Romance Island Part 6

St. George explained the location, and Mrs. Hastings fretfully commented.

"I'm sure, Olivia," she said, "I think it is frightfully unwomanly in you--"

"To take so much interest in my own murder?" Miss Holland asked in amus.e.m.e.nt. "Aunt Dora, I'm going to do more: I suggest that you and Mr. Frothingham and I go with Mr. St. George to this address in McDougle Street--"

"My dear Olivia!" shrilled Mrs. Hastings, "it's in the very heart of the Bowery--isn't it, Mr. St. John? And only think--"

It was as if Mrs. Hastings' frustrate words emerged in the fantastic guise of her facial changes.

"No, it isn't quite the Bowery, Mrs. Hastings," St. George explained, "though it won't look unlike."

"I wish I knew what Mr. Hastings would have done," his widow mourned, "he always said to me: 'Medora, do only the necessary thing.' Do you think this _is_ the necessary thing--with all the frightful smells?"

"It is perfectly safe," ventured St. George, "is it not, Mr.

Frothingham?"

Mr. Frothingham bowed and tried to make non-partisanship seem a tasteful resignation of his own will.

"I am at Mrs. Hastings' command," he said, waving both hands, once, from the wrist.

"You know the place is really only a few blocks from Washington Square," St. George submitted.

Mrs. Hastings brightened.

"Well, I have some friends in Washington Square," she said, "people whom I think a great deal of, and always have. If you really feel, Olivia--"

"I do," said Miss Holland simply, "and let us go now, Aunt Dora. The brougham has been at the door since I came in. We may as well drive there as anywhere, if Mr. St. George is willing."

"I shall be happy," said St. George sedately, longing to cry: "Willing! Willing! Oh, Mrs. Hastings and Miss Holland--_willing_!"

Miss Holland and St. George and the lawyer were alone for a few minutes while Mrs. Hastings rustled away for her bonnet. Miss Holland sat where the afternoon light, falling through the corner window, smote her hair to a glory of pale colour, and St. George's eyes wandered to the gla.s.s through which the sun fell. It was a thin pane of irregular pieces set in a design of quaint, meaningless characters, in the centre of which was the figure of a sphinx, crucified upon an upright cross and surrounded by a border of coiled asps with winged heads. The window glittered like a sheet of gems.

"What wonderful gla.s.s," involuntarily said St. George.

"Is it not?" Miss Holland said enthusiastically. "My father sent it.

He sent nearly all these things from abroad."

"I wonder where such gla.s.s is made," observed St. George; "it is like lace and precious stones--hardly more painted than carved."

She bent upon him such a sudden, searching look that St. George felt his eyes held by her own.

"Do you know anything of my father?" she demanded suddenly.

"Only that Mrs. Hastings has just told me that he is abroad--in the South Atlantic," St. George wonderingly replied.

"Why, I am very foolish," said Miss Holland quickly, "we have not heard from him in ten months now, and I am frightfully worried. Ah yes, the gla.s.s is beautiful. It was made in one of the South Atlantic islands, I believe--so were all these things," she added; "the same figure of the crucified sphinx is on many of them."

"Do you know what it means?" he asked.

"It is the symbol used by the people in one of the islands, my father said," she answered.

"These symbols usually, I believe," volunteered Mr. Frothingham, frowning at the gla.s.s, "have little significance, standing merely for the loose barbaric ideas of a loose barbaric nation."

St. George thought of the ladies of Doctor Johnson's Amicable Society who walked from the town hall to the Cathedral in Lichfield, "in linen gowns, and each has a stick with an acorn; but for the acorn they could give no reason."

He looked long at the gla.s.s.

"She," he said finally, "our false mulatto, ought to stand before just such gla.s.s."

Miss Holland laughed. She nodded her head a little, once, every time she laughed, and St. George was learning to watch for that.

"The gla.s.s would suit any style of beauty better than steel bars,"

she said lightly as Mrs. Hastings came fluttering back. Mrs.

Hastings fluttered ponderously, as humblebees fly. Indeed, when one considered, there was really a "blunt-faced bee" look about the woman.

The brougham had on the box two men in smart livery; the footman, closing the door, received St. George's reply to Mrs. Hastings'

appeal to "tell the man the number of this frightful place."

"I dare say I haven't been careful," Mrs. Hastings kept anxiously observing, "I have been heedless, I dare say. And I always think that what one must avoid is heedlessness, don't you think? Didn't Napoleon say that if only Caesar had been first in killing the men who wanted to kill him--something about Pompey's statue being kept clean. What was it--why should they blame Caesar for the condition of the public statues?"

"My dear Mrs. Hastings," Mr. Frothingham reminded her, his long gloved hands laid trimly along his knees as before, "you are in my care."

The statue problem faded from the lady's eyes.

"Poor, dear Mr. Hastings always said you were so admirable at cross-questioning," she recalled, partly rea.s.sured.

"Ah," cried Miss Holland protestingly, "Aunt Dora, this is an adventure. We are going to see 'Tabnit.'"

St. George was silent, ecstatically reviewing the events of the last six hours and thinking unenviously of Amory, rocking somewhere with _The Aloha_ on a mere stretch of green water:

"If Chillingworth could see me now," he thought victoriously, as the carriage turned smartly into McDougle Street.

CHAPTER IV

THE PRINCE OF FAR-AWAY

No. 19 McDougle Street had been chosen as a likely market by a "hokey-pokey" man, who had wheeled his cart to the curb before the entrance. There, despite Mrs. Hastings' coach-man's peremptory appeal, he continued to dispense stained ice-cream to the little denizens of No. 19 and the other houses in the row. The brougham, however, at once proved a counter-attraction and immediately an opposition group formed about the carriage step and exchanged penetrating comments upon the livery.

"Mrs. Hastings, you and Miss Holland would better sit here, perhaps," suggested St. George, alighting hurriedly, "until I see if this man is to be found."

"Please," said Miss Holland, "I've always been longing to go into one of these houses, and now I'm going. Aren't we, Aunt Dora?"

"If you think--" ventured Mr. Frothingham in perplexity; but Mr.

Frothingham's perplexity always impressed one as duty-born rather than judicious, and Miss Holland had already risen.