The Last Woman Part 6

"What was it? I didn't hear it."

"He said he was going to see Melvin. I suppose you know who Melvin is, don't you?"

"Oh, yes, indeed. Mr. Melvin and I are great friends. I think he is about the nicest old gentleman of my acquaintance; don't you? He is what I should call the _arbiter elegantiarum_ of the Langdon court, if one could imagine Old Steve as a Caesar, and Patricia as--" Beatrice paused, and flushed hotly. She had not considered to what length her words were reaching. She had almost cast a reflection upon her friend, which would have been as unkind as it was unmerited. She added, quickly: "But why, if I may ask, did the mention of Mr. Melvin's name interest you?"

Duncan gazed at his companion rather stupidly, for a moment, for his mind had suddenly become intent upon the complications of the day, and he had forgotten for the time being, where he was, and with whom he was talking. But Beatrice's smile and the mockery in her eyes brought him back to the present.

"I remembered that I should have gone, myself, to see Melvin, to-night," he told her, quietly. "It really was quite important. I should have sought him, instead of coming here."

"Indeed?" Beatrice laughed, brightly. "Mr. Melvin seems to be in great demand. Are you and Patricia to follow the French fashion of drawing the marriage-contract? and is Mr. Melvin to act the part of a French notary?" There was a touch of irony in her question, a little shaft of sarcasm that brought a quick flush to Duncan's face. He was reminded instantly of the tentative betrothal with Patricia, and his misgivings concerning it. Beside him was seated the one person who might aid them both; and with sudden resolution, acted upon as quickly as it was formed, he reached out and took one of Miss Brunswick's hands, holding it between both his own.

"Beatrice," he said, with quiet emphasis, "you have always been a good fellow, if ever there was a girl born in the world who was one. I wonder if you could be persuaded to give me the benefit of your advice, and, possibly, your active a.s.sistance?"

She flushed a little under the praise and the intimately personal request that came with it, but he did not notice this as he went on: "I've somehow got things into the biggest kind of a muddle to-day, and I have a notion to tell you all about it; I have the impulse to take you into my confidence and to ask you to help me out. I know you can do it. By Jove, Beatrice, I think you are the only person in the world who can do it! Will you?"

She shrugged her shoulders ever so little, and the flush left her cheeks, rendering them paler than was their wont. It suddenly came home to her that he was asking a favor that might prove extremely difficult to grant.

"I cannot say as to that until I hear what you wish me to do," she replied.

"I want you to help me square myself," he said, quickly.

"To square yourself?" She raised her brows in a.s.sumed surprise. "With whom?"

"Why, with Patricia, of course."

"Help you to square yourself with Patricia?" She laughed outright, but without mirth. "I am afraid I don't at all understand you, Roderick. I supposed you had already accomplished that much, for you told me--did you not?--that Patricia has just accepted you?"

"Yes, and that's the devil of it!" was the unexpected astounding reply. Beatrice moved farther away from him, and took her hand from his grasp, in well-simulated horror of what he had said.

"Let us, at least, confine ourselves to the usages and language of polite society;" she said, with mock severity. "We will leave the devil out of it, if you please. Besides, you amaze me! Patricia has just accepted you, and that is 'the devil of it.' Really, I can't guess what you mean by such a paradoxical statement as that."

"Forgive me. I am so wrought up that I scarcely know what I am talking about, or what I am doing. As I said before, I have managed to get things into a terrible mess, and I believe that you, Beatrice, are the only person alive who can unravel the tangle for me. Will you help me out? Will you?"

"You must tell me what it is, before I commit myself. You are so very aggravating, in words and manner, that I cannot even attempt to understand you."

For just a few moments, he hesitated. There was within him the feeling that he would outrage Patricia's ideas of the fitness of things, if he should take Beatrice Brunswick into his confidence and relate to her all that had occurred this afternoon and evening. But, on the other hand, he saw in this beautiful girl a personification of the straw at which a drowning man grasps. He knew that she was, personally, closer to Patricia than any other friend had been, and that she understood Patricia better than did anyone else, save Stephen Langdon, perhaps. He knew, also, that he could trust her, and that he could rely, implicitly, upon her loyalty. He knew that she would never betray the secrets he would be obliged to tell concerning Stephen Langdon's affairs. He had tried her often, and he had never found her wanting. Therefore, he felt that the greatest secret of all, concerning the financial extremity in which Stephen Langdon had become involved, would be safe with Beatrice Brunswick. Manlike, he began very stupidly and very strangely.

"By Jove, Beatrice!" he exclaimed. "I wish I might have fallen in love with you, instead of with Patricia! You would never have seen things in the light she does!"

Beatrice's eyes widened and deepened; then, they narrowed so that she almost frowned. She bit her lips with vexation, and for an instant was angry. At last, she laughed. She did not wish him to know how deeply he had wounded her by that careless statement, so she uttered a care-free ripple of laughter.

"I don't quite know whether I should take that as a compliment or not," she replied. "It is more than likely that I would have conducted myself very much worse than Patricia has done in this affair which you have not as yet explained to me. Perhaps, it is a fortunate thing for both of us that you did not fall in love with me, instead of her. I'm sure I don't know what I should have done with you, in such a case.

But I will help you if I can; only, understand in the beginning that if you tell me the story at all, you must tell me all of it. I don't want any half-confidences, Roderick."

Duncan did tell her all of it then, leaving nothing to be added, when he had finished; and she listened to the end of his tale in utter silence, with her head half-turned away and her chin supported by the palm of one of her jeweled hands. They did not move to the front of the box again, nor give any heed to the rise of the curtain or to what was taking place on the stage, during the ensuing act. Duncan talked straight on, through it all; and Beatrice listened with close attention. One might have supposed that the music and the singing did not reach the ears of either of them, and one would not have been very wrong in that surmise. The tragic fate of John, the Baptist; the unholy, unnatural pa.s.sion of a depraved soul for the dead lips of a man who had spurned her while he lived; the exquisite music of Strauss; the superb scenery and stage-setting; the rich and gorgeous costumes--all remained unseen and unheard by these two, one intent upon reestablishing himself in the esteem of Patricia Langdon, the other disturbed by emotions she could not have named, which she would have declined to recognize, even had they presented themselves frankly to her. She had known, of course, of Duncan's love for her friend, but until this hour there had always existed an unformed, unrecognized doubt in the mind of Beatrice that it would ever be requited.

When he had finished, she was still silent, and for so long a time that at last, with some impatience, he bent nearer to her, and exclaimed:

"Well, Beatrice? What do you think of it all?"

She shuddered a little. There was still another interval before she spoke, and then, with calm directness, she replied:

"I think you are both exceedingly brave to be willing to face the situation that exists."

"Eh?" he asked her, not comprehending.

"Why, if you carry out this compact that you have made, if Patricia Langdon becomes your wife according to the terms she has dictated to Melvin--for I can guess, now, what they are--you will both be casting yourselves straight down into h.e.l.l. I speak metaphorically, of course," she added, with a whimsical smile. "I have been told that there isn't any h.e.l.l, really. But I mean it, Roderick. If there isn't a h.e.l.l, you two seem to be bent upon the arrangement of a correct imitation of one."

"How is that?" he demanded, frowning. "I don't know what you mean."

"Our friend has not been named 'Juno' for nothing. She is a strange girl; but I love her, almost as much as you do," Beatrice continued, as if she had not heard his question. "She possesses characteristics, the depth of which I have never been able to sound, and I am her best and closest friend. If you two live up to this agreement, in the spirit in which it was made, and conclude it in the spirit in which she has dictated her conditions to Melvin, I tremble for the consequences that will ensue, for I can almost foresee them. Patricia is not one who forgives easily, and she will resent a hurt to her pride with all the force there is in her."

Beatrice rose to her feet, standing before him, and he, also, stood up, facing her. She reached out both her hands toward him, and he took them; and there were tears in her big blue eyes, when she added, with a depth of feeling that he did not understand:

"Roderick Duncan, it would be better for you, and for Patricia as well, if you never saw each other again. You might far better, and with much greater hope of happiness, cast your future lot with some other woman whom you have never thought of as a wife, than marry Patricia Langdon upon such terms as you have outlined. Have you known her so intimately all your life without understanding her at all? She might have forgiven disloyalty, or unfaithfulness, or at least have condoned such--but an offense against her pride? Never! You would be undergoing much less risk if you should select an utterly unknown woman from one of these boxes, and should take her out of this theatre now, and marry her instead!"

Having delivered this remarkable statement, Beatrice burst into laughter. Duncan, suddenly alive to her beauty and her nearness, deeply impressed by what she had said, and fully alive to the truth of her utterances, retained the grasp he had upon her hands, and drew her toward him, quickly.

"Why not?" he demanded, hotly. "I'll do it if you say the word! But not a strange woman. You, Beatrice--you!! I'll dare you!!! We'll go to the 'Little Church Around the Corner.' I dare you! I dare you, Beatrice! They always have a wedding ceremony on tap, there; if you've got the sand, come on. It offers a solution of everything. Come on, Bee--marry me!"

She raised her eyes to his, and he understood, instantly, how he had wounded her; he saw that her laughter had not been real, and that she was very near to tears. But the fact that she shrank away from his impetuous words and manner, only spurred him on anew. He caught her hands again.

"Let's do it, Beatrice," he said rapidly, bending forward with sudden eagerness. "I hate all this mess and muddle of affairs. I hate it! Say yes, Bee."

He stood with his back toward the curtains at the rear of the box; she was facing them. He saw her eyes dilate suddenly, and he had the sensation that she had discovered another person near them, or in the act of entering the box; and then, with more astonishment than he would have believed himself capable of feeling, he realized that Beatrice Brunswick had thrown herself forward and that her white arms were wound clingingly about his neck; at the same time, with evident design, she turned him still more, so that he could not see the curtains which screened the entrance to the box.

The last and final shock of that eventful day, came to him then, for he did turn, in spite of Beatrice's restraining arms--he turned to find that the curtains were drawn apart, and in the opening thus created stood Patricia Langdon. Duncan knew that she had both seen and heard.

He could not have moved, had he attempted to do so, although somewhere deep down inside of him he felt that it was his duty to untwine those clinging arms and somehow to account for the appalling situation.

Beyond where Patricia stood, he saw and recognized two other figures that were moving steadily forward toward them, but he had the subconscious a.s.surance in his soul that neither Stephen Langdon nor his lawyer, Melvin, had noticed the scene which Patricia had discovered. He could not guess that it had been the consequence of sudden inspiration on the part of Beatrice, who had thrown her arms around his neck at the very instant when she had intended to administer a rebuff.

He did not imagine that she had discovered the approach of Patricia before she made this outward demonstration in acceptance of his mad proposal. Duncan felt very guilty indeed, in that trying moment; nevertheless, he was not one to attempt an ignominious escape from a predicament in which he believed himself to be wholly at fault. But Beatrice was not yet through with acting a part. She drew away from Duncan quickly, with an exclamation of mingled disappointment, pleasure and alarm. She cried out the single e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n, "Oh!" and dropped backward upon the chair she had recently occupied. But there was a gleam of mischief in her eyes, which belied the confusion otherwise expressed upon her face.

"So sorry to have interrupted you at such a critical moment," said Patricia coolly, at once master of herself and of the situation.

"Good-evening, Beatrice. I hope you have enjoyed the opera. I decided to come at the last moment, and met my father at the door of the theatre, as I was entering. He insisted on seeing Mr. Melvin to-night, so we drove to his house together and brought him here. I thought I would enjoy the last act."

One might have thought that Roderick Duncan did not exist. Patricia did not so much as glance in his direction, but she moved forward to the front of the box and took her accustomed seat, just as Stephen Langdon and the lawyer, Melvin, entered it.

All this had pa.s.sed so quickly that the interval it occupied could be reckoned only by seconds. Beatrice Brunswick's face was flushed, and her eyes were alight with mischief, or with something deeper, as she greeted the two gentlemen. Duncan's countenance was like marble; he realized that the mess was bigger now, by far, than it had been before.

Langdon and his lawyer perceived nothing unusual in the att.i.tude of any person in the box; both were preoccupied with the discussion upon which they had just been engaged. Patricia's eyes were already fixed on the stage, and evidently her entire attention was devoted to it.

She appeared to have forgotten the propinquity of other persons.

There was a vacant chair beside her which Duncan should have taken, and, doubtless, he would have done so, had not the lawyer stupidly preempted it for his own use. The banker occupied the middle chair, and the consequence was that Duncan was given no choice, but was literally forced into the one next to Beatrice. Not that he would have preferred it otherwise, at the moment. Not he. He was angered by Patricia's conduct toward him; he resented the whole circ.u.mstance--and possibly, too, he still felt something of the thrill induced by the clinging arms of Beatrice Brunswick. He stared silently toward the stage, seeing nothing upon it. He was endeavoring to arrange, in some comprehensive form, the combination of circ.u.mstances and scenes which it had been his misfortune to encounter, and in part enact, since noon that day. But the more he tried, the more difficult became the task.

The whole thing was as exasperating as an attempt to put together, within an alloted time, a puzzle-picture which has been cut into all sorts of sizes and shapes. It was not a panorama of events, as he recounted them in his own mind; it was a kaleidoscope, a jumble of colors and figures, of angles and s.p.a.ces--or to put it in his own words, it was literally a mess.

He turned toward Beatrice, whose right hand was negligently waving a fan. He reached out and claimed it, and she did not resent the act. He drew it toward him, and she looked up and smiled into his eyes with an expression he did not understand. She made no effort to withdraw her hand, nor any attempt to resist his advances. He bent nearer.