Читать книгу Running Sands - Reginald Wright Kauffman - Страница 8

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Holt's jaw fell.

"I beg your pardon," he stammered; "but I didn't know you even knew her."

"I have never met her," said Stainton.

"What? Oh, quit your jollying."

"I have never met her."

"Then—well, you don't need a drink, after all."

"After all—that is, after the performance," said Stainton, "I shall explain. Just now I want you to take me to your friends' box and present me all round."

Holt recalled having heard that certain of the Cæsars had been driven mad by their sudden acquisition of power. He recalled having read of stock-gamblers that went crazy when they achieved a great coup. He recalled having seen the Las Animas country, when the Las Animas country was really a prospectors' bedlam, one gold-seeker that had lost his wits in what were then the vast solitudes of the San Juan Triangle. All of these recollections rushed in detail through a brain warped by a few years of the most unnatural side of city life, and following them came the realisation, as the newspapers had brought it to him, of Stainton's unexpected success. Stainton had always, when Holt knew him in the West, been unlike his fellows, a man aloof. Stainton had once, Holt recollected, been practical, silent, slow; now, having come upon a gold mine after twenty-five years of adversity, in a country more desolate than the San Juan had ever been, this man was powerful, almost in a day, rich. He wondered if—

But Stainton was once more smiling his old self-reliant smile.

"No," he was saying, "I am not crazy, and I am not drunk. It sounds queer, I know——"

"Sounds! Sounds——"

"But I am sane and sober. Come along and, honestly, I'll explain—later."

"You can't," said Holt.

"Can't what?"

"Explain. Such things can't be explained. This would balk Teddy himself."

Nevertheless, in the end Holt did what he was accustomed to doing, which is to say that he did as he was told, and before the curtain had risen again Stainton was in the agonies of the introduction.

"Mr. Holt has just been telling us of your splendid bravery and how you saved his life," said Mrs. Newberry.

She was a stout, uncertain nonentity, whose chief endeavours in her narrow world were to seem as slim as she would like to be and as certain of her social position as was proper for a woman of moderate antecedents, who had married a membership in Manhattan's three most difficult clubs. What, of course, she had been thinking was not at all about Stainton's bravery: it was, rather, that Stainton had become quite rich quite romantically, and that he was not the rough diamond which tradition demanded.

Stainton took all this for granted and, knowing not what to say in reply, bowed and said nothing.

"Glad to know you," was what Newberry said: and he presently added: "The cast's in rotten voice to-night. Sit down."

Newberry, the sleek, weary-eyed elderly man, whom Stainton had barely noticed in his first survey of the box, was the membership in New York's three most difficult clubs. He had inherited money without brains, had sought to adjust matters by marrying brains without money, and had been intellectually disappointed.

To him in turn Stainton bowed in silence. His eyes were on the girl, and the girl's slim back was set resolutely toward him.

There was an awkward pause. Nobody seemed to remember Muriel. At length Holt, still in terror, blundered forward.

"Miss Muriel——" he began.

The girl turned. The glory of her warm eyes brushed Stainton's face and passed it.

"I am Miss Stannard," she said. "It is good of you to join us. Do sit down, Mr. Stainton."

Stainton sat down. He sat down directly behind her, and at last, politely unencouraging though she at first managed to remain, he succeeded in gaining some sort of conversational opening.

What did he say there, for the early ten minutes of their talk? He was unable at any later date to recall one word of it. Everything, he was sure, that was clumsy. As a matter of fact, his own speech was probably by no means so uncouth as his torturing fancy declared it, hers by no means so brilliant as his memory, which retained no souvenirs, insisted. More likely than not, their talk fulfilled the requirements of convention. Convention requires the commonplace.

Nobody paid any but sporadic attention to the opera. To the left of the girl and Stainton, Mrs. Newberry and her husband, a Dido matched to a Don Juan, exchanged low monosyllables with each other and darting exchanges of talk, like rallies at badminton, with Holt. Sometimes they were ill-mannered enough to converse in whispers, near Stainton's shoulder, but mostly Mrs. Newberry was laboriously conventional, out of a constant fear of being adjudged plebeian, and now and again, to Stainton's huge disgust, she would lean to confer a word on her niece and her niece's companion.

"I hope you care for opera," she said to Stainton in one of these sallies.

"I hope to," replied the miner, guardedly.

"Though of course," pursued Mrs. Newberry, "this is rather an off evening. The cast led us to expect so much, but they all seem to be in such poor voice."

Stainton made a civil noise.

"Apart from the music," his hostess continued, "I dare say that the stage doesn't appeal to you."

"I have had very little chance to know it," said Stainton, "but I am fond of it."

"Indeed?" Mrs. Newberry's tone indicated that she was mildly interested in meeting a tamed adventurer. "But I should suppose that it would all seem so false to you. It must seem false, I should think, to anyone that has known so much of—of Real Life, you know; and dear Mr. Holt has given us such descriptions of your romantic career."

Stainton's disavowal of this apparent praise of his career was earnest, but not convincing.

"My life has seemed dull to me," he said, with a deadly glance at dear Mr. Holt, grinning in the background.

Holt tried to change the subject.

"At all events, this is a romantic episode for you, isn't it?" he asked.

"What do you mean?" snapped Stainton.

"Oh," Holt hurried to explain, "all this." He indicated the audience with the sweep of a plump hand.

"It is new," granted Stainton.

Holt edged his chair forward.

"Of course it is, and whatever's new's romantic. That's all romance is, isn't it, Miss Muriel?"

The girl had been listening to the music, her dark eyes, veiled by their long lashes, fixed on nothing.

"Is it?" she enquired.

"Sure it is," said Holt. "Now, Jim, you're in the crowd you read about. You ought to get us to point 'em out to you."

"The woman just next," whispered Mrs. Newberry—"the one in forget-me-not blue, draped with chiffon and crystal trimmings—don't you see? The bodice is finished with crystal fringe——"

"I'm afraid——" said Stainton.

Preston Newberry explained.

"Girl with yellow hair," said he.

"Oh!" said Stainton.

"That," Mrs. Newberry went on, "is Dora van Rooz. She was a Huyghens, you know."

"I'm afraid I don't read the society-columns," Stainton apologised.

"Dora's not confining herself to them," said Newberry. "She and van Rooz are calling each other names in the divorce-court now."

"And just beyond," Mrs. Newberry ran on, "in the American beauty satin veiled in ninon—there: her waist is embroidered with beads and rows of silver lace; you can't see very well in this light."

"Girl with the fine nose," Preston elucidated.

"I see."

"That's Mrs. Billy Merton. You must have heard of her. She divorced Clem Davis last month and married Billy the next day."

She rattled on for some time, ceasing her chatter only for brief pauses, at intervals unconsciously regulated by her long acquaintance with the opera and its finer moments. The strains of the beautiful music seemed to Stainton to be a loveliness unworthily draping, on the stage, the story of a base man's perfidy; and the pleasant indiscretions of the fashionable opera-gowns to be clothing, in the audience, none but women that had already stripped their souls in one or other of the scandalous rituals imposed by modern law for the dissolution of the most private of relationships.

He made but brief answers, and he was unfeignedly relieved when his poor responsiveness forced Mrs. Newberry to retreat and left him free again with Muriel. He looked frank admiration at her level brows, her dark eyes, and her full lips. Here, he assured himself, was innocence: her face was her young soul made visible.

Perhaps, as she pretended, it was his distress at her aunt's garrulity; for it must have been evident to her. Perhaps it was the dropped hint of his adventurous life; for women are all Desdemonas at heart. Perhaps it was only his patent worship of her beauty; since we are all assailable through this sort of compliment to whatever of our charms we are least responsible for. Perhaps it was all or none of these things. In any case, as Mrs. Newberry retired to a continuation of her gossip with Holt, broken only by the terser remarks of Newberry, Muriel bent a little closer to Stainton.

"You don't care a bit about such things, do you?" she enquired.

Her tone was lower than when she had last spoken. It was low enough to draw the curtain of confidence between them and their companions, with that subtle quality that takes account of but one listener.

Stainton's pulses leaped.

"About what things?" was all that he was at first able to say.

The girl smiled. Stainton thought her smile wistful.

"The sort that fill these boxes," said Muriel: "the sort, I dare say, that uncle and aunt and Mr. Holt and I are."

He heard a shimmering sprite of regret in her voice: regret not that he did not care for these people, but that these people should be what they were.

"Don't include yourself in this lot," he answered.

He was immediately aware that his reply was scarcely courteous to his hosts, and so was she.

"You are hard on them," she said.

"Hadn't you just been hard on them, too?" he countered.

"Ah, yes, but they are my relatives. At least Uncle Preston and Aunt Ethel are. Family criticism is permitted everywhere."

He did not like her schoolgirlish attempt at epigram, and he showed his disapproval.

"Now you are trying to be of a piece with them," he said.

The glance that she gave him was no longer calm: there was a flash of flame in it.

"You talk as if you had known me for years."

"For thirty years."

"Yes?" She did not understand.

"I have known you for thirty years."

What sort of man was this? "But I am only eighteen," she said.

"Nevertheless, I have known you for thirty years."

She gave an empty glance at her programme.

"Since you were in pinafores," she said, still looking down.

Stainton bit his lip. There had been no malice in her tone, yet all children are cruel, he reflected, and the modern child's cruelty is ingenious. Was there anything in that speech for her to be sorry for, and, if there were, would she be sorry?

"Some day," he said quietly, "I shall try to explain."

She regarded him again, this time with altered gaze.

"Some day," she said, "I hope you will tell me about that romantic career that Aunt Ethel was talking of."

Was she sorry? Was she interested?

"It's not romantic," he protested. "It isn't in the least romantic. It's just a story of hard work and disappointment, and hard work and success."

"But Mr. Holt told us that in one month you were condemned to death for piracy in Central America and acted—what do they call it?—floor-manager for a firemen's ball in Denver."

"George has been dipping his brush in earthquake and eclipse. He never knew me till he met me in the West five or six years ago. I was condemned for piracy in absentio by a Spanish-American court because I had a job as cook on a filibustering ship that was wrecked off Yucatan and never got any nearer to shore, and I was floor-manager at the firemen's ball because—well, because I happened to belong to a fire-company."

"But you did have adventures in Alaska and Colorado and New Mexico?"

"Oh, I've knocked about a bit."

"And——" Her lips were parted, her eyes large. She no longer heard the voices on the stage. "Did you ever——Mr. Holt said you once shot——"

"Yes," said Stainton, gravely, "I think I once killed a man."

She clasped her hands on the railing of the box.

"Tell me about it," she commanded. Her tone was a compliment.

"There's nothing to tell. It was in an Alaskan mining-camp. The man was drunk and armed. He attacked me, and I had to defend myself. He shot twice before I shot at all, but I hit and he didn't. I'm sorry I had to do it to remain alive, but I'm not sorry to have remained alive."

"Oh," she cried, petulantly, "you are so matter-of-fact!"

"Not nearly so matter-of-fact as you suppose. Not in the important things. In business, in everyday life, a man has to be matter-of-fact. It's the only method to get what you want."

"Do you really think so?" She appealed to him now as to a well of knowledge. Perhaps, he reflected, she had about her ordinarily few wells to which she was permitted so to appeal. "Then maybe that is why I don't get what I want."

"Surely you have all you want."

She shook her raven hair. "Not any of it."

"And you want?"

"Lots of things."

"For instance?"

She smiled, but was firm. "No, I sha'n't tell you."

"Not one?"

"Not now."

"Perhaps they are not always the sort of things that you ought to have."

"Yes, they are."

"All of them?"

Her nod was positive: "All."

"But, whether you ought to have them or not, are you equally sure that they would be worth possessing?"

"How can I know till I have had them?"

"Easily. There are two ways of learning the value of anything we want: one is to get it, the other to lose it."

"We're crabbed against the things we miss."

"Are we? I don't know. Even if we are, there's a good deal to be said in favour of the comfort that lies in the philosophy of sour grapes."

She did not wholly follow him, but she was clear on the chief point. "It doesn't make me feel any more contented," she said, "to believe that I wouldn't have been happy if I had got something that I wanted to get and didn't."

Stainton shook his head.

"Some time," he said, "that belief will be your greatest comfort."

Muriel looked away. She was revolving this problem in her youthful mind, and when she replied it was by the argumentum ad hominem, which is an excellent argument and generally ab femina.

"You have been successful," she began. "If you had not been, would it have made you more contented to believe that success wouldn't have brought you happiness?"

"I was thinking," said Stainton, "of something in the past, something that I didn't get, and something that was not a business matter." He spoke slowly.

She understood.

"I'm sorry," she said, softly.

"No, no," he smiled. "In point of fact, whenever I failed in prospecting I did try to think that money would not have made me happy. But you may be right, for I always started prospecting again."

"And now?"

"Oh, now," said Stainton, with a concluding smile, "I am trying hard to resist the manifold temptations of good fortune."

As he spoke, the curtain was falling on the tragic termination of Madama Butterfly. The Newberrys and their guests rose as the curtain fell, and Stainton held her cloak for Muriel. Newberry was gasping his way into his own coat, and Holt was holding for Mrs. Newberry a gorgeous Japanese kimono absurdly reminiscent of the opera to which they had not listened; but Muriel's cloak was a simple and beautiful garment in Stainton's eyes, a grey garment lined with satin of the colour of old-fashioned roses. As she got into it—"Oh, it's quite easy," she said—his awkward hand was brushed by her cheek, and he bent his head, certain of being unobserved in that hurry to depart wherewith the average American opera-audience expresses its opinion of the average operatic performance, and inhaled the perfume of her hair. His hands shook.

With Holt he saw their hosts to their motor.

"Aren't you coming home with us for supper?" asked Mrs. Newberry.

But Holt, who was abominably curious, wished to quiz Stainton, and Stainton, with the wisdom of his years, knew that enough had been done for an initial evening.

"No, thanks," Stainton allowed Holt to say; "we've just met after five years, you know, and we've got no end of things to talk about."

Ethel Newberry leaned forward and pressed Stainton's hand.

"You will look us up soon?" she politely enquired.

"Indeed, yes," said Stainton.

"Always glad to see you," said Newberry.

Muriel said nothing, but Stainton pressed warmly the little hand that she unreservedly offered.

"Good-night," said Stainton.

"Good-night," said Muriel.

No, thought Stainton, as he reluctantly turned away with Holt, in spite of her caustic reference to his age, she must be merely an impulsive, innocent girl. He was glad to come to this determination, glad, however, simply because it was what he concluded must be a final answer to a question that had already become annoying.