Many Kingdoms Part 7

He drank the last of his black coffee with a sigh of content, and blew a last ring from the cigar she had insisted that he should smoke.

"Don't you think," he hazarded, "that it would be jolly to drive up and down Broadway and Fifth Avenue for an hour or two? If you want crowds, they're there; and if you see anything worth closer inspection, we can get out and look at it."

She agreed, and he paid the bill, tipping the waiter discriminatingly.

As their hansom threaded its way through the crowded street she rarely smiled, but her sombre eyes took in everything, and she "said things,"

as the boy put it, which he recalled and quoted years afterward.

Incidentally she talked of herself, though always without giving him a clew as to who she was and where she came from. Several times, as a face in the pa.s.sing throng caught her interest, she outlined for him in a few terse words the character of its possessor. He was interested, but he must have unconsciously suggested a certain unbelief in her intuition, for once she stopped speaking and looked at him sharply.

"You think I don't know," she said, "but I do. We always know, until we kill the gift with conventionalities. We're born with an intuitive knowledge of character. Savages have it, and animals, and babies. We lose it as we advance in civilization, for then we distrust our impressions and force our likes and dislikes to follow the dictates of policy. I've worked hard to keep and develop my insight, and behold my reward! I recognized you at the first glance as the perfect companion of a day."

The boy's face flamed with pleasure.

"Then it is a success?"

"It is a success. But it's also five o'clock. What next?"

"Then it's been a success?" he repeated, dreamily--"so far, I mean.

We've done so little in one way, but I'm awfully glad you've liked it.

We'll drop into Sherry's now for a cup of tea and a b.u.t.tered English m.u.f.fin and the beautiful ladies and the Hungarian Band. Then, instead of dining there, suppose we go to some gayer, more typical New York place--one of the big Broadway restaurants? That will show you another 'phase,' as you say; and the cooking is almost as good."

She agreed at once. "I think I'd like that," she said. "I want as much variety as I can get."

He leaned toward her impressively over the little table in the tea-room, recalling her unexpected tribute to the "perfect companion,"

and feeling all at once surprisingly well acquainted with her.

"What a pity you've got to go away tonight!" he murmured, ingenuously.

"There's so much left to do."

For an instant, as memory rolled over her, her heart stopped beating.

He observed her change of expression and looked at her with a sympathetic question in his gray eyes.

"Can't you change your plans?" he suggested, hopefully. "Must you go?"

"No, they're not that kind of plans. I must go."

As she spoke her face had the colorlessness and the immobility he had seen in it during the first moments it was turned toward him in the morning, and her features suddenly looked old and drawn. Under the revelation of a trouble greater than he could understand, the boy dropped his eyes.

"By Jove!" he thought, suddenly, "she's got something the matter with her." He wondered what it was, and the idea flashed over him that it might be an incurable disease. Only the year before he had heard a friend receive his death-warrant in a specialist's office, and the memory of the experience remained with him. He was so deep in these reflections that for a moment he forgot to speak, and she in her turn sat silent.

"I'm sorry," he then said, awkwardly. Then, rightly divining the quickest way to divert her thoughts, he suggested that they should drive again before dinner, for an hour or two, to get the effect of the twilight and the early lights on Broadway.

She agreed at once, as she had agreed to most of his suggestions, and her face when she looked at him was serene again, but he was not wholly rea.s.sured. In silence he followed her to the cab.

Over their dinner that night in the glittering Broadway restaurant, with the swinging music of French and German waltzes in their ears, she relaxed again from the impersonal att.i.tude she had observed during the greater part of the day. She looked at him more as if she saw him, he told himself, but he could not flatter himself that the change was due to any deepening of her interest in him. It was merely that she knew him better, and that their long hours of sight-seeing had verified her judgment of him.

Their talk swept over the world. He realized that she had lived much abroad and had known many interesting men and women. From casual remarks she dropped he learned that she was an orphan, unmarried, with no close ties, and that her home was not near New York. This, when the next day, after a dazed reading of the morning newspapers, he summed up his knowledge of her, was all he could recall--the garnered drift-wood of a talk that had extended over twelve hours.

"You look," he said once, glancing critically at her, "as if you had lived for centuries and had learned all the lessons life could teach."

She shook her head. "I have lived for centuries, so far as that goes,"

she said, "but of all the lessons I've really learned only one."

"And that is?"

"How little it all amounts to."

Again, as he studied her, he experienced an unpleasant little tremor.

He felt at the same time an odd conviction that this woman had played a part all day, and that now, through fatigue and depression, she was tiring of her role and would cast it away, showing herself to him as she was. For some reason he did not want this. The face behind the mask, of which he was beginning to get a glimpse at intervals, was a face he feared he would not like. He shrank from it as a child shrinks from what it does not understand.

Much to his relief, she threw off the dark mood that seemed to threaten her, and at the play she was more human than she had been yet.

"Ah, that first act," she said, as the curtain fell on Peter Pan's flight through the window with the Darling Children--"that delicious first act! Of course Barrie can't keep it up--no one could. But the humor of it and the tenderness and the naivete! Only a grown-up with the heart of a child could really appreciate it."

"And you are that?" he asked, daringly. He knew she was not.

"Only for this half-hour," she smiled. "I may get critical at any moment and entirely out of touch."

She did not, however, and watching her indulgent appreciation of the little boys in Never Never Land, he unconsciously reflected that, after all, this must be the real woman. That other personality, some sudden disheartening side of which he got from time to time, was not his new friend who laughed like a young girl over the crocodile with the clock inside, and showed a sudden swift moisture in her brown eyes when the actress pleaded for the dying fairy. When the curtain fell on the last act, leaving Peter Pan alone with his twinkling fairy friends in his little home high among the trees, Alice Stansbury turned to her companion with the sudden change of expression he had learned to dread.

The pupils of her eyes were strangely dilated, and she was evidently laboring under some suppressed excitement. She spoke to him curtly and coolly.

"We'll have a Welsh rabbit somewhere," she said, "and then I'll go--back." He was struck by this use of the word, and by the tone of her voice as she said it. "Back," he repeated, mentally--"back to something mighty unpleasant, I'll wager."

At the restaurant she ate nothing and said little. All the snap and sparkle had gone out of the day and out of their companionship as well.

Even the music was mournful, as if in tacit sympathy, and the faces of the diners around them looked tired and old. When they left the dining-room they stood together for an instant in the vestibule opening into the street. No one was near them, and they were for the moment beyond the reach of curious eyes. She cast one quick look around to be sure of this, and then, going close to him, she put both her hands on his shoulders. As she stood thus he realized for the first time how tall she was. Her eyes were almost on a level with his own.

"You're a dear boy," she said, quickly, and a little breathlessly. "You have made the day perfect, and I thank you. We shall not meet again, but I'd like to feel that you won't forget me, and I want you to tell me your first name."

He put his hands over hers.

"It's Philip," he said, simply, "and as for forgetting, you may be very sure I won't. This isn't the kind of thing one forgets, and you're not the kind of woman."

As he spoke the grip of her hands on his shoulders tightened, and she leaned forward and kissed him on the mouth. Under the suddenness and the surprise of it his senses whirled, but even in the chaos of the moment he was conscious of two conflicting impressions--the first, an odd disappointment in her, his friend; the second, an absurd resentment against the singular remoteness of those cool, soft lips that for an instant brushed his own. She gave him no chance to speak.

"I've left my gloves on the table," she said, crisply. "Get them."

He went without a word. When he returned the vestibule was deserted.

With a swift intuition of the truth he opened the door and rushed out into the street. She was not there, nor the cabman whom he had instructed to wait for them. She had slipped away, as she intended to do, and the kiss she had given him had been a farewell. He was left standing looking stupidly up and down the street, with her gloves in his hand and her purse, as he now remembered, in his pocket. Well, he could advertise that the next morning, in such a way that she could reclaim it without seeing him again if she wished. He could even seal it in an envelope and leave it at the _Herald_ office, to be given to any one who would describe it. He walked slowly down Broadway and turned into the side street which held the house and the unattractive hall bedroom he called home. He felt "let down," as he would have put it, and horribly lonely and depressed. She was such a good sort, he reflected, and it was such a big pity she wouldn't let him see her again. He knew somehow that he never would. She was not a woman that changed her mind about things. Jove! but the whole experience had been interesting; and that kiss--that kiss he had been cad enough to misunderstand for an instant. ... The deepest blush of the day scorched his face as he recalled it.

Miss Stansbury arrived at the front entrance of her hotel at the same moment, and tersely instructed the driver to collect his fare at the desk. She entered the hall with him, and walked indifferently past the night clerk, answering with a nod the tacit question of that youth as he glanced from her to the cabman. She was not unconscious of the suppressed excitement in his manner nor of the elevator boy's relief as he joyfully greeted her appearance in his car. What did it matter? What did anything matter now? Her day was over.

Miss Manuel, already informed of her arrival by a hurried telephone message from the office, was waiting for her at the door of their apartment. She burst into tears as she put her arms around her patient and kissed her and led her inside.

"Oh, my dear, how _could_ you?" she cried, reproachfully. "Think of the agonies I've been through. It's almost twelve o'clock."

The other woman did not look at her, nor did she return the caress. She walked into the room and sat down at her desk, with a strange appearance of haste, at which the nurse marvelled. Without waiting to take off her hat or coat, she seized a pen and paper and wrote these lines, marking them plainly:

PERSONAL