seem to know you this morning,” she
said.
“Oh, yes; he spoke to me as we left the hotel,” Carlton answered. “But
they are on parade at present. There are a lot of their countrymen among
the tourists.”
“I feel rather sorry for them,” Miss Morris said, looking at the group
with an amused smile. “Etiquette cuts them off from so much innocent
amusement. Now, you are a gentleman, and the Duke presumably is, and why
should you not go over and say, ‘Your Highness, I wish you would present
me to your sister, whom I am to meet at dinner to-morrow night. I admire
her very much,’ and then you could point out the historical features to
her, and show her where they have finished off a blue and green tiled
wall with a rusty tin roof, and make pretty speeches to her. It wouldn’t
hurt her, and it would do you a lot of good. The simplest way is always
the best way, it seems to me.”
“Oh yes, of course,” said Carlton. “Suppose he came over here and said:
‘Carlton, I wish you would present me to your young American friend. I
admire her very much.’ I would probably say: ‘Do you? Well, you will
have to wait until she expresses some desire to meet you.’ No; etiquette
is all right in itself, only some people don’t know its laws, and that
is the one instance to my mind where ignorance of the law is no excuse.”
Carlton left Miss Morris talking with the Secretary of the American
Legation, and went to look for Mrs. Downs. When he returned he found
that the young Secretary had apparently asked and obtained permission to
present the Duke’s equerries and some of his diplomatic confrères, who
were standing now about her in an attentive semicircle, and pointing out
the different palaces and points of interest. Carlton was somewhat
disturbed at the sight, and reproached himself with not having presented
any one to her before. He was sure now that she must have had a dull
time of it; but he wished, nevertheless, that if she was to meet other
men, the Secretary had allowed him to act as master of ceremonies.
“I suppose you know,” that gentleman was saying as Carlton came up,
“that when you pass by Abydos, on the way to Athens, you will see where
Leander swam the Hellespont to meet Hero. That little white light-house
is called Leander in honor of him. It makes rather an interesting
contrast—does it not?—to think of that chap swimming along in the dark,
and then to find that his monument to-day is a light-house, with
revolving lamps and electric appliances, and with ocean tramps and
bridges and men-of-war around it. We have improved in our mechanism
since then,” he said, with an air, “but I am afraid the men of to-day
don’t do that sort of thing for the women of to-day.”
“Then it is the men who have deteriorated,” said one of the equerries,
bowing to Miss Morris; “it is certainly not the women.”
The two Americans looked at Miss Morris to see how she received this,
but she smiled good-naturedly.
“I know a man who did more than that for a woman,” said Carlton,
innocently. “He crossed an ocean and several countries to meet her, and
he hasn’t met her yet.”
Miss Morris looked at him and laughed, in the safety that no one
understood him but herself.
“But he ran no danger,” she answered.
“He didn’t, didn’t he?” said Carlton, looking at her closely and
laughing. “I think he was in very great danger all the time.”
“Shocking!” said Miss Morris, reprovingly; “and in her very presence,
too.” She knitted her brows and frowned at him. “I really believe if you
were in prison you would make pretty speeches to the jailer’s daughter.”
“Yes,” said Carlton, boldly, “or even to a woman who was a prisoner
herself.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” she said, turning away from him to the
others. “How far was it that Leander swam?” she asked.
The English captain pointed out two spots on either bank, and said that
the shores of Abydos were a little over that distance apart.
“As far as that?” said Miss Morris. “How much he must have cared for
her!” She turned to Carlton for an answer.
“I beg your pardon,” he said. He was measuring the distance between the
two points with his eyes.
“I said how much he must have cared for her! You wouldn’t swim that far
for a girl.”
“For a girl!” laughed Carlton, quickly. “I was just thinking I would do
it for fifty dollars.”
The English captain gave a hasty glance at the distance he had pointed
out, and then turned to Carlton. “I’ll take you,” he said, seriously.
“I’ll bet you twenty pounds you can’t do it.” There was an easy laugh at
Carlton’s expense, but he only shook his head and smiled.
“Leave him alone, captain,” said the American Secretary. “It seems to me
I remember a story of Mr. Carlton’s swimming out from Navesink to meet
an ocean liner. It was about three miles, and the ocean was rather
rough, and when they slowed up he asked them if it was raining in London
when they left. They thought he was mad.”
“Is that true, Carlton?” asked the Englishman.
“Something like it,” said the American, “except that I didn’t ask them
if it was raining in London. I asked them for a drink, and it was they
who were mad. They thought I was drowning, and slowed up to lower a
boat, and when they found out I was just swimming around they were
naturally angry.”
“Well, I’m glad you didn’t bet with me,” said the captain, with a
relieved laugh.
That evening, as the Englishman was leaving the smoking-room, and after
he had bidden Carlton good-night, he turned back and said: “I didn’t
like to ask you before those men this morning, but there was something
about your swimming adventure I wanted to know: Did you get that drink?”
“I did,” said Carlton—“in a bottle. They nearly broke my shoulder.”
As Carlton came into the breakfast-room on the morning of the day he was
to meet the Princess Aline at dinner, Miss Morris was there alone, and
he sat down at the same table, opposite to her. She looked at him
critically, and smiled with evident amusement.
“‘To-day,’” she quoted, solemnly, “‘the birthday of my life has come.’”
Carlton poured out his coffee, with a shake of his head, and frowned.
“Oh, you can laugh,” he said, “but I didn’t sleep at all last night. I
lay awake making speeches to her. I know they are going to put me
between the wrong sisters,” he complained, “or next to one of those old
ladies-in-waiting, or whatever they are.”
“How are you going to begin?” said Miss Morris. “Will you tell her you
have followed her from London—or from New York, rather—that you are
young Lochinvar, who came out of the West, and——”
“I don’t know,” said Carlton, meditatively, “just how I shall begin; but
I know the curtain is going to rise promptly at eight o’clock—about the
time the soup comes on, I think. I don’t see how she can help but be
impressed a little bit. It isn’t every day a man hurries around the
globe on account of a girl’s photograph; and she _is_ beautiful, isn’t
she?”
Miss Morris nodded her head encouragingly.
“Do you know, sometimes,” said Carlton, glancing over his shoulders to
see if the waiters were out of hearing, “I fancy she has noticed me.
Once or twice I have turned my head in her direction without meaning to,
and found her looking—well, looking my way, at least. Don’t you think
that is a good sign?” he asked, eagerly.
“It depends on what you call a ‘good sign,’” said Miss Morris,
judicially. “It is a sign you’re good to look at, if that’s what you
want. But you probably know that already, and it’s nothing to your
credit. It certainly isn’t a sign that a person cares for you because
she prefers to look at your profile rather than at what the dragomans
are trying to show her.”
Carlton drew himself up stiffly. “If you knew your _Alice_ better,” he
said, with severity, “you would understand that it is not polite to make
personal remarks. I ask you, as my confidante, if you think she has
noticed me, and you make fun of my looks! That’s not the part of a
confidante.”
“Noticed you!” laughed Miss Morris, scornfully. “How could she help it?
You are always in the way. You are at the door whenever they go out or
come in, and when we are visiting mosques and palaces you are invariably
looking at her instead of the tombs and things, with a wistful far-away
look, as though you saw a vision. The first time you did it, after you
had turned away I saw her feel to see if her hair was all right. You
quite embarrassed her.”
“I didn’t—I don’t!” stammered Carlton, indignantly. “I wouldn’t be so
rude. Oh, I see I’ll have to get another confidante; you are most
unsympathetic and unkind.”
But Miss Morris showed her sympathy later in the day, when Carlton
needed it sorely; for the dinner toward which he had looked with such
pleasurable anticipations and loverlike misgivings did not take place.
The Sultan, so the equerry informed him, had, with Oriental
unexpectedness, invited the Duke to dine that night at the Palace, and
the Duke, much to his expressed regret, had been forced to accept what
was in the nature of a command. He sent word by his equerry, however,
that the dinner to Mr. Carlton was only a pleasure deferred, and that at
Athens, where he understood Carlton was also going, he hoped to have the
pleasure of entertaining him and making him known to his sisters.
“He is a selfish young egoist,” said Carlton to Mrs. Downs. “As if I
cared whether he was at the dinner or not! Why couldn’t he have fixed it
so I might have dined with his sisters alone? We would never have missed
him. I’ll never meet her now. I know it; I feel it. Fate is against me.
Now I will have to follow them on to Athens, and something will turn up
there to keep me away from her. You’ll see; you’ll see. I wonder where
they go from Athens?”
The Hohenwalds departed the next morning, and as their party had engaged
all the staterooms in the little Italian steamer, Carlton was forced to
wait over for the next. He was very gloomy over his disappointment, and
Miss Morris did her best to amuse him. She and her aunt were never idle
now, and spent the last few days of their stay in Constantinople in the
bazaars or in excursions up and down the river.
“These are my last days of freedom,” Miss Morris said to him once, “and
I mean to make the most of them. After this there will be no more
travelling for me. And I love it so!” she added, wistfully.
Carlton made no comment, but he felt a certain contemptuous pity for the
young man in America who had required such a sacrifice. “She is too nice
a girl to let him know she is making a sacrifice,” he thought, “or
giving up anything for him, but _she_ won’t forget it.” And Carlton
again commended himself for not having asked any woman to make any
sacrifices for him.
They left Constantinople for Athens one moonlight night, three days
after the Hohenwalds had taken their departure, and as the evening and
the air were warm, they remained upon the upper deck until the boat had
entered the Dardanelles. There were few passengers, and Mrs. Downs went
below early, leaving Miss Morris and Carlton hanging over the rail, and
looking down upon a band of Hungarian gypsies, who were playing the
weird music of their country on the deck beneath them. The low receding
hills lay close on either hand, and ran back so sharply from the narrow
waterway that they seemed to shut in the boat from the world beyond. The
moonlight showed a little mud fort or a thatched cottage on the bank
fantastically, as through a mist, and from time to time as they sped
forward they saw the camp-fire of a sentry, and his shadow as he passed
between it and them, or stopped to cover it with wood. The night was so
still that they could hear the waves in the steamer’s wake washing up
over the stones on either shore, and the muffled beat of the engines
echoed back from either side of the valley through which they passed.
There was a great lantern hanging midway from the mast, and shining down
upon the lower deck. It showed a group of Greeks, Turks, and Armenians,
in strange costumes, sleeping, huddled together in picturesque confusion
over the bare boards, or wide awake and voluble, smoking and chatting
together in happy company. The music of the tizanes rose in notes of
passionate ecstasy and sharp, unexpected bursts of melody. It ceased and
began again, as though the musicians were feeling their way, and then
burst out once more into shrill defiance. It stirred Carlton with a
strange turbulent unrest. From the banks the night wind brought soft
odors of fresh earth and of heavy foliage.
“The music of different countries,” Carlton said at last, “means many
different things. But it seems to me that the music of Hungary is the
music of love.”
Miss Morris crossed her arms comfortably on the rail, and he heard her
laugh softly. “Oh no, it is not,” she said, undisturbed. “It is a
passionate, gusty, heady sort of love, if you like, but it’s no more
like the real thing than burgundy is like clear, cold, good water. It’s
not the real thing at all.”
“I beg your pardon,” said Carlton, meekly. “Of course I don’t know
anything about it.” He had been waked out of the spell which the night
and the tizanes had placed upon him as completely as though some one had
shaken him sharply by the shoulder. “I bow,” he said, “to your superior
knowledge. I know nothing about it.”
“No; you are quite right. I don’t believe you do know anything about
it,” said the girl, “or you wouldn’t have made such a comparison.”
“Do you know, Miss Morris,” said Carlton, seriously, “that I believe I’m
not able to care for a woman as other men do—at least as some men do;
it’s just lacking in me, and always will be lacking. It’s like an ear
for music; if you haven’t got it, if it isn’t born in you, you’ll never
have it. It’s not a thing you can cultivate, and I feel that it’s not
only a misfortune, but a fault. Now I honestly believe that I care more
for the Princess Aline, whom I have never met, than many other men could
care for her if they knew her well; but what they feel would last, and I
have doubts from past experience that what I feel would. I don’t doubt
it while it exists, but it never does exist long, and so I am afraid it
is going to be with me to the end of the chapter.” He paused for a
moment, but the girl did not answer. “I am speaking in earnest now,” he
added, with a rueful laugh.
“I see you are,” she replied, briefly. She seemed to be considering his
condition as he had described it to her, and he did not interrupt her.
From below them came the notes of the waltz the gypsies played. It was
full of the undercurrent of sadness that a waltz should have, and filled
out what Carlton said as the music from the orchestra in a theatre
heightens the effect without interrupting the words of the actor on the
stage.
“It is strange,” said Miss Morris. “I should have thought you were a man
who would care very much and in just the right way. But I don’t believe
really—I’m sorry, but I don’t believe you do know what love means at
all.”
“Oh, it isn’t as bad as that,” said Carlton. “I think I know what it is,
and what it means to other people, but I can’t feel it myself. The best
idea I ever got of it—the thing that made it clear to me—was a line in a
play. It seemed to express it better than any of the love-poems I ever
read. It was in ‘Shenandoah.’”
Miss Morris laughed.
“I beg your pardon,” said Carlton.
“I beg yours,” she said. “It was only the incongruity that struck me. It
seemed so odd to be quoting ‘Shenandoah’ here in the Dardanelles, with
these queer people below us and ancient Troy on one hand—it took me by
surprise, that’s all. Please go on. What was it impressed you?”
“Well, the hero in the play,” said Carlton, “is an officer in the
Northern army, and he is lying wounded in a house near the Shenandoah
Valley. The girl he loves lives in this house, and is nursing him; but
she doesn’t love him, because she sympathizes with the South. At least
she says she doesn’t love him. Both armies are forming in the valley
below to begin the battle, and he sees his own regiment hurrying past to
join them. So he gets up and staggers out on the stage, which is set to
show the yard in front of the farm-house, and he calls for his horse to
follow his men. Then the girl runs out and begs him not to go; and he
asks why, what does it matter to her whether he goes or not? And she
says, ‘But I cannot let you go; you may be killed.’ And he says again,
‘What is that to you?’ And she says: ‘It is everything to me. I love
you.’ And he makes a grab at her with his wounded arm, and at that
instant both armies open fire in the valley below, and the whole earth
and sky seem to open and shut, and the house rocks. The girl rushes at
him and crowds up against his breast, and cries: ‘What is that? Oh, what
is that?’ and he holds her tight to him and laughs, and says: ‘_That?_
That’s only a battle—you love me.’”
Miss Morris looked steadfastly over the side of the boat at the waters
rushing by beneath, smiling to herself. Then she turned her face toward
Carlton, and nodded her head at him. “I think,” she said, dryly, “that
you have a fair idea of what it means; a rough working-plan at
least—enough to begin on.”
“I said that I knew what it meant to others. I am complaining that I
cannot feel it myself.”
“That will come in time, no doubt,” she said, encouragingly, with the
air of a connoisseur; “and let me tell you,” she added, “that it will be
all the better for the woman that you have doubted yourself so long.”
“You think so?” said Carlton, eagerly.
Miss Morris laughed at his earnestness, and left him to go below to ask
her aunt to join them, but Mrs. Downs preferred to read in the saloon,
and Miss Morris returned alone. She had taken off her Eton jacket and
pulled on a heavy blue football sweater, and over this a reefer. The
jersey clung to her and showed the lines of her figure, and emphasized
the freedom and grace with which she made every movement. She looked, as
she walked at his side with her hands in the pockets of her coat and
with a flat sailor hat on her head, like a tall, handsome boy; but when
they stopped and stood where the light fell full on her hair and the
exquisite coloring of her skin, Carlton thought her face had never
seemed so delicate or fair as it did then, rising from the collar of the
rough jersey, and contrasted with the hat and coat of a man’s attire.
They paced the deck for an hour later, until every one else had left it,
and at midnight were still loath to give up the beautiful night and the
charm of their strange surroundings. There were long silent places in
their talk, during which Carlton tramped beside her with his head half
turned, looking at her and noting with an artist’s eye the free light
step, the erect carriage, and the unconscious beauty of her face. The
captain of the steamer joined them after midnight, and falling into
step, pointed out to Miss Morris where great cities had stood, where
others lay buried, and where beyond the hills were the almost
inaccessible monasteries of the Greek Church. The moonlight turned the
banks into shadowy substances, in which the ghosts of former days seemed
to make a part; and spurred by the young girl’s interest, the Italian,
to entertain her, called up all the legends of mythology and the stories
of Roman explorers and Turkish conquerors.
“I turn in now,” he said, after Miss Morris had left them. “A most
charming young lady. Is it not so?” he added, waving his cigarette in a
gesture which expressed the ineffectiveness of the adjective.
“Yes, very,” said Carlton. “Good-night, sir.”
He turned, and leaned with both elbows on the rail, and looked out at
the misty banks, puffing at his cigar. Then he dropped it hissing into
the water, and, stifling a yawn, looked up and down the length of the
deserted deck. It seemed particularly bare and empty.
“What a pity she’s engaged!” Carlton said. “She loses so much by it.”
They steamed slowly into the harbor of the Piræus at an early hour the
next morning, with a flotilla of small boats filled with shrieking
porters and hotel-runners at the sides. These men tossed their painters
to the crew, and crawled up them like a boarding crew of pirates,
running wildly about the deck, and laying violent hands on any piece of
baggage they saw unclaimed. The passengers’ trunks had been thrown out
in a heap on the deck, and Nolan and Carlton were clambering over them,
looking for their own effects, while Miss Morris stood below, as far out
of the confusion as she could place herself, and pointed out the
different pieces that belonged to her. As she stood there one of the
hotel-runners, a burly, greasy Levantine in pursuit of a possible
victim, shouldered her intentionally and roughly out of the way. He
shoved her so sharply that she lost her balance and fell back against
the rail. Carlton saw what had happened, and made a flying leap from the
top of the pile of trunks, landing beside her, and in time to seize the
escaping offender by the collar. He jerked him back off his feet.
“How dare you—” he began.
But he did not finish. He felt the tips of Miss Morris’s fingers laid
upon his shoulder, and her voice saying, in an annoyed tone: “Don’t;
please don’t.” And, to his surprise, his fingers lost their grip on the
man’s shirt, his arms dropped at his side, and his blood began to flow
calmly again through his veins. Carlton was aware that he had a very
quick temper. He was always engaging in street rows, as he called them,
with men who he thought had imposed on him or on some one else, and
though he was always ashamed of himself later, his temper had never been
satisfied without a blow or an apology. Women had also touched him
before, and possibly with a greater familiarity; but these had stirred
him, not quieted him; and men who had laid detaining hands on him had
had them beaten down for their pains. But this girl had merely touched
him gently, and he had been made helpless. It was most perplexing; and
while the custom-house officials were passing his luggage, he found
himself rubbing his arm curiously, as though it were numb, and looking
down at it with an amused smile. He did not comment on the incident,
although he smiled at the recollection of his prompt obedience several
times during the day. But as he was stepping into the cab to drive to
Athens, he saw the offending ruffian pass, dripping with water, and
muttering bitter curses. When he saw Carlton he disappeared instantly in
the crowd. Carlton stepped over to where Nolan sat beside the driver on
the box. “Nolan,” he said, in a low voice, “isn’t that the fellow who——”
“Yes, sir,” said Nolan, touching his hat gravely. “He was pulling a
valise one way, and the gentleman that owned it, sir, was pulling it the
other, and the gentleman let go sudden, and the Italian went over
backwards off the pier.”
Carlton smiled grimly with secret satisfaction.
“Nolan,” he said, “you’re not telling the truth. You did it yourself.”
Nolan touched his cap and coughed consciously. There had been no
detaining fingers on Nolan’s arm.
III
“You are coming now, Miss Morris,” exclaimed Carlton from the front of
the carriage in which they were moving along the sunny road to Athens,
“into a land where one restores his lost illusions. Anybody who wishes
to get back his belief in beautiful things should come here to do it,
just as he would go to a German sanitarium to build up his nerves or his
appetite. You have only to drink in the atmosphere and you are cured. I
know no better antidote than Athens for a siege of cable-cars and muddy
asphalt pavements and a course of ‘Robert Elsmeres’ and the ‘Heavenly
Twins.’ Wait until you see the statues of the young athletes in the
Museum,” he cried, enthusiastically, “and get a glimpse of the blue sky
back of Mount Hymettus, and the moonlight some evening on the Acropolis,
and you’ll be convinced that nothing counts for much in this world but
health and straight limbs, and tall marble pillars, and eyes trained to
see only what is beautiful. Give people a love for beauty and a respect
for health, Miss Morris, and the result is going to be, what they once
had here, the best art and the greatest writers and satirists and poets.
The same audience that applauded Euripides and Sophocles in the open
theatre used to cross the road the same day to applaud the athletes who
ran naked in the Olympian games, and gave them as great honor. I came
here once on a walking tour with a chap who wasn’t making as much of
himself as he should have done, and he went away a changed man, and
became a personage in the world, and you would never guess what it was
that did it. He saw a statue of one of the Greek gods in the Museum
which showed certain muscles that he couldn’t find in his own body, and
he told me he was going to train down until they did show; and he
stopped drinking and loafing to do it, and took to exercising and
working; and by the time the muscles showed out clear and strong he was
so keen over life that he wanted to make the most of it, and, as I said,
he has done it. That’s what a respect for his own body did for him.”
The carriage stopped at the hotel on one side of the public square of
Athens, with the palace and its gardens blocking one end, and yellow
houses with red roofs, and gay awnings over the cafés, surrounding it.
It was a bright sunny day, and the city was clean and cool and pretty.
“Breakfast?” exclaimed Miss Morris, in answer to Carlton’s inquiry;
“yes, I suppose so, but I won’t feel safe until I have my feet on that
rock.” She was standing on the steps of the hotel, looking up with
expectant, eager eyes at the great Acropolis above the city.
“It has been there for a long time now,” suggested Carlton, “and I think
you can risk its being there for a half-hour longer.”
“Well,” she said, reluctantly, “but I don’t wish to lose this chance.
There might be an earthquake, for instance.”
“We are likely to see _them_ this morning,” said Carlton, as he left the
hotel with the ladies and drove toward the Acropolis. “Nolan has been
interviewing the English maid, and she tells him they spend the greater
part of their time up there on the rock. They are living very simply
here, as they did in Paris; that is, for the present. On Wednesday the
King gives a dinner and a reception in their honor.”
“When does your dinner come off?” asked Miss Morris.
“Never,” said Carlton, grimly.
“One of the reasons why I like to come back to Athens so much,” said
Mrs. Downs, “is because there are so few other tourists here to spoil
the local color for you, and there are almost as few guides as tourists,
so that you can wander around undisturbed and discover things for
yourself. They don’t label every fallen column, and place fences around
the temples. They seem to put you on your good behavior. Then I always
like to go to a place where you are as much of a curiosity to the people
as they are to you. It seems to excuse your staring about you.”
“A curiosity!” exclaimed Carlton; “I should say so! The last time I was
here I tried to wear a pair of knickerbockers around the city, and the
people stared so that I had to go back to the hotel and change them. I
shouldn’t have minded it so much in any other country, but I thought men
who wore Jaeger underclothing and women’s petticoats for a national
costume might have excused so slight an eccentricity as knickerbockers.
_They_ had no right to throw the first stone.”
The rock upon which the temples of the Acropolis are built is more of a
hill than a rock. It is much steeper upon one side than the other, with
a sheer fall a hundred yards broad; on the opposite side there are the
rooms of the Hospital of Æsculapius and the theatres of Dionysus and
Herodes Atticus. The top of the rock holds the Parthenon and the other
smaller temples, or what yet remains of them, and its surface is
littered with broken marble and stones and pieces of rock. The top is so
closely built over that the few tourists who visit it can imagine
themselves its sole occupants for a half-hour at a time. When Carlton
and his friends arrived, the place appeared quite deserted. They left
the carriage at the base of the rock, and climbed up to the entrance on
foot.
“Now, before I go on to the Parthenon,” said Miss Morris, “I want to
walk around the sides, and see what is there. I shall begin with that
theatre to the left, and I warn you that I mean to take my time about
it. So you people who have been here before can run along by yourselves,
but I mean to enjoy it leisurely. I am safe by myself here, am I not?”
she asked.
“As safe as though you were in the Metropolitan Museum,” said Carlton,
as he and Mrs. Downs followed Miss Morris along the side of the hill
toward the ruined theatre of Herodes, and stood at its top, looking down
into the basin below. From their feet ran a great semicircle of marble
seats, descending tier below tier to a marble pavement, and facing a
great ruined wall of pillars and arches which in the past had formed the
background for the actors. From the height on which they stood above the
city they could see the green country stretching out for miles on every
side and swimming in the warm sunlight, the dark groves of myrtle on the
hills, the silver ribbon of the inland water, and the dark blue Ægean
Sea. The bleating of sheep and the tinkling of the bells came up to them
from the pastures below, and they imagined they could hear the shepherds
piping to their flocks from one little hill-top to another.
“The country is not much changed,” said Carlton. “And when you stand
where we are now, you can imagine that you see the procession winding
its way over the road to the Eleusinian Mysteries, with the gilded
chariots, and the children carrying garlands, and the priestesses
leading the bulls for the sacrifice.”
“What can we imagine is going on here?” said Miss Morris, pointing with
her parasol to the theatre below.
“Oh, this is much later,” said Carlton. “This was built by the Romans.
They used to act and to hold their public meetings here. This
corresponds to the top row of our gallery, and you can imagine that you
are looking down on the bent backs of hundreds of bald-headed men in
white robes, listening to the speakers strutting about below there.”
“I wonder how much they could hear from this height?” said Mrs. Downs.
“Well, they had that big wall for a sounding-board, and the air is so
soft here that their voices should have carried easily, and I believe
they wore masks with mouth-pieces, that conveyed the sound like a
fireman’s trumpet. If you like, I will run down there and call up to
you, and you can hear how it sounded. I will speak in my natural voice
first, and if that doesn’t reach you, wave your parasol, and I will try
it a little louder.”
“Oh, do!” said Miss Morris. “It will be very good of you. I should like
to hear a real speech in the theatre of Herodes,” she said, as she
seated herself on the edge of the marble crater.
“I’ll have to speak in English,” said Carlton, as he disappeared; “my
Greek isn’t good enough to carry that far.”
Mrs. Downs seated herself beside her niece, and Carlton began scrambling
down the side of the amphitheatre. The marble benches were broken in
parts, and where they were perfect were covered with a fine layer of
moss as smooth and soft as green velvet, so that Carlton, when he was
not laboriously feeling for his next foothold with the toe of his boot,
was engaged in picking spring flowers from the beds of moss and sticking
them, for safe-keeping, in his button-hole. He was several minutes in
making the descent, and so busily occupied in doing it that he did not
look up until he had reached the level of the ground, and jumped lightly
from the first row of seats to the stage, covered with moss, which lay
like a heavy rug over the marble pavement. When he did look up he saw a
tableau that made his heart, which was beating quickly from the exertion
of the descent, stand still with consternation. The Hohenwalds had, in
his short absence, descended from the entrance of the Acropolis, and had
stopped on their way to the road below to look into the cool green and
white basin of the theatre. At the moment Carlton looked up the Duke was
standing in front of Mrs. Downs and Miss Morris, and all of the men had
their hats off. Then, in pantomime, and silhouetted against the blue sky
behind them, Carlton saw the Princesses advance beside their brother,
and Mrs. Downs and her niece curtsied three times, and then the whole
party faced about in a line and looked down at him. The meaning of the
tableau was only too plain.
“Good heavens!” gasped Carlton. “Everybody’s getting introduced to
everybody else, and I’ve missed the whole thing! If they think I’m going
to stay down here and amuse them, and miss all the fun myself, they are
greatly mistaken.” He made a mad rush for the front first row of seats;
but there was a cry of remonstrance from above, and, looking up, he saw
all of the men waving him back.
“Speech!” cried the young English Captain, applauding loudly, as though
welcoming an actor on his first entrance. “Hats off!” he cried. “Down in
front! Speech!”
“Confound that ass!” said Carlton, dropping back to the marble pavement
again, and gazing impotently up at the row of figures outlined against
the sky. “I must look like a bear in the bear-pit at the Zoo,” he
growled. “They’ll be throwing buns to me next.” He could see the two
elder sisters talking to Mrs. Downs, who was evidently explaining his
purpose in going down to the stage of the theatre, and he could see the
Princess Aline bending forward, with both hands on her parasol, and
smiling. The captain made a trumpet of his hands, and asked why he
didn’t begin.
“Hello! how are you?” Carlton called back, waving his hat at him in some
embarrassment. “I wonder if I look as much like a fool as I feel?” he
muttered.
“What did you say? We can’t hear you,” answered the captain.
“Louder! louder!” called the equerries. Carlton swore at them under his
breath, and turned and gazed round the hole in which he was penned in
order to make them believe that he had given up the idea of making a
speech, or had ever intended doing so. He tried to think of something
clever to shout back at them, and rejected “Ye men of Athens” as being
too flippant, and “Friends, Countrymen, Romans,” as requiring too much
effort. When he looked up again the Hohenwalds were moving on their way,
and as he started once more to scale the side of the theatre the Duke
waved his hand at him in farewell, and gave another hand to his sisters,
who disappeared with him behind the edge of the upper row of seats.
Carlton turned at once and dropped into one of the marble chairs and
bowed his head. When he did reach the top Miss Morris held out a
sympathetic hand to him and shook her head sadly, but he could see that
she was pressing her lips tightly together to keep from smiling.
“Oh, it’s all very funny for you,” he said, refusing her hand. “I don’t
believe you are in love with anybody. You don’t know what it means.”
They revisited the rock on the next day and on the day after, and then
left Athens for an inland excursion to stay overnight. Miss Morris
returned from it with the sense of having done her duty once, and by so
doing having earned the right to act as she pleased in the future. What
she best pleased to do was to wander about over the broad top of the
Acropolis, with no serious intent of studying its historical values, but
rather, as she explained it, for the simple satisfaction of feeling that
she was there. She liked to stand on the edge of the low wall along its
top and look out over the picture of sea and plain and mountains that
lay below her. The sun shone brightly, and the wind swept by them as
though they were on the bridge of an ocean steamer, and there was the
added invigorating sense of pleasure that comes to us when we stand on a
great height. Carlton was sitting at her feet, shielded from the wind by
a fallen column, and gazing up at her with critical approval.
“You look like a sort of a ‘Winged Victory’ up there,” he said, “with
the wind blowing your skirts about and your hair coming down.”
“I don’t remember that the ‘Winged Victory’ has any hair to blow about,”
suggested Miss Morris.
“I’d like to paint you,” continued Carlton, “just as you are standing
now, only I would put you in a Greek dress; and you could stand a Greek
dress better than almost any one I know. I would paint you with your
head up and one hand shielding your eyes, and the other pressed against
your breast. It would be stunning.” He spoke enthusiastically, but in
quite an impersonal tone, as though he were discussing the posing of a
model.
Miss Morris jumped down from the low wall on which she had been
standing, and said, simply, “Of course I should like to have you paint
me very much.”
Mrs. Downs looked up with interest to see if Mr. Carlton was serious.
“When?” said Carlton, vaguely. “Oh, I don’t know. Of course this is
entirely too nice to last, and you will be going home soon, and then
when I do get back to the States you will—you will have other things to
do.”
“Yes,” repeated Miss Morris, “I shall have something else to do besides
gazing out at the Ægean Sea.” She raised her head and looked across the
rock for a moment with some interest. Her eyes, which had grown wistful,
lighted again with amusement. “Here are your friends,” she said,
smiling.
“No!” exclaimed Carlton, scrambling to his feet.
“Yes,” said Miss Morris. “The Duke has seen us, and is coming over
here.”
When Carlton had gained his feet and turned to look, his friends had
separated in different directions, and were strolling about alone or in
pairs among the great columns of the Parthenon. But the Duke came
directly toward them, and seated himself on a low block of marble in
front of the two ladies. After a word or two about the beauties of the
place, he asked if they would go to the reception which the King gave to
him on the day following. They answered that they should like to come
very much, and the Prince expressed his satisfaction, and said that he
would see that the chamberlain sent them invitations. “And you, Mr.
Carlton, you will come also, I hope. I wish you to be presented to my
sisters. They are only amateurs in art, but they are great admirers of
your work, and they have rebuked me for not having already presented
you. We were all disappointed,” he continued, courteously, “at not
having you to dine with us that night in Constantinople, but now I trust
I shall see something of you here. You must tell us what we are to
admire.”
“That is very easy,” said Carlton. “Everything.”
“You are quite right,” said the Prince, bowing to the ladies as he moved
away. “It is all very beautiful.”
“Well, now you certainly will meet her,” said Miss Morris.
“Oh no, I won’t,” said Carlton, with resignation. “I have had two
chances and lost them, and I’ll miss this one too.”
“Well, there is a chance you shouldn’t miss,” said Miss Morris, pointing
and nodding her head. “There she is now, and all alone. She’s sketching,
isn’t she, or taking notes? What is she doing?”
Carlton looked eagerly in the direction Miss Morris had signified, and
saw the Princess Aline sitting at some distance from them, with a book
on her lap. She glanced up from this now and again to look at something
ahead of her, and was apparently deeply absorbed in her occupation.
“There is your opportunity,” said Mrs. Downs; “and we are going back to
the hotel. Shall we see you at luncheon?”
“Yes,” said Carlton, “unless I get a position as drawing-master; in that
case I shall be here teaching the three amateurs in art. Do you think I
can do it?” he asked Miss Morris.
“Decidedly,” she answered. “I have found you a most educational young
person.”
They went away together, and Carlton moved cautiously toward the spot
where the Princess was sitting. He made a long and roundabout détour as
he did so, in order to keep himself behind her. He did not mean to come
so near that she would see him, but he took a certain satisfaction in
looking at her when she was alone, though her loneliness was only a
matter of the moment, and though he knew that her people were within a
hundred yards of her. He was in consequence somewhat annoyed and
surprised to see another young man dodging in and out among the pillars
of the Parthenon immediately ahead of him, and to find that this young
man also had his attention centred on the young girl, who sat
unconsciously sketching in the foreground.
“Now what the devil can he want?” muttered Carlton, his imagination
taking alarm at once.
“If it would only prove to be some one who meant harm to her,” he
thought—“a brigand, or a beggar, who might be obligingly insolent, or
even a tipsy man, what a chance it would afford for heroic action!”
With this hope he moved forward quickly but silently, hoping that the
stranger might prove even to be an anarchist with a grudge against
royalty. And as he advanced he had the satisfaction of seeing the
Princess glance over her shoulder, and, observing the man, rise and walk
quickly away toward the edge of the rock. There she seated herself with
her face toward the city, and with her back firmly set against her
pursuer.
“He _is_ annoying her!” exclaimed Carlton, delightedly, as he hurried
forward. “It looks as though my chance had come at last.” But as he
approached the stranger he saw, to his great disappointment, that he had
nothing more serious to deal with than one of the international army of
amateur photographers, who had been stalking the Princess as a hunter
follows an elk, or as he would have stalked a race-horse or a prominent
politician or a Lord Mayor’s show, everything being fish that came
within the focus of his camera. A helpless statue and an equally
helpless young girl were both good subjects and at his mercy. He was
bending over, with an anxious expression of countenance, and focussing
his camera on the back of the Princess Aline, when Carlton approached
from the rear. As the young man put his finger on the button of the
camera, Carlton jogged his arm with his elbow, and pushed the
enthusiastic tourist to one side.
“I say,” exclaimed that individual, “look where you’re going, will you?
You spoiled that plate.”
“I’ll spoil your camera if you annoy that young lady any longer,” said
Carlton, in a low voice.
The photographer was rapidly rewinding his roll, and the fire of pursuit
was still in his eye.
“She’s a Princess,” he explained, in an excited whisper.
“Well,” said Carlton, “even a Princess is entitled to some
consideration. Besides,” he said, in a more amicable tone, “you haven’t
a permit to photograph on the Acropolis. You know you haven’t.” Carlton
was quite sure of this, because there were no such permits.
The amateur looked up in some dismay. “I didn’t know you had to have
them,” he said. “Where can I get one?”
“The King may give you one,” said Carlton. “He lives at the palace. If
they catch you up here without a license, they will confiscate your
camera and lock you up. You had better vanish before they see you.”
“Thank you. I will,” said the tourist, anxiously.
“Now,” thought Carlton, smiling pleasantly, “when he goes to the palace
with that box and asks for a permit, they’ll think he is either a
dynamiter or a crank, and before they are through with him his interest
in photography will have sustained a severe shock.”
As Carlton turned from watching the rapid flight of the photographer, he
observed that the Princess had remarked it also, as she had no doubt
been a witness of what had passed, even if she had not overheard all
that had been said. She rose from her enforced position of refuge with a
look of relief, and came directly toward Carlton along the rough path
that led through the débris on the top of the Acropolis. Carlton had
thought, as he watched her sitting on the wall, with her chin resting on
her hand, that she would make a beautiful companion picture to the one
he had wished to paint of Miss Morris—the one girl standing upright,
looking fearlessly out to sea, on the top of the low wall, with the wind
blowing her skirts about her, and her hair tumbled in the breeze, and
the other seated, bending intently forward, as though watching for the
return of a long-delayed vessel; a beautifully sad face, fine and
delicate and noble, the face of a girl on the figure of a woman. And
when she rose he made no effort to move away, or, indeed, to pretend not
to have seen her, but stood looking at her as though he had the right to
do so, and as though she must know he had that right. As she came toward
him the Princess Aline did not stop, nor even shorten her steps; but as
she passed opposite to him she bowed her thanks with a sweet impersonal
smile and a dropping of the eyes, and continued steadily on her way.
Carlton stood for some short time looking after her, with his hat still
at his side. She seemed farther from him at that moment than she had
ever been before, although she had for the first time recognized him.
But he knew that it was only as a human being that she had recognized
him. He put on his hat, and sat down on a rock with his elbows on his
knees, and filled his pipe.
“If that had been any other girl,” he thought, “I would have gone up to
her and said, ‘Was that man annoying you?’ and she would have said,
‘Yes; thank you,’ or something; and I would have walked along with her
until we had come up to her friends, and she would have told them I had
been of some slight service to her, and they would have introduced us,
and all would have gone well. But because she is a Princess she cannot
be approached in that way. At least she does not think so, and I have to
act as she has been told I should act, and not as I think I should.
After all, she is only a very beautiful girl, and she must be very tired
of her cousins and grandmothers, and of not being allowed to see any one
else. These royalties make a very picturesque show for the rest of us,
but indeed it seems rather hard on them. A hundred years from now there
will be no more kings and queens, and the writers of that day will envy
us, just as the writers of this day envy the men who wrote of chivalry
and tournaments, and they will have to choose their heroes from bank
presidents, and their heroines from lady lawyers and girl politicians
and type-writers. What a stupid world it will be then!”
The next day brought the reception to the Hohenwalds; and Carlton,
entering the reading-room of the hotel on the same afternoon, found Miss
Morris and her aunt there together taking tea. They both looked at him
with expressions of such genuine commiseration that he stopped just as
he was going to seat himself and eyed them defiantly.
“Don’t tell me,” he exclaimed, “that this has fallen through too!”
Miss Morris nodded her head silently.
Carlton dropped into the chair beside them, and folded his arms with a
frown of grim resignation. “What is it?” he asked. “Have they postponed
the reception?”
“No,” Miss Morris said; “but the Princess Aline will not be there.”
“Of course not,” said Carlton, calmly, “of course not. May I ask why? I
knew that she wouldn’t be there, but I may possibly be allowed to
express some curiosity.”
“She turned her ankle on one of the loose stones on the Acropolis this
afternoon,” said Miss Morris, “and sprained it so badly that they had to
carry her——”
“Who carried her?” Carlton demanded, fiercely.
“Some of her servants.”
“Of course, of course!” cried Carlton. “That’s the way it always will
be. I was there the whole afternoon, and I didn’t see her. I wasn’t
there to help her. It’s Fate, that’s what it is—Fate! There’s no use in
my trying to fight against Fate. Still,” he added anxiously, with a
sudden access of hope, “she may be well by this evening.”
“I hardly think she will,” said Miss Morris, “but we will trust so.”
The King’s palace and gardens stretch along one end of the public park,
and are but just across the street from the hotel where the Hohenwalds
and the Americans were staying. As the hotel was the first building on
the left of the square, Carlton could see from his windows the
illuminations, and the guards of honor, and the carriages arriving and
departing, and the citizens of Athens crowding the parks and peering
through the iron rails into the King’s garden. It was a warm night, and
lighted grandly by a full moon that showed the Acropolis in silhouette
against the sky, and gave a strangely theatrical look to the yellow
house fronts and red roofs of the town. Every window in the broad front
of the palace was illuminated, and through the open doors came the sound
of music, and one without could see rows of tall servants in the King’s
blue and white livery, and the men of his guard in their white
petticoats and black and white jackets and red caps. Carlton pulled a
light coat over his evening dress, and, with an agitation he could
hardly explain, walked across the street and entered the palace. The
line of royalties had broken by the time he reached the ball-room, and
the not over-severe etiquette of the Greek court left him free, after a
bow to those who still waited to receive it, to move about as he
pleased. His most earnest desire was to learn whether or not the
Princess Aline was present, and with that end he clutched the English
adjutant as that gentleman was hurrying past him, and asked eagerly if
the Princess had recovered from her accident.
“No,” said the officer; “she’s able to walk about, but not to stand, and
sit out a dinner, and dance, and all this sort of thing. Too bad, wasn’t
it?”
“Yes,” said Carlton, “very bad.” He released his hand from the other’s
arm, and dropped back among the men grouped about the doorway. His
disappointment was very keen. Indeed, he had not known how much this
meeting with the Princess had meant to him until he experienced this
disappointment, which was succeeded by a wish to find Miss Morris, and
have her sympathize and laugh with him. He became conscious, as he
searched with growing impatience the faces of those passing and
repassing before him, of how much the habit of going to Miss Morris for
sympathy in his unlucky love-affair had grown of late upon him. He
wondered what he would have done in his travels without her, and whether
he should have had the interest to carry on his pursuit had she not been
there to urge him on, and to mock at him when he grew faint-hearted.
But when he finally did discover her he stood quite still, and for an
instant doubted if it were she. The girl he saw seemed to be a more
beautiful sister of the Miss Morris he knew—a taller, fairer, and more
radiant personage; and he feared that it was not she, until he
remembered that this was the first time he had ever seen her with her
hair dressed high upon her head, and in the more distinguished
accessories of a décolleté gown and train. Miss Morris had her hand on
the arm of one of the equerries, who was battling good-naturedly with
the crowd, and trying to draw her away from two persistent youths in
diplomatic uniform who were laughing and pressing forward in close
pursuit on the other side. Carlton approached her with a certain feeling
of diffidence, which was most unusual to him, and asked if she were
dancing.
“Mr. Carlton shall decide for me,” Miss Morris said, dropping the
equerry’s arm and standing beside the American. “I have promised all of
these gentlemen,” she explained, “to dance with them, and now they won’t
agree as to which is to dance first. They’ve wasted half this waltz
already in discussing it, and they make it much more difficult by saying
that no matter how I decide, they will fight duels with the one I
choose, which is most unpleasant for me.”
“Most unpleasant for the gentleman you choose, too,” suggested Carlton.
“So,” continued Miss Morris, “I have decided to leave it to you.”
“Well, if I am to arbitrate between the powers,” said Carlton, with a
glance at the three uniforms, “my decision is that as they insist on
fighting duels in any event, you had better dance with me until they
have settled it between them, and then the survivor can have the next
dance.”
“That’s a very good idea,” said Miss Morris; and taking Carlton’s arm,
she bowed to the three men and drew away.
“Mr. Carlton,” said the equerry, with a bow, “has added another argument
in favor of maintaining standing armies, and of not submitting questions
to arbitration.”
“Let’s get out of this,” said Carlton. “You don’t want to dance, do you?
Let us go where it’s cool.”
He led her down the stairs, and out on to the terrace. They did not
speak again until they had left it, and were walking under the trees in
the Queen’s garden. He had noticed as they made their way through the
crowd how the men and women turned to look at her and made way for her,
and how utterly unconscious she was of their doing so, with that
unconsciousness which comes from familiarity with such discrimination,
and Carlton himself held his head a little higher with the pride and
pleasure the thought gave him that he was in such friendly sympathy with
so beautiful a creature. He stopped before a low stone bench that stood
on the edge of the path, surrounded by a screen of tropical trees, and
guarded by a marble statue. They were in deep shadow themselves, but the
moonlight fell on the path at their feet, and through the trees on the
other side of the path they could see the open terrace of the palace,
with the dancers moving in and out of the lighted windows. The splash of
a fountain came from some short distance behind them, and from time to
time they heard the strains of a regimental band alternating with the
softer strains of a waltz played by a group of Hungarian musicians. For
a moment neither of them spoke, but sat watching the white dresses of
the women and the uniforms of the men moving in and out among the trees,
lighted by the lanterns hanging from the branches, and the white mist of
the moon.
“Do you know,” said Carlton, “I’m rather afraid of you to-night!” He
paused, and watched her for a little time as she sat upright, with her
hands folded on her lap. “You are so very resplendent and queenly and
altogether different,” he added. The girl moved her bare shoulders
slightly and leaned back against the bench.
“The Princess did not come,” she said.
“No,” Carlton answered, with a sudden twinge of conscience at having
forgotten that fact. “That’s one of the reasons I took you away from
those men,” he explained. “I wanted you to sympathize with me.”
Miss Morris did not answer him at once. She did not seem to be in a
sympathetic mood. Her manner suggested rather that she was tired and
troubled.
“I need sympathy myself to-night,” she said. “We received a letter after
dinner that brought bad news for us. We must go home at once.”
“Bad news!” exclaimed Carlton, with much concern. “From home?”
“Yes, from home,” she replied; “but there is nothing wrong there; it is
only bad news for us. My sister has decided to be married in June
instead of July, and that cuts us out of a month on the Continent.
That’s all. We shall have to leave immediately—to-morrow. It seems that
Mr. Abbey is able to go away sooner than he had hoped, and they are to
be married on the first.”
“Mr. Abbey!” exclaimed Carlton, catching at the name. “But your sister
isn’t going to marry him, is she?”
Miss Morris turned her head in some surprise. “Yes—why not?” she said.
“But I say!” cried Carlton, “I thought—your aunt told me that you were
going to marry Abbey; she told me so that day on the steamer when he
came to see you off.”
“I marry him—my aunt told you—impossible!” said Miss Morris, smiling.
“She probably said that ‘her niece’ was going to marry him; she meant my
sister. They had been engaged some time.”
“Then who are _you_ going to marry?” stammered Carlton.
“I am not going to marry any one,” said Miss Morris.
Carlton stared at her blankly in amazement. “Well, that’s most absurd!”
he exclaimed.
He recognized instantly that the expression was hardly adequate, but he
could not readjust his mind so suddenly to the new idea, and he remained
looking at her with many confused memories rushing through his brain. A
dozen questions were on his tongue. He remembered afterward how he had
noticed a servant trimming the candle in one of the orange-colored
lanterns, and that he had watched him as he disappeared among the palms.
The silence lasted for so long a time that it had taken on a
significance in itself which Carlton recognized. He pulled himself up
with a short laugh. “Well,” he remonstrated, mirthlessly, “I don’t think
you’ve treated _me_ very well.”
“How, not treated you very well?” Miss Morris asked, settling herself
more easily. She had been sitting during the pause which followed
Carlton’s discovery with a certain rigidity, as if she was on a strain
of attention. But her tone was now as friendly as always, and held its
customary suggestion of amusement. Carlton took his tone from it,
although his mind was still busily occupied with incidents and words of
hers that she had spoken in their past intercourse.
“Not fair in letting me think you were engaged,” he said. “I’ve wasted
so much time; I’m not half civil enough to engaged girls,” he explained.
“You’ve been quite civil enough to us,” said Miss Morris, “as a courier,
philosopher, and friend. I’m very sorry we have to part company.”
“Part company!” exclaimed Carlton, in sudden alarm. “But, I say, we
mustn’t do that.”
“But we must, you see,” said Miss Morris. “We must go back for the
wedding, and you will have to follow the Princess Aline.”
“Yes, of course,” Carlton heard his own voice say. “I had forgotten the
Princess Aline.” But he was not thinking of what he was saying, nor of
the Princess Aline. He was thinking of the many hours Miss Morris and he
had been together, of the way she had looked at certain times, and of
how he had caught himself watching her at others; how he had pictured
the absent Mr. Abbey travelling with her later over the same route, and
without a chaperon, sitting close at her side or holding her hand, and
telling her just how pretty she was whenever he wished to do so, and
without any fear of the consequences. He remembered how ready she had
been to understand what he was going to say before he had finished
saying it, and how she had always made him show the best of himself, and
had caused him to leave unsaid many things that became common and
unworthy when considered in the light of her judgment. He recalled how
impatient he had been when she was late at dinner, and how cross he was
throughout one whole day when she had kept her room. He felt with a
sudden shock of delightful fear that he had grown to depend upon her,
that she was the best companion he had ever known; and he remembered
moments when they had been alone together at the table, or in some old
palace, or during a long walk, when they had seemed to have the whole
world entirely to themselves, and how he had consoled himself at such
times with the thought that no matter how long she might be Abbey’s
wife, there had been these moments in her life which were his, with
which Abbey had had nothing to do.
Carlton turned and looked at her with strange wide-open eyes, as though
he saw her for the first time. He felt so sure of himself and of his
love for her that the happiness of it made him tremble, and the thought
that if he spoke she might answer him in the old, friendly, mocking tone
of good-fellowship filled him with alarm. At that moment it seemed to
Carlton that the most natural thing in the world for them to do would be
to go back again together over the road they had come, seeing everything
in the new light of his love for her, and so travel on and on forever
over the world, learning to love each other more and more each
succeeding day, and leaving the rest of the universe to move along
without them.
He leaned forward with his arm along the back of the bench, and bent his
face toward hers. Her hand lay at her side, and his own closed over it,
but the shock that the touch of her fingers gave him stopped and
confused the words upon his tongue. He looked strangely at her, and
could not find the speech he needed.
Miss Morris gave his hand a firm, friendly little pressure and drew her
own away, as if he had taken hers only in an exuberance of good feeling.
“You have been very nice to us,” she said, with an effort to make her
tone sound kindly and approving. “And we——”
“You mustn’t go; I can’t let you go,” said Carlton, hoarsely. There was
no mistaking his tone or his earnestness now. “If you go,” he went on,
breathlessly, “I must go with you.”
The girl moved restlessly; she leaned forward, and drew in her breath
with a slight, nervous tremor. Then she turned and faced him, almost as
though she were afraid of him or of herself, and they sat so for an
instant in silence. The air seemed to have grown close and heavy, and
Carlton saw her dimly. In the silence he heard the splash of the
fountain behind them, and the rustling of the leaves in the night wind,
and the low, sighing murmur of a waltz.
He raised his head to listen, and she saw in the moonlight that he was
smiling. It was as though he wished to delay any answer she might make
to his last words.
“That is the waltz,” he said, still speaking in a whisper, “that the
gypsies played that night—” He stopped, and Miss Morris answered him by
bending her head slowly in assent. It seemed to be an effort for her to
even make that slight gesture.
“_You_ don’t remember it,” said Carlton. “It meant nothing to you. I
mean that night on the steamer when I told you what love meant to other
people. What a fool I was!” he said, with an uncertain laugh.
“Yes, I remember it,” she said—“last Thursday night, on the steamer.”
“Thursday night!” exclaimed Carlton, indignantly. “Wednesday night,
Tuesday night, how should I know what night of the week it was? It was
the night of my life to me. That night I knew that I loved you as I had
never hoped to care for any one in this world. When I told you that I
did not know what love meant I felt all the time that I was lying. I
knew that I loved you, and that I could never love any one else, and
that I had never loved any one before; and if I had thought then you
could care for me, your engagement or your promises would never have
stopped my telling you so. You said that night that I would learn to
love all the better, and more truly, for having doubted myself so long,
and, oh, Edith,” he cried, taking both her hands and holding them close
in his own, “I cannot let you go now! I love you so! Don’t laugh at me;
don’t mock at me. All the rest of my life depends on you.”
And then Miss Morris laughed softly, just as he had begged her not to
do, but her laughter was so full of happiness, and came so gently and
sweetly, and spoke so truly of content, that though he let go of her
hands with one of his, it was only that he might draw her to him, until
her face touched his, and she felt the strength of his arm as he held
her against his breast.
The Hohenwalds occupied the suite of rooms on the first floor of the
hotel, with the privilege of using the broad balcony that reached out
from it over the front entrance. And at the time when Mrs. Downs and
Edith Morris and Carlton drove up to the hotel from the ball, the
Princess Aline was leaning over the balcony and watching the lights go
out in the upper part of the house, and the moonlight as it fell on the
trees and statues in the public park below. Her foot was still in
bandages, and she was wrapped in a long cloak to keep her from the cold.
Inside of the open windows that led out on to the balcony her sisters
were taking off their ornaments, and discussing the incidents of the
night just over.
The Princess Aline, unnoticed by those below, saw Carlton help Mrs.
Downs to alight from the carriage, and then give his hand to another
muffled figure that followed her; and while Mrs. Downs was ascending the
steps, and before the second muffled figure had left the shadow of the
carriage and stepped into the moonlight, the Princess Aline saw Carlton
draw her suddenly back and kiss her lightly on the cheek, and heard a
protesting gasp, and saw Miss Morris pull her cloak over her head and
run up the steps. Then she saw Carlton shake hands with them, and stand
for a moment after they had disappeared, gazing up at the moon and
fumbling in the pockets of his coat. He drew out a cigar-case and
leisurely selected a cigar, and with much apparent content lighted it,
and then, with his head thrown back and his chest expanded, as though he
were challenging the world, he strolled across the street and
disappeared among the shadows of the deserted park.
The Princess walked back to one of the open windows, and stood there
leaning against the side. “That young Mr. Carlton, the artist,” she said
to her sisters, “is engaged to that beautiful American girl we met the
other day.”
“Really!” said the elder sister. “I thought it was probable. Who told
you?”
“I saw him kiss her good-night,” said the Princess, stepping into the
window, “as they got out of their carriage just now.”
The Princess Aline stood for a moment looking thoughtfully at the floor,
and then walked across the room to a little writing-desk. She unlocked a
drawer in this and took from it two slips of paper, which she folded in
her hand. Then she returned slowly across the room, and stepped out
again on to the balcony.
One of the pieces of paper held the picture Carlton had drawn of her,
and under which he had written: “This is she. Do you wonder I travelled
four thousand miles to see her?” And the other was the picture of
Carlton himself, which she had cut out of the catalogue of the Salon.
From the edge of the balcony where the Princess stood she could see the
glimmer of Carlton’s white linen and the red glow of his cigar as he
strode proudly up and down the path of the public park, like a sentry
keeping watch. She folded the pieces of paper together and tore them
slowly into tiny fragments, and let them fall through her fingers into
the street below. Then she returned again to the room, and stood looking
at her sisters.
“Do you know,” she said, “I think I am a little tired of travelling so
much. I want to go back to Grasse.” She put her hand to her forehead and
held it there for a moment. “I think I am a little homesick,” said the
Princess Aline.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
1. Silently corrected obvious typographical errors and variations in
spelling.
2. Retained archaic, non-standard, and uncertain spellings as printed.
3. Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.
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