Girl Alone Part 37

"You do love your mother, don't you?" he smiled significantly. "Maybe you'll learn to love Van a little, too. It would be-very wise."

It was half past four o'clock when the tireless debutantes were willing to call it a night. Sally braved the thing out, but her face was wan as she listened to the last compliments on the success of the party which had officially launched her into the circles of society to which her mother belonged by the divine right of inheritance and immense wealth.

"We'll talk it all over tomorrow, sweetheart," Enid said pityingly. "You run along to bed now. I've got to give a few instructions to Randall.

And you'd better stay in bed all day, or until tea time anyway. You were marvelous tonight, darling. So beautiful, so sweet. These wild young flappers-but run along, daughter beloved. You look as if you might faint with fatigue. Have Ernestine bring you some hot milk."

It was ridiculously easy for Sally to slip out of the house, using the servants' entrance, as Van Horne had suggested. She found him waiting for her and submitted wearily to being led to where his car was parked, a block away.

"What do you want, Van?" she asked abruptly, when the car turned into Central Park from Fifth Avenue at Eighty-fourth street, the wheels crunching the glazed crust of new snow.

"To talk with you and hold your hand and possibly kiss you-oh, very possibly!" Van Horne laughed at her, reaching for her hand.

"What did you mean when you said it would be 'very wise' for me to love you a little?" she persisted, too tired to be diplomatic. But of course she knew. He held her mother's security and happiness in the hollow of his hand. That he could destroy her own social career if he wished did not occur to her, for she had not yet learned to care about it, to prize it. But Enid must be protected at all costs.

"I think you know," Van Horne shrugged. "But why put it into words? Some things are much nicer unsaid, if they are distinctly understood.

Now-will you kiss me, Sally? I've waited a long time, sweet child, and I'm naturally not a patient man."

"Not tonight," Sally said in a low, flat voice, shrinking into her own corner of the seat. "Please turn at One Hundred and Tenth street and take me back home, Van. I'm utterly tired."

Van obeyed cheerfully, exultant over her indirect promise. Sally was creeping exhaustedly up the stairs to her room, her mother, still dressed in her formal ball gown, came hurrying frantically down to meet her.

"Darling, where have you been? I've been crazy with worry! How _could_ you go out and meet that Nash boy so brazenly? Tonight of all nights!"

"It wasn't David, Mother," Sally said in a dead-tired voice. "It was Arthur Van Horne. He-knows-all about me. He's known all along."

Five weeks later-it was in early January, just before the annual scurrying of self-coddling society folk from the rigors of a New York winter to the suns.h.i.+ne of Palm Beach and Na.s.sau-Sally Barr, "one of the season's most beautiful debutantes," as the society editors called her, sat at a table for six in one of New York's most exclusive night clubs.

She was thankful for the fact that an inhumanly flexible male dancer was doing his most incredible tricks for the amus.e.m.e.nt of the club's patrons, for watching him gave her an opportunity to think, an excuse for not chattering brightly as debutantes were expected to do.

Grant Proctor, whom Enid had hoped she would marry, sat opposite her, Arthur Van Horne on her right. Beside Grant, twittering and giggling, was Claire Bainbridge, whose engagement to the heir of the Proctor millions would be announced from Palm Beach.

And yet Sally was conscious that Grant's nice, leaf-brown eyes followed her with a frustrated, doglike devotion whenever she was near him. He had told her that he loved her, and Sally, terribly anxious to please her mother and to secure Enid Barr's safety from scandal, had been ready to listen to his proposal of marriage. Since David was lost to her, it did not much matter whom she married.

"But if he asks me to marry him, Mother, I'll have to tell him the truth about my birth," Sally had told Enid.

Now, with her wistful eyes apparently watching the agile dancer, she remembered Enid's horrified protest. "You can't tell him, Sally! He wouldn't marry you if he knew. His parents wouldn't let him. Promise me you won't tell, darling!"

And so Sally had not told him, but when he did ask her to marry him she refused him. His as yet unannounced engagement to Claire Bainbridge had followed swiftly, but his eyes were still pathetically true to Sally.

She s.h.i.+fted her position a trifle, so that she could observe Arthur Van Horne out of the corner of her eye. Not that she wanted to see him! She had been forced to see so much of him since the night of her debut party that the very sound of his mocking, drawling voice was obnoxious to her.

She would never forget her mother's terror, her abject pleading and tears.

"Don't antagonize him, darling!" Enid had begged. "He can ruin us, ruin us! Be nice to him, Sally! If-if he was in love with you during those awful carnival days, maybe-" She had hesitated, ashamed to put her hope into words. "Van is really a rather wonderful man, you know, darling.

One of the most eligible bachelors in New York society. Old family, no mother or father to dictate to him, a tremendous fortune. Of course, he's cynical and blase, and rather more experienced than I'd like, but-just be nice to him, darling. Maybe-"

That shamefaced "maybe" of Enid's had kept thrusting itself upon Sally's rebellious attention ever since. Enid, more frightened of Van's power over her than she would admit, even to Sally, threw the two together on every possible occasion. After Grant Proctor had retreated from the field, smarting under his refusal by Sally, Enid had almost feverishly concentrated on Van Horne. Sally had stubbornly insisted to her mother that she would not marry any man whom she could not tell the truth about her illegitimacy, and Enid had just as stubbornly refused to consider the possibility of Sally's telling.

"If Van really knows," she had told Sally in desperation, "that is one too many. You could not possibly harm any man by marrying him without telling. You're _our_ daughter now-the legally adopted daughter of Mr.

and Mrs. Courtney Barr. That is all that matters."

"What matters to me," Sally had insisted wearily, "is that no man that you would like for me to marry would have me if he knew. I can't cheat.

Of course I don't have to marry."

"Of course not," Enid had agreed with a.s.sumed gayety. "But since Van does know-Of course, since he already knows, if you married him it would be as much to his interest to forget it and protect me-us-as it is ours.

But I want you to be happy, darling."

Sally, her little round chin supported on her laced fingers, her eyes brooding upon the dancer whom she did not see, reflected with an unchildlike bitterness that there was no question now of her being happy. Happiness lay behind her; she had almost grasped it, had been "half-married" to a man she loved. David! His name flashed through her heart like the thrust of a red-hot lancet.

"Dance, Sally? Or do you prefer to go on dreaming?" Van Horne's low, teasing voice interrupted her bitter reverie.

She made a sudden resolution, rose with sprightly vivacity from her chair, flung a sparkling glance to her mother whose beautiful face was a little pinched with the strain under which she had lived these last few weeks. "Dance, of course. Van!" she cried, wrinkling her nose at him with a provocative moue. "I was dreaming about you! Aren't you flattered?"

She saw her mother's pinched face flush and bloom with hope, caught an austere but approving smile from Courtney Barr, with whom she had not yet reached the intimacy that should exist between a father and a daughter, even an adopted daughter. If she could make them so happy by marrying Arthur Van Horne, why let her own feelings prevent? If she couldn't have David, what difference did it make whom she married? And if she married Van Horne the only menace to her mother's reputation would be removed.

"You adorable little thing!" Van Horne whispered, as he swept her out upon the crowded dance floor. "So you were dreaming about me? Pleasant dreams, little Princess Lalla?" His ardent, dark face was bending close, his black eyes free of mockery but lit by a fire that repelled her.

"Did you really fall in love with 'Princess Lalla'?" Sally forced herself to ask coquettishly, fluttering her long lashes in the demure fas.h.i.+on which had proved so effective during her short career as a debutante.

"Absurd question!" Van Horne jeered softly. "Didn't I convince you at the time? Listen, Sally, I almost never see you alone. Enid seems to have an antiquated leaning toward chaperonage."

"Chaperons are 'coming in' again," Sally laughed at him, hiding her distaste. "Mother adores being a leader of fas.h.i.+on, you know."

"You're so adorable tonight that I want to run away with you," Van told her boldly. "But I'll try to be content if you'll promise me to come to my apartment alone for tea tomorrow. Do, Sally! I've something to tell you. Can you guess?"

She stiffened, every nerve on the defensive against him. But she remembered her resolution, and nodded slowly, her head tucked on one side, her eyes granting him a swift, shy upward glance.

"If you look at me like that again, I'll kiss you right here on the dance floor!" Van threatened exultantly, as his arms tightened about her.

Enid's pathetic grat.i.tude to her for being "nice" to Van Horne strengthened the girl's resolution to carry it through. She dressed with especial care for her tea date with Van the next afternoon, pinning the corsage of Parma violets which he had sent her on the full shawl collar of her Russian squirrel coat.

But before she left her room she took the ring David had given her from the box in which she had hidden it because the sight of it hurt her so intolerably, and kissed the shallow, flawed little sapphire with pa.s.sionate grief.

"Goodby, David," she whispered to the ring, but inconsistently she thrust it into her dark-blue and gray leather handbag. No matter what sort of ring Van gave her, it could never be so precious to her as this cheap little ring that David had given her to mark their betrothal.

She had visited Van Horne's apartment once before with Enid, but as she gave the floor number to the elevator operator-it was one of the most exclusive and expensive of the new Park Avenue apartment houses-she thought she saw a gleam of amus.e.m.e.nt in the man's eyes.

Almost as soon as her finger had pressed the bell the door was opened by Van himself, Van in a black and maroon silk dressing gown over impeccable trousers and s.h.i.+rt. She was drawing back instinctively when he laughed his low, mocking laugh and, seizing her hands, pulled her resisting body into the room.

"I think one reason I am so mad about you, Sally my darling, is that you are always fluttering out of my reach like a frightened bird. You are superb in a Lillian Gish role, but even Lillian Gish is captured and tamed before the end of the film. Like this!" And he laughed exultingly as his arms encircled her quivering, fluttering little body, held it crus.h.i.+ngly against his breast.

Only her head was free to weave from side to side as his flushed, laughing face came closer and closer. "The best kissing technique advocates the closing of the eyes, darling," he gibed with tender mockery. "And there is a point at which maidenly coyness ceases to be charming. Now!"

She submitted to his kiss then, but her lips were lax, unresponsive.

When he released her, an angry glint in his eyes, she backed away, touching her lips involuntarily with her handkerchief. "Please don't-kiss me again-like that, Van," she quavered. "Not yet. I'll marry you, but you'll have to give me time to get used to-you."

The blank amazement in his eyes made her voice falter lamely. Then he laughed, a short bark that was utterly unlike the tenderly mocking laughter which she had always inspired in him.

"You'll _marry_ me?" His voice was staccato with contempt. "By heaven, your naivete is magnificent! You should be enshrined in a museum! Thanks for your kind offer, Miss Barr, but I must confess, if your innocence will stand the strain, that my intentions in regard to you did not include marriage. They were strictly dishonorable. When a Van Horne allows himself to be led to the altar, the successful huntress is a woman who is at least socially worthy to be the mother of future Van Hornes. There is as yet no bar sinister on our coat of arms....