Who Cares? Part 7

He was in evening clothes. His face had lost its tan and his eyes their clear country early-to-bed look. "You've had a tea-fight, I see. I peered into the drawing-room an hour ago and backed out, quick."

"Why? They were all consumed with curiosity about you. Alice has advertised our romantic story, you see." She clasped her hands together and adopted a pose in caricature of the play heroine in an ecstasy of egomania.

But Martin's laugh was short and hollow. He wasn't amused. "How did you get on?" he asked.

"Lost seventy dollars--that's all. Three-handed bridge with Grandfather and Grandmother was not a good apprenticeship. I must have a few lessons. D'you like my frock? Come up. You can't see it from there."

And he came up and looked at her as she turned this way and that. How slim she was, and alluring! The fire in him flamed up, and his eyes flickered. "Awful nice!" he said.

"You really like it?"

"Yes, really. You look beyond criticism in anything, always."

Joan stretched out her hand. "Thank you, Marty," she said. "You say and do the most charming things that have ever been said and done."

He bent over the long-fingered hand. His pride begged him not to let her see the hunger and pain that were in his eyes.

"Going out?" she asked.

Martin gave a careless glance at one of B. C. Koekkoek's inimitable Dutch interiors that hung between two pieces of Flemish tapestry. His voice showed some of his eagerness, though. "I was going to have dinner with some men at the University Club, but I can chuck that and take you to the Biltmore or somewhere else if you like."

Joan shook her head. "Not to-night, Marty. I'm going to bed early, for a change."

"Aren't you going to give me one evening, then?" His question was apparently as casual as his att.i.tude. He stood with his hands in his pockets and his legs wide apart and his teeth showing. He might have been talking to a sister.

"Oh, lots, presently. I'm so tired to-night, old boy."

He would have given Parna.s.sus for a different answer. "All right then,"

he said. "So long."

"So long, Marty! Don't be too late." She nodded and smiled and went upstairs.

And he nodded and smiled and went down--to the mental depths. "What am I to do?" he asked himself. "What am I to do?" And he put his arms into the coat that was held out and took his hat. In the street the soft April light was fading, and the scent of spring was blown to him from the Park. He turned into Fifth Avenue in company with a horde of questions that he couldn't shake off. He couldn't believe that any of all this was true. Was there no one in all this world of people who would help him and give him a few words of advice? "Oh, Father," he said from the bottom of his heart, "dear old Father, where are you?"

The telephone bell was ringing as Joan went into her room. Gilbert Palgrave spoke--lightly and fluently and with easy words of flattery.

She laughed and sat on the edge of the bed and crossed her legs and put the instrument on her knee. "You read all that in a book," she said.

"I'm tired. Yesterday and the night before... No... No... All right, then. Fetch me in an hour." She put the receiver back.

"Why not?" she said to herself, ringing for her maid. "Bed's for old people. Thank G.o.d, I sha'n't be old for a century."

She presented her back to the deft-fingered girl and yawned. But the near-by clatter of traffic sounded in her ears.

II

Gilbert Palgrave turned back to his dressing table. An hour gave him ample time to get ready.

"Don't let that bath get cold," he said. "And look here. You may take those links out. I'll wear the pearls instead."

The small, eel-like j.a.panese murmured sibilantly and disappeared into the bathroom.

This virginal girl, who imagined herself able to play with fire without burning her fingers, was providing him with most welcome amus.e.m.e.nt. And he needed it. He had been considerably bored of late--always a dangerous mood for him to fall into. He was thirty-one. For ten years he had paid far more than there had been any necessity to keep constantly amused, constantly interested. Thanks to a shrewd ancestor who had bought large tracts of land in a part of Manhattan which had then been untouched by bricks and mortar, and to others, equally shrewd, who had held on and watched a city spreading up the Island like a mustard plant, he could afford whatever price he was asked to pay.

Whole blocks were his where once the sheep had grazed.

Ingenuity to spend his income was required of Palgrave. He possessed that gift to an expert degree. But he was no easy mark, no mere degenerate who hacked off great chunks of a splendid fortune for the sake of violent exercise. He was too indolent for violence, too inherently fastidious for degeneracy. And deep down somewhere in a nature that had had no incentive to develop, there was the f.a.g end of that family shrewdness which had made the early Palgraves envied and maligned. Tall and well built, with a handsome Anglo-Saxon type of face, small, soft, fair mustache, large, rather bovine gray eyes, and a deep cleft in his chin, he gave at first sight an impression of strength--which left him, however, when he spoke to pretty women. It was not so much the things he said,--light, jesting, personal things,--as the indications they gave of the overweening vanity of the spoiled boy and of a brain which occupied itself merely with the fluff and thistledown of life. He was, and he knew it and made no effort to disguise the fact, a typical specimen of the very small cla.s.s of indolent bystanders made rich by the energy of other men who are to be found in every country. He was, in fact, the peculiar type of aristocrat only to be found in a democracy--the aristocrat not of blood and breeding or intellect, but of wealth. He was utterly without any ambition to shine either in social life or politics, or to achieve advertis.e.m.e.nt by the affectation of a half-genuine interest in any cause. On the contrary, he reveled in being idle and indifferent, and unlike the aristocrats of Europe he refused to catch that archaic habit, encouraged at Eton and Oxford, of relating everything in the universe to the standards and prejudices of a single cla.s.s.

Palgrave was triumphantly one-eyed and selfish; but he waited, with a sort of satirical wistfulness, for the time when some one person should cause him to stand eager and startled in a chaos of individualism and indolence and shake him into a Great Emotion. He had looked for her at all times and places, though without any troublesome optimism or personal energy, and had almost come to believe that she was to him what the end of the rainbow is to the idealist. In marrying Alice he had followed the path of least resistance. She was young, pretty and charming, and had been very much in love with him. Also it pleased his mother, and she had been worth pleasing. He gave his wife all that she could possibly need, except very much of himself. She was a perfectly dear little soul.

Joan only kept him waiting about fifteen minutes. With perfect patience he stood in front of an Italian mirror in the drawing-room, smoking a cigarette through a long tortoise-sh.e.l.l holder. He regarded himself with keen and friendly interest, not in the least surprised that his wife's little friend from the country so evidently liked him. He found that he looked up to his best form, murmured a word of praise for the manner in which his evening coat was cut and smiled once or twice in order to have the satisfaction of getting a glimpse of his peculiarly good teeth. Then he laughed, called himself a conceited a.s.s and went over to examine a rather virile sketch of a muscular, deep-chested young man in rowing costume which occupied an inconspicuous place among many well-chosen pictures. He recognized Martin, whom he had seen several times following the hounds, and tried to remember if Alice had told him whether Joan had run away with this strenuous young fellow or been run away with by him. There was much difference between the two methods.

He heard nothing, but caught the scent of Peau d'Espagne. It carried his mind back to a charming little suite in the Hotel de Crillon in Paris. He turned and found Joan standing in the doorway, watching him.

"Did you ever row?" she asked.

"No," he said, "never. Too much f.a.g. I played squash and roulette. You look like a newly risen moon in her first quarter. Where would you like to go?"

"I don't know," said Joan. "Let's break away from the conventional places. I rather want to see queer people and taste different food. But don't let's discuss it. I leave it to you." She went downstairs. She might have been living in that house for years.

He followed, admiring the way her small, patrician head was set on her shoulders, and the rich brown note of her hair. Extraordinary little person, this! He told his chauffeur to drive to the Brevoort, and got into the car. It was possible at that hour to deal with the Avenue as a street and not as a rest-cure interrupted by short spurts.

"Would you rather the windows were up, Gehane?" he asked, looking at her through his long lashes.

"No. The air's full of new ferns. But why Gehane?"

"You remind me of her, and I'm pretty certain that you also could do your hair in the same two long braids. Given the chance, I can see you developing into some-thing like medievalism and joining the ranks of women who loved greatly."

They pa.s.sed the Plaza with all its windows gleaming, like a giant's house in a fairy tale.

Joan shook her head. "No," she said. "No. I'm just the last word of this very minute. Everybody in America for a hundred and fifty years has worked to make me. I'm the reward of mighty effort. I'm the dream-child of the pioneers, as far removed from them as the chimney of the highest building from the rock on which it's rooted."

Palgrave laughed a little. "It appears that you did some thinking out there in your country cage."

"Thinking! That's all I had to do! I spent a lifetime standing on the hill with the woods behind me trying to catch the music of this street, the sound of this very car, and I thought it all out, every bit of it."

"Every bit of what?"

"Life and death and the great hereafter," she said, "princ.i.p.ally life.

That's why I'm going out to dinner with you instead of going early to bed."

The glare of a lamp silvered her profile and the young curve of her bosom. Somewhere, at some time, Palgrave had knelt humbly, with strange anguish and hunger, at the feet of a girl with just that young proud face and those unawakened eyes. The memory of it was like an echo of an echo.

"Why," said Joan, halting for a moment on her way to the steps of the old hotel, "this looks like a picture postcard of a bit of Paris."

"Yes, on the other side of the Seine, near the Odeon. Our grandfathers imagined that they were very smart when they stayed here. It's one of the few places in town that has atmosphere."