Without effort, irresistibly, she swept him along with her into the music room.

Mary, when they were gone, let herself out by the other door as softly as she had come in. She fled down one flight of the stairs and a moment later had locked the door of her own room behind her. She switched on the light, gave a ragged laugh at Sir Galahad; then lay down, just as she was, on the little white bed, her face in the pillow, and cried.

CHAPTER VII

NO THOROUGHFARE

It was hours later, well along toward one o'clock in the morning when Rush coming into his room saw a light under the door communicating with his sister's and, knocking, was told he might come in.

He found her in bed for the night, reclining against a stack of pillows as if she had been reading, but from the way she blinked at the softened light from the lamp on her night table, it appeared that she had switched it on only when she heard him coming. She might have been crying though she looked composed enough now;--symmetrically composed, indeed, a braid over each shoulder, her hands folded, her legs straight down the middle of the bed making a single ridge that terminated in a little peak where her feet stuck up (the way heroines lie, it occurred to Rush, in the last act of grand operas, when they are dead) and this effect was enhanced by the new-laundered whiteness of the sheet, neatly folded back over the blankets and the untumbled pillows.

"You always look so nice and clean," he told her, and, forbearing to sit on the edge of the bed as a pat of her hand invited him to, pulled up a chair instead. It was going to be a real talk, not just a casual good-night chat.

"We were wondering what had become of you," he said. "Poor Graham was worried."

"Graham!" But she did not follow that up. "I decided we'd had temperament enough for one evening," she explained in a matter-of-fact tone, "so when I saw I was going to explode I came away quietly and did it in here. By the time it was over I thought I might as well go to bed."

"It doesn't look as if you'd exploded very violently," he observed.

"Oh, I've cleared away the ruins," she said. "I hate reminders of a mess."

It was like her exquisiteness to do that and it tightened his throat to think about it. He'd have liked to make sure what the cause of the explosion had been, but thought he'd better wait a while for that. All he ventured in the way of sympathetic approbation was to reach out and pat the ridge that extended down the middle of the bed. "It certainly has been one devil of an evening," he said.

"I suppose it has," she agreed, thoughtfully. Then, noticing that this had rather thrown him off his stride, she went on, "Tell me all that's been happening since I ran away. How did Paula act when it was over?"

"I haven't seen her," he said. "She never came down at all. Of course it must have been--well, in a way, a devil of an evening for her, too.

Though I can't believe our being there cramped her style very much in singing those songs. If it did, I'd hate to think what she would have done if we hadn't been. I hope March liked his own stuff. He was there all the while, you know. She must have had him tucked away in that little old room of Annie's that opened off the nursery. Somewhere anyhow, because long after every one else had gone, he came down-stairs with the Frenchman. I got one surprise just then all right. He's a private soldier, did you know that? Just a plain doughboy."

"Overseas?" Mary asked.

"As far as Bordeaux, with the Eighty-sixth. Saxaphone player with one of the artillery bands. In a way I'm rather glad of it. That that's what he turns out to be, I mean."

"Why?" Mary made the word rather crisply.

"Oh, well," Rush explained uncomfortably, "you know what it had begun to look like. Paula quarreling with father about him and not going down to dinner; and--cutting loose like that over his music. But of course there couldn't be anything of that sort--with a chap like that."

"What is the lowest military rank," Mary inquired, "that you think Paula could fall in love with?"

The satirical import of her question was not lost upon him but he held his ground. "It may sound sn.o.bbish but it's true just the same," he insisted. "A doughboy's a doughboy, and Paula wouldn't get mixed up with one--any more than you would."

There was a silence after that.

"His music didn't sound to me like doughboy music," Mary observed at last. "Nor his going to Walt Whitman to get the words."

"Was that Walt Whitman? It sounded to me as if he was making it up as he went along." He had the grace to grin at himself over that admission, however. "Oh, well," he concluded, "Paula's all right anyhow. I think she's--wonderful, myself. Only poor old dad! He is a peach, Mary. It's funny how differently I remember him. He acted like one real sport to-night."

"Afterward, you mean." Mary, it seemed, would not have characterized her father's behavior earlier in the evening in just that way. "Tell me all about it. Only reach me a cigarette first."

He obeyed the latter injunction with an air of protest. "It's the only thing you do that I wish you didn't," he said.

"Why? Do you think it's bad for me?"

He wouldn't commit himself by answering that. The retort it offered her was obvious. "It doesn't seem like you," he explained.

"Very well," she said, taking a light from his match, "then I shall go on just to keep you reminded that I'm not plaster of Paris. I like to have somebody around who doesn't think that."

"Father doesn't," Rush a.s.serted, and got so eager a look of inquiry from her that he regretted having nothing very substantial to satisfy it with. "Oh, down there in the hall," he said, "after everybody but March and the Frenchman had gone. Aunt Lucile began fussing about you. She was rather up in the air, anyway. She'd done the nonchalant, all right,--overdone it a bit in fact--as long as there was any one around to play up to. But when we had got rid of the Novellis--they were the last--she did a balloon ascension. She had a fit or two in general and then came round to wondering about you. Wanted to know when we'd last seen you--what _could_ have happened to you,--that sort of thing. I'd been having a little talk with Graham so I supposed I knew. But of course I said nothing about that."

He was looking rather fixedly away from her and so missed her frown of incomprehension. "Well, but father?" she asked.

It had been coming over him that what his father had said was not just what he wanted to report to Mary. Not while she felt about him as she had confessed, down there in New York, she did. But he had let himself in for it.

"Why, it wasn't much," he said; "just that nothing could have happened to you; that you wouldn't 'fall off anything and break.' What you said about plaster of Paris made me think of it. He was only trying to get Aunt Lucile quieted down."

"While he had Paula on his mind, he didn't want to be bothered about me.

That's natural enough, of course." Her dry brittle tone was anything but rea.s.suring. Still without looking at her, he hurried on.

"Well, it _is_ natural that he should be worried about Paula. I know how I'd feel about a thing like that. It was rather weird while we waited after Aunt Lucile went up to bed for those two to come down.

Old Nat was fussing around the drawing-room, shutting up and putting things to rights. Dad sent him to bed, too, told him we'd do the locking up ourselves. I got the idea that he was expecting Paula to come sailing down, with March, you know, and perhaps didn't want any one around. So I made a bluff of going to bed myself. But he told me to stick; said we'd settle down and have a smoke presently. I don't know how long it was before we heard LaChaise and March coming but it seemed a deuce of a while.

"Dad was right on the job then, calm as a May morning. He introduced March and me and said something polite about his music, never a word about his having been hiding all the evening.

"Then LaChaise spoke to dad in French. Said there was some business he wanted to talk with him about and that he'd like an appointment. I wasn't sure that dad quite got him so I crashed in and interpreted.

"Dad reached out and took hold of me, as if he was sort of glad that I was there, and told me to tell Mr. LaChaise that we had plenty of time right now, and if there was anything to discuss the sooner we got at it, the better.

"I handed that on in French--I tried not to lose any of the kick out of it--and while I was doing that March made a move to go.

"Dad told him not to. I wish you could have been there. I remember he said after inviting him to stay, 'I imagine you are as much concerned in this as any one.' It didn't faze March though. He said that he didn't believe that what Mr. LaChaise had to say concerned him. Then he made a stiff little bow for good night and went off down the hall to get his hat. Oh, that wasn't like a doughboy, I'll admit. I went to the door with him and we made a little conversation there for a minute or two just to--take off the edge. That's when I found out where he'd been.

"Father had taken LaChaise into the drawing-room when I got back but I don't believe either of them had said three words. They were waiting for me. Dad led off by asking what he thought of March, and LaChaise told him, though you could see that wasn't what was on his mind. He said March had a very strong and original talent and that he believed he had operas in him. There was one about finished that he was going to look at to-morrow. Then he pulled up short and said it was Paula he wanted to talk about.

"Dad caught that all right without waiting for me to translate it. What he wanted to get at, right at the jump off, was whether Paula knew LaChaise had come down to talk about her. Was he to consider Mr.

LaChaise her emissary? I took a chance on _emissaire_ for that and it worked all right.

"Well, the Frenchman said, as cool as you please, that he was. Said he wouldn't have ventured to intrude otherwise:--and dad froze to ice right there. But LaChaise went on and spoke his piece just the same. He said he'd come to-night to verify the enthusiastic reports he had heard of her singing but that she had outdone them all. He said the voice itself was unusual, of great power and of beautiful quality, adequate in range for anything that could be expected of her. But he said that was only the beginning of it. The important things were that she was a real musician in the first place and a woman with real pa.s.sions in the second.

"I didn't know whether to translate that to dad or to shut the Frenchman up myself right there. I would have liked to take a punch at him. But, of course, you're nothing but a part of the machinery when you are interpreting, so I handed it on, without looking at dad. All he said was, 'We'll get to the point, if you please, Monsieur.'

"LaChaise understood that without waiting for me. He said he had had no hesitation in offering Paula a contract to sing the leading dramatic soprano roles at Ravinia this summer and that he had told her if it worked anywhere near as well as he expected it to there was no doubt of her getting a good Metropolitan engagement next season. He finished up by saying he had had to ask her to make a decision as soon as possible because he was at that moment negotiating with some one else who couldn't be put off very long.

"Dad asked then whether Paula had given him an answer to-night. LaChaise told him she had accepted--subject to his obtaining dad's consent. Then he finished up with a full-dress bow. 'That is the point you have asked me to come to, Monsieur,' he said.

"Dad never said a word for a minute. You could see it must have been ghastly for him. I guess LaChaise must have seen it himself, for he went on and tried to soften it down a bit. Said he didn't want to seem to _brusque_ the affair. All he wanted to ask dad to-night was that he should agree to consider the matter, bearing in mind that a real artist like _madame_, his wife, couldn't be kept shut up in a bra.s.s tower indefinitely.