CHAPTER XIX.

PHILLIP VAN ZANDT.

“What are they playing now, Phillip?” Isabel Harding draws the program to her and scans the musical numbers listed thereon.

“Is it possible that you do not recognize the immortal unfinished Schubert symphony?” her companion asks, with good-natured sarcasm.

“You know I cannot tell one symphony from another,” Mrs. Harding remarks, pettishly. “I wish you would pay less attention to the music and more to me.”

Phillip Van Zandt smiles, but makes no reply to this reproach. And while he listens intently to the divine music which the orchestra is making, his companion sips her claret punch with a pretty frown upon her face.

The place is Madison Square Garden; the occasion, one of a series of classical concerts which Mr. Walter Damrosch and his orchestra are furnishing New York.

The two—Mrs. Harding and Mr. Van Zandt—are sitting by the wall in a comparatively uncrowded section of the Garden and more than one person who glances at them remarks that they are a handsome couple.

Phillip Van Zandt is not far from 30 years of age. There is nothing effeminate about his singularly handsome face; the closely trimmed brown beard does not conceal the firm, almost hard lines about the mouth. A mass of dark-brown curls cluster about a noble forehead that fronts a well-shaped head. But the striking features of the face are the eyes. Something inscrutable lurks in their dark-brown depths, now dreamy and tender, and again cold and glittering.

Who he is and what he is are points upon which his nearest acquaintances—he has no intimate friends—have never succeeded in satisfying themselves. He came somewhere out of the West less than a year ago. He occupies luxurious quarters at the Wyoming apartment house, spends money freely, and seems to be drifting through existence with the insouciance of a man who has lived his life and who looks forward to nothing this side of Charon’s ferry—or perhaps beyond.

He plays at cards and plunges at the track and wins or loses with the inevitable composure which characterizes his every action. To men he is cold, often insolent; to women he is indifferent, although infinitely courteous. Handsome, distingue, wealthy, witty in a dry, cynical sort of way, he is a man who could be immensely popular with his fellows and fascinating to the other sex. That he is neither one nor the other is his peculiarity.

His companion of this evening, Isabel Harding, is a personage, who would attract instant attention in a crowd of attractive women. She is magnificently proportioned—a splendid animal, as Van Zandt remarked when first his careless gaze rested upon her. Her hair is black as midnight; her eyes, large and lustrous, can either flash with the fury of the tiger or beam with the softness of the dove. Her mouth is somewhat large, but it is firm, and between full, scarlet lips gleam two arcs of strong, milk-white teeth.

She has known occasions when propriety was not finically insisted upon, but on this night she is as demure as innocence at 16. For she knows Van Zandt well enough to understand that, while virtue and worth may not interest him, viciousness and unworthiness decidedly do not. And the least discerning student of human nature can see that she loves him—loves him blindly, madly, and—hopelessly.

Van Zandt cares nothing for her, save in his indifferent way, and she knows it. But she does not despair. She is a woman.

Somewhere in Bohemia, Van Zandt met Isabel Harding. She interested him, she was so unlike the other women at the little French restaurant where he had dropped in to get lunch and a bottle of really good wine. Some small service by him rendered sufficed to establish between the two a camaraderie that continued until the present. It witnessed no alteration of sentiment on the part of Van Zandt. But Isabel—she began by admiring and finished by worshiping.

He never asked who or what she was, although she was obviously a woman with a story to tell. She was a widow, she said. Widows are many in Bohemia.

“Some day I will give you my history,” she told him. But Van Zandt only laughed and asked, “Shall we go to the play to-night?”

“He cares no more for me than for the glass he is holding,” Mrs. Harding now thinks, as she watches his face, turned again toward the orchestra. “Don’t you ever think of anything except music?” she demands, a little impatiently.

“Oh, yes; of a great many other things. For instance, I was this minute thinking of you.”

“Oh, indeed?” ironically. “Something vastly complimentary, no doubt.”

Van Zandt smiles emphatically. “I was thinking that I should like to set you to music, if I possessed the faculty,” he says, as he glances humorously at his companion’s pouting face.

“What should you write, a waltz refrain or a dancehall ditty?” asks Mrs. Harding.

“Neither; I should write a symphony, a wild sort of affair,” he smiles. “It would begin quietly and run along for bars and bars in a theme that would suggest days when the heart was young and life seemed a pathway of roses. This would give place to scherzo and the whole movement would be light and playful and singing. Then the music would begin to grow troublous, anon turbulent, and would finally burst into uncontrollable tumult. This would gradually pass away, and the third movement would be capriccio, the music now flashing fire, again singing on like a mountain brook, on and on, and on.”

“You are very discerning, Mr. Van Zandt,” says Isabel, biting her lip. “What name should you bestow on this remarkable symphony?”

“I should call it ‘Isabel.’”

“And the last movement, what would that be?”

“Oh, that would be unfinished, like Schubert’s,” Van Zandt replies, with a provoking smile.

“Fortunately. For if you design to complete it you will have to do so from memory. I am going away,” declares Isabel, with a flush in each cheek.

“Going away? Where?”

“Ah, mon ami, that is for you to find out. Besides, what do you care? I have had an offer—diplomatic service, I believe it is politely called. I leave in two days.”

“By Jove! You would do well in diplomatic circles,” exclaims Van Zandt, glancing at her in frank admiration. “You said nothing of this before.”

“I have only just made up my mind. Your symphony decided me,” Isabel avers with some bitterness.

“The Garden is filling up,” Van Zandt remarks abruptly. About all the tables around them are beginning to be taken. “Hello! There’s that chap again,” he adds, as two men seat themselves at an adjoining table and fall to chatting.

“Didn’t know I was a musical critic, did you, Barker? Well, you see our regular music expert is off duty sick to-night, so they put me on the job. It’s a short one.”

“Your duties, friend Ashley, appear to be beautifully diversified.”

“They are that. Anything from a murder to a concert. I suppose Raymond is about the same as when we left it, about a year ago?”

“To a dot. Same crowd on the hotel veranda. Same symposium of hay, horse and village gossip.”

“Just the same it is a great country. I’d give several good iron dollars to be back for one morning in that gorge near South Ashfield, on the old wood road where I ran upon Ernest Stanley.”

“Push over a bit. Here’s another party,” says Barker, as a jolly quartet approach.

“Plenty of room,” they declare, as they find chairs and seat themselves close by. The man nearest to the detective and the newspaper man is a stout, florid-faced party, whose clean-cut visage and smooth bearing betoken the sporting man. His companions are well-dressed young men about town.

“Hold on, major,” remarks one of the latter, interrupting the stout party in the act of giving an order to the waiter. “I’ll buy this round, gentlemen, and we will make it wine. I played in luck to-day.”

“So? Cards run well, eh?”

“Never saw them come easier. I had a bit of luck, major, which does not materialize often enough to render poker a continuously profitable employment. I sat between two men who raised the pot four times before the draw, and I filled up a straight flush.”

“You stood the raises on a bob flush?”

“I had to. It was open at both ends. Basket of wine, waiter, and fetch it in a hurry,” adds the young man, whom his friends call Chauncey, and he gives the waiter a tip that sends him a-flying.

The major smiles as the reminiscences of innumerable interesting jack-pots are stirred up by the story of his young friend’s good luck.

“Speaking of straight flushes,” he observes, “I never saw a hand fill more neatly or appropriately than during a little game in which I was sitting three or four years ago.”

“Story by the major, gentlemen,” cries Chauncey, rapping the table to order and receiving the angry glances of a number of people about him who are trying to hear the music. “Here comes the wine. We will drink a toast to all straight flushes, high or low, and then the major shall have the floor.”