CHAPTER XVIII
The weather, for the winter season, was unusually fine during the first five or six days of the voyage eastward, and Rodrigo kept closely to his cabin. He slept much. It seemed to him that for six months he had gone virtually without sleep. The slight motion of the ship, the changed environment soothed him like a lullaby. He rested soundly at night and took frequent naps during the day. By the time the inevitable change in the weather came and stormy seas tossed the staunch vessel about so violently that his cabin had become virtually untenantable, he was fit and ready to endure the gusty blasts and angry, slanting rain. Rodrigo was an excellent sailor and really enjoyed the decks of a wave-tossed ship.
On a cloudy afternoon, with the wind lashing the rigging with screams and whines and the waves shooting spray as high as the canvas-protected bridge, Rodrigo sat wrapped in blankets in a steamer chair and calmly watched the mountainous watery madness on the other side of the rail. So thoroughly was the little man in the steamer chair beside him sheltered in overcoat, cap, and a whole battalion of blankets that Rodrigo was unaware that another foolish soul, in addition to himself, was on deck. Indeed he looked around bewildered for a moment to discover where the voice was coming from when his neighbor addressed him with a chuckle, "'What fools these mortals be', eh? Freezing to death up here when we might be down in nice warm cabins?"
Rodrigo laughed, "The cabins may be warm, but most of them are very damp by this time, I guess, and full of mal de mer germs."
He observed the habitation of this deep, cheerful voice more closely and saw that it came out of the fat, ruddy, cheerful face of a man about fifty years old, an American. Rodrigo suddenly became aware that he was very glad to hear a friendly voice, that he was in need of human companionship. They continued the conversation and Rodrigo learned that his companion was a Dr. Woodward from Washington, bound for Rome on a holiday. Still talking on inconsequential topics in a light, mind-easing vein, they later walked the abandoned deck together, sloshing through the water that the waves frequently splattered about them. That evening Woodward transferred his place in the dining saloon, now also practically abandoned save for them, to the table where Rodrigo had been eating alone heretofore.
Learning Rodrigo's line of business and having had explained to him how a titled Italian happened to be connected with a Fifth Avenue art emporium, David Woodward revealed casually, between courses of a rather damp dinner, that he was head of the psychiatric ward at the Luther Mead Hospital, Washington. His charges were for the most part, he explained, shell-shocked veterans of the late war, though they also included a number of civilian patients with mental disorders.
"Perhaps it's my association with mental deficients ashore that leads me to enjoy irrational pursuits, such as getting my feet soaked on a wave-washed deck," Woodward chortled.
During the next few days which continued monotonously stormy, the two became quite well acquainted. Under Rodrigo's questioning, Woodward talked further about his own profession, in which he was deeply immersed and stood very high.
On deck one day he made the remark in a discussion of mental disorders that insanity comes often from too much introspection or the abandonment of the mind to a single obsession. On an impulse, Rodrigo told him of John Dorning's experience, making the case hypothetical and, of course, not mentioning names. Having stated the circumstances, he asked Dr. Woodward whether there was a chance that the victim might suffer a relapse and topple over the border-line or whether he might in time completely efface from his mind the harrowing event that had unbalanced him.
The psychiatrist pondered a moment and then answered, "I should say that if this man never learns anything definite about his wife's fate, that is, does not receive information that would give him a new shock, he will go on much as he is at present. I gather from what you say that he has made a partial recovery, so that he again finds life tolerable, but that he is in a measure living under the shadow of the initial shock. Well, that is not so bad. Most of us are concealing a major worry or two. On the other hand, this man's salvation probably lies in falling in love with another woman, a different type of woman from his former wife. That would be an almost sure way of healing his wound. And I should say that the chances of this happening are excellent, particularly if the man is being brought into daily contact with a woman of a sympathetic turn of mind. That's when men frequently fall in love, you know—when they have suffered tragedy and are desperately in need of the sort of sympathy only a woman can give."
Rodrigo suddenly abandoned the subject, for in this "woman of a sympathetic turn of mind" he had seen, in a flash, Mary. Would she and John, thrown together now, with John aching for someone to minister to his bruised mind, fall in love? Having, as he tortured himself into believing, lost Elise to John, would he now be called upon to give up Mary to his friend, as if in retribution? He made an excuse, arose abruptly and started to pace the deck. But this was foolishness, he told himself at length. What if Mary and Dorning should learn to love each other? It was natural. They had much in common. They were both fine, wonderful characters. And had he not virtually abandoned her, lost her by being what she termed a "coward," revealed to her he would never return?
He told himself savagely that he was the most selfish man in the world. And in the next moment he was praying silently that this thing would not happen, that the two people he loved best in the world would not fall in love with each other. His heart ached with a pain that was physical.
Just before they parted at Naples, whence Dr. Woodward was to entrain at once for Rome, the psychiatrist said half-seriously to Rodrigo, "I have been observing you all the way over, young man. It's a habit of my profession. You have something on your mind that is gnawing at it. Take my warning and get rid of it. Get drunk, get married, get anything—but forget it. Remember what I told you. Don't think too much. It's a bad habit."
Rodrigo walked alone along the crowded, dirty streets of the familiar city, which was bathed in a warmth and sunshine far different from the damp and cold that had remained with them the greater part of the voyage over. He secured a room at the Hotel Metropole and, upon awaking and dressing the next morning, strolled out upon the balcony of his room to hear the cries of his countrymen driving their carts past the hotel, the protesting shrieks of the miniature trolley cars as they crawled up the hilly streets of the city, the automobiles bustling about with reckless young Italian chauffeurs at the wheel, the old smell and the gay colors that he had grown up with.
He paid a visit before lunch to the real estate man who had the palace of the Torrianis in charge and was told by that brisk, sharp-faced individual that his cable had been received and that he was awaiting Rodrigo's word before renting the place again.
So it was that the heir of the Torrianis was bumped out to his palace in a hired automobile a few hours later and had the doubtful pleasure of strolling through the great empty rooms of the dwelling of his ancestors. The place had suffered a little from the American tenants who had occupied it. Some of the precious frescoes had been chipped, and the whole establishment was musty and dirty. Rodrigo prepared to leave the historic pile with a feeling of depression. Its sorry condition, contrasted with the spick-and-span modernity of the surroundings he had become accustomed to in New York, weakened whatever idea he might have had of settling there. Nevertheless, sentiment and his now comparative affluence demanded that he restore the palace to a habitable condition. He was therefore doubly glad, as well as surprised, to observe standing beside his rented conveyance a familiar, corpulent female form as he came out.
Maria had been talking excitedly to the chauffeur and now came waddling up to meet her former master. A smile covered her wide and usually stolid face. Rodrigo greeted her heartily and learned from the torrent of words that came from her toothless mouth that she was working in a neighboring villa, which, like the palace of the Torrianis, had been rented by Americans. But, she explained, her Americans were leaving. Had Master Rodrigo come home for good? Would he, perhaps, want old Maria again? She had many times, after the departure of Rodrigo's American tenants, tried to get into the place to clean it. But the pig of a real estate man had refused her a key—her, Maria! Rodrigo, upon the spot, hired her as the permanent caretaker of the palace and turned over to her the massive keys to the outer gate and to the main entrance of the building. She beamed at him as he stepped into the ancient automobile. She shouted blessings upon his head until he disappeared over the hill in a cloud of dust.
It seemed his afternoon for renewing old acquaintances, for a little over a mile from Naples he was about to pass a man and a woman plodding along the dusty road when suddenly the woman raised her head from under the heavy cloth-wrapped bundle she was carrying. It was Rosa Minardi. Rodrigo at once had his car stopped. Rosa, smiling, set down her bundle, and the man with her, who was quite unencumbered and was smoking a long, curved pipe, followed her leisurely to the side of the automobile. Rosa, after the first greeting, introduced the loose-jointed, lazy-looking fellow as her husband.
She looked older, stouter, and considerably less attractive than she had when Rodrigo had last seen her. He wondered if she had really changed or whether it was because that painful scene in which her father had extorted five thousand liras from him seemed now to have taken place years, instead of months, ago, in quite another world. Certainly there seemed nothing particularly alluring about her now, though she was rolling her bright, black eyes at him hopefully and striking attitudes to display the outlines of her too buxom figure as she talked. She was finding the pose difficult, however. There were tired, aging lines under those eyes. And there was the slouching hulk of a man watching her mildly, her husband. Rosa glanced from Rodrigo to this husband, and sighed. The Minardis never had luck. Her worthless father had long since spent his tainted profits from her love affair with Rodrigo. That same worthless father had saddled this equally worthless husband upon her, with the promise that the man was rich, and had then borrowed what little money his son-in-law possessed and disappeared once more to Rome.
This, Rosa did not, of course, tell Rodrigo. Instead she said soberly, "You are looking pale, my friend, and older. Has life not been so gay in America, eh?
"Oh, it has been gay enough," he replied, and he began to admit to himself that he too must have changed, what with John and Dr. Woodward and now Rosa telling him of it.
"Do you think, then, to remain in Italy?" she asked, and he thought he detected a little gleam in those once inviting eyes.
The question having thus been put to him directly, he made a decision and said, "No. I am going to travel a while. Later—I do not know. But I am, as you have guessed, Rosa, not so gay. Perhaps in Paris or London I shall be gayer."
"You used to be—very gay," she mused, and again smiled at him coquettishly, but heavily, as if trying to say that it was not impossible that those happy times might be revived. But, though he returned her smile, she failed to stimulate him. Indeed he found her more depressing even than the palace of his fathers. Bright-eyed Rosa turned drudge, slave of a dirty, indolent Italian husband! Well, that was life. As he started on again and looked back at her, trudging under her burden along the dusty road, the man walking, hands in his pockets, by her side, Rodrigo knew that, even had she been twice as pretty as ever, she would not have struck a spark in him. His old weakness for a pretty face had been killed. And the pity of it was that it had been killed just too late.
He visited Paris, Paris striving to display its old pre-war gayety in the sunny days of a perfect spring. He looked up some old acquaintances, English and Italian artists of the Latin Quarter for the most part, and drank wine with them and talked and tried to recapture some of the old carefree spirit in the musty cafés of Montmartre. He attended the theatre, alone and in the company of his friends and browsed among the galleries and shops, making a few purchases and forwarding them to Dorning and Son. For he could not forget that he was still, in name, John's partner. He found himself frequently speculating, almost unconsciously, as to the outcome of business projects he had had under way when he left and had more than one impulse to write or cable about them. Would he, after all, go back? Dorning and Son had become even more of a part of him that he had suspected. And John and Mary—yes, he wanted that adopted world of his back again intensely already, though he had been gone hardly a month.
Yet the prospect of facing John Dorning day after day, facing his dearest friend with a guilty lie in his heart—and the ache of being near Mary and knowing she was lost to him—he could not endure that!
He crossed the Channel in May, reaching London on a wet and foggy night and establishing himself at the Savoy. For the next few days he loitered in his room, sleeping late and eating only when he felt an active hunger, and walking purposelessly about the streets. On the third evening, over a lonesome dinner, he read by chance in the paper of a play that had opened the night before. It was a problem play called "The Drifters" and, according to the reviewer, possessed considerable merit. Rodrigo was surprised and interested to see the name of Sophie Binner in the cast. Far down in the review, he read a paragraph devoted to Sophie's performance. It said that Miss Binner, late of the musical comedy stage, showed distinct promise in her first straight dramatic role, that the mannerisms which used to delight revue patrons had quite disappeared, that "the former Christy ingenue has demonstrated that she is a character actress of polished competence and, of course, outstanding beauty."
Rodrigo was viewing "The Drifters" an hour later. He found its opening act rather ponderous and talky, until the entrance of Sophie. In the plain tailored suit and subdued make-up which her role called for, she was, he was surprised to discover, more striking in appearance than she had ever been in the tinsel costumes she had worn for Gilbert Christy. Her shiny golden hair, now cropped and confined closely to her head, instead of flying in the breeze as previously, set off her piquant, innocent-wise face in fascinating effectiveness. Her voice had somewhere lost its rasping overtone and acquired clarity and gentility. She moved surely and with an understanding of her part that was in amazing contrast to the slovenly manner in which she had always filled the meager requirements of the bits she had played in Christy's sketches. Formerly Sophie had been able only to sing, dance, and display her figure; now, Rodrigo admitted, she was a real actress. He became interested in discovering how the metamorphosis had come about. His chance came more quickly than he had bargained on.
Just before the curtain rose for the second act, an usher handed Rodrigo a card as he resumed his chair very near the stage. The card read:
Rodrigo:
I noticed you in the audience. I would like to talk with you. Come to my dressing-room after the show, if you care to.
SOPHIE.
It was significant of the change in her, he realized, that later she kept him waiting outside her dressing-room, when he knocked, instead of crying carelessly for him to enter. When she appeared at the door at last, she was dressed simply and becomingly, far more modestly than in the old days. She greeted him cordially enough and accepted his invitation for a bite of supper in a small restaurant just off Piccadilly.
"You are thinner and older," she accused him, when later they were seated cosily in a corner of the smoke-filled and talk-filled room, for the place was a popular rendezvous for after-theatre crowds, though nothing in the way of entertainment was offered except excellent food and a congenial atmosphere.
"You have changed yourself," he retorted. "Tell me how it happened—why you decided to become an actress."
"I think your friend John Dorning had more to do with it than anything," she surprised him by replying.
"John—but how? Do you mean something he said or did the time you—" He stopped in confusion.
"Go on. I don't mind," she laughed. "All that seems very far away now. I don't know whether or not he told you—I imagined he wouldn't—but I came to see you when I was down and out and—well, I got two thousand dollars from Mr. Dorning by a rather shabby trick. But I received a lot more from him than that, though he'll probably never know it. He's a wonderful man. I was in no mood then for being preached at though, but somehow he made me listen and he got over to me, without preaching at all, just where I was headed. He said that no woman had ever found real happiness in living on other people and that if I was any good and had any real love for the stage I would dig out on my own and try to get somewhere.
"When he handed over the two thousand dollars, he said that if I was wise, I would take it and use it to tide myself over while I tried to build a real career. What's more, he offered to send me more if I needed it and could prove I was honestly making an effort to succeed in my profession. That was real sportsmanship, wasn't it? I thought so. So I chucked the musical comedy business and caught on with a small stock company in Leeds. I studied day and night, I worked like a dog, and well, I'm a little way on the road to somewhere now."
"I'm glad, Sophie," he said honestly. "John's a prince. I know that too." He looked across the table into her grave blue eyes so intently that her eyes widened into questioning. Then she smiled understandingly.
"I know what you are thinking, Rodrigo," she said softly. "You are thinking that this is the first time you have ever been with me alone that you did not want to take me in your arms and kiss me. The first time that we could sit here comfortably as friends, without making love. I have been thinking the same thing. And it's true. I used to be an awful man-hunter. I used to think I wasn't living unless I was mad about some man—one or more. I remember that I could have killed you that night you left me in New York. But I have learned different. I have your friend, John Dorning, largely to thank for that."
When he left her at her apartment later, he felt that he had gained a friend.
A letter was handed him by the room clerk that night when he called at the desk of the hotel for his key. Rodrigo stared at the rectangle of white. In the corner was the neat, familiar name of Dorning and Son. The envelope bore his name, typewritten, was addressed to the Palace di Torriani, Naples, and contained scribblings on its face in pencil that had forwarded it to Paris and thence to London. Maria, he decided, had been the original recipient and had sent it to the address he had given her in Paris. He thrust the letter into his pocket and summoned the lift to take him to his room. He wanted to read this message in seclusion, for he had a foreboding of its importance. His original quaking thought that something had happened to John, he assured himself, was absurd. In that event, he felt, Mary would have cabled him.
He sank into a chair, lit a cigarette, and applied trembling fingers to the envelope.
Dear Rodrigo:
I do not know how firmly your mind is set by this time upon remaining in Europe. I do know that something unexpected has developed here that vitally affects you and John and all of us.
John is sure you will return soon and intends to tell you then. I am not so sure you are coming back, but I emphatically urge you, for your own sake, to do so, at least until you can learn of these developments from John's own lips. Return to Europe later if you like, but—come now.
I cannot tell you more. Perhaps I have told too much already.
Sincerely yours,
MARY DRAKE.
He leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. Mary! He had known instinctively, when the letter was handed to him, that it was from Mary. Suddenly its meaning flashed upon him. She and John loved each other, were going to be married, and wanted to tell him about it, wanted him to take charge of the business while they were away on their honeymoon. In vain he told himself that the thought was absurd, that, if such a thing had really happened, Mary would have written him a straightforward letter about it instead of this cryptic note. Ever since he had left New York, this idea—yes, he might as well admit it—this dread of Mary and John loving each other had hung over his head. Yet why should he dread it? It was no more than fair. A love for a love. He had taken Elise from John; now John was taking Mary from him.
He lay awake all that night, fearing, restless, unhappier than he had ever been in his life. The next morning he engaged passage for New York on a steamer leaving within three days.