The talk fell upon these immediately, and he forthwith perceived that he was in for it. And why not? he asked himself. How did it endanger him, or why should he shun it? All the Cove and the countryside for twenty miles around knew of his feats of sleight of hand; and since accident had revealed his knack to this little coterie of well-bred and well-placed young men, why should he grudge the exhibition to the few scores of ladies and children at New Helvetia, to aid the little diversion of the evening? His scruples could have no force now, for this would bring him—the social pariah!—no nearer to them than when he sat by the tenpin-alley and humbly watched his betters play. The episode of the jugglery, once past, would be an old story and bereft of interest. He would have had his little day, basking in the sun of the applause of his superiors, and would sink back to his humble obscurity at the side of the bowling-alley. Should he show any disposition to presume upon the situation, he realized that they well understood the art of repressing a forward inferior. The entertainment contemplated no subsequent social festivities. The programme, made out with many an interlineation, had been calculated to occupy all the time until eleven o’clock; and Royce, looking at it with the accustomed eye of a manager of private theatricals, felt himself no prophet to discern that midnight would find the exhausted audience still seated, enjoying that royal good measure of amusement always meted out by bounteous amateurs. Throughout the evening he would be immured with the other young men in the close little pens which served for dressing and green rooms,—for all the actors in the farce were to be men,—save for the fraction of time when his jugglery would necessitate his presence on the stage. True, Miss Fordyce, should she patronize the entertainment, might then have to look at him somewhat more discerningly than she would look at the wall, perhaps! It could surely do her no harm. She had seen worse men, he protested, with eager self-assertion. She owed him that much,—one glance, one moment’s cognition of his existence. It was not much to ask. He had made a great sacrifice for her sake, and all unknown to her. He had had regard to her estimate of her dignity and held it dear. He had done her reverence from the depths of his heart, regardless that it cost him his last hope.
The powers of the air were gradually changing at New Helvetia Springs. The light of the days had grown dull and gray. Masses of white vapor gathered in the valley, rising, and rising, and filling all its depths and slopes, as if it were the channel of some great river, till only the long level line of the summit of the opposite range showed above the impalpable tides in the similitude of the further banks of a great stream. It was a suggestive resemblance to Lucien Royce, and he winced as he looked upon it. He was not sorry when it had gone, for the gathering mists soon pervaded the forests, and hid cliffs and abysses and even the familiar path, save for the step before the eye, and in this still whiteness all the world was lost; at last one could only hear—for it too shared the invisibilities—the rain falling steadily, drearily, all the day and all the long, long hours of the black night. The bowling-alley was deserted; lawn-tennis had succumbed to the weather; the horses stood in the stalls. One might never know that the hotel at New Helvetia Springs existed except that now and again, in convolutions of mist as it rolled, a gable high up might reveal itself for a moment, or a peaked turret; unless indeed one were a ghost, to find some spectral satisfaction in slipping viewless through the white enveloping nullity, and gazing in at the window of the great parlor, where a log fire was ruddily aflare and the elders perused their newspapers or worked their tidies, and the youth swung in rocking-chairs and exchanged valuable ideas, and played cards, and read a novel aloud, and hung in groups about the tortured piano. So close stood a poor ghost to the window one day, risking observation, that he might have read, over the charming outline of sloping shoulders clad faultlessly in soft gray cloth, the page of the novel which Miss Fordyce had brought there to catch the light; so close that he might have heard every syllable of the conversation which ensued when the man in whom he discovered her destiny—the cold, inexpressive-looking, personified conventionality—came and sat beside her on the sofa. But the poor ghost had more scruples than reality of existence, and, still true to the sanctions that control gentlemen in a world in which he had no more part, he turned hastily away that no syllable might reach him. And as he turned he ran almost into the arms of a man who had been tramping heavily up and down the veranda in the white obscurities, all unaware of his propinquity. It might have been better if he had!
XIV.
For there were strangers at New Helvetia,—two men who knew nobody and whom nobody knew. Perhaps in all the history of the hotel this instance was the first. The patronage of New Helvetia, like that of many other secluded southern watering-places, had been for generations among the same clique of people, all more or less allied by kindred or hereditary friendship, or close association in their respective homes or in business interests, and the traditions of the place were community property. So significant was the event that it could scarcely escape remark. More than one of the hereditary sojourners observed to the others that the distance of fifty miles from a railroad over the worst stage-road in America seemed, after all, no protection from the intrusion of strangers. Here were two men who knew nobody, whom nobody knew, and who seemed not even to know each other. One was a quiet, decorous, reserved person who might be easily overlooked in a crowd, so null was his aspect. The other had good, hearty, aggressive, rustic suggestions about him. He was as stiffly upright as a ramrod, and he marched about like a grenadier. He smoked and chewed strong, rank tobacco. He flourished a red-bordered cotton handkerchief. He had been carefully trimmed and shaved by his barber for the occasion, but alas, the barber’s embellishments can last but from day to day, and the rougher guise of his life was betrayed in certain small habitudes, conspicuous among which were an obliviousness of many uses of a fork and an astonishing temerity in the thrusting of his knife down his throat at the dinner-table.
The two strangers appeared on the evening of the dramatic entertainment among the other guests of the hotel in the ballroom, as spectators of the “Unrivaled Attraction” profusely billed in the parlor, the office of the hotel, and the tenpin-alley. The rain dashed tempestuously against the long windows, and the sashes now and again trembled and clattered in their frames, for the mountain wind was rising. Ever and anon the white mist that pressed with pallid presence against the panes shivered convulsively, and was torn away into the wild night and the savagery of the fastnesses without, returning persistently, as if with some fatal affinity for the bright lights and the warm atmosphere that would annihilate its tenuous existence with but a single breath. The blended sound of the torrents and the shivering gusts was punctuated by the slow dripping from the eaves of the covered walks within the quadrangle close at hand, that fell with monotonous iteration and elastic rebound from the flagging below, and was of dreary intimations distinct amid the ruder turmoil of the elements. But a cheerful spirit pervaded the well-housed guests, perhaps the more grateful for the provision for pleasantly passing the long hours of a rainy evening in the country, since it did not snatch them from alternative pleasures; from languid strolls on moonlit verandas, or contemplative cigars in the perfumed summer woods under the stars, or choice conferences with kindred spirits in the little observatory that overhung the slopes. The Unrivaled Attraction had been opportunely timed to fill an absolute void, and it could not have been presented before more leniently disposed spectators than those rescued from the jaws of unutterable ennui. There sounded a continuous subdued ripple of laughter and stir of fans and murmur of talk amongst them; but, although richly garbed in compliment to the occasion, the brilliancy of their appearance was somewhat reduced by the tempered light in which it was essential that they should sit throughout the performance and between the acts, for the means at the command of the Unrivaled Attraction were not capable of compassing the usual alternations of illumination, and the full and permanent glare of splendor was reserved to suffuse the stage. The audience was itself an object of intense interest to the actors behind the scenes, and there was no interval in which the small rent made in the curtain for the purpose of observation was not utilized by one or another of the excited youths, tremulous with premonitions of a fiasco, from the time when the first groups entered the hall to the triumphant moment when it became evident that all New Helvetia was turning out to honor the occasion, and that they were to display their talents to a full house. It was only when the stir of preparation became tumultuous—one or two intimations of impatience from the long-waiting audience serving to admonish the performers—that Lucien Royce found an opportunity to peer out in his turn upon the scene in the dusky clare-obscure. Here and there the yellow globes of the shaded lamps shed abroad their tempered golden lustre, and occasionally there came to his eye a pearly gleam from a fluttering fan, or the prismatic glitter of a diamond, or the ethereal suggestion of a girl in white in the midst of such sombre intimations of red and brown and deeply purple and black in the costumes of the dark-robed elders that they might hardly be accounted as definite color in the scale of chromatic values. With such a dully rich background and the dim twilight about her, the figure and face of the girl he sought showed as if in the glamours of some inherent light, reminding him of that illuminating touch in the method of certain painters whose works he had seen in art galleries, in which the radiance seems to be in the picture, independent of the skylight, and as if equally visible in the darkest night. She wore a green dress of some silken texture, so faint of hue that the shadows of the soft folds appeared white. It was fashioned with a long, slim bodice, cut square in the neck, and a high, flaring ruff of delicate old lace, stiff with a Medici effect, that rose framing the rounded throat and small head with its close and high-piled coils of black hair, through which was thrust a small comb of carved coral of the palest possible hue. She might have been a picture, so still and silent she sat, so definitely did the light emanate from her, so completely did the effect of the pale, lustrous tints of her attire reduce to the vague nullities of a mere background the nebulous dark and neutral shades about her. How long Royce stood and gazed with all his heart in his eyes he never knew. He saw naught else. He heard naught of the stir of the audience, or the wild wind without, or the babel upon the stage where he was. He came to himself only when he was clutched by the arm and admonished to clear the track, for at last the curtain was to be rung up.
What need to dwell on the tremulous eagerness and wild despair of that moment,—the glee club all ranged in order on the stage, and with heart-thumping expectation, the brisk and self-sufficient tinkle of the bell, the utter blank immovableness of the curtain, the subdued delight of the audience? Another tintinnabulation, agitated and querulous; a mighty tug at the wings; a shiver in the fabric, a sort of convulsion of the texture, and the curtain goes up in slow doubt,—all awry and bias, it is true, but still revealing the “musicianers,” a trifle dashed and taken aback, but meeting a warm and reassuring reception which they do not dream is partly in tribute to the clownish tricks of the curtain.
Royce, suddenly all in heart, exhilarated by the mere sight of her, flung himself ardently into the preparations progressing in the close little pens on either side and at the rear of the stage. The walls of these were mere partitions reaching up only some ten feet toward the ceiling, and they were devoid of any exit save through the stage and the eye of the public. Hence it had been necessary that all essentials should be carefully looked to and provided in advance. Now and then, however, a wild alarum arose because of the apparent non-existence of some absolutely indispensable article of attire or furniture, succeeded by embarrassed silence on the part of the mourner when the thing in question was found, and a meek submission to the half-suppressed expletives of the rest of the uselessly perturbed company. It was a scene of mad turmoil. Young men already half clad in feminine attire were struggling with the remainder of their unaccustomed raiment,—the actors to take part in the farce “The New Woman.” Others were in their white flannel suits,—no longer absolutely white,—hot, dusty, perspiring, the scene-shifters and the curtain contingent, all lugubriously wiping their heated brows and blaming one another. The mandolin and banjo players, in faultless evening dress, stood out of the rush and kept themselves tidy. And now arose a nice question, in the discussion of which all took part, becoming oblivious, for the time, of the audience without and the tra-la-la-ing of the glee singers, the boyish tones of argument occasionally rising above these melodious numbers. It was submitted that in case the audience should call for the author of “The New Woman,”—and it would indeed be unmannerly to omit this tribute,—the playwright ought to be in full dress to respond, considering the circumstances, the place, and the full dress of the audience. And here he was in his white flannel trousers and a pink-and-white striped blazer at this hour of the night, and his room a quarter of a mile away in a pitching mountain rain, whither certain precisians would fain have him hie to bedizen himself. He listened to this with a downcast eye and a sinking heart, and doubtless would have acted on the admonition save for the ludicrous effect of emerging before the audience as he was, and returning to meet the same audience in the blaze of full-dress glory.
“It’s no use talking,” he said at last, decisively. “We are caught here like rats in a trap. There is no way of getting out without being seen. I wonder I didn’t think to have a door cut.”
Repeatedly there rose on the air the voice of one who was a slow study repeating the glib lines of “The New Woman;” and once something very closely approximating a quarrel ensued upon the discovery that the budding author, already parsimonious with literary material, had transferred a joke from the mouth of one character to that of another; the robbed actor came in a bounding fury and with his mother’s false hair, mildly parted and waving away from his fierce, keen young face and flashing eyes, to demand of the author-manager its restoration. His decorous stiffly lined skirts bounced tumultuously with his swift springs forward, and his fists beneath the lace frill of his sleeves were held in a belligerent muscular adjustment.
“It’s my joke,” he asseverated vehemently, as if he had cracked it himself. “My speech is ruined without it, world without end! I will have it back! I will! I will!” he declared as violently as if he could possess the air that would vibrate with the voice of the actor who went on first, and could put his collar on the syllables embodying the precious jest by those masterful words, “I will!”