“DARK MAGDALEN.”
Mr. Lovell sat earning his salary.
In a black temper he plodded through his developing, washed his
hands, decided the afternoon was too gray for photographic printing,
and walking out incontinently crossed Fleet Street and turned into a
labyrinth of dingy thoroughfares. If his brown face were a little paler
from spending his days over stuffy chemicals and his eyesight somewhat
strained on retouching ugly people’s portraits, his long, light step
was as usual. Half-a-dozen women glanced at the man as he passed them,
with his look of being clean outside and in, of careless strength, of
immaculate smartness in old blue serge clothes.
But Mr. Lovell had no eye for women, being engaged inwardly in
cursing his nearest relative up in heaps. Not that he had learned
anything new about him, nor heard anything tangibly annoying. But he
had a perfectly involuntary trick of putting two and two together
correctly; and the result to-day sickened him. So much so that as he
walked he deliberately assured himself that he had imagined the whole
thing--items added up and the result; after which he instantly reduced
several fractions to a common denominator and did the whole thing over
again.
“I wish to Heaven he’d marry again and migrate,” he thought in
exasperation, and turned impatiently into a tobacconist’s and bought a
handful of cigarettes. Good tobacco was wicked on a pound a week, and
Mr. Lovell, to be accurate, was hungry. Also it was tea-time, and for
a moment there came into his mind the carnal vision of his late club,
where there were comfortable chairs, hot toast and men of his own class
to speak to. His mouth set hard on his extravagant cigarette.
“I’ll go back when I’ve money to go,” he said to himself grimly,
“unless I find it necessary to return and put the fear of God into a
fool!” and his face was so forbidding that a girl who was coming down
the street almost changed her mind. For it was all very well to clear
out of an unpleasant and dependent situation, but when black suspicions
followed you that you were playing into some one’s hands by so doing it
spelled of cowardice.
“I’m ---- if it’s any business of mine!” thought Mr. Lovell angrily.
“Let him hang himself;” but in his soul he knew it was not that which
haunted him, but something quite Quixotic and outside the sympathy of a
man who had fallen from high estate to retouching photographs.
A woman’s black skirt brushed his boot and he drew back civilly.
The next second he threw a just-lighted cigarette into the street and
looked straight into a girl’s eyes.
“Mr. Lovell!” said Magdalen Clyde, her cheeks a pale flame, her eyes a
dark one.
Lovell made no answer, good or bad, and she turned white as she looked
away.
The lifting of his hat, the quick throwing away of his cigarette, had
been ordinary good manners; his eyes were hard as steel, his face
forbidding, and she had been glad to see him, gladder than of anything
else she had ever known. There was no earthly reason that he should be
pleased at seeing a girl he had only met twice in his life; but all the
same her shamed disappointment made her angry.
“‘A hard man with a soft manner,’” she quoted to herself involuntarily,
her eyes still on a grocer’s window opposite, so that she did not see
the change on Dick Lovell’s face as he looked down at her.
“It was odd, my meeting you,” she said indifferently. “I was startled.
Good-by,” with a little nod that she did not know was languid any more
than that her averted face was beautiful.
“Odd?” said Mr. Lovell, taking a quick step to her side as she would
have walked on. “I don’t know--I suppose so,” without a glimmer of just
how odd it was. “It’s a great pleasure at all events. I had no idea you
were even in town.”
“I came back three weeks ago,” she said, still without looking at him.
In Scotland, in a bad place, it had seemed so sure that this man was
a friend; here and now she knew the thought had been the thought of
a fool. She and Dolly, masquerading, could not dare to have friends
picked up at random. In the waning light she turned, her face
repellant, her eyes cold. She was worrying over unhatched chickens; Mr.
Lovell had made no sign of either friendliness or pleasure at seeing
her.
The sudden, sweet light in the eyes she met sent the blood to her
face. She stood for one breathless instant stock-still, three times
more beautiful than he had even dreamed, and all Dick Lovell’s uneasy
thoughts were gone at the lovely sight.
“I feel as if you’d waked me from a bad dream,” he said slowly. “Do you
know for a moment I could scarcely believe my eyes?”
“I know you terrified me,” observed Miss Clyde, marching on with a
queer feeling that she must get away from his eyes if she were wise. “I
never in my life saw anyone look more bad-tempered than you did when I
spoke to you.”
Lovell laughed, and looked ten years younger for it.
“Was that why you wouldn’t look at me?” he said boyishly. “I’ve been
in a black rage all day; more fool I! Are you going anywhere in
particular?” with a sudden knowledge that she meant to dismiss him, and
as sudden a determination that he would not submit to it.
“I’m going to that French bakery,” pointing across the street.
“So am I,” he calmly remarked. “I was going to have tea there. I
wonder--if you----” he stammered. Lovell, who had been the best-beloved
and worst-spoiled man in town, stammering at asking a girl to have tea!
A hundred thoughts went through Magdalen’s head before she answered.
She was tired out, lonely; why should she never be happy because of
Dolly’s cares? She threw the whole bundle of them aside and answered
the half-finished question demurely:
“I would, if there were little hot cakes.”
In Lovell’s pocket was the change those cigarettes had left from ten
shillings; his eyes smiled into hers with the reckless consciousness of
wealth.
“There shall be,” he averred, and he also cast a black care behind him
as they entered the little shop where the coffee was wonderful and the
tea weird.
Lovell, as he gave an order to the white-capped man behind the counter,
did not notice his companion pause and look back into the dingy
street. She made a little self-contemptuous movement, as no one of the
passers-by so much as glanced at Dufour’s.
It must have been fancy that ever since she stopped to speak to Lovell
some one had never let her get out of sight.
“I’m getting to be an awful fool,” the girl reflected swiftly. “This
hole-and-corner business of Doll’s, and her eternal cautions, are
making me nervous. We’re all right; we’ve sunk in London like stones
till I met him to-day. I don’t know why I’m so stupid; it was all so
much easier and quicker than I thought. It all went swimmingly.”
It certainly had. At three o’clock one day three weeks ago “Mrs.
Morton, child and maid” had departed from the Euston Hotel; at five
Lady Barnysdale--after nearly frightening Mr. Barrow into a fit by her
appearance, when he had just wired diplomatic condolences on her death
to Lord Stratharden--had left the lawyer’s office for Charing Cross and
Paris, with a hundred pounds in her pocket; at seven Mrs. Morton and
party had reappeared again at a modest hotel, the poorer by the price
of unused tickets to Paris, and Dolly had gone to bed and stayed there
for a week, after which she had emerged quite recovered and gayer than
the gay, had boldly gone out, trusting in a thick crepe veil and a
plausible tongue, and taken the upper part of a house in Hare Street.
To the vacating tenant, a milliner, she gave an extra ten pounds for
leaving her plate on the door, which was easily earned money to that
lady, who was retiring in disgust from a phantom business. It was,
therefore, from behind the neglected door-plate and the respectable
blinds of “Madame Aline, Robes and Modes,” that Miss Magdalen Clyde
had come out to-day in search of French bread; come out with an eye at
every corner and a firm determination to take to her heels at the sight
of the most innocuous Chinaman in London, and ended in Dufour’s shop,
with a dismissal of all her nervous tremblings and groundless fears
because a man’s hawk eyes were the eyes of a comrade as he came back to
her side.
“I ordered coffee,” said Lovell, and perhaps he had no idea what a
pleasant voice he had, nor what a tower of strength he looked in his
worn blue serge. “Their tea is horrible, but the little hot cakes!”
and he laughed as he stood back to let her pass into Mr. Dufour’s
respectable family tea-room.
To his surprise “the girl whose name was Magdalen” sat down at the
little marble table with undisguised fatigue. He wondered swiftly who
and what she was. His quick glance took in her smart black gown, her
chinchilla furs, the immaculate dressing of her lovely rust-colored
hair, her long, white hands as she took off her gloves. The left one
was no business of his, but a senseless pleasure made him smile as he
looked at it. Whoever she was she was nobody’s wife; Mr. Lovell had no
leaning toward other people’s property.
That she was a lady he did not even say to himself; it was too evident.
No one who put on make-up every night could have that sort of skin;
she was not an actress. Yet, somehow, she did not look like a girl who
did nothing; he was pretty certain that care and responsibility fell
on those shoulders; for every line of her was tired and lax in Mr.
Dufour’s hard chair; and yet she looked anything but poor.
That a girl he had met in Krug’s half-caste restaurant without benefit
of introduction, had followed it up by making no bones about coming to
tea with him, never entered the man’s head. The very look of her told
him there was never a girl in the world more unconscious of her strange
beauty than she.
“This isn’t a very grand place to bring you to,” he said with a sudden
consciousness that, for all he knew, she might be used to Prince’s
Restaurant. “But it’s quiet.”
Remembering Krug’s, he kept his tongue from “respectable.”
“Yes,” she said simply. She looked straight at him. “I suppose I should
not have come,” she observed calmly; “but I wanted to. I was tired. We
have just found new quarters--my sister and I. And--did you ever move?”
she suddenly and tragically inquired.
“I did. But as I had only myself and some clothes it was not
fatiguing,” rather grimly, remembering the house from which he had
departed in haste. “You look as if your removal had been tiresome. Will
you pour out the coffee, or shall I?”
“You,” with the smile that made her lovely. “I don’t do those things
well.”
“Non-sense!” said Lovell with a drawling sweetness that made the curt
word civil.
In complete happiness, such as neither had ever tasted in their lives,
the two sat at their little table. If for a moment the ghosts of the
many rebukes she had given with some point to Dolly, on the subject of
going to tea with unknown men, arose before Magdalen Clyde, she put
them behind her with determination. Dolly’s men and this man were not
alike; and for once she would let herself go, be young and gay and
happy like other girls, with no silly hiding to worry them. As for
Lovell, he was like a lost dog who has suddenly got home. No one would
ever have said he was grave and unhappy to-day.
The economical soul of Mr. Dufour had not lighted the gas in his
tea-room, which was getting dusky. With his hand on the matches, he
glanced with pleased sympathy at the two who took their coffee so
gaily, and were so appreciative of his hot cakes; glanced back at his
shop window, and drew a curtain noiselessly over the tea-room door.
M. Dufour, where a pretty woman was concerned, was a man of impulse, to
his own mind one of great insight; and----
He was putting cakes on a tray deliberately as a man entered his shop.
If M. Dufour had not liked his looks from outside he liked them still
less from in.
“The fat and furious husband!” said he to himself, with his best shop
smile. He did not move from his place by the tea-room door.
“Monsieur wanted?” he asked blandly. “Bread, cakes?--all of the best.”
The man laughed. If his manner meant to be pleasant it was not. M.
Dufour observed that utter silence reigned in his tea-room.
“Good food for women,” the new visitor returned patronizingly. “No; let
me have a light, will you? By the way, did a lady come in here half an
hour ago?”
“Several, monsieur.” M. Dufour’s box of matches was obsequiously held
out on a tray.
“Oh, damn the several! A pale girl with reddish hair?”
M. Dufour was a judge of beauty and his gorge rose.
“I did not observe,” he said with a shrug, “any red hair. One tall lady
arrived and has just departed through that door,” with a slighting wave
of his hand to his back entrance.
“You’ve a tea-room,” the visitor bluntly remarked in spite of a
thick-lipped smile. “I’ll have tea.”
“I regret it is impossible,” said the Frenchman smoothly. “My tea-room
is to-day closed. My wife is indisposed.”
He was too clever to give the man any idea that he was lying; he began,
apologetically, to recommend his little cakes. But it was to empty air.
The unwelcome customer--who had not paid for his box of matches--had
left the shop by the little-used back door.
To the proprietor’s eyes rose the bland light of the successful
diplomatist. The denied tea was of course a loss to business, but what
M. Dufour had begun to oblige his old customer, M. Lovell, he had
finished for personal dislike of a disagreeable man. He did not grudge
his sixpence thrown away.
“Also, I can charge extra for the coffee!” he thought with a pleasant
consciousness of having done a kind and tactful action.
It was a pity he could not have seen the reason for the sudden silence
in the tea-room. Magdalen, sitting very straight, had held up a warning
hand and sat listening. There was no mistaking Starr-Dalton’s voice; it
was odd that he had been in her thought all day.
As the door closed behind him she rose with a little laugh.
“Did you hear?” she said. “That man was looking for me. He used to come
to see us, and we hated him. We didn’t mean him to know we were in
London.”
There was careless scorn in her face, but there was also the cold,
intuitive hatred many a girl has for a bad man.
Lovell regarded her in silence. Whoever and whatever she was, there was
nothing milk-and-water about her.
“He shan’t know now if you don’t want him to,” he said. “You’re not
going because of him?” for she had risen.
“No,” truthfully enough. “It is quite time I was at home, though.”
Starr-Dalton was neither here nor there to her; it was not he who could
shatter the dream of peace that had come to her; the time was gone by
when she must be civil to him for the sake of borrowed money; she
could afford to be angry at his insolence in dogging her.
“I won’t have it,” she thought. “He shan’t follow me home and find
Dolly. I’ll drive,” but even as she thought her face fell; she had only
sixpence; a hansom was impossible, and to walk might mean running into
Starr-Dalton at the first corner.
She looked up and met Lovell’s eyes.
“Ready?” said he simply. “I’m going to take you home in a hansom if I
may.”
At the modest door where Madame Aline’s door-plate shone meagerly in
the gaslight she turned to him.
“You’ve been very kind,” she said a little uncomfortably, “and you
don’t even know my name”--for “Madame Aline’s sister” had not thought
of one, and did not dare to make one up on the spur of the moment.
“No.” Mr. Lovell perhaps helped her out with some haste. “I know--that
is--Madame Aline is quite enough for me!” with a glance at the
tarnished sign.
But when she had gone in and the hansom had driven off he put the two
shillings that remained to him into his pocket and laughed. Her name
had been settled for him long ago.
“Good-night, Dark Magdalen,” said he to a shut door, and lifted his hat
as he turned away.