Part 14

"You're really quite unfair," he began; but paused to regain control of himself and to wonder a little, blindly, why it was that he tolerated her impudence--for it couldn't be called anything less. It would be much more sensible and quite just to bow to her construction of their indefinite relations and let her go her ways without more argument.

In spite of everything, he could not refrain from one last attempt to set himself right.

"I don't quite know what to say to you," he resumed patiently, "when you insist on putting thoughts into my head that never were there. I've really wanted to help you--"

"Why?"

The monosyllable brought him up startled and staring. "Why? I hardly know...."

"Didn't you know better?"

"I don't understand you--"

Her eyes were wide and dark to his; all trace of petulance had faded from her manner. "You ought to. You ought to know," she insisted quietly, "that a man like you can't be just _kind_ to a girl like me without.... Oh!" she cried, "I suppose it would've been different if the show had gone out--and everything--but now, with that hope gone--and nothing more to do for you--with no prospects but to lose you--the only friend I've got in the world--!"

Her voice broke at a high pitch, and she fell silent, turning away to stare with swimming eyes down at the table. He saw her trembling violently, her lips quivering. His amazement was extraordinary and bewildering. He heard his voice, as it might have been another's, saying: "Does it really mean so much to you?"

"Oh, can't you see!"

With a little, helpless motion of her hands, she lifted quickly to him a face of flushed and tear-dimmed loveliness. Another man might have been numb to its appeal: to Matthias it proved irresistible, coming sharp upon the shock of comprehending that she offered him her love, herself.

In a stride, hardly knowing what he did, he folded the girl in his arms. She lay therein for an instant as though bewitched by the exquisite wonder of this consummation of her fondest, maddest dreams; then in a breath became a woman reanimate and wild with love, clinging to him with all her strength, in an ecstasy of impassioned tenderness.

Bending his head, Matthias found her lips.

"My dear, dear girl!" he murmured.

"Oh," she breathed, "I have loved you always--always!"

"If I had only known, if I had only guessed--!"

"How could you? _I_ didn't know ... not till a little while ago.... And even then, I couldn't have told you ... only the thought of losing you ... my dear, my dear!"

"I never guessed...."

"You're not sorry? You're not angry with me--?"

"Angry? I adore you!"

"You will love me always?"

"Always and forever."

"And never send me away from you?"

"You shall never leave me but of your own will."

"I think I was going mad with the thought of losing you!"

"My beloved girl!..."

The dusky stillness of the room was murmurous with whispers, sighs, terms of endearment half smothered and all but inaudible.

To these a foreign and alarming sound: a rapping at the door.

Matthias lifted his head, wincing from the interruption. The girl in his arms moved feebly, as if to disengage. He held her for a moment still more close. Her heart sounded sonorously against his bosom. "Hush!" he said in a low and warning voice. And then the rapping was repeated. At once he released her. She moved away, blushing and dishevelled, the fragrant freshness of her starched linen waist a crumpled disorder, her hair in disarray; her crimson face one of many evidences of the tumult of her senses.

In the hallway a man's voice said: "He must be in. There's a light--"

A woman answered impatiently: "Of course he's in; but the chances are he's asleep." She called in a louder tone: "Jack--Jack Matthias!"

Recognizing the voice of his aunt, that person groaned aloud--"O Lord!"--stole a glance at Joan, hesitated, shrugged, as if to say: There's no help for it! Then he answered the door.

Helena swept in with a swirl of impatient skirts. "Good heavens!" she cried. "What ails you, Jackie? We knocked half a dozen times. Were you--?"

Her glance encountering Joan, the words dried on her lips.

Tankerville, at her heels, jerked a motor gauntlet from his fat hand in order to grasp that of Matthias. "Surprised you--eh?" he chuckled--"getting in so late. Well, it's all accidental. We were bound home--been visiting the Hastings for a week, you know--but the car broke down just this side of Poughkeepsie and delayed us and...."

He became distressfully aware of his wife's silence, simultaneously ascertained the cause of it, and cut his speech short in full stride.

Matthias laughed a little, quietly: no good trying to carry off this situation; by many a clue aside from Joan's confusion, they were betrayed.

"You've caught us," he said cheerfully. "We may as well own up. Helena, this is Joan--Miss Thursday--my fiancée. And Joan, this is my aunt, Mrs. Tankerville--and her husband."

And immediately he was conscious of the necessity of bridging the pause that would inevitably hold these three confounded, pending adjustment to his amazing announcement.

"We had intended to keep it quiet for a while," he pursued evenly, shutting the door.... "Helena, let me help you with that cloak.... But since you've declared yourselves in, we can only ask you to hold your peace until we're ready. I'm sure we can count on you both."

Tankerville puffed an explosive: "Oh--certainly!"

Helena glanced shrewdly from Joan to Matthias. He smiled his confidence in her, knowing that he might count upon her doing the right thing to put the girl at ease--just shoulders of the girl as positively as he might count upon her violent opposition to the match as soon as she discovered that he had engaged himself to her pet abomination, a woman of the stage.

With a bright nod to him, she turned back to Joan; drew slowly near to her; dropped kindly hands upon the shoulders of the girl.

"But, my dear!" she exclaimed in a tone of expostulation--"you are beautiful!"

XVIII

Escorting his aunt to the car, Matthias helped her in, closed the door, and then, with a grin of amused resignation masking that trepidation to which he was actually a prey, folded his arms on the top of the door and invited the storm with one word of whimsical accent: "Well?"

"Is it true?" she demanded, as if downright incredulous.

"Most true," he insisted with convincing simplicity.

The tip of one gloved finger to her chin, Helena considered remotely.

"She's very beautiful," she conceded, "and sweet and fetching and hopelessly plebeian. She'd be wonderful to have around, to look at; but to listen to.... Oh my dear! what _are_ you thinking of?"

"Cut it," Tankerville advised from his corner. "None of your funeral, old lady."

"That consideration never yet hindered a Matthias," his wife retorted--"or a Tankerville, either, as far as I've been gifted to observe. However"--she turned again to her nephew--"you are presumably in love, and I hope you'll be happy, if ever you marry her. I shan't interfere--don't be afraid--but ... I could murder Venetia for this!"

"Good night," said Matthias, offering his hand.

But instead of taking it, his aunt leaned forward, caught his cheeks between both hands, and kissed him publicly.

"Good night," she murmured in a tragical voice. "And Heaven help you!... When is it going to be?"

"We haven't settled that yet," he laughed; "but you may be sure I shan't marry until I'm able to support my wife in a manner to which she's unaccustomed."

He returned to Joan with--until he recrossed the threshold of his study--a thought ironic concerning the inconsistency of Helena's veneration of caste with her union to fat, good-natured, pretentiously commonplace George Tankerville. For that matter, the Matthias dynasty itself was descended from a needy, out-at-elbows English adventurer who had one day founded the family fortunes by taking title to Manhattan real estate in settlement of a gambling debt and on the next had died in a duel--the only act of thoughtful provision against improvidence registered in his biography. So Matthias wasn't much disposed to reverence his pedigree: social position, at least as a claim upon his consideration, meant little to him: the only class distinctions he was inclined to acknowledge were those created by the intellect and of the heart. In his private world people were either intelligent or stupid, either kindly or (stupidly) egoistic. To the first order, with humility of soul he aspired; for the other he was, without condescension, heartily sorry....

But there was nothing half so analytical as this in his temper when he rejoined Joan: only wonder and rejoicing and delight in her.

He found her near the door, tense and hesitant, as though poised on the point of imminent flight. There was in her wide eyes a look almost of consternation; they seemed to glow, shot with the fire of her lambent thoughts. A doubting thumb and forefinger clipped her chin; a thin line of exquisite whiteness shone between her scarlet lips.

Closing the door, he opened his arms. She came to them swiftly and confidently. Doubts and fears vanished in the joy of his embrace; she was no longer lonely in a world unfriendly.

From the eloquent deeps of their submerged and blended senses, words now and again floated up like bubbles to the surface of consciousness:

"You still love me?"

"I love you."

"It wasn't pity--impulse--Jack--?"

"It was--love. It is love. It shall be love, dear heart, forever and always...."

"You _told_ her--your aunt--we were engaged!"

"Aren't we?"

A convulsive tightening of her arms....

A whisper barely articulate: "You really ... want me ... enough to marry me?"

"I love you."

"But...."

"Isn't that enough?"

"But I am--only me: nothing: a girl who dares to love you."

"Could any man ask more?"

"You.... What will your friends say?... You'll be ashamed of me."

"Hush! That's treason."

"But you will--you won't be able to help it--"

A faint, half-hearted cry of protest: words indistinguishable, silenced by lips on lips; a space of quiet....

"How shall I make myself worthy of you?"

"Love me always."

"How shall I dare to meet your family, your friends--?"

"You will be my wife."

"But that won't be for a long time...."

"Yes, we must wait--be patient, Joan." She lifted her head, wondering. "But don't fear; love will sustain us."

"I will be patient. You'll have to give me time to learn how not to disgrace you--"

"What nonsense!"

"I mean it. I must be somebody. I'm nobody now."

"You are my dearest love."

"I must be more, to be your wife. Give me time to learn to act. When I am a success--"

"No more of that!" There was definite resolution in the interruption. "You must give up all thought of the stage."

"But I want to--"

"It's not the place for you--for my wife that is to be."

"But we're not to be married for a long time, you say."

"I'm a poor man, dear--I have enough for one, not enough for two. It may be only weeks, it may be months or years before my work begins to pay."

"But meantime I must live--support myself, somehow."

"You will leave that to me?"

"I must do something--be independent--"

"Won't you leave it all to me? I will arrange everything--"

"I'll do whatever you wish me to."

"And forget the stage--?"

"I don't know--I'll try, Jack."

"You must, dear one."

It was not a time for disagreements. Joan clung more closely to him. The issue languished in default, was forgotten for the time....

Transports ebbed: the faintest premonitory symptoms of a return to something resembling sanity made their appearance; of a sudden Matthias remembered the hour.

"Do you know," he said with tender gravity, having consulted his watch, "it's after eleven?"

"It doesn't seem possible," she laughed happily.

"And I'm hungry," he announced. "Aren't you?"

She dared to be as frank as he: "Famished!"

"Come along, then! Run, get your hat. It gives us an excuse for at least two hours more...."

By the time she had repaired the damage this miracle had wrought with her appearance, Matthias had walked to the Astor and brought back a taxicab. The attention affected Joan with a poignant and exquisite sense of happiness.

It was only her second ride in a motor vehicle. The top being down, they sat very circumspectly apart; but Matthias captured her hand and eye spoke to eye with secret laughter of delight, each reading the other's longing thought. The speed of the cab and its sudden slackening as it picked its path down Broadway, the flow of cool air against her face, the swimming maze of lights through which they sped, the sense of luxury and protection, added the last touch of delirious pleasure to Joan's mood.

Matthias had chosen the café of "Old Martin's," at Twenty-sixth Street, the first place that suggested itself as one where they could sup without the girl being made to feel out of place in her modest work-a-day attire; but his thoughtfulness was misapplied: Joan was exalted beyond such annoyances; and those feminine glances which she detected, of pity, disdain, and jealousy, she took complacently as envious tributes to her prettiness and her conquest.

From a seat against the wall, in a corner, she reviewed the other patrons of the smoke-wreathed room with a hauteur of spirit that would have seemed laughable had it been suspected. She thought of herself as the handsomest woman there, and the youngest, of Matthias as the most distinguished man and--the luckiest. The circumstances of the place and her partner enchanted her to distraction.

The food Matthias ordered she devoured heedlessly; but there was a delicious novelty in the experience of sipping her first glass of champagne. It was, for that matter, the first time she had ever tasted good wine, or any kind of alcoholic drink other than an occasional glass of lukewarm beer, cheap and nasty to begin with and half-stale at best, and that poisonous red wine of the Italian boarding-house to which Charlie Quard had introduced her. She had never dreamed of anything so delicious as this dry and exhilarating draught with its exotic bouquet and aromatic bubbles.

With a glowing face and dancing eyes she nodded to Matthias over the rim of her goblet.

"When we are rich," she laughed softly, "I'm never going to drink anything else!"

He smiled quietly, enjoying her enjoyment; but, when emptied, the half-bottle he had ordered was not renewed.

There was without that enough intoxication in his fondness, in the simulacrum of gaiety manufactured by the lights, the life, the laughter, and in the muted, interweaving strains of music. Joan felt that she was living wonderfully and intensely, a creature of an existence transcendent and radiant.

It was after one when another taxicab whisked them homeward through the quieting streets. She sat as close as could be to her lover and would not have objected on the grounds of "people looking" had he put an arm round her. Though he didn't, she was not disappointed, sharing something of his mood of sublimely sufficient contentment. But when he bade her good night at the foot of the stairs in the deserted and poorly lighted hallway, she gave herself to his caresses with a passion and abandon that startled and sobered Matthias, and sent him off to his room and bed in a thoughtful frame of mind.

Lying awake in darkness until darkness was dimly tempered by the formless dusk that long foreruns the dawn, he communed gravely with his troubled heart.

"Things can't go on this way--as they've started. There's _got_ to be sanity.... It's myself I've got to watch, of course," he said with stubborn loyalty to his ideal. "I mustn't forget I'm a man--nine years older--nearly ten.... Why, she's hardly more than a kiddie.... She doesn't _know_.... I've got to watch myself...."

And in her room, four floors above, Joan sat as long before her bureau, chin cradled on her slim, laced fingers, eyeing intently the face shown her by gas-light in the one true patch of the common, tarnished mirror.

When at length she rose, suddenly conscious of a heavy weariness, she lingered yet another long moment for one last fond look.

"It's true," she told herself with a little nod of conviction; "I am beautiful. _She_ said I was ... he thinks I am ... I must be...."

XIX

For a long time Joan lay snug between the sheets, staring wide-eyed into the patch of lustrous blue morning sky framed by the window, reviewing this new and wonderful adventure of her heart from a point of view remote, detached, and critical. Thoughts recurred that in the excitement and ardour of the night had been passed over and neglected; and from them she derived a new, strange, and intoxicating sense of power.

Her first waking thought was as her last before sleeping: _I am beautiful_.

Her second, not _I love him_, but _He loves me_.

And her third grew out of the second: _I can make him do what pleases me_.

Yesterday a lowly supplicant at the shrine of love: today Love's very self, adored and desired by an erstwhile divinity now humbled to the level of humanity!

A fit of petulance, beauty in tears, a whispered word of passion: strange and strangely simple incantation to have turned a world upside down! How easily was man suppled to the spell!

The sense of power ran like wine through her being: she felt herself invincible, an adept of love's alchemy; she had surprised its secret, and now the world of man's heart lay open to the practices of her disastrous art. For a moment she experienced an almost terrifying intimation of empires ripe for conquest that lay beyond Matthias; but from this she withdrew her troubled gaze; nor would she look again; not yet....

She considered his mad extravagance of last night--taxicabs, champagne, tips! Was he, then, able to afford such expenditures? In her understanding they went oddly with his pretensions to decent poverty. Or had he merely lost his head under the influence of her charms? This last theory pleased her; she adopted it with reservations: the question remained one to be cleared up.

He disapproved of a career upon the stage for her?... Joan smiled indulgently: that matter would be arranged in good time. She meant to have her way....

At a tap on her door she changed suddenly from the aloof egoist to a woman athrill before the veil of portentous mysteries. She sat up in bed, called out to know who was knocking, gave permission to the chambermaid to enter, and received a note in the hand of Matthias.

"_Past twelve o'clock_," she read, "_and still no sign of you, sweetheart. I give you thirty minutes to dress and come to me. If you don't, I'll come for you. After breakfast, we'll run out of town for the day--our first day together!_ MATTHIAS."

Half wild with delight, she hurried through her toilet and ran down-stairs to find her lover waiting in the hallway, watch in hand.

He closed it with a snap, and made her a quaintly ceremonious bow. "In two minutes more--!" he observed in a tone of grave menace. "But before we go out, have the kindness to step into my humble study. I have somewhat to say to you."

She appeared to hesitate, to be reluctant and preoccupied occupied.

"What about?" she demanded distantly.

But her dancing eyes betrayed her.

"Business," he said, sententious. His gesture indicated a vigilant universe of eavesdroppers. "Nobody's but our own!"

Nevertheless, there was none to spy upon them as he drew her gently by the waist, down the hall and into the back-parlour. She yielded with a charming diffidence.

In his embrace the sense of power slipped unheeded from her ken; returned the deep, obliterating rapture of over-night. Lips that first submitted, soon gave in return, then demanded....

She clung heavily to him, a little faint and breathless with a vague and sweet and nameless longing....

At breakfast in a neighbouring restaurant, Matthias disclosed his plans for the day, involving a motor trip down along the north shore of Long Island, dinner at Huntington, a return by moonlight. Joan, enchanted by the prospect--the sum of whose experience outside Manhattan Island was comprised in a few trips to Coney Island--consented with a strange mingling of eagerness and misgivings; the thought of the cost troubled a conscience still haunted by memories of last night's prodigality.

"I didn't know you had an automobile."

"I haven't; I'm chartering one for the day."

"But ... but ... won't it be awf'ly expensive?"

"Don't worry, dear."

"But, you know, you aren't--rich."

"I'm a magnate of happiness, at all events: and today is _our_ day, the first of our love, sweetheart. For twelve long hours we're going to forget everything but our two selfish selves. Why fret about tomorrow? It always does manage to take care of itself, somehow. And frankly, I don't care to be reminded of its existence today; for tomorrow I work...."

A day of quicksilver hours slipping ever from their jealous grasp; of hours volatile and glamorous: in Joan's half-dazed consciousness, a delectable pageant of scenes, sensations and emotions no sooner comprehended than displaced by others no less wonderful....

Abed long after midnight, visions besieged her bewilderingly: a length of dusty golden highway walled by green forest, with a white bridge glaring in sunlight at the bottom of a hill; the affrighting onrush of great motor-cars meeting their own, and the din and dust of their passage; the bright harbour of Huntington, blue and gold in a frame of gold and green, viewed from the marble balustrade of the Château des Beaux Arts; the wrinkled, kindly, comprehending face of a waiter who served them at dinner; the look in her lover's eyes as she repeated, on demand, guarded avowals under cover of the motor's rumble; the ardent face of a boy who had seemed unable to cease staring at her in the restaurant; silver and purple of the road by night; wheeling ranks of lights dotting the desolation of suburban Brooklyn; the high-flung span of Queensboro' Bridge, a web of steel and concrete strung with opalescent globes; the glare of the city's painted sky; the endless pulsing of the motor; their last caress on parting at the foot of the stairs....

On the morrow she went back to her typewriter like Cinderella to her kitchen. But what work Matthias was able to invent for her was neither arduous nor urgent; she was able to take her time on it, and wasted many an hour in dreaming. Her mind was, indeed, more engaged with thoughts of new frocks than with the circumstances of her love or her services to her lover.

She was to receive thenceforward twenty-five instead of ten dollars a week. Matthias had experienced little difficulty in over-ruling her faint protestations: they were to be together a great deal, he argued, and she must be able to dress at least neatly; moreover, by requiring her promise to marry him at some future time when his fortunes would permit, he had in a measure made her dependent upon him; she couldn't reasonably be asked to wait for long on a bare pittance.

His arguments were reinforced by one he knew nothing of, a maxim culled from the wisdom of Miss Maizie Dean: _It was up to a girl to look out for herself first, last, and all the time_. The platitude had made an ineffaceable impression upon Joan's sense of self-preservation. And if Matthias were able to afford nightly dinners for two at good restaurants, in addition to theater tickets several times a week, he ought to be able to afford a decent compensation to his stenographer; especially when it was his wish that she refrain from attempting to earn more money on the stage.

It was, however, true that no offer had come to Joan of other theatrical work, and that the issue of her ambition remained in abeyance, a subject which she didn't care to raise and which Matthias, since that first night, had considered settled.