Part 6

The next morning, towards noon, Cyril Adair was lounging over the bar of the Good Fellows' Grotto, with one well-shod foot perched on the metal rest below. Before him was a Martini cocktail, and the admiring, deferential face of Larry, the bar-keeper. Adair stood the scrutiny of daylight better than most actors. Late hours, dissipation and grease-paint had not impaired a fine and ruddy skin that the morning razor left as fresh as a boy's. His brown eyes were clear, and there was about him an air of unassailable health that was enhanced by broad shoulders, a neck as firm as any ever cut from Greek marble, and a finely-swelling chest--the physique, in fact, of what he had some pretensions to be--a good, welter-weight boxer. His skill in this direction was well known, and his readiness when tipsy to exercise it on any one unfortunate enough to offend him, was one of the scandals of his stormy and scandalous life. His engagements, nine times out of ten, had the knack of ending in the police court, with raw beefsteak for the plaintiff's eye, and the option of "seven day's hard" for the uncontrite defendant. Even when stark sober--and to do him justice he drank only in fits and starts, with long intermissions between--there was something subtly formidable in the man, and people instinctively made way for him, and treated him with a respect verging on fear.

He was over-dressed in what was the last accentuation of the prevailing fashion--with far too much braided cuff, with far too startling a waistcoat, with far too extravagant a tie and pin--and worse than anything, wore them all with assertiveness and self-complacency. Though his manners were good (when he liked,) and his address agreeable, and even ingratiating, he was too showy, too self-satisfied, too elaborately at ease, and his assurance seemed to rest, not on the conventional groundwork of birth and breeding, but rather on his power and will to knock you through the door if he cared to take the trouble.

Of course, he was profoundly ignorant, knowing nothing, reading little, his life bounded by the footlights on one side, and the stage-door on the other--and like all such men perpetually nervous lest he should be found out. His inherent ability was enormous--as enormous as his vanity. He had fought his way up from nothing--from the muddy streets in which he had sold papers, and begged, and starved, his whole boyhood long. He was full of instincts that had never had the chance of becoming anything more--instincts, which, if cultivated, might have made him a very different man. He was passionately fond of bad music; delighted in the only pictures he knew, those in hotels and saloons; he had, stored away in a memory that never forgot anything, half the plays of Shakespeare, and thousands of lines of trashy verse. A savage, in fact, in the midst of our civilization, which, after trying to grind him into powder, and denying him everything, was unjust enough to despise him heartily for what he had made of himself unaided. Could he have refrained from taking offense at trifles, and from punching people's heads, he could easily have retained the high place he had once held on the New York stage. He had no one to thank but himself if he were now touring the country in a fifty-class company, with an enemy in every manager who had ever employed him. He had a strong, unusual talent. In the delineation of somber and misunderstood natures, contradictory, pent-up, heroic--the out and out bad man with a spark of good--he was admitted by metropolitan critics to have no equal in America. Others copied him slavishly and made successes, while he, their inspiration and their model, remained comparatively unknown. There were times when he felt very badly about it, but a pretty face and a provocative petticoat could always divert his attention. Needless to say he had not to look far to find either.

"Larry," he asked nonchalantly, "do you know any people in Carthage here named Ladd?"

"I don't believe I do, Mr. Adair," returned Larry, scratching his head. "Leastways, none except Robert T. R. Ladd, the railroad president." Larry was unable to conceive that this mighty name could possibly have any bearing on Adair's question. "No, I don't believe I do."

"Oh, the railroad president? Any family?"

"Just one daughter."

"Well, go on--tell me about her."

"Why, there isn't much to say, except people call her the prettiest girl in Carthage--but then they always say that of a millionaire's daughter--Emma Satterlee would turn the milk sour, and yet in the society notes--"

"Did you ever see her?--No, no, I don't mean that one--the railroad man's--the Ladd girl?"

"Yes, I saw her onst in a church fair. She hit _me_ all right. Slender brunette, very aristocracy, with the kind of eyes that if you're _fond_ of brunettes--seem like--"

"How old is she?"

"Hell, how do I know! Twenty--twenty-one--something around there. Just a girl."

"And the prettiest one in Carthage?" repeated Adair, sipping his cocktail as though the description pleased him.

"Well, I would leave _my_ happy home for her," said Larry, with a grin. "Pretty--I'd say she was pretty--pretty enough to eat."

"Lives out Chestnut Avenue way, doesn't she?"

"Yes, in the stone house that's set back in a kind of park, with a big gate in front and a driveway. The Ladds' are at the top of the top, you know. My, I felt I was breaking into the swell bunch myself when she told my fortune for a dollar. If I had had the nerve and the money I guess she would be telling it yet! And she smiled so sweet when she took it, like I was as good as anybody. God forgive me if I seem to talk disrespectful of her, for she's a lady through and through, and I knew it even if I was only a bar-keeper."

"Toss you for the drinks," said Adair, draining his glass. "Hand over the box, Larry."

"Sure Mike," said the bar-keeper rattling the dice.

Adair encountered an acquaintance, a commercial traveler named Hellman, on the sidewalk outside.

"Just the fellow I wanted to see," he cried. "Hellman, there is such a word as temerity, isn't there?"

"Bet your life," said Hellman. "The temerity of my playing _Hamlet_, you know--the temerity of you thinking yourself a better-looking man than I am--the temerity of--"

"And you spell it t-e-m-e-r-i-t-y?" interrupted Adair.

"Yes, why?"

"Oh, I used it in a letter I was writing to a girl, and I didn't want to mail it till I was sure." He showed the envelope in his hand, with his thumb hiding the name.

"Always at it," said Hellman, with an unpleasant laugh. "Who are you throwing the handkerchief at now?"

"The prettiest girl in Carthage," returned Adair genially. "There's a box over there--let's drop it in."

And together they crossed the street, and sent the letter on its way.

It was to Phyllis, begging in warm but respectful language for the privilege of calling on her.

*CHAPTER X*

"Dear Mr. Adair: I hardly expected you to reply to my note, nor could I have thought it would please you so much as you say. Indeed, I hope you will not misjudge it--or me--for it was written on the same impulse that makes one applaud in the theater itself, and with no ulterior idea. Frankly, I do not think I ought to ask you to call--the circumstances are so peculiar--and it is all so against the conventionalities. In Washington or New York it would be different, but this little place--like all little places--is strait-laced beyond belief. It will be my loss more than yours, which perhaps will be some consolation to you. Yet it seems too stupid to say no--that is, if you really _do_ want to come--and I am going to ask you after all. Surely a little talk over a cup of tea to-morrow at five ought not to arrest the stars in their courses, or bring down the pillars of the universe on our unfortunate heads? And if any one should come in, we might say that we had met before in Washington? That would place our acquaintance on a more correct footing, and save me, at least, the possibility of embarrassment. Is this asking too much of you? Sincerely yours, Phyllis Ladd."

*CHAPTER XI*

There are men who pursue women with a skill, zest and pertinacity that others do bears or tigers, and with very much the same hardihood and delight. In the rich preserves of the world, so well stocked with youth and beauty, they find an unending enjoyment, and an unending occupation. No sooner have they brought down one, and beheld her bleeding and stricken at their feet, than they are up and off, with another notch on their gun, and fresh ardor in their hearts. They are debarred from taking the tangible trophies of skin and head; a slipper, a glove, a bundle of letters are often all they have to show; but within them wells the satisfaction of the hunter who has made a "kill."

Amongst this race of sportsmen there were few hardier or more daring than Cyril Adair. That the game was cruel or cowardly had never occurred to him. The women he knew--all of the lower class--frequently played their side of it with eyes wide open, and ran--not to escape--but with the full intention of being caught. This is not urged in his extenuation. Often he was not aware of the subterfuge. Women to him were but prey, and in more venerable times he would have waylaid any lady he favored, with a club.

Behold him in immaculate afternoon costume, striding along Chestnut Avenue--boutonniere, silk-hat, cane, new suede gloves, etc.--a devil of a fellow in his own estimation, with an air and a swagger that reflected his profound contentment with himself. He had never gone a-hunting before in such a splendid wood. The thought that he was actually going to invade one of those imposing mansions made his pulses leap. How big they were, how aristocratic! What incomes they represented! What mysteries of ease and luxury lay hidden behind those stately windows! He was tremendously stirred; tremendously excited. He swelled with self-complacency. He was hardly over thirty, he was handsome, he was a genius--and the women loved him!

A man-servant admitted him. Yes, Miss Ladd was expecting him. His hat and cane were taken, while he gazed, somewhat daunted, at the immense hall in which he found himself. He had a confused sense of tapestries; of stone bas-reliefs very worn and old; of oriental rugs; of strange-looking, moldy chairs, straight-backed and carved, with massive arms, on which there was still the fading gilt of the fifteenth century.--He was led through another room of a similar cold and spacious magnificence, and then up-stairs to the drawing-room. Here he was left, while the man departed to inform his mistress of the visitor's arrival.

The elegance and beauty with which Adair found himself surrounded fairly took his breath away. His only standard was that of fashionable hotels, yet here was something that made the splendors of the Waldorf or the Auditorium seem suddenly tawdry in comparison. His instinctive good taste was ravished by the old Venetian brocades, the rich dark pictures, the Sheriton furniture, the harmonious blending of all these, and so many other half-seen and half-comprehended things into a gracious and exquisite whole. Near him was the table set out for tea, with silver that it was a joy to look at; and about the little island it made in the vastness of the room was a wealth of red roses, marking as it were the boundaries of coziness and intimacy.

Adair's complacency was not proof against such aristocratic and undreamed of surroundings. His exultation fell, and pangs of self-pity assailed him. What was he but a child of the gutter, an outcast--a man full of yearning for the unattainable, who had been starved and kept down by merciless circumstances? Such swift transitions were not unusual in his peculiar and contradictory nature. After all, he was an artist, even if often a brute and a fool, and somewhere within him, very much overlaid and shrouded, there was a spark of the divine fire. Yes, he said to himself, he was coarse and common, and ignorant and unrefined. He had done much with himself; he had achieved wonders, considering the handicap he had always been under--but admitting all that, what enormous deficiencies still remained! How ill at ease he was in such a room as this! How hard he would have to strive to hide his lack of knowledge and breeding! He had almost wished he had never come. In such a place he was an intruder--a boor--condemned to blunder through a part with no author's lines to help him.

As it turned out, nothing could have been more fortunate for him than this dejected mood. First appearances are everything, and he might easily--so easily--have made an intolerable impression. Indeed, in the cold fit, almost the terror, succeeding the impulse that had caused Phyllis to invite him, she was prepared to find him forward, and perhaps eager to take advantage of her recklessness, and misconstrue it. At the hint of such a thing she would have frozen; and the fact that she would only have had herself to blame would have doubled her humiliation. A woman who makes the first advances to a man is more capable than any of sudden revulsions. Her pride is on edge, and morbidly apprehensive.

But the grave, quiet, handsome man awaiting her dispelled these fancies as soon as their eyes had met. He thanked her with an embarrassment not unbecoming under the circumstances, for the unconventionality that had given him the privilege of meeting her. His smile as he said this was charming; his respect and courtesy beyond reproach; that other nature of his, the artist-nature, so quick and responsive in its intuitions warned him to put a guard on himself. Besides, if the room had over-awed him, how much more overpowering was the apparition of this slim and radiant woman, the mistress of all this splendor, whose pure dark face filled him with an indefinable sense of another world in which he was but a clod. Though he was a connoisseur of pretty women, and had possessed in his disreputable past many of greater physical beauty than Phyllis, not one of them had had the least pretensions to what in her appealed to him so strongly--distinction. From her glossy hair to the tips of her little feet, she was the embodiment of race, of high-breeding and high spirit; it was as marked in her girlish beauty as in any thoroughbred. She was the child of those who had admitted no superior save their God and their King.

Adair found himself bereft of all his assurance. The professional besieger, accustomed to advance with sureness and precision, unaccountably held back, hardly knowing why his heart had turned to water. It seemed presumptuous enough that he should even talk on terms of equality with one so immeasurably above him. His humility was painful. He stammered. He colored. His hand trembled on his tea-cup as he strove to keep alive a conversation of the usual commonplaces.

"Miss Ladd," he said suddenly, "you mustn't think I am a gentleman--because I am not. I am not accustomed to this kind of thing; you are the first lady I--I've ever met." He arrested the expostulation on her lips and went on hurriedly. "It's much better to tell you that right off. I don't know those books you speak of; I don't know anything very much; I am awfully uncultivated and ignorant. There, I have said it! It will make me feel more comfortable, and it will be lots better than pretending I am something I'm not."

"You are a great actor, Mr. Adair."

"My God," he returned with simplicity, "sometimes I'm not so sure that I am." Then he burst into laughter at his own artlessness--a delightful laugh, contagious and musical, that no one could hear without liking him the better. Phyllis laughed, too, and somehow with it the ice seemed broken, and constraint disappeared. "Miss Ladd," he went on, "people like you, and places like this, are the realities which we try so hard to copy with our poor theatrical pasteboard and calico. I used to hate Mansfield for saying we ought to work as servants amongst--well, people we couldn't meet in any other way, and yet the ones we are audacious enough to represent on the stage. He meant it as an insult, of course--but he was right in some ways. Just seeing you pour tea makes me feel how badly we do even that!"

Phyllis, naturally, was touched and flattered.

"Why, we just pour it anyhow," she said, smiling.

"Precisely," exclaimed Adair, "and now let me do it our way!" He drew nearer the table, put his hand to the tea-pot, and grimacing at an imaginary company, proceeded to pour and pass several imaginary cups with a grotesque affectation of grace and elegance. "Two lumps, dear Sir James?--Patricia, the Bishop is famishing for some almond cake.--Oh, mercy me, and what's become of the Dook?" It was an admirable bit of mimicry, and so gay and captivating in its satire that Phyllis thought she had never seen anything so clever. She laughed with delight and clapped her hands.

"Though you shock me, too," she protested. "Correze mustn't do things like that--it isn't in keeping."

"Correze?"

"Yes, you are not Mr. Adair to me, though I know that's your name, and I have invited you. I can only think of you as Correze."

"Was I as good as that in the part?"

"I told you what I thought of it in my note."

"And you really meant it?"

"Would I have written if I hadn't? It was an awful thing to do. I can't think of it without burning with shame.--How can you say you are not a gentleman, Mr. Adair? Only a gentleman would have put the right construction on it."

He was questioning her face with his fine eyes. His intuition again stood him in good stead. This was not provocation, it was innocence. To himself he said: "No, it is impossible."

Then aloud: "It was the only construction--and I felt childishly pleased. We're great children, you know, we actors; and after all, are we to blame for liking approbation? Just think a moment. How close it all is to the ridiculous, our standing up there and declaiming all sorts of red-hot emotions, with painted paper on one side, and bald-headed fiddlers on the other! Doesn't it sometimes come over a man--sort of shoot through him--the feeling of what a monkey-spectacle he is making of himself? _You_ go ahead and play Lady Macbeth in a nightgown; rage and strut before those cold, scornful faces. Then let one amongst them cry: 'Bravo, bravo,' and give you a hand!--My Lord, you'd give him your watch and chain, your diamond pin--don't you see, he returns you your self-respect, makes your work worth the doing?--and that's what your note did for me, Miss Ladd."

"Oh, Mr. Adair, don't talk to me about the cold, scornful faces at your performance. I was there twice, and saw how they called you out!"

"Miss Ladd," he said, his strong, handsome, eager face whimsically alight, "let me confess the honest truth--an actor simply can't have enough admiration!"

"You worry me for fear I didn't make mine warm enough! For really, Mr. Adair, in all sincerity, I--"

"Well, go on."

"Bravo, bravo!" Her lips parted mockingly over her white teeth as she pretended to applaud madly. It was the daintiest teasing, and more charming in the intimacy it implied than any downright praise. Adair glowed with a pleasure so honest and boyish that Phyllis might be forgiven for not suspecting the baser depths he hid so well.

"I'm a conceited ass," he admitted, "and after all, isn't it enough to turn a man's head to be here with you, and feel I owe it to the ginger I put into Correze? Most people get their friends by introductions and all that, but I just snatched you out of a whole theater full of strangers. For you are my friend, aren't you, Miss Ladd?"

"Yes, Correze."

"You'll be making me jealous of the chap," he cried running his hands through his hair with make-believe exasperation. "I think he is a good deal of a whining humbug myself, and the sly way he throws bouquets at himself is disgusting. Miss Ladd, I am ever so much nicer than he is--really I am--though I see I shall never be able to convince you."

"No reason why you shouldn't try."

"Perhaps I am ashamed to," he returned, with an intensity of expression that became him well. "You find me in a wretched little theater, the cheapest of cheap stars--the hoodlum's pet, the shop-girl's dream--and how can it help coloring your whole idea of me? You admire my Correze, but for me myself how can you have anything but contempt? No, no--listen--it's true--and the more you knew of my history the more contemptuous you'd be. I've been rated very high; I've had every chance in the world; I've played with the biggest kind of people, and--succeeded. Yet I have always been the dog who hanged himself. No, there is no mystery about it--there never is with a man who is sinking--a man of ability. It's his own fault every time--every, every time."

His earnestness made Phyllis thrill. Adair was playing his best role--himself, and playing it with the fire and eloquence he could always bring to it. His voice, incomparable in the beauty and range of its tones, was never so effective as when tinged with emotion. Nothing was more manly, more sincere, more moving. It rose and fell in cadences that lingered in the ear after the words themselves were spoken--veritable music, affecting not only the listener, but the musician as well. Under the spell of it he now found himself tempted into strange confidences. Never before had he spoken of his childhood and early life except to lie, to brag, to romance. Yet here, to his own wonder, and impelled by he hardly knew what, he was unbosoming himself of the whole ignoble truth. That instinct of his, so often wiser than himself, so diabolically helpful, was showing him the right road. Had Phyllis been some little milliner this would have been no road at all; such a one would have been too familiar with the seamy side of life to find any glamour in the tale; such a one would have preferred the bogus palaces and bogus splendors his instinct would then have indicated. Phyllis' intelligence was too keen thus to be deceived; even genuine splendors would have interested her less than this pitiful story of the slums; it not only touched her sensibility to the quick, but enhanced Adair in her tender and sympathetic eyes.

His father had been an Englishman--a remittance man named Mayne--George Cyril Augustus Fitzroy Mayne. Whether his pretensions were justified or not, and they were inordinate, including "Wales" and "Cambridge," he was beyond all doubt a gentleman, with grand manners, a back like a ramrod, and a curt, military directness in speaking. He used to say "dammy"; was fond of alluding to himself as "an old Hussar"; was wont to remark that a gentleman could always be told by his hat and his boots; and once, when attacked on the street, had shown extraordinary courage and adroitness in defending himself with a light cane. This was about all Adair remembered of him, except that he drank hard; had recurring fits of delirium tremens in which he raged and fought like a wild beast; and finally, dying in a hospital ward, was buried like a dog in the Potter's Field.