CHAPTER XVI. PRETTY MARQUISE

The two friends walked through a sort of opera-bouffe to find her; music playing, a swaying crowd, bright lights, bright eyes, pretty women, a glimpse of dancers footing it over a polished floor in a room beyond--a hundred colors flashing and changing, as the groups shifted, before the eye could take in the composition of the picture. A sudden thrill of exhilaration rioted in John's pulses, and he trembled like a child before the gay disclosure of a Christmas tree. Meredith swore to himself that he would not have known him for the man of five minutes agone. Two small, bright red spots glowed in his cheeks; he held himself erect with head thrown back and shoulders squared, and the idolizing Tom thought he looked as a king ought to look at the acme of power and dominion. Miss Hinsdale's word in the hallway was the geniuses touch: a bent, gray man of years--a word--and behold the Great John Harkless, the youth of elder days ripened to his prime of wisdom and strength! People made way for them and whispered as they pa.s.sed. It had been years since John Harkless had been in the midst of a crowd of b.u.t.terfly people; everything seemed unreal, or like a ball in a play; presently the curtain would fall and close the lights and laughter from his view, leaving only the echo of music. It was like a kaleidoscope for color: the bouquets of crimson or white or pink or purple; the profusion of pretty dresses, the brilliant, tender fabrics, and the handsome, foreshortened faces thrown back over white shoulders in laughter; glossy raven hair and fair tresses moving in quick salutations; and the whole gay shimmer of festal tints and rich artificialities set off against the brave green of out-doors, for the walls were solidly adorned with forest branches, with, here and there amongst them, a blood-red droop of beech leaves, stabbed in autumn's first skirmish with summer. The night was cool, and the air full of flower smells, while harp, violin, and 'cello sent a waltz-throb through it all.

They looked rapidly through several rooms and failed to find her indoors, and they went outside, not exchanging a word, and though Harkless was a little lame, Tom barely kept up with his long stride.

On the verandas there were fairy lamps and colored incandescents over little tables, where people sat chatting. She was not there. Beyond was a terrace, where a myriad of Oriental lanterns outlined themselves clearly in fantastically shaped planes of scarlet and orange and green against the blue darkness. Many couples and groups were scattered over the terrace, and the young men paused on the steps, looking swiftly from group to group. She was not there.

"We haven't looked in the dancing-room," said Tom, looking at his companion rather sorrowfully. John turned quickly and they reentered the house.

He had parted from her in the blackness of storm with only the flicker of lightning to show her to him, but it was in a blaze of lights that he saw her again. The dance was just ended, and she stood in a wide doorway, half surrounded by pretty girls and young men, who were greeting her. He had one full look at her. She was leaning to them all, her arms full of flowers, and she seemed the radiant centre of all the light and gaiety of the place. Even Meredith stopped short and exclaimed upon her; for one never got used to her; and he remembered that whenever he saw her after absence the sense of her beauty rushed over him anew.

And he believed the feeling on this occasion was keener than ever before, for she was prettier than he had ever seen her.

"No wonder!" he cried; but Harkless did not understand. As they pressed forward, Meredith perceived that they were only two more radii of a circle of youths, sprung from every direction as the waltz ended, bearing down upon the common focus to secure the next dance. Harkless saw nothing but that she stood there before him. He feared a little that every one might notice how he was trembling, and he was glad of the many voices that kept them from hearing his heart knock against his ribs.

She saw him coming toward her, and nodded to him pleasantly, in just the fashion in which she was bowing to half a dozen others, and at that a pang of hot pain went through him like an arrow--an arrow poisoned with cordial, casual friendliness.

She extended her hand to him and gave him a smile that chilled him--it, was so conventionally courteous and poised so nicely in the manner of society. He went hot and cold fast enough then, for not less pleasantly in that manner did she exclaim: "I am very glad to see you, Mr.

Harkless, so extremely glad! And so delighted to find you looking strong again! Do tell me about all our friends in Plattville. I should like to have a little chat with you some time. So good of you to find me in this melee."

And with that she turned from the poor fellow to Meredith. "How do you do. Cousin Tom? I've saved the next dance for you." Then she distributed words here and there and everywhere, amongst the circle about her--pretty Marquise with a vengeance! "No, Mr. Swift, I shall not make a card; you must come at the beginning of a dance if you want one. I cannot promise the next; it is quite impossible. No, I did not go as far north as Mackinac. How do you do, Mr. Burlingame?--Yes, quite an age;--no, not the next, I am afraid; nor the next;--I'm not keeping a card. Good evening, Mr. Baird. No, not the next. Oh, _thank_ you, Miss Hinsdale!--No, Mr. Swift, it is quite impossible--I'm so sorry. Cousin, the music is commencing; this is ours."

As she took Meredith's arm, she handed her flowers to a gentleman beside her with the slightest glance at the recipient; and the gesture and look made her partner heartsick for his friend; it was so easy and natural and with the air of habit, and had so much of the manner with which a woman hands things to a man who partakes of her inner confidences. Tom knew that Harkless divined the gesture, as well as the ident.i.ty of the gentleman. They started away, but she paused, and turned to the latter.

"Mr. Macauley, you must meet Mr. Harkless. We leave him in your care, and you must see that he meets all the pretty girls--you are used to being nice to distinguished strangers, you know."

Tom put his arm about her, and whirled her away, and Harkless felt as if a soft hand had dealt him blow after blow in the face. Was this lady of little baffling forms and small cold graces the girl who had been his kind comrade, the girl who stood with him by the blue tent-pole, she who had run to him to save his life, she who walked at his side along the pike? The contrast of these homely scenes made him laugh grimly. Was this she who had wept before him--was it she who had been redolent of kindness so fragrantly natural and true--was it she who said she "loved all these people very much, in spite of having known them only two days"?

He cried out upon himself for a fool. What was he in her eyes but a man who had needed to be told that she did not love him! Had he not better--and more courteously to her--have avoided the meeting which was necessarily an embarra.s.sment to her? But no; he must rush like a Mohawk till he found her and forced her to rebuff him, to veil her kindness in little manners, to remind him that he put himself in the character of a rejected importunate. She had punished him enough, perhaps a little too cruelly enough, in leaving him with the man to whom she handed bouquets as a matter of course. And this man was one whose success had long been a trumpet at his ear, blaring loudly of his own failure in the same career.

It had been several years since he first heard of the young editor of the Rouen "Journal," and nowadays almost everybody knew about Brainard Macauley. Outwardly, he was of no unusual type: an American of affairs; slight, easy, yet alert; relaxed, yet sharp; neat, regular, strong; a quizzical eye, a business chin, an ambitious head with soft, straight hair outlining a square brow; and though he was "of a type," he was not commonplace, and one knew at once that he would make a rattling fight to arrive where he was going.

It appeared that he had heard of Harkless, as well as the Carlow editor of him. They had a few moments of shop, and he talked to Harkless as a brother craftsman, without the offense of graciousness, and spoke of his pleasure in the meeting and of his relief at Harkless's recovery, for, aside from the mere human feeling, the party needed him in Carlow--even if he did not always prove himself "quite a vehement partisan." Macauley laughed. "But I'm not doing my duty," he said presently; "I was to present you to the pretty ones only, I believe. Will you designate your preferred fashion of beauty? We serve all styles."

"Thank you," the other answered, hurriedly. "I met a number last night--quite a number, indeed." He had seen them only in dim lights, however, and except Miss Hinsdale and the widower, had not the faintest recognition of any of them, and he cut them all, except those two, one after the other, before the evening was over; and this was a strange thing for a politician to do; but he did it with such an innocent eye that they remembered the dark porch and forgave him.

"Shall we watch the dancing, then?" asked Macauley. Harkless was already watching part of it.

"If you will. I have not seen this sort for more than five years."

"It is always a treat, I think, and a constant proof that the older school of English caricaturists didn't overdraw."

"Yes; one realizes they couldn't."

Harkless remembered Tom Meredith's fine accomplishment of dancing; he had been the most famous dancer of college days, and it was in the dancer that John best saw his old friend again as he had known him, the light lad of the active toe. Other couples flickered about the one John watched, couples that plodded, couples that bobbed, couples that galloped, couples that slid, but the cousins alone pa.s.sed across the glistening reflections as lightly as October leaves blown over the forest floor. In the midst of people who danced with fixed, gla.s.sy eyes, or who frowned with determination to do their duty or to die, and seemed to expect the latter, or who were pale with the apprehension of collision, or who made visible their anxiety to breathe through the nose and look pleased at the same time, these two floated and smiled easily upon life. Three or four steep steps made the portly and cigarette-smoking Meredith pant like an old man, but a dance was a cooling draught to him. As for the little Marquise--when she danced, she danced away with all those luckless hearts that were not hers already.

The orchestra launched the jubilant measures of the deux-temps with a torrent of vivacity, and the girl's rhythmic flight answered like a sail taking the breeze.

There was one heart she had long since won which answered her every movement. Flushed, rapturous, eyes sparkling, cheeks aglow, the small head weaving through the throng like a golden shuttle--ah, did she know how adorable she was! Was Tom right: is it the attainable unattainable to one man and given to some other that leaves a deeper mark upon him than success? At all events the unattainable was now like a hot sting in the heart, but yet a sting more precious than a balm. The voice of Brainard Macauley broke in:

"A white brow and a long lash, a flushing cheek and a soft eye, a voice that laughs and breaks and ripples in the middle of a word, a girl you could put in your hat, Mr. Harkless--and there you have a strong man p.r.o.ne! But I congratulate you on the manner your subordinates operate the 'Herald' during your absence. I understand you are making it a daily."

Macauley was staring at him quizzically, and Harkless, puzzled, but without resentment of the other's whimsey, could only decide that the editor of the Rouen "Journal" was an exceedingly odd young man. All at once he found Meredith and the girl herself beside him; they had stopped before the dance was finished. He had the impulse to guard himself from new blows as a boy throws up his elbow to ward a buffet, and, although he could not ward with his elbow, for his heart was on his sleeve--where he began to believe that Macauley had seen it--he remembered that he could smile with as much intentional mechanism as any wornout rounder of afternoons. He stepped aside for her, and she saw what she had known but had not seen before, for the thickness of the crowd, and this was that he limped and leaned upon his stick.

"Do let me thank you," he said, with a louder echo of her manner of greeting him, a little earlier. "It has been such a pleasure to watch you dance. It is really charming to meet you here. If I return to Plattville I shall surely remember to tell Miss Briscoe."

At this she surprised him with a sudden, clear look in the eyes, so reproachful, so deep, so sad, that he started. She took her flowers from Macauley, who had the air of understanding the significance of such ceremonies very well, and saying, "Shan't we all go out on the terrace?"

placed her arm in Harkless's, and conducted him (and not the others) to the most secluded corner of the terrace, a nook illumined by one j.a.panese lantern; to which spot it was his belief that he led her. She sank into a chair, with the look of the girl who had stood by the blue tent-pole. He could only stare at her, amazed by her abrupt change to this dazzling, if reproachful, kindness, confused by his good fortune.

"'_If_ you go back to Plattville!'" she said in a low voice. "What do you mean?"

"I don't know. I've been dull lately, and I thought I might go somewhere else." Caught in a witchery no lack of possession could dispel, and which the prospect of loss made only stronger while it lasted, he took little thought of what he said; little thought of anything but of the gladness it was to be with her again.

"'Somewhere else?' Where?"

"Anywhere."

"Have you no sense of responsibility? What is to become of your paper?"

"The 'Herald'? Oh, it will potter along, I think."

"But what has become of it in your absence, already? Has it not deteriorated very much?"

"No," he said; "it's better than it ever was before."

"What!" she cried, with a little gasp.

"You're so astounded at my modesty?"

"But please tell me what you mean," she said quickly. "What happened to it?"

"Isn't the 'Herald' rather a dull subject? I'll tell you how well Judge Briscoe looked when he came to see me; or, rather, tell me of your summer in the north."

"No," she answered earnestly. "Don't you remember my telling you that I am interested in newspaper work?"

"I have even heard so from others," he said, with an instant of dryness.

"Please tell me about the 'Herald'?"

"It is very simple. Your friend, Mr. Fisbee, found a subst.i.tute, a relative six feet high with his coat off, a traction engine for energy and a limited mail for speed. He writes me letters on a type writer suffering from an impediment in its speech; and in brief, he is an enterprising idiot with a mania for work-baskets."

Her face was in the shadow.

"You say the--idiot--is enterprising?" she inquired.

"Far more enterprising and far less idiot than I. They are looking for oil down there, and when he came he knew less about oil than a kindergarten babe, and spoke of 'boring for kerosene' in his first letter to me; but he knows it all now, and writes long and convincing geological arguments. If a well comes in, he is prepared to get out an extra! Perhaps you may understand what that means in Plattville, with the 'Herald's' numerous forces. I owe him everything, even the shares in the oil company, which he has persuaded me to take. And he is going to dare to make the 'Herald' a daily. Do you remember asking me why I had never done that? It seemed rather a venture to try to compete with the Rouen papers in offering State and foreign news, but this young Gulliver has tacked onto the a.s.sociated Press, and means to print a quarto--that's eight pages, you know--once a week, Sat.u.r.day, and a double sheet, four pages, on other mornings. The daily venture begins next Monday."

"Will it succeed?"

"Oh, no!" he laughed.