Wild Wings: A Romance of Youth

by Margaret Piper Chalmers

CHAPTER XXXVIII

THE SONG IN THE NIGHT

Tony Holiday sat in the dressing room waiting her cue to go on the stage. It was only a rehearsal however. Miss Clay was back now and Tony was once more the humble understudy though with a heart full of happy knowledge of what it is like to be a real actress with a doting public at her feet.

While she waited she picked up a newspaper and carelessly scanned its pages. Suddenly to the amazement and consternation of the other girl who was dressing in the same room she uttered a sharp little cry and for the first time in her healthy young life slid to the floor in a merciful faint. Her frightened companion called for help instantly and it was only a moment before Tony's brown eyes opened and she pulled herself up from the couch where they had laid her. But she would not speak or tell them what had happened and it was only when they had gotten her off in a cab with a motherly, big hearted woman who played shrew's and villainess' parts always on the stage but was the one person of the whole cast to whom every one turned in time of trouble that the rest searched the paper for the clew to the thing which had made Tony look like death itself. It was not far to seek. Tony looked like death because Alan Massey was dead.

They all knew Alan Massey and knew that he and Tony Holiday were intimate friends, perhaps even betrothed. More than one of them had seen and remembered how he had kissed her before them all on the night of Tony's first Broadway triumph and some of them had wondered why he had not been seen since with her. So he had been in Mexico and now he was dead, his heart pierced by a Mexican dagger. And Tony—Tony of the gay tongue and the quick laughter—had the dagger gone into her heart too? It looked so. The "End of the Rainbow" cast felt very sad and sober that day. They loved Tony and just now she was not an actress to them but a girl who had loved a man, a man who was dead.

Jean Lambert telegraphed at once for Doctor Holiday to come to Tony who was in a bad way. She wouldn't talk. She wouldn't eat. She did not sleep. She did not cry. Jean thought if she cried her grief would not have been so pitiful to behold. It was the stony, white silence of her that was intolerable to witness.

In her uncle's arms Tony's terrible calm gave way and she sobbed herself to utter weariness and finally to sleep. But even to him she would not talk much about Alan. He had not known Alan. He had never understood—never would understand now how wonderful, how lovable, how splendid her lover had been. For several days she was kept in bed and the doctor hardly left her. It was a hard time for him as well as his stricken niece. Even their love for each other did not serve to lighten the pain to any great extent. It was not the same sorrow they had. Doctor Holiday was suffering because his little girl suffered. Tony was suffering because she loved Alan Massey who would never come to her again. Neither could entirely share the grief of the other. Alan Massey was between them still.

Finally Dick came and was able to give what Doctor Philip could not. He could sing Alan's praises, tell her how wonderful he had been, how generous and kind. He could share her grief as no one else could because he had learned to love Alan Massey almost as well as she did herself.

Dick talked freely of Alan, told her of the strange discovery which they had made that he and Alan were cousins and that he himself was John Massey, the kidnapped baby whom he had been so sorry for when he had looked up the Massey story at the time of the old man's death. Dick was not an apt liar but he lied gallantly now for Alan's sake and for Tony's. He told her that it was only since Alan had been in Mexico that he had known who his cousin was and had immediately possessed the other of the facts and turned over to him the proofs of his identity as John Massey.

It was a good lie, well conceived and well delivered but the liar had not reckoned on that fatal Holiday gift of intuition. Tony listened to the story, shut her eyes and thought hard for a moment. Then she opened her eyes again and looked straight at Dick.

"That is not the truth," she said. "Alan knew before he went to Mexico.
He knew long before. That was the other ghost—the one he could not lay.
Don't lie to me. I know."

And then yielding to her command Dick began again and told her the truth, serving Alan's memory well by the relation. One thing only he kept back. After all he had no proof that the young engineer had been right in his conjecture that Alan had wanted the dagger to find him. There was no need of hurting Tony with that.

"Dick—I can't call you John yet. I can't even think about you to-night though I am so thankful to have you back safe and well. I can't be glad yet for you. I can't remember any one but Alan. You will forgive me, I know. But tell me. It was a terrible thing he did to you. Do you forgive him really?" The girl's deep shadowed eyes searched the young man's face, challenging him to speak the truth and only that.

He met the challenge willingly. He had nothing to conceal here. Tony might read him through and through and she would find in him neither hate nor rancor, nor condemnation.

"Of course I forgive him, Tony. He did a terrible thing to me you say. He did a much more terrible thing to himself. And he made up for everything over and over by what he did for me in Mexico. He might have let me die. I should have died if he had not come. There is no doubt in the world of that. He could not have done more if he had been my own brother. He meant me to like him. He did more. He made me love him. He was my friend. We parted as friends with a handshake which was his good-by though I didn't know it."

It was a fatal speech. Too late Dick realized it as he saw Tony's face.

"Dick, he meant to let himself get killed. I've thought so all along and now I know you think so too."

"I didn't mean to let that out. Maybe I am mistaken. We shall never know. But I believe he was not sorry to let the dagger get him. He had given up everything else. It wasn't so hard for him to give up the one thing more—the thing he didn't want anyway—life. Life wasn't much to him after he gave you up, Tony. His love was the biggest thing about him. I love you myself but I am not ashamed to say that his love was a bigger thing than mine every way, finer, more magnificent, the love of a genius whereas mine is just the love of an every day man. It was love that saved him."

"Dick, do you believe that the real Alan is dust—nothing but dust down in a grave?" demanded Tony suddenly.

"No, Tony, I don't. I can't. The essence of what was best in him is alive somewhere. I know it. It must be. His love for you—for all beauty—they couldn't die, dear. They were big enough to be immortal."

"And his dancing," sighed Tony. "His dancing couldn't die. It had a soul."

If she had not been sure already that Alan had meant to go out of her life even if he had not meant to go to his death when he left New York she would have been convinced a little later. Alan's Japanese servant brought two gifts to her from his honorable master according to his honorable master's orders should he not return from his journey. His honorable master being unfortunately dead his unworthy servant laid the gifts at Mees Holiday's honorable feet. Whereupon the bearer had departed as quietly as death itself might come.

One of the gifts was a picture, a painting which Tony had seen, and which was she thought the most beautiful of all his beautiful creations. Its sheer loveliness would have hurt her even if it had had no other significance and it did have a very real message.

At first sight the whole scene seemed enveloped in translucent, silver mist. As one looked more closely however there was revealed the figure of a man, black clad in pilgrim guise, kneeling on the verge of a precipitous cliff which rose out of a seemingly bottomless abyss of terrific blackness. Though in posture of prayer the pilgrim's head was lifted and his face wore an expression of rapt adoration. Above a film of fog in the heavens stretched a clear space of deep blue black sky in which hung a single luminous star. From the star a line of golden light of unearthly radiance descended and finding its way to the uplifted transfigured face of the kneeling pilgrim ended there.

Tony Holiday understood, got the message as clearly as if Alan himself stood beside her to interpret it. She knew that he was telling her through the picture that she had saved his soul, kept him out of the abyss, that to the end she was what he had so often called her—his star.

With tear blinded eyes she turned from the canvas to the little silver box which the servant had placed in her hands together with a sealed envelope. In the box was a gorgeous, unset ruby, the gem of Alan's collection as Tony well knew having worshiped often at its shrine. It lay there now against the austere purity of its white satin background—the symbol of imperishable passion.

Reverently Tony closed the little box and opened the sealed envelope dreading yet longing to know its contents. Alan had sent her no word of farewell, had not written to her that night before he went out into the storm to meet his death, had made no response to the letter she herself had written offering herself and her love and faith for his taking. At first these things had hurt her. But these gifts of his were beginning to make her understand his silence. Selfish and spectacular all his life at his death Alan Massey had been surpassingly generous and simple. He had chosen to bequeath his love to her not as an obsession and a bondage but as an elemental thing like light and air.

The message in the envelope was in its way as impersonal as the ruby had been but Tony found it more hauntingly personal than she had ever found his most impassioned love letter. Once more the words were couched in the symbol tongue of the poet in India—in only two sentences, but sentences so poignant that they stamped themselves forever on Tony Holiday's mind as they stood out from the paper in Alan's beautiful, striking handwriting.

"When the lighted lamp is brought into the room
I shall go.
And then perhaps you will listen to the night, and
hear my song when I am silent."

The lines were dated on that unforgettable night when Tony had played Broadway and danced her last dance with her royal lover. So he had known even then that he was giving her up. Realizing this Tony realized as she never had before the high quality of his love. She could guess a little of what that night had meant to him, how passionately he must have desired to win through to the full fruition of his love before he gave her up for all the rest of time. And she herself had been mad that night Tony remembered. Ah well! He had been strong for them both. And now their love would always stay upon the high levels, never descend to the ways of earth. There would never be anything to regret, though Tony loving her lover's memory as she did that moment was not so sure but she regretted that most of all.

Yet tragic as Alan's death was and bitterly and sincerely as she mourned his loss Tony could see that he had after all chosen the happiest way out for himself as well as for her and his cousin. It was not hard to forgive a dead lover with a generous act of renunciation his last deed. It would have been far less easy to forgive a living lover with such a stain upon his life. Even though he tried to wash it away by his surrender and she by her forgiveness the stain would have remained ineradicable. There would always have been a barrier between them for all his effort and her own.

And his love would ill have borne denial or frustration. Without her he would have gone down into dark pits if he had gone on living. Perhaps he had known and feared this himself, willing to prevent it at any cost. Perhaps he had known that so long as he lived she, Tony, would never have been entirely her own again. His bondage would have been upon her even if he never saw her again. Perhaps he had elected death most of all for this reason, had loved her well enough to set her free. He had told her once that love was twofold, a force of destruction and damnation but also a force of purification and salvation. Alan had loved her greatly, perhaps in the end his love had taken him in his own words "to the gate of Heaven." Tony did not know but she thought if there really was a God he would understand and forgive the soul of Alan Massey for that last splendid sacrifice of his in the name of love.

And whatever happened Tony Holiday knew that she would bear forever the mark of Alan Massey's stormy, strange, and in the end all-beautiful love. Perhaps some day the lighted lamp might be brought in. She did not know, would not attempt to prophesy about that. She did not know that she would always listen to the night for Alan Massey's sake and hear his song though he was silent forever.

The next day Richard Carson officially disappeared from the world and John Massey appeared in his place. The papers made rather a striking story of his romantic history and its startling denouement which had come they said through the death bed confessions of the man Roberts which had only just reached the older Massey's hands, strangely enough on the eve of his own tragic death, which was again related to make the tale a little more of a thriller. That was all the world knew, was ever to know for the Holidays and John Massey kept the dead man's secret well.

And the grass grew green on Alan Massey's grave. The sun and dew and rain laid tender fingers upon it and great crimson and gold hearted roses strewed their fragrant petals upon it year by year. The stars he had loved so well shone down upon the lonely spot where his body slept quiet at last after the torment of his brief and stormy life. But otherwise, as John Massey and Tony Holiday believed, his undefeated spirit fared on splendidly in its divine quest of beauty.