The Paliser case Part 16

Ca.s.sy had been about to order a chocolate eclair. The new note stayed her. But though new, it was not novel. She had heard it before. It rang true. Absently she shoved at her plate.

In theory she knew her way about. The migratory systems of domestic experience said nothing to her, nor, thus far, had the charts of matrimony either. In the sphere of life to which a walk-up leads, the charts were dotted with but the postman and the corner druggist. Men and plenty of them she had met, but they too said nothing and not at all because they were dumb, but because, as the phrase is, they did not talk her language. But for every exception there is perhaps a rule. The one man who did speak her language, had held his tongue.

Now, as she shoved at her plate, she saw him, saw the tea-caddy, saw his rooms and saw too, as she left them, the girl to whom he was engaged. In the memory of that she lingered and looked down.

"Why, he could lead an orchestra of his own, your papa could."

Ca.s.sy looked up. She had been far away, too far, in a land where dreams do not come true. Impatiently she twisted. "What?"

"Didn't you hear me, dearie? I was talking about money--bushels of it."

About the bushels the woman rolled her tongue. They tasted better than the fritters.

A waiter approached. The room was long, dark, narrow, slovenly, s.p.a.ced with tables on which were maculate cloths and lamps with faded shades.

Greasily the waiter produced the bill.

"Bushels!" she appetisingly repeated.

Ca.s.sy paid. The waiter slouched away.

"You will drive through life in a hundred horsepower car and be fined for speeding. The papers will say: 'Mrs. Pal----'"

"What did he pay you to tell me that?" Ca.s.sy exploded at her.

Unruffled by the shot, which was part and parcel of the job, and realising that any denial would only confirm what at most could be but a suspicion, the former diva fingered her pearls and a.s.sumed an air of innocence.

But already Ca.s.sy had covered her with her blotting-paper look. "As if I cared!"

"Dearie, he did pay me. He paid me the compliment of supposing that I take an interest in you. But he said nothing except what I said he said.

He said if he got down on his knees you would turn your back on him."

"Then he is cleverer than he looks."

"Well, anyway, he is clever enough to have bushels of money and that is the greatest cleverness there is."

"In New York," retorted Ca.s.sy, who had never been anywhere else, physically at least, though mentally her little feet had trod the streets of Milan, the boards of the Scala.

"It can't be much different in Patagonia," replied this lady, who, to save her life, could not have told whether the land was Asiatic or African, nor who, to save her soul--if the latter were still salvable--could not have told that it was neither. "Besides," she added, "I was only thinking of your poor, dear papa."

Ca.s.sy said nothing. She stood up. She was making for the door and the charm of the scented streets.

Ma Tamby sighed, rose and followed. It was the devil's own job.

Housebreaking must be easier!

XIV

Ca.s.sy's department-store investments reached her the next day. Her father, who opened the door to them, fell back before the sum total of the C. O. D. With an arm in a sling, he could not hold the packages, much less pay for them, and he gasped as he called for aid.

The money that Ca.s.sy then produced seemed to him darkly mysterious and although he believed as firmly in her virtue, as, before the break, he had believed in the maestria of his own right hand, none the less, in addition to aid, he exacted light.

Ca.s.sy, dumping the packages on her bed, occupied herself in verifying the change which amounted to one cent. Then she sketched it.

His surprise fell away. The mythical catamount, the imaginary concert, the ponderable subsidy--two hundred and fifty, less ten per cent.--seemed to him natural and an unnatural world.

"And there's about ten dollars remaining," Ca.s.sy resumed. "Ten dollars and a penny. You can have the penny and I will keep the ten, or I'll keep the ten and you can have the penny."

That also seemed natural. But the addition or subtraction disclosed a deficit and he exclaimed at it. "You said two hundred and fifty!"

Ca.s.sy too saw the hole, but she could not lie out of it. "Well, I owed the difference."

In speaking she turned. Before her was a mirror in which she glanced at her hair that had been superiorly tralala'd. She turned again, reflecting that Lennox must have already received the postal-order, which she had mailed the night before, and wondering whether he had liked her little scrawl of indignant thanks.

"I'll tell you about it later," she added. "Now I must get your dinner.

How would you like a tenderloin, a salad, and a box of Camembert?"

He shuffled. "There is no Camembert any more." The tragedy of that seemed to overwhelm him. "I wish I were dead."

Ca.s.sy laughed. "Now it's the cheese. On Sat.u.r.day it was the violin.

Well, you got it back. What will you say if I find some Camembert? Do stop meowing. Any one might think you didn't have me."

At her young laughter, he groaned. "Formerly if I let a day go without practising, I noticed it. If I let two days go, Toscanini noticed it.

Now it's weeks and weeks. It's killing me."

To cheer him, Ca.s.sy said gaily: "The artist never dies."

But it did not cheer him. Besides, though Ca.s.sy had laughed, there had been a tugging at her heartstrings. Shabby, unkempt, in a frayed dressing-gown, his arm in a dismal sling, he looked so out of it, so forlorn, so old.

He had shuffled away. She bit her lip. Later, when he had had his tenderloin and she had department-stored herself, a pint of grocer's burgundy had reduced him to tears.

The day before it had seemed to her that the frock would do. But her judgment had been hurried. Shops, crowds, the vibrations of both, devitalised and confused her. In choosing the frock she had not therefore given it the consideration which it perhaps did not merit, and now her mirror shrieked it. The frock was not suited to her. Nothing was suited to her, except the produce of baronial halls, where the simplest thing exceeded the dreams of avarice, or else the harlequinades which she herself devised. None the less she would have liked to have had her father exclaim and tell her how smart she looked. He omitted it.

"Where are you going?"

"I told you. Dinner and the opera."

"Opera! There is no opera to-night. What do you mean? What did you tell me?"

On the table were dishes and the lamentable bottle. Ca.s.sy, in doubt whether to clear them then or later, hesitated. The hesitation he misconstrued.

"You told me nothing. You tell me nothing. I am kept in the dark."

Ca.s.sy, adjusting the wrap which she had left open that he might admire the unadmirable, moved to where he sat and touched him. "You're the silliest kind of a silly. I told you yesterday. Perhaps the opera was last night. But how could I go? Except that old black rag I had nothing to wear. If there is no opera to-night, there will be a concert or something. Don't you remember now? I was at the telephone."

He did remember, but apparently the recollection displeased. He growled.