Mary Burton made her way between tall hedgerows of box where an alley of
shade ran to a side terrace, and when she had gained her own room her
eyes were aglow with a new and rather radiant sort of smile, that also
crept to the corners of her lips and hovered happily. It was a vague
smile, but if the man who had enticed it there had seen it, he would
have felt reassured. The threat of tomorrow's wrath would not have
troubled him.
When Mary Burton, changed into bedroom attire, had dismissed her maid
for the night, she still moved about with a restlessness which did not
at once yield to the composure needed for the rigid self-analysis upon
which she was resolved. She stood before the mirror and looked gravely
into the glass.
With the lustrous masses of hair falling braided over her shoulders and
the new glow of discovery in her eyes she might have been a girl just
budding into womanhood. She seemed in the last hour to have slipped back
into the blossom time of her beauty--and though it was a beauty which
she had always realized she now felt a new happiness in its possession.
Heretofore her pride had been such as one feels for a means of conquest.
Now it was different. Her breast rose suddenly and fell to the
excitement of a subtly powerful emotion. This beauty had a new value. It
might be a prize worth surrendering proudly and as a gift to a man of
her choosing. If this rainbow of promised love proved real she would
wish herself even lovelier--for his pleasure. It was of course too soon
to feel sure--and at that thought a sudden gasp of fear rose in her
throat. At all events it was not too early to hope that the night had
brought her the thing for which she had yearned--brought the
commencement. She gave to the face in the mirror a friendly smile. "This
afternoon I rather hated you," she announced gravely. "I gazed at you
and a soulless little pig stared back ... but who knows? Maybe down
under your vanity and selfishness you have after all the cobwebbed
little germ of a soul. If so we must dig it out and brush it off and put
it to work."
Then she turned out the lights and sank down dreamily in the broad
window seat. The moon rode high and bathed the hills in its limpid yet
elusive wash of silver and blue and dove grays. Far off like a
brush-stroke from a dream palette ran the horizon's margin of hills and
nearer at hand tapering poplars stood up like dark sentinels. The lights
and music told of the dance still in progress and strolling figures
occasionally crossed the silver patches between the shadows.
In her own mind she was reviewing all the men who with her had sought to
throw off the mantle of the Platonic and invest themselves in the more
romantic habiliments of courtship. One lesson had been taught her from
the first, and she had learned it thoroughly--too thoroughly! She was no
ordinary girl to give way to unwise throbbing of the pulses. Her future
must run side by side with brilliant things and brilliant men.
It takes experience to teach distrust to those frolicsome playmates,
Youth and Buoyancy. She had met with that experience and had learned
that fortune-hunters are by no means mythical or extinct. When to the
honey-pot of wealth is added the lure of beauty, how can one be sure
that any proffered love is free from the taint of greed? Her brother was
one of America's most brilliant money-getters. He gathered in and
disbursed with a lavish magnificence. She had been called the most
beautiful woman in Europe and her gem-like brilliancy had been set in
Life's gold and platinum of environment. When Cupid came to her what
bill of health could he produce to prove that he was not a sneak-thief
in disguise? She had accepted the cynical conclusion that she might
never be sure of any man's love and the tenderer little heart-nerves
which govern impulse were growing numb. Under a naïve freshness and
girlish fragrance of personality, lay masked batteries of distrust and
hardness. The Duke de Metuan fancied himself genuinely in love with her.
Of that she was sure, but should the Duke de Metuan learn tomorrow
morning that she had overnight become penniless--she broke off and
laughed.
And tonight had come the unwarned tumult of feeling against which she
possessed no argument. Jefferson Edwardes had looked at her and his eyes
were a guarantee of honesty beyond question. She did not even ask to see
the Love God's passport. This man was a member of a great family of
bankers; a family that had stood for generations among the richest in
the country. Ham's magic control of the money tides could not even
subconsciously influence his decisions.
It was wonderful to sit there in the window, adrift on a tide of
elation, and to know that the numbness of her heart was not a permanent
paralysis--that she had a soul. It was absurdedly delightful, too, to
reflect upon the illogical swiftness with which it had all happened.
"Tomorrow," she announced to herself, nodding her head very decisively,
"I shall be furious with him. I shall refuse to speak to him. I shall
let him realize that such lordly assumption brings swift retribution."
Then, low and gaily, she laughed. "After I've punished him I'll be very
nice to him, unless--" her lips tightened as she added--"unless he says
he's sorry he did it and apologizes. If he does that I'll never speak to
him again."
* * * * *
While Mary was spending so comfortable and pleasing an hour with her
reflections and while Jefferson Edwardes was tramping the hills several
miles away, a small number of unattached men lingered near the
punch-bowl and cigars in the huge living-room of the lodge.
One of these refugees from the zone of dancing activities was of more
than ordinarily striking appearance. When he stood he towered and even
when he sat, as now, morosely lounging and taciturn, he bulked large and
wore a countenance of such strength and determination as suited his
giant body. In spite of his great physique he carried no superfluous
flesh, but tapered to the waist and, notwithstanding his present
detachment and a seriousness that verged on sullenness, the face seemed
more patterned by nature for the broad grin of good fellowship and clean
mirthfulness.
Quite obviously Len Haswell, whose laugh ordinarily rang like a fog-horn
over the chorus of conversation, would just now have preferred being
elsewhere. When their customary joviality left those gray eyes, the
man's immensity took on something of an ogre's power. He tinkled the
ice in his high-ball glass--a process to which he had devoted himself
with unaccustomed repetition this evening and, instead of mellowing into
conviviality under his libations, his eyes narrowed a little and the
small frowning line between his brows deepened.
"The Big Fellow's having a grouch, eh, what? He's getting a bit squiffy,
if you ask me," suggested Norvil Thayre to the group centered where the
punch-bowl was being administered. Norvil Thayre was not having a
grouch. If he had ever had a grouch he had kept his secret well. An
American by adoption, he was still aggressively British in speech, dress
and eccentricity.
Norvil Thayre's chest was always thrust out as cheerily and confidently
as a cock-robin's, and his step was as elastic as though he had just
come, freshly galvanized, from some electric source of exuberant energy.
His clothing escaped the extremes of fashion by the narrowest margin of
good taste, and his mustache ends bristled up toward the laughing
wrinkles about his wide-awake eyes like exclamation points of alertness.
"And," went on Mr. Thayre amiably, "if he hungers for solitude I'm the
last chap in the world to intrude on his meditations. I jolly well know
myself what it means to hang precariously on the fringe of plutocracy
with only a beastly whisper of an income--and by the Lord Harry I'm a
bachelor." Several auditors nodded their sympathetic understanding, but
a tall youth with viking blond hair and vacant eyes which seemed to
proclaim, "I am looking, but I see not," was less judicious. He lounged
over and dropped into a chair at Haswell's side.
"That singularly frightful little ass, Larry Kirk, is going to cheer
him up now," smiled Thayre. "Trust him to make himself a nuisance."
"Not dancing much this evening, Len?" suggested Kirk by way of opening
the conversation with the silent one.
"No." The reply was curt.
"I've been wanting to dance with your wife," persisted the other, "but
she's as illusive as a wraith."
This time Haswell did not vouchsafe even a monosyllable in reply, and
the tactless Kirk assumed the double burden of the conversation.
"I call it rough treatment when the two truly beautiful women in society
come to a dance and proceed, to all intents and purposes, to evaporate.
Miss Burton, too, seems to have been converted into thin air. What's the
use of struggling to keep up with new steps?"
Len Haswell rose stiffly from his chair, and, tossing his cigar through
the open window, stalked silently from the room.
The blond young man glanced uncomprehendingly after him, and Thayre's
laugh broke in a booming peal.
"Rather gratuitous, son, wasn't it?" he suggested.
"What do you mean?" Larry Kirk put his question blankly.
"Nothing, except that you know Len or ought to. He's the present-day
Othello, sulking because he can't get a dance with his wife. It's barely
conceivable that he's not aching to have it rubbed in."
"Can't get a dance?" repeated the empty-eyed youth perplexedly. "Why?"
Thayre snorted. "What chance has he--or any one else when Ham Burton's
gifted pomeranian sequesters her in some shaded nook and whispers
musical nonsense into her coral ear?"
"You mean Paul Burton? Gifted pomeranian fits him nicely ... but why
should any man be jealous of--him?"
"A man may be jealous of any creature that all women pet. Paul Burton
can play to them until their golden souls come soaring out to be
playmates with his golden soul. You and I, having no wives, may be able
to laugh at such things--but Len Haswell has a devilish pretty one--and
a devilish foolish one."
To young Mr. Kirk the situation seemed simple.
"Why doesn't Len just take this pleasing minstrel by the scruff of his
neck and say to him, 'Nice little doggy, run away'?"
"For two reasons. First, behind the pleasing minstrel stands the
Emperor--damn his magnificently audacious soul! Secondly, when you chase
a man who has access to the treasure of the Incas ... you take a fairish
chance of chasing the lady along with him."
"I'm sorry I made Len sore." The blond man spoke contritely. Then his
voice snapped into animosity. "He's worth a dozen Paul Burtons, the
vapid little piano-player."
"Right-o!" Thayre stood with his feet well apart and his baldish head
thrown back. "Even that profound gift for reading human nature, which it
pleased a Divine Providence to bestow upon me, could hardly have hit
more jolly well on the peg." He paused, then added, "But be that as it
may--in the habit which has become so prevalent among us money-changers
in the temple, of damning the soul of Hamilton Burton--when he is
absent--I think we overlook a few patent truths. We hate the man and
all his breed simply because he outclasses us at our own game."
"You mean he outplunders us," contradicted Kirk.
"It comes to much the same thing, young son, though High Finance is a
prettier name for the pastime. He gathers in millions to our thousands
not only because he is a naughty, wicked man, but because of his greater
caliber and range. Brother Paul shines by some of this reflected
glory--so it has become the fashion to damn Brother Paul, too."
It began to dawn on the fair-haired young man that he was being chaffed.
His reply came sulkily.
"To my mind Paul Burton is nothing but a hanger-on."
"Quite true. So am I. So are you. So are all of us who produce nothing
tangible. Paul is a hanger-on by better right than many others who
depend directly or indirectly on the energies of this great producing
pirate."
Kirk had exhausted his line of argument and fell silent, but Jack
Staples stepped into the breach. Staples himself was no mean type of
financier, holding as he did a commission as one of Malone's chief
lieutenants. He was a striking man with a lower jaw which thrust itself
aggressively forward and a single white lock over his forehead, though
except for that the blackness of his hair bore no touch of gray even at
the temples.
"I hate the lot of them!" he announced vehemently. "I hate this upstart
Cyclops and his conscienceless power. I hate the pampered brother--but
Thayre is right. Great God in heaven, gentlemen, it is a family of
geniuses. Stop and reflect. Fifteen years ago they were
bare-footed--ragged--half-starved, the whole brood. Now consider them.
Hamilton is magnificent, ruthless, but almost omnipotent. He is one of
the world's few blazing and dazzling figures. As for Paul, in spite of
his weakness, he's inspirational. His genius is no less intrinsic. I'm
not emotional, but I've heard them all play and that boy can carry me
out of myself as can no other artist, professional or amateur, to whom
I've ever listened. He is a gifted troubadour. His fingers control the
magic of harmony as his brother's control the magic of money. For my
part I'd rather be Paul than Hamilton. Hamilton will be hated to
death--by men, but Paul will be loved to death--by women."
"Well," suggested another member of the group drily, "when one New York
family can move as stolid an old cynic as Staples to eulogy, it must be
some family."
"I tell you," protested Staples hotly, "I hate them, but we gain nothing
by belittling our enemies. It sets a man's imagination afire to see a
strain of remarkable blood proclaiming itself in so diverse a fashion
through members of one household; a household that has come from the
pinch of want. Take the girl. Leave her beauty out of the question,
because beauty is not genius. But her mind is as trenchant as her
brother's. She could reign on any throne in Europe and stand out as
conspicuous in brilliant contrast to that colorless royalty as a torch
flaming among candles. I'll wager that her courage is as unflinching as
his and her gifts as varied and remarkable. Why, even old Tom, the
father, is, for all his seeming of pompous emptiness, the craftiest and
cagiest old chap in the National Union Club. He plays rotten bridge, but
he still has a brain in his old head."
"I suppose as far as that goes," commented Mr. Kirk, fortified by the
entry of a new disputant into the argument, "that even Nero had his
attractive angles of personality."
Thayre laughed and lighted a cigarette. Then as he inhaled deeply he
nodded and replied.
"I hold no brief for Nero, but I dare say he was a bit misunderstood."
"Since you've undertaken the modern Nero's defense, suppose you
catalogue _his_ good points--aside from a conceded brilliancy in
finance," suggested another member of the group.
The Englishman nodded, and began his summary.
"An unswerving loyalty to his friends--until they are guilty of _lèse
majesté_; a personal integrity which no man questions; a wit that makes
him in his lighter moments a rare companion; a generosity as broad as
his fighting ruthlessness is deep; and, finally, a lion-like courage. To
me, my lads, those assets seem worth a moment's consideration."
* * * * *
The gardens and grounds of Haverly Lodge were that night such a terrain
as best suits the ambuscading warfare of the small god with the bow and
darts.
Loraine Haswell was thinking something of the sort as she strolled with
Paul Burton away from the dancers, leaving their destination to chance.
Kirk had hardly exaggerated when he bracketed the name of this slender
and graceful wife of the gigantic broker with that of Mary Burton as the
two most beautiful women in society.
They were opposite types, for while Mary was a glowing incarnation of
color, rich as a golden morning in blossom-time, Loraine, with heavy
masses of softly spun jet coiled above her brow, looking out from eyes
that were pools of liquid darkness, might have been the queen of night.
But her mouth was a carmine blossom. This evening she wore a gown almost
barbaric in its richness of color and pattern, and when she walked ahead
of Paul Burton where the path narrowed, it seemed to him that some slim
and lithe Cleopatra was preceding him. The waltz music came across the
short distance, and Loraine Haswell went with a step that captured the
rhythm of the measure. When they had come to a corner of the garden
where a fountain tinkled in shadow and only a lacey strand or two of
moonlight fell on the grass, she halted with her outstretched arms
resting lightly on the tall basin, and let her fingers dip into the
clear water while she turned to smile on him.
"Do you know, Mrs. Haswell," Paul spoke low and with a musical thrill in
his voice, "you are the loveliest creature in captivity tonight? Your
loveliness is to a man's imagination what Wilde said white hyacinths are
to the soul--worth going without bread for."
She laughed, but into her mirth there crept, or was injected as the case
may be, a note of wistfulness.
"In captivity," she repeated, slowly. "I am always in captivity."
With most men Paul was diffident and prone to silence, but something in
his effete nature gave him confidence with women. He had been flattered
into a sort of assurance that they found him irresistible. They thought
him clairvoyantly sympathetic--and he was by the very over-refinement of
his music and dream-fed temperament.
"The other evening when I left you, I went home and closed my eyes and
sat alone--thinking of you," he told her. "To me all that is fine
beyond words I try to translate into music. Where words--even
poetry--fail, notes begin. So at the piano I tried to express something
like a portrayal of you--to myself."
She seated herself on a stone bench while he stood looking down at her.
Her head was for a moment bent and something in the droop of her
shoulders intimated unhappiness.
"Does my improvising music about you offend?" He put the question very
gently. "You know that I go to the piano as another man might go to his
prayers."
She looked up and shook her head. Then she said softly. "Offend me? No,
it makes me very proud.... I was just thinking of something else--that
troubled me."
"Of what?" Into the two short words Paul Burton put such a sympathy as
only voices of women and partly feminine men can express.
"Of the word you used just now ... captivity."
He seated himself at her side and his hand fell to the edge of the stone
bench--where her own fingers lightly rested. The cool satiny touch of
the hand his own encountered, which she made no effort to withdraw,
affected him as though a clear and silvery note had sounded near him.
Paul was one whose senses were exquisitely attuned.
"Mrs. Haswell--Loraine," he said, and his voice was seductively tender,
"you are unhappy."
Slowly she nodded her dark head and her voice was a whisper. "Yes....
Paul, I'm afraid I am just that."
It was the first time they had called each other by their first names.
It was the first time that the gradually ripening intimacy between them
had had a more propitious setting than a table at Sherry's. Paul Burton
had awaited this moment patiently, knowing that it must sometime come.
Now he bent toward her until her hair brushed his face.
"It is your right to find life a thing of joy," he whispered. "Your soul
is a flower. It should have the fulness and radiance of sunshine."
"Our rights," she said slowly, "are not always the things we get."
"But just why are you unhappy?" he insisted.
"I guess you summed it up in that one word, Paul ... captivity."
Paul Burton, the easily swayed, the facilely led, rose and paced up and
down, and after a few moments he halted before her.
"Doesn't he--your jailer--appreciate you, Loraine?"
She shrugged her lovely shoulders and looked up at him, smiling through
lashes that glistened a little.
"As much, I suppose, as a man can appreciate a woman whom he fails to
understand. It's not his fault."
"Of course he--cares for you?"
Loraine Haswell shot him a quick inquiring glance. "Yes," she smiled,
"he cares enough to persecute me with little jealousies. He cares enough
to want me to make love to him when--" she halted and put both hands
over her face; through her slight figure ran a faint shudder--"when I
can't."
The man pressed his tapering fingers to his temples. He must seem
agitated and his emotions lay so ready to call that seeming so was
almost being so. Yet in the back of his mind was the thought: "She will
be in my arms in five minutes."
Suddenly she rose from her seat. "I oughtn't to say such things to
you," she declared in a voice freighted with self-accusation. "Please
forget it, Paul. But it's a thing you can understand. You know the
emptiness of a life that deals only with material things."
He leaned forward with one knee on the bench and one hand on the
fountain basin. She was beautiful and his heart responded to her
beauty's challenge.
"To me you can say anything. In me you will always find one who has no
interest above your interests." He stopped and took her hands, but she
shook her head in gentle negation, and, as he obeyed the unuttered
mandate and let his own arms fall at his sides, she rewarded him with a
smile that thrilled him like an embrace.
"Len is fine and big and everybody likes him," went on the wife as
though bent on being fair at all costs. "Sometimes I think that's the
trouble. It's like being married to a standing army. In times of peace
one doesn't need a standing army and in times of war it's me that he
makes war on."
Loraine rose and started toward the house. Paul followed, her,
appraising her beauty with eyes into which a new interest had come. In a
moment she turned and halted so suddenly that the man found her face
close to his as she spoke. "I don't know what's the matter with me
tonight. I feel faint and giddy--and full of undefined longings. I
sha'n't sleep--unless--" she looked questioningly up at him--"unless you
will play for me, Paul. Will you?"
Then she put out both hands and swayed unsteadily. Paul caught her in
his arms and pressed her to him. The fragrance of her breath and the
velvet coolness of the cheek he found himself kissing were details that
brought an exquisite responsiveness to his senses. He did not know
whether she had fainted or was still conscious, for she rested there in
his embrace limp and unresisting and wordless.
"What is the matter, dearest?" he whispered, when the first flush of
exultation had passed. "What is the matter?"
Slowly the dark fringe of lashes flickered up and the jet eyes gazed
languorously into his own. The blossom lips parted over the flashing
whiteness of a smile. Still she did not move except to close both her
hands tightly on the arms that circled her.
"Paul," she told him, "I ought to be unconscious or--or break away, but
I'm just--just forgetting my captivity." Her eyes held his, drawing them
hypnotically nearer and he lowered his face till his lips met hers and
received from them the answer to his kiss.
Then Loraine Haswell drew away and straightened up. She was a very
lovely picture of contrite confusion as she put up both gleaming arms
and rearranged the dark hair he had rumpled. All the way to the house
she was silent.