Star-Dust Part 69

"You darling!"

They alighted at the Washington Arch, jamming their way into the tight battalion of spectators already lining both sides of lower Fifth Avenue.

The head of the parade was already forming, a slim young leader holding in her white mount with difficulty.

"Lilly, she looks like our picture of Jeanne d'Arc when she sees the vision!"

"She is heeding a vision, Zoe--of to-morrow."

"I feel so--so thrilled, Lilly. Do you?"

"Yes," said Lilly, for some reason breathing hard. "Oh, I do!"

There was a break of music, and all about them women darting into line, sudden banners floating out, and the white horse prancing in the archway, for all the world as if spun at a tangent off the narrative frieze of the arch.

At the Eighth Street curb, where they stood, five hundred women, with standards lifted, stiffened suddenly into formation, a deputy from their ranks, a buyer, by the way, for the largest cloak-and-suit house in the world, calling short, quick orders and distributing American flags.

The air was rent with silk and bra.s.s; a simoom of rapture raced over Zoe. She danced on the b.a.l.l.s of her feet. It was then that a deputy, with a face that recalled newspaper reproductions of it, spied her.

"Here, little girl! You! Oh, lovely! Could you manage this banner, dear, and lead this section? Miss, is this lovely child your sister? Do let her lead!"

"She's my daughter."

"Come; you may fall in line right behind her. Do you mind if I unpin your sister's curls? Oh, she's lovely--"

"I said she's my _daughter!_"

"Here, right in front, dear--my--oh, what a find!"

And so, with her somewhat bewildered parent in the ranks behind her, her little black frock wrapped in a purple-and-yellow banner, head up, eyes stars, Zoe Penny led the largest district of Greater New York up Fifth Avenue, a constant and running line of applause following her lead.

She was youth sonnetized. Cameras clicked after her, and, with the martial music tickling her blood, her head went higher still, like a stag's. To her mother, following after, it seemed that the loudest of all must be music within her own heart, and so she marched on, sprayed, as it were, by the wave of constant applause as it broke over Zoe and died down at the rank and file.

It was dusk when they reached Fifty-ninth Street, and in the jam of disbanding and quite a little demonstration over Zoe by the section she had distinguished, they worked their way out finally toward the cross-town street car, hand in hand, like two ecstatic, rather bewildered babes in the wood.

At a touch upon her shoulder Lilly turned, spun, rather, under high tension, to encounter the well-bred hesitancy of an exceedingly slender woman, a very small head set on the stem of a long, gracile neck, something hauntingly familiar in the somewhat heart-shaped face and the far-apart eyes that were considerably younger than the white hair which framed them.

"I beg your pardon"--in a voice perfectly rounded of edges--"but my husband is so enchanted with the little girl that we are taking the liberty of asking to meet her. Won't you permit me to present my husband, Gedney Daab? You have heard of him, I presume."

Lilly had. The "Dolorosa" above her desk was a print from a Gedney Daab.

He stepped forward then, lanky and rugged, with a great shock of upstanding gray hair, with the path of his fingers through it and his features with no scheme at all. Just very delightfully irregular, he jutted out of any crowd.

"Zoe, Mr. and Mrs. Daab want to meet you."

She lifted her clean gaze, dropped a courtesy, and held out her hand with the short, curved gesture of childhood.

"h.e.l.lo!" he said, the timbre of real youth in his voice, which childhood is so quick to detect from the silly enameling of tone coated on by grown-ups for the occasion. "I want to paint you, youngster."

"Oh, Lilly, what fun!"

"Then she is your sister?"

"Oh no, Mrs. Daab; she is my daughter."

"But the name--"

"It's our way together."

"How droll!"

"Do you think I'm pretty?"

Gedney Daab looked down at her ardent artlessness without a burst of laughter.

"Oh, as little girls go."

"Zoe knows G.o.d has merely given her a fair urn of a body, Mr. Daab, which she, in turn, must fill with beauty of mind and spirit."

"You are the Dolorosa, aren't you?" continued Zoe, turning to Mrs. Daab.

"The sad one with the tears that don't show, from crying on the inside of you."

It was not until then that this dawned upon Lilly. Those eyes of the Dolorosa, bleeding tears, were Mrs. Daab's.

"You'll have to paint me as glad--won't you?--glad all over clear from the inside."

"Yes, Sunlight; I rather think I will."

"Will you permit my husband and me to take you home, Mrs.--"

"Penny."

"Oh, please, Lilly!"

"We live rather far up from here--Ninety-first Street, West."

"And we live at Park Hill; so you see we hardly regard that as far."

They were presently riding through the Park, Zoe facing the three of them in the soft gray interior of the Daab limousine. She was absolutely artless.

"I've been in a taxi three times and a hansom once. But I prefer this. I shall have my own some day--only, purple upholstery instead of gray--sort of wine color--"

"An early eye to effect, I see, young miss."

"I'm the cla.s.s beauty," she explained. "I didn't care to be that at first--Lilly says it is just a lovely accident and might happen to anyone else. She wanted me to be cla.s.s president; so I decided to be both."

"You will observe that my daughter is not chiefly notable for her reticence."

"You come to my studio, little lady, and I am going to paint you just as golden and radiantly innocent as you are."