Black Oxen Part 4

"What has some brute of a man done to her?" thought Clavering with furious indignation, and feeling more romantic than ever. Could it have been her husband? For a moment he regretted that Count Josef Zattiany had gone beyond human vengeance.

"You are too young to hate men," he stammered. And then he went on with complete ba.n.a.lity, "You have never met the right man."

"I am older than you perhaps think," she said drily. "And I have known a great many men--and of a variety! But," she added graciously, "I shall be glad if you will come and see me sometimes. I enjoy your column, and I am sure we shall find a great deal to talk about."

Clavering glowed with a pride that almost convinced him he was not as blase as he had hoped. He rose, however.

"I'll come as often as you will let me. Make no mistake about that.

But I should not have stayed so long. It is very late, and you are--well, rather unprotected, you know. I think you should have a chaperon."

"I certainly shall not. And if I find you interesting enough to talk with until two in the morning, I shall do so. Dine with me tomorrow night if you have nothing better to do. And----" She hesitated a moment, then added with a curious smile, "Bring Mr. Dinwiddie. It is always charitable to lay a ghost. At half after eight?"

She walked with him to the front door, and when he held out his hand she lifted hers absently. He was a quick-witted young man and he understood. He raised it lightly to his lips, then let himself out.

As he was walking rapidly toward Park Avenue, wondering if he should tramp for hours--he had never felt less like sleeping--he remembered the broken window. The "crime wave" was terrorizing New York. There was no policeman in sight. To leave her unprotected was unthinkable.

He walked back slowly until he reached the lamp-post opposite her house; finally, grinning, he folded his arms and leaned against it.

There he stood until a policeman came strolling along, some two hours later. He stated the case and told the officer that if anything happened to the house he would hold him responsible. The man was inclined to be intensely suspicious until Clavering mentioned his newspaper and followed the threat with a bill. Then he promised to watch the house like a hawk, and Clavering, tired, stiff, and very cold, went home to bed.

VIII

"Tommy rot. Don't believe a word of it. Mary's mother was one of the Thornhills. Don't believe there ever was a Virginia branch. But I'll soon find out. Also about this Josef Zattiany. That girl is Mary Ogden's daughter."

They were seated in a corner of Mr. Dinwiddie's favorite club, where they had met by appointment. Clavering shrugged his shoulders. He had no intention of communicating his own doubts.

"But you'll dine there tonight?"

"Won't I? And I'll keep my ears open."

Clavering privately thought that the Countess Josef Zattiany would be more than a match for him, but replied: "After all, what does it matter? She is a beautiful and charming woman and no doubt you'll have a very good dinner."

"That's all very well as far as it goes, but I've never been so interested in my life. Of course if she's Mary's daughter I'll do anything to befriend her--that is if she'll be honest enough to admit it. But I don't like all this lying and pretence----"

"I think your terms are too strong. There have been extraordinary resemblances before in the history of the world, 'doubles,' for instance, where there was no known relations.h.i.+p. Rather remarkable there are enough faces to go round. And she confesses to be of the same family. At all events you must admit that she has not made use of her alibi to force her way into society."

"Probably knows her alibi won't stand the strain. The women would soon ferret out the truth... . What I'm afraid of is that she's got this power of attorney out of Mary when the poor girl was too weak to resist, and is over here to corral the entire fortune."

"But surely Judge Trent----"

"Oh, Trent! He's a fool where women are concerned. Always was, and now he's got to the stage where he can't sit beside a girl without pawing her. They won't have him in the house. Of course this lovely creature's got him under her thumb. (I'll see him today and give him a piece of my mind for the lies he's told me.) And if this girl has inherited her mother's brains, she's equal to anything."

"I thought that your Mary was composite perfection."

"Never said anything of the sort. Didn't I tell you she always kept us guessing? I sometimes used to think that if it hadn't been for her breeding and the standards that involves, and her wealth and position, she'd have made a first-cla.s.s adventuress."

"Was she a good liar?"

"She was insolently truthful, but I'm certain she wouldn't have hesitated at a whopping lie if it would have served her purpose. She was certainly _rusee_."

"Well, the dinner should be highly interesting with all these undercurrents. I'll call for you at a quarter past eight. I must run now and do my column."

Clavering, often satirical and ironic, was positively brutal that afternoon. The latest play, book, moving picture, the inefficiency of the New York police, his afflicting correspondents, were hacked to the bone. When he had finished, his jangling nerves were unaccountably soothed. Other nerves would shriek next morning. Let 'em. He'd been honest enough, and if he chose to use a battle-axe instead of Toledo steel that was his privilege.

He called down for a messenger boy and strolled to the window to soothe his nerves still further. Dusk had fallen. Every window of the high stone buildings surrounding Madison Square was an oblong of light. It was a symphony of gray and gold, of which he never tired. It invested business with romance and beauty. The men behind those radiant panels, thinking of nothing less, made their brief contribution to the beauty of the world, transported the rapt spectator to a realm of pure loveliness.

A light fall of snow lay on the gra.s.s and benches, the statues and trees of the Square. Motors were flas.h.i.+ng and honking below and over on Fifth Avenue. The roar of the great city came up to him like a flood over a broken dam. Black ma.s.ses were pouring toward the subways.

Life! New York was the epitome of life. He enjoyed forcing his way through those moving ma.s.ses, but it interested him even more to feel above, aloof, as he did this evening. Those tides swept on as unconscious of the watchers so high above them as of the soaring beauty of the Metropolitan Tower. Ground hogs, most of them, but part of the ever changing, ever fascinating, metropolitan pageant.

The arcade of Madison Square Garden was already packed with men and he knew that a triple line reached down Twenty-sixth Street to Fourth Avenue. There was to be a prize fight tonight and the men had stood there since noon, buying apples and peanuts from peddlers. This was Tuesday and there was no half-holiday. These men appeared to have unbounded leisure while the rest of the city toiled or demanded work.

But they were always warmly dressed and indubitably well-fed. They belonged to what is vaguely known as the sporting fraternity, and were invariably in funds, although they must have existed with the minimum of work. The army of unemployed was hardly larger and certainly no bread line was ever half as long. Mounted police rode up and down to avert any antic.i.p.ation of the night's battle. A loud barking murmur rose and mingled with the roar of the avenues.

The great clock of the Metropolitan Tower began to play those sad and sweetly ominous notes preliminary to booming out the hour. They always reminded him of the warning bell on a wild and rocky coast, with something of the Lorelei in its cadences: like a heartless woman's subtle allure, poignantly difficult to resist.

There was a knock on the door. Clavering gave his daily stint to the messenger boy. He was hunting for change, when he recaptured his column, sat down at his desk, and, running it over hastily, inserted the word "authentic." New York must have its Word, even as its topic.

"Authentic," loosed upon the world by Arnold Bennett, was the rage at present. The little writers hardly dared use it. It was, as it were, the trademark of the Sophisticates.

The boy, superior, indifferent, and chewing gum, accepted his tip and departed. Clavering returned to the window. Gone was the symphony of gold and gray. The buildings surrounding the Square were a dark and formless ma.s.s in the heavy dusk. Only the street lights below shone like globular phosph.o.r.escence on a dark and turbulent sea.

Two hours later he left his hotel and walked up Madison Avenue.

Twenty-sixth Street was deserted and as littered with papers, peanut sh.e.l.ls, and various other debris as a picnic train. The mounted police had disappeared. From the great building came the first roar of the thousands a.s.sembled, whether in approval or the reverse it would be difficult to determine. They roared upon the slightest pretext and they would roar steadily until half-past ten or eleven, when they would burst out of every exit, rending the night with their yells, while a congested ma.s.s of motors and taxi-cabs shrieked and honked and squealed and coughed; and then abruptly the silence of death would fall upon what is now a business quarter where only an occasional hotel or little old brownstone house--sole reminder of a vanished past when Madison Square was the centre of fas.h.i.+on--lingered between the towering ma.s.ses of concrete and steel.

IX

When Clavering and Dinwiddie arrived at the Ogden house Judge Trent was already there and mixing c.o.c.ktails in the library. He was a large man who must have had a superb figure before it grew heavy. He wore the moustache of his generation and in common with what was left of his hair it glistened like crystal. His black eyes were still very bright and his full loose mouth wore the slight smirk peculiar to old men whose s.e.x vanity perishes only in the grave. Beside him stood a man some ten years younger who was in the graying period, which gave him a somewhat dried and dusty look; but whose figure was still slender and whose hard outlines of face were as yet unblurred by flesh. They were, of course, faultlessly groomed, but if met in the wilds of Africa, clad in rags and bearded like the jungle, to the initiate they still would have been New Yorkers.

"Come in! Come in!" cried the Judge heartily. "Madame Zattiany will be down in a minute--she prefers to be called Madame Zattiany, by the way.

Thinks t.i.tles in America are absurd unless wearers were born to them--more particularly since continental t.i.tles today are worth about as much as rubles and marks... . Mr. Clavering, you know Mr. Osborne?

Madame Zattiany kindly permitted me to bring him as she was having a little party. Families old friends."

Clavering placed two fingers in the limp hand extended and met the cold appraising eye calmly. The New York a.s.sumption that all other Americans are rank outsiders, that, in short, not to have been born in New York is a social and irremediable crime, had often annoyed him but never caused him to feel the slightest sense of inferiority. He had his own ancestors, as important in their day as any bewigged old Dutchmen--all of whom, he reminded himself, had been but honest burghers in Holland. But he admired their consistency. The rest of the country had been commenting bitterly on the New York att.i.tude since the eighteenth century. And when you got under their protective armor they were an honorable and a loyal lot. Meanwhile it paid to be as rude as themselves.

"I am delighted that Madame Zattiany has decided to come out of her sh.e.l.l at last," said Judge Trent, shaking vigorously. "I've been urging it for some time. But she has had a long and harrowing experience, and seemed to want only to rest. I think the stir she made at your first-nights, Clavering, had something to do with it. There was a time, you know, when she never appeared without making a sensation--like poor Mary before her--but young as she is all that seems almost too remote to recall. Of course if she had been able to live in London or Paris after the war it would have been different, but she was stuck in Buda Pesth and Vienna--ah!"

Madame Zattiany had entered the room. She wore pale green chiffon with floating sleeves that left her arms bare. In the subdued light she looked like a girl playing at Undine.

Clavering heard Dinwiddie give a sharp hiss. "Gad! More like Mary than ever. Nile-green was her favorite color."

She greeted the Judge and Clavering with her slight flickering smile and then turned to the other two men.

"This must be Mr. Osborne, as Judge Trent pointed out Mr. Dinwiddie to me one day on Fifth Avenue. It was kind of you both to come in this informal manner. I appreciate it very much."

Her manner was a little like that of a princess giving audience, Clavering reflected, a manner enhanced by her slight accent and profound repose, the negligent lifting of her hand to be kissed; and as she stood graciously accepting their expressions of unhoped for felicity she looked less American, more European, than ever. But Clavering wondered for the first time if that perfect repose were merely the expression of a profound indifference, almost apathy ... but no, she was too young for that, however the war may have seared her; and she was smiling spontaneously, there was a genuine note of pleasure in her voice as she turned to him.

"It was more than kind of you to watch my house until the policeman came," she said on a lower key. "I was really alarmed when I remembered that broken window and all those dreadful stories in the newspapers. But you kept watch beneath my windows like a _preux chevalier_ and I felt safe."