More food for thought. It was beginning to look to Val as though this man, who was in this business so mysteriously and so unexplainedly, was to be a storm center around which the affair revolved. He had made it plain that Val’s presence in any way was unwelcome; there had even been a veiled threat, if he continued his attentions to Miss Pomeroy.
Why did the man who had no hands desire him to keep away? Why was it so important that he had gone to the trouble personally to warn him? And now that he knew Val suspected him of having been in his room and stolen the books from him, undoubtedly he knew that Val, in his mind, implicated him in the murder of the bookseller, for there the books had been the only things taken, also—the books sold by Miss Pomeroy. That being the case he would from now on, beyond peradventure of a doubt, consider Val as more than a rival for the attention of Miss Pomeroy, if indeed they were rivals. Probably, hoped Val, he would consider him as rather a dangerous enemy. That was good; he would rather have this man an open enemy than a lukewarm acquaintance, rather a final finish fight with him than continual skirmishing and veiled attacks. One got somewhere by a fight—either one was victorious or he lost; either the spoils of victory were his or the losses of defeat. In either event he could know where he stood.
In a ferment of imagination and anticipation he lounged in Peacock Alley and waited for the coming of the girl with the burnished copper hair.
Half a dozen times he consulted his watch. It did not seem to hasten her arrival in the least. But then, he was a bit early. If you have an appointment with a lady at seven thirty it is absurd to expect her there at seven twenty. He told himself this and contained his impatience as well as he could. It puzzled him a little too, to feel as he did about this girl. He had known women in his life, yet never had he known one to whom he reacted in this curious manner. It seemed to him as though the very fact of her being on the same earth with him touched some vibrant chord in his nature that echoed throughout his whole being. He could have told himself, of course, that he was in love—but does one fall in love with a woman whom he has seen for perhaps less than ten minutes in his whole life?
The answer to that is yes, as he admitted after a few moments’ reflection. It would have been yes if the time had been ten seconds—or ten centuries—or even if he had never seen her. It was enough that, somewhere on this earth, was a woman like Jessica Pomeroy—he did not have to see her, or know her; she was simply the incarnation of an unconscious ideal he had been building up in his mind, an ideal he had created without knowing it, and here suddenly she had come to life like Galatea and he realized of a sudden that he had made her. She was everything he had pictured to himself—and suddenly she stepped down from her pedestal and became Jessica Pomeroy, who was to meet him here in a few minutes.
With this, he began to wonder whether she really would meet him; whether she would not change her mind and decide that, after all, it was best not to see him now. This produced in him no feeling of trepidation because he would have gone to her if she had not come to him—if she did not come to-night he would go to her apartment and all the world could not stop him. If she did not—
He rose hastily, because at this moment he caught a glimpse of her at the end of the long corridor, halting in slight uncertainty. The evening had turned chilly with the first approach of autumn, and she wore a blue and gold wrap above the furry collar of which her head, encased in a lacy something, peeped like a fresh field flower. He hastened down the room to meet her and she stood stock still to await his approach.
“Am I late, dear benefactor?” she asked, extending her hand to him. He bent above it and kissed the very tips of her tiny fingers—a trick he had learned in Europe and which seemed perfectly apropos when he did it.
“You will always seem late when I wait for you. Miss Pomeroy,” he remarked, smiling. “The time will always be long⸺”
“Don’t fire all your guns so early in the evening,” she replied. “You will do better to keep some of them in reserve for later, Mr. Morley.”
“I don’t have to,” he came back. “I’ll make up better ones as we go along.”
“I’m sure this is perfectly improper—dining with a man whom I have never actually met, isn’t it?” she appealed to him.
He nodded pleasantly. “It is.”
“Isn’t that fine!” she ejaculated.
“Impropriety becomes the height of respectability when you indulge in it, Miss Pomeroy,” he fired back. “Shall we go to the dining room?”
She nodded. “Please. I’m horribly and vulgarly hungry—I suppose you think I ought to live on hummingbirds’ wings and nightingales’ tongues—to judge from the things you say to me; I don’t really, though,” she confided to him in a low tone.
“No?” he asked, as though shocked that anything substantial in the way of food should appeal to her. “You astound me.”
“No,” she said. “I’m going to deal out death and destruction to oysters, filet mignon, with dozens of different kinds of vegetables and salad, ice cream⸺”
“That’s fine; at least you know what you want. Most women don’t seem to have the least idea of what they want to eat when they dine with a man. It’s a relief to come across one who knows her own mind—after all, your stomach—if I may be so presumptuous to suppose you have such a thing,” he smiled, “is a very personal matter.”
“You’d think so, wouldn’t you?” She smiled at him gently, and he took careful note of the dimples the smile produced in her cheeks, “And yet, I don’t think we ought to stand here and discuss my—er—internal organs in such an offhand way, do you?”
“Er—well—perhaps not. We’ll come to that later, perhaps.” He told her this gravely.
At the door of the dining room they were met by a squad of officials, respectful and obsequious, prominent among whom were the head waiter and the manager. The Morley name was a potent factor where it was known, which accounted for the ceremonial parade—almost like a coronation procession—that proceeded through the dining room to a sheltered alcove where a table laid for two, decorated with just the proper flowers, awaited them.
“You must feel like a feudal baron,” she whispered to him, “to whom everything comes as a matter of right.”
He smiled. “I feel like an animated National Bank, to tell you the truth.”
“Yet money has its uses,” she smiled, when they were seated.
He nodded. “So I’ve been led to believe,” he said. “I don’t know, really—I’ve always had it, you know—so perhaps I don’t actually realize what it means. There are times when I’ve found it to be more of a disadvantage than—but we’d better order first and talk later. I’m sure you must be perfectly starved.”
“I am,” she admitted. “Don’t forget the oysters.”
They chatted idly for awhile, until the first part of the dinner was finally served. It made little difference to Val what they talked about—rather, what she talked about. It was enough for him that he heard her voice; that he was sitting opposite her at table, that they were eating together, living a small fraction of their lives together, with each other. Externals hardly mattered; here was his woman—and at present she was with him to the exclusion of the whole world.
Something of what he was thinking must have flashed into her mind like the ghost of a shadow—it must have been as intangible and as nebulous as that, because Val himself had not realized concretely the thoughts that were running through his mind. She looked at him, serious for perhaps the first time that evening—an appraising glance, a glance that took in every part of him, that seemed to dissect him, almost; her glance at him—for it was but during the merest part of a second that she looked at him frankly, was almost calculatingly cold in its process of weighing this man who sat opposite her. For that instant it almost seemed as though she looked at him not as a man who was there because he was interested in her, but as a tool that a workman finds ready to his hand, a sword a soldier finds conveniently placed so that he can use it.
“Curious that we should meet like this, isn’t it?” She looked at him with frank approval now—he had been weighed in that instant. “I mean,” she went on in a small sudden panic, afraid that it would seem to him that their juxtaposition was appearing very fateful and important in her eyes, “it’s funny how people meet, isn’t it. Just an accident—and there you are.”
He did not answer for an instant, while he bit into an olive with his fine, even white teeth.
“All meetings are like that,” he said when he did break the silence. “People meet—they must meet some way—by the most trivial sort of chances, by the most ordinary sort of accidents. When you look back on it later you say that it is curious you meet by just such an accident or chance—but if you look back on any acquaintance you have you will find it was an ordinary accident that brought you together—just the chance of your having been somewhere together—at the same time—and somebody there to introduce you, perhaps; life is made up of just such ‘accidents’—we go rushing along in our mad careers, like funny, busy little bugs, until, by chance, we bunk into each other—which is the first time we ever really haul off and take a good square look. And then we say we met by accident, and we don’t realize that an accident is the only way we can ever meet. Every formal introduction is an accident, isn’t it? The accident of you all being there at that time⸺”
“Sometimes we’re there purposely, Mr. Pomeroy, aren’t we?” He had to smile at this.
“Well, yes,” he admitted. “As when we spend a couple of days hunting up the owner of a name in a bible—but don’t forget that the accident of our meeting came before that—in the bookstore.” He was silent for a moment or two after that, because both of them suddenly realized that there was much to be explained; the thought of the bookstore brought that back.
Her face had become sober and serious again, reflective, almost—as one who has been brought back to business with a sharp turn.
“I had made up my mind to be bright and happy for once, this evening,” she said;—“I was going to forget about—oh, about things, for awhile—pretend I haven’t anything to worry about.”
“Acting, eh,” he commented. She nodded her head quickly.
“That’s just it—you know, I want to go on the stage—I have to, in fact; got to make a living some way; that’s why I was holding on to all these expensive clothes when I could have sold them and⸺”
“You know. Miss Pomeroy,” he said seriously, “you don’t have to tell me this unless you want to—unless it relieves your mind to have somebody to talk to. I’m not asking you, mind.”
“Oh, I know—but I haven’t anybody to tell things to,” she said, a little troubled. “Perhaps, if I had a girl friend⸺” she was silent for a moment. “But even girl friends, you know, don’t always quite answer the purpose. There’s nothing in the world so satisfying to a woman as a man friend—a real friend with whom she can talk out her troubles and to whom⸺”
“I hope that you will be able to feel that I’m such a friend, Miss Pomeroy,” he broke in.
“That’s the singular part of it, don’t you know,” she said smiling. “I’ve felt —that you were from the moment I saw you at my apartment—even before you spoke a word.” He smiled, much gratified.
This was a discerning girl, he decided. She knew a regular fellow when she saw one. A real he-man! One of nature’s noblemen! True-blue. No, he was not conceited nor egotistical beyond the ordinary run of males—when you consider that all of them are like that. Although a man would never admit that he thinks such thoughts as the above, yet all of them do. There are few men who don’t consider that they are the salt of the earth and nature’s noblemen—and there are none who would not be grateful to a woman for being discerning enough to perceive that important fact.
“I suppose I ought to begin at the beginning,” she said, and he nodded. “Though we’re having a peep at the end right now⸺”
“The way some women read a book, eh?” be commented.
“Well, not all. Some don’t read—they live. The beginning,” she went on, “is my father. Probably you know of him—he was a racing man. That is, he bred horses, and he raced them—going around the country to wherever there was a meet. You can’t have a home—in the true sense of the word—when your only living relative is always off somewhere at the other end of the country, so we lived, when we weren’t separated, in a small apartment hotel here in the city. We had a place in Virginia, too, near Hampton—but the buildings are about ready to cave in and nobody has lived there for twenty years—not since my mother died there. The house itself has been locked up, although we stayed a few times at one of the cottages on the property, on account of father’s stable being there, and his horses. He had a kind of a race track there where there used to be try-outs.
“I spent all of my girlhood and most of my young womanhood in boarding and finishing schools and I only came home for good a few months before my father’s death last year. I never was very intimate with my father—in fact, I don’t think I saw enough of him to become intimate with him. He was a peculiar sort—that is, much different from most people. He came into a large fortune when he attained his majority—in Virginia. He turned it all into cash, preparatory to making an investment, and placed it all in the bank.
“The details of the investment took two or three months to complete. In the meantime, the bank failed. Creditors received about two cents on the dollar—it completely wiped out my father’s fortune. Well, he made two or three more before he was through—but, as I told you, he never trusted banks after that, and he always kept his money and his valuable papers—stocks and bonds—hidden away or on his person. More than once he carried over a hundred thousand dollars with him in large bills, to my knowledge. He always had many thousands of dollars with him.
“Well, as I say, he recouped. He always loved horses, so I suppose it was perfectly natural to go in for them as a business. At one time it was said that he had the largest blooded stable in America. A few months before he died he turned it all into cash, keeping only the Virginia estate, and retired from the business. I did not see him at his death—I was traveling in Europe with a companion; he died suddenly, from a stroke of apoplexy, lapsing into unconsciousness and regaining consciousness only a few seconds before he died. Ignace Teck was with him. He⸺”
“Ignace Teck?” queried Val. “Who is he?”
“You’ve seen him—the man who called at my place yesterday when you were there. He⸺”
“The man without hands?”
She nodded. “The man without hands—I didn’t know you saw that. He usually keeps his hands in his pockets when strangers are present.”
She was silent for a moment, unaccountably. So was Val—he was wondering who this Ignace Teck was, with his hard, sinister countenance, his small, cruelly calculating eyes. She played with a crumb on the table, the long lashes fringing her eyes like willow at the edge of a pond, but he noticed that her slender hand trembled just a little as her fingers continued their aimless playing. Evidently there was a great deal about this man for one to know, thought Val. Ignace Teck! The very name sounded ominous. He broke the silence at last, seeing that if he did not there was scarcely any telling when she would resume—and he was interested in her recital—interested in the liquid cadences of her voice.
“Just who is this man?” he asked finally, making his voice as careless as possible. “Where does he come into this thing, anyway?”
Her hands ceased their playing with the breadcrumbs and her eyes no longer shaded by the lashes, looked directly into his for a brief instant. Then, slowly, in a voice as hard as flint, and as dry as a country road in summer, she answered him briefly.
“He is my fiancé,” she said.