Part 11

"My dear," said Mr. Ladd, with an uncertain smile, "I am thinking of sending you on a visit to your Aunt Sarah's. It will be better for both of us to stay apart for a time, and see matters with a little more calmness and—consideration for each other. There's no sense in being over-hasty, and making momentous resolutions in this twinkling-of-an-eye sort of way. There's lots of time—oceans of time. You may change, I may change—for I don't set up to be inflexible, and neither do you. Yes, you'll go to your Aunt Sarah's, and then to Paris with her if you like, or Monte Carlo. I guess I can fix it up to the nines, even to a look-in at Paquin's, and one of those expensive strolls down the Rue de La Paix. Go ahead—why not?"

"I'd rather stay here, Papa."

"Phyllis, this is a request—a favor to me. I want you to."

"When?"

"Why not the noon train? I've taken a drawing-room for you, and a berth for your maid—and Sarah's expecting you."

"You told her?"

He made no attempt to avoid the implication of her eyes.

"No," he replied. "No, I don't believe in roaring out your troubles over the long distance 'phone. It was enough to call it an impulse. With you, my dear, that is always a sufficient reason."—They both laughed, and Mr. Ladd's anxious cordiality redoubled at so favorable a symptom. "If it's the real thing, Phyllis, time won't hurt it."

"It is the real thing, Papa."

"But you will go?"

"No."

"Phyllis, I insist."

"I'm sorry, but it's impossible."

"You have to. You must."

"I won't!"

It is the terrible part of stereotyped situations that people will make use of the stereotyped expressions that go with them. Mr. Ladd was the kindest and most devoted father on earth, yet the venerable formula rose to his lips: "You defy me under my own roof?"

It of course forced out the stereotyped reply: "I can leave it."

Mr. Ladd, in silence, looked at her long and steadily; then he bent his head. She saw nothing but the iron-gray hair; the stooping, dejected shoulders; the hand, lying as limp as dead, on the damask cloth.

"Papa?"

No answer.

"Papa?"

She ran to his side, all revolt gone, her only thought to comfort him. Her bare arms entwined themselves about his neck in a paroxysm of remorse; her bosom swelled; her voice was incoherent as she lavished her young tenderness upon him. It was a moment that would decide her life. Had her father left the initiative to her, had he been content to accept mutely these tokens of her surrender—he would have won, then and there, and nothing again would ever have come between them. But with blind stupidity he had to persevere with the intention their clash had interrupted.

"I will tell you my real reason for wanting you to get away," he said. "It wasn't what you thought at all—it was to spare you unnecessary pain. Last night I sent Reynolds, our best secret-service man, to New York with carte blanche to confer with the Pinkertons and ransack this fellow's record from top to bottom. From what Reynolds told me he already knew—I mean what's said down-town, I believe it will be a black one, so black that there won't be any question about your giving him up—just on the facts brought out—facts that can not be disproved or contested. Reynolds—"

"But, Papa, I don't understand. You are setting detectives to go back over his life, like a criminal? Detectives?"

"Yes."

"But how dishonorable, how infamous!"

"Oh, it's done every day; it's common, my dear; if the man's straight it can't hurt him—but if he has anything to hide, why, we turn on the search-light, and find out what's wrong.—It's all done secretly; he won't know; don't worry about that.—I expect a full report in a few days, and would rather not have you here when I get it."

"And do you think that's fair or right, or anything but—fiendish?"

"How do you know he isn't married, Phyllis?"—he shot this at her mercilessly. "How do you know anything except what he's told you? You may be willing to believe him, and all that—but I'm your father, and I want to know, and by God, I'm going to know!"

"Papa, don't!"

"Aha, you're not very confident, are you?"

"He's a man. I don't doubt he's been foolish, and bad, and fast, but to see it written down cold-bloodedly on sheets of paper is more than I can bear. I am willing to ignore that; I am willing to take him as he is now. Oh, Papa, a woman can forgive so much."

"Yes, my dear, and a great deal that a father never could."

"I beg you, Papa, I implore you to telegraph to them to stop."

"It's too late—besides it has to be done; I insist on it; I'm going to strip that man's past to the bone."

"Even if it costs you me? Even if this is the end of everything between us?"

"Fiddle-de-dee, these theatrics are unworthy of you! You're going to take the noon train to Sarah's, and behave yourself; and this business, however disagreeable to both of us, has got to go through."

Her lips tightened mutinously. She was not a young woman who could be driven.

"I'll stay here, or walk right out of your house—and you know where."

"Then stay," he cried, rising wrathfully, "and may God forgive you for the misery you are bringing down on me. I'm only trying to do what's best, and you treat me as though I was one of that fellow's cruel parents on the stage! It's no time to mince matters, and I tell you straight out, Phyllis, he's a blackguard and a scoundrel, and when you see the Pinkertons' report, I guess you'll go down on your knees and beg my pardon for your heartlessness and obstinacy."

He glared at her, expecting a retort that would add fresh fuel to his anger, but she was silent, downcast, trembling. The answer she made was to herself, inaudible save to her anguished soul: "Oh, that Saturday night were here!"

CHAPTER XVI

The four days that followed were almost unendurable in the strain they entailed. Phyllis was heavy with her secret; beset by emotions so conflicting that they seemed to rend her to pieces; forlorn and desolate under her father's studied coldness. The detectives' report did not come, or was withheld perhaps,—but the apprehension of it was always hanging horribly above her head. It was not the facts themselves she feared most, though she dreaded them, too; it was to hear them tauntingly on her father's lips; to be forced to stand, and listen, and cringe at what the human ferrets had unearthed.—Anxious days; leaden days; sad, introspective, interminable days, never to be recalled in after life without a peculiar depression.

On Saturday, at the stroke of noon, she was in a telephone booth, with shivers cascading down her back, and the eagerest heart in Carthage thumping under her breast. In the time she took to get her number, she had decided to go, not to go—then again to go, then again not to go. It was awful, and she couldn't; it was awful, and she would!

"Hello, is that the St. Charles Hotel?"

"Yes, Chincholchell, whodyerwant?"

"Mr. Cyril Adair?"

"Hold the line."

He must have been waiting there for his voice answered immediately, abrupt and deep: "Hello, is that you?"

"Yes,—you know who."

"Is it all right—you are coming?"

"If you want me to."

His only answer to that was a laugh that shook the wire. How manly and confident it sounded in contrast to her own quavering whisper!

"Now, listen, you darling baby, and get this right. We're to pick up the Alleghany local at ten minutes past midnight, and at half-past eleven I'll have Tom Merguelis waiting for you in a cab, across the Avenue on the southeastern corner. Can you manage to get out of the house, do you think?"

"Oh, yes."

"No trunk, you know—just the few things you need, and the fewer the better."

"I understand."

"Find Tom—that's all you have to do—and the rest is for him."

"Yes, Cyril."

"Say it as though you meant it! I'd rather have you back out now than fail me at the last moment. That's an awful faint 'yes.'"

"Don't blame me if I'm scared—you'd be scared too, in my place."

"Well, how scared are you going to be at half-past eleven—that's the real point of it?"

"Cyril, dearest?"

"Yes, my darling."

"I'm coming, I want to come, I'm crazy to come—and you mustn't think for a single moment that I won't."

"That's the way to talk!"

"And you'll be good to me, won't you?"

"My precious!"

"And love me, oh, so well?"

"Yes, yes!"

"And I'll try to be the best little wife that ever made a man warm, and comfortable, and happy—and I'm going to keep your heart-buttons sewed on as well as the others—and darn your beautiful big soul with girl-silk—and dress you every day in a lovely new suit of kisses, so that people will turn round on the street, and ask who's your tailor! And Cyril?"

"Yes, sweetheart?".

"I'm the happiest girl in the world, and the luckiest! And I'm not scared a bit, and I'll be there at half-past eleven, and I love you, and I'm going to run away with you; and I'm glad I'm going to run away with you, and I'm twenty-one, and my own mistress, and as bold as brass, and six policemen couldn't stop me, and I'm just a little slave panting for her master, and I've gnawed the ropes through with my teeth, and no one shall ever tie me up again, or keep me away from you, Amen!"

Again there was that manly, confident laugh.

"I think that little slave had better run home again and pretend to tie up," he said. "It would spoil everything if your father got wind of this—I know those rich old fellows—they can be a power for mischief whether the law is on their side or not. Good-by, my darling, take care of yourself, and look out for Tommy at eleven thirty. Good-by!"

"I hope we will never say that word to each other again," exclaimed Phyllis. "It's a horrid word and I hate it. Good-by, Cyril, and don't forget your little slave, counting the minutes at home!"

"Ta, ta, my lamb, I won't forget her. Couldn't if I would, ta, ta!"

There is no harder task than to fold one's hands and wait. Adair had his matinee and his evening performance to engross his thoughts, and allay to some degree his fever of anticipation. But Phyllis had no such resource. Restless, nervous, on edge with suspense—fits of joy alternating with craven terror—she wore out the longest afternoon of her life, and an evening that was more trying still. Her father, to make matters worse, attempted some advances; spoke to her with unexpected kindness; hovered on the brink of another appeal. What a little Judas she felt, sitting opposite him for perhaps the last time, and maintaining a constraint that was, indeed, her armor, for if she responded at all she knew she would never go that night. So she parried and fenced, and kept the conversation impersonal at any hazard, while his face grew steadily more overcast, and the lines of his forehead deepened. She excused herself early, pleading fatigue, and relaxed her attitude to kiss him tenderly good night.

"It'll all come right before long," she murmured softly. "Good night, my darling daddy, and remember I love you whatever happens."

She was off before he could take advantage of a mood so melting. But he felt much consoled, nevertheless.

"She's coming round," he said to himself. "I might have known she would. That's the comfort of her being such a good girl, and so intelligent!"

Up-stairs, the young lady thus complacently described was stripping off her dinner gown, and wondering what dress she would replace it with. She was the daintiest of soubrettes in her long dark-red silk stockings, and Watch, her Russian poodle, gazed at her with an approving, first-row-of-the-orchestra expression that made him look too wicked and dissipated for anything. She gave him a gentle kick on the nose to remind him that staring wasn't gentlemanly, and finally chose a blue tailor-made by Redfern. When this was on, the rest of her preparations were easy. She could not well take Watch, so she took his collar, and this was the first to go into the little hand-bag. A nightgown followed, a pair of stockings, tooth-brush, comb and brush, tooth-powder, some handkerchiefs, the photographs of her father and mother, still in their frames, and a pair of patent leather slippers with gilt buckles. Surely no little bride of her importance and social position had ever set forth with so slender a trousseau. There it all was, dog-collar below, slippers on top, in a bag no bigger than an exaggerated purse. She smiled a little tremulously as she looked at it, touched as only a woman could be by the magnitude of her sacrifice. Her clothes and her father—tears for both, thus equally abandoned, suffused her eyes.

The next thing was a note of farewell, to be found the following morning on her unused pillow. "I am going away with Mr. Adair," she wrote, "taking my own life in my own hands for better or worse. Whether we are to be friends—you and I—depends entirely upon yourself, although alienation from you will be very hard for me to bear. Forgive me if you can, and do not let your disappointment and chagrin embitter you against me; or what would hurt me almost as much—against him. To-night when I kissed you it was good-by, and if it is for ever it will be your own fault, and very, very cruel, for I love you, dearest father, I love you. Ever your devoted Phyllis."

By half-past nine everything was ready; and it was with a consuming impatience that she went into her boudoir with Watch, and ensconsed herself on the sofa to wait. A confidential Russian poodle can be of great help to a young lady in distress. Watch's sympathy; Watch's certainty of everything coming out right; Watch's implied determination to soften the blow to Mr. Ladd; Watch's willingness to whine over the general tragedy of things—all were whimsically comforting. Best of all, he could listen for ever and ever with one ear cocked up, and never lose for an instant his air of highly gratified interest. And what didn't he hear during that hour and three quarters on the sofa! What secrets of longing and tenderness, of girlish hopes, of girlish dreams, of delicious falterings and trepidations—all breathed into that woolly ear!

Then came the suffocating moment of departure—the quieting of an unruly friend—the peeping from the door; the tip-toeing down the stairs; the panicky stops to cower and listen; the stealthy passage of the great dim hall; the groping for bolts and chains; the heavy door swinging heavily back; the cold, dark, starry night beyond; the egress into it; the wild sense of escape and freedom; the sound of gravel under the eager little feet; the gate-way; the wide silent Avenue; the glimmering lights of the cab at the farther corner; and—

"Yes, I'm Tom Merguelis, Miss. Jump in—everything is ready."

She discovered herself sitting beside a very tall, very thin young man, who smiled down at her in a quizzical, friendly manner not unsuggestive of the Cheshire Cat. That vague, deprecatory grin was as much a part of Mr. Merguelis as his sandy hair, his retreating chin, and the whole amiable vacancy of his expression. His youth had been passed before the public as "assistant" to Professor Theophilus Blitz, the exhibiting hypnotist, who was accustomed nightly to run pins into him; make him drink kerosene under the impression it was beer; smack his lips over furniture-polish; eat potato peelings for sausages; bark like a dog, meow like a cat, make love to a bolster, and generally disport himself to the astonishment and horror of clodhopper audiences. Six years of this had left Tommy without a digestion, and that fixed and bewildered grin, which to Phyllis, under the unusual circumstances of their meeting, seemed to her not without a satiric quality.

But as they drove through the deserted streets she realized her mistake, and corrected so unjust a first impression. The artless, gawky creature idolized Adair, and was proud beyond measure to be serving him so romantically. It gave him an extraordinary fellow-feeling for Phyllis to have her also on her knees at the shrine of the demigod; and he overflowed with a hero-worship so naive and sincere that she could not help liking him—grin and all. Indeed, it seemed a happy augury for her own future that Adair could excite so profound an admiration in those about him. Mr. Merguelis seemed as infatuated as she, and saw nothing strange in these midnight proceedings. There was approval in that everlasting grin. Would she please call him Tommy? Mr. Adair called him Tommy. They shook hands on it in the semi-darkness, and she knew she had found a friend.

Phyllis expected that Cyril would be waiting for her at the station, and was much cast down to learn that she was to remain alone with Tommy until the train arrived. "Then we'll all bustle on board together, and nobody will notice you," explained Tommy. The good sense of this was apparent, yet at the same time she could not help feeling a little forlorn and slighted. "Nobody will notice you," said Young Lochinvar's Tommy.—Now that the die was cast, why should she not be noticed? She was ready to avow herself Adair's before all the world, and why not on that dark, ill-lighted platform, when her courage was nearly spent and her slim young body drooping?

They sat on a bench, and waited in a corner of the vast cavern, she with her bag in her lap, Tommy with his unrelaxing grin fixed on space. Waited and waited, while stragglers passed, immigrants with babies and bundles, hurrying couples returning to the suburbs from a night in town. Above the noise there suddenly rose a louder thunder. It was the train bursting in with a roar, hissing steam and grinding its brakes as it slowed down, throbbing majestically. Tommy seized her by the arm and ran along the platform.

"Day car reserved for Steinberger's theatrical company?"

"Third car back."

"Day car reserved for Steinberger's theatrical company?"

"Jump in!"

Others were scrambling in, too. Phyllis had a fleeting glimpse of Miss de Vere, still with dabs of make-up on her sulky, handsome face; of the wicked Prince, loaded down with baggage, and excitedly taking the direction of everything on his shoulders; of a stout, authoritative Jew with a diamond pin, who was staring at her with a greedy curiosity, and that cattleman's look, as of one who could tell the shape, age, attractiveness, and market value of a human heifer at a single glance. They jostled into the empty car, a dozen or more, settling themselves anywhere, anyhow, like a big boisterous family. Tommy and Phyllis slipped into a seat at the farther end, and they had hardly done so before the latter felt a hand reach over and touch her cheek; and turning, saw Adair! Tommy sprang up, and made way for him, Adair taking the vacated place as though by right.

Whatever pique she might have held against him vanished in the magic of his presence. His hand, closing on hers, communicated peace and resolution. No longer was she afraid, or lonely, or sad, or uneasily conscious of those other prying and speculating occupants of the car. The goal was attained; stronger shoulders than her own now lifted her burden; she had run her race, and could now lie, all spent and weary, in that haven of heart's content. His musical voice flowed on in caressing cadences. Had Tommy carried out his instructions? Had Tommy explained the need of an unobtrusive departure, so that any chance reporter or busybody might be put off the scent?—Oh, the poor baby, how neglected she must have felt, on this the night of nights; how utterly ignored and forgotten!

He drew her head against his cheap fur coat, and stroked her cheek and tresses—his sweetheart, his darling, his little bride! It was sweet to be petted; sweeter still to enjoy the luxury of self-pity as he expatiated with smiling exaggeration on her sad, miserable, wretched waiting with Tommy, in the sad, miserable, wretched station! She closed her sleepy eyes, and nestled closer, awake only to catch every soft word of endearment. Of these she could not have enough. It was heavenly to doze away with: "I love you, I love you, I love you," falling in that insatiable little ear; heavenly to feel that big hand playing with her hair, and tempting kisses as it lingered against her mouth; heavenly to feel so weak, and small, and helpless, and tired against that muscular arm. Divine mystery of love! Divine the dependence of woman on man, of man on woman, neither complete without the other, and each so different... "My little bride" ... "I love you, ... I love you, ... I love you..."