Читать книгу Damned - E. S. Dorrance - Страница 7

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From facts later learned, Dolores was able at this point to shift the viewpoint of her earth story from performer to audience. The incidents of that first morning’s payment in service of her financial debt she presented through the eyes of John Calvin Cabot, sole scion of a seventh generation of New Yorkers and a financier who, through his inherent aversion to idleness, was rated many times a millionaire.

The Cabots were late motoring down town, having been detained at their upper Fifth Avenue home by a domestic contretemps. The distress of it still hardened the lines of the man’s somewhat grim-featured face. Through the downward rush of many blocks, he pondered the first personal favor he had considered asking his wife in years.

“Catherine,” he said at last, “I wish you’d come with me to some toy shop and help in the selection.”

Catherine Cabot glanced into the limousine mirror, hung near the vase of her favorite yellow orchids, “to double,” as she put it, their beauty. She looked a good deal like the orchids, golden-haired, delicate of outline, fragile of texture, flower-eyed. John glanced into the mirror, too, rather than straight at her. During their ten years together he had come to prefer the reflection of his wife to the original. It was softer.

“My day is so full. John, you order any toys you like. Have them sent by special messenger.”

“You don’t get my idea, Catherine. Jack would be touched and perhaps punished more than in any other way for his outbreak this morning, if you selected a birthday present for him yourself.”

“Can’t you tell him that I did, anyhow?”

“I could, yes. But I won’t. I expected you’d suggest that lie.”

“John! I sometimes think Jackie inherited his viciousness straight from you.”

A moment the man considered this effective, if unconvincing reproach of the mother of his only child.

“I wish you could feel some of my indignation over that statement,” he made quiet comment. “Now and then you have caprices for the most unique frankness I ever have noticed in a woman. Tell me, do you have no yearnings whatever over our unfortunate boy?”

She looked interested, as if at a compliment.

“I pride myself on my frankness. Of course any woman has a natural affection for her own child. But, as you know, I am a beauty lover. It is not my fault that I can’t love Jack as I should if he looked like me, or even you.”

“Perhaps, Catherine, he inherited something from you. Perhaps he also is a beauty lover. Should you consider the suggestion that the ‘viciousness’ you accredit to me may be in him an extreme case of nerves—of a suffering over his deformity older than you’d expect at eight years?”

She was thumbing the pages of her morocco-bound engagement book and omitted to reply.

With a sadness too complete for contempt, he added: “You often have wondered where Jack’s ugliness comes from. I’ll tell you—from the ill-favored spirit of our marriage.”

Catherine looked startled. Then she looked indignant. After that, with a sigh of long-sufferance, she looked very sweet.

In a voice gentle as his had been—“Since you take my refusal so hard as to resort to your semi-occasional marital recriminations, dear John, I’ll yield. I will go with you to the toy-shop, although probably I’ll have to break a luncheon engagement in consequence. You can’t ever say that I am unwilling to do my part. Just a minute until I see what I have on to-day.”

Soon and coaxingly she glanced up at him. Her upper lip shortened over mouse-like teeth which gleamed, sharp and white, between their crimson guards. Even with the husband who claimed to know her, Catherine never was chary of her ingenuous, confiding smiles.

“It’s your turn to make a concession. On our way to the toy-shop, stop in with me at a showing of underwear at Seff’s. It lasts only from twelve to one and I’ll miss it if I go further down town. Even puritanical you may be amused. Seff is rather sensational in his advertising, but he does import lovely things. Here is the invitation for the latest of his shows. Do you mind?”

She handed him a card, engraved and dictioned in the very best form. She looked rather pleased than otherwise at the manner of her husband’s consent.

“How like you, Catherine, to make your concessions C. O. D.! For Jack’s sake, I shall try not to ‘mind.’”

A flutter of interest greeted the Cabot’s appearance on the top floor of the lingerie establishment, for no more discussed pair trod the made-up scenery of the ways and by-ways of Gotham’s rich.

Catherine, despite the irregularity of that short upper lip and the tortured, metallic brilliancy of the yellow of her hair and the demand for public notice made by her clothes, often was pronounced the most beautiful matron “among those present”; at least, always was conspicuous. To-day her perquisitory air of excelling even her splendid mink coat won her distinction in the fashionable gathering of many women and a few men.

John—as his wife was given to explaining—she had married for his looks. She called him the “handsomest unhandsome man” she knew. Tall, clean-shaved, black-haired, with dark eyes of a singular intensity, he wore a manner as unpretentious as his clothes. This was heightened to-day by an air of detachment from the enforced situation.

Above greetings and introductions, tintillated comment over the setting of Seff’s top floor. Arranged as a miniature auditorium, its rows of ashwood chairs faced a small stage, equipped with footlights. Wrought on the gray velvet curtain that concealed the exact nature of this adventure in advertising was the title—

THE LITTLE OLD LADY OF LORRAINE

At the twelfth chime of a concealed clock, an orchestral whisper of the Marseillaise caused the audience, creatures of habit, to seek their places. John Cabot, although offended as always by the commercialization of patriotism in cafés and music halls and the like, stood in front of the prominent chairs to which an usher had led his wife and himself. Those about him also stood, if with treasonable sighs; as the music died away relievedly sank into their chairs.

The curtain parted. Vincent Seff appeared and lifted the right of his artistic hands.

“Patrons—may I say friends?” he began when their mannerly palm-patting had ceased.

The silence of curiosity greeted his hesitant, yet pleasantly delivered announcement. Only Mrs. Hutton understood his need of courage, his desire for pseudo-sincerity. Virulently though she appeared to condemn him, she evidently wished him to succeed in this, his monster imposition. She had poured the stiff drink which lubricated his voice to that especial smoothness. She stood in the improvised wings, an expression which would have defied a mental analyst hardening her face, as she listened to the delivery of the brief speech which she had helped him prepare.

“Always have we admired the lingerie from Lorraine, you and I. But how many of you have stopped to wonder whose hands are responsible for its textile exquisiteness, its chic and the needlework that makes it more lovely than any other in the world? With the many changes which war has wrought, came the fear that our American fair would be reduced to less attractive underwear. Imagine, then, my joy when there arrived recently, unsolicited and in trust, a shipment from my little old lady of Lorraine.”

The speaker smiled upon the interested faces below in humid, self-deprecatory appeal.

“The pluck as well as the embroidery of this maker was, all through the war, a marvel to the trade. For weeks her home was under enemy fire and the grand dame herself in constant danger of her devoted life. But alone in her cellar workshop she plied her needle as industriously as the Boches laid down their shells. Such heroism swells the heart and chokes the voice.”

After a brief substantiating pause, the shopman continued, as if glorying in his show of emotion.

“Why did she do it? Not for herself, surely, since the value of her work would have counted little against the loss of her life. Patrons—friends—she did it for France. Every mite that she earned was tossed into the coffers of her country. And now that the reconstruction period is on, she still finds work for her withered hands to do—still not for herself—but for the war orphans of the French. Every cent which this shipment yields will be spent on children whom the great struggle has deprived of their natural protectors. Not even a commission will be subtracted. No price has been set upon the things which I am about to show you. I feel that they are priceless. In the name of that little old lady of Lorraine I shall give them to you for what you offer and have no fear for the net results. To show them from boxes on my counters—the mere thought has seemed unworthy the trust placed in me. Will you try to like the more unique method which I have devised?”

Bowing deeply and repeatedly in response to perfunctory applause, Vincent Seff backed from view. Orchestral whispers of the Marche Lorraine accompanied a flurry of exclamation. The gray velvet curtain parted; lifted.

The set was a bedchamber. Through a half-open door showed the suggestion of a tiled bathroom. Another door and the two windows were closed. Once the eyes became accustomed to the indeterminate light, they made out rare hangings and furniture that looked to wear the stamp of Louis XIV. Beneath the satin coverlet of the bed, an elongated lump suggested a human figure asleep. Upon one pillow a lace cap indicated rather than covered a mass of murky hair.

For minutes the orchestral rendition of Schumann’s Traumerei was the only action of the piece. In time the pantomime of a morning’s awakening began—a shudder of the coverlet, a stretching of legs beneath and rounded arms above. The face which uplifted from its background of locks and lace suggested a loathful emergence from dreams. With some degree of energy a hand reached out and pressed a bell. That accomplished, the luxurious sleeper slipped beneath the eider-down and again drowsed off.

The entrance of a soft-treading, black-garbed, middle-aged maid brought diversion. Her lips moved in a supposed good-morning. She drew up the window blinds, flooding the room with light. Her disappearance into the bathroom was followed by the plash of water in a tub.

Her simulation of annoyance on returning to the bedside, to find the dreamer reclaimed, was a nice histrionic bit. She reminded; urged; finally shook. At last the lady of lethargy, smiling deliciously, aroused to a sitting posture. The thrown coverlet bared two rosy feet for the enclosure of satin mules. She deserted the nest of the night, crossed the room front stage and stood with arms uplifted as an aid to her yawns.

The spotlight found her some seconds before the maid could throw over her a bathrobe of silk so pliant that it might have been drawn through a bracelet.

Inhalations and forward-leanings moved the audience.

Indeed, there was cause for comment. The daring of Seff in his presentation, the novelty of the crêpe sleeping-gown which, innocent of filet or ribbons, depended solely upon its Empire lines and girdling silken cord—even the type of the model was rare.

Pretty of face beyond question, with a luminous sort of pallor, red lips delicately full and purplish, child-wide eyes, she stood revealing through the sheer a body both slender and rounded. Discussions of her as frank as they were low-pitched proved that the pantomime was “taking” from the start.

John Cabot was of the few who suppressed remark, but none watching him could have doubted his interest.

Catherine curved an amused smile at him.

“Et tu, Brute,” she murmured.

At first from natural endowment and later from deliberate effort, John always had believed in the virtue of women until compelled to disbelieve. To-day he was studying neither the exquisite, hand-stitched garment nor the “points” of the manikin who wore it.

Had he really seen lines of suffering at the corners of that smiling mouth? Had he imagined a look of distress in eyes which momentarily had met, but now evaded his? He was no sentimentalist. Yet he wondered.

Vincent Seff, from a chair at the far right of the first row, looked entertained by his own entertainment. He sat slouched forward, knees crossed, elbow on them, chin in palm, eyes up-gazing. A flush was on his rather anaemic skin. Occasionally his cheeks twitched in an odd, carefully controlled smirk. He nodded, now and then, as if well pleased.

John, glancing toward the shopman, saw the tip of his tongue appear and wipe both lips. About Seff, too, he wondered.

From the wings, Mrs. Hutton watched all—the play, the “house,” the man who had conceived and perpetrated the coup and the newspaper reporters upon whom he depended to give it city-wide circulation. She, however, did not wonder about Seff. Only too well she understood why he was off guard at the moment, showing tendencies which, ordinarily, his policy would have concealed.

She did not wonder, no. But she feared for him as much as, with a reaction that crushed the fear, she hotly, contemptuously resented him. As she studied the look fixed upon the girl whom he had chosen at first glance from a room full of attractive applicants, almost did she hate him. The chains of the hideous relationship which shackled together him and her seemed to clank as she turned from his unconscious pantomime to that which he had foreplanned.

The playlet proceeded.

The model trailed her bath robe to the door of the tiled room, there to throw it off and disappear within. Presumedly she plunged into her tub. At any rate, her next appearance, although fleeting, enhanced that impression. Just a glimpse of her was caught, as the maid pushed wider the door to supply a bath towel, but a glimpse that brought gasps from the audience sharp as though they, too, had taken a cold plunge.

With hair twisted in a Grecian knot atop her head, she showed for the brief moment before the door was closed, garbed only in the flimsiest of silken undervests. By comparison she looked amply clad when, some seconds later, she reëntered the bedroom, stockinged, slippered and girdled, her outer garment a confection of the chemise persuasion which laid claim to modesty only in its blush hue. The length lack of this costume was remedied by the maid. After a chase whose obvious object was further to show the cut and texture of the display, the woman succeeded in noosing the head of her charge with a hemstitched petticoat.

Upon the door sounded a knock of that portentiousness met only on the stage. In effective dismay, the manikin paused front stage, the spotlight obligingly following her example. The maid, moved by belated prudery, scurried to a closet, from which, after a search whose duration would not have recommended her either for system or dispatch, she emerged with a negligee that matched the morning set. This she draped about her young mistress and stood off to admire with a deliberation accented by repetitions of the portentious knock.

When the door at last was opened, expectation of the unusual was gainsaid by the man-servant who laid several ribbon-bedizened boxes upon the couch and departed. Mistress and maid became animated by curiosity. The parcels were undone and their contents examined—a dozen sets of lingerie only less lovely than the one worn by the model in that they were less attractively displayed.

These still lay about the room on chairs, tables and bed when, at entertainment’s end, Vincent Seff himself appeared before the footlights. His face was noticeably flushed, his voice thicker than before in his invitation that all ascend the stage and personally inspect the shipment from Lorraine.

If applause meant appreciation, he must have been gratified. And, in fact, the tribute was sincere. The hour’s advertising whimsy had been amusing and artistic. Commendatory chatter lifted as the spectators disturbed their chairs.

John Cabot was preoccupied by an analysis of the look seen on the face of the master of ceremonies, a look which had intensified as Seff studied, not so much the piece as the star. Since a certain incidental which the financier had noticed, the elaborate exhibition had become offensive to him.

In the manikin’s small tussle over the adjustment of her petticoat, just when she had been laughing with most abandon, two somethings—gleaming, small yet large in suggestion—had dropped from her eyes and been absorbed by the crêpe.

That she could weep for shame, while successfully playing her frolicsome part, meant a great deal. Many young girls might have wept before entering upon such a career. Most could be imagined as weeping afterward. But to realize and suffer enough for tears in what evidently was an initial step—Although Catherine often had told John that he was losing his sense of humor, nobody could have declared him deficient in vision.

He was recalled to the immediate present by the lifted voice of his wife addressing Seff.

“I will give five hundred dollars,” she was saying, “for the set shown on the model. The things are exquisite and the charity deserves response.”

“My dear Mrs. Cabot!” The shopman over-accented that familiarity which the lofty seem so to appreciate from traffic-policemen, waiters, hotel clerks and the like. “The identical set is yours. I thank you from my heart and from the hearts of those orphans of France.”

“I’ll take them with me,” stipulated Catherine. “Have the box put in my car, please. And, Seff, I am in something of a hurry.”

The crispness of her conclusion was like frost on a sunlit window pane. The merchant showed himself nipped by it.

“I’ll attend to your order at once, Mrs. Cabot.”

Disregarding the importunities of less prominent would-be purchasers, he hurried back to the stage.

“Mary—Mary!” His voice was pitched several notes above its wonted mellifluence.

Mrs. Hutton appeared.

“Take charge out here, Mary,” he directed. “Have the ladies step up and examine the lot. Every garment has the inimitable chic attained only by the French, and the sizes vary, so that—— You know, Mary. Take anything that is offered. Such patrons aren’t going to fail our lady of Lorraine.”

Far too elated was he to notice the composite of his chief aide’s expression as she observed his uneven manner, his flushed face and the glitter of his eyes. In the same thought, she sneered, pitied and suspected. She turned to attend the gathering patrons.

Seff had not noticed, but another had. John Cabot had followed to the stage and now stood contemplating the closed door that gave upon the suppositious bathroom. Through it the shopman had disappeared. A mental reminder that the whole circumstance was doubtless gross chicanery and, at the worst, none of his affair, seemed somehow dampened by his memory of those two small, enlightening somethings which he had seen drip from the eyes of a laughing girl. From within he could hear fragments in Seff’s thick tones.

“A hit.... Five hundred for the set you adorn.... Let me help, you dream.... No time—she’s in a hurry.... I will.... Hush, dear heart, they’ll hear you.”

Ensued a duet of his chuckles and gasped protests in a softer voice. The end unmistakably was a scuffle.

John turned away, disagreeably impressed. Many of the fashionables had ascended the stage, where Mrs. Hutton was offering the Seff confections for sale. He advised himself that he must be imagining the alert turn of the forewoman’s head toward the closed door and the annoyance that falsified her smile. Then he flouted the advice. He didn’t imagine—he saw. The woman was alert and annoyed.

The conclusion was substantiated. Sounds that might have been laughter or sobs percolated through the key-hole. Rasped gutterals interrupted, plead, threatened. There followed a rushing sound and a thump against the inside of the door.

John recrossed the stage. As he hesitated, he saw Mrs. Hutton drop the garment under discussion and approach him.

Next moment a scream rent all uncertainty.

The most cynical scarcely could have mistaken the cry for anything but one of terror, even without the words—intense, jumbled, regardless—that translated it.

“No.... No.... I hate you.... Father, help me—save me!”

Before Mrs. Hutton could force the resisting handle of the door, John Cabot had put his shoulder against the panel and broken the lock.