The Magpies Nest (29 page)

"They do exist," she reflected. "I wonder, now, if some venerable Aunt Euphemia, who remembers Washington Irving distinctly, and has no living relatives except an asthmatic lapdog, lives there, a little dried-up old kernel in a big, dim shell. She takes the
Post,
and drives in an open carriage with a matched pair and an apoplectic coachman—I've seen her second cousin sometimes, coming out to take the air on the Avenue, with her maid and her butler and her stick to help her across the pavement to the carriage. And I might be living in Mars for all she knows of me, or ever could know; our lives are as remote; we could as soon touch each other as the poles. How disturbing Heaven will be to most of us when we get there; I'm afraid Aunt Euphemia will call it 'very mixed," and regret her pew at St. Simeon Stylites, or wherever it is. I'd rather be me, after all." She walked on, still smiling. Her conceit pleased her, though it was far, far from the truth.

For she had been looking at Grace Sturtevant's house.

Hurrying, for she had been out longer than she should, and still dreaming, she walked into the once familiar portals of the hotel before she realised she had transgressed and taken the main entrance. So she almost ran toward the elevator, not wishing to turn back. Someone called to her, but she did not hear, and then a boy in buttons touched her respectfully on the sleeve. The clerk was leaning over his desk, holding out two letters to her.

"You haven't been in for a long time, Mrs. Angell," he said. He had never seen her, capped and aproned, in the upper hall; he remembered her first stay there, a winter ago. "This came quite lately, though. You told us to hold your mail?"

"Yes, I did; thank you," she stammered slightly, took the letters, and vanished. For one mad moment her heart had leaped to her throat. But neither bore Nick's writing. One was in Mrs. Hamilton's hand; the other unfamiliar. She opened the last one first, standing in the middle of her room and dropping gloves and envelope on the floor.

"Evelyn Curtis." She had almost forgotten Evelyn Curtis, having lost her home address.

Sitting on the bed, she read the letter a second time, very carefully, as if there might be a trick in it somewhere.

"I have looked and looked for you," it ran, "but no one could tell me anything; Mr. Kennard said you had been ill and never came back, and I am leaving this letter here as a last resort; they said you might call. I hope you get it soon. Those pictures of yours —I am almost as excited as if they were mine—I meant to do something with them before I left, but you know I went home unexpectedly. So I took them to the Bancrofts'; they get out millions of children's books, and I met Mr. Bancroft abroad. He said they were so quaint, so original, and he has a series of stories he wants done right away, and he said maybe he could arrange to have them run in the
Planet,
or syndicate them. I am sure he can. The stories, too —can't you furnish the stories to go with them? Come and see me at once, when you get this; I'll take you down to see him. Make him bid up; he wants the stuff, and I told him you were getting quite well established; I hope it is true. Do come soon." And so on, to the same fortunate purport.

"Soon?" But instantly. She thrust Mrs. Hamilton's letter into her bodice unopened, and rushed madly down the hall, waving the one from Evelyn, seeking Mrs. Merrick.

Mrs. Merrick, in the linen room, looked up at her cyclonic entrance with an attempt at severity.

"Goodness, I'm glad you're back," she said. "Ida is sick again—I believe that girl
likes
cramps—and if you just would, I wish you'd take her place this evening. There are four rooms waiting to be done right this minute and—what? Oh, now, Mrs. Angell,
I
don't see how I possibly can let you go off again.
I
know, but..."

Hope talked her down by sheer lung power, and began to explain joyously.

"Well, isn't that lovely?" said Mrs. Merrick, her kind, homely face lighting with enthusiasm. "Go on. I'll do the rooms myself. Course I knew you'd go sometime, but I hoped it wouldn't be soon. I've been glad to have you."

"What should I have done without you?"' said Hope, conscience-stricken. "I will take Ida's turn."

"You will not," said Mrs. Merrick firmly. "Never keep good luck waiting, child. Run along." She put aside an armful of white things to kiss Hope, who submitted politely. Touched by the disinterestedness of these two women—Evelyn and Mrs. Merrick— Hope went back to her room, and remembered Mrs. Hamilton's unopened letter as she put on her coat.

It was largely made of good wishes and inquiries. Hope had not written for long, and it seemed Mary Dark also wondered at her silence; several letters had gone unanswered. Mary was still with Mrs. Hamilton, but might not be much longer; an exasperatingly inconclusive bit of information. There was hardly any other news, except of the children, and the growth of the town, until the last paragraph. That was evidently an afterthought. That pretty Emily Edgerton, Mrs. Hamilton had heard, or read, was being married during the month, and in New York! The bridegroom was of New York, and since Emily could hardly be said to have a home—why not, Hope wondered, and conjectured an open break—the wedding was to be at the home of one of the bridegroom's relatives. Perhaps Hope would be there! At that simple supposition Hope looked at her cap, lying on the floor, and grinned. She recalled the day of the month with an effort. Emily must have been married yesterday.

And Conroy Edgerton, quite as certainly, must be in New York.

Even so, he seemed a million years away, with the old mad days, when she wanted the world and he was going to give it to her. Mad days, and merry. Had she been like that? Quite seriously she went to the mirror; for when one remembers old days one feels no longer young. And she thought she must wear a different face now, unrealising how much she was the same—the girl who had helped one man to play with fire; the woman who had walked through it to reach another she wanted.

And here was Conroy Edgerton just around the corner, in at the death again, in a sense. She seemed destined to be shipwrecked at his feet. He had been so kind that other time. What would it be like to see him again?

Not difficult, at least. For all this was New York, and Mrs. Hamilton had naturally credited him with no address; he was no needle in a haystack. By no stretch of the imagination could one consider him a needle! Knowing New York a little, and him a great deal, she would have wagered her new-found luck on her ability to find him. If he hadn't already started home, or if he wasn't stopping with some other tiresome relative. She quickened her pace up the Avenue, as if he might make good his escape before she reached Thirty-fourth Street, and Peacock Alley. Having once thought of seeing him, homesickness, loneliness, swept her towards him with the force of floods breaking bounds. The revolving doors let her into the huge brown stone hostelry with a seeming of added haste, impelled her on past the rows of gorgeous, somnolently watchful women and plump, prosperous men, till she came to the desk. She wrote her name on a card—"H. Angell," as she was wont to sign her drawings, quite forgetting that Edgerton might not recall her by any such cognomen—with a line asking if he could come down—and waited.

The close, warm, scented air made her sleepy; she leaned on the arm of her great carved and gilded chair, her face shadowed by her hat, studying with an impersonal eye the people who quested past her. So it was she looked on Edgerton first, hardly realising his identity, as he came toward her down the strip of red carpet, looking over her head. Hewas just like all these other solid, comfortable, middle-aged men: there were thousands of him. Until she stood up. directly under his nose, and held out her hand and called him by name; then he was different to her. Because he was kind still: his shrewd eyes, after one moment's amazement, still enshrined her—and were sorry for her! She had never known before that he had always been sorry for her; she had not known that he was so clever as that. Her heart, which had felt as if constricted by invisible hands since Nick's vanishment, seemed to escape and unfold, and her frozen sensibilities melted. He was speaking, enfolding her gloved hands in his warm cushioned clasp.

"You!"
he said. "Did you know I'd been looking for you? And here you are by accident—I just came downstairs to meet a man—no, was that your card? By Jiminy, I didn't recognise it. Come in here where we can talk." He swept her away and commandeered a headwaiter, who bestowed them in an obscure, palm-sheltered alcove and stood at bland attention.

"But I've only a minute," said Hope. "I don't want to eat. Give me—oh, give me some tea," she said desperately, though it was six-thirty. "I've an engagement with a girl right away. And I must go back to work."

"What work?"

She spread her pretty hands, unspoiled by a mere week's labour, on the cloth.

"I am a maid at the Alhambra Hotel."

This with an air so demure that a wiser man than he would never have guessed she was taking in, at an eyeful, all the resplendency of his diamonds, the fineness of his linen, the creased newness of his suit, and mischievously pelting this brutal fact of her manual toil at them, his insignia of ease—like a small boy's snowball aimed irresistibly at a silk hat.

"What?" Now he appraised her in turn, for confirmation. "I don't believe it." But he did; he believed that hat of hers. "Good heavens, why?"

"Oh, bad luck, bad management. Better than starving."

"Or..." He stopped.

She shook her head.

"Not that. Expensive, but I like to own myself. I suppose you'd think you might have been to blame?" Some such matter, truly. She said cryptically: "How we all flatter ourselves! I think I never had a better friend than you. If I have had no success, it was not for lack of the best counsel. Besides, perhaps I have," A childish pleasure in "saving it up" made her defer her very new news. "Why don't you tell me something about your own self?"

"Emily's married," he said, with doting regret. "Got a good fellow. They sailed for France this morning; biggest suite on the
Mauretania.
Now, look here, Hope, we've got to change things a bit for you."

"What shall we do?" she asked, gravely mischievous. "We failed once, you know. You don't want to try it over again?"

She studied his face; the complexity of his feelings made it worthwhile, but she could barely restrain a shout of mirth. And then, unexpectedly, she perceived a hint of the old feeling, a tenderness, a baffled reaching for something elusive, for the wraiths of dead dreams. He put his hands in his coat pockets, though the table was between them, and gave her a look of sheer appeal.

"Do you want to?" he asked slowly.

"No, no." She felt very small, and remorseful. "I oughtn't to plague you; forgive me, you were always good. It's too late—it was always too late..."

"It was always too late," he nodded. "But, God, how I used to wish it wasn't. Say, Hope, where's your husband?"

"I don't know," she replied truthfully. "And you?"

"My wife got a divorce. It was a kind of a jolt, but I'm glad now. The fact is—But here, now, are you going to let me help you?"

"You're just the same," she said. How restful, how refreshing, to find someone just the same. "But look, I don't need it. I've got everything already—everything anyone can give me, I mean—read this; look here."

She thrust the letter into his hands excitedly, poured a torrent of explanation over him while he tried to read it, and finally made the matter reasonably clear to him, more or less in spite of herself.

"I knew you'd make it sometime," he beamed. "I'm going to order some champagne—sure, you've got to celebrate. Buy a Paris hat, and a trunkful of new dresses."

"Do I look so
passée
as that?" she queried. "Very well, I will—to-morrow. Now I have got to go and see the girl who wrote the letter; I looked for you first, Con. Oh, indeed I must; but to-morrow I will do as you say, anything; I know this is mean of me, but good-bye." She pushed away her untasted cup of tea, and rose, drawing on her gloves....

"Why did you come?" he asked aggrievedly. "Now I've got to eat my dinner alone. Where shall I find you to-morrow?"

"Still at the Alhambra. Oh, I came because— because I was alone, too. And I wanted to tell someone my news." She pulled down her veil and hurried out, bumping into a gold laced page at the door, because more than her veil obscured her eyes. All this wealth, this soft luxury, was what she had foregone from Edgerton, but she was not thinking of that. "It was Nick I wanted to tell," was her thought.

CHAPTER XXVII

BUT if she had spoken it in his ear, he could not have heard.

At the office, where he made the rounds to say good-bye to the men he knew, their cordial regrets would have touched him if he had been able to bring his head down from the clouds. They noticed that, too; Everson, the manager, a man of dry speech and a quick eye, pricked him neatly.

"You needn't look so damned glad to be going. What? Yes, you do; you look like a new bridegroom. And you won't even give us a chance to congratulate you."

"Rats," said Nick, reddening furiously, and laughing. "Want me to burst into tears? Say, I do hate to leave."

"Well, come and have a drink, anyway," Everson offered. Men liked Nick. "There's a long dry spell ahead, if I know weather signs. Never mind the denials."

"Don't think I've got time," said Nick dubiously. "I've got to go to the bank, and then a call to make."

"Take you round in my car," said Everson, putting on his hat. "Drop you wherever you say; I've got to go uptown anyway. Anyone else on?"

Several of the other men took the invitation, but they left these in a few minutes at the café. Nick got into the motor with Everson.

"East Nineteenth," Nick requested, after they had left the bank. "This is your new car, ain't it? Got the new motor in it; really! Let's try it."

Everson had been driving himself; they shifted seats, and Nick took the wheel.

"Smooth," he said admiringly.