"Dear Mr. Adair: I hardly expected you to reply to my note, nor could I have thought it would please you so much as you say. Indeed, I hope you will not misjudge it--or me--for it was written on the same impulse that makes one applaud in the theater itself, and with no ulterior idea. Frankly, I do not think I ought to ask you to call--the circumstances are so peculiar--and it is all so against the conventionalities. In Washington or New York it would be different, but this little place--like all little places--is strait-laced beyond belief. It will be my loss more than yours, which perhaps will be some consolation to you. Yet it seems too stupid to say no--that is, if you really do want to come--and I am going to ask you after all. Surely a little talk over a cup of tea to-morrow at five ought not to arrest the stars in their courses, or bring down the pillars of the universe on our unfortunate heads? And if any one should come in, we might say that we had met before in Washington? That would place our acquaintance on a more correct footing, and save me, at least, the possibility of embarrassment. Is this asking too much of you? Sincerely yours, Phyllis Ladd."
CHAPTER XI
There are men who pursue women with a skill, zest and pertinacity that others do bears or tigers, and with very much the same hardihood and delight. In the rich preserves of the world, so well stocked with youth and beauty, they find an unending enjoyment, and an unending occupation. No sooner have they brought down one, and beheld her bleeding and stricken at their feet, than they are up and off, with another notch on their gun, and fresh ardor in their hearts. They are debarred from taking the tangible trophies of skin and head; a slipper, a glove, a bundle of letters are often all they have to show; but within them wells the satisfaction of the hunter who has made a "kill."
Amongst this race of sportsmen there were few hardier or more daring than Cyril Adair. That the game was cruel or cowardly had never occurred to him. The women he knew--all of the lower class--frequently played their side of it with eyes wide open, and ran--not to escape--but with the full intention of being caught. This is not urged in his extenuation. Often he was not aware of the subterfuge. Women to him were but prey, and in more venerable times he would have waylaid any lady he favored, with a club.
Behold him in immaculate afternoon costume, striding along Chestnut Avenue--boutonniere, silk-hat, cane, new suede gloves, etc.--a devil of a fellow in his own estimation, with an air and a swagger that reflected his profound contentment with himself. He had never gone a-hunting before in such a splendid wood. The thought that he was actually going to invade one of those imposing mansions made his pulses leap. How big they were, how aristocratic! What incomes they represented! What mysteries of ease and luxury lay hidden behind those stately windows! He was tremendously stirred; tremendously excited. He swelled with self-complacency. He was hardly over thirty, he was handsome, he was a genius--and the women loved him!
A man-servant admitted him. Yes, Miss Ladd was expecting him. His hat and cane were taken, while he gazed, somewhat daunted, at the immense hall in which he found himself. He had a confused sense of tapestries; of stone bas-reliefs very worn and old; of oriental rugs; of strange-looking, moldy chairs, straight-backed and carved, with massive arms, on which there was still the fading gilt of the fifteenth century.--He was led through another room of a similar cold and spacious magnificence, and then up-stairs to the drawing-room. Here he was left, while the man departed to inform his mistress of the visitor's arrival.
The elegance and beauty with which Adair found himself surrounded fairly took his breath away. His only standard was that of fashionable hotels, yet here was something that made the splendors of the Waldorf or the Auditorium seem suddenly tawdry in comparison. His instinctive good taste was ravished by the old Venetian brocades, the rich dark pictures, the Sheriton furniture, the harmonious blending of all these, and so many other half-seen and half-comprehended things into a gracious and exquisite whole. Near him was the table set out for tea, with silver that it was a joy to look at; and about the little island it made in the vastness of the room was a wealth of red roses, marking as it were the boundaries of coziness and intimacy.
Adair's complacency was not proof against such aristocratic and undreamed of surroundings. His exultation fell, and pangs of self-pity assailed him. What was he but a child of the gutter, an outcast--a man full of yearning for the unattainable, who had been starved and kept down by merciless circumstances? Such swift transitions were not unusual in his peculiar and contradictory nature. After all, he was an artist, even if often a brute and a fool, and somewhere within him, very much overlaid and shrouded, there was a spark of the divine fire. Yes, he said to himself, he was coarse and common, and ignorant and unrefined. He had done much with himself; he had achieved wonders, considering the handicap he had always been under--but admitting all that, what enormous deficiencies still remained! How ill at ease he was in such a room as this! How hard he would have to strive to hide his lack of knowledge and breeding! He had almost wished he had never come. In such a place he was an intruder--a boor--condemned to blunder through a part with no author's lines to help him.
As it turned out, nothing could have been more fortunate for him than this dejected mood. First appearances are everything, and he might easily--so easily--have made an intolerable impression. Indeed, in the cold fit, almost the terror, succeeding the impulse that had caused Phyllis to invite him, she was prepared to find him forward, and perhaps eager to take advantage of her recklessness, and misconstrue it. At the hint of such a thing she would have frozen; and the fact that she would only have had herself to blame would have doubled her humiliation. A woman who makes the first advances to a man is more capable than any of sudden revulsions. Her pride is on edge, and morbidly apprehensive.
But the grave, quiet, handsome man awaiting her dispelled these fancies as soon as their eyes had met. He thanked her with an embarrassment not unbecoming under the circumstances, for the unconventionality that had given him the privilege of meeting her. His smile as he said this was charming; his respect and courtesy beyond reproach; that other nature of his, the artist-nature, so quick and responsive in its intuitions warned him to put a guard on himself. Besides, if the room had over-awed him, how much more overpowering was the apparition of this slim and radiant woman, the mistress of all this splendor, whose pure dark face filled him with an indefinable sense of another world in which he was but a clod. Though he was a connoisseur of pretty women, and had possessed in his disreputable past many of greater physical beauty than Phyllis, not one of them had had the least pretensions to what in her appealed to him so strongly--distinction. From her glossy hair to the tips of her little feet, she was the embodiment of race, of high-breeding and high spirit; it was as marked in her girlish beauty as in any thoroughbred. She was the child of those who had admitted no superior save their God and their King.