The Helicon Club was at the end of the street. Women interested in
literature, the arts, in social and public affairs could lunch, dine,
entertain their friends in this oasis. Its pleasant rooms were large
and cool, and, crowning boon in the very heart of modern Babylon, they
offered even a measure of isolation. For the members’ roll did not
respond too readily to the length of “the waiting list.”
A nook of the “silence” room enabled Helen to think her thoughts with
the help of a well-earned cup of tea. And a second look at the evening
paper cast one ray upon the darkness. “I believe in the Sword.” The
phrase hurt like a blow, yet somehow it forced the conclusion upon her
that the speech could not have been reported accurately. Knowing John
Endor so well, she could not bring herself to believe that those were
the words he had used. It hardly seemed credible that without some hint
beforehand he should go back on all that he stood for in political life.
Bent on setting doubt at rest, she went presently to the telephone
and rang up John’s chambers in Bury Street. She was informed that Mr.
Endor had not yet returned from Blackhampton, but that he was expected
home about half past seven. Thereupon she left a message, asking him,
if not otherwise engaged, to come and dine with her, adding the little
feminine proviso that “he was not to dress.”
It was then a quarter to six. Two hours slowly passed. Helen had
letters to write, a book deeply interesting to look at. Much was said,
all the same, for her mental habit that, with a grim specter in the
outskirts of her mind, she could yet dragoon her will to the task of
putting it away.
A few minutes before eight John arrived. She went to him at once.
The glow of her greeting masked a tumult of feeling. None could have
guessed from such _entrain_ that she was facing a crisis upon whose
issue her whole life must turn.
“What a piece of luck that you were able to come!”
The eyes and the laugh of a man deeply in love proclaimed this happy
chance to be even more than that.
With no other preface, Helen led the way to the dining room. Before
one question could be put to a hard-driven politician he must be
fed. No matter what her own emotions might immediately dictate, she
had a sense, almost masculine, of the rules of the game. Hers was a
powerfully disciplined nature. A terrible phrase seared her like an
acid, but for the time being sheer stoicism allowed her to bear the
pain.
A table had been commandeered without difficulty in a favorite corner.
Only a few of the Club habitués were dining, but John Endor brought
a new interest into the room. It was no more than the emotion he was
accustomed to excite. He leapt to the eye of every assembly. A force,
a magnet, the lines of a rare personality made an effect of positive
beauty. Nearly all women were attracted by him.
Well over six feet high, thin almost to emaciation, pale with the cast
of thought, his high cheek-bones seemed to accentuate the hollows
beneath them. The poise of the head and the features exquisitely bold
might have been lures for the chisel of Pheidias; the deep eyes with
their in-striking glances were those of a seer. Moving with freedom
and grace, he had the look of a man who has seen a vision of the
eternal. Nature at last seemed to have come near that which through the
centuries she had been in search of. In the mind and mansion of John
Endor her only concern was ultimate things.
As he crossed the wide room, intense curiosity tinged in some cases
by an open admiration, was in the gaze of the other diners. Yet this
did not apply to all. The curiosity was universal, but in one or two
instances there was also a steady, level-lidded hostility. Helen was
conscious of this as she piloted him to their table, perhaps because it
was to be expected; but in this rising politician who had Gladstone’s
power of arousing strong yet diverse emotion wherever he went there
was an apartness which lifted him far beyond the plane whereon friend
gives the countercheck to foe.
It was a good dinner. And the guest, for all his air of
other-worldliness, had none of that rather dubious breeding which holds
itself indifferent to what it eats and drinks. He complimented his
hostess upon a modest sole Colbert and a poulet en casserole--the Club
chef he assured her had nothing to learn from Saint James’s Street and
Pall Mall; to the claret he rendered all the honors of a vintage wine;
in a word, John Endor’s look of high ascetism did not taboo the minor
arts of life.
It was this zest in everything which made him such a lovable companion.
The seer, the visionary, was a man of the world. In spite of his
dedication, in spite of the inward fire of the prophets of old, he had
that subtle appreciation of the human comedy which is one of the final
graces of a liberal education.
This evening, as always, he was charming. Helen could not help yielding
to his attraction, no matter how strict her guard against it; she could
not help being fascinated by his mental outlook and being lulled,
even a little dangerously, by the personality of the man she loved.
Listening to him now made it seem almost tragic that one should have to
put the question she had summoned him to ask.
Delays are perilous. Twice before the enchanted meal was through she
was at the point of sending for the evening paper, so that she might
learn the truth. The fallibility of the newspaper press was still
her hope. But while he talked as only he could, it seemed an act of
barbarism to open the case so crudely. While his fancy and his humor
played upon a hundred things how could one sidetrack him with such a
doubt? There was some absurd mistake. High faith in this hero bade her
take care.
Almost before she knew that she had let a precious moment go, she found
herself bitterly rueing the fact. One of his odd, quick, unforeseen
turns brought her up dead against an impasse she would have given much
to avoid.
Plunging an impetuous hand in his coat, he suddenly produced a half
sheet of notepaper, and tossed it over the table into her lap. “High
time,” he laughed, “we let the dear old _Morning Post_ into our _secret
de Polichinelle_.”
She unfolded the slip of paper and read with a pang of dismay:
| An engagement is announced between |
| John Endor, only son of the late Myles |
| Endor, Wyndham, Middleshire, and |
| Lady Elizabeth Endor, and Helen Mary, |
| eldest daughter of James Lee Sholto |
| and Mrs. Sholto of Longmore, Richmond, |
| Virginia, U. S. A. |
“Will it meet the case?” The question was whimsically direct, even
without the enforcement of his amused eyes.
The blood burned slowly vivid in her face. Happily the quality or
absence of quality in the electric light prevented his seeing it.
“Don’t you think?”--in a gay whisper.
There was no escape. “One shrinks----” Her will cut the phrase in two.
To have completed it would have been to say too little or too much.
“Everybody’s secret,” he laughed.
As she felt the knife edge of the irony lurking in the situation, she
gave a little gasp. There was only one thing for her now. She must
harden her heart.
“I hadn’t realized,” she said, in her soft voice, a delicious blend of
the Old World and the New, “that your speech to-day was going to be so
important.”
“Quite the last word for it,” he said, lightly. “A heart-to-heart
talk, don’t you know, with a few friends and constituents. For some
dark reason they insisted on giving me a lovely bit of old Sheffield
plate--and a scroll. One mustn’t forget the scroll. Perhaps the birds
have been talking. Anyhow, the Chairman thought the salver would look
very nice on the dining-room sideboard of a newly married couple!”
He waited for her laugh, but only one tiny segment of her mind was
listening.
“It fills the entire placard of the _Evening Press_.” She dare not look
at him. There was a clutch at her heart.
“What! My jawbation! Shade of the sea serpent and the giant gooseberry!”
She felt the beat of her heart strike upwards. Her throat was filled
by it. He sounded hardly more than a laughing, irresponsible boy. And
yet the hour was surely near when even his lighter grace notes must
prove organ tones in the strained ear of the time.