Many Kingdoms Part 6

He flushed again and looked at her, this time with a veiled suspicion in his glance. She met it with such calm appreciation that it changed to one of surprised doubt. She knew perfectly what was pa.s.sing in his mind, and it caused her no more concern than the puzzled silence of a child who has heard a new word. She went on as complacently as if he were the little boy who had walked beside her a few moments before.

"In Paris and London," she remarked, "one can engage a guide, a gentleman, for a day at a fixed price. Probably there are such guides here in New York, if I knew where they were to be found and had the time to look for them. You are much younger than I am. You might almost be my son! Moreover, you will not mind my saying that I fancied you were unemployed and possibly were looking for employment. You can hardly help seeing the definite connection in all this."

His eyes met hers for a moment and then dropped. He blushed boyishly.

"I see you're trying to help me," he murmured, apologetically.

She went on as if she had not heard him.

"Let me employ you for the day. I need amus.e.m.e.nt, interest, occupation--more than you can imagine. I am in the same mood, as far as desolation and discouragement go, that you are in. I must be about, seeing people and diverting my mind. We can each supply the other with one thing that we need. I have money. To earn a little of that professionally, by a humane service, should really appeal to you."

Something in her voice as she uttered the last words made him turn toward her again. As he looked, his young face softened. She waited in silence for what he would say.

He sat up and straightened his shoulders with a quick gesture.

"You are right," he said, "but I'm awfully afraid you'll get the worst of it. I'm not an ornamental escort for a lady, as you see." He looked at his broken shoe, and then at her. Her expression showed entire indifference to the point he had raised.

"We will consider it settled," she said. "You will take my purse and pay our joint expenses. I think," she went on, as she handed it to him, "we'll omit the Metropolitan. After miles of the Louvre and the Luxembourg and the Vatican, I don't seem to crave miles of that.

Suppose we take a cab and drive round. I want to see the streets, and the crowds, and the different types of men and women, and the slums. I used to be interested in Settlement work, long ago."

"Pardon me," he said. "You have won your case. I will serve you to the best of my ability. But as a preliminary I insist on counting the money in this purse, and on your seeing that my accounts are all right."

"Do as you like about that," she replied, indifferently, but her glance rested on him with a glint of approval.

He deliberately counted the bills. "There are three hundred and forty dollars," he said, replacing them.

She nodded absently. She had sunk into a momentary reverie, from which he did not arouse her until she suddenly looked at her watch. "Why, it's after twelve!" she exclaimed, with more animation than she had yet shown. "We'll go to Delmonico's or Sherry's for luncheon, and make our programme while we're there."

He started, and leaned forward, fixing his eyes on her, but she did not meet them. She replaced her watch in her belt with a successful a.s.sumption of abstraction, but she was full of doubt as to how he would take this first proposition. The next instant the bench trembled under the force with which he had dropped back on it.

"G.o.d!" he cried, hoa.r.s.ely, "it's all a put-up job to feed me because you suspect I'm hungry! No, you don't even suspect--you _know_ I'm hungry!"

She put her hand on his arm, and the gesture silenced him.

"Be quiet," she said. "Suppose you are hungry? What of it? Is it a disgrace to be hungry? Men and women deliberately cultivate the condition! Come," she ended, as she rose abruptly, "keep to your bargain. We both need our luncheon."

He replaced the purse in the inside-pocket of his coat, and rose. They walked a few moments without a word. She noticed how well he carried himself and how muscular and athletic his figure appeared even in its shabby clothes. As they strolled toward the nearest exit she talked of the Park, and asked him a few matter-of-fact questions, to which he replied with growing animation. "I can't give you figures and statistics, I'm afraid," he added, smiling.

She shook her head. "It would be sad if you could," she said. "Give me anything but information. As for statistics, I've a const.i.tutional distaste for them. Where can we find a cab?"

"We won't find a cab," he explained, with an authoritative independence which somehow appealed to her. "We'll take this trolley-car and ride to within a short walk of Delmonico's. After luncheon we'll find cabs at every turn."

He helped her into a car as he spoke, and paid their fare from her purse, flus.h.i.+ng as he had to change a five-dollar note to do so. The simple act emphasized for him, as no words could have done, his peculiar relation to this strange woman, whom he had never seen until half an hour ago. Balancing the purse in his hand, he glanced at her, taking in almost unconsciously the tragic droop of her lips, the prematurely gray locks in her dark hair, and the unchanging gloom of her brown eyes.

"How do you know I won't drop off the car at some corner and abscond with this?" he asked, in a low voice.

She looked at him calmly.

"I think I know you will not. But if you did it would hurt me."

"Would it spoil your day?"

"Yes," she conceded, "it would spoil my day."

"Well," he announced, judiciously, "you shall not have to reproach me with anything of that kind. Your day shall be a success if I can make it so."

His manner was more than gentle. His mood was one of grat.i.tude and pleasant expectation. He was getting to know her and was sorry for her--possibly because she trusted him and was sorry for him. She was not the companion he would have chosen for a day's outing, and it was doubtful if she would be any too cheerful; but he would serve her loyally, wherever this queer adventure led, and he was young enough to appreciate its possibilities. Inwardly she was amused by his little affectation of experience, of ripe age addressing youth, but it was so unconsciously done, so unconquerably youthful, that it added to the interest he had aroused in her. She liked, too, his freshness and boyish beauty, and his habit of a.s.serting his sense of honor above everything. Above all things, she liked his ignorance of her. To him, she was merely a woman like other women; there was a satisfaction to her in that thought as deep as it was indescribable. The only other occupants of the car were a messenger-boy, lost to his surroundings in a paper-covered novel, and a commercial traveller whose brow was corrugated by mental strain over a notebook.

"There are some things I would like to do in New York," she confided.

"We will do them now--lunch at Delmonico's, go sight-seeing all the afternoon, dine at Sherry's, and go to the theatre this evening. Which is the best play in town?"

"Well--er--that, you know, depends on what you like," hazarded the boy, sagely. "Do you prefer comedy, tragedy, or melodrama?"

She reflected.

"Something light," she decided; "something airy and effervescent--with no problems or even thoughts in it."

His eyes twinkled as he smiled at her. If these were her tastes, she was getting on, he reflected, and the vista of the long day before him offered attractions.

"'Peter Pan'!" he exclaimed. "That's all those things. I've not seen it, but I've read the criticisms, and I know a fellow who has gone five times."

"Testimony enough," agreed his companion. "We'll go to 'Peter Pan.' Now tell me something about yourself."

"Is that in the bond?"

"No. That would be a gift."

"I'd--I'd rather not, if you don't mind."

He indulged in his inevitable painful blush as he spoke, but she stared at him without pity and with a sudden hauteur which gave him a glimpse of another side of her complex nature. This woman who picked up strange youths in the street and spent the day with them was obviously accustomed to unquestioning deference from others. He edged away from her, firm but unhappy.

"You're right," she said, at last. "We'll add a clause to our compact and play we're disembodied spirits. Neither of us will ask the other a personal question."

"Agreed, and thank you. It's not that I wouldn't be flattered, you know, by your interest, and all that," he went on, awkwardly. "It's only because it's such a beastly harrowing recital and shows me up in such--such an inefficient light. It would depress you, and it couldn't do me any good. The things about myself are what I want to get away from--for a while."

They were soon at Delmonico's, and she followed him into the main dining-room, where she selected a table at a window looking out on the Avenue. The head waiter glanced at him, hesitated, surveyed her, and showed that he was indeed a good servant who knew his own. He hovered over them with deepening interest as they scanned the menu.

The boy smiled at his companion, trying not to notice the smell of the food around them, nor the horrible sinking sensation which overwhelmed him at intervals. A sickening fear swept over him that he would faint before luncheon came--faint on a lady's hands, and from starvation at that! He plunged into conversation with reckless vivacity.

When the waiter came with the oysters she set the example of eating them at once. Her companion followed it in leisurely fas.h.i.+on. She told herself that he was a thoroughbred, and that she had not been mistaken in him, but she would almost have preferred to see him eat wolfishly.

His restraint got on her nerves. She could not eat, though she made a pretence of it. When he had eaten his soup with the same careful deliberation, a little color came into his face. She observed this, and her tension relaxed.

"The last time I was here," he said, absently, "was two years ago. One of the fellows at New Haven had a birthday, and we celebrated it in the corner room just above this. It was a pretty lively dinner. We kept it up from seven o'clock until two in the morning, and then we all went out on the Avenue and sat down in the middle of the street, where it was cool, to smoke and talk it over. That was Davidson's idea. It annoyed the cabmen and policemen horribly. They have such ready tempers and such torpid minds."

The recital and the picture it called up amused her.

"What else did you do?" she asked, with interest.

"I'm afraid I don't remember much of it," he confessed. "I know we were pretty silly; but I do remember how foolish the head waiter looked when Davidson insisted on kissing him good-bye in the hall out there, and cried because he didn't know when he'd see him again. Of course you can't see how funny that was, because you don't know Davidson. He was the most dignified chap at college, and hated gush more than any one I ever knew."