The Hillman Part 28

"I sha'n't eat any more supper," Rosie Sharon pouted, pus.h.i.+ng away her plate.

"You ought to have told us about her at once," the lady who had been a countess declared severely.

John preserved his equanimity.

"It is to be presumed," he murmured, "that you ladies are both free from any present attachment?"

"Got you there!" Amerton chuckled. "What about Billy?"

Rosie Sharon sighed.

"We don't come to the prince's supper parties to remember our ties," she declared. "Let's all go on talking nonsense, please. Even if my heart is broken, I could never resist the prince's _pate_!"

Apparently every one was of the same mind. The hum of laughter steadily grew. Jokes, mostly in the nature of personalities, were freely bandied across the table. It was becoming obvious that the contributors to the penny ill.u.s.trated papers knew what they were talking about. Under shelter of the fire of conversation, the prince leaned toward his companion and reopened their previous discussion.

"Do you know," he began, "I am inclined to be somewhat disappointed by your lack of enthusiasm in a certain direction!"

"I have disappointed many men in my time," she replied. "Do you doubt my power, now that I have promised to exercise it?"

"Who could?" he replied courteously. "Yet this young man poses, I believe, as something of a St. Anthony. He may give you trouble."

"He is then, what you call a prig?"

"A most complete and perfect specimen, even in this nation of prigs!"

"All that you tell me," she sighed, "makes the enterprise seem easier.

It is, after all, rather like the lioness and the mouse, isn't it?"

The prince made no reply, but upon his lips there lingered a faintly incredulous smile. The woman by his side leaned back in her place. She had the air of accepting a challenge.

"After supper," she said, "we will see!"

A single chord of music in a minor key floated across the room, soft at first, swelling later into a volume of sound, then dying away and ceasing altogether. John, standing momentarily alone in a corner of the picture-gallery, found it almost incredible that this wildly hilarious throng of men and women could so soon, and without a single admonitory word, break off in the midst of their conversation, stifle their mirth, almost hold their breath, in obedience to this unspoken appeal for silence. Every light in the place was suddenly extinguished. There remained only the shaded lamps overhanging the pictures.

Not a whisper was heard in the room. John, looking around him in astonishment, was conscious only of the half-suppressed breathing of the men and women who lined the walls, or were still standing in little groups at the end of the long hall. Again there came the music, this time merged in a low but insistent clamor of other instruments. Then, suddenly, through the door at the farther end of the room came a dimly seen figure in white. The place seemed wrapped in a mystical twilight, with long black rays of deeper shadow lying across the floor. There was a little murmur of tense voices, and then again silence.

For a few moments the figure in white was motionless. Then, without any visible commencement, she seemed suddenly to blend into the waves of low, pa.s.sionate music. The dance itself was without form or definite movement. She seemed at first like some white, limbless spirit, floating here and there across the dark bars of shadow at the calling of the melody. There was no apparent effort of the body. She was merely a beautiful, unearthly shape. It was like the flitting of a white moth through the blackness of a moonless summer night.

The impression it made upon John was indescribable. He watched with straining eyes, conscious of a deep sense of pleasure. Here was something appealing insistently to his love of beauty pure and simple; a new joy, a new grace, something which thrilled him and which left no aftermath of uneasy thoughts.

The music suddenly faded away into nothing. With no more effort than when she had glided into her poem of movement, the dancer stood in a pose of perfect stillness. There were a few moments of tense silence.

Then came a crash of chords, and the slender white figure launched into the dance.

Her motions became more animated, more human. With feet which seemed never to meet the earth, she glided toward the corner where John was standing. He caught the smoldering fire in her eyes as she danced within a few feet of him. He felt a catch in his breath. Some subtle and only half-expressed emotion shook his whole being, seemed to tear at the locked chamber of his soul.

She had flung her arms forward, so near that they almost touched him. He could have sworn that her lips had called his name. He felt himself bewitched, filled with an insane longing to throw out his arms in response to her pa.s.sionate, unspoken invitation, in obedience to the clamoring of his seething senses. He had forgotten, even, that any one else was in the room.

Then, suddenly, the music stopped. The lights flared out from the ceiling and from every corner of the apartment. Slender and erect, her arms hanging limply at her sides, without a touch of color in her cheeks or a coil of her black hair disarranged, without a sign of heat or disturbance or pa.s.sion in her face, John found Aida Calavera standing within a few feet of him, her eyes seeking for his. She laid her fingers upon his arm. The room was ringing with shouts of applause, in which John unconsciously joined. Every one was trying to press forward toward her. With her left hand she waved them back.

"If I have pleased you," she said, "I am so glad! I go now to rest for a little time."

She tightened her clasp upon her companion's arm, and they pa.s.sed out of the picture-gallery and down a long corridor. John felt as if he were walking in a dream. Volition seemed to have left him. He only knew that the still, white hand upon his arm seemed like a vise burning into his flesh.

She led him to the end of the corridor, through another door, into a small room furnished in plain but comfortable fas.h.i.+on.

"We will invade the prince's own sanctum," she murmured. "Before I dance, I drink nothing but water. Now I want some champagne. Will you fetch me some, and bring it to me yourself?"

She sank back upon a divan as she spoke. John turned to leave the room, but she called him back.

"Come here," she invited, "close to my side! I can wait for the champagne. Tell me, why you are so silent? And my dancing--that pleased you?"

He felt the words stick in his throat. The sight of her cold, alluring beauty, s.h.i.+ning out of her eyes, proclaiming itself and her wishes from her parted lips, filled him with a sudden resentment. He hated himself for the tumult which raged within him, and her for having aroused it.

"Your dancing was indeed wonderful," he stammered.

"It was for you!" she whispered, her voice growing softer and lower. "It was for you I danced. Did you not feel it?"

Her arms stole toward him. The unnatural calm with which she had finished her dance seemed suddenly to pa.s.s. Her bosom was rising and falling more quickly. There was a faint spot of color in her cheek.

"It was wonderful," he told her. "I will get you the champagne."

Her lips were parted. She smiled up at him.

"Go quickly," she whispered, "and come back quickly! I wait for you."

He left the room and pa.s.sed out again into the picture-gallery before he had the least idea where he was. The band was playing a waltz, and one or two couples were dancing. The people seemed suddenly to have become like puppets in some strange, unreal dream. He felt an almost feverish longing for the open air, for a long draft of the fresh sweetness of the night, far away from this overheated atmosphere charged with unnamable things.

As he pa.s.sed through the farther doorway he came face to face with the prince.

"Where are you going?" the latter asked.

"Mme. Calavera has asked me to get her some champagne," he answered.

The prince smiled.

"I will see that it is sent to her at once," he promised. "You are in my sanctum, are you not? You can pursue your _tete-a-tete_ there without interruption. You are a very much envied man!"

"Mme. Calavera is there," John replied. "As for me, I am afraid I shall have to go now."

The smile faded from the prince's lips. His eyebrows came slowly together.

"You are leaving?" he repeated.

"I must!" John insisted. "I can't help it. Forgive my behaving like a boor, but I must go. Good night!"

The prince stretched out his hand, but he was too late.