Beatrix's principles extended even to the point of observing her day at
home. Society was bidden, the next afternoon, to a tea at Mrs.
Stanley's, and Beatrix was absolutely certain that none of her friends
would cross the intervening forty blocks in order to look in upon her,
going or coming. In her secret heart, she longed to follow society;
instead, she was sitting in solitude, when Thayer was announced.
She rose to greet him with a cordial friendliness, for the past six
months had made a great change in their outward relations. They had
liked each other from the day of Mrs. Stanley's recital, and the liking
had increased with each subsequent meeting. During the next few weeks,
they had met often. Lorimer insisted upon going to every recital at
which Thayer was to sing, and under his guidance Beatrix had gained a
fair idea of what went on behind the scenes. Thayer, meanwhile, had
swiftly assumed his own place in society, and discerning hostesses
generally found it well to put him near to Beatrix at dinner. Owing to
his many evening engagements, Thayer usually ate but sparingly, so it
was all the more necessary that he should be placed within range of
someone with whom he cared to talk. He rarely lent himself to the usual
run of social badinage; but retired into his shell whenever it became
the dominant note of the conversation. A man of his bulk and prominence
and potential boredom was an object of hospitable consideration. He
could always talk to Beatrix, for she never chattered. Therefore he was
generally to be found somewhere within the conversational radius of
Beatrix Dane.
The tea table of Beatrix, moreover, had become one of the focal points
of his New York life. He liked the cheery, informal atmosphere of the
house whose old-fashioned austerity was tempered with a dash of modern
frivolity; he liked the people he met there, people too assured of their
own social position to be touchy upon slight points of social
precedence. Most of all, he liked Beatrix Dane, herself. In the gay,
chattering multitude among whom she moved, her own steadfast quietness
stood out in bold relief, and it answered to certain traits of his own
Puritanism. It was not that she was dull, or overfreighted with
conscience. She frisked with the others of her kind; but her friskiness
was intermittent and never frivolous. To Beatrix Dane, pleasure was an
interlude, never the sole end and aim of life. And, on her own side,
Beatrix felt a thorough admiration for the clean-minded, clean-bodied
singer, a thorough reliance upon his judgment and upon his loyalty to
anyone to whom he vouchsafed his friendship.
This had been the relation between them, on the evening of the concert
for the Fresh Air Fund, a relation whose cordial matter-of-factness was
in no way disturbed by the potent spell of Thayer's voice. Beatrix had
spent much of her life in the open air; she was too healthy to be given
to self-analysis. She admitted to herself the wonderful power of
Thayer's voice, the passionate appeal of certain of his songs; but she
made a curiously sharp distinction between the man and the voice. The
one might be a strong guiding force in the current of her life; the
other was a rising tide that swept her from her moorings and left her
drifting to and fro over stormy seas. On the night of the Fresh Air Fund
concert, for the first time in her experience, these two personalities
had become inextricably intermingled. As she had said, she had never
before realized the possibilities of either Thayer or his voice.
Everything had conspired to produce the impression. All day long, she
had been haunted by a nervous, nameless dread. The vague hints and
signs of the past months had suddenly gathered to a nucleus of anxiety
and alarm, and, in spite of her rigid self-control, she had been
terrified into giving the one outcry, partly to satisfy her feminine
need for sympathy, partly with the hope of putting Lorimer upon his
guard. The sympathy had come, prompt and loving; the warning had been
utterly ignored.
Music ought to be taken with fasting and prayer. Quiet nerves and a full
stomach are deaf to its deepest meaning. To most of the audience, _Honor
and Arms_ stood as a superb piece of vocal gymnastics; to Beatrix,
Thayer was like a live wire, pulsing with a virile scorn of any but
uneven contests, defiant only of those mightier than himself. To her
mind, he was ready to court heavy odds, bound to conquer them, one and
all; and her own pulses beat faster in time to the half-barbarous
outburst which ends the great aria. The Gade concerto, instead of
soothing her, had only exasperated her. She longed to get behind the
violinist and the orchestra and even the composer himself, and goad them
into some tenseness of emotion. But the Slavonic Dance had set her heart
bounding once more, until her very finger tips tingled with the blood
racing through them, and the clashing cymbals had seemed scarcely
louder than the ringing of her own ears. The rest had been only the
natural sequel; _Danny_ and Arlt's failure had led inevitably up to the
finale when Thayer's eyes, burning with that new, strange light, had
held her own eyes captive while he had sounded the tragic note which
dominates all human love.
And the finale had not been final, after all. She had had a vague
presentiment that the cross might be at the end; she had been totally
unprepared to find it pressed to her lips, that selfsame night.
With a swift excuse, Thayer had hurried her back into the music-room;
but he had not been able to prevent that one instant when Beatrix had
found herself face to face with a Lorimer she had never known till then.
Though her eyes had betrayed her horror of the scene, she had kept her
voice steady as she asked Thayer to call her carriage and to say her
farewells to her hostess.
Thayer went with her to her own door. Neither of them spoke until they
stood on the steps; then Thayer cleared his throat, but even then his
voice was husky.
"It may not be as bad as you think, Miss Dane," he said slowly.
As if with a physical effort, she raised her eyes to his.
"Perhaps not," she assented; "but I can think of nothing worse."
It took Thayer two weeks to gather together his courage to see her
again. He too had been shaken by the events of the evening. His Slav
blood, kindled by the Dvorak dance, fired by his anger for Arlt, had
blazed up into a fury of scorn and hatred against the man who would so
allow his own weakness to stab another's strength. Lorimer, in Bobby
Dane's cab and under the lash of Bobby's energetic tongue, was out of
Thayer's way; but, as Thayer stood looking down at the face, whiter than
the fluffy white fur of her cloak, he had felt a momentary longing to
take Beatrix into his arms and, holding her there, to protect her from
Lorimer and from the danger that was threatening her whole happiness.
The moment passed and with it the longing; but, unknown to himself, it
had done its work. It had broken out the beginning of a new channel; it
had prepared the way for a new trend of thought.
Bobby Dane told him what had actually passed between himself and Lorimer
on the way home, what had probably occurred, the next day, between
Lorimer and Beatrix. Thayer waited before calling until he hoped the
memory of what had passed was so remote that neither he nor Beatrix
would think of it again. Nevertheless, though Beatrix was surrounded by
callers and upon her guard, the eyes of both drooped before the sudden
consciousness of having faced a crisis side by side.
According to their annual custom, the Danes went to their cottage at
Monomoy, the first of July, and Lorimer took up his quarters at the
hotel, less than a mile away. Two weeks later, Thayer and Arlt joined
him there. Lorimer had been urgent for Thayer's coming, and Thayer, upon
thinking the matter over, could see no valid reason for refusal. Miss
Gannion was on the way to Alaska, that summer, and, next to her, the
Danes were the closest friends he had made during his first season in
New York. It was only natural that he should arrange his plans in order
to be near them. Moreover, the idle life on the island sounded
attractive, and he was fully aware of the fact that his constant
companionship would be a strong hold upon Lorimer. All in all, he
decided to go.
He took Arlt with him, on the plea of requiring an accompanist for the
new songs he was studying. The boy needed the change. The stress of New
York life was wearing upon him; the consciousness of comparative failure
had disheartened him. He needed the tonic of sea air and of idleness and
of contact with inartistic, care-free humanity. Furthermore, Thayer felt
that he himself might need the tonic of the simple-hearted affection of
the young German. The world about him was too complex. There were days
when the most conventional of incidents seemed weighted with a hidden
meaning, burdened with a consciousness of their own future import.
The summer days passed swiftly and with a certain monotony. During the
mornings while Thayer was practising, Lorimer and Beatrix idled away the
hours together. Later in the day, Thayer always appeared at Monomoy,
sometimes with Lorimer, sometimes alone. Occasionally Beatrix forsook
them both, and went off for long walks with Arlt or floated lazily about
the harbor with him, leaving her mother to entertain the young men with
garrulous recollections of her own childhood.
One subject was forever sealed between Beatrix and Thayer, to one
evening's events they neither of them ever alluded. Now and then, at
some careless turn of the conversation, one or the other of them would
stealthily raise his eyes to find the other furtively watching him; and
their eyes would drop apart again swiftly. It was obvious to Thayer that
Beatrix was carrying a heavy care, that summer. If Lorimer were tardy in
appearing, she was absent and restless; if he came upon her suddenly,
she started; if he talked or laughed more than usual, she invented an
excuse to take him away from the group, apart from the general
conversation. Occasionally, it was evident to Thayer that she was trying
to take him, himself, off his guard, seeking to make him betray himself,
in case he was sharing in her watchfulness. Upon such occasions,
Thayer's mental armor became as impenetrable as a corselet of steel. If
he were keeping guard over Lorimer, amusing him and circumventing him in
a thousand different ways, it was not only for Lorimer's sake, but for
that of Beatrix as well, and it was imperative that Beatrix should never
know. The day had passed forever when he could look into Miss Gannion's
clear eyes and declare with perfect truthfulness that Beatrix was
nothing in the world to him. He admitted this to himself; he also
admitted that there are an infinite number of gradations between the
opposite poles, nothing and something. There was no especial need of
deciding which one of them marked his present status.
This Monday afternoon was the first time he had seen Beatrix since early
September. He had left the others at Monomoy and, in company with Arlt,
had gone back to the city to put himself in training for some autumn
festivals at which he had been engaged to sing. By the time Beatrix was
back in town once more, he had started upon what was destined to be a
triumphal progress through New England. To some men, the mere
professional success would have been enough in itself; but Thayer was of
too large calibre to find a steady diet of applause and adjectives, both
in the superlative degree of comparison, either a satisfactory or a
stimulating meal. Often and often, as he bowed across the footlights
preparatory to shouldering and lugging off his ponderous wreath of
laurels, he would have given all the evening's triumph for the sake of
one quiet hour upon the Monomoy beach.
The evening before had been the climax of his empty successes. It had
been Boston's first oratorio of the season, and the wreath had been an
unusually ponderous one. It had met him promptly at the end of his first
number, and it had impressed him as a curious bit of irony, following as
it did upon the closing phrases of _Spe modo Vivitur_. Were his crowns
to be only the thornless, characterless ones that went with his
profession? He bowed low, nevertheless, before the storm of applause,
set up his trophy against the steadiest of the music racks of the second
violins, and lost himself so completely in wondering how Lorimer was
holding out without him that he went through his part in the quartette,
three numbers later, in perfect unconsciousness of the hostile glances
which the soprano had been casting at him during the _Est tibi Laurea_.
Her flowers had been carnations, and only two dozen of them, at that.
The next afternoon, Thayer found himself in the familiar room, with
Beatrix's hand in his own.
"Only ten weeks, measured by time," he answered her greeting; "but it
seems half a decade since we were killing time on the beach at Monomoy."
"Killing crabs, you would better say," she returned, with a smile. "I
think you and Sidney must have exterminated the race for all time."
"Can you destroy the future for a race that habitually goes backwards?"
he questioned, with a boyish gayety which she had never seen in him
before. "How is Lorimer?"
No one else but Thayer would have noted the slight hesitation that
punctuated her reply.
"He is--well."
Thayer's momentary gayety left him, and he glanced at her sharply.
"And you?" he asked.
"I am always in rude health, just now the better for having you invade
my loneliness. Do you still take only one lump?" Her tone was perfectly
noncommittal.
"Only one. How does it happen that I have the good luck to find you
alone?"
"Everybody is at Mrs. Stanley's. She has captured a new lion, and has
bidden the world to come and inspect her prey."
Thayer laughed.
"What is he, this time?"
"Not he at all; it is a full-fledged Japanese princess whose husband
does lectures on some sort of theosophy before all the universities.
Your lustre is totally eclipsed by this new comet." There was a short
silence; then Beatrix added inconsequently, "We all of us have been so
delighted at your success, Mr. Thayer."