Part 11

Sophy Gerard sat in the little back room of Louise's house, which the latter called her den, but which she seldom entered. The little actress was looking very trim and neat in a simple blue-serge costume which fitted her to perfection, her hair very primly arranged and tied up with a bow. She had a pen in her mouth, there was a sheaf of bills before her, and an open housekeeping-book lay on her knee. She had been busy for the last half-hour making calculations, the result of which had brought a frown to her face.

"There is no doubt about it," she decided. "Louise is extravagant!"

The door opened, and Louise herself, in a gray morning gown of some soft material, with a bunch of deep-red roses at her waist, looked into the room.

"Why, little girl," she exclaimed, "how long have you been here?"

"All the morning," Sophy replied. "I took the dogs out, and then I started on your housekeeping-book and the bills. Your checks will have to be larger than ever this month, Louise, and I don't see how you can possibly draw them unless you go and see your bankers first."

Louise threw herself into an easy chair.

"Dear me!" she sighed. "I thought I had been so careful!"

"How can you talk about being careful?" Sophy protested, tapping the little pile of bills with her forefinger. "You seem to have had enough asparagus and strawberries every day for at least half a dozen people. As for the butcher, I am going this afternoon to tell him exactly what I think of him. And there are several matters here," she went on, "concerning which you must really talk to the cook yourself. For instance--"

"Oh, please don't!" Louise broke in. "I know I am extravagant. I suppose I always shall be; but if there is one thing in the world I will not do, it is talk to the cook! She might insist upon going, and I have never known any one who made such entrees. Remember, child, it will be full salary in a fortnight's time."

"You will have to go and see your bankers, anyhow," Sophy declared. "It's no use my writing out these checks for you. Unless you have paid in some money I don't know anything about, you seem to be overdrawn already."

"I will see to that," Louise promised. "The bank manager is such a charming person. Besides, what are banks for but to oblige their clients? How pale you look, little girl! Were you not late last night?"

Sophy swung round in her place.

"I am all right. I spent the evening in my rooms and went to bed at eleven o'clock. Who's lunching with you? I see the table is laid for two."

Louise glanced at the clock upon the mantelpiece.

"Mr. Strangewey," she replied. "I suppose he will be here in a minute or two."

Sophy dropped the housekeeping-book and jumped up.

"I'd better go, then."

"Of course not," Louise answered. "You must stay to lunch. Ring the bell and tell them to lay a place for you. Afterward, if you like, you may come in here and finish brooding over these wretched bills while Mr. Strangewey talks to me."

Sophy came suddenly across the room and sank on the floor at Louise's feet.

"What are you going to do about Mr. Strangewey, Louise?" she asked wistfully.

"What am I going to do about him?"

"He is in love with you," Sophy continued. "I am sure--I am almost sure of it."

Louise's laugh was unconvincing.

"I do not think," she said, "that he quite knows what it means to be in love."

Sophy suddenly clasped her friend's knees.

"Dear," she whispered, "perhaps I am a little fool, but tell me, please!"

Louise, for a moment, was startled. Then she leaned forward and kissed the eager, upturned face.

"You foolish child!" she exclaimed. "I believe that you have been worrying. Why do you think so much about other people?"

"Please tell me," Sophy begged. "I want to understand how things really are between you and John Strangewey. Are you in love with him?"

Louise's eyes were soft and dreamy.

"I wish I knew," she answered. "If I am, then there are things in life more wonderful than I have ever dreamed of. He doesn't live in our world--and our world, as you know, has its grip. He knows nothing about my art, and you can guess what life would be to me without that. What future could there be for him and for me together? I cannot remake myself."

There was something in Sophy's face which was almost like wonder.

"So this is the meaning of the change in you, Louise! I knew that something had happened. You have seemed so different for the last few months."

Louise nodded.

"London has never been the same place to me since I first met him in Cumberland," she admitted. "Sometimes I think I am--to use your own words--in love with John. Sometimes I feel it is just a queer, indistinct, but passionate appreciation of the abstract beauty of the life he seems to stand for."

"Is he really so good, I wonder?" Sophy asked pensively.

"I do not know," Louise sighed. "I only know that when I first talked to him, he seemed different from any man I have ever spoken with in my life. I suppose there are few temptations up there, and they keep nearer to the big things. Sometimes I wonder, Sophy, if it was not very wrong of me to draw him away from it all!"

"Rubbish!" Sophy declared. "If he is good, he can prove it and know it here. He will come to know the truth about himself. Besides, it isn't everything to possess the standard virtues. Louise, he will be here in a minute. You want to be left alone with him. What are you going to say when he asks you what you know he will ask you?"

Louise looked down at her.

"Dear," she said, "I wish I could tell you. I do not know. That is the strange, troublesome part of it--I do not know!"

"Will you promise me something?" Sophy begged. "Promise me that if I stay in here quietly until after he has gone, you will come and tell me!"

Louise leaned a little downward as if to look into her friend's face. Sophy suddenly dropped her eyes, and the color rose to the roots of her hair. There was a knock at the door, and the parlor maid entered.

"Mr. Strangewey, madam," she announced.

XIX

"There can be no possible doubt," Louise remarked, as she unfolded her napkin, "as to our first subject of conversation. Both Sophy and I are simply dying of curiosity to know about the prince's supper party."

"It was very cheerful and very gay," John said. "Every one seemed to enjoy it very much."

"Oh, la, la!" Sophy exclaimed. "Is that all you have to tell us? I shall begin to think that you were up to mischief there."

"I believe," Louise declared, "that every one of the guests is sworn to secrecy as to what really goes on."

"I can assure you that I wasn't," John told them.

"The papers hint at all sorts of things," Sophy continued. "Every one who writes for the penny illustrated papers parades his whole stock of classical knowledge when he attempts to describe them. We read of the feasts of Lucullus and Bacchanalian orgies. They say that at supper-time you lie about on sofas and feast for four hours at a stretch."

"The reports seem exaggerated," John laughed. "We went in to supper at half past twelve and we came out just before two. We sat on chairs, and the conversation was quite decorous."

"This is most disappointing!" Louise murmured. "I cannot think why the prince never invites us."

"The ladies of his family were not present," John remarked stiffly.

There was a moment's silence. Louise had looked down at her plate, and Sophy glanced out of the window.

"Is it true that Calavera was there?" the latter asked presently.

"Yes, she was there," John replied. "She danced after supper."

"Oh, you lucky man!" Louise sighed. "She only dances once or twice a year off the stage. Is she really so wonderful close to?"

"She is, in her way, very wonderful," John agreed.

"Confess that you admired her," Louise persisted.

"I thought her dancing extraordinary," he confessed, "and, to be truthful, I did admire her. All the same, hers is a hateful gift."

Louise looked at him curiously for a moment. His face showed few signs of the struggle through which he had passed, but the grim setting of his lips reminded her a little of his brother. He had lost, too, something of the boyishness, the simple light-heartedness of the day before. Instinctively she felt that the battle had begun. She asked him no more about the supper party, and Sophy, quick to follow her lead, also dropped the subject.

Luncheon was not a lengthy meal, and immediately its service was concluded, Sophy rose to her feet with a sigh.

"I must go and finish my work," she declared. "Let me have the den to myself for at least an hour, please, Louise. It will take me longer than that to muddle through your books."

Louise nodded and rose to her feet.

"We will leave you entirely undisturbed," she promised. "I hope, when you have finished, you will have something more agreeable to say than you had before lunch. Shall we have our coffee up-stairs?" she suggested, turning to John.

"I should like to very much," he replied. "I want to talk to you alone."

She led the way up-stairs into the cool, white drawing-room, with its flower-perfumed atmosphere and its delicate, shadowy air of repose. She curled herself up in a corner of the divan and gave him his coffee. Then she leaned back and looked at him.

"So you have really come to London, Mr. Countryman!"

"I have followed you," he answered. "I think you knew that I would. I tried not to," he went on, after a moment's pause. "I fought against it as hard as I could; but in the end I had to give in."

"That was very sensible of you," she declared knocking the ash from her cigarette. "There is no use wearing oneself out fighting a hopeless battle. You know now that there are things in life which are not to be found in your passionless corner among the hills. You have realized that you owe a duty to yourself."

"That was not what brought me," he answered bluntly. "I came for you."

Louise's capacity for fencing seemed suddenly enfeebled. A frontal attack of such directness was irresistible.

"For me!" she repeated weakly.

"Of course," he replied. "None of your arguments would have brought me here. If I have desired to understand this world at all, it is because it is your world. It is you I want--don't you understand that? I thought you would know it from the first moment you saw me!"

He was suddenly on his feet, leaning over her, a changed man, masterful, passionate. She opened her lips, but said nothing. She felt herself lifted up, clasped for a moment in his arms. Unresisting, she felt the fire of his kisses. The world seemed to have stopped. Then she tried to push him away, weakly, and against her own will. At her first movement he laid her tenderly back in her place.

"I am sorry!" he said. "And yet I am not," he added, drawing his chair close up to her side. "I am glad! You knew that I loved you, Louise. You knew that it was for you I had come."

She was beginning to collect herself. Her brain was at work again; but she was conscious of a new confusion in her senses, a new element in her life. She was no longer sure of herself.

"Listen," she begged earnestly. "Be reasonable! How could I marry you? Do you think that I could live with you up there in the hills?"

"We will live," he promised, "anywhere you choose in the world."

"Ah, no!" she continued, patting his hand. "You know what your life is, the things you want in life. You don't know mine yet. There is my work. You cannot think how wonderful it is to me. You don't know the things that fill my brain from day to day, the thoughts that direct my life. I cannot marry you just because--because--"

"Because what?" he interrupted eagerly.

"Because you make me feel--something I don't understand, because you come and you turn the world, for a few minutes, topsyturvy. But that is all foolishness, isn't it? Life isn't built up of emotions. What I want you to understand, and what you, please, must understand, is that at present our lives are so far, so very far, apart. I do not feel I could be happy leading yours, and you do not understand mine."

"I have come to find out about yours," John explained. "That is why I am here. Perhaps I ought to have waited a little time before I spoke to you as I did just now. Come, you can forget what I have said and done; but to me it will be an everlasting joy. I shall treasure the memory of it. It will help me--I can't tell you quite in what way it will help me. But for the rest, I will serve my apprenticeship. I will try to get into sympathy with the things that please you. It will not take me long. As soon as you feel that we are drawing closer together, I will ask you again what I have asked you this afternoon. In the meantime, I may be your friend, may I not? You will let me see a great deal of you? You will help me just a little?"

Louise leaned back in her chair. She had been carried off her feet, brought face to face with emotions which she dared not analyze. Perhaps, after all her self-dissection, there were still secret chambers. She thought almost with fear of what they might contain. Her sense of superiority was vanishing. She was, after all, like other women.

"Yes," she promised, "I will help. We will leave it at that. Some day you shall talk to me again, if you like. In the meantime, remember we are both free. You have not known many women, and you may change your mind when you have been longer in London. Perhaps it will be better for you if you do!"

"That is quite impossible," John said firmly. "You see," he went on, looking at her with shining eyes, "I know now what I half believed from the first moment that I saw you. I love you!"

Springing restlessly to her feet, she walked across the room and back again. Action of some sort seemed imperative. A curious hypnotic feeling seemed to be dulling all her powers of resistance. She looked into her life and she was terrified. Everything had grown insignificant. It couldn't really be possible that with her brains, her experience, this man who had dwelt all his life in the simple ways had yet the power to show her the path toward the greater things!

Through the complex web of emotions which made up her temperament there suddenly sprang a primitive instinct, the primitive instinct of all women, rebelling against the first touch of a master's hand. Was she to find herself wrong and this man right? Was she to submit, to accept from his hand the best gifts of life--she who had looked for them in such very high, such very inaccessible places?

She felt like a child again. She trembled a little as she sat down by his side. It was not in this fashion that she had intended to hear what he had to say.

"I don't know what is the matter with me to-day," she murmured distractedly. "I think I must send you away. You disturb my thoughts. I can't see life clearly. Don't hope for too much from me," she begged. "But don't go away," she added, with a sudden irresistible impulse of anxiety. "Oh, I wish--I wish you understood me and everything about me, without my having to say a word!"

"I feel what you are," he answered, "and that is sufficient."

Once more she rose to her feet and walked across to the window. An automobile had stopped in the street below. She looked down upon it with a sudden frozen feeling of apprehension.

John moved to her side, and for him, too, the joy of those few moments was clouded. A little shiver of presentiment took its place. He recognized the footman whom he saw standing upon the pavement.

"It is the Prince of Seyre," Louise faltered.

"Must you see him?" John muttered.

"Yes!"

"Send him away," John begged. "We haven't finished yet. I won't say anything more to upset you. What I want now is some practical guidance."

"I cannot send him away!"

John glanced toward her and hated himself for his fierce jealousy. She was looking very white and very pathetic. The light had gone from her eyes. He felt suddenly dominant, and, with that feeling, there came all the generosity of the conqueror.

"Good-by!" he said. "Perhaps I can see you some time to-morrow."

He raised her hand to his lips and kissed her fingers, one by one. Then he left the room. She listened to his footsteps descending the stairs, firm, resolute, deliberate. They paused, there was a sound of voices--the prince and he were exchanging greetings; then she heard other footsteps ascending, lighter, smoother, yet just as deliberate.

Her face grew paler as she listened. There was something which sounded to her almost like the beating of fate in the slow, inevitable approach of this unseen visitor.

XX

Henri Graillot had made himself thoroughly comfortable. He was ensconced in the largest of John's easy chairs, his pipe in his mouth, a recently refilled teacup--Graillot was English in nothing except his predilection for tea--on the small table by his side. Through a little cloud of tobacco-smoke he was studying his host.

"So you call yourself a Londoner now, my young friend, I suppose," he remarked, taking pensive note of John's fashionable clothes. "It is a transformation, beyond a doubt! Is it, I wonder, upon the surface only, or have you indeed become heart and soul a son of this corrupt city?"

"Whatever I may have become," John grumbled, "it's meant three months of the hardest work I've ever done!"

Graillot held out his pipe in front of him and blew away a dense cloud of smoke.

"Explain yourself," he insisted.

John stood on the hearth-rug, with his hands in his pockets. His morning clothes were exceedingly well-cut, his tie and collar unexceptionable, his hair closely cropped according to the fashion of the moment. He had an extremely civilized air.

"Look here, Graillot," he said, "I'll tell you what I've done, although I don't suppose you would understand what it means to me. I've visited practically every theater in London."

"Alone?"

"Sometimes with Miss Maurel, sometimes with her little friend, Sophy Gerard, and sometimes alone," John replied. "I have bought a Baedeker, taken a taxicab by the day, and done all the sights. I've spent weeks in the National Gallery, picture-gazing, and I've done all those more modern shows up round Bond Street. I have bought a racing-car and learned to drive it. I have been to dinner parties that have bored me stiff. I have been introduced to crowds of people whom I never wish to see again, and made one or two friends," he added, smiling at his guest, "for whom I hope I am properly grateful."

"The prince has been showing you round a bit, hasn't he?" Graillot grunted.

"The prince has been extraordinarily kind to me," John admitted slowly, "for what reason I don't know. He has introduced me to a great many pleasant and interesting people, and a great many whom I suppose a young man in my position should be glad to know. He has shown me one side of London life pretty thoroughly."

"And what about it all?" Graillot demanded. "You find yourself something more of a citizen of the world, eh?"

"Not a bit," John answered simply. "The more I see of the life up here, the smaller it seems to me. I mean, of course, the ordinary life of pleasure, the life to be lived by a young man like myself, who hasn't any profession or work upon which he can concentrate his thoughts."

"Then why do you stay?"

John made no immediate reply. Instead, he walked to the window of his sitting room and stood looking out across the Thames with a discontented frown upon his face. Between him and the Frenchman a curious friendship had sprung up during the last few months.

"Tell me, then," Graillot continued, taking a bite from his piece of cake and shaking the crumbs from his waistcoat, "what do you find in London to compensate you for the things you miss? You are cooped up here in this little flat--you, who are used to large rooms and open spaces; you have given up your exercise, your sports--for what?"

"I get some exercise," John protested. "I play rackets at Ranelagh most mornings, and I bought a couple of hacks and ride occasionally in the park before you're out of bed."

"That's all right for exercise," Graillot observed. "What about amusements?"

"Well, I've joined a couple of clubs. One's rather a swagger sort of place--the prince got me in there; and then I belong to the Lambs, where you yourself go sometimes. I generally look in at one or the other of them during the evening."

"You see much of Miss Maurel?"

John shook his head gloomily.

"Not as much as I should like," he confessed. "She seems to think and dream of nothing but this play of yours. I am hoping that when it is once produced she will be more free."

"I gather," Graillot concluded, "that, to put it concisely and truthfully, you are the most bored man in London. There is something behind all this effort of yours, my friend, to fit yourself, the round human being, into the square place. Speak the truth, now! Treat me as a father confessor."

John swung round upon his heel. In the clear light it was obvious that he was a little thinner in the face and that some of the tan had gone from his complexion.

"I am staying up here, and going on with it," he announced doggedly, "because of a woman."

Graillot stopped eating, placed the remains of his cake in the saucer of his teacup, and laid it down. Then he leaned back in his chair and balanced his finger-tips one against the other.

"A woman!" he murmured. "How you astonish me!"

"Why?"

"Candor is so good," Graillot continued, "so stimulating to the moral system. It is absolute candor which has made friends of two people so far apart in most ways as you and myself. You surprise me simply because of your reputation."

"What about my reputation?"

Graillot smiled benignly.

"In France," he observed, "you would probably be offered your choice of lunatic asylums. Here your weakness seems to have made you rather the vogue."

"What weakness?"

"It is to a certain extent hearsay, I must admit," Graillot proceeded; "but the report about you is that, although you have had some of the most beautiful women in London almost offer themselves to you, you still remain without a mistress."

"What in the world do you mean?" John demanded.

"I mean," Graillot explained frankly, "that for a young man of your age, your wealth, and your appearance to remain free from any feminine entanglement is a thing unheard of in my country, and, I should imagine, rare in yours. It is not so that young men were made when I was young!"

"I don't happen to want a mistress," John remarked, lighting a cigarette. "I want a wife."

"But meanwhile--"

"You can call me a fool, if you like," John interrupted. "I may be one, I suppose, from your point of view. All I know is that I want to be able to offer the woman whom I marry, and who I hope will be the mother of my children, precisely what she offers me. I want a fair bargain, from her point of view as well as mine."

Graillot, who had been refilling his pipe, stopped and glowered at his host.

"What exactly do you mean?" he asked.

"Surely my meaning is plain enough," John replied. "We all have our peculiar tastes and our eccentricities. One of mine has to do with the other sex. I cannot make an amusement of them. It is against all my prejudices."

Graillot carefully completed the refilling of his pipe and lit it satisfactorily. Then he turned once more to John.

"Let us not be mistaken," he said. "You are a purist!"

"You can call me what you like," John retorted. "I do not believe in one law for the woman and another for the man. If a man wants a woman, and we all do more or less, it seems to me that he ought to wait until he finds one whom he is content to make the mother of his children."

Graillot nodded ponderously.

"Something like this I suspected," he admitted. "I felt that there was something extraordinary and unusual about you. If I dared, my young friend, I would write a play about you; but then no one would believe it. Now tell me something. I have heard your principles. We are face to face--men, brothers, and friends. Do you live up to them?"