She laughed and took Valerie’s gloved hands in her own; and Stephanie, who had been looking at the latter, came to an abrupt conclusion that amazed her; and she heard herself saying:
“It has been most interesting to meet you, Miss West. I have heard of you so pleasantly that I had hoped to meet you some time. And I hope I shall again.”
Valerie thanked her with a self-possession which she did not entirely feel, and turned away with Hélène d’Enver.
“That’s the girl who is supposed to be engaged to Louis Neville,” whispered the pretty countess.
Valerie halted, astounded.
“Didn’t you know it?” asked the other, surprised.
For a moment Valerie remained speechless, then the wild absurdity of it flashed over her and she laughed her relief.
“No, I didn’t know it,” she said.
“Hasn’t anybody ever told you?”
“No,” said Valerie, smiling.
“Well, perhaps it isn’t so, then,” said the countess naïvely. “I know very few people of that set, but I’ve heard it talked about — outside.”
“I don’t believe it is so,” said Valerie demurely. Her little heart was beating confidently again and she seated herself beside Hélène d’Enver in the prim circle of delegates intent upon their chairman, who was calling the meeting to order.
The meeting was interesting and there were few feminine clashes — merely a smiling and deadly exchange of amenities between a fashionable woman who was an ardent advocate of suffrage, and an equally distinguished lady who was scornfully opposed to it. But the franchise had nothing at all to do with the discussion concerning the New Idea Home, which is doubtless why it was mentioned; and the meeting of delegates proceeded without further debate.
After it was ended Valerie hurried away to keep an appointment with Neville at Burleson’s studio, and found the big sculptor lying on the sofa, neck swathed in flannel, and an array of medicine bottles at his elbow.
“Can’t go to dinner with you,” he said; “Rita won’t have it. There’s nothing the matter with me, but she made me lie down here, and I’ve promised to stay here until she returns.”
“John, you don’t look very well,” said Valerie, coming over and seating herself by his side.
“I’m all right, except that I catch cold now and then,” he insisted obstinately.
Valerie looked at the pink patches of colour burning in his cheeks. There was a transparency to his skin, too, that troubled her. He was one of those big, blond, blue-eyed fellows whose vivid colour and fine-grained, delicate skin caused physicians to look twice.
He had been reading when Valerie entered; now he laid his ponderous book away, doubled his arms back under his head and looked at Valerie with the placid, bovine friendliness which warmed her heart but always left a slight smile in the corner of her mouth.
“Why do you always smile at me, Valerie?” he asked.
“Because you’re good, John, and I like you.”
“I know you do. You’re a fine woman, Valerie…. So is Rita.”
“Rita is a darling.”
[Illustration: “‘John, you don’t look very well,’ said Valerie.”]
“She’s all right,” he nodded. A moment later he added: “She comes from
Massachusetts.”
Valerie laughed: “The sacred codfish smiled on your cradle, too, didn’t it, John?”
“Yes, thank God,” he said seriously…. “I was born in the old town of
Hitherford.”
“How funny!” exclaimed the girl.
“What is there funny about that?” demanded John.
“Why, Rita was born in Hitherford.”
“Hitherford Centre,” corrected John. “Her father was a clergyman there.”
“Oh; so you knew it?”
“I knew, of course, that she was from Massachusetts,” said John, “because she speaks English properly. So I asked her where she was born and she told me…. My grandfather knew hers.”
“Isn’t it — curious,” mused the girl.
“What’s curious?”
“Your meeting this way — as sculptor and model.”
“Rita is a very fine girl,” he said. “Would you mind handing me my pipe? No, don’t. I forgot that Rita won’t let me. You see my chest is rather uncomfortable.”
He glanced at the clock, leaned over and gulped down some medicine, then placidly folding his hands, lay back:
“How’s Kelly?”
“I haven’t seen him to-day, John.”
“Well, he ought to be here very soon. He can take you and Rita to dinner.”
“I’m so sorry you can’t come.”
“So am I.”
Valerie laid a cool hand on his face; he seemed slightly feverish. Rita came in at that moment, smiled at Valerie, and went straight to Burleson’s couch:
“Have you taken your medicine?”
“Certainly.”
She glanced at the bottles. “Men are so horridly untruthful,” she remarked to Valerie; “and this great, lumbering six-footer hasn’t the sense of a baby—”
“I have, too!” roared John, indignantly; and Valerie laughed but Rita scarcely smiled.
“He’s always working in a puddle of wet clay and he’s always having colds and coughing, and there’s always more or less fever,” she said, looking down at the huge young fellow. “I know that he ought to give up his work and go away for a while—”
“Where?” demanded Burleson indignantly.
“Oh, somewhere — where there’s plenty of — air. Like Arizona, and
Colorado.”
“Do you think there’s anything the matter with my lungs?” he roared.
“No! — you perfect idiot!” said Rita, seating herself; “and if you shout that way at me again I’ll go to dinner with Kelly and Valerie and leave you here alone. I will not permit you to be uncivil, John. Please remember it.”
Neville arrived in excellent spirits, greeted everybody, and stood beside Valerie, carelessly touching the tip of his fingers to hers where they hung at her side.
“What’s the matter with you, John? Rita, isn’t he coming? I’ve a taxi outside ruining me.”
“John has a bad cold and doesn’t care to go—”
“Yes, I do!” growled John.
“And he doesn’t care to risk contracting pneumonia,” continued Rita icily, “and he isn’t going, anyway. And if he behaves like a man instead of an overgrown baby, I have promised to stay and dine with him here. Otherwise I’ll go with you.”
“Sure. You’d better stay indoors, John. You ought to buck up and get rid of that cold. It’s been hanging on all winter.”
Burleson rumbled and grumbled and shot a mutinous glance at Rita, who paid it no attention.
“Order us a nice dinner at the Plaza, Kelly — if you don’t mind,” she said cheerfully, going with them to the door. She added under her breath: “I wish he’d see a doctor, but the idea enrages him. I don’t see why he has such a cold all the time — and such flushed cheeks—” Her voice quivered and she checked herself abruptly.
“Suppose I ring up Dr. Colbert on my own hook?” whispered Neville.
“Would you?”
“Certainly. And you can tell John that I did it on my own responsibility.”
Neville and Valerie went away together, and Rita returned to the studio. Burleson was reading again, and scowling; and he scarcely noticed her. She seated herself by the fire and looked into the big bare studio beyond where the electric light threw strange shadows over shrouded shapes of wet clay and blocks of marble in the rough or partly hewn into rough semblance of human figures.
It was a damp place at best; there were always wet sponges, wet cloths, pails of water, masses of moist clay about. Her blue eyes wandered over it with something approaching fear — almost the fear of hatred.
“John,” she said, “why won’t you go to a dry climate for a few months and get rid of your cold?”
“Do you mean Arizona?”
“Or some similar place: yes.”
“Well, how am I to do any work out there? I’ve got commissions on hand.
Where am I going to find any place to work out in Arizona?”
“Build a shanty.”
“That’s all very well, but there are no models to be had out there.”
“Why don’t you do some Indians?”
“Because,” said John wrathfully, “I haven’t any commissions that call for Indians. I’ve two angels, a nymph and a Diana to do; and I can’t do them unless I have a female model, can I?”
After a silence Rita said carelessly:
“I’ll go with you if you like.”
“You! Out there!”
“I said so.”
“To Arizona! You wouldn’t stand for it!”
“John Burleson!” she said impatiently, “I’ve told you once that I’d go with you if you need a model! Don’t you suppose I know what I am saying?”
He lay placidly staring at her, the heavy book open across his chest.
Presently he coughed and Rita sprang up and removed the book.
“You’d go with me to Arizona,” he repeated, as though to himself— “just to pose for me…. That’s very kind of you, Rita. It’s thoroughly nice of you. But you couldn’t stand it. You’d find it too cruelly stupid out there alone — entirely isolated in some funny town. I couldn’t ask it of you—”
“You haven’t. I’ve asked it — of you.”
But he only began to grumble and fret again, thrashing about restlessly on the lounge; and the tall young girl watched him out of lowered eyes, silent, serious, the lamplight edging her hair with a halo of ruddy gold.
* * * * *
The month sped away very swiftly for Valerie. Her companionship with Rita, her new friendship for Hélène d’Enver, her work, filled all the little moments not occupied with Neville. It had been a happy, exciting winter; and now, with the first days of spring, an excitement and a happiness so strange that it even resembled fear at moments, possessed her, in the imminence of the great change.
Often, in these days, she found herself staring at Neville with a sort of fixed fascination almost bordering on terror; — there were moments when alone with him, and even while with him among his friends and hers, when there seemed to awake in her a fear so sudden, so inexplicable, that every nerve in her quivered apprehension until it had passed as it came. What those moments of keenest fear might signify she had no idea. She loved, and was loved, and was not afraid.
In early April Neville went to Ashuelyn. Ogilvy was there, also
Stephanie Swift.
His sister Lily had triumphantly produced a second sample of what she could do to perpetuate the House of Collis, and was much engrossed with nursery duties; so Stephanie haunted the nursery, while Ogilvy, Neville, and Gordon Collis played golf over the April pastures, joining them only when Lily was at liberty.
Why Stephanie avoided Neville she herself scarcely knew; why she clung so closely to Lily’s skirts seemed no easier to explain. But in her heart there was a restlessness which no ignoring, no self-discipline could suppress — an unease which had been there many days, now — a hard, tired, ceaseless inquietude that found some little relief when she was near Lily Collis, but which, when alone, became a dull ache.
She had grown thin and spiritless within the last few months. Lily saw it and resented it hotly.
“The child,” she said to her husband, “is perfectly wretched over Louis and his ignominious affair with that West girl. I don’t know whether she means to keep her word to me or not, but she’s with him every day. They’re seen together everywhere except where Louis really belongs.”
“It looks to me,” said Gordon mildly, “as though he were really in love with her.”
“Gordon! How can you say such a thing in such a sympathetic tone!”
“Why — aren’t you sorry for them?”
“I’m sorry for Louis — and perfectly disgusted. I was sorry for her; an excess of sentimentality. But she hasn’t kept her word to me.”
“Did she promise not to gad about with him?”
“That was the spirit of the compact; she agreed not to marry him.”
“Sometimes they — don’t marry,” observed Gordon, twirling his thumbs.
Lily looked up quickly; then flushed slightly.
“What do you mean, Gordon?”
“Nothing specific; anything in general.”
“You mean to hint that — that Louis — Louis Neville could be — permit himself to be so common — so unutterably low—”
“Better men have taken the half-loaf.”
“Gordon!” she exclaimed, scarlet with amazement and indignation.
“Personally,” he said, unperturbed, “I haven’t much sympathy with such affairs. If a man can’t marry a girl he ought to leave her alone; that’s my idea of the game. But men play it in a variety of ways. Personally, I’d as soon plug a loaded shot-gun with mud and then fire it, as block a man who wants to marry.”
“I did block it!” said Lily with angry decision; “and I am glad I did.”
“Look out for the explosion then,” he said philosophically, and strolled off to see to the setting out of some young hemlocks, headed in the year previous.
Lily Collis was deeply disturbed — more deeply than her pride and her sophistication cared to admit. She strove to believe that such a horror as her husband had hinted at so coolly could never happen to a Neville; she rejected it with anger, with fear, with a proud and dainty fastidiousness that ought to have calmed and reassured her. It did not.
Once or twice she reverted to the subject, haughtily; but Gordon merely shrugged:
“You can’t teach a man of twenty-eight when, where, and how to fall in love,” he said. “And it’s all the more hopeless when the girl possesses the qualities which you once told me this girl possesses.”
Lily bit her lip, angry and disconcerted, but utterly unable to refute him or find anything in her memory of Valerie to criticise and condemn, except the intimacy with her brother which had continued and which, she had supposed, would cease on Valerie’s promise to her.
“It’s very horrid of her to go about with him under the circumstances — knowing she can’t marry him if she keeps her word,” said Lily.
“Why? Stephanie goes about with him.”
“Do you think it is good taste to compare those two people?”
“Why not. From what you told me I gather that Valerie West is as innocent and upright a woman as Stephanie — and as proudly capable of self-sacrifice as any woman who ever loved.”
“Gordon,” she said, exasperated, “do you actually wish to see my brother marry a common model?”
“Is she common? I thought you said—”
“You — you annoy me,” said Lily; and began to cry.
Stephanie, coming into the nursery that afternoon, found Lily watching the sleeping children and knitting a tiny sweater. Mrs. Collis was pale, but her eyes were still red.
“Where have you been, Stephanie?”
“Helping Gordon set hemlocks.”
“Where is Louis?”
The girl did not appear to hear the question.
“I thought I heard him telephoning a few minutes ago,” added Lily. “Look over the banisters, dear, and see if he’s still there.”
“He is,” said Stephanie, not stirring.
“Telephoning all this time? Is he talking to somebody in town?”
“I believe so.”
Lily suddenly looked up. Stephanie was quietly examining some recently laundered clothing for the children.
“To whom is Louis talking; do you happen to know?” asked Lily abruptly.
Stephanie’s serious gaze encountered hers.
“Does that concern us, Lily?”
After a while, as Mrs. Collis sat in silence working her ivory needles, a tear or two fell silently upon the little white wool garment on her lap.
“Do you know,” said Stephanie in a low voice, “that she is a modest, well-bred, and very beautiful girl?”
“What!” exclaimed Lily, staring at her in grief and amazement. “Of whom are you speaking, Stephanie?”
“Of Valerie West, dear.”
“W-what do you know about her?”
“I have met her.”
“You!”
“Yes. She came, with that rather common countess, as substitute delegate for Mrs. Hind-Willet, to a New Idea meeting. I spoke to her, seeing she was alone and seemed to know nobody; I had no suspicion of who she was until she told me.”
“Mrs. Hind-Willet is a busybody!” said Lily, furious. “Let her fill her own drawing-room with freaks if it pleases her, but she has no right to send them abroad among self-respecting people who are too unsuspicious to protect themselves!”
Stephanie said: “Until one has seen and spoken with Valerie West one can scarcely understand how a man like your brother could care so much for her—”
“How do you know Louis cares for her?”
“He told me.”
Lily looked into the frank, gray eyes in horror unutterable. The crash had come. The last feeble hope that her brother might come to his senses and marry this girl was ended forever.
“How — could he!” she stammered, outraged. “How could he tell — tell you—”
“Because he and I are old and close friends, Lily…. And will remain so, God willing.”
Lily was crying freely now.
“He had no business to tell you. He knows perfectly well what his father and mother think about it and what I think. He can’t marry her! He shall not. It is too cruel — too wicked — too heartless! And anyway — she promised me not to marry him—”
“What!”
Lily brushed the tears from her eyes, heedless now of how much Stephanie might learn.
“I wrote her — I went to see her in behalf of my own family as I had a perfect right to. She promised me not to marry Louis.”
“Does Louis know this?”
“Not unless she’s told him…. I don’t care whether he does or not! He has disappointed me — he has embittered life for me — and for his parents. We — I — I had every reason to believe that he and — you—”
Works of Robert W Chambers Page 543