BEATRICE UP STAGE
If you vision Clay as a man of battles and violent deaths you don't see
him as he saw himself. He was a peaceful citizen from the law-abiding
West. It was not until he had been flung into the whirlpool of New
York that violent and melodramatic mishaps befell this innocent. The
Wild East had trapped him into weird adventure foreign to his nature.
This was the version of himself that he conceived to be true and the
one he tried to interpret to Bee Whitford when he emerged from the
hospital after two days of seclusion and presented himself before her.
It was characteristic of Beatrice that when she looked at his battered
face she asked no questions and made no exclamations. After the first
startled glance one might have thought from her expression that he
habitually wore one black eye, one swollen lip, one cauliflower ear,
and a strip of gauze across his check.
The dark-lashed eyes lifted from him to take on a business-like
directness. She rang for the man.
"Have the runabout brought round at once, Stevens. I'll drive myself,"
she gave orders.
With the light ease that looked silken strong she swept the car into
the Park. Neither she nor Clay talked. Both of them knew that an
explanation of his appearance was due her and in the meantime neither
cared to fence with small talk. He watched without appearing to do so
the slender girl in white at the wheel. Her motions delighted him.
There was a very winning charm in the softly curving contours of her
face, in that flowerlike and precious quality in her personality which
lay back of her boyish comradeship.
She drew up to look at some pond lilies, and they talked about them for
a moment, after which her direct eyes questioned him frankly.
He painted with a light brush the picture of his adventure into
Bohemia. The details he filled in whimsically, in the picturesque
phraseology of the West. Up stage on his canvas was the figure of the
poet in velveteens. That Son of the Stars he did full justice. Jerry
Durand and Kitty Mason were accessories sketched casually.
Even while her face bubbled with mirth at his story of the improvised
tango that had wrecked the Sea Siren, the quick young eyes of the girl
were taking in the compelling devil-may-care charm of Lindsay.
Battered though he was, the splendid vigor of the man still showed in a
certain tigerish litheness that sore, stiff muscles could not conceal.
No young Greek god's head could have risen more superbly from the
brick-tanned column of his neck than did this bronzed one.
"I gather that Mr. Lindsay of Arizona was among those present,"
Beatrice said, smiling.
"I was givin' the dance," he agreed, and his gay eyes met hers.
Since she was a woman, one phase of his story needed expansion for Miss
Whitford. She made her comment carelessly while she adjusted the
mileage on the speedometer.
"Queer you happened to meet some one you knew down there. You did say
you knew the girl, didn't you?"
"We were on the same train out of Denver. I got acquainted with her."
Miss Whitford asked no more questions. But Clay could not quite let
the matter stand so. He wanted her to justify him in her mind for what
he had done. Before he knew it he had told her the story of Kitty
Mason and Durand.
Nor did this draw any criticism of approval or the reverse.
"I couldn't let him hypnotize that little girl from the country, could
I?" he asked.
"I suppose not." Her whole face began to bubble with laughter in the
way he liked so well. "But you'll be a busy knight errant if you
undertake to right the wrongs of every girl you meet in New York." A
dimple flashed near the corner of her mouth. "Of course she's pretty."
"Well, yes. She is right pretty."
"Describe her to me."
He made a lame attempt. Out of his tangled sentences she picked on
some fragments. ". . . blooms like a cherokee rose . . . soft like a
kitten."
"I'm glad she's so charming. That excuses any indiscretion," the girl
said with a gleam of friendly malice. "There's no fun in rescuing the
plain ones, is there?"
"They don't most usually need so much rescuin'," Clay admitted.
"Don't you think it possible that you rescued her out of a job?"
The young man nodded his head ruefully. "That's exactly what I did.
After all her trouble gettin' one I've thrown her out again. I'm a
sure-enough fathead."
"You've been down to find out?" she asked with a sidelong tilt of her
quick eyes.
"Yes. I went down this mawnin' with Tim Muldoon. He's a policeman I
met down there. Miss Kitty hasn't been seen since that night. We went
out to the Pirate's Den, the Purple Pup, Grace Godwin's Garret, and all
the places where she used to sell cigarettes. None of them have seen
anything of her."
"So that really your championship hasn't been so great a help to her
after all, has it?"
"No."
"And I suppose it ruined the business of the man that owns the Sea
Siren."
"I don't reckon so. I've settled for the furniture. And Muldoon says
when it gets goin' again the Sea Siren will do a big business on
account of the fracas. It's Kitty I'm worried about."
"She's a kind of cuddly little girl who needs the protection of some
nice man, you say?"
"That's right."
The eyes of Miss Whitford were unfathomable. "Fluffy and--kind of
helpless."
"Yes."
"I wouldn't worry about her if I were you. She'll land on her feet,"
the girl said lightly.
Her voice had not lost its sweet cadences, but Clay sensed in it
something that was almost a touch of cool contempt. He felt vaguely
that he must have blundered in describing Kitty. Evidently Miss
Whitford did not see her quite as she was.
The young woman pressed the starter button. "We must be going home. I
have an engagement to go riding with Mr. Bromfield."
The man beside the girl kept his smile working and concealed the little
stab of jealousy that dirked him. Colin Whitford had confided to
Lindsay that his daughter was practically engaged to Clarendon
Bromfield and that he did not like the man. The range-rider did not
like him either, but he tried loyally to kill his distrust of the
clubman. If Beatrice loved him there must be good in the fellow. Clay
meant to be a good loser anyhow.
There had been moments when the range-rider's heart had quickened with
a wild, insurgent hope. One of these had been on a morning when they
were riding in the Park, knee to knee, in the dawn of a new clean
world. It had come to him with a sudden clamor of the blood that in
the eternal rightness of things such mornings ought to be theirs till
the youth in them was quenched in sober age. He had looked into the
eyes of this slim young Diana, and he had throbbed to the certainty
that she too in that moment of tangled glances knew a sweet confusion
of the blood. In her cheeks there had been a quick flame of flying
color. Their talk had fallen from them, and they had ridden in a shy,
exquisite silence from which she had escaped by putting her horse to a
canter.
But in the sober sense of sanity Clay knew that this wonderful thing
was not going to happen to him. He was not going to be given her
happiness to hold in the hollow of his hand. Bee Whitford was a modern
young woman, practical-minded, with a proper sense of the values that
the world esteems. Clarendon Bromfield was a catch even in New York.
He was rich, of a good family, assured social position, good-looking,
and manifestly in love with her. Like gravitates to like the land
over. Miracles no longer happen in this workaday world. She would
marry the man a hundred other girls would have given all they had to
win, and perhaps in the long years ahead she might look back with a
little sigh for the wild colt of the desert who had shared some perfect
moments with her once upon a time.
Bromfield, too, had no doubt that Bee meant to marry him. He was in
love with her as far as he could be with anybody except himself. His
heart was crusted with selfishness. He had lived for himself only and
he meant to continue so to live. But he had burned out his first
youth. He was coming to the years when dissipation was beginning to
take its toll of him. And as he looked into the future it seemed to
him an eminently desirable thing that the fresh, eager beauty of this
girl should belong to him, that her devotion should stand as a shield
between him and that middle age with which he was already skirmishing.
He wanted her--the youth, the buoyant life, the gay, glad comradeship
of her--and he had always been lucky in getting what he desired. That
was the use of having been born with a silver spoon in his mouth.
But though Clarendon Bromfield had no doubt of the issue of his suit,
the friendship of Beatrice for this fellow from Arizona stabbed his
vanity. It hurt his class pride and his personal self-esteem that she
should take pleasure in the man's society. Bee never had been well
broken to harness. He set his thin lips tight and resolved that he
would stand no nonsense of this sort after they were married. If she
wanted to flirt it would have to be with some one in their own set.
The clubman was too wise to voice his objections now except by an
occasional slur. But he found it necessary sometimes to put a curb on
his temper. The thing was outrageous--damnably bad form. Sometimes it
seemed to him that the girl was gratuitously irritating him by
flaunting this bounder in his face. He could not understand it in her.
She ought to know that this man did not belong to her world--could not
by any chance be a part of it.
Beatrice could not understand herself. She knew that she was behaving
rather indiscreetly, though she did not fathom the cause of the
restlessness that drove her to Clay Lindsay. The truth is that she was
longing for an escape from the empty life she was leading, had been
seeking one for years without knowing it. Her existence was losing its
savor, and she was still so young and eager and keen to live. Surely
this round of social frivolities, the chatter of these silly women and
smug tailor-made men, could not be all there was to life. She must
have been made for something better than that.
And when she was with Clay she knew she had been. He gave her a vision
of life through eyes that had known open, wide spaces, clean,
wholesome, and sun-kissed. He stood on his own feet and did his own
thinking. Simply, with both hands, he took hold of problems and
examined them stripped of all trimmings. The man was elemental, but he
was keen and broad-gauged. He knew the value of the things he had
missed. She was increasingly surprised to discover how wide his
information was. It amazed her one day to learn that he had read
William James and understood his philosophy much better than she did.
There was in her mind no intention whatever of letting herself do
anything so foolish as to marry him. But there were moments when the
thought of it had a dreadful fascination for her. She did not invite
such thoughts to remain with her.
For she meant to accept Clarendon Bromfield in her own good time and
make her social position in New York absolutely secure. She had been
in the fringes too long not to appreciate a chance to get into the
social Holy of Holies.