They passed up a carven, squarely built staircase to the second floor.
The rooms were lofty and spacious. It seemed to Carlota, in the first
glance about her, there here prevailed something of the same spirit
that had marked her grandmother’s receptions. Little groups gathered
intimately in corners, a girl played something of Grieg’s at the
grand piano in the far room. Her hair had a golden sheen beneath the
lampshade of Chinese embroidery, bronze and yellow.
The Marchese was in his happiest mood, the smiling courtier to his
finger-tips. He left her with Mrs. Phelps, a little dark woman with
frankly graying hair, but as the other guests came up the staircase,
Carlota found herself on a low Moorish stool beside Carrollton
Phelps’s chair. He attracted her greatly. During the drive down the
Avenue the Marchese had told her his story with unction. It was a
favorite tale with him. Phelps had gone abroad in the earliest days
of the war, joining the Lafayette Escadrille. Only those who knew him
intimately before this happened, could appreciate what his personal
gift of service had meant at that time even in the great summing-up of
sacrifice that followed later. He had been a very successful artist,
painting portraits of celebrities and social leaders. He had always
been lavish in entertaining even then, and now, when he returned at
thirty-five, a helpless paralytic from his final fall, the most amazing
thing had been, as the Marchese expressed it, that “his wings were
unbroken.”
To Carlota, even the expression of his face brought a certain sense of
encouragement, as if he divined the strangeness that she felt among
all these new faces. His dark hair was prematurely whitened like his
wife’s, but she liked his lean, virile face, and keen, dark eyes. Even
while his friends came and went beside him, he kept her there, asking
her questions of her life in Italy.
“The Marchese has told me who you are--a glorious heritage. Mind you
keep the pace, but don’t let them starve you.” His thin, strong hands
gesticulated eagerly. “I know them. It was the same with me before I
went over, success and more success and then--husks. Do you know the
greatest thing that came to me from it all? My wife. We were married
just before I left, and she went also, down in Serbia, where it was
hell, you remember, nursing. I did not see her for four years, then
her face came out of a gray cloud in a London hospital and I found
the strength to live even to look at her. Don’t let them deceive you,
my dear. There is nothing at all in this thing called life but love
and ideals. Will you tell that fellow to come here, the one with the
violin.”
The man stood by the piano, smiling at something the girl had just said
as she turned from the keyboard. He bowed as Carlota gave her message,
looked at her with his quizzical, half-closed eyes near-sightedly, and
strolled to Phelps’s side. Presently he returned.
“I have to bring you back. He only wanted me to meet you.”
“I have been preaching your song of life,” Phelps said, drawing himself
up in his chair with the quick, restless movement that spoke of
pain-cramped muscles. “This is the spirit of Serbia and all burdened
peoples, Dmitri Kavec. Betty saved his life, and he has retaliated
by keeping me in a ferment of enthusiasm over his country in her
birth-pangs. He is not as sardonic as he appears. It is a pose.”
Dmitri’s face flushed eagerly, a queer, shy deepening in color like an
embarrassed boy.
“I never pose, Miss Trelango. My life is nothing, understand. I drop it
overboard anywhere at all, but I had forgotten how to laugh or look at
the sun, and Mrs. Phelps has shown it to me again, that is all. For her
sake I put up with the abuse from this person here. Do you live down
here?”
Carlota shook her head. Some one had taken the place of the girl at the
piano, she could not see whom, but at the first low, minor chords, she
was aware of a strange thrill of interest. Dmitri leaned back in the
winged armchair next to Phelps and closed his eyes.
“Now we have some dream pictures,” he said softly.
Carlota lifted her head eagerly to catch a glimpse of the player. The
other men in the studio, even Phelps himself, had all seemed to her
like the Marchese and Jacobelli, middle-aged, sophisticated, impervious
to romance or sentiment, tired of all emotion. But the boy at the piano
was different. He seemed to have forgotten the people around him, and
yet he led their fancy where he would with the magic of his melody and
tone pictures.
Looking from face to face Carlota saw the spell steal over each.
The Marchese smiled with half-closed eyes, living over the joyous
indiscretions of his youth. Mrs. Phelps had forgotten her guests as
she bent over Carrollton, her fingers clasped in his with mothering
tenderness. The girl who had played Grieg leaned back her head, her
eyes filled with moody unrest. Dmitri bent forward, his cigarette
burning itself to a neglected ash, a little smile on his lips. Almost
imperceptibly his eyes watched Carlota.
A strange troubled feeling stole over her. It was as if the music had
seized upon her own secret yearnings and was expressing them in all its
exotic cadence. Suddenly she caught the eyes of the musician watching
her as he played. The studio was dimly lighted from long, pendent
temple lamps. The shifting glow from a tall candelabra on the piano
showed her his face. It was young, with strong, lean lines, restless,
seeking eyes, the chin and mouth lacking the sensuous weakness of the
usual virtuoso. When he finished he crossed to her, pausing to answer a
few who stopped him on the way. Dmitri sighed heavily and rose.
“See now, he will come and tell you he has been waiting for æons to
see your face. He is all on fire. Do not extinguish the flame. He will
tread the star path in this mood if you do not pitch him down to earth.”
Carlota drew back from his amused eyes, behind a tall Moorish screen
of carved olive fretwork. Why did they all smile at things that were
sacred and beyond all sense of touch or sound? If the Marchese would
only come near, she would beg him to leave now, now while it was all
clear and fresh in her mind, the haunting, hurting sweetness of the
music and the long look between them. And as she found her breath,
he stood beside her. For the moment they were as isolated as if he
had found her alone in some glade of Fontainebleau, like Pierrot and
Columbine.
“Why did you try to hide from me?” His tone was low and broken with
embarrassment. “I played to you--you knew that, didn’t you? I tried
to get to you before, but Dmitri had you. Who are you, you pagan girl
with the wonder eyes? Tell me how you slipped in here to-night. Where I
come from, we have gorgeous night moths; I love them, brown and tawny.
Your eyes are that color, and your face is like a jasmine lifted to
the moon. A warm, amber moon in late August, don’t you know. You’ll
think I’m a crazy poet if I keep on, but it’s your own fault. You make
me want to be a poet and everything else that means adoration of you.
Can’t you speak to me?”
She closed her eyes as he gripped her hands in his. It was all so
strange, so wrong, she knew how Maria would banish any such mad
emotions, and yet she gloried in the tumult in her heart, in the swift
response to every word he uttered, the reckless urge within her to turn
to him. She strove to conquer it, and answer with composure.
“I think it is dangerous to speak so. Let us go to Mr. Phelps.”
“And your eyes say all the while, ‘I have found you,’” he laughed and
took the seat beside her. “That’s what I told myself when you looked
at me. I’ve found her. Tell me, truthfully, aren’t you glad to see me,
aren’t you?”
Carlota smiled up at him teasingly.
“The man you call Dmitri told me you would say this to me. You should
not let him spoil the surprise.”
“Did he? I didn’t think the old gray fra had such discernment. Did he
tell you my name? I know yours. It is all the sweethearts of the ages
in one. That last thing I played was a Celtic love song; I saw you in
a silver mist with the sea behind you and headlands and a girl moon
clambering up the stairway of desire.” He stopped short, eyeing her
with boyish curiosity. “I wonder just who you are really. You came with
old Veracci, didn’t you?”
“I am Italian,” Carlota answered gravely. “I have been here nearly
three years. I am a singer.”
“Are you?” he exclaimed eagerly. “That’s why everything in me called
out to you. I was in college, the third year, when the war came over
here. I had wanted to go with Carrollton, but I was just eighteen
then, so I promised my mother I’d wait. She’ll love you,” he added
ingenuously. “I went over the next spring and came through all right;
that’s how I met Dmitri. We were all wounded about the same time.”
“I thought you said you were all right?”
“I mean I didn’t get killed or anything like that. Isn’t Phelps a
wonder? He’d give a dying coyote courage to howl. He told me to stick
it out down here. I’m a composer. One of those kinks of fate put me
into a perfectly respectable, sane Colorado family. Father was head
of some smelter works out there. He started me through Columbia, with
a postgrad. in law ahead of me, but I met Carrollton and he heard me
play. Now I’m here until I make good.”
“You will be famous.” Carlota’s eyes shone as she looked up at him.
“Never have I heard such music, and I have listened to--” She checked
herself, a sudden spirit of mischief prompting her. Was he not Pierrot,
poor and struggling, with his heart a chalice of faith uplifted to the
stars, while she was a child of fortune with the pathway to success
fair and broad before her as the sea road to the Campagna back home.
But for to-night, only to-night, she would be Columbine for him,
straying, friendless Columbine, seeking shelter from the storm. “Some
day I hope to be a great singer,” she said softly.
“Do you? You beautiful, dreaming moth girl. And lessons cost like the
very devil here in New York.” He ran his fingers through his close-cut
blond hair doubtfully, Carlota watching him shyly, thinking how much
his profile was like that of a certain young emperor’s on an old
Roman coin she had. There was the same straight line from forehead to
nostril, the same touch of youth’s arrogance in his curving lips and
cleft, projecting chin. “Do you know,” he continued confidently, “I am
sure I can help you. I could start you on your lessons, you know. Don’t
refuse. I’d love to help you, to even think I was. I have a rocky old
studio down on the Square; nothing like this; it’s poverty’s back door
compared to it, but if you’ll come there, I will help you.”
“Oh, but it is impossible,” Carlota exclaimed, rising hurriedly. “I
never go anywhere alone, it is not the custom with my people. It is so
very kind of you, but”--she met his eyes wistfully--“I do not even know
your name.”
“I am Griffeth Ames. Ask Veracci, he knows me, so does Phelps. Listen,
if you won’t come for your own sake, for God’s pity, come for mine.
I’m starving down here for just what you gave me to-night when I first
looked into your eyes--inspiration. I must see you and talk to you
about my work; I need you. Will you come?”
“The heavens would fall if I did,” she laughed unsteadily, trying to
draw her hands from his clasp.
“Let them crash, who cares?” he said. “You’ll come to me, I know you
will. I’ll call to you with music till you hear.”