The Two Vanrevels Part 11

She placed her hand on the General's arm, turning her back squarely upon Tom.

In addition to those who heard, many persons in that part of the room saw the affront and paused in arrested att.i.tudes; others, observing these, turned inquiringly, so that sudden silence fell, broken only by the voice of Miss Betty as she moved away, talking cheerily to the General. Tom was left standing alone in the broken semicircle.

All the eyes swept from her to him and back; then everyone began to talk hastily about nothing. The young man's humiliation was public.

He went to the door under cover of the movement of the various couples to find places in the quadrille, yet every sidelong glance in the room still rested upon him, and he knew it. He remained in the ball, alone, through that dance, and at its conclusion, walked slowly through the rooms, speaking to people, here and there, as though nothing had happened, but when the music sounded again, he went to the dressing-room, found his hat and cloak, and left the house. For a while he stood on the opposite side of the street, watching the lighted windows, and twice he caught sight of the lilac and white brocade, the dark hair, and the wreath of marguerites. Then, with a hot pain in his breast, and the step of a Grenadier, he marched down the street.

In the carriage Mrs. Tanberry took Betty's hand in hers. "I'll do as you wish, child," she said, "and never speak to you of him again as long as I live, except this once. I think it was best for his own sake as well as yours, but--"

"He needed a lesson," interrupted Miss Betty, wearily. She had danced long and hard, and she was very tired.

Mrs. Tanberry's staccato laugh came out irrepressibly. "All the vagabonds do, Princess!" she cried. "And I think they are getting it."

"No, no, I don't mean--"

"We've turned their heads, my dear, between us, you and I; and we'll have to turn 'em again, or they'll break their necks looking over their shoulders at us, the owls!" She pressed the girl's hand affectionately.

"But you'll let me say something just once, and forgive me because we're the same foolish age, you know. It's only this: The next young man you suppress, take him off in a corner! Lead him away from the crowd where he won't have to stand and let them look at him afterward. That's all, my dear, and you mustn't mind."

"I'm not sorry!" said Miss Betty hotly. "I'm not sorry!"

"No, no," said Mrs. Tanberry, soothingly. "It was better this time to do just what you did. I'd have done it myself, to make quite sure he would keep away--because I like him."

"I'm not sorry!" said Miss Betty again.

"I'm not sorry!" she repeated and reiterated to herself after Mrs.

Tanberry had gone to bed. She had sunk into a chair in the library with a book, and "I'm not sorry!" she whispered as the open unread page blurred before her, "I'm not sorry!" He had needed his lesson; but she had to bear the recollection of how white his face went when he received it. Her affront had put about him a strange loneliness: the one figure with the stilled crowd staring; it had made a picture from which her mind's eye had been unable to escape, danced she never so hard and late.

Unconsciously, Robert Carewe's daughter had avenged the other figure which had stood in lonely humiliation before the staring eyes.

"I'm not sorry!" Ah, did they think it was in her to hurt any living thing in the world? The book dropped from her lap, and she bowed her head upon her hands. "I'm not sorry! "--and tears upon the small lace gauntlets!

She saw them, and with an incoherent exclamation, half self-pitying, half impatient, ran out to the stars above her garden.

She was there for perhaps half an hour, and just before she returned to the house she did a singular thing.

Standing where all was clear to the sky, where she had stood after her talk with the Incroyable, when he had bid her look to the stars, she raised her arms to them again, her face, pale with a great tenderness, uplifted.

"You, you, you!" she whispered. "I love you!"

And yet it was to nothing definite, to no man, nor outline of a man, to no phantom nor dream-lover, that she spoke; neither to him she had affronted, nor to him who had bidden her look to the stars. Nor was it to the stars themselves.

She returned slowly and thoughtfully to the house, wondering what she had meant.

CHAPTER XI. A Voice in a Garden

Crailey came home the next day with a new poem, but no fish. He lounged up the stairs, late in the afternoon, humming cheerfully to himself, and, dropping his rod in a corner of Tom's office, laid the poem on the desk before his partner, produced a large, newly-replenished flask, opened it, stretched himself comfortably upon a capacious horse-hair sofa, drank a deep draught, chuckled softly, and requested Mr. Vanrevel to set the rhymes to music immediately.

"Try it on your instrument," he said. "It's a simple verse about nothing but stars, and you can work it out in twenty minutes with the guitar."

"It is broken," said Tom, not looking up from his work.

"Broken! When?"

"Last night."

"Who broke it?"

"It fell from the table in my room."

"How? Easily mended, isn't it?"

"I think I shall not play it soon again."

Crailey swung his long legs off the sofa and abruptly sat upright.

"What's this?" he asked gravely.

Tom pushed his papers away from him, rose and went to the dusty window that looked to the west, where, at the end of the long street, the sun was setting behind the ruin of charred timbers on the bank of the s.h.i.+ning river.

"It seems that I played once too often," he said.

Crailey was thoroughly astonished. He took a long, affectionate pull at the flask and offered it to his partner.

"No," said Tom, turning to him with a troubled face, "and if I were you, I wouldn't either. These fis.h.i.+ng trips of yours--"

"Fis.h.i.+ng!" Crailey laughed. "Trips of a poetaster! It's then I write best, and write I will! There's a poem, and a d.a.m.ned good one, too, old preacher, in every gill of whiskey, and I'm the lad that can extract it!

Lord! what's better than to be out in the open, all by yourself in the woods, or on the river? Think of the long nights alone with the glory of heaven and a good demijohn. Why, a man's thoughts are like actors performing in the air and all the crowding stars for audience! You know in your soul you'd rather have me out there, going it all by myself, than raising thunder over town. And you know, too, it doesn't tell on me; it doesn't show! You couldn't guess, to save your life, how much I've had to-day, now, could you?"

"Yes," returned the other, "I could."

"Well, well," said Crailey, good-naturedly, "we weren't talking of me."

He set down the flask, went to his friend and dropped a hand lightly on his shoulder. "What made you break the guitar? Tell me."

"What makes you think I broke it?" asked his partner sharply.

"Tell me why you did it," said Crailey.

And Tom, pacing the room, told him, while Crailey stood in silence, looking him eagerly in the eye whenever Tom turned his way. The listener interrupted seldom; once it was to exclaim: "But you haven't said why you broke the guitar?"

"'If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out!' I ought to have cut off the hands that played to her."

"And cut your throat for singing to her?"

"She was right!" the other answered, striding up and down the room.

"Right--a thousand times! in everything she did. That I should even ap-proach her, was an unspeakable insolence. I had forgotten, and so, possibly, had she, but I had not even been properly introduced to her."

"No, you hadn't, that's true," observed Crailey, reflectively. "You don't seem to have much to reproach her with, Tom."