The Best Short Stories of 1919 Part 23

The boy hung fire under the determined voice.

"The--the women who go to Maurice's are--are--of a--certain _kind_, aren't they?"

"Some of them--most of them," said Mr. Montagu. "If you've never been there, why do you want so to go? They're not unusual; simply--painted women."

"Painted?" repeated the boy in astonishment. He turned to the portrait.

"_That's_ a painted woman, too. Aren't they _alive_ at Maurice's?"

In his marvel at the enormous innocence of it, Mr. Montagu wondered, for the first time, what the young man's age could definitely be, but in a moment he remembered the one pitiful way to account for the pathetic question, and his voice was very gentle as he said:

"My boy, if you have your heart set on going to Maurice's, you shall go.

But surely, after this mysterious time together in my house, and knowing that whatever you may be I welcome your companions.h.i.+p, you won't refuse my request to let me go with you? To say that I've enjoyed it would be to put a queer word to a terrible business that I have no way of understanding. But until you came I was bitterly, hungrily lonely--"

"Don't! Don't!" cried the boy. He had begun to tremble at the earnest tenderness of the voice. "I can't bear it! You don't know what you're talking about! Oh! let me go to Maurice's, and let me go alone! If you insist on going with me I can't stop you--"

"I do insist," said Mr. Montagu.

"But I can plead with you not to! And I can warn you what the price will be! Oh--" and he stretched out his hands in so imploring a gesture that his host could see the dull, dried blood of his cruelly injured wrists--"for G.o.d's sake, for _G.o.d's_ sake, believe what I tell you! _If you leave this house with me to-night, you're lost!_ Oh, G.o.d, G.o.d, I see you don't believe me! Tell me this, I beg of you, I demand of you--did you _feel_ that I was in the hall to-night, before you opened the door?"

"Yes," said Mr. Montagu.

"Had I made any noise?"

"No."

"Then I can prove to you that I know what I'm saying! I _did_ that! I _made_ you feel me! Till after you let me in, I wasn't strong enough to make a sound! Yet I made you know I was there! Am I telling the truth, then? When I started to leave you, and now, even now, in warning you I was doing, I _am_ doing, a more unselfish thing, a decenter thing, than any you've ever done in all your years of life! It's because I like you more than I want to! I'm unselfish, I tell you! I _wanted_ you to go to Maurice's with me! I intended to make you, as I made you let me in! But if you do, you'll find me out! I'll tell you! I won't be able to conceal it! You'll know the truth about me! You've said all this was mysterious--for your own sake, let it stay so! You needn't think all truths are beautiful, and the truth about me is the most ghastly in the universe!"

"I _want_ to find you out," said Mr. Montagu, steadying his voice. "I want to know the truth."

"By that cross and crown of thorns that mean so much to you and nothing at all to me," implored the boy, "_don't go!_ I swear to you, _mine is a more terrible secret than any living heart has ever held!_ You'll hate me, and I don't want you to! Oh, _while_ I don't, while I'm _merciful_ to you, believe me, and let me go alone! No loneliness that _you_ could ever suffer would equal the price that you will pay if you go with me!"

Though the sense of horror sweeping indomitably through him was worse than any he had felt before, Mr. Montagu's answer was deliberate and resolute:

"I told myself only a few minutes ago that I would sacrifice anything in my life, almost my life itself, to--well, to this. Do you mean that the price would be--my--death?"

He threw every possible significance demandingly into the word, and the boy's voice was suddenly quiet in its tensity as he gazed back at him.

"It would be worse than death," he said solemnly. "If you let me go, and face your loneliness here, there's a chance for you, though I've warned you as it is. If you leave the house with me to-night, you're as lost as I am, and I am irretrievably d.a.m.ned and always have been d.a.m.ned. As truly as you see me standing before you now, the price is--madness."

"Come," said Mr. Montagu, and without another word he opened the door.

At Maurice's, Mr. Montagu led the way to the far side of the big room, threading in a zigzag through the gleam of bright silver, the glitter of white linen, the crimson of deep carnations. Maurice's in its own way was admirably tasteful; as distinctively quiet and smooth in its manners and rich hangings as it was distinctly loud in its lights and ragged in its music. No after-theatre corner of Broadway had a crisper American accent of vice, or displayed vice itself more delicately lacquered. The place was as openly innocent as a street, with a street's sightless and irresponsible gaze for what occurred in it. And nothing remarkable occurred, save the fungus growth of what was to occur elsewhere.

Mr. Montagu, on the way to the table, looked several times over his shoulder, ostensibly to speak to his companion, but in reality to see whether the extraordinary boy was running the gantlet of eyes he had presupposed he would. And each time he met inquisitive faces that were not only staring but listening.

His own conspicuousness was grilling, but it was part and parcel of his insistent bargain; he could understand, quite sympathetically, how the youth's appearance, as awful as it was immaculate, should pound open the heart of any woman alive; and his suppressed excitement was too powerful for him to resent even the obvious repugnance in the faces of the men until he imagined an intentional discourtesy to the boy on the part of the waiter.

To himself, the man was over-servile, and elaborately cautious in pulling out his chair, but he stood, with his face quite white, and his back to the boy, and pulled out none for him. Henry Montagu had never yet bullied a waiter, and he did not bully now. But with an icy glare of reproof at the man, he rose and set the chair for his guest himself.

"Shall I order for you?" he asked gently as the boy sat quietly down; and made irritably incisive by the tendency of near-by men and women to listen as well as watch, he emphasized his expensive order of foods and wines, repeated each item loudly to cheapen the listeners, and sent the man scuttling.

In his intense desire to see the effect of the queerly chosen place on his queerly chosen companion, he now turned to him. And as he saw the effect, every shock of the night seemed to recoil upon him. The feeling of mystery; the foreboding, despite his courage and his conviction that the boy was mad, of the imminent unknown; his recurrent and absorbing curiosity to learn the gruesome secret that he had declared; all rushed one by one back upon him, and then as swiftly left him to the simple grip of horror at his face. It was gazing at woman after woman, here, there and yonder, throughout the large room, deliberately, searchingly, venomously, its great eyes and set lips and every tense haggard line fuller and fuller of an undying hate that eclipsed even that which had shaken Henry Montagu before they came. Appalled and fascinated, he looked with him, and back at him, and with him again, to the next and the next. There were women there, and ladies of every sort, good, bad and indecipherable; yet in every instance the childlike, horribly sophisticated eyes had picked their victim unerringly, deterred by neither clothes, veneer, nor manner.

As he stared with him from frightened female face to frightened female face, Mr. Montagu realized shamefully that his own features were helplessly mirroring the detestation of the boy's, and he changed from very pale to very red himself as woman after woman flushed crimson under his gaze. Yet the boy's face grew calm and his voice was perfectly so as he turned at last from his horrid review and met the eyes of his host.

"I see what you meant, now, by 'painted' women. Well, they'd much _better_ be dead!"

At the tone, cruelly cool as if he planned to see that they were, Mr.

Montagu s.h.i.+vered. "Why, _why_ do you hate them like that?" he whispered.

The fierce anger flickered dangerously in the great eyes again.

"Because they're my enemy! Because they and the wicked thing they mean are my prowling, triumphant enemy, and the enemy of all others like me!"

"Oh, my boy, my boy!" pleaded the man of the world, sickly. "You don't realize it, but I can tell you from appearances--some of those women you stared at are here with their _husbands_!"

"So was _your_ wife when she came here," said the boy.

Mr. Montagu fell back in his chair with a gasp. As swiftly as it had leapt into his mind, the frightful implication of the words leapt out again in his amazement at the boy's knowledge of the incident.

But the waiter stepped between them with the order, and in obvious terror now instead of simple aversion, clattered it down with trembling hands.

"Go away! Go away!" commanded Mr. Montagu angrily. "_I'll_ arrange it!

Go!" And the waiter escaped.

"How did you know?" he asked; but without waiting for a reply he poured out the boy's wine and his own, and took a long hasty draft.

"Now, how did you?"

"Oh!" cried the boy piteously. "Don't ask me! I shouldn't have said it!

I knew I'd let it out if you came here with me! I'll be telling you everything in a minute, and you'll go stark mad when you know!"

The inference rushed again upon Henry Montagu, a worse vague horror than any yet, and he almost sprang from his chair.

"Are you going to tell me my wife was unfaithful to me, and with--with--"

"Fool! Fool!" cried the boy. "I wish to G.o.d she _had_ been unfaithful to you! I tried to make her, I can tell you that! Then there'd have been at least half a chance for _me_! But now that she's dead, there's no chance for either of us, even you! Unless--O G.o.d!--unless you'll control yourself and think! I beg you again, I beg of you, _think_ again! Go away from here, go now, without asking me anything more, and there's just a shade of a chance for you! I told you there was none if you left the house, but there may be, there may be! Go home, and forget this, and be satisfied your wife loved you, for she did. She kept herself for you _at my expense_! Go now, and they'll let you go. But if you stay here and talk to me, you'll leave this place in manacles! I'm here, _among those women_, and I'm with you! My secret will come out and drag you down, as I planned it should before I began to like you! And you like me, too--I feel it. For _my_ sake, then, for G.o.d's sake and for your sake, _won't you go_?"

"No!" cried Mr. Montagu, almost roughly in his eagerness. "I don't judge you, but it's your duty, and in your power, to put me where I can! I harbored you, thinking you were a frightened fugitive, and you weren't.

I'm your voluntary host in circ.u.mstances of mysterious horror and you ask me to quit you in ignorance! I won't! You sicken me with a doubt about the wife I loved--Who are you? What are you?"

"If you believed I knew as much of her as I said I did," cried the boy, "why don't you believe me when I a.s.sure you that she loved you? What more should _you_ demand? I meant everything I said, and more--your wife was nothing but a licensed wanton, _and you knew it_! You ask me who and what I am--so long as she loved you, who are _you_, and what are _you_, to point a finger at her?"

A rush of instinctive fury filled the man, but he felt as dazed at finding himself angry at the beautiful unhappy youth, as if he had known him for years, and he only gasped and stared.

"If you think I'm crazy," cried the boy, "I'll show you, as I showed you once before, that I know what I'm talking about! I'll tell you something that was a secret between you two, and your wife didn't tell me, either!

The night you'd been here, after you'd gone home, _after you were locked in your room_, you disputed about this place! She refused to come here again, and she refused to tell you why! But I know why!"

Once more Mr. Montagu gasped and with a thrill of wondering terror.