When Althea went in to lunch next day, after an arduous morning of
shopping, she observed, with mingled relief and disappointment, that the
young lady in black was not in her place. She might very probably have
gone away, and it was odd to think that an impression so strong was
probably to remain an impression merely. On the whole, she was sorry to
think that it might be so, though the impression had not been altogether
happy.
After lunch she lay down and read reviews for a lazy hour, and then
dressed to receive Miss Harriet Robinson, who, voluble and beaming,
arrived punctually at four.
Miss Robinson looked almost exactly as she had looked for the last ten
years. She changed as little as the hotel drawing-room, but that the
pictures on the wall, the vases on the shelf of her mental decoration
varied with every season. She was always passionately interested in
something, and it was surprising to note how completely in the new she
forgot last year's passion. This year it was eugenics and Strauss; the
welfare of the race had suddenly engaged her attention, and the menaced
future of music. She was slender, erect, and beautifully dressed. Her
hands were small, and she constantly but inexpressively gesticulated
with them; her elaborately undulated hair looked like polished, fluted
silver; her eyes were small, dark, and intent; she smiled as constantly
and as inexpressively as she gesticulated.
'And so you really think of going back for the winter?' she asked Althea
finally, when the responsibilities of parenthood and the impermanency of
modern musical artifices had been demonstrated. 'Why, my dear? You see
everybody here. Everybody comes here, sooner or later.'
'I don't like getting out of touch with home,' said Althea.
'I confess that I feel this home,' said Miss Robinson. 'America is so
horribly changed, so vulgarised. The people they accept socially! And
the cost of things! My dear, the last time I went to the States I had to
pay five hundred francs--one hundred dollars--for my winter hat! _Je
vous demande!_ If they will drive us out they must take the
consequences.'
Althea felt tempted to inquire what these might be. Miss Robinson
sometimes roused a slight irony in her; but she received the
expostulation with a dim smile.
'Why won't you settle here?' Miss Robinson continued, 'or in Rome--there
is quite a delightful society in Rome--or Florence, or London. Not that
I could endure the English winter.'
'I've sometimes thought of England,' said Althea.
'Well, do think of it. I'm perfectly disinterested. Rather than have you
unsettled, I would like to have you settled there. You have interesting
friends, I know.'
'Yes, very interesting,' said Althea, with some satisfaction.
'You would probably make quite a place for yourself in London, if you
went at it carefully and consideringly, and didn't allow the wrong sort
of people to _accaparer_ you. We always count, when we want to, we
American women of the good type,' said Miss Robinson, with frank
complacency; 'and I don't see why, with your gifts and charm, you
shouldn't have a salon, political or artistic.'
Althea was again tempted to wonder what it was Miss Robinson counted
for; but since she had often been told that her gifts and charm demanded
a salon, she was inclined to believe it. 'It's only,' she demurred,
'that I have so many friends, in so many places; it is hard to decide on
settling.'
'One never does make a real life for oneself until one does settle. I've
found that out for myself,' said Miss Robinson.
It did not enter into her mind that Althea might still settle, in a
different sense. She was of that vast army of rootless Europeanised
Americans, who may almost be said to belong to a celibate order, so
little does the question of matrimony and family life affect their
existence. For a younger, more frivolous type, Europe might have a
merely matrimonial significance; but to Miss Robinson, and to thousands
of her kind, it meant an escape from displeasing circumstance and a
preoccupation almost monastic with the abstract and the aesthetic. To
Althea it had never meant merely that. Her own people in America were
fastidious and exclusive; from choice, they considered, but, in reality,
partly from necessity; they had never been rich enough or fashionable
enough to be exposed to the temptation of great European alliances.
Althea would have scorned such ambitions as basely vulgar; she had never
thought of Europe as an arena for social triumphs; but it had assuredly
been coloured for her with the colour of romance. It was in Europe,
rather than in America, that she expected to find, if ever, her ardent,
compelling wooer. And it irritated her a little that Miss Robinson
should not seem to consider such a possibility for her.
She did not accept her friend's invitation to go with her to the
Francais that evening; the weariness of the morning of shopping was her
excuse. She wanted to study a little; she never neglected to keep her
mind in training; and after dinner she sat down with a stout tome on
political economy. She had only got through half a chapter when Amelie
came to her and asked her if she could suggest a remedy for a young lady
next door who, the _femme de chambre_ said, was quite alone, and had
evidently succumbed to a violent attack of influenza.
'C'est une dame anglaise,' said Amelie, 'et une bien gentille.'
Althea sprang up, strangely excited. Was it the lady in black? Had she
then not gone yet? 'Next door, you say?' she asked. Yes; the stranger's
bedroom was next her own, and she had no _salon_.
'I will go in myself and see her,' said Althea, after a moment of
reflection.
She was not at all given to such impulses, and, under any other
circumstances, would have sent Amelie with the offer of assistance. But
she suddenly felt it an opportunity, for what she could not have said.
It was like seeing a curious-looking book opened before one; one wanted
to read in it, if only a snatched paragraph here and there.
Amelie protested as to infection, but Althea was a resourceful traveller
and had disinfectants for every occasion. She drenched her handkerchief,
gargled her throat, and, armed with her little case of remedies, knocked
at the door near by. A languid voice answered her and she entered.
The room was lighted by two candles that stood on the mantelpiece, and
the bed in its alcove was dim. Tossed clothes lay on the chairs; a
battered box stood open, its tray lying on the floor; the dressing-table
was in confusion, and the scent of cigarette smoke mingled with that of
a tall white lily that was placed in a vase on a little table beside the
bed. To the well-maided Althea the disorder was appalling, yet it
expressed, too, something of charm. The invalid lay plunged in her
pillows, her dark hair tossed above her head, and, as Althea approached,
she did not unclose her eyes.
'Oh, I beg your pardon,' said Althea, feeling some trepidation. 'My maid
told me that you were ill--that you had influenza, and I know just what
to do for it. May I give you some medicine? I do hope I have not waked
you up,' for the invalid was now looking at her with some astonishment.
'No; I wasn't asleep. How very kind of you. I thought it was the
chambermaid,' she said. 'Forgive me for seeming so rude.'
Her eyes were more dazed than ever, and she more mysterious, with her
unbound hair.
'You oughtn't to lie with your arms outside the covers like that,' said
Althea. 'It's most important not to get chilled. I'm afraid you don't
know how to take care of yourself.' She smiled a little, gentle and
assured, though inwardly with still a tremor; and she drew the clothes
about the invalid, who had relapsed passively on to her pillows.
'I'm afraid I don't. How very kind of you!' she murmured again.
Althea brought a glass of water and, selecting her little bottle, poured
out the proper number of drops. 'You were feeling ill last night,
weren't you?' she said, after the dose had been swallowed. 'I thought
that you looked ill.'
'Last night?'
'Yes, don't you remember? I sat next you in the dining-room.'
'Oh yes; of course, of course! I remember now. You had this dress on; I
noticed all the little silver tassels. Yes, I've been feeling wretched
for several days; I've done hardly anything--no shopping, no
sight-seeing, and I ought to be back in London to-morrow; but I suppose
I'll have to stay in bed for a week; it's very tiresome.' She spoke
wearily, yet in decisive little sentences, and her voice, its hardness
and its liquid intonations, made Althea think of wet pebbles softly
shaken together.
'You haven't sent for a doctor?' she inquired, while she took out her
small clinical thermometer.
'No, indeed; I never send for doctors. Can't afford 'em,' said the young
lady, with a wan grimace. 'Must I put that into my mouth?'
'Yes, please; I must take your temperature. I think, if you let me
prescribe for you, I can see after you as well as a doctor,' Althea
assured her. 'I'm used to taking care of people who are ill. The friend
I've just been staying with in Venice had influenza very badly while I
was with her.'
She rather hoped, after the thermometer was removed, that the young lady
would ask her some question about Venice and her present destination;
but, though so amiable and so grateful, she did not seem to feel any
curiosity about the good Samaritan who thus succoured her.
Althea found her patient less feverish next morning when she went in
early to see her, and though she said that her body felt as though it
were being beaten with red-hot hammers, she smiled in saying it, and
Althea then, administering her dose, asked her what her name might be.
It was Helen Buchanan, she learned.
'And mine is Althea Jakes. You are English, aren't you?'
'Oh no, I'm Scotch,' said Miss Buchanan.
'And I am American. Do you know any Americans?'
'Oh yes, quite a lot. One of them is a Mrs. Harrison, and lives in
Chicago,' said Miss Buchanan, who seemed in a more communicative mood.
'I met her in Nice one winter; a very nice, kind woman, who gives most
sumptuous parties. Her husband is a millionaire; one never sees him. Do
you come from Chicago? Do you know her?'
Althea, with some emphasis, said that she came from Boston.
'Another,' Miss Buchanan pursued, 'lives in New York, though she is
usually over here; she is immensely rich, too. She hunts every winter
in England, and is great fun and is frightfully well up in
everything--pictures, books, music, you know: Americans usually are well
up, aren't they? She wants me to stay with her some day in New York;
perhaps I shall, if I can manage to afford the voyage. Her name is
Bigham; perhaps you know her.'
'No. I know of her, though; she is very well known,' said Althea rather
coldly; for Mrs. Bigham was an excessively fashionable and reputedly
reckless lady who had divorced one husband and married another, and
whose doings filled more scrupulous circles with indignation and
unwilling interest.
'Then I met a dear little woman in Oxford once,' said Miss Buchanan.
'She was studying there--she had come from a college in America. She was
so nice and clever, and charming, too; quaint and full of flavour. She
was going to teach in a college when she went back. She was very poor,
quite different from the others. Her father, she told me, kept a shop,
but didn't get on at all; and her brother, to whom she was devoted, sold
harmoniums. It was just like an American novel. Wayman was her
name--Miss Carrie Wayman; perhaps you know her. I forget the name of the
town she came from, but it was somewhere in the western part of
America.'
No, Althea said, she did not know Miss Wayman, and she felt some little
severity for the confusion that Miss Buchanan's remarks indicated. With
greater emphasis than before, she said that she did not know the West at
all.
'It must be rather nice--plains and cowboys and Rocky Mountains,' Miss
Buchanan said. 'I've a cousin on a ranch in Dakota, and I've often
thought I'd like to go out there for a season; he says the riding is
wonderful, and the scenery and flowers. Oh, my wretched head; it feels
as if it were stuffed with incandescent cotton-wool.'
'You must remember to keep your arms under the covers,' said Althea, as
Miss Buchanan lifted her hands and pressed them to her brows. 'And let
me plait your hair for you; it must be so hot and uncomfortable.'
And now again, looking up at her while the friendly office was
performed, Miss Buchanan said, 'How kind you are! too kind for words. I
can't think what I should have done without you.'