Chapter 15. Two Discoveries

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_ CHAPTER XV. TWO DISCOVERIES

Bob Maxwell was standing before the fire. He turned abstractedly and set his untouched glass on the mantel shelf.

"You've got a grouch, Bobby," lectured the young actress, "at a time when you ought to be all puffed up and chesty. Aren't you glad we made good in the same piece? It would be nice of you to say so."

He turned on her a face strangely drawn and his words came swiftly in agitation.

"Triumph, did you say? Don't you know that it's only when you get the thing you've worked for, that you realize it's not worth working for? That's not triumph--it's despair. Triumph means laying your prize at somebody's feet--" he broke off with a sort of groan. "To hell with such success!" he burst out with sudden bitterness. "To hell and damnation with the whole of it!"

For a long while the girl held him in a steady scrutiny. They had both forgotten me, silent in my corner. Her cheeks paled a little, and when finally she reiterated her old question, her steady voice betrayed the training of strong effort.

"Who is she?"

"Listen, Grace," he said. "I've got to talk to some one. You have come here, so you let yourself in for it.... Ten years ago I was reporting on a paper for a few dollars a week. It was a long way from Broadway. There was a dusty typewriter and dirty walls decorated with yellowed clippings--but ... There was wild young ambition and all of life ahead. That was living."

"Who was she?" insistently repeated the actress, when he paused.

"What can it matter how big a play one writes," demanded the author, "if he presents it to an empty house? The absence of one woman can make any house empty for any man. I'd give it all, to hear her say once more--" He broke off in abrupt silence.

"To hear her say what, Bobby?" prompted Grace Bristol, softly.

"Well," he answered with a miserable laugh, "something she used to say."

"I suppose, Bobby--" the girl spoke very slowly, and a little wistfully, too--"I suppose it wouldn't do any good to--to hear any one else say it?"

He shook his head.

"Do you remember, Grace," he went on, "the other evening, when we were sitting in the cafe at the Lorillard and the orchestra in another room was playing 'Whispering Angels'? The hundred noises of the place almost drowned it out, yet we were always straining our ears to catch the music--and when there came a momentary lull, it would swell up over everything else. That's how it is with this--and sometimes it swells up and slugs one--simply slugs one, that's all." He broke off and laughed again. "I guess I'm talking no end of rot. You probably don't understand."

She raised her face and spoke with dignity.

"Why don't I understand, Bobby? Because I'm a show-girl?"

My old friend's voice was contrite in its quick apology.

"Forgive me, Grace--of course I didn't mean that. You're the cleverest woman on Broadway."

She laughed. "I'm said to be quite an emotional ash-trash," she responded.

It seemed inconceivable that Maxwell should miss the note of bitter misery in her voice; yet, blinded by his own quarrel with Fate, he passed into the next room oblivious of all else.

She crossed to the table which lay littered with the confusion of his untidy packing, and took up a shirt that he had left tumbled. She carefully folded it, then with a surreptitious glance over her shoulder to make sure that she was not observed, she tore a rose from her belt and, holding it for an impulsive moment against her breast, dropped it into the bag. My face was averted, but through a mirror I saw the pitiful pantomime. From the table she turned and stood gazing off through his window, with her face averted. From my seat I could also catch some of the detail that the window framed. Below stretched Washington Square, almost as desolately empty as in those days when, instead of asphalt and trees and fountain, it held only the many graves of the pauper dead. The arch at the Avenue loomed stark and white and the naked branches of a sycamore were like skeleton fingers against the garish light flung from an arc lamp. The girl had thrown up the sash and stood drinking in the cold air, though she shivered a little, and forgetful of my presence clenched her hands at her back.

From the bedroom, to which Bobby had withdrawn, drifted his voice in the melancholy tune and words of one of Lawrence Hope's lyrics:

"Less than the dust beneath thy chariot wheels--"

The girl at the window turned with a violent start and her exclamation broke passionately from lips, for the moment trembling.

"For God's sake, Bobby, don't!"

"What's the matter with my singing?" demanded his aggrieved voice from beyond the door.

She forced a laugh.

"Oh, nothing," she said carelessly enough, "only when anybody pulls one of those Indian Love Lyrics on me, I pass."

He returned a moment later to find her still standing by the window. At last she turned back to the room and took up her hat. She lifted it to her head as though it were very heavy, and her arms very tired.

"I guess, Bobby, I'll be running along," she announced.

"Grace," he said earnestly, "it's good to know that from this time on you are a star."

She laughed.

"Yes, isn't it?" she answered. "I'm a real ash-trash now. No--don't bother to see me down. Mr. Deprayne will put me into the taxi'."

Outside the threshold she paused to thrust her head back into the room, and to laugh gaily as she shouted in the slang of the street:

"Oh, you Galahad!"

But her eyes were swimming with tears.

As I climbed the creaking stairs again, I was pondering the question of contentment. Here were three of us. One had raked success out of the fire of failure and had written what promised to be the season's dramatic sensation. One had earned the right to read her name, nightly, in Broadway's incandescent roster. I myself had been preserved from cannibal flesh-pots. All of us were seemingly brands snatched from the burning, and all of us were deeply miserable. I wondered if the fourth was happy; the woman who had once said to Maxwell the things he now vainly longed to hear? And She--the lady I had never seen; what of her?

I found the author gazing off with a far-away reminiscence which was mostly pain. The taxi' was whirring under the arch, but he had already forgotten it and its occupant.

"Do you want to unbosom yourself, Bobby?" I questioned.

He shook his head.

"To you?" he inquired with a smile. "You're a woman-hater."

But a moment later he came over and laid his hand affectionately on my shoulder, fearing he had offended me.

"I guess, old man," he explained, "there's no balm in post-mortems. I loved her, that's all, and I still do."

"She married?" I inquired.

"She is now Mrs. William Clay Weighborne of Lexington. It's a prettier name than Fanny Maxwell, and looks better on a check. I was number three, that's all."

"Mrs. Who?" I repeated, in astonishment. "You don't mean the wife of W. C. Weighborne?"

"Why?" he asked suddenly. "Is the gentleman an acquaintance of yours?"

"Since this morning, yes. He is even a business associate."

"How you birds of a financial feather do flock around the same pabulum," he coolly observed.

"I was rather well impressed with him," I admitted idiotically enough. "He seemed a very decent sort of chap."

Maxwell lighted a cigarette. His voice was a trifle unenthusiastic as he replied.

"So I am informed."

A few days later I arrived at Lexington and Weighborne, who met me at the station with his car, announced that I was to go to his home on the Frankfort turnpike. But at this arrangement I balked. Despite a certain curiosity to see his wife, the lady who had left such a melancholy impress on the heart of my friend, there were considerations which outweighed curiosity. My own peculiar afflictions bore more heavily on me than those of my acquaintances and I had no yearning for the effort of socializing.

So Weighborne protestingly drove me to the Ph[oe]nix, and armed me with a visitor's card to the Lexington Union Club. I could see that he was deeply absorbed. His mind was so tensely focused on coal and timber development that it was difficult for him to think of other matters. My apathy lagged at the prospect of following his untiring energy over hours of close application to detail. I would put it off until to-morrow. Yet I had hardly taken my seat at table in the dining-room of the Ph[oe]nix, when a page called me to the telephone booth and Weighborne's voice came through the transmitter.

"Hullo, old man, did I drag you away from food? Sorry, but there are some papers here I'd like mighty well to have you look over. I might bring them in, but if you don't mind running out it would be better."

Of necessity I assented.

"I'll have my chauffeur call for you at 8:30," he arranged, "and meanwhile I'll be getting things into shape here. By the way"--his voice took on a reassuring note--"you sidestepped my rooftree this evening, and I gathered that you were not in the mood for meeting people."

I murmured some insincere assurance to the contrary, which did not beguile him.

"We shall have the house quite to ourselves," he said. "All the family are flitting off to a dance at the Country Club."

An hour later his car turned in at a stone gate, and up a long maple-lined avenue. From the windows of a generously broad, colonial mansion came a cheery blaze of light, throwing shadows outward from the tall white columns at the front. I could not help thinking of Maxwell's lodgings in Washington Square, and reflecting that, all prejudice aside, the flower of his worship had not chosen so badly in transplanting herself here.

Weighborne met me at the entrance of a hall over which hung the charm of ripe old portraits and wainscoted walls. Furnishings of unostentatious elegance made the place a delight. We passed into a large library where a wide hearth dispensed the cheer of blazing logs and our feet sunk deep in Persian rugs.

Yet even here, although instinctively hospitable, my host was plainly immersed in thoughts of coal and timber, for as soon as he had done the honors he plunged me into a litter of statistics.

I, poor business man that I was, had, time after time, to force my mind back from its undisciplined straying. As he talked of coal veins, I would find myself thinking of coral reefs. When he enlarged upon advances in timber tracts I would be seeing in my memory a circle of mahogany-skinned pigmies squatting silently about a portrait spiked to a sailor's chest with a pair of Damascus daggers.

At last Weighborne began sorting through the papers for some misplaced and necessary memorandum. He crossed the room to a desk at one corner which he found locked, and his ejaculation was one of deep annoyance.

"My wife has locked the desk and Heaven only knows where she has put the key," he complained. "I'll have to call the Country Club and ask her."

His words must have carried to the next room, for at once a voice answered. It was a richly musical contralto, and at its first syllable my heart stood still, and the room commenced to whirl about me. I had never heard it and yet I had heard it--singing in a wilderness of coral and orchids. Surely after all the big, little doctor was right, I was becoming a lunatic.

"Billy," called the voice, "you needn't 'phone. I'm here. I'll unlock it."

My host turned in surprise and walked over to the door.

"Hullo, Frances!" he exclaimed. "Didn't you go to the Club?"

"I had a headache," replied the voice. "I sent the others off, and stayed at home. I'll come in just a moment."

I stood waiting, my pulses pounding turbulently. Had my host not been just then dedicated to a single idea he must have noticed my pallor and wondered at the fascination with which I came to my feet and stood gazing at the door.

And as I gazed she appeared on the threshold, the blaze from the logs lighting her and throwing a nimbus about her hair of gold and honey. I placed both my hands on the top of the table and braced myself as a man may do when the executioner whispers the warning "ready!"

She might have stepped from the picture herself. Again she was in evening dress, which clung to her in soft lines of unspeakable grace. At her throat hung a string of pearls--the same pearls--and as she paused and our eyes met, I could have sworn that her muscles grew momentarily taut, and her lips twitched in a gasp. She put out one hand and steadied herself against the door jamb; then with the gracious recognition of a half-smile for a guest not yet duly presented, she went over and unlocked the desk.

I stood looking after her. I was conscious of a numbness of spirit--a sickening of hopelessness. The question was answered. The Frances of my Island, the Frances of Maxwell's heartbreak, the Frances who had married my business associate, were, by a monstrous sequence of hideous circumstances and coincidence, one and the same. She stood ten feet and twenty sky depths away from me. _

Read next: Chapter 16. An Interview And A Crisis

Read previous: Chapter 14. The "Ash-Trash Lady"

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