"What?" demanded her father.
Altogether unexpectedly little Eve Edgarton threw back her tousled
head and burst out laughing.
"Oh, Father!" she jeered. "Can't you take a joke?"
"I don't know as you ever offered me one before," growled her father a
bit ungraciously.
"All the same," asserted little Eve Edgarton with sudden
seriousness--"all the same, Father, he did stop breathing twice. And I
worked and I worked and I worked over him!" Slowly her great eyes
widened.
"And oh, Father, his skin!" she whispered simply.
"Hush!" snapped her father with a great gust of resentment that he
took to be a gust of propriety. "Hush, I say! I tell you it isn't
delicate for a--for a girl to talk about a man's skin!"
"Oh--but his skin was very delicate," mused little Eve Edgarton
persistently. "There in the lantern light--"
"What lantern light?" demanded her father.
"And the moonlight," murmured little Eve Edgarton.
"What moonlight?" demanded her father. A trifle quizzically he stepped
forward and peered into his daughter's face. "Personally, Eve," he
said, "I don't care for the young man. And I certainly don't wish to
hear anything about his skin. Not anything! Do you understand? I'm
very glad you saved his life," he hastened to affirm. "It was very
commendable of you, I'm sure, and some one, doubtless, will be very
much relieved. But for me personally the incident is closed! Closed, I
said. Do you understand?"
Bruskly he turned back toward his own room, and then swung around
again suddenly in the doorway.
"Eve," he frowned. "That was a joke--wasn't it?--what you said about
wanting to keep that young man?"
"Why, of course!" said little Eve Edgarton.
"Well, I must say--it was an exceedingly clumsy one!" growled her
father irritably.
"Maybe so," droned little Eve Edgarton with unruffled serenity. "It
was the first joke, you see, that I ever made." Slowly again her eyes
began to widen. "All the same, Father," she said, "his--"
"Hush!" he ordered, and slammed the door conclusively behind him.
Very thoughtfully for a moment little Eve Edgarton kept right on
standing there in the middle of the room. In her eyes was just the
faintest possible suggestion of a smile. But there was no smile
whatsoever about her lips. Her lips indeed were quite drawn and most
flagrantly set with the expression of one who, having something
determinate to say, will--yet--say it, somewhere, sometime, somehow,
though the skies fall and all the waters of the earth dry up.
Then like the dart of a bird, she flashed to her father's door and
opened it.
"Father!" she whispered. "Father!"
"Yes," answered the half-muffled, pillowy voice. "What is it?"
"Oh, I forgot to tell you something that happened once--down in
Indo-China," whispered little Eve Edgarton. "Once when you were away,"
she confided breathlessly, "I pulled a half-drowned coolie out of a
canal."
"Well, what of it?" asked her father a bit tartly.
"Oh, nothing special," said little Eve Edgarton, "except that his skin
was like yellow parchment! And sand-paper! And old plaster!"
Without further ado then, she turned away, and, except for the single
ecstatic episode of making the four hundred muffins for breakfast,
resumed her pulseless role of being just--little Eve Edgarton.
As for Barton, the subsequent morning hours brought sleep and sleep
only--the sort of sleep that fairly souses the senses in oblivion,
weighing the limbs with lead, the brain with stupor, till the sleeper
rolls out from under the load at last like one half paralyzed with
cramp and helplessness.
Certainly it was long after noon-time before Barton actually rallied
his aching bones, his dizzy head, his refractory inclinations, to meet
the fluctuant sympathy and chaff that awaited him down-stairs in every
nook and corner of the great, idle-minded hotel.
Conscientiously, but without enthusiasm, from the temporary retreat of
the men's writing-room, he sent up his card at last to Mr. Edgarton,
and was duly informed that that gentleman and his daughter were
mountain-climbing. In an absurd flare of disappointment then, he edged
his way out through the prattling piazza groups to the shouting tennis
players, and on from the shouting tennis players to the teasing
golfers, and back from the teasing golfers to the peaceful
writing-room, where in a great, lazy chair by the open window he
settled down once more with unwonted morbidness to brood over the
grimly bizarre happenings of the previous night.
In a soft blur of sound and sense the names of other people came
wafting to him from time to time, and once or twice at least the word
"Barton" shrilled out at him with astonishing poignancy. Still like a
man half drugged he dozed again--and woke in a vague, sweating
terror--and dozed again--and dreamed again--and roused himself at last
with the one violent determination to hook his slipping consciousness,
whether or no, into the nearest conversation that he could reach.
The conversation going on at the moment just outside his window was
not a particularly interesting one to hook one's attention into, but
at least it was fairly distinct. In blissfully rational human voices
two unknown men were discussing the non-domesticity of the modern
woman. It was not an erudite discussion, but just a mere personal
complaint.
"I had a house," wailed one, "the nicest, coziest house you ever saw.
We were two years building it. And there was a garden--a real
jim-dandy flower and vegetable garden--and there were twenty-seven
fruit-trees. But my wife--" the wail deepened--"my wife--she just
would live in a hotel! Couldn't stand the 'strain,' she said, of
'planning food three times a day'! Not--'couldn't stand the strain of
earning meals three times a day'--you understand," the wailing voice
added significantly, "but couldn't stand the strain of ordering 'em.
People all around you, you know, starving to death for just--bread;
but she couldn't stand the strain of having to decide between squab
and tenderloin! Eh?"
"Oh, Lordy! You can't tell me anything!" snapped the other voice more
incisively. "Houses? I've had four! First it was the cellar my wife
wanted to eliminate! Then it was the attic! Then it was--We're living
in an apartment now!" he finished abruptly. "An apartment, mind you!
One of those blankety--blank--blank--blank apartments!"
"Humph!" wailed the first voice again. "There's hardly a woman you
meet these days who hasn't got rouge on her cheeks, but a man's got to
go back--two generations, I guess, if he wants to find one that's got
any flour on her nose!"
"Flour on her nose?" interrupted the sharper voice. "Flour on her
nose? Oh, ye gods! I don't believe there's a woman in this whole hotel
who'd know flour if she saw it! Women don't care any more, I tell you!
They don't care!"
Just as a mere bit of physical stimulus the crescendoish stridency of
the speech roused Barton to a lazy smile. Then, altogether
unexpectedly, across indifference, across drowsiness, across absolute
physical and mental non-concern, the idea behind the speech came
hurtling to him and started him bolt upright in his chair.
"Ha!" he thought. "I know a girl that cares!" From head to foot a
sudden warm sense of satisfaction glowed through him, a throb of
pride, a puffiness of the chest. "Ha!" he gloated. "H--"
Then interruptingly from outside the window he heard the click of
chairs hitching a bit nearer together.
"Sst!" whispered one voice. "Who's the freak in the 1830 clothes?"
"Why, that? Why, that's the little Edgarton girl," piped the other
voice cautiously. "It isn't so much the '1830 clothes' as the 1830
expression that gets me! Where in creation--"
"Oh, upon my soul," groaned the man whose wife "would live in a
hotel." "Oh, upon my soul--if there's one thing that I can't stand
it's a woman who hasn't any style! If I had my way," he threatened
with hissing emphasis, "if I had my way, I tell you, I'd have every
homely looking woman in the world put out of her misery! Put out of my
misery--is what I mean!"
"Ha! Ha! Ha!" chuckled the other voice.
"Ha! Ha! Ha!" gibed both voices ecstatically together.
With quite unnecessary haste Barton sprang to the window and looked
out.
It was Eve Edgarton! And she did look funny! Not especially funny, but
just plain, every-day little-Eve-Edgarton funny, in a shabby old
English tramping suit, with a knapsack slung askew across one
shoulder, a faded Alpine hat yanked down across her eyes, and one
steel-wristed little hand dragging a mountain laurel bush almost as
big as herself. Close behind her followed her father, equally shabby,
his shapeless pockets fairly bulging with rocks, a battered tin botany
kit in one hand, a dingy black camera-box in the other.
Impulsively Barton started out to meet them, but just a step from the
threshold of the piazza door he sensed for the first time the long
line of smokers watching the two figures grinningly above their puffy
brown pipes and cigars.
"What is it?" called one smoker to another. "Moving Day in Jungle
Town?"
"Ha! Ha! Ha!" tittered the whole line of smokers. "Ha!--Ha! Ha!
Ha!--Ha!"
So, because he belonged, not so much to the type of person that can't
stand having its friends laughed at, as to the type that can't stand
having friends who are liable to be laughed at, Barton changed his
mind quite precipitately about identifying himself at that particular
moment with the Edgarton family, and whirled back instead to the
writing-room. There, by the aid of the hotel clerk, and two bell-boys,
and three new blotters, and a different pen, and an entirely fresh
bottle of ink, and just exactly the right-sized, the right-tinted sort
of letter paper, he concocted a perfectly charming note to little Eve
Edgarton--a note full of compliment, of gratitude, of sincere
appreciation, a note reiterating even once more his persistent
intention of rendering her somewhere, sometime, a really significant
service!
Whereupon, thus duly relieved of his truly honest effort at
self-expression, he went back again to his own kind--to the
prattling, the well-groomed, the ultra-fashionables of both mind and
body. And there on the shining tennis-courts and the soft golf greens,
through the late yellow afternoon and the first gray threat of
twilight, the old sickening ennui came creeping back to his senses,
warring chaotically there with the natural nervous reaction of his
recent adventure, till just out of sheer morbid unrest, as soon as the
flower-scented, candle-lighted dinner hour was over, he went stalking
round and round the interminable piazzas, hunting in every dark corner
for Mr. Edgarton and his daughter.
Meeting them abruptly at last in the full glare of the office, he
clutched fatuously at Mr. Edgarton's reluctant attention with some
quick question about the extraordinary moonlight, and stood by,
grinning like any bashful schoolboy, while Mr. Edgarton explained to
him severely, as if it were his fault, just why and to what extent the
radii of mountain moonlight differed from the radii of any other kind
of moonlight, and Eve herself, in absolute spiritual remoteness,
stood patiently shifting her weight from one foot to the other,
staring abstractedly all the time at the floor under her feet.
Right into the midst of this instructive discourse broke one of
Barton's men friends with a sharp jog of his elbow, and a brief,
apologetic nod to the Edgartons.
"Oh, I say, Barton!" cried the newcomer, breathlessly. "That wedding,
you know, over across at the Kentons' to-night, with the Viennese
orchestra--and Heaven knows what from New York? Well, we've shanghaied
the whole business for a dance here to-morrow night! Music! Flowers!
Palms! Catering! Everything! It's going to be the biggest little
dancing party that this slice of North American scenery ever saw!
And--"
Slowly little Eve Edgarton lifted her great solemn eyes to the
newcomer's face.
"A party?" she drawled. "A--a--dancing party--you mean? A
real--Christian--dancing party?"
Dully the big eyes drooped again, and as if in mere casual mannerism
her little brown hands went creeping up to the white breast of her
gown. Then just as startling, just-as unprovable as the flash of a
shooting star, her glance flashed up at Barton.
"O--h!" gasped little Eve Edgarton.
"O--h!" said Barton.
Astoundingly in his ears bells seemed suddenly to be ringing. His head
was awhirl, his pulses fairly pounding with the weird, quixotic
purport of his impulse.
"Miss Edgarton," he began. "Miss--"
Then right behind him two older men joggled him awkwardly in passing.
"--and that Miss Von Eaton," chuckled one man to another. "Lordy!
There'll be more than forty men after her for to-morrow night! Smith!
Arnold! Hudson! Hazeltine! Who are you betting will get her?"
"I'M BETTING THAT I WILL!" crashed every brutally
competitive male instinct in Barton's body. Impetuously he broke
away from the Edgartons and darted off to find Miss Von Eaton before
"Smith--Arnold--Hudson--Hazeltine"--or any other man should find
her!
So he sent little Eve Edgarton a great, gorgeous box of candy instead,
wonderful candy, pounds and pounds of it, fine, fluted chocolates, and
rose-pink bonbons, and fat, sugared violets, and all sorts of
tin-foiled mysteries of fruit and spice.
And when the night of the party came he strutted triumphantly to it
with Helene Von Eaton, who already at twenty was beginning to be just
a little bit bored with parties; and together through all that riot of
music and flowers and rainbow colors and dazzling lights they trotted
and tangoed with monotonous perfection--the envied and admired of all
beholders; two superbly physical young specimens of manhood and
womanhood, desperately condoning each other's dullnesses for the sake
of each other's good looks.
And while Youth and its Laughter--a chaos of color and shrill
crescendos--was surging back and forth across the flower-wreathed
piazzas, and violins were wheedling, and Japanese lanterns drunk with
candle light were bobbing gaily in the balsam-scented breeze, little
Eve Edgarton, up-stairs in her own room, was kneeling crampishly on
the floor by the open window, with her chin on the window-sill,
staring quizzically down--down--down on all that joy and novelty, till
her father called her a trifle impatiently at last from his microscope
table on the other side of the room.
"Eve!" summoned her father. "What an idler you are! Can't you see how
worried I am over this specimen here? My eyes, I tell you, aren't what
they used to be."
Then, patiently, little Eve Edgarton scrambled to her feet and,
crossing over to her father's table, pushed his head mechanically
aside and, bending down, squinted her own eye close to his magnifying
glass.
"Bell-shaped calyx?" she began. "Five petals of the corollary partly
united? Why, it must be some relation to the Mexican rain-tree," she
mumbled without enthusiasm. "Leaves--alternate, bi-pinnate, very
typically--few foliate," she continued. "Why, it's a--a
Pithecolobium."
"Sure enough," said Edgarton. "That's what I thought all the time."
As one eminently relieved of all future worry in the matter, he jumped
up, pushed away his microscopic work, and, grabbing up the biggest
book on the table, bolted unceremoniously for an easy chair.
Indifferently for a moment little Eve Edgarton stood watching him.
Then heavily, like a sleepy, insistent puppy dog, she shambled across
the room and, climbing up into her father's lap, shoved aside her
father's book, and burrowed her head triumphantly back into the lean,
bony curve of his shoulder, her whole yawning interest centered
apparently in the toes of her father's slippers.
Then so quietly that it scarcely seemed abrupt, "Father," she asked,
"was my mother--beautiful?"
"What?" gasped Edgarton. "What?"
Bristling with a grave sort of astonishment he reached up nervously
and stroked his daughter's hair. "Your mother," he winced. "Your
mother was--to me--the most beautiful woman that ever lived! Such
expression!" he glowed. "Such fire! But of such a spiritual modesty!
Of such a physical delicacy! Like a rose," he mused, "like a
rose--that should refuse to bloom for any but the hand that gathered
it."
Languorously from some good practical pocket little Eve Edgarton
extracted a much be-frilled chocolate bonbon and sat there munching it
with extreme thoughtfulness. Then, "Father," she whispered, "I wish I
was like--Mother."
"Why?" asked Edgarton, wincing.
"Because Mother's--dead," she answered simply.
Noisily, like an over conscious throat, the tiny traveling-clock on
the mantelpiece began to swallow its moments. One moment--two
moments--three--four--five--six moments--seven moments--on, on, on,
gutturally, laboriously--thirteen--fourteen--fifteen--even twenty;
with the girl still nibbling at her chocolate, and the man still
staring off into space with that strange little whimper of pain
between his pale, shrewd eyes.
It was the man who broke the silence first. Precipitately he shifted
his knees and jostled his daughter to her feet.
"Eve," he said, "you're awfully spleeny to-night! I'm going to bed."
And he stalked off into his own room, slamming the door behind him.
Once again from the middle of the floor little Eve Edgarton stood
staring blankly after her father. Then she dawdled across the room and
opened his door just wide enough to compass the corners of her mouth.
"Father," she whispered, "did Mother know that she was a rose--before
you were clever enough to find her?"
"N--o," faltered her father's husky voice. "That was the miracle of
it. She never even dreamed--that she was a rose--until I found her."
Very quietly little Eve Edgarton shut the door again and came back
into the middle of her room and stood there hesitatingly for an
instant.
Then quite abruptly she crossed to her bureau and pushing aside the
old ivory toilet articles, began to jerk her tously hair first one way
and then another across her worried forehead.
"But if you knew you were a rose?" she mused perplexedly to herself.
"That is--if you felt almost sure that you were," she added with
sudden humility. "That is--" she corrected herself--"that is--if you
felt almost sure that you could be a rose--if anybody wanted you to be
one?"
In impulsive experimentation she gave another tweak to her hair, and
pinched a poor bruised-looking little blush into the hollow of one
thin little cheek. "But suppose it was the--the people--going by," she
faltered, "who never even dreamed that you were a rose? Suppose it was
the--Suppose it was--Suppose--"
Dejection unspeakable settled suddenly upon her--an agonizing sense of
youth's futility. Rackingly above the crash and lilt of music, the
quick, wild thud of dancing feet, the sharp, staccato notes of
laughter--she heard the dull, heavy, unrhythmical tread of the
oncoming years--gray years, limping eternally from to-morrow on,
through unloved lands, on unloved errands.
"This is the end of youth. It is--it is--it is," whimpered her heart.
"It ISN'T!" something suddenly poignant and determinate shrilled
startlingly in her brain. "I'll have one more peep at youth, anyway!"
threatened the brain.
"If we only could!" yearned the discouraged heart.
Speculatively for one brief instant the girl stood cocking her head
toward the door of her father's room. Then, expeditiously, if not
fashionably, she began at once to rearrange her tousled hair, and
after one single pat to her gown--surely the quickest toilet-making of
that festive evening--snatched up a slipper in each hand, crept safely
past her father's door, crept safely out at last through her own door
into the hall, and still carrying a slipper in each hand, had reached
the head of the stairs before a new complexity assailed her.
"Why--why, I've never yet--been anywhere--alone--without my mother's
memory!" she faltered, aghast.
Then impetuously, with a little frown of material inconvenience, but
no flicker whatsoever in the fixed spiritual habit of her life, she
dropped her slippers on the floor, sped back to her room, hesitated on
the threshold a moment with real perplexity, darted softly to her
trunk, rummaged as noiselessly through it as a kitten's paws,
discovered at last the special object of her quest--a filmy square of
old linen and lace--thrust it into her belt with her own handkerchief,
and went creeping back again to her slippers at the head of the
stairs.
As if to add fresh nervousness to the situation, one of the slippers
lay pointing quite boldly down-stairs. But the other slipper--true as
a compass to the north--toed with unmistakable severity toward the
bedroom.
Tentatively little Eve Edgarton inserted one foot in the timid
slipper. The path back to her room was certainly the simplest path
that she knew--and the dullest. Equally tentatively she withdrew from
the timid slipper and tried the adventurous one. "O-u-c-h!" she cried
out loud. The sole of the second slipper seemed fairly sizzling with
excitement.
With a slight gasp of impatience, then, she reached out and pulled the
timid slipper back into line, stepped firmly into it, pointed both
slipper-toes unswervingly southward, and proceeded on down-stairs to
investigate the "Christian Dance."
At the first turn of the lower landing she stopped short, with every
ennui-darkened sense in her body "jacked" like a wild deer's senses
before the sudden dazzle of sight, sound, scent that awaited her
below. Before her blinking eyes she saw even the empty, humdrum hotel
office turned into a blazing bower of palms and roses and electric
lights. Beyond this bower a corridor opened out--more dense, more
sweet, more sparkling. And across this corridor the echo of the unseen
ball came diffusing through the palms--the plaintive cry of a violin,
the rippling laugh of a piano, the swarming hum of human voices, the
swish of skirts, the agitant thud-thud-thud of dancing feet, the
throb, almost, of young hearts--a thousand commonplace, every-day
sounds merged here and now into one magic harmony that thrilled little
Eve Edgarton as nothing on God's big earth had ever thrilled her
before.
Hurriedly she darted down the last flight of steps and sped across the
bright office to the dark veranda, consumed by one fuming, passionate,
utterly uncontrollable curiosity to see with her own eyes just what
all that wonderful sound looked like!
Once outside in the darkness her confusion cleared a little. It was
late, she reasoned--very, very late, long after midnight probably; for
of all the shadowy, flickering line of evening smokers that usually
crowded that particular stretch of veranda only a single distant glow
or two remained. Yet even now in the almost complete isolation of her
surroundings the old inherent bashfulness swept over her again and
warred chaotically with her insistent purpose. As stealthily as
possible she crept along the dark wall to the one bright spot that
flared forth like a lantern lens from the gay ballroom--crept
along--crept along--a plain little girl in a plain little dress,
yearning like all the other plain little girls of the world, in all
the other plain little dresses of the world, to press her wistful
little nose just once against some dazzling toy-shop window.
With her fingers groping at last into the actual shutters of that
coveted ballroom window, she scrunched her eyes up perfectly tight for
an instant and then opened them, staring wide at the entrancing scene
before her.
"O--h!" said little Eve Edgarton. "O--h!"
The scene was certainly the scene of a most madcap summer carnival.
Palms of the far December desert were there! And roses from the near,
familiar August gardens! The swirl of chiffon and lace and silk was
like a rainbow-tinted breeze! The music crashed on the senses like
blows that wasted no breath in subtler argument! Naked shoulders
gleamed at every turn beneath their diamonds! Silk stockings bared
their sheen at each new rompish step! And through the dizzy mystery of
it all--the haze, the maze, the vague, audacious unreality,--grimly
conventional, blatantly tangible white shirt-fronts surrounded by
great black blots of men went slapping by--each with its share of
fairyland in its arms!
"Why! They're not dancing!" gasped little Eve Edgarton. "They're just
prancing!"
Even so, her own feet began to prance. And very faintly across her
cheek-bones a little flicker of pink began to glow.
Then very startlingly behind her a man's shadow darkened suddenly,
and, sensing instantly that this newcomer also was interested in the
view through the window, she drew aside courteously to give him his
share of the pleasure. In her briefest glance she saw that he was no
one whom she knew, but in the throbbing witchery of the moment he
seemed to her suddenly like her only friend in the world.
"It's pretty, isn't it?" she nodded toward the ballroom.
Casually the man bent down to look until his smoke-scented cheek
almost grazed hers. "It certainly is!" he conceded amiably.
Without further speech for a moment they both stood there peering into
the wonderful picture. Then altogether abruptly, and with no excuse
whatsoever, little Eve Edgarton's heart gave a great, big lurch, and,
wringing her small brown hands together so that by no grave mischance
should she reach out and touch the stranger's sleeve as she peered up
at him, "I--can dance," drawled little Eve Edgarton.
Shrewdly the man's glance flashed down at her. Quite plainly he
recognized her now. She was that "funny little Edgarton girl." That's
exactly who she was! In the simple, old-fashioned arrangement of her
hair, in the personal neatness but total indifference to fashion of
her prim, high-throated gown, she represented--frankly--everything
that he thought he most approved in woman. But nothing under the
starry heavens at that moment could have forced him to lead her as a
partner into that dazzling maelstrom of Mode and Modernity, because
she looked "so horridly eccentric and conspicuous"--compared to the
girls that he thought he didn't approve of at all!
"Why, of course you can dance! I only wish I could!" he lied
gallantly. And stole away as soon as he reasonably could to find
another partner, trusting devoutly that the darkness had not divulged
his actual features.
Five minutes later, through the window-frame of her magic picture,
little Eve Edgarton saw him pass, swinging his share of fairyland in
his arms.
And close behind him followed Barton, swinging his share of fairyland
in his arms! Barton the wonderful--at his best! Barton the
wonderful--with his best, the blonde, blonde girl of the marvelous
gowns and hats. There was absolutely no doubt whatsoever about them.
They were the handsomest couple in the room!
Furtively from her hidden corner little Eve Edgarton stood and
watched them. To her appraising eyes there were at least two other
girls almost as beautiful as Barton's partner. But no other man in the
room compared with Barton. Of that she was perfectly sure! His brow,
his eyes, his chin, the way he held his head upon his wonderful
shoulders, the way he stood upon his feet, his smile, his laugh, the
very gesture of his hands!
Over and over again as she watched, these two perfect partners came
circling through her vision, solemnly graceful or rhythmically
hoydenish--two fortune-favored youngsters born into exactly the same
sphere, trained to do exactly the same things in exactly the same way,
so that even now, with twelve years' difference in age between them,
every conscious vibration of their beings seemed to be tuned
instinctively to the same key.
Bluntly little Eve Edgarton looked back upon the odd, haphazard
training of her own life. Was there any one in this world whose
training had been exactly like hers? Then suddenly her elbow went
crooking up across her eyes to remember how Barton had looked in the
stormy woods that night--lying half naked--and almost wholly dead--at
her feet. Except for her odd, haphazard training, he would have been
dead! Barton, the beautiful--dead? And worse than dead--buried? And
worse than--
Out of her lips a little gasp of sound rang agonizingly.
And in that instant, by some trick-fashion of the dance, the
rollicking music stopped right off short in the middle of a note, the
lights went out, the dancers fled precipitously to their seats, and
out of the arbored gallery of the orchestra a single swarthy-faced
male singer stepped forth into the wan wake of an artificial moon, and
lifted up a marvelous tenor voice in one of those weird folk-songs of
the far-away that fairly tear the listener's heart out of his body--a
song as sinisterly metallic as the hum of hate along a dagger-blade; a
song as rapturously surprised at its own divinity as the first trill
of a nightingale; a song of purling brooks and grim, gray mountain
fortresses; a song of quick, sharp lights and long, low, lazy
cadences; a song of love and hate; a song of all joys and all
sorrows--and then death; the song of Sex as Nature sings it--the
plaintive, wheedling, passionate song of Sex as Nature sings it
yet--in the far-away places of the earth.
To no one else in that company probably did a single word penetrate.
Merely stricken dumb by the vibrant power of the voice, vaguely
uneasy, vaguely saddened, group after group of hoydenish youngsters
huddled in speechless fascination around the dark edges of the hall.
But to little Eve Edgarton's cosmopolitan ears each familiar gipsyish
word thus strangely transplanted into that alien room was like a call
to the wild--from the wild.
So--as to all repressed natures the moment of full self-expression
comes once, without warning, without preparation, without even
conscious acquiescence sometimes--the moment came to little Eve
Edgarton. Impishly first, more as a dare to herself than as anything
else, she began to hum the melody and sway her body softly to and fro
to the rhythm.
Then suddenly her breath began to quicken, and as one half hypnotized
she went clambering through the window into the ballroom, stood for an
instant like a gray-white phantom in the outer shadows, then, with a
laugh as foreign to her own ears as to another's, snatched up a great,
square, shimmering silver scarf that gleamed across a deserted chair,
stretched it taut by its corners across her hair and eyes, and with a
queer little cry--half defiance, half appeal--a quick dart, a long,
undulating glide--merged herself into the dagger-blade, the
nightingale, the grim mountain fortress, the gay mocking brook, all
the love, all the rapture, all the ghastly fatalism of that
heartbreaking song.
Bent as a bow her lithe figure curved now right, now left, to the
lilting cadence. Supple as a silken tube her slender body seemed to
drink up the fluid sound. No one could have sworn in that vague light
that her feet even so much as touched the ground. She was a wraith! A
phantasy! A fluctuant miracle of sound and sense!
Tremulously the singer's voice faltered in his throat to watch his
song come gray-ghost-true before his staring eyes. With scant
restraint the crowd along the walls pressed forward, half
pleasure-mad, to solve the mystery of the apparition. Abruptly the
song stopped! The dancer faltered! Lights blazed! A veritable shriek
of applause went roaring to the roof-tops!
And little Eve Edgarton in one wild panic-stricken surge of terror
went tearing off through a blind alley of palms, dodging a cafe table,
jumping an improvised trellis--a hundred pursuing voices yelling:
"Where is she? Where is she?"--the telltale tinsel scarf flapping
frenziedly behind her, flapping--flapping--till at last, between one
high, garnished shelf and another it twined its vampirish chiffon
around the delicate fronds of a huge potted fern! There was a
jerk,--a blur,--a blow, the sickening crash of fallen pottery--And
little Eve Edgarton crumpled up on the floor, no longer "colorless"
among the pale, dry, rainbow tints and shrill metallic glints of that
most wondrous scene.
Under her crimson mask, when the rescuers finally reached her, she lay
as perfectly disguised as even her most bashful mood could have
wished.
All around her--kneeling, crowding, meddling, interfering--frightened
people queried: "Who is she? Who is she?" Now and again from out of
the medley some one offered a half-articulate suggestion. It was the
hotel proprietor who moved first. Clumsily but kindly, with a fat hand
thrust under her shoulders, he tried to raise her head from the floor.
Barton himself, as the most recently returned from the "Dark Valley,"
moved next. Futilely, with a tiny wisp of linen and lace that he found
at the girl's belt, he tried to wipe the blood from her lips.
"Who is she? Who is she?" the conglomerate hum of inquiry rose and
fell like a moan.
Beneath the crimson stain on the little lace handkerchief a trace of
indelible ink showed faintly. Scowlingly Barton bent to decipher it.
"Mother's Little Handkerchief," the marking read. "'Mother's?'" Barton
repeated blankly. Then suddenly full comprehension broke upon him,
and, horridly startled and shocked with a brand-new realization of the
tragedy, he fairly blurted out his astonishing information.
"Why--why, it's the--little Edgarton girl!" he hurled like a bombshell
into the surrounding company.
Instantly, with the mystery once removed, a dozen hysterical people
seemed startled into normal activity. No one knew exactly what to do,
but some ran for water and towels, and some ran for the doctor, and
one young woman with astonishing acumen slipped out of her white silk
petticoat and bound it, blue ribbons and all, as best she could,
around Eve Edgarton's poor little gashed head.
[Illustration: Suddenly full comprehension broke upon him and he
fairly blurted out his astonishing information]
"We must carry her up-stairs!" asserted the hotel proprietor.
"I'll carry her!" said Barton quite definitely.
Fantastically the procession started upward--little Eve Edgarton white
as a ghost now in Barton's arms, except for that one persistent
trickle of red from under the loosening edge of her huge Oriental-like
turban of ribbon and petticoat; the hotel proprietor still worrying
eternally how to explain everything; two or three well-intentioned
women babbling inconsequently of other broken heads.
In astonishingly slow response to as violent a knock as they thought
they gave, Eve Edgarton's father came shuffling at last to the door to
greet them. Like one half paralyzed with sleep and perplexity, he
stood staring blankly at them as they filed into his rooms with their
burden.
"Your daughter seems to have bumped her head!" the hotel proprietor
began with professional tact.
In one gasping breath the women started to explain their version of
the accident.
Barton, as dumb as the father, carried the girl directly to the bed
and put her down softly, half lying, half sitting, among the great
pile of night-crumpled pillows. Some one threw a blanket over her. And
above the top edge of that blanket nothing of her showed except the
grotesquely twisted turban, the whole of one white eyelid, the half of
the other, and just that single persistent trickle of red. Raspishly
at that moment the clock on the mantelpiece choked out the hour of
three. Already Dawn was more than half a hint in the sky, and in the
ghastly mixture of real and artificial light the girl's doom looked
already sealed.
Then very suddenly she opened her eyes and stared around.
"Eve!" gasped her father, "what have you been doing?"
Vaguely the troubled eyes closed, and then opened again. "I
was--trying--to show people--that I was a--rose," mumbled little Eve
Edgarton.
Swiftly her father came running to her side. He thought it was her
deathbed statement. "But Eve?" he pleaded. "Why, my own little girl.
Why, my--"
Laboriously the big eyes lifted to his. "Mother was a rose," persisted
the stricken lips desperately.
"Yes, I know," sobbed her father. "But--but--"
"But--nothing," mumbled little Eve Edgarton. With an almost superhuman
effort she pushed her sharp little chin across the confining edge of
the blanket. Vaguely, unrecognizingly then, for the first time, her
heavy eyes sensed the hotel proprietor's presence and worried their
way across the tearful ladies to Barton's harrowed face.
"Mother--was a rose," she began all over again. "Mother--was a rose.
Mother--was--a rose," she persisted babblingly. "And Father--g-guessed
it--from the very first! But as for me--?" Weakly she began to claw at
her incongruous bandage. "But--as--for me," she gasped, "the way I'm
fixed!--I have to--announce it!"