CHAPTER III
When Lydia ran upstairs to dress everything was waiting for her—the lights lit, the fires crackling, her bath drawn, her underclothes and stockings folded on a chair, her green-and-gold dress spread out upon the bed, her narrow gold slippers standing exactly parallel on the floor beside it, and in the midst Evans, like a priestess waiting to serve the altar of a goddess, was standing with her eyes on the clock.
Lydia snatched off her hat, rumpled her hair with both hands as Evans began to undo her blouse. She unfastened the cuff, and then looked up with pale startled eyes.
"Your bracelet, miss?"
"Bracelet?" For a second Lydia had really forgotten it.
"The little diamond bracelet. You were wearing it this afternoon."
Something panic-stricken and excited in the girl's tone annoyed Lydia.
"I must have dropped it," she said.
The maid gave a little cry as if she herself had suffered a loss.
"Oh, to lose a valuable bracelet like that!"
"If I don't mind I don't see why you should, Evans."
Evans began unhooking her skirt in silence.
Twenty minutes later she was being driven rapidly toward the Piers'. These minutes were among the most contemplative of her life, shut in for a few seconds alone without possibility of interruption. Now as she leaned back she thought how lonely her life was—always facing criticism alone. Was she a bully, as Ilseboro had said? Perhaps she was hard. But then how could you get things done if you were soft? There was Benny. Benny, with many excellent abilities, was soft, and look where she was—a paid companion at fifty-five. Lydia suspected that ten years before her father had wanted to marry Benny, and Benny had refused. Lydia thought she knew why—because Benny thought old Joe Thorne a vulgar man whom she didn't love. Very high-minded, of course, and yet wasn't there a sort of weakness in not taking your chance and putting through a thing like that? Wouldn't Benny be more a person from every point of view if she had decided to marry the old man for his money? If she had she'd have been his widow now, and Lydia a dependent step-daughter. How she would have hated that!
The Piers had built a perfect French château, and had been successful in changing the scrubby woods into gardens and terraces and groves. Lydia stepped out of the car and paused on the wide marble steps, wrapping her cloak about her with straight arms, as an Indian wraps his blanket about him. She turned her head slightly at her chauffeur's inquiry as to the hour of her return.
"Oh," she said, "eight—ten—bridge. Come back at eleven."
The mirrors in the Piers' dressing room were flattering as she dropped her cloak with one swift motion into the hands of the waiting servant and saw a reflection of her slim gold-and-green figure with the emerald band across her forehead.
She saw at a glance on entering the drawing-room that it wasn't a very good party—only eight, and nothing much in the line of bridge players. She listened temperately to Fanny Piers' explanation that four people had given out since six o'clock. She nodded, admitting the excuse and reserving the opinion that if the Piers gave better parties people wouldn't chuck them so often.
She looked about. There was Tim Andrews again. Well, she could always amuse herself well enough with Tim. May Swayne—a soft blond creature whom Lydia had known for many years and ignored. Indeed, May was as little aware of Lydia's methods as a mole of a thunderstorm. Then there was Hamilton Gore, the lean home wrecker of a former generation, not bad—a little elderly, a little too epigrammatic for the taste of this day; but still, once a home wrecker always a home wrecker. He was still stimulating. The last time she had talked to him he had called her a sleek black panther. That always pleases, of course. Since then Fanny Piers, a notable mischief-maker, had repeated something else he said. He had called her a futile barbarian. She disliked the "futile." She would take it up with him; that would amuse her if everything else failed. She would say, "Hello, Mr. Gore! I suppose you hardly expected to meet a barbarian at dinner—especially a futile one." It would make Fanny wretched, but then if Fanny would repeat things she must expect to get into trouble.
And then, of course, there was Eleanor's new best bet—the intensely interesting and absolutely worthwhile young man. Lydia looked about, and there he was. Dear me, she thought, he certainly was interesting and worth while, but not quite from the point of view Eleanor had suggested—public service and political power. He was very nice looking, tall and heavy in the shoulders. He was turned three-quarters from her as she made her diagnosis. She could see little more than his mere size, the dark healthy brown of a sunburned Anglo-Saxon skin, and the deep point at the back of his neck where short thick hair grew in a deep point. Eleanor, looking small beside him, was staring idly before her, not attempting to show him off. There was nothing cheap about Eleanor. She spoke to him now, preparing to introduce him to her friend. Lydia saw him turn, and their eyes met—the queerest eyes she had ever seen. She found herself staring into them longer than good manners allowed; not that Lydia cared much about good manners, but she did not wish to give the man the idea she had fallen in love with him at first sight; only it just happened that she had never seen eyes before that flared like torches, grew dark and light and small and large like a cat's, only they weren't the color of a cat's, being gray—a pure light gray in contrast with his dark hair and skin. There was a contrast in expression too. They were a little mad, at least fanatical, whereas his mouth was controlled and legal and humorus. What was it Bobby had said about him in college—a wild man? She could well believe it. During these few seconds Eleanor was introducing him, and she was casting about for something to say to him. That was the trouble with meeting new people—it was so much easier to chatter to old friends. Benny said that was provincial. She made a great effort.
"How are you?"—this quite in the Ilseboro manner. "Are you staying near here?"
You might have counted one-two before he betrayed the least sign of having heard her. Then he said, "Yes, I live about ten miles from here."
"Oh, of course! You're a judge or something like that, aren't you?"
Was the man a little deaf?
"Something like that."
She noted that trick of pausing a second or two before answering. Ilseboro had had it too. It was rather effective in a way. It made the other person wonder if what he had said was foolish. He wasn't deaf a bit—quite the contrary.
"Aren't you going to tell me what you are?" she said.
He shook his head gravely. Then her eye fell on Gore standing at her elbow and she couldn't resist the temptation. She turned her back on Eleanor's discovery.
"Hullo, Mr. Gore! Did you expect to meet a barbarian at dinner—especially a futile one?"
Gore, unabashed, took the whole room in.
"Now," he said in his high-pitched voice, "could anything be more barbarous than that attack? Oh, yes, I said it; and what's worse, I think it, my dear young lady—I think it!"
She turned back to O'Bannon.
"Would you think I was a barbarian?"
"Certainly not a futile one," he answered.
They went in to dinner. It was a fixed principle of Fanny Piers' life to put her women friends next to their own young men, so that Eleanor found herself next to O'Bannon at dinner. He was on his hostess' right, Gore on her left, then Lydia and Tim and May and Piers, and Eleanor again. The arrangement suited Lydia very well. She went on baiting Gore. It suited Eleanor even better. She had known Noel Piers far too long to waste any time talking to him, and as this was the arrangement he preferred, they were almost friends. This left her free to talk to O'Bannon. Her native ability, joined to her personal interest in him, made her familiar with every aspect of his work. He talked shop to her and loved it. He was telling her of a case in which labor unions, with whose aims he himself as an individual was in sympathy, had made themselves amenable to the law. That was one of the penalties of a position like his. Piers caught a few words and leaned over.
"Well, I'm pretty liberal," he said—that well-known opening of the reactionary—"but I'm not in favor of labor."
"Not even for others, Noel," said Eleanor, who did not want to be interrupted.
"I mean labor unions," replied Piers, who, though not without humor in its proper place, had too much difficulty in expressing an idea to turn aside to laugh about it. "I hope you'll be firm with those fellows, O'Bannon. I hope you're not a socialist like Eleanor."
Piers had used the word "socialist" as a hate word, and expected to hear O'Bannon repudiate the suggestion as an insult. Instead he denied it as a fact.
"No," he said, "I'm not a socialist. I think you'll find lawyers conservative as a general thing. I believe in my platform—the equal administration of the present laws. That's radical enough—for the present."
Piers gave a slight snort. Everyone, he said, believed in that.
"I don't find they do—it isn't my experience," answered O'Bannon. "Some fellows broke up a socialist meeting the other evening in New York, and no one was punished, although not only were people injured, but even property was damaged." Eleanor was the only person who caught the "even." "You know very well that if the socialists broke in on a meeting of well-to-do citizens they would be sent up the river."
Piers stared at his guest with his round, bloodshot eyes. He was a sincere man, and stupid. He reached his conclusions by processes which had nothing to do with thought, and when someone talked like this—attacking his belief that it was wrong to break up his meetings and right to break up the other man's—he felt as he did at a conjurer's performance: that it was all very clever, but a sensible person knew it was a trick, even though he could not explain how it was done.
"I'm not much good at an argument," he said, "but I know what's right. I know what the country needs, and if you show favoritism to these disloyal fellows I shall vote against you next time, I tell you frankly."
Lydia, hearing by the tones that the conversation across the table promised more vitality than her waning game with Gore about the barbarian epithet, dropped her own sentence and answered, "No one really believes in equality who's on top. I believe in special privilege."
O'Bannon, who had been contemptuously annoyed with Piers, was amused at Lydia's frankness as she bent her head to look at him under the candle shades and the light gleamed in her eyes and flashed on the emeralds on her forehead. Beauty, after all, is the greatest special privilege of all.
"That's what I said," he returned. "No one honestly believes in my platform—the equal administration of the present laws."
"I do," said Piers. "I do—everyone does."
O'Bannon glanced at him, and deciding that it wasn't worth while to take him round the circle again let the sentence drop.
"Do you believe in it yourself, Mr. O'Bannon?" asked Lydia, and she stretched out a slim young arm and moved the candle so that she could look straight at him or he at her. "I mean, if you caught some friend smuggling—me, for example—would you be as implacable as if you caught my dressmaker?"
"More so; you would have less excuse."
She laughed and shook her head.
"You know in your heart it never works like that."
"Unfortunately," he answered, "my office does not take me into Federal customs, or you might find I was right."
"The administration of the customs of the United States," Piers began, but his wife interrupted.
"Don't explain it, there's a dear," she said, and oddly enough he didn't.
Lydia was delighted with O'Bannon's challenging tone.
"I wish you were," she said, "because I know you would turn out to be just like everyone else. Or even if you are a superman, Mr. O'Bannon, you couldn't be sure all your underlings were equally noble."
"What you mean is that you habitually bribe customs inspectors."
"No," said Lydia, as one surprised at her own moderation—"no, I don't, for I never much mind paying duty; but if I did mind—well, I must own I have bribed other officers of the law with very satisfactory results."
O'Bannon, looking at her under the shades, thought—and perhaps conveyed his thought to her—that she could bribe him very easily with something more desirable than gold. It was Gore who began carefully to point out to her the risk run by the taker of the bribe.
"You did not think of him, my dear young lady."
"Yes, I did," answered Lydia. "He wanted the money and I wanted the freedom. It was nice for both of us." She glanced at O'Bannon, who was talking to Mrs. Piers as if Lydia didn't exist. She felt no hesitation in interrupting.
"You couldn't put me in prison for that, could you, Mr. O'Bannon?"
"No, I'm afraid not," said O'Bannon, and turned back to Fanny Piers.
After dinner she told Eleanor in strict confidence the story of the bicycle policeman, and made her promise not to tell O'Bannon.
"I shouldn't dream of telling anyone," said Eleanor with her humorous lift of the eyebrows. "I think it's a perfectly disgusting story and represents you at your worst."
When they sat down to bridge Lydia drew O'Bannon, and whatever antagonism had flashed out between them at dinner disappeared in a perfectly adjusted partnership. They found they played very much the same sort of game; they understood one another's makes and leads, and knew as if by magic the cards that the other held. It seemed as if they could not mistake each other. They were both courageous players, ready to take a chance, without overbidding. They knew when to be silent, and, with an occasional bad hand, to wait. But the bad hands were few. They had the luck not only of holding high cards but of holding cards which invariably supported each other. Their eyes met when they had triumphantly doubled their opponents' bids; they smiled at each other when they had won a slam by a subtle finesse or by patiently forcing discards. Their winnings were large. Lydia seemed as steady as a rock—not a trace of excitement in her look.
O'Bannon thought, after midnight when he was totaling the score, "I could make a terrible fool of myself about this girl."
When they were leaving he found himself standing on the steps beside her. The footman had run down the drive to see why her chauffeur, after a wait of more than an hour, wasn't bringing her car round. O'Bannon, who was driving himself in an open car, came out, turning up the collar of his overcoat, and found himself alone with her in the pale light of the waning moon, which gave, as the waning moon always does, the effect of being a strange, unfamiliar celestial visitor.
O'Bannon, like so many strict supporters of law, was subject to invasions of lawless impulses. He thought now how easy it would be to run off with a girl like this one and teach her that civilization was not such a complete protection as she thought it. What an outcry she would make, and yet perhaps she wouldn't really object! He had a theory that men and women were more susceptible to emotion in the first minutes of their meeting than at any subsequent time—at least in such first meetings as this.
She was standing wrapping her black-and-silver cloak about her with that straight-armed Indian pose.
"It's a queer light, isn't it?" she said.
He agreed. Something certainly was queer—the greenish silver light on the withered leaves or the mist like a frothy flood on the lawn. Just as she spoke two brighter lights shone through the mist—her car coming up the drive with the footman standing on the step.
"Is that yours?" he asked.
She nodded, knowing that he was watching her.
"Why don't you send it away," he went on very quietly, "and let me drive you home? This is no night for a closed car."
He hardly knew whether he had a plan or not, but his pulses beat more quickly as she walked down the steps without answering him. He did not know whether she was going to get into her car and drive away or give orders to the man to go home without her. Then he saw that the footman was closing the door on an empty car and the chauffeur releasing his brake. When she came up the steps he was looking at the moon.
"I never get used to its waning," he said, as if he had been thinking of nothing else.
She liked that—his not commenting in any way on her accepting an invitation not entirely conventional from a stranger. Perhaps he did not know that it wasn't. Oh, if he could only keep on like that—maintaining that remote impersonality until she herself wanted him to be different! But if he wrapped the lap robe about her with too lingering an arm, or else, flying to the other extreme, began to be friendly and chatty, pretending that there was nothing extraordinary in two strangers being alone like this in a sleeping, moonlit world
He did neither. When he brought the car to the steps the lap robe was folded back on the seat so that she could wrap it about her own knees. She did so with an exclamation. The mist clung in minute drops to its rough surface.
"It's wet," she said.
He did not answer—did not speak even, when as they left the Piers' place it became necessary to choose their road. He chose without consultation.
"But do you know where I live?" she asked.
"Be content for once to be a passenger," he replied.
The answer had the good fortune to please. She leaned back, clasping her hands in her lap, relaxing all her muscles.
On the highroad she was less aware of the moon, for the headlights made the mist visible like a wall about them. She felt as if she were running through a new element and could detect nothing outside the car. She was detached from all previous experience, content to be, as he had said, for once a passenger. This was a new sensation. She remembered what Ilseboro had said about her being a bully. Well, she'd try the other thing to-night. She only hoped it wouldn't end in some sort of a scene. She glanced up at her companion's profile. It looked quiet enough, but she decided that she had better not go on much longer without making him speak. Her ear was well attuned to human vibrations, and if there were a certain low tremor in his voice—well, then it would be better to go straight home.
"This is rather extraordinary, isn't it?" she said. This might be interpreted in a number of ways.
"Yes, it is," he said, exactly matching her tone.
She tried him again.
"Did you enjoy the evening?" It seemed almost certain that he would answer tenderly, "I'm enjoying this part of it."
"It was good bridge," he said.
That sounded all right, she thought. His voice was as cool as her own. She could let things go and give herself up to enjoying the night and the moon and the motion and the damp air on her face and arms. She felt utterly at peace. Presently he turned from the highroad down a lane so untraveled that the low branches came swishing into her lap; they came out on a headland overlooking the Sound. Over the water the mist was only a thickening of the atmosphere which made the lights of a city across the water look like globes of yellow light in contrast to the clear red and white of a lighthouse in the foreground. He leaned forward and turned off the engine and lights.
Lydia found that she was trembling a little, which seemed strange, for she felt unemotional and still. And then all of a sudden she recognized that she was really waiting—waiting to feel her cheek against his rough frieze coat and his lips against hers. It was not exactly that she wanted it, but that it was inevitable—simple—not her choice—something that must be. This was an experience that she had never had before. In the silence she felt their mutual understanding rising like a tide. She had never felt so at one with any human being as with this stranger.
Suddenly he moved—but not toward her. She saw with astonishment that he was turning the switch, touching the self starter, and the next instant backing the car out. The divine moment was gone. She would never forgive him.
They drove back in silence, except for her occasional directions about the road. Her jaw was set like a little vise. Never again, she was saying to herself, would she allow herself to be a passenger. Hereafter she would control. It didn't matter what happened to you, if you were master of your own emotions. She remembered once that the husband of a friend of hers had caught her in his arms in the anteroom of a box at the opera during the darkness of a Wagnerian performance. She had felt like frozen steel—so sure of herself that she hardly hated the man—she felt more inclined to laugh at him. But this man who hadn't touched her, left her feeling outraged, humiliated—because she had wanted him to kiss her, to crush her to him
They were at her door. She stepped out on the broad flat stones, under the trellis on which the grapevines grew so thickly that not even the flood of moonlight could penetrate the thick mass of verdure. The air was full of the smell of grapes. She knew he was following her. Suddenly she felt his hand, firm and confident on her shoulder, stopping her, turning her round. She did not resist him—she felt neither resistant nor acquiescent—only that it was all inevitable. He took her head in his two hands, looking in the dark and half drawing her to him, half bending down he pressed his lips hard against hers. She felt herself held closely in his arms; her will dissolved, her head drooped against him.
Then inside the house the steps of the faithful Morson could be heard. He must have been waiting for the sound of an approaching motor. The door opened—letting a great patch of yellow lamp light fall on the misty moonlight. Morson peered out; for a moment he thought he must have been mistaken; there appeared to be no one there. Then his young mistress, very erect, stepped out from the shadow. A tall gentleman, a stranger to Morson, said in a voice noticeably low and vibrant:
"At four to-morrow."
There was a pause. Morson holding the door open thought at first that Miss Thorne had not heard, and then she shocked him by her answer.
"No, don't come," she said. "I don't want you to come." She walked into the house, and indicated that he might shut the door. As he bolted it he could hear the motor moving away down the drive. Turning from the door, he saw Miss Thorne standing still in the middle of the hall, as if she too were listening to the lessening drum of the engine. There was a long pause, and then Morson said:
"Shall I put out the lights, Miss?"
She nodded and went slowly upstairs, like a person in a trance.
She seemed hardly aware of Evans waiting to undress her, but stood still in her bedroom, as she had stood in the hall, staring blankly in front of her. Evans took her cloak from her shoulder.
"It's quite wet, Miss," she said, "as if it had been dipped in the sea and your hair, too."
Miss Thorne did not come to life, until in unhooking her dress Evans touched her with cold fingers. Then she started, exclaiming:
"What is the matter with you, Evans," she cried. "Do go and put your hands in hot water before you touch me. Your fingers are like ice."
The girl murmured that she had been upset since the loss of the bracelet—she felt responsible for Miss Thorne's jewels.
Lydia flung down the roll of bills and cheques that represented her evening's winnings. "I could buy myself another with what I've won to-night. Don't worry about it." The idea occurred to her that she would buy herself a sort of memento mori, something to remind her not to be a weak craven female thing again—nestling against men's shoulders like May Swayne.
Evans did not answer, but gathered up the money and the jewels and carried them into the dressing room to lock them in the safe.