The Return of the Prodigal Part 31

How beautiful she was he realized after a dinner which figured in his memory as one of those dinners which he had not enjoyed, though as a matter of fact he _had_ enjoyed it or the mere distraction of it. By way of distraction he had taken the table next to hers, facing her where she sat between her two men.

She was an American; that fact had at first made his doubt itself a little dubious. And she was probably from the South (they were different there). Hence her softness, her full tone, her richness and her glow. Hence her exotic strain that went so well with the false tropics of the scene. But whether she were a provincial or an urban, or, as she seemed, a cosmopolitan splendor, Thesiger was not cosmopolitan enough to tell. She might have been the supreme flower of her astounding country. She might have been, for all he knew, unique.

She was tall, and her body, large and ma.s.sive, achieved the grace of slenderness from the sheer perfection of its lines. Her attire, within the bounds of its subservience to Paris, was certainly unique. It was wonderful the amount of decoration she could carry without being the worse for it. Her head alone, over and above its bronze hair, coil on coil and curl on curl, sustained several large tortoise-sh.e.l.l pins, a gold lace fillet, and a rose over each ear.

It was no more to her than a bit of black ribbon to a young girl.

Old rose and young rose mingled delicately in the silks and gauzes of her gown; here and there a topaz flashed rose from her bodice and from the dusk of her bared neck. There was a fine dusk in her whiteness and in the rose of her face, and in the purplish streaks under her eyes, and deeper dusks about the roots of her hair. And gold sprang out of her darkness there; gold and bronze and copper gleamed and glowed and flamed on every coil and curl. Her eyes held the light gloriously; they were of a luminous, tawny brown, wide apart, and slightly round, with a sudden fineness at the corners.

The lids had thick black lashes, so short that when they drooped they had the effect of narrowing her eyes without darkening them.

Her nose, small and straight, was a shade too broadly rounded at the tip, but that defect gave a sort of softness to her splendor. Of her mouth Thesiger could not judge; he hadn't seen it at rest; and when she talked her white teeth flashed at him and disturbed him.

As he looked at her, disturbed, and he hoped, disturbing, he thought of little Vera Walters, of her slender virginal body, of her small virginal face, smooth, firm, and slightly pointed like a bud, of her gray eyes, clear as water, and of the pale gold and fawn of her hair. He thought of her tenderness and of her cruelty. He caught himself frowning at it over the _mousse de volaille_ he was eating; and just then he thought that the other woman who was looking at him smiled. Most certainly she gazed.

The gaze was condoned and allowed by the two men who followed it.

She was superb; but the men, the men were awful. To begin with, they were American, altogether too American for Thesiger. One, whom the lady addressed with some ceremony as Mr. Tarbuck, was the big, full type, florid, rough-hewn, civilized by the cut of his clothes and the excessive cleanness of his shaving. From the first he had oppressed and offended Thesiger by his large and intolerably genial presence. The other, whom she familiarly and caressingly called Binky, was small and lean and yellow; he had a young face with old, nervous lines in it, the twitching, tortured lines of the victim of premature high pressure, effete in one generation. The small man drank, most distinctly and disagreeably he drank. He might have been the wreck of saloon bars, or of the frequent convivial c.o.c.ktail, or of savage, solitary drinking.

The lady seemed to be traveling under Tarbuck's awful wing, while the outrageous Binky wandered conspicuously and somewhat mysteriously under hers. She was attentive to the small man and peeled his peaches for him, while the large man, smiling largely and with irrepressible affection, peeled hers. The large man (flagrantly opulent) had ordered peaches. He supposed they'd be the one thing that durned hotel hadn't got.

Thesiger conceived a violent hatred for him and for the small man, too. He always had hated the male of the American species. He looked on him as a disagreeable and alien creature; at his best a creature of predatory instincts who appropriated and monopolized all those things of power and beauty that belonged, properly speaking, to his betters; at his worst a defiler of the sacred wells, a murderer and mutilator of the language, of his, Oscar Thesiger's, language.

The two were murdering it now, the large man with a terrible slow a.s.surance in the operation; the small man, as it were, worrying it between his teeth, disposing of it in little savage snaps and jerks and nasal snarlings. He would stop eating to do it. That was when his beautiful and hypothetical companion left him to himself.

For the lady had a curiously soothing and subduing effect on the small man. Sometimes, when his snarls were too obtrusive, she would put out her hand, her small, perfect hand, and touch his sleeve, and he would cease snarling and begin to peck feebly at the things before him, or at the things before her, as the case might be.

Thesiger actually saw her transferring the _entree_ she had just tasted from her own plate to his; he heard her coaxing and cajoling him, calling on him by his offensive name of Binky. "Eat, little Binky! Little Binky, eat!"

There seemed to be some rule in a game they had, by which, if she first touched or tasted anything, Binky could not honorably refuse it.

It was clear that she had a hold on the small man. Thesiger had noticed that when she cancelled his orders for drinks he made no resistance, while he bitterly resented Mr. Tarbuck's efforts at control. She would then inquire gaily of Mr. Tarbuck whether he was in command of this expedition or was she?

To-night, her fine eyes being considerably occupied with Thesiger, the small man a.s.serted his independence and was served, surrept.i.tiously as it were, with a br.i.m.m.i.n.g whisky and soda.

He had got his hand on it when the lady shot out a sudden arm across the table, and with a staggering dexterity and impudence possessed herself of his gla.s.s. Over the rim of it she kept her eyes on him, narrowed eyes, darting mockery of Binky under half-closed lids; and, with her head tilted back, she drank; she drank daintily, about an inch down, and then she gave the gla.s.s to the large man, and he, as if honor and chivalry compelled him also, emptied it.

"Did you that time, Binky," she murmured.

Thesiger heard her. She was looking at him, obviously to see how his fastidiousness had taken it. She leaned forward, her elbows on the table, and her head, propped on her hands, tilted slightly backward, and she gazed at him under her lowered eyelids with her narrowed, darting eyes. Then suddenly she lowered her chin and opened her eyes, and he met them full.

Her gaze, which had first fascinated, now excited him; very curiously it excited him, seeing that he was thinking about Vera Walters all the time. So unabashed it was, and so alluring, it sent such challenge and encouragement to the adventurous blood, that under it the pa.s.sion that Vera would have none of detached itself from Vera with a fierce revulsion, and was drawn and driven, driven and drawn toward that luminous and invincible gaze. And Thesiger began to say to himself that the world was all before him, although for him Vera had walked out of it; that he was a man of the world; and that he didn't care.

It seemed to him that the beautiful American smiled again at him.

Then she got up, and swept down the dining-hall, swinging her rosy draperies. The two men followed her, and Thesiger was left alone in that vast place, seated at his table, and staring into a half-empty winegla.s.s, to the embarra.s.sment of the waiter who hovered by his chair.

After all, she left him an ultimate scruple; he could not altogether trust his doubt.

III

It was a fine night, and the lounge was almost deserted. Thesiger, searching it for some one he could speak to, counted four old ladies and their middle-aged companions, three young governesses and their charges only less young, and one old gentleman, fixed by an extreme corpulence in his armchair, asleep over _Le Figaro_, while one ponderous hand retained upon his knee _Le Pet.i.t Journal_. Nowhere any sign of the transatlantic mystery and her companions. It occurred to Thesiger that it might interest him to know her name (he hadn't heard it), and even the number of her room.

He strolled to the racks on each side of the great staircase where the visitors' names were posted, and after a prolonged investigation he came upon the three: Miss Roma Lennox, Mr. Frank Bingham-Booker, and Mr. Theobald G. Tarbuck, of New York City, U. S. A. Their respective numbers were 74, 75, and 80. What was odd, the opulent Tarbuck (number 80) occupied a small room looking over the garage at the back, while 74, Mr. Frank Bingham-Booker, who was visibly impecunious, and 75, Miss Roma Lennox, luxuriated.--Thesiger shook his head over the social complication and gave it up.

The lounge was no place for him. He went out, down the Californie Hill and along the Avenue des Palmiers, with some idea of turning eventually into the Casino. He was extraordinarily uplifted. He thought that he was feeling the enchantment of the lucid night above the sea, the magic of the white city of the hills, feeling the very madness of the tropics in the illusion that she made with her palm trees and their velvet shadows on the white pavement.

He had come to the little Place before the Casino, set with plane trees. Under the electric globes the naked stems, the branches, naked to the tip, showed white with a livid, supernatural, a devilish and iniquitous whiteness. The scene was further illuminated, devilishly, iniquitously, as it were, through the doors and windows of the Casino, of the restaurants, of the bra.s.series, of the omnipresent and omnipotent American Bar. If there were really any magic there, any devilry, any iniquity, it joined hands with the iniquity and devilry in Oscar Thesiger's soul, and led them forth desirous of adventure. And walking slowly and superbly, under the white plane trees, the adventure came.

As the light fell on her superb and slow approach, he saw that it was Roma Lennox; Roma Lennox walking, oh Lord! by herself, like that, after ten at night, in Cannes, on the pavement of the Place.

She was coming toward him, making straight for him, setting herself unavoidably in his path. He had been prepared for many things, but he had not been prepared for that, for the publicity, the flagrance of it. And yet he was not conscious of any wonder; rather he had a sense of the expectedness, the foregoneness of the event, and a savage joy in the certainty she gave him, in his sudden absolution from the ultimate scruple, the release from that irritating, inhibiting doubt of his doubt.

He raised his hat and inquired urbanely whether he might be permitted to walk with her a little way.

She had stopped and was regarding him with singular directness.

"Why, certainly," she said.

They walked the little way permitted, and then, at her suggestion, they sat together under the plane trees on one of the chairs in a fairly solitary corner of the Place.

He saw now that she had changed her gown and that, over some obscurer thing, she wore a long, dull purple coat with wide hanging sleeves; her head was bound and wound, half-Eastern fashion, in a purple veil, hiding her hair. In her dark garb, with all her colors hidden, her brilliance extinguished, she was more wonderful than ever, more than ever in keeping with the illusion of the tropics.

His hands trembled and his pulses beat as he found himself thus plunged into the heart of the adventure. He might have been put off by the sheer rapidity and facility of the thing, but for her serious and somber air that seemed to open up depths, obscurities.

She sat very still, her profile slightly averted, and with one raised hand she held her drifting veil close about her chin. They sat thus in silence a moment, for her mystery embarra.s.sed him. Then (slowly and superbly) over her still averted shoulder she half turned her head toward him.

"Well," she said, "haven't you anything to say for yourself? It's up to you."

Then, nervously, he began to say things, to pay her the barefaced, far from subtle, compliments that had served him once or twice before on similar occasions (if any occasion could be called similar). Addressed to her, they seemed somehow inadequate. He said that, of course, inadequate he knew they were.

"I'm glad you think so," said Miss Lennox.

"I--I said I knew it."

"Oh--the things you know!"

"And the things _you_ know." He grew fervid. "Don't pretend you don't know them. Don't pretend you don't know how a man feels when he looks at you."

"And why should I pretend?"

She had turned round now with her whole body and faced him squarely.

"Why should you? Why should you?"

Lashed, driven as he judged she meant him to be by her composure, his pa.s.sion shook him and ran over, from the tips of his fingers stroking the flung sleeve of her coat, from the tip of his tongue uttering the provoked, inevitable things--things that came from him hushed for the crowd, but, for her, hurried, vehement, unveiled.

She listened without saying one word; she listened without looking at him, looking, rather, straight in front of her, and tilting her head a little backward before the approach of his inflamed, impetuous face.

He stopped, and she bent forward slightly and held him with the full gaze of her serious eyes.

"What--do you think--you're doing?" she asked slowly.

He said he supposed that she could see.