"Hope!" he exclaimed. Then his hand fell on the other man's shoulder—the man in the brown hat. Hope recognised him now—the "bad lot" whose face she had said she "hated"; their fellow-lodger at Mrs. Hassard's. Hope started to speak, but could not think of anything appropriate to say. The other also opened his mouth, but prudently closed it again at the feel of Nick's grip. "That will be absolutely all!" said Nick. "You'd better go quick." The other was a small man, with a furtive, narrow face. He showed his teeth unpleasantly as he twisted away, and looked back once while hastening down the hall.
Hope stood staring, until Nick took her hands and drew her through the door. Then she got a belated sense of shock, for Nick was trembling. It frightened her unaccountably; she threw herself into his arms with an answering shudder.
"What was the matter? What were you quarrelling about? What did he want?" she asked breathlessly.
"Nothing, dear; we weren't quarrelling." But she took him by the shoulders peremptorily, and he reddened again. "At least, I suppose we were," he said, patting her shoulder soothingly. "Just a man's row: I was rude to him, and he didn't like it, so I told him to get out."
"But you were talking about me," she said slowly.
"No," said Nick explosively.
"Oh, I heard you!"
He blushed, he stammered miserably, then he caught her hands again pleadingly.
"Look here, Hope, we weren't talking about you; that's just it. That fellow saw us here and tried to force himself on us for the evening; I shunted him off, as I told you; that was when he mentioned you, and I told him to shut up and get out. It was just— just a stupid misunderstanding. The man was a fool, that's all." Poor Nick really did not know what he was saying; he had to satisfy her somehow, and he thought the truth might be alarming to her inexperience. She thought she understood. Evidently the man had insulted her, but no good could come of resenting it further. He should have let it rest at that, but he blundered on: "I'll tell you all about it some other time, if you insist; when we get to Chicago. I'm too angry now." He took her pensive look for disbelief. He looked so unhappy and upset over it, she flung her arms about his neck again, closing the incident. Nevertheless, he had said too much and looked too much. It was quite involuntarily that she asked him later in the evening irrelevantly:
"Wasn't it queer that he happened to be here?"
"Awfully queer," said Nick, and flushed again.
It had shaken his debonair sense of security. There was a hint of the world's hostility toward the individual as such in the affair, the meaningless cruelty of an ordered scheme of things toward all things not orderly. He did not like to think he had put Hope in the position of an outlaw. He wished profoundly that their year was passed. But he had spared her the same uneasiness.
What he had spared her would hardly have troubled her at all. She was seldom daunted by the things she understood, however inimical. Knowing the worst, she could contemplate it with equanimity. Hope was just the kind of person to make a good breakfast before facing a firing squad. But—she was a trifle afraid of the dark. A common, rather cowardly blackmailer, who had been scared off at that, was nothing.
It was the dark she faced instead, when, a week later, she sat alone in New York, waiting for Nick, who did not come. Not knowing the meaning of either happening, she inevitably associated the two in her mind. It grew to some terrible, unknown menace, connected with herself. Together they overwhelmed her.
CHAPTER XXVI
THERE is hardly a worse torment than waiting in absolute uncertainty, counting the hours and the minutes, running the gamut of indignation and anxious hope and that gnawing grief which cannot find relief in tears. It takes a certain hardihood of soul to wear it out without giving way to utter hysteria. Hope had known heavy and corroding hours before, but then she had lost faith and could take counsel of forgetfulness. Now came a period she never afterwards cared to refer to: three days of mentally sitting still with folded hands before a misfortune whose face was shrouded. There was no way she could turn for information; New York is a human sea, which washes out a footprint almost sooner than the maker is out of sight around a corner.
Nick had left her very gaily, saying he would be no more than two or three hours, or until dinner-time. He meant to go to his office and inform them of his completed plans, to go to his bank and get what money he needed, and if there was time to make a farewell call upon his cousin. That he might, however, defer. And with that he might have stepped off the earth, so far as Hope was concerned.
She was at a small and quiet hotel downtown. By the next morning she knew the pattern of her room's wall-paper by heart, and at six o'clock was down, asking hopefully and fearfully for letters. There were none. So till afternoon she stayed in her room again, unable to read or sit still. Not till then could she feel she might try to find him through whatever channels her memory might point out. His office, naturally, first.
There are times in every human life when bad luck apparently ceases to be merely casual and becomes malignant. The telephone operator at Nick's office told Hope that he had left, very positively. Gone to Chicago, she mentioned cheerfully, and rang off.
He certainly meant to leave, Hope cogitated miserably. It might be that she had not understood him aright, and he had really severed the connection before they went down to the sea. That avenue was closed. She felt rather stunned, but resorted to the telephone again, to see if any unconjecturable reason could have taken him back to Mrs. Hassard's. That was negatived in brief time. Who had he ever named to her as intimate friends? She fished some names out of her mind, but nothing more; she could as soon find himself as these merely heard-of individuals of unknown address. He had a club. After the fashion of clubs, it could or would tell her nothing. And she began to feel beaten and a little shamed. Something —some impalpable shade of a tone from whoever had answered her at the club—had shown her the world's view of what she was doing, a woman seeking a man who evaded. She could almost taste her own scorn in her throat; it choked her when she tried to speak. Hadn't she vowed to take each day as sufficient unto itself? But her heart spoke, thrusting pride aside. Nick ought to have his chance—if anything had happened to him.
Now there remained no one, except, she remembered, strangely only at the very last, his cousin.
Mrs. Stuyvesant—Studebaker? Sturtevant! Grace Sturtevant. And she lived somewhere downtown — Sixteenth, Seventeenth, Eighteenth Street? The telephone book showed a Mrs. Ralph Sturtevant in East Nineteenth Street. Fully conscious of the unpardonable social solecism she was committing, but with every other feeling suddenly lost again in that black anxiety that was suffocating her, she went to the telephone again.
"Who is speaking, please?" A servant's voice; there is an unmistakable inflection in the tone of the trained servitor.
"I should like to speak to Mrs. Sturtevant," repeated Hope harshly.
There was silence a moment, then a voice, clear, almost toneless, as if strained, and infinitely detached, said:
"This is Mrs. Sturtevant. Who is there?"
"I am afraid you would not know my name," said Hope, her throat dry. "But, if you would be so kind, you might be able to do me a favour. Do you know Mr. Norris Carter's present address?"
The merest ghost of a caught-up cry came back to her—"Ah!" Silence again. And then, as even, as toneless, perhaps more distant than before:
"I am sorry I cannot. Hehas sailed for Europe, I believe. Is there anything else?" The last she might have spared, but it is instinct to strike out when one feels a blow, wheneever it come.
"No. Thank you." Hope hung up the receiver. Then, since she had no other thing in the world left, she called on her pride to sustain her and went quietly up to her room again, till her mind should be clear enough to plan.
Her pride and—how much? Mechanically, she looked into her little purse: four or five small pieces of silver. The hotel bill was not paid. Nick had laughingly turned out his pockets before her the evening they returned, and with a
kind of naive pleasure they shared what he found in them. She had a few dollars of her own, and had spent that immediately on some necessary trifle; and he was going to the bank when he went out.
To Europe. Why, in the name of a blind Providence, should he go to Europe?
And what should she do with that sixty-five cents? Anyone can spend a million dollars wisely; the judicious investment of sixty-five cents is a graver problem.
And she wanted Nick, with a simple hunger, that ache for the accustomed thing which is the substantial half of loving. Against him her pride could not arm itself, because it could find no memory for a weapnn. Even to the last, when they had made the laughing division of what he had, she could recall nothing that had not been kind.
"What shall I do?" she asked herself. "I must live." Must she? Yes; if she had said that once to get her own way, she still could see the other side of the shield, and know that a privilege is also an obligation. "That's our business," she thought gallantly, "to live. That's what life's for. To do the best we can with it. Even if we don't know what to do, we ought to do something. When you get through you know at least what you shouldn't have done. And Nick's not dead. Was it something I did? Was it..."
The blindly inimical forces of the world, bent on self-preservation only, dimly apprehended earlier, recurred to her mind. She felt them now. The world had suddenly, violently, projected itself in physical form between them—brick and mortar, walls and gates, and people, endless people, armedly neutral, holding them apart, stolidly, unconsciously, indifferently. No one would help her, and "who is not for me is against me," as a wise man has said. She had chosen to stand alone; she had her choice. Let her bend her proud, graceful neck and say to her lawless heart: "Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa." That was what was left her. Every tradition cried it to her; and she had learned now what it meant to defy tradition.
"And yet, I will not," she said inwardly.
So, since there was absolutely no other thing to do, after her last nickel had gone for her fare, and the last editor had said, with casual courtesy, "Perhaps later," she went to see Mrs. Merrick.
Standing before her wavering mirror, unfastening her white collar preparatory to dressing for the street, a week later, she stopped suddenly and looked, long and curiously, at the slim black figure imaged there, white aproned, capped even. She pulled off the cap hastily. "I didn't wear a cap then," she reflected whimsically. "This is the badge of civilisation, which means servitude. Now, is it all the same? I wonder if I've dreamed all the rest, and this is not New York, and I am seventeen. No, I could never pass for seventeen now. How the wheel turned; it made me dizzy, I suppose. Full circle. Tout passe, tout casse. Is the rest true? For nothing ever palled on me, except nothing. I liked things, anyway. Too much—well, perhaps. The Laodiceans rule. But I must hurry."
She got into her tailored frock, shabby now, and a little out of fashion, but still smart in essence, and went out to see if the sun still shone. She had hardly looked on it since coming here, and Mrs. Merrick nagged her to go.
It shone; she walked quickly to the Avenue, turned down and followed it to the Arch, turned back and eastward, doubling and twisting, pleased with the old and quiet streets.
"Gramercy Park," she said to herself, seeing it, strangely, for the first time. "H-m-m," and she sniffed delicately. "This was what I didn't get." She loitered around the square and found herself later in Nineteenth Street, following the sunny side. "Now," she said to herself suddenly, stopping to gaze, "I've found it. That wasn't a front door opened; it was the cover of a novel of the most exclusive flavour."
But it was only a front door, a wide, fan-lighted door, above a high stoop, and out of it a bent old butler in a worn black livery had thrust his meekly scornful white head, to look up and down the street, blinking at the afternoon sun. Whatever he sought, it was not Hope; he popped back again, like a turtle in its shell, and the gentle slam of the door seemed to be directed at her. He had looked over her head, and she laughed to herself.
"They do exist," she reflected. "I wonder, now, if some venerable Aunt Euphemia, who remembers Washington Irving distinctly, and has no living relatives except an asthmatic lapdog, lives there, a little dried-up old kernel in a big, dim shell. She takes the Post, and drives in an open carriage with a matched pair and an apoplectic coachman—I've seen her second cousin sometimes, coming out to take the air on the Avenue, with her maid and her butler and her stick to help her across the pavement to the carriage. And I might be living in Mars for all she knows of me, or ever could know; our lives are as remote; we could as soon touch each other as the poles. How disturbing Heaven will be to most of us when we get there; I'm afraid Aunt Euphemia will call it 'very mixed," and regret her pew at St. Simeon Stylites, or wherever it is. I'd rather be me, after all." She walked on, still smiling. Her conceit pleased her, though it was far, far from the truth.
For she had been looking at Grace Sturtevant's house.
Hurrying, for she had been out longer than she should, and still dreaming, she walked into the once familiar portals of the hotel before she realised she had transgressed and taken the main entrance. So she almost ran toward the elevator, not wishing to turn back. Someone called to her, but she did not hear, and then a boy in buttons touched her respectfully on the sleeve. The clerk was leaning over his desk, holding out two letters to her.
"You haven't been in for a long time, Mrs. Angell," he said. He had never seen her, capped and aproned, in the upper hall; he remembered her first stay there, a winter ago. "This came quite lately, though. You told us to hold your mail?"
"Yes, I did; thank you," she stammered slightly, took the letters, and vanished. For one mad moment her heart had leaped to her throat. But neither bore Nick's writing. One was in Mrs. Hamilton's hand; the other unfamiliar. She opened the last one first, standing in the middle of her room and dropping gloves and envelope on the floor.
"Evelyn Curtis." She had almost forgotten Evelyn Curtis, having lost her home address.
Sitting on the bed, she read the letter a second time, very carefully, as if there might be a trick in it somewhere.
"I have looked and looked for you," it ran, "but no one could tell me anything; Mr. Kennard said you had been ill and never came back, and I am leaving this letter here as a last resort; they said you might call. I hope you get it soon. Those pictures of yours —I am almost as excited as if they were mine—I meant to do something with them before I left, but you know I went home unexpectedly. So I took them to the Bancrofts'; they get out millions of children's books, and I met Mr. Bancroft abroad. He said they were so quaint, so original, and he has a series of stories he wants done right away, and he said maybe he could arrange to have them run in the Planet, or syndicate them. I am sure he can. The stories, too —can't you furnish the stories to go with them? Come and see me at once, when you get this; I'll take you down to see him. Make him bid up; he wants the stuff, and I told him you were getting quite well established; I hope it is true. Do come soon." And so on, to the same fortunate purport.
"Soon?" But instantly. She thrust Mrs. Hamilton's letter into her bodice unopened, and rushed madly down the hall, waving the one from Evelyn, seeking Mrs. Merrick.
Mrs. Merrick, in the linen room, looked up at her cyclonic entrance with an attempt at severity.
"Goodness, I'm glad you're back," she said. "Ida is sick again—I believe that girl likes cramps—and if you just would, I wish you'd take her place this evening. There are four rooms waiting to be done right this minute and—what? Oh, now, Mrs. Angell, I don't see how I possibly can let you go off again. I know, but..."
Hope talked her down by sheer lung power, and began to explain joyously.
"Well, isn't that lovely?" said Mrs. Merrick, her kind, homely face lighting with enthusiasm. "Go on. I'll do the rooms myself. Course I knew you'd go sometime, but I hoped it wouldn't be soon. I've been glad to have you."
"What should I have done without you?"' said Hope, conscience-stricken. "I will take I
da's turn."
"You will not," said Mrs. Merrick firmly. "Never keep good luck waiting, child. Run along." She put aside an armful of white things to kiss Hope, who submitted politely. Touched by the disinterestedness of these two women—Evelyn and Mrs. Merrick— Hope went back to her room, and remembered Mrs. Hamilton's unopened letter as she put on her coat.
It was largely made of good wishes and inquiries. Hope had not written for long, and it seemed Mary Dark also wondered at her silence; several letters had gone unanswered. Mary was still with Mrs. Hamilton, but might not be much longer; an exasperatingly inconclusive bit of information. There was hardly any other news, except of the children, and the growth of the town, until the last paragraph. That was evidently an afterthought. That pretty Emily Edgerton, Mrs. Hamilton had heard, or read, was being married during the month, and in New York! The bridegroom was of New York, and since Emily could hardly be said to have a home—why not, Hope wondered, and conjectured an open break—the wedding was to be at the home of one of the bridegroom's relatives. Perhaps Hope would be there! At that simple supposition Hope looked at her cap, lying on the floor, and grinned. She recalled the day of the month with an effort. Emily must have been married yesterday.
And Conroy Edgerton, quite as certainly, must be in New York.
Even so, he seemed a million years away, with the old mad days, when she wanted the world and he was going to give it to her. Mad days, and merry. Had she been like that? Quite seriously she went to the mirror; for when one remembers old days one feels no longer young. And she thought she must wear a different face now, unrealising how much she was the same—the girl who had helped one man to play with fire; the woman who had walked through it to reach another she wanted.
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