Part 10

Armstrong, studying Raphael's face, which instantly attracted him, wheeled toward the door at the sound of this name as if he had been shot at from that direction. He might not have been noted, had he not straightway got a far greater shock. In abandon of sheer amazement he stared at the figure in the doorway--Neva, completely transformed in the two years since he saw her. The revolution in her whole mode of life and thought had produced results as striking inwardly as outwardly.

In America, transformations usually cause, at most, only momentary surprise; for almost everyone above the grade of day laborer, and not a few there, changes his environment completely, not once but several times in the lifetime, readjusting himself to his better or worse circumstances. After an interval one sees the man or the woman he has known as poor and obscure; success has come in that interval, and with it all the external and internal results of success. Or, failure has come, and with it that general sloughing away and decay which is the inevitable consequence of profound discouragement; the American, most adaptable of human beings, accepts defeat as facilely as victory.

In Neva's case, however, the phenomenon was somewhat different. It is not often that circumstance drags an obstinately retiring person into activity, breaks the shell and compels that which was hidden to become open, to develop, to dominate. The transformation of Neva seemed somewhat as if a violet had become a tall-stemmed rose; it was, in fact, no miracle of transubstantiation, but one of those perfectly natural marvels, like the metamorphosis of grub into butterfly. Armstrong had seen the chrysalis, all unsuspicious of its true nature; now, with no knowledge of the stages between, he was seeing the ethereal beauty the chrysalis had so securely concealed. It must be said, however, that Boris, though he had seen the day-to-day change, the gradual unfolding of wing and color and grace, was almost as startled as the big, matter-of-fact Westerner. In the evolution of every living thing, there comes a definite moment when the old vanishes and the new bursts forth in full splendor--when bud ceases to be bud and is in a twinkling leaf or bloom, when awkward boy or girl is all at once graceful youth, full panoplied. Neva, knowing she was to see Armstrong that night, had put forth the last crucial effort, had for the first time spread wide to the light her new plumage of body and soul. And there stood in the doorway of Trafford's salon the woman grown, radiant in that luminous envelope which crowns certain kinds of beauty with the supreme charm of mystery.

She paused an instant before Armstrong's stare, which was disconcerting the whole company. In spite of her forewarned self-control, her eyes sparkled and her cheeks flushed; that stare of his was the triumph of which she had dreamed. She came on to her hostess and extended her hand. Mrs. Trafford, who prided herself on being the "complete hostess," equal to any emergency, for once almost lost her head; something in Armstrong's face, in his eyes, raised in her the dread of a scene, and she showed it. But Neva restored her--Neva, tranquil and graceful, a "study in lengths" to delight the least observant eye now, her faintly shimmering evening dress of pale gray leaving bare her beautiful arms and shoulders and neck, and giving full opportunity to the poise of her small head with its bright brown crown of thick, vital hair; and her eyes, gleaming from the long, narrow lids, seemed at once to offer and refuse the delights such words as youth and passion conjure.

"I don't wonder you can't keep from staring," said Miss Trafford in an undertone to Armstrong, with intent to recall him to himself.

With that, he did contrive to get himself together; Mrs. Trafford introduced him to Neva, not without a nervous flutter in her voice. Neva put her hand out to him. "How d'ye do, Horace?" she said, with a faint smile, neither friendly nor cold.

Armstrong took her hand without being able to speak. Mrs. Trafford was about to say, "You have met before," when it occurred to her that this might precipitate the scene. Dinner was announced; she paired her guests--Lona with Armstrong, Neva with Trafford, she herself taking Boris.

"Did you see him stare at her?" she asked, on the way to the dining room.

Boris laughed unpleasantly. "And so should I, in the circumstance," replied he.

"What circumstance?"

"Seeing such a beautiful woman so suddenly," he said, after just an instant's hesitation.

Mrs. Trafford looked shrewdly at him. "Is it a scandal?" she asked, at the same time sending a beaming glance at Armstrong who was entering the door at the other end of the room with her daughter on his arm.

"Not at all," replied Boris.

The dinner went placidly enough. Raphael had been almost as startled as Armstrong when Neva appeared in the door of the salon, though he did not show it. Expert in women's ways, he knew it was for some specific reason that she had thus taken unprecedented pains with her toilet. Why had she striven to outshine herself? Obviously because she wished to punish the man who had so stupidly failed to appreciate her. A perfectly natural desire, a perfectly natural seizing of a not to be neglected opportunity for revenge. Still--Boris could not but wish she had shown some such desire to dazzle him; he would have preferred that she had been absolutely indifferent to the man of whom he often thought with twinges of rakish jealousy. He affected high spirits, was never more brilliant, and helped Neva to shine by giving her every encouragement and chance to talk and talk well.

In contrast to them, Armstrong was morosely silent; occasionally he ventured a glance across the table at Neva, and each time into his face came the expression that suggested he was suspecting his eyes or his mind of playing him a wildly fantastic trick. So far as he could judge, Neva was not at all disturbed by his presence. Raphael went upstairs soon after the women; he refused to be bored with the business conversation into which Trafford had drawn Armstrong.

"Well," said Trafford, the moment Boris was out of the way, "what have you decided to do?"

"I'll go in with you," said Armstrong.

Trafford rubbed his hands and his eyes sparkled--like a hungry circuit rider at sight of the heaping platter of fried chicken. "Good! Splendid!" he exclaimed. He glanced at butler and waiters busy clearing the sideboard; but they took no hints that would delay their freedom, and Trafford did not dare give an order that would put them out of humor and the domestic machinery out of gear. "No matter," said he. "This isn't the time to talk business. We'll arrange the details to-morrow. Or, shall we adjourn to my study?"

"I'll come to you in a few days when I have my plans formed," said Armstrong. "Wait till you hear from me." He tossed his cigar into a plate. "Let's go upstairs. I must leave soon."

Meanwhile, Raphael, in the salon, had bent over Neva and had said in an undertone, "You would like to leave? You can have my cab--it's waiting. I'll take yours when it comes."

"Thanks, no," answered Neva. "I'm not the least in a hurry."

Her tone ruffled him. His ears had been sentinels and his eyes scouts from the instant he knew who Armstrong was and with one expert glance took his measure mentally and physically. He appreciated that the female method in judging men is not at all like the male method, is wholly beyond the comprehension of a man; still, he could not believe that any man of the material, commercial type would attract a sincerely artistic, delicate, spiritual woman like Neva Carlin. He could not, as an expert in mankind, deny to Armstrong a certain charm of the force that in repose is like the mountain and in action is like the river. "But," reasoned he, "she knows him through and through, knows him as he is. For her, he's a commonplace tale that is told."

As Armstrong entered, his glance darted for Neva. It had first to meet Raphael smiling friendlily and suggesting anything but the man on guard, every nerve alert. Armstrong frowned frank dislike. He felt at a disadvantage before this superelegantly dressed and delicately perfumed personage. While he was not without experience with women, he had known only those who had sought him; his expertness was, thus, wholly in receiving advances and turning them to such advantage as suited his fancy, not at all in making overtures or laying siege. He saw at once that Boris was a master at the entire game of man and woman; he recalled Neva's passion for things artistic, her reverence for those great in artistic achievement; despite his prejudice against Boris, he measured him as a man of distinction and force. It seemed to him that this handsome master-painter, so masculine in feature and figure, so effeminately dandified in dress and manner, this fascinating specimen of the artistic sex that is the quintessence of both sexes, must have hypnotized his wife. Yes, his wife! For, now that Neva's revealed personality inspired in him wonder, awe, desire, he began to think of her as his property. He had quit title under a misapprehension; he had been cheated, none the less because the cheater happened to be himself.

Boris, ignoring his unfriendliness, advanced, engaged him, drew in Lona Trafford. Before he could contrive a move toward Neva, Boris had him securely trapped in a far corner of the salon with Lona as his watchful keeper, and was himself retreated in triumph to sit beside Neva. So thoroughly had Boris executed the maneuver, Armstrong was seated at such an angle that he could not even see Neva without rudely twisting away from Miss Trafford. He did not appreciate that he was the victim of a deliberate strategy. But Miss Trafford did; and when she found herself unable to fix his attention, she took a vengeful pleasure in keeping him trapped, enjoying his futile struggles, his ill-concealed wrath, his unconcealed jealousy.

That was a miserable half hour he passed; Lona talked of the painter and Neva--"his latest flame--you know, he's very inconstant--has the most dreadful reputation. Mamma wouldn't let him speak half a dozen words to me, unless she was there. They do say that Miss Carlin is making a saint of him--though, no doubt it's a disguise that'll be thrown off as soon as-- I don't admire that sort of man, do you, Mr. Armstrong? I like a simple, honest man--" This with a look that said she regarded Armstrong as such--"a man that doesn't understand feminine tricks and the ways to circumvent women." There her cynical eyes smiled amusement at Armstrong's ruddy, lip-biting jealousy.

"It's rather cold, so far from the fire," said Armstrong, rising.

Lona rose also; she saw that Neva was about to go. "Just a minute," said she. "Miss Carlin is leaving. You can take the sofa as soon as she's out of the way."

Armstrong wheeled, left Miss Trafford precipitately. He was barely in time to intercept Neva, on her way to the door with Trafford. "Good night, Horace," she said. He could only stand and stare. For the first time she looked directly at him, her eyes full upon his. He remembered that in the old days, when their eyes occasionally met thus, hers had made him vaguely uncomfortable; he understood why, now. What was the meaning of this look she was giving him--this look from long, narrow lids, this look that searched him out, thrilled him with longing and with fear? He could not fathom it; he only knew that never before in his entire singly intent, ambitious life had the thought occurred to him that there might be some other worth while game than the big green tables of finance, some other use for human beings than as pawns in that game. She drew her hand away from his confused, detaining grasp, and was gone, leaving him an embarrassed, depressed, ludicrous figure, to be later the jeer of his own sense of humor.

Before Trafford had time to return from escorting her to her cab, Armstrong took leave. A brief silence in the salon; then Mrs. Trafford said to Raphael, "There is some mystery here, which I feel compelled to ask you to explain. You introduced Miss Carlin to me." She noted her daughter listening eagerly. "Lona, you would better go. Good night, my child."

Boris looked the amusement this affectation roused in him. "Don't send her away, Mrs. Trafford. The mystery is quite respectable. Miss Carlin used to be Mrs. Armstrong. As there were no children, she took her own name, when it became once more the only name she was entitled to."

"He divorced her!" exclaimed Mrs. Trafford, rearing. "And you brought her to _my_ house!" She held it axiomatic that no woman would divorce a well-appearing breadwinner of the highest efficiency.

"_She_ divorced _him_," corrected Raphael.

"I can't believe it," replied Mrs. Trafford. "If she did, he let her, to avoid scandal."

"Not at all," protested Boris. "They come from a state which has queer, sentimental divorce laws, made for honest people instead of for hypocrites. They didn't get on well; so, the law let them go their separate ways--since God had obviously not joined them."

"I must look into it," said Mrs. Trafford, with a frown at Raphael and a significant side glance toward Lona. "People in our position can't afford to----"

"I have the honor to wish you good evening," said Boris with a formal bow. And before she could recover herself, he was gone.

"You _have_ made a mess, mamma!" exclaimed Lona.

Mrs. Trafford seemed on the verge of hysterics. "Was there _ever_ a more unfortunate evening!" she cried. Then: "But he'd not have been so touchy, if there wasn't something wrong."

Trafford came sauntering in and she explained the situation to him. He flamed in alarm and anger, impatiently cut off her explanations with, "You've got to straighten this, Lily. If Armstrong should hear of it, and be offended, it'd cost me--I can't tell you how much!"

Mrs. Trafford looked as miserable as she felt. "I'll send off a note apologizing to Raphael this very night," she said. "And in the morning I'll ask her to the opera. Why didn't you warn me?"

"Warn!" exclaimed Trafford, bustling up and down, and plucking at his neat little beard. "How was I to know? But I supposed you'd understand that we never have anybody--any man--here unless he's of use. It's all very well to be strict, Lily; but----"

"Let's not talk about it," wailed his wife. "I'll do my best to straighten it. I shan't sleep a wink to-night."

Lona--"the child"--slipped away, a smile on her lips--a cynical smile which testified that the lesson in life as it is lived in the full stench of "respectability," had not failed to impress her.

*XII*

*"WE NEVER WERE"*

For the first time in Armstrong's career, it was imperative that he concentrate his whole mind; and, for the first time, he could not. In the midst of conferences with Trafford, with Atwater even, his attention would wander; forgetful of his surroundings, he would stare dazedly at a slim, yet not thin, figure, framed in the heavy purple and gold curtains of a doorway--the figure of his former wife, of the recreated Neva, on the threshold of Mrs. Trafford's salon. He had the habit of judging himself impartially, and this newly developed weakness of character, as strange in its way as the metamorphosis of Neva, roused angry self-contempt; but the apparition persisted, and also his inability to keep his thoughts off it.

Passion he understood, but not its compulsion, still less its tyranny. Love--except love of mother and child--he regarded as a myth that foozled only the foolish. He had sometimes thought he would like a home, a family; but a glance at the surface of the lives of his associates was enough to put such sentimentalities out of his head. He saw the imbecilities of extravagance and pretense into which the wife and daughters plunged as soon as the wealth of the head of the family permitted, the follies into which they dragged the "old man"--how, in his own home, just as downtown, he was not a man but a purse. No, Armstrong had no disposition to become the drudge and dupe of a fashionable family. So, in his life he had put woman in what he regarded as her proper place of merest incident. He spent a great deal of time with women--that is, a great deal for so busy a man. He liked women better than he liked men because with them he was able to relax and lower his guard, where with men he always had the sense of the game. For intelligence in women he cared not at all. Beauty and a good disposition--those were the requirements. It was not as at a woman that he looked at this unbanishable figure--not with the longing, thought he, or even the admiration of the masculine for the feminine--simply with wonder, a stupid stare, an endless repetition of the query, _Who_ is it?

His vanity of self-poise was even more hard pressed to explain why he always saw, in sinister background to the apparition of Neva, the handsome, dandified face of Boris, strong, sensual, triumphant. He recalled what Lona Trafford had said of the painter. Yes, that explained it. Neva, guileless, inexperienced in the ways of the world, was being ensnared, all unsuspicious, by this rake. And, even though she might, probably would, have the virtuous fiber to stand out against him, still she would lose her reputation. Already people must be talking about her; so far as he could learn, no woman could associate with Raphael without it being assumed that she was not wasting his time. "The scented scoundrel!" muttered Armstrong. "Such men should be shot like mad dogs." This with perfect sincerity; with not a mocking suggestion that he himself had been as active in the same way as his time and inclination had permitted.

"Really, somebody ought to warn her," was naturally the next step. "What the devil do her people mean by letting her come here alone?" Yes, somebody ought to warn her. Of course, he couldn't undertake the office; his motive might be misunderstood. Still, it ought to be done. But-- "Maybe, he's really in love with her--wants to marry her." This reflection so enraged him that he was in grave danger of discovering to himself the truth about his own state of mind. "Why not?" he hastily retorted upon himself. "What do I care? I must be crazy, to spend any time at all in thinking about matters that are nothing to me."

And he ordered the subject out of his mind. He was not surprised to discover that it had not obeyed him. Now, hatred of Boris became a sort of obsession with him. He found in, or imagined into, his memory picture of the painter's face, many repellant evidences of bad character. Whenever he heard Raphael's name, or saw it in a newspaper, he paused irritably upon it; he was soon in the habit of thinking of him as "that damned hound." Nor did this development unsettle his confidence in his freedom from heart interest in Neva; he was sure his antipathy toward the painter was the natural feeling of the normal man toward the abnormal. "Where's the man that wouldn't despise a creature who decks himself out with jewelry and wears rolling collars because he wants to show off his throat, and scents himself like a man-chasing woman?"

The longer he revolved it, the more clearly he saw the necessity that she be warned--and the certainty that his warning would be misunderstood. "I couldn't speak of him without showing my feelings, and women always misinterpret that sort of thing." He looked up her address; and, as he was walking to his hotel from the office in the late afternoon, or was strolling about after dinner, developing his vast and complex scheme to pile high the ruins of his enemies that he might rise the higher upon them, he would find himself almost or quite at the entrance to the apartment house where she lived. "I think I must be going crazy," he said to himself one night, when he had twice within two hours drawn himself from before her door. Then a brilliant idea came to him: "I'll go to see her, and end this. To put a woman out of mind, all that's necessary is to give her a thorough, impartial look-over. Also, in ten minutes' talk with her I can judge whether it would be worth while to warn her against that damned hound."

And at five the very next day he sent up his card. "She'll send down word she isn't at home," he decided.

He was astonished when the boy asked him into the elevator; he was confused when he faced at her door old Molly who had lived with them out in Battle Field. "Step in, sir," she said stiffly, as if he were a stranger, and an unwelcome one. He entered with his head lowered and a pink spot on either cheek. "What the devil am I doing here?" he muttered. "Yes, I'm losing my mind."

He heard indistinctly a man's voice in the room shut off by the curtains at the far end of the hall--evidently she had a caller. He went in that direction. "Is this the right way?" he called, hesitating at the curtain.

"Yes, here," came in Neva's voice. Had he not been expecting it, he would hardly have recognized it, so vibrant now with life.

He entered--found her and Boris. "I might have known _he'd_ be here," he said to himself. "No doubt he's _always_ here."

He ignored Boris; Boris stared coldly at him. "You two have met before?" said Neva, with a glance from one to the other, her eyes like those of a nymph smiling from the dark, dense foliage round a forest pool. "Yes, I remember. Let me give you some tea, Horace."

As she spoke that name, Boris set down his cup abruptly. He debated whether he should defy politeness and outsit the Westerner. He decided that to do so would be doubly unwise--would rouse resentment in Neva, who had had the chance to ask him to spare her being left alone with her former husband and had not; would give him an appearance of regarding the Westerner as an important, a dangerous person. With a look in his eyes that belied the smile on his lips, he shook hands with her. "Until Thursday," he said. "Don't forget you're to come half an hour earlier." And Armstrong was alone with her, was entirely free to give her the "thorough, impartial lookover."

He saw his imagination had not tricked him at Trafford's--his imagination and her dress. The change in her was real, was radical, miraculous, incredible. It was, he realized, in part, in large part, a matter of dress, of tasteful details of toilet--hair and hands and skin not merely clean and neat but thoroughly cared for. This change, however, was evidently permanent, was outward sign of a new order of thought and action, and not the accident of one evening's effort as he had been telling himself. Their eyes met and his glance hastily departed upon a slow tour of the room; in what contrast was it to his own apartment, which cost so much and sheltered him so cheerlessly. "You are very comfortable here," said he. "That, and a great deal more."

"The Siersdorfs built this house," replied she. "They have ideas--especially Narcisse." He thought her wonderfully, exasperatingly self-possessed; his own blood was throbbing fiercely and her physical charms gave him the delicious, terrifying tremors of a boy on the brink of his first love leap.

"What is it that women"--he went on, surprised by the steadiness of his voice, "_some_ women--do to four walls, a floor, and ceiling, and a few pieces of furniture to get a result like this? It isn't a question of money. The more one spends in trying to get it, the worse off he is."

"It seems to me," said she, "that, in arranging a place to live, the one thing to consider is that it's not for show or for company, but to live in--day and night, in all kinds of weather, and in all kinds of moods. Make it to suit yourself, and then it'll fit you and be like you--and those who care for you can't but be pleased with it."