The Street of Seven Stars Part 30

As was Peter's way, the words meant little, the tone much. McLean knew what in his heart he had known all along--that the girl was safe enough; that all that was to fear was the gossip of scandal-lovers. He took Peter's hand, and then going to Harmony stood before her very erect.

"I suppose I've said too much; I always do," he said contritely. "But you know the reason. Don't forget the reason, will you?"

"I am only sorry."

He bent over and kissed her hand lingeringly. It was a tragic moment for him, poor lad! He turned and went blindly out the door and down the dark stone staircase. It was rather anticlimax, after all that, to have Peter discover he had gone without his hat and toss it down to him a flight below.

All the frankness had gone out of the relationship between Harmony and Peter. They made painful efforts at ease, talked during the meal of careful abstractions, such as Jimmy, and Peter's proposed trip to Semmering, avoided each other's eyes, ate little or nothing. Once when Harmony pa.s.sed Peter his coffee-cup their fingers touched, and between them they dropped the cup. Harmony was flushed and pallid by turns, Peter wretched and silent.

Out of the darkness came one ray of light. Stewart had wired from Semmering, urging Peter to come. He would be away for two days. In two days much might happen; Dr. Jennings might come or some one else. In two days some of the restraint would have worn off. Things would never be the same, but they would be forty-eight hours better.

Peter spent the early part of the evening with Jimmy, reading aloud to him. After the child had dropped to sleep he packed a valise for the next day's journey and counted out into an envelope half of the money he had with him. This he labeled "Household Expenses" and set it up on his table, leaning against his collar-box. There was no sign of Harmony about. The salon was dark except for the study lamp turned down.

Peter was restless. He put on his shabby dressing-gown and worn slippers and wandered about. The Portier had brought coal to the landing; Peter carried it in. He inspected the medicine bottles on Jimmy's stand and wrote full directions for every emergency he could imagine. Then, finding it still only nine o'clock, he turned up the lamp in the salon and wrote an exciting letter from Jimmy's father, in which a lost lamb, wandering on the mountain-side, had been picked up by an avalanche and carried down into the fold and the arms of the shepherd. And because he stood so in loco parentis, and because it seemed so inevitable that before long Jimmy would be in the arms of the Shepherd, and, of course, because it had been a trying day all through, Peter's lips were none too steady as he folded up the letter.

The fire was dead in the stove; Peter put out the salon lamp and closed the shutters. In the warm darkness he put out his hand to feel his way through the room. It touched a little sweater coat of Harmony's, hanging over the back of a chair. Peter picked it up in a very pa.s.sion of tenderness and held it to him.

"Little girl!" he choked. "My little girl! G.o.d help me!"

He was rather ashamed, considerably startled. It alarmed him to find that the mere unexpected touch of a familiar garment could rouse such a storm in him. It made him pause. He put down the coat and pulled himself up sharply. McLean was right; he was only human stuff, very poor human stuff. He put the little coat down hastily, only to lift it again gently to his lips.

"Good-night, dear," he whispered. "Goodnight, Harmony."

Frau Schwarz had had two visitors between the hours of coffee and supper that day. The reason of their call proved to be neither rooms nor pension. They came to make inquiries.

The Frau Schwarz made this out at last, and sat down on the edge of the bed in the room that had once been Peter's and that still lacked an occupant.

Mrs. Boyer had no German; Dr. Jennings very little and that chiefly medical. There is, however, a sort of code that answers instead of language frequently, when two or three women of later middle life are gathered together, a code born of mutual understanding, mutual disillusion, mutual distrust, a language of outspread hands, raised eyebrows, portentous shakings of the head. Frau Schwarz, on the edge of Peter's tub-shaped bed, needed no English to convey the fact that Peter was a bad lot. Not that she resorted only to the sign language.

"The women were also wicked," she said. "Of a man what does one expect?

But of a woman! And the younger one looked--Herr Gott! She had the eyes of a saint! The little Georgiev was mad for her. When the three of them left, disgraced, as one may say, he came to me, he threatened me. The Herr Schwarz, G.o.d rest his soul, was a violent man, but never spoke he so to me!"

"She says," interpreted Dr. Jennings, "that they were a bad lot--that the younger one made eyes at the Herr Schwarz!"

Mrs. Boyer drew her ancient sables about her and put a tremulous hand on the other woman's arm.

"What an escape for you!" she said. "If you had gone there to live and then found the establishment--queer!"

From the kitchen of the pension, Olga was listening, an ear to the door.

Behind her, also listening, but less advantageously, was Katrina.

"American ladies!" said Olga. "Two, old and fat."

"More hot water!" growled Katrina. "Why do not the Americans stay in their own country, where the water, I have learned, comes hot from the earth."

Olga, bending forward, opened the door a crack wider.

"Sh! They do not come for rooms. They inquire for the Herr Doktor Byrne and the others!"

"No!"

"Of a certainty."

"Then let me to the door!"

"A moment. She tells them everything and more. She says--how she is wicked, Katrina! She says the Fraulein Harmony was not good, that she sent them all away. Here, take the door!"

Thus it happened that Dr. Jennings and Mrs. Boyer, having shaken off the dust of a pension that had once harbored three malefactors, and having retired Peter and Anna and Harmony into the limbo of things best forgotten or ignored, found themselves, at the corner, confronted by a slovenly girl in heelless slippers and wearing a knitted shawl over her head. "The Frau Schwarz is wrong," cried Olga pa.s.sionately in Vienna dialect. "They were good, all of them!"

"What in the world--"

"And, please, tell me where lives the Fraulein Harmony. The Herr Georgiev eats not nor sleeps that he cannot find her."

Dr. Jennings was puzzled.

"She wishes to know where the girl lives," she interpreted to Mrs.

Boyer. "A man wishes to know."

"Naturally!" said Mrs. Boyer. "Well, don't tell her."

Olga gathered from the tone rather than the words that she was not to be told. She burst into a despairing appeal in which the Herr Georgiev, Peter, a necktie Peter had forgotten, open windows, and hot water were inextricably confused. Dr. Jennings listened, then waved her back with a gesture.

"She says," she interpreted as they walked on, "that Dr. Peter--by which I suppose she means Dr. Byrne--has left a necktie, and that she'll be in hot water if she does not return it."

Mrs. Boyer sniffed.

"In love with him, probably, like the others!" she said.

CHAPTER XIX

Peter went to Semmering the next morning, tiptoeing out very early and without breakfast. He went in to cover Jimmy, lying diagonally across his small bed amid a riot of tossed blankets. The communicating door into Harmony's room was open. Peter kept his eyes carefully from it, but his ears were less under control. He could hear her soft breathing.

There were days coming when Peter would stand where he stood then and listen, and find only silence.

He tore himself away at last, closing the outer door carefully behind him and lighting a match to find his way down the staircase. The Portier was not awake. Peter had to rouse him, and to stand by while he donned the trousers which he deemed necessary to the dignity of his position before he opened the street door.

Reluctant as he had been to go, the change was good for Peter. The dawn grew rosy, promised sunshine, fulfilled its promise. The hurrying crowds at the depot interested him: he enjoyed his coffee, taken from a bare table in the station. The horizontal morning sunlight, shining in through marvelously clean windows, warmed the marble of the floor, made black shadows beside the heaps of hand luggage everywhere, turned into gold the hair of a toddling baby venturing on a tour of discovery. The same morning light, alas! revealed to Peter a break across the toe of one of his shoes. Peter sighed, then smiled. The baby was catching at the bits of dust that floated in the sunshine.

Suddenly a great wave of happiness overwhelmed Peter. It was a pa.s.sing thing, born of nothing, but for the instant that it lasted Peter was a king. Everything was well. The world was his oyster. Life was his, to make it what he would--youth and hope and joy. Under the beatific influence he expanded, grew, almost shone. Youth and hope and joy--that cometh in the morning.

The ecstasy pa.s.sed away, but without reaction. Peter no longer shone; he still glowed. He picked up the golden-haired baby and hugged it. He hunted out a beggar he had pa.s.sed and gave him five h.e.l.lers. He helped a suspicious old lady with an oilcloth-covered bundle; he called the guard on the train "son" and forced a grin out of that dignitary.

Peter traveled third-cla.s.s, which was quite comfortable, and no bother about "Nicht Rauchen" signs. His unreasonable cheerfulness persisted as far as Gloggnitz. There, with the increasing ruggedness of the scenery and his first view of the Raxalpe, came recollection of the urgency of Stewart's last message, of Marie Jedlicka, of the sordid little tragedy that awaited him at the end of his journey.

Peter sobered. Life was rather a mess, after all, he reflected. Love was a blessing, but it was also a curse. After that he sat back in his corner and let the mountain scenery take care of itself, while he recalled the look he had surprised once or twice in Marie's eyes when she looked at Stewart. It was sad, pitiful. Marie was a clever little thing. If only she'd had a chance!--Why wasn't he rich enough to help the ones who needed help. Marie could start again in America, with no one the wiser, and make her way.

"Smart as the devil, these Austrian girls!" Peter reflected. "Poor little guttersnipe!"