Star-Dust Part 51

Then she felt absurd and looked absurd and stood there with the quick fizzing spurt of exultation died down into a state of bathos.

"Let me stay on here on my terms, Mr. Visigoth," she finished with a sort of broken-wing lameness of voice.

"What terms?"

"The terms you have been generous enough not to violate up to now. I've the most glorious reason for wanting to make good that a girl--a woman could have. I don't think the career stuff, as you once called it, is rankling any more. I'm suddenly glad and quiet about my job. Let me stay on. Let me make myself indispensable to this growing, interesting enterprise of yours. Why, even watching the letters grow in numbers and importance, and using the little individuality in handling them that you are beginning to allow me, is a game worth playing! I'm like a bad girl who has been spanked by life and is all chastened and ready to be good.

If you are the clever business man I think you are, you'll let me stay, Mr. Visigoth, on my terms."

There was a s.h.i.+ne to her there in the half light, probably because her eyes were wide and the muscles of her face lifted so that her teeth showed, but not in a smile.

"I played the game on your terms, Mr. Visigoth; now meet me on mine."

"Put your cards on the table, then; no fine flights of speech either.

Who are you?"

"I told you from the first I am a married woman, with nothing to be said against my husband except that he was part of a condition that was intolerable to me."

"Where is he?"

"West."

"Stage ambition, eh?"

"Yes or--I don't know. Too many ambitions of all kinds crawling over me like a terrible itch, for G.o.d knows what. Fermenting. The grape fermenting! But I'm quiet now. So quiet that sometimes I think I wouldn't change it for even the--the singing wine of fulfillment. I don't think I can make you understand. I seem to have been stretching all these years for--for something my arm isn't quite long enough to touch, and now my child--my little girl--"

"You have a child?"

"A little girl."

"How old?"

"Eleven weeks."

He looked at her across a long silence.

"Good G.o.d!" he said, and then again, "Good G.o.d."

"Yes," she said, watching belated comprehensions flood up into his face, "that was it."

"You mean you had on your hands that night a--"

"Yes, a three-and-a-half-weeks-old one."

"You were broke?"

"Stony."

"Good G.o.d! You--poor--"

"I'm not pleading for your sympathy, Mr. Visigoth. Only a square deal.

Will you give it?"

He walked over to his desk, turning on a green-shaded bulb, the clip back in his voice and manner.

"That will be all for this evening, Mrs. Parlow--"

"Penny."

"Mrs. Penny," he said, picking up a random sheaf of papers and not meeting her eyes. "I want you to go over to Newark Monday afternoon and bring back a report on an act over there; and, by the way, you are to begin your new week in the booking department at twenty dollars."

She wanted to speak and her lips did move, but the tears antic.i.p.ated her, and, blink as she would, they sprang, magnifying her glance, and besides, there were footsteps coming up the flight of stairs that led from the stage entrance, and a young, a lean, a honed silhouette rather suddenly in the doorway, the right side borne down by the pull of a dress-suit case.

"R.J?" Peering into the gloom.

"Good Lord!" from the figure at the desk, leaning forward on the palm of his hand. "That you, Bruce?"

They met center, gripping hands.

"When did you get in, youngster? Didn't expect you for another couple of days."

"Just now. Took a chance on finding you here."

"Another five minutes and you wouldn't have."

"So these are the new diggings?"

"There is your desk."

He deposited his hat on the flat top indicated, his silhouette cutting vigorously into the dimness, particularly the rather heavy double wave to his hair causing Lilly to grope with a vague sense of having seen him before. It was merely a rather remote resemblance to the remote Horace Lindsley, but not for days did she stumble across this realization.

She knew, instinctively, even while she marveled at his youth and the merest and most lightninglike resemblance to his brother, that here was Bruce Visigoth, and what she did not know was that a certain throaty resonance to his voice had a tendency to gooseflesh her and that quite suddenly her eyes were very hot and her hands very cold.

"Well, R.J.," he was saying, and she noticed that his head came up with a fine kind of young defiance, as if a pair of invisible Mercury wings flowed with the sleek nap of his hair, "I'm for taking a chance on the Buffalo lease. I stopped over yesterday and the little theater looks good to me."

It was then Lilly began noiselessly to move toward the door.

"Oh--here--Mrs. Penny. My brother, Mrs. Penny. Sort of secretary on the booking department, and a darn good one."

"How do you do, Mrs. Penny? Mighty pleased," he said, through the resonance that had a little aftermath of a ting to it.

Her five fingers rather trailed along the palm of his hand as he slowly released her.

"Thank you, Mr. Visigoth," she said, smiling up at him with her eyebrows, pressing down her sailor hat, and hurrying toward the staircase.

Outside, the darkness had the quality of cool water to her face. The palm of her right hand and the tips of her fingers were tingling as if they had been kissed.

She could have run before the wind.