The Ordeal of Elizabeth Part 14

"Have you really never been here before?" she asked at length. She could not have explained what induced her to put the question.

He answered it absently. "Why, yes, every day"--and then suddenly stopped and turned his eyes full upon her, while that strange light gleamed in their sombre depths which she had surprised once or twice before and had interpreted many different ways, which now set her heart beating wildly, and made her wish her question unspoken. "Every day," he repeated, quietly, "about this time, or earlier, since--since the thing began."

"Then why--why"--The words died away on her lips. They had reached the head of the great staircase, and the crowd came streaming up, a confused ma.s.s, to which she paid no heed. She had again the feeling of being alone, quite alone, in the midst of it all, while involuntarily their eyes met, and his were all aglow with a fire which she had never before seen in them, or imagined; a fire that dazzled and bewildered, and filled her with a strange, unreasoning joy, as it burned away the barriers of doubt and indifference, till for one short, breathless moment, which she could have counted with her heart-beats she read his inmost soul.

"I only looked at one picture," he said.

And then with the words the spell which held her seemed broken, and the crowd closed in about her, with a sound like the roar of the sea very near at hand, and she looked down the great staircase, and saw Mrs. Bobby coming towards them.

_Chapter XVIII_

"My dear," said Mrs. Bobby, "I'm so sorry to be late. Luncheon was interminable. Why, Julian, who would have expected to see you here?"

She gave him her hand demurely, with softly shining eyes. Neither her surprise nor her contrition seemed to ring quite true.

Gerard's dark eyes were again half closed beneath their heavy lids. He looked, if a trifle pale, more impa.s.sive than usual.

"I don't know why my presence here should cause so much surprise," he said. "Most people come here, don't they, some time or another. It's a--a meeting-place, isn't it?"

"It seems to have been on this occasion," Mrs. Bobby murmured under her breath. A young man had just stopped and spoken to Elizabeth, and the words might have referred to him. Gerard smiled.

"Won't you come and look at some of these pictures?" he asked. "I want to talk to you."

"You awaken my curiosity."

They walked slowly along the gallery which skirted the hall, too deep in conversation to pay much heed to the pictures which hung along their way. Elizabeth's eyes followed them, the while she was repeating mechanically "Yes, the portraits are extremely fine."

"But not one," the young man declared, with blunt gallantry "to compare with yours. It's by all odds the most beautiful picture here."

"Do you really think so?" said Elizabeth, gently. "I'm very glad." She had heard the sentiment, rather differently put, perhaps a hundred times. Yet it seemed now to have all the charm of novelty.

The young man, a very slight acquaintance, charmed to have called up that glow of pleasure to her face, redoubled his efforts to entertain her. He was sorry when Mrs. Bobby returned with Gerard, and bore her off. "She was delighted when I said that about her picture," he thought, "there's nothing like flattering a girl, if you know how to do it delicately."

"We really must be going, Elizabeth," said Mrs. Bobby, consulting her engagement-book. "We have at least a dozen visits, and we promised, you know, to go to Mr. D'Hauteville's musicale."

"That reminds me that I did too," said Gerard. "I'm glad you spoke of it."

"We shall see you there, then," said Mrs. Bobby, as he placed them in the carriage, and they drove off. "I am feeling utterly crushed," she continued, turning to Elizabeth, and looking under the circ.u.mstances, very cheerful. "Julian has been giving me a terrible lecture. He thinks me, I see very clearly, quite unfit to have the care of you. He says that you are not as strong as you seem, that I have been dragging you around--entirely for my own pleasure, apparently--from one thing to another till you are quite worn out, and that you will be ill if I don't take care. He has quite frightened me. But there, Elizabeth, you don't look so very tired, after all."

She certainly did not. There was color in her cheeks, a light in her eyes that was at once brilliant and soft. All the lines drawn by sleepless nights had, for the moment at least, disappeared.

"You don't look badly," Mrs. Bobby repeated. "You look, in fact, infinitely better than when I saw you this morning."

"I feel better," Elizabeth admitted. "Just for a moment, at the Portrait Show, I did feel tired and depressed, and he--Mr. Gerard got alarmed about me, but it was nothing. I am quite well now. And the portraits are really very interesting. I am glad you persuaded me to look at them again, Eleanor."

"I thought you might be repaid," said Mrs. Bobby, serenely. "What did you think of your own picture? Doesn't it look better in that light?"

Elizabeth's face was turned away, so that Mrs. Bobby could only see the rounded outline of her cheek and one small, sh.e.l.l-like ear. "Yes, I--I thought it looked better," she said, in a low voice. "Perhaps you were right. It must have been the--the light of the studio that made me feel--disappointed in it, somehow."

"Oh, there is everything in the light in which you look at things,"

a.s.sented Mrs. Bobby, cheerfully. And with this profound remark, the two women sank into silence, while the carriage rolled swiftly up the Avenue, stopping occasionally, as the footman left cards. To Elizabeth, as she sat gazing out of the window, the prosaic brown stone houses, and the more pretentious ones of marble which broke the monotony here and there, and the brilliant shops, which had intruded themselves like parvenus among their quieter and more aristocratic neighbors--all these familiar objects stood out in a softened perspective, which endowed them with lines almost of romance. The wide, commonplace streets had an unwonted charm, the people who walked on them wore an air of curious happiness, merely, no doubt, at finding themselves alive in this beautiful world. Yes, as Mrs. Bobby had so wisely observed, "there is everything in the light in which you look at things."

"I wonder if Mr. D'Hauteville's musicale will be pleasant," Elizabeth observed dreamily, as they neared Carnegie Hall. The remark was purely perfunctory. Pleasant? Of course it would be pleasant--she hadn't a doubt of it.

"There will be a lot of queer people there--musical, literary, and that sort of thing," said Mrs. Bobby, vaguely. "Some men with long hair will play, and the women, no doubt, will wear wonderful aesthetic gowns. If Julian were not to be there, I should not dream of going. My prophetic instinct tells me that we shall not know a soul."

"But won't that be rather amusing," suggested Elizabeth.

"Well, theoretically, yes," said Mrs. Bobby, in rather a doubtful tone, "but, practically, I'm afraid I prefer people whom I know, and who have the conventional amount of hair and lack of brains. Let me confess the truth to you, Elizabeth. I'm not really Bohemian--I only pretend to be so at odd moments, when I want to tease Bobby, or shock the Neighborhood. There isn't at heart, I believe, a more conventional little society wretch than I. However, as you say, that sort of thing is amusing--for one afternoon; and Julian will be there, and protect us from the celebrities and tell us who they all are."

Julian was fortunately on hand when they arrived, but the room was filled for the most part with people who looked very much like any one else, and only a few were sufficiently long-haired and eccentric to justify Mrs. Bobby's prediction of their being celebrities of some sort. The host, who came forward to meet them, was a well-known musician, a man with an intellectual face and dreamy eyes, which lighted up as he welcomed them with eager cordiality; but he could do no more for the present than seat them and give them programmes, for the music was about to begin.

It was a charming studio, well up near the top of Carnegie Hall, and like most studios, it was artistically furnished. The polished floor was strewn with rich rugs, the walls were covered in every nook and cranny, with plaques, and pictures, and rare tapestries, and strange Eastern weapons. A grand piano took up the whole of one corner, and in another a toy staircase seemed to have been placed entirely for ornament, till it was utilized as a seat by some picturesque-looking girls in large hats. From the broad cas.e.m.e.nted window near which Elizabeth sat, she could see an expanse of roofs and chimneys, far down from the dizzy height, and beyond them the river, and further still the winter sunset, fading in cold blues and greens and violets, on a still colder sky. Her eyes rested there with dreamy satisfaction.

She had no wish to look back into the room, to where Gerard was standing close to them, on the other side of Mrs. Bobby. She was still living on the memory of that moment--was it an hour or was it years ago?--that long look of which the reflected light was still glowing on her face, and in her dreamy eyes. She had no wish to renew it; the recollection was sufficient, for awhile at least. Yet she was glad to know that he was there.

Mrs. Bobby meanwhile, having embarked on her trip to Bohemia, was disappointed to find it comparatively tame.

"I don't see any one I know," she said to Gerard, as the piano solo came to an end. "They look, most of them, depressingly commonplace.

But they must be extraordinary in some way, or they wouldn't be here.

Tell us who they are, Julian, and introduce them to us if you think we would like them."

"Why, there are some musical lights," he answered, rather absently "who, I hope, are going to perform for our benefit, and there are a few ordinary music-lovers like myself, and some literary people--whom I don't know that you would care about."

"You think us too frivolous, I see," said Mrs. Bobby. "But you don't realize how clever I can be if I try, and as for Elizabeth, she knows a lot more than she seems to know."

"Does she?" asked Gerard with a smile, and he glanced across at Elizabeth, who still would not meet his eyes. "She looks very innocent," he said, musingly, after a pause. "I should be sorry to think of her as--concealing anything."

A little pang, a thought sharp like a stone, struck Elizabeth for an instant. It was the first rift in the lute. She put it resolutely away from her.

"You think me too stupid, I see," she said "to have any knowledge to conceal."

He had no time to answer before some woman began to sing. She had a beautiful voice, and Elizabeth listened, yet chiefly conscious, all the while, of the fact that Gerard had managed to shift his position, and was standing directly behind her.

"I never thought you stupid," he said, under cover of the applause, in a low voice that no one but she could hear, "no, nor ignorant; but I have sometimes thought you frivolous, and flippant, and--and a little hard. You seem, I sometimes think, to take pleasure in showing these qualities to me. Why is it, I wonder?"

"I--I don't know," she murmured, in the same low voice, and gazing straight before her. "You--somehow you seem to compel it. You ought to be grateful, I think. At least you know the worst of me."

She spoke these words with an absolute unconsciousness of their falseness; and even as they died away on her lips, she glanced across the room and saw Paul Halleck standing in the door-way.

That old mythological king whom some vague reminiscence of her school-days had conjured up in Elizabeth's mind, he who had every wish fulfilled, till he grew at last to dread his own prosperity--was it, I wonder, in some such moment of foreboding that the final crash came, or was it when his fears were lulled and his senses stilled, by some delicious, over-powering sense of happiness that shut out for the moment all unpleasant thoughts? This, at all events, was the way in which fate overtook Elizabeth.

Paul Halleck stood in the door-way, having apparently just arrived.

His blue eyes were wandering about the room. They did not fall, as yet, upon Elizabeth.

She did not faint, or cry out, or make herself in any way conspicuous.

She turned deathly white, and her heart, which had been beating faster for Gerard's presence, seemed suddenly to stop entirely, as though a piece of ice had been laid on it. And then, in a moment, her heart began to beat again, though faintly. She drew a long breath. Gerard, who was standing directly behind her, could not see her face beneath the shadow of her large hat, yet he felt instinctively that something was wrong.