The Girl From His Town Part 23

At the sight of it beside the breakfast tray, Dan blushed scarlet. He picked up the fragrant object.

"That's all right; I'll take care of it."

"Is _Mandalay_ running the same as ever?" Ruggles asked over his bacon and eggs.

"Same as ever."

Ruggles saw he had not returned in vain, and that he was destined to take up his part of the business just as he had laid it out for himself to Lord Galorey. "It's up to me now: I'll have to take care of the actress, and I'm darned if I haven't got a job. If Dan colors up like that at the sight of her glove, I wonder what he does when he holds her hand!"

CHAPTER XXII-WHAT WILL YOU TAKE?

When Dan, on the minute of two, went to the Savoy, Higgins, as was her custom, did not meet him. Miss Lane met him herself. She was reading a letter by the table, and when Dan was announced she put it back in its envelope. Blair had seen her only in soft clinging evening dresses, in white visionary clothes, or in her dazzling part costume, where the play dress of the dancer displayed her beauty and her charms. To-day she wore a tailor-made gown, and in her dark cloth dress, in her small hat, she seemed a new woman-some one he hadn't known and did not know, and he experienced the thrill a man always feels when the woman he loves appears in an unaccustomed dress and suggests a new mystery.

"Oh, I say! You're not going out, are you?"

In the lapel of her close little coat was a flower he had given her. He wanted to lean forward and kiss it as it rested there. She a.s.sured him:

"I have just come in; had an early lunch and took a long walk-think of it! I haven't taken a walk alone since I can remember!"

Her walk had given her only the ghost of a flush, which rose over her delicate skin, fading away like a furling flag. Her frailness, her slenderness, the air of good-breeding her dress gave her, added to Dan's deepening emotions. She seemed infinitely dear, and a thing to be protected and fostered.

"Can't you sit down for a minute? I've come to make you a real call."

"Of course," she laughed. "But, first, I must answer this letter."

His jealousy rose and he caught hold of her hand that held the envelope.

"Look here, you are not to write it if it is to that d.a.m.ned scoundrel. I took you away from him last night and you are never to see him again."

For the first time the two really looked at each other. Her lips parted as though she would reprove him, and the boy murmured:

"That's all right. I mean what I say-never to see him again! Will you promise me? Promise me-I can't bear it! I won't have it!"

A film of emotion crossed his clear young eyes and her slender hands were held fast in his clasp. His face was beautiful in its tenderness and in a righteous anger as he bent it on her. Instead of reproving him as she had done before, instead of s.n.a.t.c.hing away her hands, she swayed, and at the sight of her weakness his eyes cleared, and the film lifted like a curtain. She was not fainting, but, as her face turned toward his, he saw it transformed, and Dan caught her in her dark dress, the flowers in her bodice, to his heart. He held her as if he had s.n.a.t.c.hed her from a wreck and in a safe embrace lifted her high to the sh.o.r.e of a coral strand. He kissed her, first timidly, wonderingly, with the sacrament of first love on his lips. Then he kissed her as his heart bade him, and when he set her free she was crying, but the tears on his face were not all her tears.

"Little boy, how crazy, how perfectly crazy! Oh, Dan-Dan!"

She clung to him, looking up at him just as his boy-dreams had told him a girl _would_ look some day. Her face was suffused and softened, her lips-her coral-red, fine, lovely lips were trembling, and her eyes were as gray, as profound as those seas his imagination had longed to explore. Made poet for the first time in his life, as his arms were around her, he whispered: "You are all my dreams come true. If any man comes near you I'll kill him just as sure as fate. I'll kill him!"

"Hush, hus.h.!.+ I told you you were crazy. We're both perfectly mad. I have tried my best not to come to this with you. What would your father say?

Let me go, let me go; I'll call Higgins."

The boy laughed aloud, the laugh of happy youth. He held her so close that she might as well have tried to loose herself from an iron image of the Spanish Inquisition as from his young arms. This slender, delicious, willowy thing he held was Letty Lane, the adored star London went mad over: the triumph of it! It flashed through him as his pulses beat and his heart was high with the conquest, but it was to the woman only that he whispered:

"I've said a lot of stuff and I am likely to say a lot more, but I want you to say something to me. _Don't you love me?_"

The word on his lips to him was as strange, as wonderful, as though it had been made for him.

"I guess I must love you, Dan. I guess I must have for a long time."

"G.o.d, I'm so glad! How long?"

"Why, ever since you used to come to the soda-fountain and ask for chocolate. You don't know how sweet you were when you were a little boy."

She put her slender hand against his hot cheek. "And you are nothing but a little boy now! I think I must be crazy!"

As he protested, as she listened intently to what his emotion taught him to say to her, she whispered close to his ear:

"What will _you_ take, little boy?"

And he answered: "I'll take you-you!"

At a slight sound in the next room Letty Lane started as though the interruption really brought her to her senses, put her hand to her disheveled hair, and before she could prevent it, Dan had called Mrs Higgins to "come in," and the woman, in response, came into the sitting-room. The boy went up to her and took her hands eagerly, and said:

"It's all right, all right, Mrs. Higgins. Just think of it! She belongs to me!"

"Oh, don't be a perfect lunatic, Dan," the actress exclaimed, half laughing, half crying, "and don't listen to him, Higgins. He's just crazy."

But the old woman's eyes went bright at the boy's face and tone. "I never was so glad of anything in my life."

"As of what?" asked her mistress sharply, and the tone was so cold and so suddenly altered that Dan felt a chill of despair.

"Why, at what Mr. Blair says, Miss."

"Then," said her mistress, "you ought to be ashamed of yourself. He's only twenty-two, he doesn't know anything about life. You must be crazy.

He's as mad as a March hare and he ought to be in school."

Then, to their consternation, she burst into a pa.s.sion of weeping; threw herself on Higgins' breast and begged her to send Dan away-to send everybody away-and to let her die in peace.

In utter despair the boy obeyed the dresser's motion to go, and his transport was changed into anxiety and dread. He hung about down-stairs in the Savoy for the rest of the afternoon, finally sending up to Higgins for news in sheer desperation, and the page fetched Blair a note in Letty Lane's own hand. His eyes blurred so as he opened the sheet, he could hardly read the scrawl which said:

"It was perfectly sweet of you to wait down there. I'm all right-just tired out! Better get on a boat and go to Greenland's Icy Mountains and cool off. But if you don't, come in to-morrow and have lunch with me.

Letty."

CHAPTER XXIII-IN THE SUNSET GLOW

He lived through a week of bliss and of torture. One minute she promised to marry him, give up the stage, go around the world on a yacht, whose luxuries, Dan planned, should rival any boat ever built, or they would motor across Asia and see, one by one, the various coral strands and the golden sands of the East. He could not find terms to express how he would spend upon her this fortune of his, which, for the first time, began to have value in his eyes. Money had been lavished on her, still she seemed dazzled. Then she would push it all away from her in disgust-tell him she was sick of everything-that she didn't want any new jewels or any new clothes, and that she never wanted to see the stage again or any place again; that there was nowhere she wanted to go, nothing she wanted to see-that he must get some fresh girl to whom he could show life, not one whom he must try to make forget it. Then, again, she would say that she loved the stage and her art-wouldn't give it up for any one in the world-that it was fatal to marry an actress-that it was mad for him to think of marrying her, anyway-that she didn't want to marry any one and be tied down-that she wanted to be her own mistress and free.

He found her a creature of a thousand whims and caprices, quick to cry, quick to laugh, divine in everything she did. He never knew what she would want him to do next, or how her mood would change, and after one of their happiest hours, when she had been like a girl with him, she would burst into tears, beg him to leave the room, telling him that she was tired-tired-tired, and wanted to go to sleep and never to wake up again. Between them was the figure of Poniotowsky, though neither spoke of him. She appeared to have forgotten him. Dan would rather have cut out his tongue than to speak his name, and yet he was there in the mind of each. During the fortnight Dan spent thousands of pounds on her, bought her jewels which she alternately raved over or but half looked at. He had made his arrangements with Galorey peacefully, coolly and between the two men it had been understood that the world should think the engagement broken by the d.u.c.h.ess, and Dan's attention to Letty Lane, already the subject of much comment, already conspicuous, was enough to justify any woman in taking offense.

One day, the pearl of warm May days, when England even in springtime touches summer, Blair was so happy as to persuade his sweetheart to go with him for a little row on the river. The young fellow waited for her in the boat he had secured, and she, motoring out with Higgins, had appeared, running down to the edge of the water like a girl, gay as a child let out from school, in a simple frock, in a marvelously fetching hat, white gloves, white parasol, white shoes, and as Dan helped her into the boat, pushed it out, pushed away with her on the crest of the sun-flecked waters, spring was in his heart, and he found the moment almost too great to bear.