He lived through a week of bliss and of torture. One minute she promised
to marry him, give up the stage, go around the world on a yacht, whose
luxuries, Dan planned, should rival any boat ever built, or they would
motor across Asia and see, one by one, the various coral strands and the
golden sands of the East. He could not find terms to express how he
would spend upon her this fortune of his, which, for the first time,
began to have value in his eyes. Money had been lavished on her, still
she seemed dazzled. Then she would push it all away from her in
disgust--tell him she was sick of everything--that she didn't want any new
jewels or any new clothes, and that she never wanted to see the stage
again or any place again; that there was nowhere she wanted to go,
nothing she wanted to see--that he must get some fresh girl to whom he
could show life, not one whom he must try to make forget it. Then,
again, she would say that she loved the stage and her art--wouldn't give
it up for any one in the world--that it was fatal to marry an
actress--that it was mad for him to think of marrying her, anyway--that
she didn't want to marry any one and be tied down--that she wanted to be
her own mistress and free.
He found her a creature of a thousand whims and caprices, quick to cry,
quick to laugh, divine in everything she did. He never knew what she
would want him to do next, or how her mood would change, and after one
of their happiest hours, when she had been like a girl with him, she
would burst into tears, beg him to leave the room, telling him that she
was tired--tired--tired, and wanted to go to sleep and never to wake up
again. Between them was the figure of Poniotowsky, though neither spoke
of him. She appeared to have forgotten him. Dan would rather have cut
out his tongue than to speak his name, and yet he was there in the mind
of each. During the fortnight Dan spent thousands of pounds on her,
bought her jewels which she alternately raved over or but half looked
at. He had made his arrangements with Galorey peacefully, coolly and
between the two men it had been understood that the world should think
the engagement broken by the duchess, and Dan's attention to Letty Lane,
already the subject of much comment, already conspicuous, was enough to
justify any woman in taking offense.
One day, the pearl of warm May days, when England even in springtime
touches summer, Blair was so happy as to persuade his sweetheart to go
with him for a little row on the river. The young fellow waited for her
in the boat he had secured, and she, motoring out with Higgins, had
appeared, running down to the edge of the water like a girl, gay as a
child let out from school, in a simple frock, in a marvelously fetching
hat, white gloves, white parasol, white shoes, and as Dan helped her
into the boat, pushed it out, pushed away with her on the crest of the
sun-flecked waters, spring was in his heart, and he found the moment
almost too great to bear.
The actress had been a girl with him all day, giving herself to his
moods, doing what he liked without demur, talking of their mutual past,
telling him one amusing story after another, proving herself an ideal
companion, fresh, varied, reposeful; and no one to have seen Letty Lane
with the boy on that afternoon would have dreamed that she ever had
known another love. They had moored their boat down near Maidenhead, and
he had helped her up the bank to the little inn, where tea had been made
for them, and served to him by her own beautiful white hands. He had
called for strawberries, and, like a shepherd in a pastoral, had fed
them to her, and as they lingered the sunset came creeping steadily in
through the windows where they sat.
As they neither called for their account nor to have the tea things
taken away, after a while the woman stealthily opened the door and,
unknown, looked at one of the prettiest pictures ever within her walls.
Letty Lane sat on the window-seat, her golden head, her white form
against the glow, and the boy by her side had his arms around her, and
her head was on his breast. They were both young. They might have been
white birds blown in there, nesting in the humble inn, and the woman of
the house, who had not heard the waters of the Thames flow softly for
nothing, judged them gently and sighed with pleasure as she shut the
door.
Here at Maidenhead Dan had left his boat and the motor took them back.
Nothing spoiled his bliss that day, and he said her name a thousand
times that night in his dreams. Jealousies--and, when he would let
himself think, they were not one, they were many--faded away. The duties
that a life with her would involve did not disturb him. For many a long
year, come what might, be what would, he would recall the glowing of
that sunset reflected under the inn windows, the singing of the thrushes
and the flash of the white dress and the fine little white shoes which
he had held in the palm of his ardent hand, which he had kissed, as he
told her with all his heart that she should rest her tired feet for
ever.
There grew in him that day a reverence for her, determined as he was to
bring into her life by his wealth and devotion everything of good. His
loving plans for her forming in his brain somewhat chaotic and very much
fevered, brought him nearer than he had ever been before to the picture
of his mother. His father it wasn't easy for Dan to think of in
connection with the actress. He didn't dare to dwell on the subject, but
he had never known his mother, and that pale ideal he could create as he
would. In thinking of her he saw only tenderness for Letty Lane--only
love; and in his room the night after the row on the river, the night
after the long idyl in the sunset-room of the inn, something like a
prayer came to his young lips, and, when its short form was finished, a
smile brought it to an end as he remembered the line in Letty Lane's own
opera:
"She will teach you how to pray in an Eastern form of prayer."
The ring he had given the Duchess of Breakwater had been her own choice,
a ruby. He had asked her, through Galorey, to keep it and to wear it
later, when she could think of him kindly, in an ornament of some kind
or another. The duchess had not refused. The ring he bought for Letty
Lane, although there was no engagement announced between them, was the
largest, purest diamond he could _with decency_ ask her to put on her
hand! It sparkled like a great drop of clear water from some fountain on
a magic continent. In another shop strands of pink coral set through
with diamonds caught his fancy and he bought her yards of them, ropes of
them, smiling to think how his boyhood's dreams were come true.
He never saw Ruggles except at meals, hardly spoke to the poor man at
all, and the boy's absorbed face, his state of mind, made the older man
feel like death. He repeated to himself that he was too late--too late,
and usually wound up his reflections by ejaculating:
"Gosh almighty, I'm glad I haven't got a son!"