Rodrigo was keeping strictly the good resolution he had made the day he landed in America. He was determined to reward John Dorning for the kindness he had shown him in pulling him out of a bad hole and setting him on the way to a business success by going straight, blinding himself to the lure of Broadway, only two blocks away, and the life of pleasure. Rodrigo did not deceive himself. He had not been suddenly transformed into a hermit. The tug of the old life was with him constantly. There were moments when he wanted to smash everything connected with Dorning and Son and run.
This would not be difficult, he knew. He had only to call up the Hotel Biltmore, for instance, and ask for Miss Sophie Binner. True, this attraction was removed after the first week. He read in the theatrical section of the paper that Christy's Revue had departed from New York for a preliminary seasoning on the road before opening on Broadway. Once, at least, during that week Sophie had called him at the office. At least his secretary had said that "a Miss Skinner caller," and he was sure the correct name had been "Binner." He had ignored the overture. With Sophie braving the March winds in Bridgeport and Stamford, gayety still had a local representative in the person of William Courtney Terhune, Rodrigo's Oxford classmate and his companion upon his other riotous sojourn in America. Bill Terhune always had time for the spending of large sums of time and money on pleasure. Rodrigo knew he had but to call him on the telephone, if he desired at any moment to shake off the austerity of Dorning and Son. He even looked up Bill's number in a weak moment and discovered the former Rhodes scholar had his office within five blocks of him.
John Dorning had generously installed Rodrigo in the comfortable bachelor apartment which he maintained on Park Avenue, almost directly east from his place of business. It was a roomy, immaculately kept establishment, furnished with Dorning's favorite pieces, picked up on many journeys to the art shrines of the world. A housekeeper came in once a day to lend the place the benefit of a feminine hand.
Rodrigo quickly discovered that John's private life was the direct antithesis of what his own had hitherto been. The man seemed to be unconscious that Broadway existed. On the occasions when he took Rodrigo out to his friends' houses for tea, the people present were the intensely refined sons and daughters of the house or colorless mutual acquaintances and their equally colorless wives.
He attended concerts and exhibitions with John. He talked gravely with the members of John's exclusive clubs, older men with their heads full of business and their thin, white lips full of black cigars, when John took him to dinner at these rather depressing places.
On two or three occasions John invited Rodrigo to luncheon at a small eating club located upon the second floor of a wooden structure which for some unknown reason had been left standing between two skyscrapers on Forty-Fifth street, just off Fifth Avenue. The club-rooms were skimpily furnished, draughty as a barn, and cried for the vacuum cleaner. The food was execrable. But the members made up for all that. They were authors and artists for the most part, most of them bearing well known names. They were colorful, interesting people, and among them was an informal camaraderie that intrigued Rodrigo at once. It was a rule at this club that guests must make speeches after luncheon. Rodrigo, who somehow felt almost immediately at home amid this witty talk, foolery, and, at times rather Rabelaisian repartee, obliged with a rapid, nonsense monologue regarding his impressions of America, that took at once. Later, the other guest, a famous pianist, protested in broken English that a speech was impossible. "Bang the box then!" shouted a raucous, good-natured, voice. The meaning was explained to him, and he allowed himself to be propelled gently to the battered piano. Deftly produced melody filled the ancient rooms. The company was silent, drinking it in. Eyes were half closed. Concentrated here was the finest audience in America for this sort of thing. The musician played an encore. Then he rose, bobbing his long hair back and forth to the clapping and shouts of applause, and waved away requests for more.
"You play—and the Count will sing!" was a loud-voiced happy thought from somewhere in the back of the room. Others took it up. They fairly pushed Rodrigo to the piano. John Dorning, who was a little out of place in the extremely informal turn the entertainment had taken, looked worried. He did not think Rodrigo could sing. But the latter was unruffled. He was thoroughly agreeable. He whispered to the dark man at the piano, who was himself an Italian. The pianist struck the opening chords of a Sicilian love song.
Rodrigo's voice was not strong, but it was a clear and pleasing baritone. He was extremely fond of the song, and he put into it a true Latin fervor. For the time being he seemed transported out of this shabby room in the teeming heart of New York. He was back beside the shining waters of the Bay of Naples. He was singing of moonlight and a warm, dark-eyed girl in his arms. All the repression of the past weeks was in his voice. He sang as one inspired. The song died away finally to clamorous applause. But he would not sing again. He resumed his seat beside John Dorning. John looked at him, a queer expression of mingled surprise and pride in his friend's achievement in his pale face. Rodrigo was flushed, a little excited, a little frightened that this simple little love song such as the Sicilian peasants sing could stir him so.
The following week-end, Rodrigo accepted John's invitation to journey to Greenwich and visit Dorning's father. They were met at the station by the Dorning limousine, containing a chauffeur and a pleasant-faced woman some five or six years older than John and looking very much like him. This was Alice Pritchard, John's married sister, who, with her husband, a Wall Street man, made their home with Henry Dorning. The latter was a widower, John's mother having died when the son was a boy of twelve. The same even disposition and reserve that were so integral a part of John's character were also possessed by his sister. She was almost the exact feminine counterpart of her brother in more than looks, Rodrigo decided during the brief ride to the Dorning home.
They drew up at a large rambling field-stone house set in several acres of well-kept lawn facing Long Island Sound. The elderly man seated in a rocking-chair on the broad front piazza, a steamer rug spread out upon his knees, did not rise as the trio from the car approached him. Henry Dorning was a semi-invalid. The Dornings were not a very robust family, committed as they were to the æsthetic rather than to the athletic life. Too close application to carrying on the tradition of his strong-willed father had done for Henry Dorning. He had quit five years too late.