As they quitted the tenement rooms, Nora Gage padded softly out on the landing in her heelless slippers. Her enormous bust undulated more than usual and her hands at her waist disappeared beneath overhanging folds of fat. "Well, I hope you'll have something good to eat," she remarked meaningly. Rachel, her head high, ignored these words; but old David nodded with smiles and gestures toward his pocket.
Like a child he expressed his delight openly. His white locks moved in the air, fine as cobwebs, and his face was wreathed in continual smiles which prolonged the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes and deepened the lines about his mouth to quivering crescents of laughter defining the rosy hillocks of his cheeks. With a shaking finger he pointed out the sights in the streets to Emily, who nodded decorously the plumes of her elaborately-trimmed hat. The hat was destined for one of Mrs. Stedenthal's customers, but Emily had borrowed it for the evening. The very novelty of the situation diverted Rachel; she became aware of a dual consciousness—a self that suffered and a self that was vaguely amused.
In the restaurant the waiter uncorked a bottle of champagne and Simon begged the young girl to taste it. She lifted it to her lips, then played with the glass.
Simon watched the slim thumb and finger that encircled the fragile stem of crystal. With unostentatious movements he repeatedly filled his own glass. Occasionally he ventured to lift a glance to Rachel's face.
She wore a skirt of dark silk, and a little flowered scarf over a waist of sheer muslin. The brim of her drooping hat, whenever she leaned forward, cast its shadow over her shoulders and her scarcely-indicated breast. When she straightened up, however, it was as if a cloud lifted and revealed the glow of her cheeks, the line of her lips, the depths of her eyes where some gloomy thought constantly hovered; for, strive as she would, summoning to her aid all her furious pride, she could not conceal the misery and despair that were consuming her heart. From her round wrists her sleeves fell back in ample folds and the pale yellow of her scarf repeated the colour of the champagne.
As the dinner progressed Simon refrained more and more from looking at her. He did not ask himself what was troubling this young girl, he did not wish to know; perhaps he shrank from anything so absolutely youthful as her despair. On the other hand, the costume she wore, in that it was probably of her own fashioning, filled him with a kind of tenderness. Many trifling peculiarities of people, scarcely noticeable movements, awakened in him this feeling. It was a kind of pitifulness in his nature, though he had rarely been moved to the same degree by so slight a detail.
Life takes on to most men, who by middle age have attained any measure of success, the character of a long meal of many courses. But to Simon Hart it seemed like the meal which the traveller takes in a gloomy way station. Now Rachel appealed to him like the unexpected nuts of a dessert, the unlooked for "riddle in ribbons," for he was keen enough to suspect the riddle hidden in this little smooth-skinned girl.
The thoughts engendered in Emily Short, as she quietly observed the pair, were as foreign to her mind as the food was to her palate. In the pauses between the courses she wove a shining romance about Rachel and her companion and finally installed them in a castle similar in architecture to that which decorated the china of the service. Old David, remembering Nora, occupied the moments while the waiter's back was turned, in secreting various tidbits in the pocket of his coat. So slyly did he do this that no one observed his manoeuvres, and he tucked away crackers, olives and finally a portion of ice-cream which was served in a little box.
Meanwhile the waiters, bearing steaming viands, hurried to and fro. They lifted silver dish covers, which reflected the light, and revealed the red claws of lobsters surrounded by green garnishings, and fowls steaming in gravy. Leaning between the shoulders of the diners, they poured out water and wine; and every moment, as they skilfully avoided trampling the dresses of the ladies, which flowed in rippling folds around their chairs, or cleared with heavy platters balanced on their hands the black shoulders of the men,—they cried, "Your pardon, madam!—In just a moment, sir!" and nothing could equal their dexterity or the softness of their cat-like tread. Through the restaurant swelled the penetrating, complicated music of the orchestra. At one moment a shower of gay notes seemed to be falling, falling everywhere, and the people broke in upon it with the loud clapping of hands. At another moment waves of melody, unnoticed, mounted insidiously like a tide and finally bore with them, like spume and tangled seaweed, something of the emotion from each overcharged heart.
Turning her head aside, Rachel felt on her cheek the cool freshness of the night which entered over some plants in a window-box. For moments together as she listened, it seemed to her that her misery was expressed poignantly by the music. Then as the motif altered, insensibly her mood changed. She thought of André from whom she had received a letter the week before. Captain Daniels, whose animosity toward the lad increased with the years, in a fit of drunken temper had broken André's fiddle. She resolved, as soon as she could, to send him another. Then Zarah Patch sent word that Buttercup, the cow he had purchased from David, mistaking the moaning of the fog bell for the crying of her calf, had floundered into the bay and been drowned. "Poor Buttercup!" she thought; then—"Poor André!" And, across the miles of space that separated them, she seemed to hear again the breathless words in which the boy had told her of his love.