The Flirt Part 8

The voice grew louder; came in front of the house; came into the yard; came and sang just under Cora's window. There it fell silent a moment; then was lifted in a long peal of imbecile laughter, and sang again:

"Then slowly, slowly rase she up And slowly she came nigh him, And when she drew the curtain by-- 'Young man I think you're dyin'.'"

Cora's door opened and closed softly, and Laura, barefooted, stole to the bed and put an arm about the shaking form of her sister.

"The drunken beast!" sobbed Cora. "It's to disgrace me! That's what he wants. He'd like nothing better than headlines in the papers: 'Ray Vilas arrested at the Madison residence'!" She choked with anger and mortification. "The neighbours----"

"They're nearly all away," whispered Laura. "You needn't fear----"

"Hark!"

The voice stopped singing, and began to mumble incoherently; then it rose again in a lamentable outcry:

"Oh, G.o.d of the fallen, be Thou merciful to me! Be Thou merciful--merciful--_merciful_" . . .

"MERCIFUL, MERCIFUL, MERCIFUL!" it shrieked, over and over, with increasing loudness, and to such nerve-racking effect that Cora, gasping, beat the bedclothes frantically with her hands at each iteration.

The transom over the door became luminous; some one had lighted the gas in the upper hall. Both girls jumped from the bed, ran to the door, and opened it. Their mother, wearing a red wrapper, was standing at the head of the stairs, which Mr. Madison, in his night-s.h.i.+rt and slippers, was slowly and heavily descending.

Before he reached the front door, the voice outside ceased its dreadful plaint with the abrupt anti-climax of a phonograph stopped in the middle of a record. There was the sound of a struggle and wrestling, a turmoil in the wet shrubberies, branches cracking.

"Let me go, da----" cried the voice, drowned again at half a word, as by a powerful hand upon a screaming mouth.

The old man opened the front door, stepped out, closing it behind him; and the three women looked at each other wanly during a hushed interval like that in a sleeping-car at night when the train stops. Presently he came in again, and started up the stairs, heavily and slowly, as he had gone down.

"Richard Lindley stopped him," he said, sighing with the ascent, and not looking up. "He heard him as he came along the street, and dressed as quick as he could, and ran up and got him. Richard's taken him away."

He went to his own room, panting, mopping his damp gray hair with his fat wrist, and looking at no one.

Cora began to cry again. It was an hour before any of this family had recovered sufficient poise to realize, with the shuddering grat.i.tude of adventurers spared from the abyss, that, under Providence, Hedrick had not wakened!

CHAPTER SIX

Much light shatters much loveliness; but a pretty girl who looks pretty outdoors on a dazzling hot summer morning is prettier then than ever. Cora knew it; of course she knew it; she knew exactly how she looked, as she left the concrete bridge behind her at the upper end of Corliss Street and turned into a shrub-bordered bypath of the river park. In imagination she stood at the turn of the path just ahead, watching her own approach: she saw herself as a picture--the white-domed parasol, with its cheerful pale-green lining, a background for her white hat, her corn-silk hair, and her delicately flushed face. She saw her pale, live arms through their thin sleeves, and the light grasp of her gloved fingers upon the glistening stick of the parasol; she saw the long, simple lines of her close white dress and their graceful interchanging movements with the alternate advance of her white shoes over the fine gravel path; she saw the dazzling splashes of suns.h.i.+ne playing upon her through the changeful branches overhead. Cora never lacked a gallery: she sat there herself.

She refreshed the eyes of a respectable burgess of sixty, a person so colourless that no one, after pa.s.sing him, could have remembered anything about him except that he wore gla.s.ses and some sort of moustache; and to Cora's vision he was as near transparent as any man could be, yet she did not miss the almost imperceptible signs of his approval, as they met and continued on their opposite ways. She did not glance round, nor did he pause in his slow walk; neither was she clairvoyant; none the less, she knew that he turned his head and looked back at her.

The path led away from the drives and more public walks of the park, to a low hill, thoughtfully untouched by the gardener and left to the shadowy thickets and good-smelling underbrush of its rich native woodland. And here, by a brown bench, waited a tall gentleman in white.

They touched hands and sat without speaking. For several moments they continued the silence, then turned slowly and looked at each other; then looked slowly and gravely away, as if to an audience in front of them. They knew how to do it; but probably a critic in the first row would have concluded that Cora felt it even more than Valentine Corliss enjoyed it.

"I suppose this is very clandestine," she said, after a deep breath. "I don't think I care, though."

"I hope you do," he smiled, "so that I could think your coming means more."

"Then I'll care," she said, and looked at him again.

"You dear!" he exclaimed deliberately.

She bit her lip and looked down, but not before he had seen the quick dilation of her ardent eyes. "I wanted to be out of doors,"

she said. "I'm afraid there's one thing of yours I don't like, Mr.

Corliss."

"I'll throw it away, then. Tell me."

"Your house. I don't like living in it, very much. I'm sorry you _can't_ throw it away."

"I'm thinking of doing that very thing," he laughed. "But I'm glad I found the rose in that queer old waste-basket first."

"Not too much like a rose, sometimes," she said. "I think this morning I'm a little like some of the old doors up on the third floor: I feel rather unhinged, Mr. Corliss."

"You don't look it, Miss Madison!"

"I didn't sleep very well." She bestowed upon him a glance which trans.m.u.ted her actual explanation into, "I couldn't sleep for thinking of you." It was perfectly definite; but the acute gentleman laughed genially.

"Go on with you!" he said.

Her eyes sparkled, and she joined laughter with him. "But it's true: you did keep me awake. Besides, I had a serenade."

"Serenade? I had an idea they didn't do that any more over here. I remember the young men going about at night with an orchestra sometimes when I was a boy, but I supposed----"

"Oh, it wasn't much like that," she interrupted, carelessly. "I don't think that sort of thing has been done for years and years.

It wasn't an orchestra--just a man singing under my window."

"With a guitar?"

"No." She laughed a little. "Just singing."

"But it rained last night," said Corliss, puzzled.

"Oh, _he_ wouldn't mind that!"

"How stupid of me! Of course, he wouldn't. Was it Richard Lindley?"

"Never!"

"I see. Yes, that was a bad guess: I'm sure Lindley's just the same steady-going, sober, plodding old horse he was as a boy. His picture doesn't fit a romantic frame--singing under a lady's window in a thunderstorm! Your serenader must have been very young."

"He is," said Cora. "I suppose he's about twenty-three; just a boy--and a very annoying one, too!"

Her companion looked at her narrowly. "By any chance, is he the person your little brother seemed so fond of mentioning--Mr.

Vilas?"

Cora gave a genuine start. "Good heavens! What makes you think that?" she cried, but she was sufficiently disconcerted to confirm his amused suspicion.

"So it was Mr. Vilas," he said. "He's one of the jilted, of course."