The Dust Flower Part 31

He came near to her. "I see this--that I can't let her throw herself away for me. I've been thinking it over, and I want to ask your opinion of this plan. Let's sit down."

She thought his plan the maddest that was ever proposed, and yet she accepted it. She accepted it because she was suspicious, jealous, and unhappy. "It'll give me the chance to watch--and _see_," she said to herself, as he talked.

In his opinion Letty couldn't take their point of view because she was so inexperienced. It seemed to her a simple thing to go away, leaving them with the responsibilities of her future on their consciences; and it would not seem other than a simple thing till she saw life more as they did. To bring her to this degree of culture they must be subtle with her, and patient. They mustn't rush things. They mustn't let her rush them. To end the situation in such a way as to make for happiness they must end it at a point where all would be best for all concerned.

For Barbara and himself nothing would be best which was not also best for the girl. What would be best for the girl would be some degree of education, of knowledge of the world, so that she might go back to the life whence they had plucked her less likely to be a prey to the vicious. In that case, if they supplied her with a little income she would know what to do with it, and would perhaps marry some man in her own cla.s.s able to take care of her.

Barbara's impulse was to cry out: "That's the most preposterous suggestion I ever heard of in my life!" But she controlled this quite reasonable prompting because another voice said to her: "This will give you the opportunity to keep an eye on them. If he's not true in his love for you--if there _is_ an infatuation on his part for this common and vulgar creature--you'll be able to detect it." Jealousy loving to suffer she was willing to inflict torture on herself for the sake of catching him in disloyalty.

Expecting a storm, and bringing out what he considered his wise proposals with great embarra.s.sment, Allerton was surprised and pleased at the sympathetic calm in which she received them.

"So that you'd suggest----?"

"Our keeping her on a while longer, and making friends with her. I'd like it tremendously if you'd be a friend to her, because you could do more for her than anyone."

"More than you?"

"Oh, I'd do my bit too," he a.s.sured her, innocently. "I could put her up to a lot of things, seeing her every day as I should. But you're the one I should really count on."

Because the words hurt her more than any she could utter; she said, quietly: "I suppose you remember sometimes that after all she's your wife."

He sprang to his feet. Knowing that he did at times remember it he tried to deny it. "No, I don't. She's not. I don't admit it. I don't acknowledge it. If you care anything about me, Barbe, you'll never say that again."

He came and knelt beside her, taking her hands and kissing them.

Laying his head in her lap, he begged to be caressed, as if he had been a dog.

Nevertheless by half past nine that evening he was at home, sitting by the fireside with Letty, and beginning his special part in the great experiment.

"She's not my wife," he kept repeating to himself poignantly, as he walked up the Avenue from the Club; "she's not--she's _not_. But she _is_ a poor child toward whom I've undertaken grave responsibilities."

Because the responsibilities were grave, and she was a poor child, his att.i.tude toward her began to be paternal. It was the more freely paternal because Barbe approved of what he was undertaking. Had she disapproved he might have undertaken it all the same, but he couldn't have done it with this whole-heartedness. He would have been haunted by the fear of her displeasure; whereas now he could let himself go.

"We don't want to keep you a prisoner, or detain you against your will," he said, with regard to the incident of the morning, "but if you'll stay with us a little longer, I think we can convince you of our good intentions."

"Who's--we?"

She shot the question at him, as she lay back in her chair, the red book in her lap. He smiled inwardly at the ready pertinence with which she went to a point he didn't care to discuss.

"Well, then, suppose I said--I? That'll do, won't it?"

She shot another question, her flaming eyes half veiled. "How long would you want me to stay?"

"Suppose we didn't fix a time? Suppose we just left it--like that?"

The question rose to her lips: "But in the end I'm to go?" only, on second thoughts she repressed it. She preferred that the situation should be left "like that," since it meant that she was not at once to be separated from the prince. The fact that she was legally the prince's wife had as little reality to her as to him. Could she have had what she yearned for law or no law would have been the same to her. But since she couldn't have that, it was much that he should come like this and sit with her by the fire in the evening.

He leaned forward and took the book from her lap. "What are you reading? Oh, this! I haven't looked at it for years." He glanced at the t.i.tle. "_The Little Mermaid!_ That used to be my favorite. It still is. When I was in Copenhagen I went to see the little bronze mermaid sitting on a rock on the sh.o.r.e. It's a memorial to Hans Andersen. She's quite startling for a minute--till you know what it is. Where are you at?"

Pointing out the line at which she had stopped her hand touched his, but all the consciousness of the accident was on her side. He seemed to notice nothing, beginning to read aloud to her, with no suspicion that sentiment existed.

"Many an evening and morning she rose to the place where she had left the prince. She watched the fruits in the garden ripen and fall; she saw the snow melt from the high mountains; but the prince she never saw, and she came home sadder than ever. Her one consolation was to sit in her little garden, with her arms clasped round the marble statue which was like the prince----"

"That'd be me," Letty whispered to herself; "my arms clasped round a marble statue--like my prince--but only a marble statue."

"Her flowers were neglected," Allerton read on, "and grew wild in a luxuriant tangle of stem and blossom, reaching the branches of the willow-tree, and making the whole place dark and dim. At last she could bear it no longer and she told one of her sisters----"

"I wouldn't tell my sister, if I had one," Letty a.s.sured herself. "I'd never tell no one. It's more like my own secret when I keep it to myself. n.o.body'll ever know--not even him."

"The other sisters learned the story then, but they told it to no one but a few other mermaids, who told it to their intimate friends. One of these friends knew who the prince was, and told the princess where he came from and where his kingdom lay. Now she knew where he lived; and many a night she spent there, floating on the water. She ventured nearer to the land than any of her sisters had done. She swam up the narrow lagoon, under the carved marble balcony; and there she sat and watched the prince when he thought himself alone in the moonlight. She remembered how his head had rested on her breast, and how she had kissed his brow; but he would never know, and could not even dream of her."

Letty had not kissed her prince's brow, but she had kissed his feet; but he would never know that, and would dream of her no more than this other prince of the little thing who loved him.

Allerton continued to read on, partly because the old tale came back to him with its enchanting loveliness, partly because reading aloud would be a feature of his educational scheme, and partly because it soothed him to be doing it. He could never read to Barbara. Once, when he tried it, the sound of his voice and the monotony of his cadences, so got on her nerves that she stopped him in the middle of a word.

But this girl with her uncritical mind, and her grat.i.tude for small bits of kindliness, gave him confidence in himself by her rapt way of listening.

She did listen raptly, since a prince's reading must always be more arresting than that of ordinary mortals, and also because, both consciously and subconsciously, she was taking his p.r.o.nunciation as a standard.

And just at this minute her name was under discussion in a brilliant gathering at The Hindoo Lantern, in another quarter of New York.

If you know The Hindoo Lantern you know how much it depends on atmosphere. Once a disused warehouse in a section of the city which commerce had forsaken, the enthusiasm for the dance which arose about 1910, has made it a temple. It gains, too, by being a temple of the esoteric. The Hindoo Lantern is not everybody's lantern, and does not swing in the open vulgar street. You might live in New York a hundred years and unless you were one of the initiated and privileged, you might never know of its existence.

You could not so much as approach it were it not first explained to you what you ought to do. You must pa.s.s through a tobacconist's, which from the street looks like any other tobacconist's, after which you traverse a yard, which looks like any other yard, except that it is bounded by a wall in which there is a small and un.o.btrusive door.

Beside the small and un.o.btrusive door there hangs a bell-rope, of the ancient kind suggesting the convent or the Orient. The bell-rope pulls a bell; the bell clangs overhead; the door is opened cautiously by a Hindoo lad, or, as some say, a mulatto boy dressed as a Hindoo.

If you are with a friend of the inst.i.tution you will be admitted without more inspection; but should you be a stranger there will be a scrutiny of your pa.s.sports. a.s.suming, however, that you go in, you will find a small courtyard, in which at last The Hindoo Lantern hangs mystic, suggestive, in oriental iron-work, and panels of colored gla.s.s.

Having pa.s.sed beneath this symbol you will enter an antechamber rich in the magic of the East. In a reverent obscurity you will find Buddha on the right, Vishnu on the left, with flowers set before the one, while incense burns before the other. Somewhere in the darkness an Oriental woman will be seated on the ground, tw.a.n.ging on a sarabar, and now and then crooning a chant of invitation to come and share in darksome rites. You will thus be "worked up" to a sense of the mysterious before you pa.s.s the third gate of privilege into the shrine itself.

Here you will discover the large empty oval of floor, surrounded by little tables for segregation and refreshment, with which the past ten years have made us familiar. The place will be buzzing with the hum of voices, merry with duologues of laughter, and steaming with tobacco smoke. A jazz-band will strike up, coughing out the nauseated, retching intervals so stimulating to our feet, and two by two, in driblets, streamlets, and lastly in a volume, the guests will take the floor.

In the way of "steps" all the latest will be on exhibition. You will see the cow-trot, the rabbit-jump, the broom-stick, the washerwoman's dip. Everyone who is anyone will be here, if not on one night then on another, in a jovial fraternity steeped in the spirit of democracy.

Revelry will be sustained on lemonade and a resinous astringent known locally as beer, while a sense of doing the forbidden will be in the air. For commercial reasons it will be needful to keep it in the air, since in the proceedings themselves there will be nothing more occult, or more inciting to iniquity, than a kindergarten game.

Hither Mr. Gorry Larrabin had brought Mademoiselle Odette Coucoul, to teach her the new dances. As a matter of fact, he had just led her back to their little table, inconspicuously placed in the front row, after putting her through the paces of the camel-step. Mademoiselle had found it entrancing, so much more novel in the motion than the antiquated valses she had danced in France. Mr. Larrabin had retreated like a camel walking backwards, while she had advanced like a camel going forwards. The art was in lifting the foot quite high, throwing it slightly backwards, and setting it down with a delicate deliberation, while you craned the neck before you with a shake of the Adam's apple. To incite you to produce this effect the jazz-band urged you onward with a sob, a gulp, a moan, an effect of strangulation, till finally it tore up the seat of your being as if you had been suddenly struck sea-sick.

"Mon Dieu, but it is lofely," mademoiselle gurgled, laughing in her breathlessness. "It is terr-i-bul to call no one a camel--_un chameau_--in France; but here am I a--_chameau_!"

Gorry took this with puzzled amus.e.m.e.nt. "What's the matter with calling anyone a camel? I don't see any harm in that."

Mademoiselle hid her face in confusion. "Oh, but it is terr-i-bul, terr-i-bul! It is almost so worse as to call no one a--how you say zat word in Eenglish?--a cow, n'est ce pas?--_une vache_--and zat is the most bad name what you can call no one."

Looking across the room Gorry was struck with an idea. "Well, there's a--what d'ye call it--_a vashe_--over there. See that guy with the girl with the cream-colored hair--fella with a big black mustache, like a brigand in a play? There's a _vashe_ all-righty; and yet I've got to keep in with him."

As he explained his reasons for keeping in with the "vashe" in question mademoiselle contented herself with shedding radiance and paying no attention. Neither did she pay attention when he went on to tell of the girl who had disappeared, and of her stepfather's reasons for finding her. She woke to cognizance of the subject only when Gorry repeated the exact words of Miss Tina Vanzetti that morning: "Name of Letty Gravely."

It was mademoiselle's turn for repet.i.tion. "But me, I know dat name. I 'ear it not so long ago. Name of Let-ty Grav-el-ly! I sure 'ear zat name all recently." She reflected, tapping her forehead with vivacity.

"Mais quand? Mais oui? C'etait--Ah!" The exclamation was the sharp cry of discovery. "Tina Vanzetti--my frien'! She tell me zis morning. Zat girl--Let-ty Grav-el-ly--she come chez Margot with ole man--what he keep ze white slave--and he command her grand beautiful trousseau--Tina Vanzetti she will give me ze address--and I will tell you--and you will tell him--and he will put you on to _riche affairs_----"

"It'll be dollars and cents in the box office for me," Gorry interpreted, forcibly, while the band belched forth a chord like the groan of a dying monster, calling them again to their feet.