VI
It was next day that Conroy met him in the college corridor, and took him aside, to the deep embrasure of a window, with a manner at once confused and mysterious. "Read this," he said, and drew from his pocket the small envelope of a note from her. It announced that she and her mother were staying with the Kimballs, invited him to call, and concluded, "If there are any other of our Coulton friends in town, will you please let them know?"
Don read it, refolded it, returned it to its envelope, and gave it back without a word.
Conroy asked timidly: "Didn't she write to you?"
He shook his head. "No."
"Perhaps she didn't know you were here."
"Yes. I think she knew."
His cousin turned the note over, without putting it back in his pocket, in a manner of disowning it, apologetically. "That's queer."
"Why?"
"I don't know. I thought Aren't you going to see her?"
"I think so. Yes."
"Are you? When?"
"Whenever you like."
Conroy was obviously relieved. "I'll call for you on my way over to-night, shall I?"
"Yes . . . if you're going to-night."
"About half-past eight?"
"That'll do. Yes."
"You'll be ready?"
"I'll try to."
"All right. Half-past eight, sharp."
Don escaped, ashamed of his deception; and Conroy, before he tucked away the letter in his pocket, fingered it a moment, smiling like a flattered young Lothario.
He arrived at Don's boarding-house at eight o'clock, in high spirits, and assumed the leadership of the expedition at once, laughing and talking and straightening his necktie before the mirror and cocking his head on one side to see the "set" of his trouser legs, while he waited for Don to polish a pair of cracked shoes. He was too boyish to have any self-conscious vanity, but he glanced at his watch, patted it back into his pocket, and smoothed his waistcoat with a pleased and excited air that would have been in an older man the anticipation of a "lady-killer." He was not handsome; his features were too flat. But he was well-dressed and well-built, and he had the assurance of an easy manner. He accented, by contrast, Don's paleness, his angularity, and his student shabbiness; and by an exuberance of spirits he had the effect of increasing, perversely, Don's reserve.
They came, together, to the door of the old, "semi-detached," white-brick house, in which the Kimballs lived. Don let him ring, standing back himself on the edge of the porch to look at the lighted curtains of the window at which she had stood to see him pass on Sunday morning. And when a maid opened the door, Don followed in, under the crimson gas-globe of the hall, as reverently as if he had been entering a church.
Lights and laughter and the music of a piano invaded him with bewilderment almost at once. She parted the hangings of a doorway at his elbow, and greeted Conroy and him with a dazzlingly flushed smile, dressed as he had never seen her before, in a young girl's evening gown with elbow sleeves. She ushered them into a blazing room of gaslights and strange faces, and introduced them to a multitudinous company—of seven persons. Her mother, a small and pretty woman with young eyes, met them—in spite of a hoarse cold—with the bright friendliness that was habitual with her. Mrs. Kimball, without rising, lifted the drooped and puffy eyelids of a strong face, and acknowledged their bows with the slightest inclination of her head, grey-haired and fine-looking. Three young ladies who were to Don three different arrangements of feminine eyes, noses and mouths, smiled politely and forgot him. A young man with a pince-nez—whom he recognised as an upper student of the university—shook his hand with a manner of condescending, for the moment only, to meet a Freshman as a social equal. Another man, prematurely bald, said deeply, "Glad to know you," and then startled him with a limp touch of indifferent fingers which he dropped like a wet fish. He recovered from his embarrassment to find himself sitting beside a girl whom he subsequently discovered to be the younger of Mrs. Kimball's two daughters.
She opened conversation with him, patronizingly, by asking him whether he was a college student, what "year" he was in, and what "course" he was taking; and leaning back in her chair with an unnecessary haughtiness that brought out a striking pose of her neck and head, she regarded him with a cool curiosity in which there was something inimical. He did not understand that she rather shone in her young circle as a girl who questioned the intellectual superiority of men—as evidenced in college students—and who prided herself on discouraging with sarcasms the masculine adoration which her beauty brought her. He replied to her with a divided attention, aware that Conroy and Margaret—for the "Richardson" was still a strange formality to his thought—had gone to the piano together, and that Conroy was preparing to turn the pages of her music while she played. She was poised on the duet-bench with a slender grace of figure that was heart-shaking. In a strange duality of consciousness, Don bent above her, with Conroy, devotedly, at the same time that he heard Miss Kimball and replied to her.
"I beg your pardon?"
Miss Kimball, after a calculated pause, repeated: "How do you like Professor Cotton?"
But the first notes of the piano, running in a quick melody tenderly, caught and tangled his attention; and after stammering distractedly, "I—I don't" he relapsed into the silence which had fallen on the room; and gazing at the carpet between his feet, he listened to the music, smiling, as if it had been a voice.
He did not know what the composition was, or who had written it; and he was not curious to know. It was magically hers; and it spoke to him of her in the rise and fall of a melody that hung and trembled and rose plaintively above the rocking chords of a flowing bass. It was to him a divine yearning, an almost tearful aspiration; and it raised in him confused thoughts of darkness and love, of mystery and sadness and the unappeasable cry of affection—thoughts that were less thoughts than pensive emotions, vibratory moods that stirred in response to the singing of the instrument, and trembled in him till it seemed to him that his very soul thrilled and was shaken.
It faded away in a fluttering and soft appeal of single notes, and was lost in a polite applause that thanked her with admiring comment. "How well she plays!" "She has such excellent technique, don't you think so?" "My favourite nocturne."
Miss Kimball had been watching the changes of his face. She asked, "Do you like Chopin?"
He looked up at the piano, transparently pale, his eyes burning; and he replied—without altogether understanding what she had asked—"I don't . . . know him."
The whole evening was a repetition in variations of that situation. Although he did not watch Conroy and Margaret, his mind was secretly with them. He listened to Miss Kimball and replied to her without betraying more than a heavy simplicity; and he remained impenetrable to her curiosity in a way that first piqued and then bored her. When she rose and left him, Mrs. Richardson took the chair beside him, and inquired for his aunt and his mother, and tried to rally him with smiles. She had been noticing the way in which Margaret devoted herself to his cousin; she had been feeling some remorse for her summary interdiction of Don's correspondence; and she began to look at him, now, with the sympathy of a mother who sees her daughter playing the coquette. But she was surprised to find him stolidly unruffled; when she caught him with his eyes on Margaret, she could find no trace of jealousy in his look; and she was puzzled, as much as Miss Kimball had been, to see him, more than once, gaze around the room with a sort of wondering interest as if he were suddenly curious to hear what they were saying, to watch their expressions and to study their gestures and their clothes. She decided that he had outgrown his boyish love affair, and she was at once relieved and disappointed. She found him rather a stupid youth.
He was, in fact, alternating between the exalted moods to which the music lifted him, and a puzzled return to the consciousness of his surroundings. At one moment, he was alone with Margaret in the gropings and longings of his doubts of life. At another, he was sitting among these curious fellow-humans who seemed to move in a small circle of light surrounded by the mysterious darknesses of their origin and their destiny, talking of nothing, smiling at nothing, and apparently unconscious of anything but what was before their eyes.
When he rose with them to say good-night, they seemed to close in on him and separate him from her; and it was as if across their interference that he reached her hand for a moment and held it while he caught the meaning of her smile. A slight pressure of friendliness seemed to reward him for the evening apart. Then Conroy came between them with a laughing "You'll not forget?"—and he backed away. Miss Kimball dismissed him with a contemptuous smile that stung him into a startled examination of his conduct toward her; Mrs. Richardson did not say good-night to him at all; and while he was waiting for Conroy on the porch, the two men came out, laughing and talking, and passed him over with a glance. He woke to the fact that he had been conspicuously dull all the evening; that they looked on him as a silent boor whose acquaintance was not worth acknowledging; that even she must be ashamed of him when she compared his conduct with Conroy's. What a clumsy dolt he must have seemed! What an ass he was to behave so!
He hurried down the path to get away from the scene of his disgrace as soon as possible, but Conroy caught up to him at the gate and accompanied him to the street corner with a reminiscent chuckling of self satisfaction that was a salt in Don's wounds. When he was alone again, he wandered dispiritedly around the streets, chafing with discomfiture and still so hungry with the unappeased desire to see her and hear her that he could not face the emptiness of his room. He came back to look at the Kimball house, hiding from a street-lamp, behind a tree-trunk, across the road; and he watched the lighted windows darken one by one, newly aware of how she was shut in from him by the conventions of the world, and feeling himself walled out with his dreams, longing and lonely, under the inscrutable cold glitter of the stars.