The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Erratic Flame, by Ysabel de Teresa

THE ERRATIC FLAME

BY

Ysabel de Teresa

NEW YORK

The Macaulay Company

Copyright, 1926, by The Macaulay Company

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

CONTENTS

THE ERRATIC FLAME

CHAPTER I
THE SCORCHING LIMELIGHT

As the mountain mist, caressing and desultory, resolved into a steady downpour, Anne glimpsed just above her the outlines of a hut. Crouched behind sodden boughs, decrepit, ramshackle, it tottered upon the lip of the ravine. With an amused sense of relief she trudged up towards it, her feet sinking amongst a welter of brown leaves, her whole being cleansed within the gray mantle of the rain. After a hectic summer of bridge and dancing this solitude of dripping trees and drenched leaves, fell upon her bruised spirit like a benediction. Anne thanked her very modern and somewhat pagan gods for having inspired her to escape from the inglorious rut. To-day, the New York season ahead of her, shone meretricious in the face of the crystal cleanliness of bathing woods. Perhaps she would give it all up and open the villa in Florence immediately instead of waiting until after Christmas. The very thought rested her. She attained the top of the ravine with renewed serenity.

Its gaunt outlines blurred by rain, the hut stood before her. Assailed by a feeling of almost girlish excitement she smiled with inward amusement. Surfeited, world-weary, surely she was not foolish enough to expect a thrill lurking within the walls of a dilapidated mountain cabin?

The careless little smile on her lips, she stepped upon the crazy porch and tried the door. Obstinate in mood it resisted her onslaught with almost personal violence. But she braced her back upon its gray stubbornness, and giving a vigorous push, burst into the room.

Dim, inhospitable, alien, its opaque shadows menaced vaguely. Still smiling, Anne ventured boldly forward. Then, as her eyes fell upon the hearth, hesitated, for from the embers rose a nebulous tube of smoke. Its faint, acrid tang rode the stale air challengingly. Anne darted a keen glance about her, focusing upon the extreme corner of the room where a denser blackness prevailed, which as she approached resolved itself into a couch and a mass of tossed blankets from which emerged a head; a tumbled, lolling head, which drooped towards the floor as if in pursuit of its own heavy, trailing hand. Pathetic, remote behind closed lids, it carried to Anne a summons both tragic and impelling.

She drew nearer and peered down into the pallid features. It was the face of a dissipated young god, glistening with a pallor of unhealth, beautiful in its decadence, with the pagan beauty of a Praxiteles.

A wave of pity and excitement surged over her. A boy, ill and alone; a boy with the face of a fallen Lucifer! She leaned over and placed her hand upon the pale forehead. It was cold and moist beneath a tangle of tumbled curls. She shivered slightly at the contact.

Ephemeral as was her touch, the leaden lids rose beneath it, and she found herself gazing down into a pair of weary, indifferent young eyes. She backed away hastily.

The boy intercepted her recoil with a harsh laugh. Sitting up, he clasped his head, and gazed at her from under long and pallid fingers.

“Did you think I was dead?” he said with a mocking air. “And what would you have done if I had been?” He shot her a look of impish hostility.

Anne assumed an air of indifference.

“There would have been a lot of red tape, I suppose,” she said curtly over her shoulder. She turned and walked slowly toward the door.

Arms clasped about his knees, he looked after her with dawning interest.

“Where are you going?” he said brusquely. “You can’t leave now in this rain.” He looked up at the roof against which rushing waters beat a thunderous tattoo. Scrambling to his feet, he started towards her.

She met the haggard young eyes with composure.

“When I came in here, I thought the place was deserted,” she said simply, “and then, when I saw you——”

“You thought I was dead!” he interposed with a repetition of the short, dry laugh. “No such luck!” He checked himself. “Seriously, you won’t be so foolish as to go out again until the rain stops, will you? Just because you find me offensive? I’ll make up the fire, and you must dry yourself.”

As he said this, a sudden child-like smile lighted up the somber face. Anne decided it would be ridiculous not to stay. After all, the young brute could not eat her. It was only a few weeks since she had recovered from summer flu and she shrank from inviting another attack of the insidious enemy. Besides, in spite or perhaps because of his haggard young impudence, there welled up from her subconscious a primitive desire to see the adventure to the finish. And as she watched the slight figure busying itself at the hearth, she was smitten with a vague sense of familiarity. Where had she seen that pale face, those uptilted, faunlike eyebrows? That classic throat, which rose columnar from the négligée shirt? And above all, those hands, those square, elongated fingers? In some ancient bronze or marble?

She took the chair nearest the hearth and stretching her hands to the blaze, watched his impassive features as the firelight played upon them.

“That’s right,” he said non-committally, “better take off your sweater, it’s dripping. I’ll lend you one in the meanwhile.”

With a quick gesture, he lighted the lamp upon the table, and opening a drawer in the ramshackle bureau, drew out a heavy wool sweater, and with a casual gesture, threw it about her shoulders.

“What a beauty!” She met his indifference with an amused smile as she caressed the smooth texture.

The eyes beneath the heavy lids mocked her. She realized with amused dismay that he evidently thought she was trying to flirt with him.

“I’m going to make tea,” he said abruptly. “All women like tea.” His voice was contemptuous.

The callow brutality roused her sense of humor. She removed her hat and ran her hands through hair which glistened like burnished chestnuts in the firelight. She smiled as she caught his eyes resting upon it unwillingly.

“What have women done to you?” she inquired softly.

He gave her a quick, menacing look.

“You are tyrants, all of you,” he sneered savagely. “Greedy for everything. For money, flattery, love, especially love. Insatiable! Demanding, always demanding but—I promised you tea, I believe.” He finished somewhat lamely, and striding to the cupboard produced a tin, a loaf of bread and some butter.

She looked at him from beneath inscrutable lashes.

“I’m sorry you’re unhappy,” she said simply.

“We are all unhappy,” he evaded. He poured water into the dingy kettle hanging over the fire. “You are unhappy because you are wet, and like a civilized lady want your tea. I am unhappy because my head aches most damnably! For me there is no help but time, but for you there is orange pekoe.”

She laughed.

“For a soulless creature like a woman there is always food, eh?” she teased. “But a masculine intellect demands only spiritual sustenance?”

He laughed more naturally, as he met her mocking glance. “I must seem an awful fool to you,” he said somewhat sheepishly.

She shook her head, still smiling.

“Oh, no, I was merely thinking what a mixture of sullen boy and embittered cynic you are. Do you know you are a very odd person, indeed?”

He looked at once flattered and woebegone.

“I suppose it’s this damned forcing-house I’ve lived in.” He muttered as he sliced the bread rather clumsily, with his most unclumsy-looking hands. “Limelight doesn’t mellow, it scorches!” Then as he met her astonished gaze, he checked himself abruptly. “Bread and butter and cigarettes are all I can offer, unless the storm has whetted you sufficiently for bacon and eggs?”

She laughed a denial, and springing up, lifted the chuckling kettle off the hearth. The boy hurried to her assistance and their flesh met over the handle.

“So you’re a celebrity?” she thrust at him, as he took the kettle from her and placed it on a table. Beneath her scrutiny his features again became a mask, except for the eyes, which gleamed liquid in the firelight.

“You flatter me,” he laughed with forced lightness. “Must I decrease my importance and the romance of the occasion by revealing my humble identity?”

“No indeed!” exclaimed Anne, “that would spoil everything.”

But the odd little speech about the limelight had challenged her curiosity, and as she continued to observe him, that strange sense of familiarity which the first impression of his face had given, insinuated itself into her consciousness more securely.

“No,” she murmured without an appreciable pause. “Let’s just be two stray cats crawling into shelter from the rain.”

An expression of relief thawed his frozen young face.

“But the Persian must not be shocked if the alley-cat does not know how to behave and laps up his milk rudely.” He laughed as he poured out her tea, and handed her the bread and butter. For the moment he looked almost happy, altogether boyish. He seated himself on the other side of the table, and gazed into the fire, which crackled up into their faces with the officiousness of an elderly chaperon. Its self-conscious sputter neutralized the clamor of the rain and somehow pleased him.

“How elemental,” he threw out his hands in an expressive gesture. “A storm, a fire, and a cave,” he looked about the shadowy room whimsically. “A man and a woman—food—. We might be in the Stone Age.” His cynical gaze probed her.

Anne’s laugh was a rippling murmur.

“A moment ago we were cats. Our evolution has been rapid!”

She pushed aside her chair, rose, and walking quickly to the window, peered through the crooked panes, at the dusky woods beyond.

“The rain is letting up,” she announced briefly. “I must go home, or Regina will worry herself into a fever.”

His somber laugh rang harshly. “So you prefer cats to cavemen?” He joined her in a couple of lazy strides. “That isn’t at all up to date! May I inquire who is Regina, and still preserve our charming incognito?”

“She is my Italian maid. We are alone here this fall and she will be wild if I don’t hurry. She has been with me since I was a child and I’m scarcely allowed to breathe without her permission,” she replied rather more expansively than she had intended.

“Well, if you must!” he shrugged. “I suppose I ought to say something romantic about ‘ships that pass in the night,’ etc. But as I am a misogynist”—he hesitated, looking at her with a sarcastic smile.

She took him up gaily.

“You merely hand me my hat, and tell me I look old enough to take care of myself!” She drew the flabby object down over her head, and met his smouldering gaze with a smile.

“You’re really not so glad to have me go as you pretend,” she challenged. Then she caught her breath, for he had thrown out his arms with a savage look, and for a moment she thought he was going to crush her within them. But, letting them drop abruptly, he turned, and pulling his mackintosh off the wall, thrust it about her shoulders.

“Let’s go, since you wish it,” he said shortly.

A moment later they were stumbling down the mountainside. Almost obliterated by rain the path had become precipitous. Masses of dead leaves choked their progress. At every step they slid and waded, ankle-deep in scaly moisture, until Anne wanted to scream at the reptilian contact.

“There’s something corpse-like about them,” she said, as she stumbled along behind the blinding rays of the lantern.

“Why not? That’s exactly what they are,” he replied grimly. He held aside a sodden branch for her to pass under. “Corpses, heaped victims of the storm, as dead as you and I shall be some day, as dead as I wish I were myself this moment!” He laughed harshly. Then as her hand touched his arm, added more gently, “Surely, you are not afraid of death.”

“No, of course not.” She huddled more closely to his side, “Only you’re so young it seems a shame——”

He interrupted her savagely.

“All the better! Life is sufficiently drab without having to pass through the horrors of decrepitude and senility. Death is the only apology the gods can offer, for having thrust us into it.”

As he spoke they emerged from the dripping woods on to the road, and the walking became easier.

“Don’t you want to get somewhere, to do something worthwhile before you die?” she asked looking pityingly into the young face so white and set in the lantern rays.

His lips curled.

“Get somewhere! Do something! That is meaningless jargon. There is really no goal, no destination. We merely fool ourselves into thinking there is. Work is only a drug, a means of forgetting. A good drug, I admit, and at times even heady, but a drug, nevertheless!”

Her hold upon his arm tightened.

“Oh, how unhappy you must be! How sorry I am for you!” she cried with unmistakable sincerity. “Do tell me what is the matter. I am sure I could help you. You’re so young, you probably exaggerate.” She caught herself up for fear of wounding him. “I mean I’m older than you.”

She held her hand out pleadingly towards him.

He clasped it in his long fingers.

“Thank you,” he replied more quietly, “I believe you mean it, but I cannot, indeed I cannot!”

She did not urge, and they walked on in silence. The rain had stopped so gradually, that neither of them remembered when it had ceased to fall. Presently, they turned a bend in the road and came upon lights close at hand.

“Here’s my cottage,” said Anne, in a slightly surprised tone. “I didn’t know we were so near. Come in and Regina will get us some supper. Then you can rest awhile before returning home.”

One foot on the step, he looked up at her, as she stood on the porch above him.

“No, the play is over, the lights are out. I must return to my hut and—” beneath his breath—“my devils.”

Although he had already turned about, Anne heard.

“Your devils can get along perfectly well without you. Besides I have one myself. Let us share them together. Come, I see we need each other badly tonight.”

Compassionate beneath her light manner, she caught him by the back of the coat with both hands, and pulled him forcibly about. “Besides, I have your mackintosh and your sweater. You mustn’t be so reckless with your property.”

He followed her up the steps with obvious reluctance. She opened the door and drew him in through the glowing aperture.

“See, there’s a fire,” she cried gaily. “And after supper I’ll play to you.” She pointed to an upright in the corner. “I can play even on an old country piano,” she boasted.

And then she saw his face. It was paler than the hands which sought to conceal it.

“No, no music! Never again!” he muttered. He fell weakly into the nearest chair, and with a low moan laid his head on the arm.

Sudden intuition flooded Anne’s being. How blind she had been! How was it possible that she had not recognized him sooner? A figure so well known, seen and listened to by her so many times?

She approached and laid her hand on the bowed head.

“I know you now, Mr. Petrovskey. It was very stupid of me not to have guessed before, only the light in the hut was so very poor. But please don’t be worried,” she added gently, as his drawn young face looked up into hers. “I can keep a secret very well indeed, and my one desire is to help you. You are not fit to go back to that lonely cabin to-night. You must stay here, and we will see how you are in the morning.”

He cast a wild glance about the rustic little room, as if he feared someone might spring out upon him from behind the pretty chintz curtains.

“You cannot know how terrible this is,” he said. “It is only a few weeks now—since it happened.” He choked over the words. “And I feel as if I should like to hide forever.”

“But there is nothing to be ashamed of—” she commenced. “Ashamed,” he cried, savagely. “I’m not ashamed! Only I’m full of hatred, of disgust for everyone and everything. I wish I could die!”

The tortured voice sent a lump into Anne’s throat. She knelt beside the chair and laid a compassionate arm about the shaking shoulders.

“Come,” said she. “You are ill and over-wrought. We will go upstairs and Regina and I will help you to bed. There’s a good boy!”

The protective gesture, the kind words were too much. Utterly beside himself, he turned and laid his head upon the refuge of her breast.

“You are good, good,” he whispered. “You are not disappointed in me because I’m a failure. You are not greedy like the others, who only want what they can get out of me. Yes, I will trust you and I will stay.”

As he raised his head, she felt her neck was moistened with his tears.

CHAPTER II
ESCAPADE

After a sleepless night, Anne dozed late. So when Regina brought in her coffee about nine o’clock as usual, she awakened gropingly to fog. Fog, which filtered in at the windows in layers of pale moonlight, and wreathed about the house an ectoplasmic shroud until for a long moment Anne had the illusion of floating through clouds in a dreamship.

Then Regina spoke.

“Dio mio, it’s as chill as the finger of death in here!” She closed the windows violently. “When will you learn to take care of yourself, carina?”

Anne smiled. She was accustomed to these wild admonitions. She sat up in bed and slipped into the green silk kimono which Regina was holding out to her. The contrast between her own slim white arms and the woman’s knotted brown hands pleased her impersonally. She allowed her fingers to rest upon Regina’s sleeve. Relaxed and peaceful, the enshrouding fog rose like a protecting wall between her and an irksome world. She sighed luxuriantly at the thought of having left it all behind her.

Then the memory of last night swooped down upon her with the clamorous beat of wings and sleep departed. She clasped Regina’s wrist with tense fingers.

“Regina, how is he? Where is he this morning?” she exclaimed wide awake and anxious. “I had forgotten all about him, poor boy!”

The woman smiled benevolently. She placed the tray upon a table beside the bed.

“He sleeps, cara, he sleeps. I but this moment popped my head in at the door and he was lying there as still and quiet as a child, poverino. So don’t worry your little head about him, but eat your breakfast before it freezes to a jelly.”

But Anne did not hesitate. With a lithe movement she was out of bed. Twisting the brazen rope of hair about her small head, she fastened it with a massive gold hairpin. Then, a mediæval princess, in trailing green draperies, she swept from the room.

Left alone, Regina thrust hands and eyes to heaven and called out upon her picturesque God. Then she shrugged with Italian fatalism and despair. What else could she have expected? It had been so from the very first. Anne had always had her own way, ever since she herself had gone to her as nurse when as a little girl they had lived in the palazzo in Florence and her father had been the American consul. Married and a widow, she still remained the same wilful child in the eyes of the faithful, long-suffering, old woman.

With a shake of the white head, she followed her mistress out into the narrow hallway and watched disapprovingly, as she disappeared into the opposite room.

It was cold in there and Anne shivered a little as she entered. The fog shimmered in from the open window, writhing itself between her and the recumbent figure on the bed. Like Regina, she closed the window, although less violently, smiling the while to herself at the similarity of their action. Approaching the bed, she looked down upon the sleeper. He was flushed and breathing irregularly, and Anne was glad she had not trusted to Regina’s optimistic inspection. For his hand and forehead were burning and her touch did not arouse him. Rather alarmed, she took him by the shoulders and shook him gently. He muttered, and opening his eyes, gazed up at her, at first vacantly, then with dawning dread.

Although her heart beat a little faster, she smiled serenely down upon him. “Well?”

He turned his head away quickly, and for a moment the unnatural flush was replaced by the glistening pallor of the day before.

“I must get up. I must go back,” he said self-consciously. “I have trespassed upon you most shamefully. What can you think of me?” Still avoiding her eye, he sat up in bed and ran an unsteady hand through his tumbled hair.

The serene smile upon her lips, she shook her head.

“Do you really want to know what I think? I think you are going to stay right here, young man, for unless I am much mistaken, you have fever, and if that is the case, I shall not permit you to get up at all!”

He tossed his blonde mane impatiently.

“Fever? Nonsense! I’m perfectly all right. There’s nothing the matter with me at all, and I am going to get up!” Flushed and unsteady, he stared at her defiantly, prepared to throw off the clothes and jump out of bed. Then remembered with horror that he was attired in one of Regina’s ample and unpoetic nightrobes, and inhibited the impulse with a groan.

Repressing her amusement, Anne approached and took his wrist in cool, silken fingers. “I’m going to take your temperature, and if you have any fever, I shall send for a doctor at once,” she announced composedly.

Horror stalked across the young face.

“No, no, you mustn’t do that!” he exclaimed. “Nobody must see me, nobody must know where I am! I’ll do anything you want, if only you won’t send for a doctor, or let anyone know I am here!”

His feverish clasp about her hands, Anne encountered his imploring look with gravity.

“Very well, I have your promise. I don’t know just how much it is worth, of course, it is up to you to show me. Now lie down again, and be a good patient while I get the thermometer and change my dress.”

Head obediently on the pillow, his eyes rested upon her wistfully as she moved toward the door.

“Must you change, you look so beautiful like that,” he said simply. “Your lines are so flowing, so fluid, like music. A Débussy prelude.”

Her hand on the knob, she laughed a little tremulously.

“Your temperature must be even higher than I feared,” she said lightly; looking at him rather shyly over her shoulder, she left the room.

The next two days she and Regina were in constant attendance. His fever had risen rapidly at first and Anne had feared that after all she might have to break her word and call in a doctor. She could even have done so without his knowledge, for most of the time he had lain in a heavy slumber, from which she and Regina had difficulty in arousing him for his medicine. But she resisted the temptation. And when the fever finally commenced to drop, experienced a triumph disproportionately disturbing, which she explained to herself as relief from the intolerable responsibility of her position.

The afternoon of the second day, as she sat beside the window the sense of relief filtering through her, Regina came into the room, and with a great show of excitement and mystery, handed her the New York paper.

She pointed to a picture on the second page, with excitement.

“Ecco lo, there he is!” she exclaimed in a whisper. “And I guessed it the moment I set eyes on him. For haven’t I sat a dozen times in the gallery and listened to him while he played, poor angel!” She approached and looked down at the boy with a mixture of compassion and adoration. “Poverino, how he has suffered,” she added, as she smoothed the bedclothes beneath the unshaven young chin.

Anne took the paper and looked at the photograph. It was indeed he, violin under one arm, who looked at her with cryptic eyes, eyes laden with all the tragedy of genius.

She sighed. A little shiver passed through her, as she glanced toward the bed. Why was genius inevitably companioned by suffering? Why did those who possess it harbor such strange magnetism, even when their personalities were often repellent and ugly? And as she looked upon the sleeping boy, an emotion to which she was not accustomed stole upon Anne and kindled a flame, which scorched as well as warmed. An embryonic temperament, drugged with artificial activities, somnolent from ennui, stirred within her. With a flutter of self-ridicule she focussed her attention upon the newspaper in her hand, and read through the headlines mechanically.

Famous Young Musician Still Missing

In Spite of Frantic Search by

Anxious Relatives

Alexis Petrovskey, who escaped ten days ago from the sanitarium where he had gone to recuperate from nervous shock following upon his unfortunate breakdown in Carnegie Hall last April, is still missing, and a lake near the sanitarium is being dragged for his body, as it is feared that in his state of acute melancholia he may have made away with himself. Etc., etc.

There followed encomiums upon his art and the great loss his death would be to the musical world in general.

So he had relatives, mused Anne, and for some cryptic reason was unpleasantly stirred by the fact. That ought to have occurred to her in the beginning and they were—how had the newspaper put it?—frantic? Yes, that was it. They would be, of course. And she was aiding and abetting this unnatural young man to make them so. Put in that way, the fact sounded very disagreeable, and yet—? She finished the article with an impatient sigh, and turning her head, saw that the mysterious object of her speculation was awake and looking at her. There was an odd little smile upon his lips and his eyes were very lucid. Conscious of a flaming and obnoxiously juvenile blush, she folded the paper quickly and threw it aside.

“Too late!” he exclaimed in a rather weak voice. “I have caught a glimpse of my beauteous self and know the worst. So they haven’t been able to keep it out of the papers, after all? Please show it to me.”

He held out a long thin hand and she gave him the paper without further parley. He sat up in bed and read the article from start to finish.

“Damn it!” he exclaimed, but rather placidly she thought. Somehow he had the air of a naughty and triumphant small boy. “This is an awful bore. What can I do to stop this parrots’ talk?”

“Let them know of your whereabouts, I suppose,” she replied laconically. She walked to the window and looked out through the vista of trees. “It is quite natural they should be worried,” she added non-committally.

“I suppose you think I’m a brute.” His eyes lingered upon the pearly nape of neck, where the copper tendrils coiled so densely. “But if you knew all the circumstances, I believe you would understand.”

The effort at self-command, the something piteous in his voice thawed her superficial coldness. A gentle rush of emotion coursed through her. She turned toward him impulsively.

“Of course I don’t think you’re a brute! What right would I have to do that, when I am ignorant of the facts? Only I do think you ought to let them know——”

He sat up in bed interrupting her savagely.

“I can’t go back—I won’t go back!” he cried in a desperate voice. “You don’t know what you are asking of me!”

A pang of curiosity shot through Anne against her will. Why and of what was he so full of hatred and fear? But her manner was calm and impersonal as she approached him.

“Perhaps you might let them know that you are safe and with friends, and let it go at that?” she suggested soothingly.

He shot her a strange look.

“Much she cares about my safety!” he muttered under his breath. Anne heard with an unacknowledged but irritating pang. So there was a wife, after all, in spite of his almost adolescent appearance!

“Shall I send your wife a telegram?” she inquired in a matter-of-fact tone.

“My wife!” he stared at her in surprise. “My mother, you mean!”

Relief welled up in Anne’s heart, but she chose to ignore its humiliating presence. “Your mother, then?” she pursued evenly.

“Yes I suppose we had better,” he acknowledged grudgingly. “But she is absolutely not to know where I am, or to try to communicate with me until I myself make the first move. That is to be understood.”

“Very well,” said Anne with composure. “I’m sure we can manage that. It might be a good idea to write a letter and have my chauffeur take it down to New York and mail it from there? Or perhaps it would be even better if he took it to your house and left it there. Then there would be no postmark.”

“You’re wonderful,” he cried enthusiastically. “I never would have thought of that!”

She met his look of admiration demurely.

“Oh no, it is really a very simple idea. I’ll go and get some notepaper and you had better write it yourself, so that your mother can be sure that the letter is absolutely genuine.”

Acting as curb to his impetuosity and anger, she helped him to concoct one of the strangest letters that a mother ever received. Such a glacial letter, in spite of her own compassionate tempering, that at the end Anne was loath to send it at all.

“It will break her heart,” she said sorrowfully.

But he laughed at her with bitter emphasis.

“Heart? She doesn’t possess one! All she cares about is what she can get out of me, not only in money, but in vicarious fame, as the fond mother of a musical prodigy!”

Shocked and pitiful, Anne regarded him. His flushed cheeks and gleaming eyes warned of the ever-present danger of recurring fever. She spoke kindly as if to a sick child.

“I’m sure you’re exciting yourself unnecessarily. This will never do. You’re not at all well, and things appear exaggeratedly awful. I’m sure your mother loves you, how could she help it?”

“Loves me? That is good! Why, she has bled me since I was seven years old. She has sometimes kept me at my violin until I have fainted from exhaustion. She has purposely isolated me from all friends and interests so that I might have no outside influences to distract me. Because of her, my life has been as narrow and as bleak as that of a Trappist Monk. We have never had any home, any ties. We have traveled from city to city, like a couple of strolling players, and lived almost as poorly, although ever since my twelfth year I have brought in thousands. But she wanted to hoard. It is her passion. She’s very greedy. In fact, she’s insatiable. She has always insisted upon being my business manager, and it wasn’t until a couple of years ago when I was twenty-one that I was allowed the use of some of my own money. And then it was only because the doctors frightened her!”

Anne met the triumph in his eyes with an inward shiver.

“Were you so ill?” she inquired, curiosity struggling with repugnance.

“No, but I was so damned neurotic and unsociable and had acquired so many complexes that they were afraid I would develop dementia praecox if my chains weren’t slackened up a bit.”

“Poor boy, what happened then?” Anne seated herself on the foot of his bed and prepared to listen to the end. Very possibly, mental catharsis might succeed where the rest-cure had failed.

He continued vehemently.

“What happened? I took a three months’ vacation from my music, which I had begun to detest in a furtive, unacknowledged, sort of way, and for a time ran completely wild. I was like an animal let out of a cage. I ran around with a pack of fools who took me into every sort of imaginable den and got me into every kind of imaginable scrape. In fact, it was only the force of money and my mother’s constant watchfulness which kept me out of the newspapers at least a dozen times.”

“But—but didn’t she try to interfere? To reason with you?” Anne was remotely angry at herself for being offended by this recital.

His laugh was sinister. The expression on his young face mephistophelian.

“Interfere? Why no, of course not. This fling was part of her own plans, and according to the psycho-analyst for whom she was going in heavily at the time, I would come out a better money-making proposition. In other words, she expected to reap from my wild oats a bounteous harvest for the future!”

Amused at Anne’s horrified expression, he chuckled sardonically.

“Motherly of her, don’t you think? But unfortunately, for her tender intentions, the experiment was an awful fluke. I came out of it as suddenly as I went in, only more melancholy, more morose than before, utterly disgusted and sickened with the whole scheme of creation. I wouldn’t touch my violin for days, and for similar periods they couldn’t get me away from it long enough to eat or sleep. I gave a few recitals, brilliant but uneven, and the critics were less kind than usual. My mother was in a perfect funk, but I was utterly indifferent. Nothing interested me at all. It was too much trouble even to live, and if I had condescended to anything so positive as a wish, it would have been for death.”

He paused, and threw himself back wearily upon the pillow. “In fact, that is the way I am now, only the longing is intense instead of indifferent.” He closed his eyes. An expression of fatigue and disdain brooded over his drawn features.

Anne leaned forward impulsively and took his long, hot hand in both of hers. “Don’t,” she begged, “I cannot bear to hear you speak so. It wrings something in my soul. Surely, you will not remain so unhappy always. Your music, your beautiful music will console you. It cannot fail!”

His fingers twined about hers almost painfully.

“My music, my beautiful music,” he murmured. He turned his head on the pillow restlessly. “I shall not make it any more. I’m not fit, I have dishonored it, and it will not come to me any more. That night—” he faltered and turned his head away from her pitying eyes. “When I failed, you know?” His voice demanded her help.

“Yes, yes, I know,” she whispered. “I was not there, but I read about it in the paper. I felt so sorry, so heartbroken for you. I had heard you so often, and with such joy.”

Tears in his eyes, he looked up at her gratefully and continued, “That night I was playing as usual, in fact a little better than usual, when all of a sudden every note went out of my head completely, and left nothing but a blank. It was as if music had ceased to exist. I wasn’t frightened or ill, I simply couldn’t play the violin any more. That was all. Since then I haven’t touched it.”

Drawing his hand abruptly out of hers, he turned on his side and hid his face in the pillow. She rose, and standing by the head of the bed, put her fingers on his tumbled, blonde head.

“Poor boy, how horribly you have suffered! But I know you are going to come out of it better and stronger than ever. You are so young! The saying ought to be, ‘Where there is youth there is hope.’” She sighed inaudibly, remembering her thirty-three years with a pang. “Besides, you are really lucky to have gone through your hell so early, while you can still reap the benefits from it. For most of us it comes too late and we retire defeated into middle age and spiritual death. But,” she patted his head lightly, “I don’t want to preach. It isn’t my métier at all! I’m supposed to be frivolous! However, tell me, I simply must know before I leave you, why did you run away from the sanitarium like that without letting anyone know, and how did you ever find the hut?”

Beneath his laughter there lay an undercurrent of almost fierce despair.

“Because I should have gone completely mad if I had stayed another minute. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t eat. I was scarcely capable of thought, and yet they tried to cheer me up as if I were an automaton, and all they had to do was to turn a crank. I was supposed to sit on the lawn and drink iced postum and be sociable with my fellow pariahs. Then the radio was turned on every night and those who could still hobble were expected to dance. So wholesome, you know. Half crazed already, the canned music and canned joviality finished me. The jazz sounded in my ears all night. I felt as if my soul were being pounded into a jelly. I couldn’t sleep a wink. So I packed my things and stole away without saying a word. I think I had some delirious idea of losing myself and my identity forever. I hiked for the first few days, keeping to the woods for fear of being found. I got my meals at stray farmhouses and slept once or twice in a barn. When I came to the hut I was pretty well exhausted and decided to rest up for a day or two. That’s all,” he sighed wearily.

Anne’s eyes were full of compassionate horror.

“Poor boy, it must have been ghastly. I scarcely wonder you wanted to end it all. And it was I who awakened you from your first good sleep. Will you ever forgive me for bringing you back to this sordid old world?”

He looked up at her with worshipping eyes.

“Not sordid with you in it,” he caught at her hand and retained it. “You are the fairy princess, you know, who broke the evil spell. To-day I feel—almost healed.”

The mournful young voice went to her heart. With an assumption of gayety she ran to the window and pulled down the shade.

“Very pretty indeed from a sick child. But now I am really going. You must sleep. Later on I will bring you a little supper, your first real meal under my roof, and we will discuss the future. Meanwhile I will give your letter to my chauffeur, who is going into New York anyway, to bring back some necessary things for the house. And now, sweet dreams.”

She turned to leave the room, but before she could stop him he drew her hand to his lips and kissed the palm passionately and with reverence.

The next day he was so much better that he was allowed to sit up in bed and dictate to Regina as to the proper disposal of the contents of his suitcase which Anne’s chauffeur had packed and brought down from the hut before leaving for New York. Attired in a pair of his own pajamas, hair brushed, face and hands washed by the delighted and flustered old woman, Alexis was seriously contemplating a shave, when at the bottom of the suitcase beneath some silk socks he came upon Claire’s picture.

He drew it out slowly, an expression of shrinking upon his face. Where had it come from? He certainly would never consciously have packed it among his things. And neither would his mother have done so. The girl herself, pitiful, sentimental little fool must have secreted it among his things hoping that he would come upon it, and perhaps cast her a random thought, as one throws a bone to a dog. For Claire was like a dog, with the same beseeching, tragic gaze that looked up at him now from the photograph so reproachfully. A tremor of rage swept over him as he met those wistful eyes. Damn it, what right had she to reproach him and to look so woebegone! As if he, Alexis, were to blame for everything. Hadn’t she fallen in with his mother’s plans with alacrity, with indecency even? Yes, they had tricked him nicely between them. Claire’s visit to his room in the dead of night and his mother’s neatly-timed discovery, and accusations. What else had there been to do after that, but to marry the girl though they were both innocent even in thought? No, Claire had no right to reproach him, for she had deceived him, too. His mother, for her own cryptic purposes and Claire in self-deluded passion. He had done the only thing possible under the circumstances. Was it his fault that he had never been able to love her? He had told her so from the beginning, hadn’t he? She had nothing to complain of. If he had neglected her, he at least had been faithful in a technical sense. What mattered it if the faithfulness had proceeded from indifference, rather than from a sense of strict virtue? The fact remained, he had been faithful. And to what? A tool of his insatiable mother; a toy thrown to serve as outlet for hitherto-repressed physical desires; a stuffed doll to appease nascent passion.

He threw the picture from him with a savage gesture and laughed aloud, much to Regina’s alarm. She hastened to his side.

“The signorino is feeling gay?” she said hopefully, but with a tinge of suspicion. The young man’s expression was anything but gay! “Shall I call my signora?”

He looked at the woman oddly.

“Please do,” he mocked. “I want her to laugh with me!”

His wild look frightened the woman, she ran out of the room, and presently Anne came in.

“Do you want me?” she asked quietly, with a quick glance at his excited face.

He nodded grimly.

“I want to show you something. Do you see this picture?” He held out the photograph. Anne approached the bed.

“Is it your sister?” she noted the trembling fingers with apprehension. A sudden knife-like foreboding pierced her.

“My sister!” he laughed. “No, unfortunately, no. This,” he pointed a trembling, contemptuous finger at the small tragic face, “this is a photograph of my wife.”

Anne’s smile was a triumph of indifference.

“Indeed?” she said coolly. “She looks like quite a child, doesn’t she?”

She sat down calmly upon the chair beside the bed.

Angered by her serenity, he flung her a look of mingled hatred and remorse.

“I suppose you are wondering why I didn’t tell you about her yesterday?” he grumbled.

She lifted her brows in astonishment, her green eyes met his coolly beneath unfathomable lashes.

“Not at all, it is your own affair, isn’t it?” her voice was icy.

“Ah, you are angry!” he exclaimed with satisfaction. “I can see you are. I don’t suppose you’d believe me if I told you that I completely forgot all about her?”

“Hardly!” Anne’s lips tightened unconsciously.

“Well, believe it or not, that is the truth! My so-called wife counts for so little in my life, I seldom even think of her, and when you asked to whom we should write yesterday, she never entered my head. That is the only explanation I have to offer.”

Anne returned his pleading glance with perfect composure. She took the photograph out of his hand and gazed at it. As she met the girl’s eyes, a tremor of sympathy quivered through her.

“She seems a pitiful little creature,” she murmured almost against her will. “Why are you so hard on her?” She avoided his eyes.

“Because I don’t love her, I suppose!” he exclaimed harshly. “And when one doesn’t love a woman, one hates her. It is her own fault. She thrust herself into my life of her own accord when my will was crushed and almost dead, and I never shall forgive her for it. That is all.”

Once more Anne interposed in the other woman’s behalf.

“How pitiless you are! I don’t believe you understand her at all. Perhaps she loves you? Indeed I am sure she must love you.”

“Loves me,” he jeered, “she thinks she does, she is a born satellite. Her docility fills me with hatred, lowers me. When I am with her I feel that I am having intercourse with a slave, a chattel.” He flung his hands out before him, in excess of emotion, then added more quietly, “but that is all over now. For weeks I have barely spoken to her, and it is my intention never to see her again if possible.”

Anne shook her head gently.

“Unfortunately, one cannot end things like that.”

He looked at her angrily.

“Why not? If she is such a fool as to refuse to divorce me, at least I can refuse to see her!”

“Have you spoken to her of divorce?”

“Of course. But she will not listen. You see she is a Roman Catholic and something of a mystic to boot. But why do we bother about her so much?” He shrugged cynically. “She is negligible. I have often forgotten her existence for weeks at a time. That is why I don’t understand why the very thought of her can upset me so.”

There was something uncanny in the comprehending look which Anne cast at him.

“That is because you cannot forgive her the injury you have done her. It is her pain and not her love which bores you. It is the memory of your own suffering and debased self which you hate in her. She is so associated with your weakness that the very mention of her name fills you with hatred and humiliation. It is not her fault at all.”

The calm voice ceased. Alexis faced the compassionate eyes with horror in his own.

“No, you are wrong, you are wrong. You do not understand.” Then, as she continued to look at him as from a great distance, “Don’t make me loathe myself more than I do already!” he pleaded.

With an odd little smile she turned to leave the room.

“Perhaps I am mistaken,” she said softly, her hand on the knob. “But somehow I don’t believe I am. Think it over.”

The odd smile lingering about her lips, she pulled the door slowly between them and was gone.

A sense of void surged over him, in a sickening sweep. He fell back upon the pillow with a suppressed groan. She had gone, misunderstanding in her heart. To explain fully and in detail would be the act of a cad, an act of which even he was incapable. For a moment his very center of gravity seemed to disintegrate. Then came the familiar blankness of despair.

CHAPTER III
LIFE’S GLAMOUR

With the death of her husband, freedom had descended upon Anne like a gift of the gods. A divine ointment, it penetrated her bruised spirit, allaying the stored-up bitterness of years. Her heart emptied itself of poison and welled with compassion for the pitiful ending of a futile life. As her husband lay back upon the pillows, broken beyond all aid, unbelievably aged, she almost forgave the insult to her youth that their common life had proved. If it had only been a case of disparity of age, no question of forgiveness would have existed at all. The twenty odd years between them might have been forged into the strongest instead of the weakest link that bound them together. It was this very disparity, in fact, which at first had attracted her to him, with the enormous flattery it implied. Her immaturity had thrilled to the condescension as it could never thrill for the horde of barbaric youngsters who formed the guard-gallant of her first New York season. Emerging from an environment entirely continental, she was accustomed to the attentions of men belonging to an older race, whose suave courtesy had its roots in the antique. From the consulates in Rome and Florence which her father had occupied ingloriously but with utter content, she had brought an old-world respect and appreciation for maturity utterly foreign to young America of even fifteen years ago. And in these respects Julius Schuyler had satisfied her entirely. In her eyes he was not only a polished, traveled and well-read man of the world, he was brilliant. He dominated. His sketches were not the mere fads of a supremely idle and blasé man. They flamed with talent. Their very unfinished condition proved it. When so much can be suggested by the mere sweep of a line, why satiate the spectator further? So she had accepted him at her own adolescent valuation, glowing dewily beneath his tired, vivacious gaze.

For it was his forte to be sprightly. The ready repartee was ever on his lips, nor was the pun scorned. No matter how trite, how forced the shaft, it played the most important rôle in his armory. To the ears of eighteen the pompous straining was inaudible, the weary dissatisfaction which it served to conceal, practically invisible. It was not until the forcing-house of marriage, the constant companionship, had opened her eyes that she glimpsed the actual man through the shallow smoke-screen behind which he strove to cover an aching ennui, an intolerable insufficiency.

Meanwhile his admiration had gone completely to her young head. The fumes of it were sweet to her unaccustomed nostrils. Almost before she was aware of it, she had consented to marry him. So it came about that before the end of her first season she had acquired a husband twenty-five years her senior, still active, distinguished in appearance, although already gray, and incidentally wealthy, besides whose fortune her father’s very comfortable means dwindled ludicrously.

And yet perhaps it had not been so bad in the long run. After all, Julius Schuyler had been a gentleman and always acquitted himself as such. For Anne there had been no brutality, no animalism to encounter. Only the monotony of an endless and artificial vivacity, the ever forcing of herself to keep up her rôle of amused and humble spectator and playmate.

He was so small, so finicky, with his endless devices for passing the time. His double solitaire, his dominoes, his checkers which he would always produce at the hint of an empty half hour. Multi-subterfuges for cheating the gnawing ennui which with the years had fastened itself upon him like a cancer. Disliking all games intensely, Anne had at first absolutely refused to share in these puerile feints against time. But, after a while, when all effort at conversation languished in the anæmic soil of his irritating triteness, she had capitulated. They played checkers in Amalfi, his back turned to the glorious bay, her subconscious bathing in its blue flame; dominoes in Luxor with the Tombs of the Kings beckoning on the glamorous horizon line; two-handed bridge on the terrace of their villa in Florence, while the setting sun tinted the Arno and set afire the mammoth dome of the old cathedral.

However, there had been compensations. The silver lining to her cloud had provided a background of decided luxury. Travel brought contact with a cosmopolitan, ever-changing, group who gave the beautiful American that delicate homage, tinged with desire, which is stimulating to a feminine ego, dissatisfied and unawakened. Intervals between tête-à-tête games were sometimes brilliant and prolonged. The buying of the villa in Florence was a joy, almost unmitigated by the fussy alterations of Julius who imagined he understood old furniture, and the Cinque-Cento. It was sheer rapture to return to Florence, to resume old friendships, revisit in stealth old haunts.

But her vitality was sapped by Julius’ greedy monopoly. He clung with the persistency of an âme damnée. He accompanied her to the dressmaker, where she was draped according to his finicky conception of her type. He chose her hats. He bought her underwear, all of the very finest, of course. But when she wore it beneath his complacent eyes, self-consciousness became an agony which habit refused to dull. If passion had underlain the complacence, she would not have minded even this. But Julius never forgot himself in his love for her. His natural diffidence was a perpetual audience, the unwelcome third in all their intercourse. Never impulsive, his caresses lacked the white heat of passion which is clean because spontaneous. Beneath his touch, Anne felt herself perpetually under the microscope. It seemed as if he were vain, not of his prowess, but of still being capable of harboring sensation at all. And habit made her quick to notice that these lapses into anæmic appetite usually followed the prodding of some erotic book or play, and were seldom occasioned by her own desirability. She became practiced in the art of retreat and withdrawal, so that the whole nature of love was distorted. Still, a sort of pity for his maimed spirit kept her silent. She closed her eyes and tried deliberately to become callous. However, she made up her mind that if so precious a commodity as freedom ever came within her grasp again, she would never permit it to escape.

And now that this freedom had been hers for almost five years, its realization had exceeded her keenest expectations. Evading every opportunity of remarriage, she had skilfully apportioned her seasons between the United States and Europe. The New York season was invariably followed by a few weeks in Egypt or the Riviera and capped by three sensuous months in the Florentine villa. And this was the best-loved time of all, in which she renewed body and soul, absorbing peace and serenity from the olive-crusted hills upon whose sides multi-colored villas gleamed like jewels in dark tresses.

Within her small but cherished garden, rose a terrace paved with bricks. One attained it by a narrow flight of moss-grown steps. Here she would sit for hours, basking beneath the sun which rode the heavens like an impartial god, while beyond the pallid balustrade, cypress-studded hills merged into the horizontal purple.

Here it was that she received her friends for tea, listening indulgently to lascivious, Tuscan, gossip. Then, alone once more, after her late dinner, or companioned by the man of the hour, it was here she would pace up and down in the sweet-scented dusk while myriads of fireflies like a flaming milky way disbanded at her approach. And high above the swarthy cypresses the sun’s paramour, the moon, shamelessly flaunted in his reflected rays.

Those were enchanted nights into which Julius’s memory intruded like the sordid wraith from another existence; a warning wraith with finger on lips, whose image tempered Anne’s blood. Not that she was discreet, for that was a quality Anne had never troubled to acquire. In fact, her dealings were so recklessly above-board that she was suspected of untold depths of wickedness. A beautiful woman who paces under the stars at midnight with now one man, now another, cannot hope to escape slander.

Although perfectly aware of this fact, Anne chose to ignore it. Even the nominal chaperonage of some poor, but genteel, relative seemed insupportable to the fierce and rapturous reaction through which she was passing. She remained defiantly alone. Her charm, her elegance, and most certainly her wealth (in that way Florentines are most human) carried her through. But rumor was building a wall of eccentricity about her and she was rapidly becoming known, both on the Continent and in America, as rather terrifyingly individual, and an image-breaker.

The most conservative began to drop off almost imperceptibly, leaving a large circle of spirits who prided themselves upon a freedom akin to looseness, and a small band of intimates too close to be affected by the whispers of the scurrilous. Among the latter, the Marchese Torrigiani and his mother refused steadfastly to believe anything but the best of Anne. Their friendship of years continued undisrupted, and both mother and son looked forward with eagerness to the day when Anne would weary of her precarious liberty, and consent to become Vittorio’s wife. But although she admitted to an affection for Vittorio which at times flickered into transient tenderness, her marriage with Julius had developed a complex which made it impossible for her to contemplate the subject without a shrinking horror. Meanwhile the Marchese waited, hoping almost against hope, that with the passing of time the lacerating memory would fade away. But so far it had refused to do so and there were hours when it seemed to the steadfast man as if the scar were branded into Anne’s very soul. Accepting his homage as a matter of course, she had continued to drift along the path of least resistance.

But latterly, a new restlessness was creeping in, and life had somehow lost its savour. The New York season was becoming a grind. Her friends were either blatantly rich, meretricious and over-fed, mere excitement chasers, or else pretenders, art fainéants, who dabbled in cubes and sex. Neurotic composers who dribbled mediocrities over the piano keys. Pseudo writers who reveled in the drab, perhaps because any further flight was beyond their stunted wings. Anne was growing to hate them all, and herself the most, because she had remained too indolent or too powerless to rise above their level. There were superior beings, of course, who were achieving the real thing somewhere. But they dwelt on a different plane, in a workers’ world of their own, whose fastnesses she had never as yet been able to scale. Her music was good, even excellent, almost professional, but that irritating adverb “almost” rose like an impassable Chinese wall, thrusting her forever into the destinationless region of the dilettantes.

Beautiful, brilliant, talented, she remained negligible in her own hypercritical eyes.

To oust this growing dissatisfaction which had sifted into the indolent drift of her life and was gradually embittering it, Anne had literally taken to her heels. Two weeks alone with the mountains had brought a certain serenity. Already the miserly future looked less blank. Soothed by solitudes and distance, her inflamed ego was content to sink into the great whole. After all, there were compensations. She might not be a genius, but that did not prevent genius from existing! And personality was only an illusion after all, a hollow shell, within which the Great Spirit differentiated. Who was she to grumble in the the face of this universal oneness, into which her littleness merged so superbly? The healing breath of the forest swept her clean of vanity. Her soul rejoiced in the vigor of its new-found simplicity. She spent her days roaming in the woods, or paddling about in a canoe on the unrippled waters of the chaste little lake. She re-read one or two favorite books, but all the time her mind remained contentedly empty and receptive, like an airing room whose windows are unclosed to the winds of heaven.

It was in this mood she had come upon the hut and Alexis. Her sleeping self had reawakened and once more taken her into possession. But it was a rested and less inverted self, a younger and more ingenuous self, who still admitted the futility of happiness but dimly craved it. In her present chastened mood she was determined to oust the personal factor. There had been too much of that in all her previous dealings with men. It had always been to that quality of pervasive femininity to which they had succumbed, and consciously or unconsciously, she had never failed to assert it. She was going to change all that. Here was a boy, probably ten years her junior, whose plight would arouse the sympathy of the veriest egotist. Whose unhappiness, combined with his genius, stirred the stagnant pool of her soul. Her quickened spirit responded to his need with almost complete self-forgetfulness. That genius should come to her door in the guise of a postulant, just as she herself had become resigned to her own lack of it, seemed the culminating miracle to her new-found peace of mind. To heal this bruised spirit and send it back to the world in the glory of renewed splendor was her job. And nothing less than success would satisfy her. For once she would step out of the amateur class and prove that she could do one thing thoroughly and well, even if it were so infinitesimal a thing as the rescue of a soul.

CHAPTER IV
THE PAWN

It was one of those crystal October days, when the air is crisp and clean, tempered by a kindly sun and Central Park is etched in russet and gold against a sky of opalescent clouds.

Huddled against the cushions of a high window seat, Claire gazed down upon it all from the eleventh story of the huge apartment building in 59th Street where she and Mme. Petrovskey had been installed for the last year. It was the customary, rather sumptuous, decidedly characteristic studio apartment which they had been in the habit of occupying for the last five or six years, ever since Alexis had commenced to be known. Walnut paneling, canopied bed, old blue brocade covers and hangings, reeked of the interior decorator; the only personal touches which had survived Claire’s listlessness being a carved ivory rosary hanging over the bedpost, a few French and Italian novels of the emotional school, and a large photograph of Alexis which scowled out upon the world from the dressing table.

At first glance, the crouching girl upon the window seat seemed as nondescript as the room. Almost frighteningly fragile in her dark street dress, she would have been entirely insignificant if it had not been for the appalling misery of her eyes. They brimmed with the sorrowfulness of a kicked puppy. In their heavy-lidded gaze was mirrored the atavistic agony of womankind. Weary, all-revealing, they stared down upon the brilliant park below, while she listlessly stroked the bizarre head of a Brussels Griffon curled upon her skirts.

It was the creature next to Alexis which she loved the best in the world, both because Alexis had bought it for her himself on a sudden boyish impulse, and because it loved her with all the devotion in its tiny body. And love was to Claire the food and drink for which her soul was starving. Not that she had ever been cruelly treated. Hers had been a negative sort of misery. When she was a child of six, her mother had died, leaving her in the charge of her aunt, Mme. Petrovskey, in whose boarding house they were then living. Of her father she knew nothing. But sometimes she suspected his official existence. All she knew was that her name was the same as that of her aunt before she had married Nicholas Petrovskey, that strange and exotic Russian musician, who had invaded the boarding house one day before she herself was born, and had never left it until his death several years later.

How well she remembered that boarding house in old London. How scrupulously clean and unutterably dreary it had all been! And how well she remembered her aunt’s foreign husband who filled the house from morning till night with the weird sobbings of his violin, until it almost seemed to her child’s understanding that one were not in a London boarding house at all, but in an enchanted castle which continually bewailed its pristine glories. It was this music and the author of it which had supplied the only romance of a childhood singularly dull and colorless. And strange to say, the frail, emaciated figure of the musician stood out more clearly in her memory than that of his little boy Alexis, who had been her playmate ever since the beginning of things. It was not until several years later, when his father had died and Alexis was almost ten years old, that he had become the greatest interest and only affection of her lonely little life.

And then the music had come between them. He was always at his violin and the old house echoed plaintively as in the years gone by; only as Claire grew older the wailing ceased to be fairy strains and seemed to be flowing from her own over-charged heart. Then they had suddenly sold the boarding house and gone to Berlin, where Alexis’ ambitious mother had put him under one of the best masters. Followed years of traveling and recitals while the boy’s fame grew and spread until the outbreak of the great war, when Alexis was fourteen and she a few months younger. They had come to the United States and made it more or less their headquarters while they toured South America, Mexico, and the West Indies.

Now, at the age of twenty-three, Alexis was an idol, not only in every large city of the United States, but in Paris and London as well. Since the end of the war they had returned to the Continent several times and it was while on a visit to Paris, five or six years before, that Alexis had bought Bébé for her.

How well Claire remembered it all. He had been away almost all day, playing for the wounded soldiers in Auteuil and had returned to the hotel downcast and tragic, as always after the sight of the brave poilus. She had induced him to go for a walk and had led him along the arcade in the Rue de Rivoli as people and shops always amused and distracted him. They had passed by a dog-fancier’s and he had insisted upon going in and buying for her the small Brussels Griffon which stared at them with bulging and egocentric eyes from the shop window. They had been quite gay when they returned to the hotel with the new member of the family, saying they had been married and acquired progeny in the short space of an hour and a half. Mme. Petrovskey had watched them grimly, a strange look in her small eyes, and perhaps, who knows, at least Claire had always imagined that it was then that she conceived the idea of their marriage? But it was not until years after, six months ago in fact, that it had actually occurred, and then so quietly, so almost clandestinely, that it had hardly seemed like a marriage at all. Except for necessary witnesses, the small chapel had been deserted, the priest a stranger. Claire had timidly requested for old Father Gregory to officiate. But her aunt’s manner had been so unapproachable that she had not dared to insist. And Alexis so unlike himself that he had scarcely spoken to her for days, barely said more than a few words, in fact, since the night she had gone to his room and Mme. Petrovskey had found her there and acted so strangely. And yet there had been nothing wrong in her going to Alexis like that. She had often done so in the years gone by, especially after a concert, when she knew it would be hours before his tension could relax into sleep. She would sit beside the bed and rub his burning forehead, and they would talk a little in soft whispers, not because they feared his mother might hear, but so as not to break the calm which was stealing over him. Time and time again Alexis had fallen asleep beneath her fingers.

And so, on this particular night, when she heard the restless pacing in the room near hers, it had been purely instinctive to get up and go to his aid. And indeed he had seemed glad to see her as usual, that is until her aunt had come in upon them and ordered her out so peremptorily. She never knew exactly what passed between them, although the sound of their muffled voices had penetrated to her room for almost an hour, and she herself had not been able to sleep all night for sheer bewilderment.

The next day Alexis had come to her and asked her to marry him. His face was very pale and his manner more distant than she had ever known it, not with the familiar absent-minded air behind which she knew lurked affection and kindness, but vested with a new hostile courtesy that would have struck her as sinister if she had not been too utterly dazed with joy to be analytical.

Since then she had often wondered in secret, and an icy fear had invaded her at times. Could Mme. Petrovskey have had anything to do with it? Was it possible that she had forced Alexis to ask her to marry him, because she had discovered them together in his room? But if that was the case, would he not have told her about it in one of those unguarded moments when it seemed as if her love had suddenly struck flint to his steel? One of those abandoned moments when he lay in her arms with closed eyes, identity swamped in a vast surge of primitive passion? Ah, yes, he would have told her then. The alternative was too horrible to contemplate. She shuddered. The months passed like a delirious moment. Perched on a see-saw of rapture and terror, she had been flung to the heavens and then plunged into the abyss according to Alexis’ moods. And he had become more eccentric every day. His passion, spasmodic from the first, had quickly degenerated into the old absent-minded kindliness at best. At times, his irritability had been frightful, but she had always excused it, attributing everything to nerves, constantly strained from excitement and overwork. Then had come his breakdown in Carnegie Hall and the collapse of the world. The doctors had sent him to a sanitarium in the mountains and all had gone well for a few weeks. Until about ten days ago when Alexis had disappeared suddenly off the face of the earth, since when Claire and his mother had existed on the verge of despair. Of course, Mme. Petrovskey had tried to keep it quiet, but it had leaked out as things always do, and the newspapers had been headlining it for the last week.

Thus it was that Claire’s eyes, always plaintive at best, brimmed with the age-old sorrow of the world, and she lay upon the window-sill, heavy with misery, recalling the scenes of childhood, clinging pitifully to their memory like an old woman for whom life has already withdrawn all hope of a future. While at her side, his small soul vaguely troubled, the Griffon whined and tugged at her skirts. Her weary eyes falling upon him presently, a sudden pity seized her for his helplessness. Her hand closed fondly upon his small head.

“Poor Bébé,” she murmured, following the little dog’s longing glance into the street below. “Shall I take you for a walk?”

At her words, he leaped up into her face rapturously, his furry body vibrant with joyful tail-waggings. She smiled wanly at his eagerness. “Poor Bébé, I’ve neglected you, haven’t I? But I’m so miserable, so miserable!” She caught him up in her arms and hugged him to her so tightly that he yelped in shrill remonstrance. Setting him down with a patient smile she sat down at her toilet table and put on her hat, an uninteresting dark blue turban which emphasized disastrously her insignificance.

As she met her weary eyes in the mirror, her pallor deepened. “No wonder Alexis couldn’t love me,” she exclaimed in a bitter whisper. “I am ugly, no——” she paused, beating her little fist upon the toilet table. “I am worse than ugly, I am nothing, nobody! How could I expect to hold a genius, a man of fire? And now,” she bent her head upon her arms and burst into low, suppressed weeping, “he is lost, perhaps dead! But I can’t believe it,” she raised her head and gazed at her reflection savagely. “He is not dead, he is only hiding somewhere—from her,” she added in a tense whisper. “From us both! Perhaps he has met another woman whom he can really love. If that should happen I wonder what I would do? Kill her? God knows I would want to!” The clenched fists rose to her mouth in a passionate gesture.

The little dog tugged at her skirts. An odd smile upon her lips, she controlled herself with an effort, caught up gloves and bag and led him out of the room.

As they reached the entrance-hall, the doorbell whirred noisily. Claire’s heart leaped, and then fell leadenly. Could it, might it be Alexis, at last?

Ito opened the door. A chauffeur was standing there, a letter in his hand. With a gasp of disappointment Claire signed to the Jap to give it to her.

It was from Alexis.

The beloved hieroglyphics sprawled before her eyes in a happy mist. Addressed not to herself but to Mme. Petrovskey, they gave her a momentary pang, that vanished quickly beneath the certainty of Alexis’ safety. She spoke to the man as steadily as she could.

“Is there—any answer?”

He hesitated. “I don’t think so, but I can wait if you like.” He stepped through a doorway and sat down gingerly upon a chair which Claire pointed out to him.

A joyful tattoo beating against her ribs, Claire ran down the long vaulted corridor and knocked upon the door of Mme. Petrovskey’s study.

A deep voice boomed permission to enter. Claire burst into the room almost violently.

“It’s a letter from Alexis, Aunt. Do please read it and tell me what he says!”

“Give it to me!”

A large woman, seated at a roll-top desk, revolved round in her chair, took the letter without a word and started to read it.

Hands clasped tightly together, Claire watched her eagerly. It was one of those bland, non-committal faces, full and inclined to be weather-beaten, which are often called motherly because they top a large motherly body, and have the smooth expressionless surface of a rag doll. But Claire knew the face very well indeed, had studied it since childhood, so that the minutest pinching of the puckered lips, the slightest increase in color, spoke volumes. And the letter was evidently disturbing indeed, judging from the mottled purple on her aunt’s cheeks, the angry clutch of the broad fingers upon the crumpled sheets.

As Mme. Petrovskey turned the last page she laid the letter deliberately upon the desk, and turned her back upon Claire.

“Well,” faltered the girl. “Is Alexis all right and is—is he coming back soon? Shall I tell the chauffeur to wait for your answer?”

“There is no answer!”