CHAPTER SEVEN
"Come in," said Teddie, rather shakily.
The bronze Moorish knocker on her studio-door had sounded ominously through the quietness, and even that second wind of courage which had come to her at the eleventh hour seemed to vanish before a sudden and rather breathless sense of impending culmination, not unlike that which once thrilled her childish body when an asbestos stage-curtain rolled up.
For thirty tense minutes, indeed, Teddie had been doing her best to work on a sketch of the Macauley Mission by Moonlight, slightly bewildered by the discovery that an ineradicable quaver in her fingers was giving uninvited Childe-Hassan vibrations to her lines. And now she had no need to look still again at her watch to become aware of the fact that it was exactly three minutes to three.
If her visitor was Raoul Uhlan, she remembered, that meant five full minutes before Gunboat Dorgan would arrive on the scene. It would be five full minutes, even though Gunboat should keep his word and be on time. It meant three hundred precious seconds, she reminded herself with an involuntary tremor, in which almost anything could happen.
Even before the door quietly opened, in fact, Teddie found herself failing to feel as valorous as she had expected. She hadn't slept well, and she hadn't eaten well, and the more she had thought over the melodrama which she was engineering into the dove-breasted days of her tranquillity the more disquieting the entire arrangement became to her. And her emotions were still playing tennis with her resolution, making her dread at one moment that her enemy might fail to appear and leaving her afraid the next moment that he might indeed return.
Then she abruptly realized that the question was already settled. For she knew, as she saw Raoul Uhlan step quietly into the studio and close the door behind him, that the die was cast, that it was already too late to evade that intimidating final issue. Yet her visitor, as he crossed smilingly to the table where she sat, carried less of the air of a cave-man than she had expected. There was a carnation in his button-hole and an air of relief touched with meekness on a face plainly more pallid than usual. He stood looking down at her with mournful and slightly reproving eyes.
"Don't be afraid of me," he murmured, as he put down his hat and gloves without letting his gaze for one moment wander from her face.
"I'm not," asserted Teddie, quite bravely, as she rose to her feet. But there was a tremor in her voice, for his meekness, she already realized, was merely a mask. And inapposite as it may have been, he impressed her as being pathetic, as pathetic as a ponderous and full-blooded ruminant of the herd already marked for slaughter by the butcher's appraising eye.
"But you're pale," said Uhlan with all the vox tremolo stops pulled out. And she was able to wonder how often he had fluttered the dove-cotes of feminine emotion with those intimately lowered yet vibrant chest-tones of his. Her mind leapt to the conclusion, even before he placed one hand on her shoulder, that he was serenely sure of himself. Yet his sheer effrontery, his immeasurable vanity, tended to stabilize her when she stood most in need of such adjustment. She shook the appropriating hand from her blouse-shoulder and fell back a few steps, eying him intently. For she was swept by a sudden and belated impulse to save him from himself, to warn him off from the dead-fall into which he was so stupidly blundering.
"There's just one thing I want to say to you, that I must say to you," she told him, still in the grip of that forlorn impulse to escape from it all while escape was yet possible. But he advanced confidently, step by step, as she retreated.
"What's the use of wasting words!" he softly inquired.
"But they won't be wasted," cried the girl.
"Everything that keeps me from remembering will be wasted!"
"Remembering what?"
"That you waited in for me! Everything but that will be wasted," he reminded her. "At first I was afraid, terribly afraid, that you wouldn't be here when I came. But you knew that I was coming, and you stayed! And that's all I want to know."
"Do you know why I stayed?" she demanded, whiter than ever, stunned by the colossal egotism that could assume so much.
"Yes—for this," was his reply as he took possession of the two barricading arms in their loose-sleeved blouse.
She tried to gasp out a desperate "Wait!" but he smothered the cry on her lips. It was not a scream that she gave voice to, when she could catch her breath, but more a moan of hate tangled up with horror.
And it was at that precise moment that Gunboat Dorgan stepped into the room.
Teddie's persecutor, with one quick glance over his shoulder, saw the intruder. He saw the younger man in the natty high-belted sophomoric-looking suit that gave him the beguiling air of a stripling, saw him standing there, studiously arrested, appraisingly alert, with anticipation as sweet to his palate as a chocolate-drop is sweet to the tongue of a street urchin.
"And what do you want?" demanded Uhlan, with one appropriative arm still grasping the girl in the paint-smudged smock.
"I want yuh," announced Gunboat Dorgan, shedding his coat with one and only one miraculously rapid movement of the arms.
The big portrait-painter slowly released his hold. His face hardened. Then he looked sharply at Teddie. Then he looked even more sharply at the audacious youth who had so significantly kicked a chair away from the center of the room.
"What does all this mean?" he demanded, drawing himself up, for Gunboat Dorgan was already advancing toward him.
"It means I'm going to pound this zooin'-bug out o' your fat carcase," cried the smaller man, with exultation in his kindling Celtic eyes.
And Teddie, overcome by what she knew to be so imminent, tried to call out "Stop!" tried to say "No, no; it's too"
But she was too late.
For the second time in one day Raoul Uhlan was guilty of a grave error in judgment. He decided to show the Celtic intruder in shirt-sleeves that he intended to pursue his own paths without the intervention of others. He decided to show this diminutive intruder that a man of his dimensions and determination wasn't to be trifled with. But something altogether unexpected seemed to intervene. That decision, in some way, evaporated under sudden and unlooked-for thuds of pain, thuds which, in the haze that enveloped him, he found it hard to account for. He was, in fact, suddenly subjected to many experiences which were hard to account for, the principal one being a misty wonder as to why an opponent so insignificant to the eye could be so explosive in his movements, so devastating in his fore-shortened arm-strokes.
Not that the big-framed artist didn't resist, and resist to the last of his strength. But the thing became loathsome to the girl, who no longer stood aside in a cold and impersonal fury. For the nose above the once airy mustache bled prodigiously and left tell-tale maculations on the studio-floor. The easel went down with a crash, and gasps and grunts became odiously labored. The dazed big frame staggered back and wabbled against the table, and Teddie, realizing that she had trifled with darker and deeper currents than she had dreamed, felt a good deal like a murderess, and could stand it no more. She was a trifle faint and sick and uncertain in the knee-joints.
"Oh, take him away, take him away!" she pleaded childishly, with her hands held over her face to shut out the horror of it all.
And the triumphant Gunboat Dorgan took him away, an inert and unprotesting hulk that was anything but good to look upon, a disheveled somnambulist with a right eye that was already beginning to close.
Gunboat took the vanquished one to the stairway, and started him down, and then flung his hat and gloves after him.
When the youth with the cauliflower ear stepped back into the studio and closed the door he already seemed to have himself well in hand. He was flushed and a little warm, but outwardly unruffled. He put on his coat and came and stood over Teddie where she sat limp and white, staring down at the overturned easel. And he in turn stood staring down at her, with his head a little to one side.
"Yuh're a thoroughbred," he averred with unqualified admiration. "Yuh're a thoroughbred, and I'm for yuh, lady, to the last jab!"
Whereupon Teddie, who felt tragically alone in the world, began to cry.
"Hully gee, don't do that," implored her protector, genuinely disturbed.
But Teddie, oblivious of his presence, sat there with the tears welling from her eyes. She wept without sound or movement, with her face buried in her hands.
"Why, your gink's canned f'r yuh, f'r good," he explained as he made a roughly gentle effort to draw her hands away from her wet face.
"Oh, please go away," said the weak-voiced girl, with a revulsion of feeling which left utter solitude the only thing to be desired.
But Gunboat Dorgan had experienced his own revulsions of feeling. And he was flushed now with something more than victory.
"Say, Ruby's all right," he confidentially acknowledged. "But this sure puts her in the discard. And what's more, I'm glad things broke the way they did. I'm mighty glad it was me you got to put this thing straight. And"
"I want to be alone," moaned Teddie through her tear-wet fingers.
"Of course yuh do," acknowledged her new-found knight. "And yuh will be. But if I'm goin' to hit those Long Island resorts in a li'l club roadster when the hot weather comes, I'd like to think it's goin' to be wit' yuh!"
And before she quite realized what he meant Gunboat Dorgan had caught her up and kissed her on the tear-stained cheek.
"Y' understand don't yuh!" he said, laughing a little triumphantly at the stricken light which came into her eyes.
She stood up, dizzy, gathering her breath to say what she had to say. But he pushed her back gently into her chair, with a smile that was both a little shy and a little proprietary. Then he slipped out of the room with his light and panther-like step, leaving her with the bed-rock of existence no longer merely undulating, but fallen utterly away.