Complete Works of F Marion Crawford

by F. Marion Crawford

  Margaret was amused, or pretended to be, but she was also thinking very seriously of the future, and asking herself whether she ought to send for Logotheti at once, or not. Van Torp would certainly not leave Bayreuth at a moment’s notice, at her bidding, and if he stayed she could not now refuse to see him, with any show of justice. She thought of a compromise, and suddenly stood still in the lane.

  ‘You said just now that you would not say over again any of those things you have told me to-night. Do you mean that?’

  ‘Yes, I mean it.’

  ‘Then please promise that you won’t. That’s all I ask if you are going to spend the next two days here, and if I am to let you see me.’

  ‘I promise,’ Van Torp answered, without hesitation.

  She allowed herself the illusion that she had both done the right thing and also taken the position of command; and he, standing beside her, allowed himself to smile at the futility of what she was requiring of him with so much earnestness, for little as he knew of women’s ways he was more than sure that the words he had spoken that night would come back to her again and again; and more than that he could not hope at present. But she could not see his face clearly.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘That shall be our compact.’

  To his surprise, she held out her hand. He took it with wonderful calmness, considering what the touch meant to him, and he returned discreetly what was meant for a friendly pressure. She was so well satisfied now that she did not think it necessary to telegraph to Logotheti that he might start at once, though even if she had done so immediately he could hardly have reached Bayreuth till the afternoon of the next day but one, when the last performance of Parsifal would be already going on; and she herself intended to leave on the morning after that.

  She walked forward in silence for a few moments, and the lights of the town grew quickly brighter.

  ‘You will come in and have some supper with us, of course,’ she said presently.

  ‘Why, certainly, since you’re so kind,’ answered Van Torp.

  ‘I feel responsible for your having forgotten to dine,’ she laughed. ‘I must make it up to you. By this time Mrs. Rushmore is probably wondering where I am.’

  ‘Well,’ said the American, ‘if she thinks I’m perfection, she knows that you’re safe with me, I suppose, even if you do come home a little late.’

  ‘I shall say that we walked home very slowly, in order to breathe the air.’

  ‘Yes. We’ve walked home very slowly.’

  ‘I mean,’ said Margaret quickly, ‘that I shall not say we have been out towards the fields, as far as the gate.’

  ‘I don’t see any harm if we have,’ observed Mr Van Torp indifferently.

  ‘Harm? No! Don’t you understand? Mrs. Rushmore is quite capable of thinking that I have already — how shall I say? — —’ she stopped.

  ‘Taken note of her good advice,’ he said, completing the sentence for her.

  ‘Exactly! Whereas nothing could be further from my intention, as you know. I’m very fond of Mrs. Rushmore,’ Margaret continued quickly, in order to get away from the dangerous subject she had felt obliged to approach; ‘she has been a mother to me, and heaven knows I needed one, and she has the best and kindest heart in the world. But she is so anxious for my happiness that, whenever she thinks it is at stake, she rushes at conclusions without the slightest reason, and then it’s very hard to get them out of her dear old head!’

  ‘I see. If that’s why she thinks me perfection, I’ll try not to disappoint her.’

  They reached the hotel, went upstairs, and separated on the landing to get ready for supper. Margaret went to her own room, and before joining Mrs. Rushmore she wrote a message to Alphonsine, her theatre maid, who was visiting her family in Alsatia. Margaret generally telegraphed her instructions, because it was much less trouble than to write. She inquired whether Alphonsine would be ready to join her in Paris on a certain day, and she asked for the address of a wig-maker which she had forgotten.

  On his side of the landing, Mr. Van Torp found Stemp waiting to dress him, and the valet handed him a telegram. It was from Captain Brown, and had been re-telegraphed from London.

  ‘Anchored off Saint Mark’s Square to-day, 3.30 P.M. Quick passage. No stop. Coaling to-morrow. Ready for sea next morning.’

  Mr. Van Torp laid the message open on the table in order to save Stemp the trouble of looking for it afterwards.

  ‘Stemp,’ he asked, as he threw off his coat and kicked off his dusty shoes, ‘were you ever sea-sick?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ answered the admirable valet, but he offered no more information on the subject.

  During the silence that followed, neither wasted a second. It is no joke to wash and get into evening dress in six minutes, even with the help of a body-servant trained to do his work at high speed.

  ‘I mean,’ said Van Torp, when he was already fastening his collar, ‘are you sea-sick nowadays?’

  ‘No, sir,’ replied Stemp, in precisely the same tone as before.

  ‘I don’t mean on a twenty-thousand-ton liner. Black cravat. Yes. I mean on a yacht. Fix it behind. Right. Would you be sea-sick on a steam yacht?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Sure?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Then I’ll take you. Tuxedo.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  Stemp held up the dinner-jacket; Mr. Van Torp’s solid arms slipped into the sleeves, he shook his sturdy shoulders, and pulled the jacket down in front while the valet ‘settled’ the back. Then he faced round suddenly, like a soldier at drill.

  ‘All right?’ he inquired.

  Stemp looked him over carefully from head to foot in the glare of the electric light.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Van Torp left the room at once. He found Mrs. Rushmore slowly moving about the supper-table, more imposing than ever in a perfectly new black tea-gown and an extremely smart widow’s cap. Mr. Van Torp thought she was a very fine old lady indeed. Margaret had not entered yet; a waiter with smooth yellow hair stood by a portable sideboard on which there were covered dishes. There were poppies and corn-flowers in a plain white jar on the table. Mrs. Rushmore smiled at the financier; it would hardly be an exaggeration to say that she beamed upon him. They had not met alone since his first visit on the previous afternoon.

  ‘Miss Donne is a little late,’ she said, as if the fact were very pleasing. ‘You brought her back, of course.’

  ‘Why, certainly,’ said Mr. Van Torp with an amiable smile.

  ‘You can hardly have come straight from the theatre,’ continued the lady, ‘for I heard the other people in the hotel coming in fully twenty minutes before you did.’

  ‘We walked home very slowly,’ said Mr. Van Torp, still smiling amiably.

  ‘Ah, I see! You went for a little walk to get some air!’ She seemed delighted.

  ‘We walked home very slowly in order to breathe the air,’ said Mr. Van Torp— ‘to breathe the air, as you say. I have to thank you very much for giving me your seat, Mrs. Rushmore.’

  ‘To tell the truth,’ replied the good lady, ‘I was very glad to let you take my place. I cannot say I enjoy that sort of music myself. It gives me a headache.’

  Margaret entered at this point in a marvellous ‘creation’ of Chinese crape, of the most delicate shade of heliotrope. Her dressmaker called it also a tea-gown, but Mr. Van Torp would have thought it ‘quite appropriate’ for a ‘dinner-dance’ at Bar Harbor.

  ‘My dear child,’ said Mrs. Rushmore, ‘how long you were in getting back from the theatre! I began to fear that something had happened!’

  ‘We walked home very slowly,’ said Margaret, with a pleasant smile.

  ‘Ah? You went for a little walk to get some air?’

  ‘We just walked home very slowly, in order to breathe the air,’ Margaret answered innocently.

  It dawned on Mr. Van Torp that the dignified Mrs. Rushmore was not quite devoid of a sense of humour. It also oc
curred to him that her repetition of the question to Margaret, and the latter’s answer, must have revealed to her the fact that the two had agreed upon what they should say, since they used identically the same words, and that they therefore had an understanding about something they preferred to conceal from her. Nothing could have given Mrs. Rushmore such profound satisfaction as this, and it revealed itself in her bright smiles and her anxiety that both Margaret and Van Torp should, if possible, over-eat themselves with the excellent things she had been at pains to provide for them and for herself. For she was something of an epicure and her dinners in Versailles were of good fame, even in Paris.

  Great appetites are generally silent, like the sincerest affections. Margaret was very hungry, and Mr. Van Torp was both hungry and very much in love. Mrs. Rushmore was neither, and she talked pleasantly while tasting each delicacy with critical satisfaction.

  ‘By the bye,’ she said at last, when she saw that the millionaire was backing his foretopsail to come to anchor, as Captain Brown might have expressed it, ‘I hope you have not had any further trouble about your rooms, Mr. Van Torp.’

  ‘None at all, that I know of,’ answered the latter. ‘My man told me nothing.’

  ‘The Russian prince arrived this evening while you were at the theatre, and threatened the director with all sorts of legal consequences because the rooms he had ordered were occupied. He turns out to be only a count after all.’

  ‘You don’t say so,’ observed Mr. Van Torp, in an encouraging tone.

  ‘What became of him?’ Margaret asked, without much interest.

  ‘Did Potts not tell you, my dear? Why, Justine assisted at the whole interview and came and told me at once.’

  Justine was Mrs. Rushmore’s Parisian maid, who always knew everything.

  ‘What happened?’ inquired Margaret, still not much interested.

  ‘He arrived in an automobile,’ answered Mrs. Rushmore, and she paused.

  ‘What old Griggs calls a sudden-death-cart,’ Mr. Van Torp put in.

  ‘What a shocking name for it!’ cried Mrs. Rushmore. ‘And you are always in them, my dear child!’ She looked at Margaret. ‘A sudden-death-cart! It quite makes me shiver.’

  ‘Griggs says that all his friends either kill or get killed in them,’ explained the American.

  ‘My throat-doctor says motoring is very bad for the voice, so I’ve given it up,’ Margaret said.

  ‘Really? Thank goodness your profession has been of some use to you at last, my dear!’

  Margaret laughed.

  ‘Tell us about the Russian count,’ she said. ‘Has he found lodgings, or is he going to sleep in his motor?’

  ‘My dear, he’s the most original man you ever heard of! First he wanted to buy the hotel and turn us all out, and offered any price for it, but the director said it was owned by a company in Munich. Then he sent his secretary about trying to buy a house, while he dined, but that didn’t succeed either. He must be very wealthy, or else quite mad.’

  ‘Mad, I should say,’ observed Mr. Van Torp, slowly peeling a peach. ‘Did you happen to catch his name, Mrs. Rushmore?’

  ‘Oh, yes! We heard nothing else all the afternoon. His name is Kralinsky — Count Kralinsky.’

  Mr. Van Torp continued to peel his peach scientifically and economically, though he was aware that Margaret was looking at him with sudden curiosity.

  ‘Kralinsky,’ he said slowly, keeping his eyes on the silver blade of the knife as he finished what he was doing. ‘It’s not an uncommon name, I believe. I’ve heard it before. Sounds Polish, doesn’t it?’

  He looked up suddenly and showed Margaret the peeled peach on his fork. He smiled as he met her eyes, and she nodded so slightly that Mrs. Rushmore did not notice the movement.

  ‘Did you ever see that done better?’ he asked with an air of triumph.

  ‘Ripping!’ Margaret answered. ‘You’re a dandy dab at it!’

  ‘My dear child, what terrible slang!’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Margaret. ‘I’m catching all sorts of American expressions from Mr. Van Torp, and when they get mixed up with my English ones the result is Babel, I suppose!’

  ‘I’ve not heard Mr. Van Torp use any slang expressions yet, my dear,’ said Mrs. Rushmore, almost severely.

  ‘You will,’ Margaret retorted with a laugh. ‘What became of Count Kralinsky? I didn’t mean to spoil your story.’

  ‘My dear, he’s got the Pastor to give up his house, by offering him a hundred pounds for the poor here.’

  ‘It’s cheap,’ observed Mr. Van Torp. ‘The poor always are.’

  ‘You two are saying the most dreadful things to-night!’ cried Mrs. Rushmore.

  ‘Nothing dreadful in that, Mrs. Rushmore,’ objected the millionaire. ‘There’s no investment on earth like charity.’

  ‘We are taught that by charity we lay up treasures in heaven,’ said the good lady.

  ‘Provided it’s not mentioned in the newspapers,’ retorted Mr. Van Torp. ‘When it is, we lay up treasures on earth. I don’t like to mention other men in that connexion, especially as I’ve done the same thing myself now and then, just to quiet things down; but I suppose some names will occur to you right away, don’t they? Where is the Pastor going to sleep, now that the philanthropist has bought him out?’

  ‘I really don’t know,’ answered Mrs. Rushmore.

  ‘Then he’s the real philanthropist,’ said Van Torp. ‘If he understood the power of advertisement, and wanted it, he’d let it be known that he was going to sleep on the church steps without enough blankets, for the good of the poor who are to have the money, and he’d get everybody to come and look at him in his sleep, and notice how good he was. Instead of that, he’s probably turned in under the back stairs, in the coal-hole, without saying anything about it. I don’t know how it strikes you, Mrs. Rushmore, but it does seem to me that the clergyman’s the real philanthropist after all!’

  ‘Indeed he is, poor man,’ said Margaret, a good deal surprised at Van Torp’s sermon on charity, and wondering vaguely whether he was talking for effect or merely saying what he really thought.

  An effect certainly followed.

  ‘You put it very sensibly, I’m sure,’ said Mrs. Rushmore, ‘though of course I should not have looked for anything else from a fellow-countryman I respect. You startled me a little at first, when you said that the poor are always cheap! Only that, I assure you.’

  ‘Well,’ answered the American, ‘I never was very good at expressing myself, but I’m glad we think alike, for I must say I value your opinion very highly, Mrs. Rushmore, as I had learned to value the opinion of your late husband.’

  ‘You’re very kind,’ she said, in a grateful tone.

  Margaret was not sure that she was pleased as she realised how easily Van Torp played upon her old friend’s feelings and convictions, and she wondered whether he had not already played on her own that night, in much the same way. But with the mere thought his words and his voice came back to her, with his talk about the uselessness of ever repeating what he had said that once, because he knew she could never forget it. And her young instinct told her that he dealt with the elderly woman precisely as if she were a man, with all the ease that proceeded from his great knowledge of men and their weaknesses; but that with herself, in his ignorance of feminine ways, he could only be quite natural.

  He left them soon after supper, and gave himself up to Stemp, pondering over what he had accomplished in two days, and also about another question which had lately presented itself. When he was ready to send his valet to bed he sat down at his table and wrote a telegram:

  ‘If you can find Barak, please explain that I was mistaken. Kralinsky is not in New York, but here in Bayreuth for some days, lodging at the Pastor’s house.’

  This message was addressed to Logotheti at his lodgings in London, and Van Torp signed it and gave it to Stemp to be sent at once. Logotheti never went to bed before two o’clock, as he knew, and might very possibly get
the telegram the same night.

  When his man was gone, Van Torp drew his chair to the open window and sat up a long time thinking about what he had just done; for though he held that all was fair in such a contest, he did not mean to do anything which he himself thought ‘low-down.’ One proof of this odd sort of integrity was that the telegram itself was a fair warning of his presence in Bayreuth, where Logotheti knew that Margaret was still stopping.

  As for the rest, he was quite convinced that it was Kralinsky himself, the ruby merchant, who had suddenly appeared at Bayreuth, and that this man was no other than the youth he had met long ago as a cow-boy in the West, who used to whistle Parsifal with his companion in exile, and who, having grown rich, had lost no time in coming to Europe for the very purpose of hearing the music he had always loved so well. And that this man had robbed the poor Tartar girl, Mr. Van Torp had no manner of doubt; and he believed that he had probably promised her marriage and abandoned her; and if this were true, to help her to find Kralinsky was in itself a good action.

  CHAPTER VII

  WHEN VAN TORP and Logotheti left Mr. Pinney’s shop, the old jeweller meant to have a good look at the ruby the Greek had brought him, and was going to weigh it, not merely as a matter of business, for he weighed every stone that passed through his hands from crown diamonds to sparks, but with genuine curiosity, because in a long experience he had not seen very many rubies of such a size, which were also of such fine quality, and he wondered where this one had been found.

  Just then, however, two well-dressed young men entered the shop and came up to him. He had never seen either of them before, but their looks inspired him with confidence; and when they spoke, their tone was that of English gentlemen, which all other Englishmen find it practically impossible to imitate, and which had been extremely familiar to Mr. Pinney from his youth. Though he was the great jeweller himself, the wealthy descendant of five of his name in succession, and much better off than half his customers, he was alone in his shop that morning. The truth was that his only son, the sixth Pinney and the apple of his eye, had just been married and was gone abroad for a honeymoon trip, and the head shopman, who was Scotch, was having his month’s holiday in Ayrshire, and the second man had been sent for, to clean and restring the Duchess of Barchester’s pearls at her Grace’s house in Cadogan Gardens, as was always done after the season, and a couple of skilled workmen for whom Mr. Pinney found occupation all the year round were in the workshop at their tables; wherefore, out of four responsible and worthy men who usually were about, only the great Mr. Pinney himself was at his post.