The Dust Flower Part 17

Of what was said between them Letty could hear nothing, but the expression on the lady's face was dissuasive. She was telling Steptoe that he had come to the wrong place, while Steptoe was saying no. From time to time the lady would send a glance toward Letty, not in disdain, but in perplexity. It was perplexity which reached its climax when Steptoe drew from an inside pocket an impressive roll of bills.

The lady looked at the bills, but she also looked at Letty. The honor of a house like Margot's is not merely in making money; it is in its clientele. To have a poor little waif step in from the street....

And yet it was because she was a poor little waif that she interested the ladies looking on. She was so striking an exception to their rule that her very coming in amazed them. One of the two who had remained near the open drawer came forward into conference with her colleague, adding her dissuasions to those which Steptoe had already refused to listen to.

"There are plenty of other places to which you could go," Letty heard this second lady say, "and probably do better."

Steptoe smiled, that old man's smile which was rarely ineffective.

"Madam don't 'ave to tell me as there's plenty of other plyces to which I could go; but there's none where I could do as well."

"What makes you think so?"

"I'm butler to a 'igh gentleman what 'e used to entertyne quite a bit when 'is mother was alive. I've listened to lydies talkin' at tyble.

No one can't tell me. I _know_."

Both madams smiled. Each shot another glance at Letty. It was plain that they were curious as to her ident.i.ty. One of them made a venture.

"And is this your--your daughter?"

Steptoe explained, not without dignity, that the young lady was not his daughter, but that she had come into quite a good bit of money, and had done it sudden like. She needed a 'igh, grand outfit, though for the present she would be content with three or four of the dresses most commonly worn by a lydy of stytion. He preferred to nyme no nymes, but he was sure that even Margot would not regret her confidence--and he had the cash, as they saw, in his pocket.

Of this the result was an exchange between the madams of comprehending looks, while, in French, one said to the other that it might be well to consult Madame Simone.

Madame Simone, who bustled in from the back room, was not in black, but in frowzy gray; her coiffure was not a la Marcel, but as Letty described it, "all anyway." A short, stout, practical Frenchwoman, she had progressed beyond the need to consider looks, and no longer considered them. The two shapely subordinates with whom Steptoe had been negotiating followed her at a distance like attendants.

She disposed of the whole matter quickly, addressing the attendants rather than the postulants for Margot's favor.

"Mademoiselle she want an outfit--good!--bon! We don't know her, but what difference does that make to me?--qu'est ce que c'est que cela me fait? Money is money, isn't it?--de l'argent c'est de l'argent, n'est-ce pas?--at this time of year especially--a cette saison de l'annee surtout."

To Steptoe and Letty she said: "'Ave the goodness to sit yourselves 'ere. Me, I will show you what we 'ave. A street costume first for mademoiselle. If mademoiselle will allow me to look at her--Ah, oui!

Ze taille--what you call in Eenglish the figure--is excellent. Tres chic. With ze proper closes mademoiselle would have style--de l'elegance naturelle--that sees itself--cela se voit--oui--oui----"

Meditating to herself she studied Letty, indifferent apparently to the actual costume and atrocious hat, like a seeress not viewing what is at her feet but events of far away.

With a sudden start she sprang to her convictions. "I 'ave it. J'y suis." A shrill piercing cry like that of a wounded c.o.c.katoo went down the long room. "Alphonsine! Alphon_sine_!"

Someone appeared at the door of the communicating rooms. Madame Simone gave her orders in a few sharp staccato French sentences. After that Letty and Steptoe found themselves sitting on two of the gilded chairs, unexpectedly alone. The other ladies had returned to their tasks. Madame Simone had gone back to the place whence they had summoned her. Nothing had happened. It seemed to be all over. They waited.

"Ain't she goin' to show us nothin'?" Letty whispered anxiously. "They always do."

Steptoe was puzzled but recommended patience. He couldn't think that Madame could have begun so kindly, only to go off and leave them in the lurch. It was not what he had looked for, any more than she; but he had always found patient waiting advantageous.

Perhaps ten minutes had gone by when a new figure wandered toward them. Strutted would perhaps be the better word, since she stepped like a person for whom stepping means a calculation. She was about Letty's height, and about Letty's figure. Moreover, she was pretty, with that haughtiness of mien which turns prettiness to beauty. What was most disconcerting was her coming straight toward Letty, and standing in front of her to stare.

Letty colored to the eyes--her deep, damask flush. The insult was worse than anything offered by Mrs. Courage; for Mrs. Courage after all was only a servant, and this a young lady of distinction. Letty had never seen anyone dressed with so much taste, not even the stars as they came on the studio lot in their everyday costumes. Indignant as she was she could appreciate this delicate seal-brown cloth, with its bits of gold braid, and darling glimpses of sage-green wherever the lining showed indiscreetly. The hat was a darling too, brown with a feather between brown and green, the one color or the other according as the wearer moved.

If it hadn't been for this cool insolence.... And then the young lady deliberately swung on her heel, which was high, to move some five or six yards away, where she stood with her back to them. It was a darling back--with just enough gold braid to relieve the simplicity, and the tiniest revelation of sage-green. Letty admired it the more poignantly for its cold contempt of herself.

Steptoe was not often put out of countenance, but it seemed to have happened now. "I _can't_ think," he murmured, as one who contemplates the impossible, "that the French madam can 'ave been so civil to begin with, just to go and make a guy of us."

"If all her customers is like this----" Letty began.

But the young lady of distinction turned again, stepping a few paces toward the back of the room, swinging on herself, stepping a few paces toward the front of the room, swinging on herself again, and all the while flinging at Letty glances which said: "If you want to see scorn, this is it."

Fascination kept Letty paralyzed. Steptoe grew uneasy.

"I wish the French madam'd come back agyne," he murmured, from half closed lips. "We 'aven't come 'ere to be myde a spectacle of--not for no one."

And just then the seal-brown figure strolled away, as serenely and impudently as she had come.

"Well, of all----!"

Letty's exclamation was stifled by the fact that as the first young lady of distinction pa.s.sed out a second crossed her coming in. They took no notice of each other, though the newcomer walked straight up to Letty, not to stare but to toss up her chin with a hint of laughter suppressed. Laughter, suppressed or unsuppressed, was her note. She was all fair-haired, blue-eyed vivacity. It was a relief to Letty that she didn't stare. She twitched, she twisted, she pirouetted, striking dull gleams from an embroidery studded with turquoise and jade--but she hadn't the hard unconscious arrogance of the other one.

All the same it pained Letty that great ladies should be so beautiful.

Not that this one was beautiful of face--she wasn't--only piquant--but the general effect was beautiful. It showed what money and the dressmaker could do. If she, Letty could have had a dress and a hat like this!--a blue or a green, it was difficult to say which--with these strips of jade and turquoise on a ground of the purplish-greenish-blue she remembered as that of the monkshood in the old farm garden in Canada--and the darlingest hat, with one long feather beginning as green and graduating through every impossible shade of green and blue till it ended in a monkshood tip....

No wonder the girl's blue eyes danced and quizzed and laughed. As a matter of fact, Letty commented, the eyes brought a little too much blue into the composition. It was her only criticism. As a whole it lacked contrast. If she herself had worn this costume--with her gold-stone eyes--and brown hair--and rich coloring, when she had any color--blue was always a favorite shade with her--when she could choose, which wasn't often--she remembered as a child on the farm how she used to plaster herself with the flowers of the blue succory--the dust-flower they called it down there because it seemed to thrive like the disinherited on the dust of the wayside--not but what the seal-brown was adorable....

The spectacle grew dazzling, difficult for Steptoe to keep up with. He and Letty were plainly objects of interest to these grand folk, because there were now four or five of them. They advanced, receded, came up and studied them, wheeled away, smiled sometimes at each other with the high self-a.s.surance of beauty and position, pranced, pawed, curveted, were n.o.ble or coquettish as the inner self impelled, but always the embodiment of overweening pride. Among the "real gentry,"

as he called them, there had unfailingly been for him and his colleagues a courtesy which might have been called only a distinction in equality, whereas these high-steppers....

It was a relief to see the French madam bustling in again from the room at the back. Steptoe rose. He meant to express himself. Letty hoped he would. For people who brought money in their hands this treatment was too much. When Steptoe advanced to meet madam, she went with him. As her champion she must bear him out.

But madam forestalled them. "I 'ope that mademoiselle has seen something what she like. Me, I thought the brown costume--_coeur de le marguerite jaune_ we call it ziz season----"

Letty was quick. She had heard of mannequins, the living models, though so remotely as to give her no visualized impression. Suddenly knowing what they had been looking at she adapted herself before Steptoe could get his protest into words.

"I liked the seal-brown; but for me I thought the second one----"

Madame Simone nodded, sagely. "Why shouldn't mademoiselle 'ave both?"

Chapter XI

While this question was being put, and Steptoe was rising to what he saw as the real occasion, Rashleigh Allerton too was having a new experience. He couldn't understand it; he couldn't understand himself.

Not that that was strange, since he had hardly ever understood himself at any time; but now he was, as he expressed it, "absolutely stumped."

He had put on the table the bottle on which the kilted Highlander was playing on the pipes; he had poured himself a gla.s.s. It was what he called a good stiff gla.s.s, meant, metaphorically, to kill or cure, and he hoped it would be to kill.

And that was all.

He had sat looking at it, or he had looked at it while walking about; but he had only looked at it. It was as far as he could go. Now that to go farther had become what he called a duty the perversity of his nerves was such that they refused. It was like him. He could always do the forbidden, the dare-devil, the crazily mad; but when it came to the reasonable and straightforward something in him balked. Here he was at what should have been the beginning of the end, and the demon which at another time would have driven him on was holding him back.

Temptation had worked itself round the other way. It was temptation not to do, when saving grace lay in doing.

An hour or more had gone by when Mr. Radbury knocked at the door, timidly.