Tears came into her eyes somehow when he called her that.
"Listen. If anything _is_ on the way to us,--and if you think so I
expect there is,--most probably it will send me one way over the earth
and you another because this way has failed. When I'm out of sight I
want you to remember one thing."
"I shall remember it all," she said.
"But especially one thing. I set out to break you."
"You've done that," she said.
"No, please don't rot me,--not to-night, out here. If ever my name
flicks across your memory at any time remember my idiotic attempt to
give you the spurs."
"Why especially that?"
"Because you beat me,--beat me to a frazzle and that's the only good
thing about this episode."
"You're very generous," she said, and held out her hand. She had an
insane desire to sit down on those dirty boards and cry. Everything he
did and said made her love him more and more. What was the matter with
her that she had turned him into a brother? Life had appeared to be so
easy to arrange. It had become so difficult.
He took her hand and held it tight. "I'm not generous," he said,
scoffing. "Don't let any man try the breaking business. Remain as you
are. Be the spoilt girl all the rest of your life, kiddie. You're all
right. Now come in and go to bed and sleep hard. That thing you got
just now may find us in the morning."
And they turned their backs to the moon and to love and walked away
without another word.
Malcolm and Ida Larpent had gone to bed. And the fat girl with the big
bow and her young friends had disappeared. The Victrola was silent.
There were no lights in the drawing-room or the sun parlor, but the
click of billiard balls came into the foyer and the reek of cheap
cigars. Two colored bell boys on the verge of sleep sat near the desk.
Outside the frogs were still at work on their endless ensemble.
Beatrix nodded and smiled and went upstairs. She had left her key in
Mrs. Keene's room. Franklin hung about aimlessly for ten minutes
reading the railroad timetables with no interest and the printed notices
to visitors and looking at the colored advertisements of steamships and
whisky and magazines, without taking them in. Yes, the episode had
failed. He was beat,--beat to a frazzle. What was going to happen
next?
Ida Larpent heard him stride along the passage, go into his room and
shut the door. Through the thin walls she could hear him shunt a chair
and do something to his windows and move about.
She wore a curious smile and an almost transparent nightgown. Her black
hair was all about her shoulders and in her eyes there was a strange
eagerness.
For half an hour she sat as still as a statue watching the hands of her
little diamond-studded watch. Her opportunity had come. She was going
to seize it. She knew men, no one better. This one needed love and she,
yes, she of all women would give it to him.
In that long, peculiar half hour during which her body was without
movement, her brain worked and her heart raced. She loved and would
make a sacrifice for love. That was the burden of her inward song. Not
of the future, not of freedom from money worries, not of mercenary
things,--love, her first great love and its fulfilment. Of that she
thought, smiling, and thanking her stars.
And when the half hour was up she rose, put on a peignoir, slipped out
of her room on the tips of her little pink slippers and tapped at
Franklin's door. He called out "Come" and she went in.
He was sitting in a dressing gown in a cane chair, under the electric
lamp that hung from the middle of the ceiling, with a pipe in his mouth
and a book in his hand and his feet on a cranky table. There was a
cloud of good tobacco smoke round his head.
He sprang to his feet at the sight of her. Although there was nothing
of the frightened woman about her, the only thing that occurred to him
was that she needed his help. A thief after her rings, probably.
"What's the matter?" instinctively lowering his voice. "Anyone in your
room?"
She shut the door and smiled at him. After all she rather liked his
naive assumption that she had not gone to his room for anything but his
assistance in some emergency. It was very charming and boyish and clean
and all that. It made things just a little difficult to explain though.
"I see you're not in a hurry to go to bed," she said, "so may I sit down
and have a cigarette? I've lots to say to you and there has been no
other opportunity to-day."
"Of course," he said. "Please do. I hate reading, and sleep is miles
away." He placed his chair for her, the only more or less comfortable
one in the room, and got a cigarette and lit it. "Awfully nice of you
to come in. Well, what's the news?"
He drew up a stiff-backed chair and sat straddle with his arms on the
back of it. A good sort, Ida Larpent, he told himself, and
extraordinarily picturesque. He couldn't make out why she didn't marry
again. She could take her pick.
"Please may I have a pillow? I can feel every rib of cane. It hurts a
little. I'm sorry to be fussy."
"Not a bit." He placed one of his pillows behind her back. "How's
that?"
"Much better, thanks."
He went back to his chair and sat looking at her with a most friendly
and admiring smile.
She liked the last part of it but not the first. It was all more than a
little disconcerting. She knew men but not of his type. It would
perhaps have been better for men, to say nothing of herself, if she had
known one or two. Give a dog a bad name and hang him. She was
conscious of looking extremely alluring in her geranium pink peignoir
and slippers and her silk nightgown cut very low and her thick, black
hair, which fluffed out over her shoulders, rather like that of a
Russian prima ballerina.
"There's no news," she said. "The faithful Mrs. Keene gave me a good
deal of worry, poor, little soul, and Malcolm Fraser has not been a very
entertaining companion. He's by way of not liking me."