The Street of Seven Stars by Mary Roberts Rinehart (page 5)

even peered through the doors of shops here and there, hoping while he feared that the girl might be seeking employment within, as she had before in the early days of the winter.

Because of his stature and powerful physique, and perhaps, too, because of the wretchedness in his eyes, people noticed him. There was one place where Peter lingered, where a new building was being erected, and where because of the narrowness of the passage the dense crowd was thinned as it passed. He stood by choice outside a hairdresser’s window, where a brilliant light shone on each face that passed.

Inside the clerks had noticed him. Two of them standing together by the desk spoke of him: “He is there again, the gray man!”

“Ah, so! But, yes, there is his back!”

“Poor one, it is the Fraulein Engel he waits to see, perhaps.”

“More likely Le Grande, the American. He is American.”

“He is Russian. Look at his size.”

“But his shoes!” triumphantly. “They are American, little one.”

The third girl had not spoken; she was wrapping in tissue a great golden rose made for the hair. She placed it in a box carefully.

“I think he is of the police,” she said, “or a spy. There is much talk of war.”

“Foolishness! Does a police officer sigh always? Or a spy have such sadness in his face? And he grows thin and white.”

“The rose, Fraulein.”

The clerk who had wrapped up the flower held it out to the customer. The customer, however, was not looking. She was gazing with strange intentness at the back of a worn gray overcoat. Then with a curious clutch at her heart she went white. Harmony, of course, Harmony come to fetch the golden rose that was to complete Le Grande’s costume.

She recovered almost at once and made an excuse to leave by another exit.

She took a final look at the gray sleeve that was all she could see of Peter, who had shifted a bit, and stumbled out into the crowd, walking along with her lip trembling under her veil, and with the slow and steady ache at her heart that she had thought she had stilled for good.

It had never occurred to Harmony that Peter loved her. He had proposed to her twice, but that had been in each case to solve a difficulty for her. And once he had taken her in his arms, but that was different. Even then he had not said he loved her–had not even known it, to be exact. Nor had Harmony realized what Peter meant to her until she had put him out of her life.

The sight of the familiar gray coat, the scrap of conversation, so enlightening as to poor Peter’s quest, that Peter was growing thin and white, made her almost reel. She had been too occupied with her own position to realize Peter’s. With the glimpse of him came a great longing for the house on the Siebensternstrasse, for Jimmy’s arms about her neck, for the salon with the lamp lighted and the sleet beating harmlessly against the casement windows, for the little kitchen with the brick stove, for Peter.

Doubts of the wisdom of her course assailed her. But to go back meant, at the best, adding to Peter’s burden of Jimmy and Marie, meant the old situation again, too, for Marie most certainly did not add to the respectability of the establishment. And other doubts assailed her. What if Jimmy were not so well, should die, as was possible, and she had not let his mother see him!

Monia Reiff was very busy that day. Harmony did not leave the workroom until eight o’clock. During all that time, while her slim fingers worked over fragile laces and soft chiffons, she was seeing Jimmy as she had seen him last, with the flower fairies on his pillow, and Peter, keeping watch over the crowd in the Karntnerstrasse, looking with his steady eyes for her.

No part of the city was safe for a young girl after night, she knew; the sixteenth district was no better than the rest, rather worse in places. But the longing to see the house on the Siebensternstrasse grew on her, became from an ache a sharp and insistent pain. She must go, must see once again the comfortable glow of Peter’s lamp, the flicker that was the fire.

She ate no supper. She was too tired to eat, and there was the pain. She put on her wraps and crept down the whitewashed staircase.

The paved courtyard below was to be crossed and it was poorly lighted. She achieved the street, however, without molestation. To the street-car was only a block, but during that block she was accosted twice. She was white and frightened when she reached the car.

The Siebensternstrasse at last. The street was always dark; the delicatessen shop was closed, but in the wild-game store next a light was burning low, and a flame flickered before the little shrine over the money drawer. The gameseller was a religious man.

The old stucco house dominated the neighborhood. From the time she left the car Harmony saw it, its long flat roof black against the dark sky, its rows of unlighted windows, its long wall broken in the center by the gate. Now from across the street its whole facade lay before her. Peter’s lamp was not lighted, but there was a glow of soft firelight from the salon windows. The light was not regular–it disappeared at regular intervals, was blotted out. Harmony knew what that meant. Some one beyond range of where she stood was pacing the floor, back and forward, back and forward. When he was worried or anxious Peter always paced the door.

She did not know how long she stood there. One of the soft rains was falling, or more accurately, condensing. The saturated air was hardly cold. She stood on the pavement unmolested, while the glow died lower and lower, until at last it was impossible to trace the pacing figure. No one came to any of the windows. The little lamp before the shrine in the wild-game shop burned itself out; the Portier across the way came to the door, glanced up at the sky and went in. Harmony heard the rattle of the chain as it was stretched across the door inside.

Not all the windows of the suite opened on the street. Jimmy’s windows–and Peter’s–opened toward the back of the house, where in a brick-paved courtyard the wife of the Portier hung her washing, and where the Portier himself kept a hutch of rabbits. A wild and reckless desire to see at least the light from the child’s room possessed Harmony. Even the light would be something; to go like this, to carry with her only the memory of a dark looming house without cheer was unthinkable. The gate was never locked. If she but went into the garden and round by the spruce tree to the back of the house, it would be something.

She knew the garden quite well. Even the darkness had no horror for her. Little Scatchy had had a habit of leaving various articles on her window-sill and of instigating searches for them at untimely hours of night. Once they had found her hairbrush in the rabbit hutch! So Harmony, ashamed but unalarmed, made her way by the big spruce to the corner of the old lodge and thus to the courtyard.

Ah, this was better! Lights all along the apartment floor and moving shadows; on Jimmy’s window-sill a jar of milk. And voices–some one was singing.

Peter was singing, droning softly, as one who puts a drowsy child to sleep. Slower and slower, softer and softer, over and over, the little song Harmony had been wont to sing:–

“Ah well! For us all some sweet hope lies Deeply buried from human eyes.
And in the–hereafter–angels may
Roll–the–stone–from–its–grave–away.”

Slower and slower, softer and softer, until it died away altogether. Peter, in his old dressing-gown, came to the window and turned down the gaslight beside it to a blue point. Harmony did not breathe. For a minute, two minutes, he stood there looking out. Far off the twin clocks of the Votivkirche struck the hour. All about lay the lights of the old city, so very old, so wise, so cunning, so cold.

Peter stood looking out, as he had each night since Harmony went away. Each night he sang the boy to sleep, turned down the light and stood by the window. And each night he whispered to the city that sheltered Harmony somewhere, what he had whispered to the little sweater coat the night before he went away:–

“Good-night, dear. Good-night, Harmony.”

The rabbits stirred uneasily in the hutch; a passing gust shook the great tree overhead and sent down a sharp shower on to the bricks below. Peter struck a match and lit his pipe; the flickering light illuminated his face, his rough hair, his steady eyes.

“Good-night, Peter,” whispered Harmony. “Good-night, dear.”

CHAPTER XXIV

Walter Stewart had made an uncomplicated recovery, helped along by relief at the turn events had taken. In a few days he was going about again, weak naturally, rather handsomer than before because a little less florid. But the week’s confinement had given him an opportunity to think over many things. Peter had set him thinking, on the day when he had packed up the last of Marie’s small belongings and sent them down to Vienna.

Stewart, lying in bed, had watched him. “Just how much talk do you suppose this has made, Byrne?” he asked.

“Haven’t an idea. Some probably. The people in the Russian villa saw it, you know.”

Stewart’s brows contracted.

“Damnation! Then the hotel has it, of course!”

“Probably.”

Stewart groaned. Peter closed Marie’s American trunk of which she had been so proud, and coming over looked down at the injured man.

“Don’t you think you’d better tell the girl all about it?”

“No,” doggedly.

“I know, of course, it wouldn’t be easy, but–you can’t get away with it, Stewart. That’s one way of looking at it. There’s another.”

“What’s that?”

“Starting with a clean slate. If she’s the sort you want to marry, and not a prude, she’ll understand, not at first, but after she gets used to it.”

“She wouldn’t understand in a thousand years.”

“Then you’d better not marry her. You know, Stewart, I have an idea that women imagine a good many pretty rotten things about us, anyhow. A sensible girl would rather know the truth and be done with it. What a man has done with his life before a girl–the right girl–comes into it isn’t a personal injury to her, since she wasn’t a part of his life then. You know what I mean. But she has a right to know it before she chooses.”

“How many would choose under those circumstances?” he jibed.

Peter smiled. “Quite a few,” he said cheerfully. “It’s a wrong system, of course; but we can get a little truth out of it.”

“You can’t get away with it” stuck in Stewart’s mind for several days. It was the one thing Peter said that did stick. And before Stewart had recovered enough to be up and about he had made up his mind to tell Anita. In his mind he made quite a case for himself; he argued the affair against his conscience and came out victorious.

Anita’s party had broken up. The winter sports did not compare, they complained, with St. Moritz. They disliked German cooking. Into the bargain the weather was not good; the night’s snows turned soft by midday; and the crowds that began to throng the hotels were solid citizens, not the fashionables of the Riviera. Anita’s arm forbade her traveling. In the reassembling of the party she went to the Kurhaus in the valley below the pension with one of the women who wished to take the baths.

It was to the Kurhaus, then, that Stewart made his first excursion after the accident. He went to dinner. Part of the chaperon’s treatment called for an early retiring hour, which was highly as he had wished it and rather unnerving after all. A man may decide that a dose of poison is the remedy for all his troubles, but he does not approach his hour with any hilarity. Stewart was a stupid dinner guest, ate very little, and looked haggard beyond belief when the hour came for the older woman to leave.

He did not lack courage however. It was his great asset, physical and mental rather than moral, but courage nevertheless. The evening was quiet, and they elected to sit on the balcony outside Anita’s sitting room, the girl swathed in white furs and leaning back in her steamer chair.

Below lay the terrace of the Kurhaus, edged with evergreen trees. Beyond and far below that was the mountain village, a few scattered houses along a frozen stream. The townspeople retired early; light after light was extinguished, until only one in the priest’s house remained. A train crept out of one tunnel and into another, like a glowing worm crawling from burrow to burrow.

The girl felt a change in Stewart. During the weeks he had known her there had been a curious restraint in his manner to her. There were times when an avowal seemed to tremble on his lips, when his eyes looked into hers with the look no women ever mistakes; the next moment he would glance away, his face would harden. They were miles apart. And perhaps the situation had piqued the girl. Certainly it had lost nothing for her by its unusualness.

To-night there was a difference in the man. His eyes met hers squarely, without evasion, but with a new quality, a searching, perhaps, for something in her to give him courage. The girl had character, more than ordinary decision. It was what Stewart admired in her most, and the thing, of course, that the little Marie had lacked. Moreover, Anita, barely twenty, was a woman, not a young girl. Her knowledge of the world, not so deep as Marie’s, was more comprehensive. Where Marie would have been merciful, Anita would be just, unless she cared for him. In that case she might be less than just, or more.

Anita in daylight was a pretty young woman, rather incisive of speech, very intelligent, having a wit without malice, charming to look at, keenly alive. Anita in the dusk of the balcony, waiting to hear she knew not what, was a judicial white goddess, formidably still, frightfully potential. Stewart, who had embraced many women, did not dare a finger on her arm.

He had decided on a way to tell the girl the story–a preamble about his upbringing, which had been indifferent, his struggle to get to Vienna, his loneliness there, all leading with inevitable steps to Marie. From that, if she did not utterly shrink from him, to his love for her.

It was his big hour, that hour on the balcony. He was reaching, through love, heights of honesty he had never scaled before. But as a matter of fact he reversed utterly his order of procedure. The situation got him, this first evening absolutely alone with her. That and her nearness, and the pathos of her bandaged, useless arm. Still he had not touched her.

The thing he was trying to do was more difficult for that. General credulity to the contrary, men do not often make spoken love first. How many men propose marriage to their women across the drawing-room or from chair to chair? Absurd! The eyes speak first, then the arms, the lips last. The woman is in his arms before he tells his love. It is by her response that he gauges his chances and speaks of marriage. Actually the thing is already settled; tardy speech only follows on swift instinct. Stewart, wooing as men woo, would have taken the girl’s hand, gained an encouragement from it, ventured to kiss it, perhaps, and finding no rebuff would then and there have crushed her to him; What need of words? They would follow in due time, not to make a situation but to clarify it.

But he could not woo as men woo. The barrier of his own weakness stood between them and must be painfully taken down.

“I’m afraid this is stupid for you,” said Anita out of the silence. “Would you like to go to the music-room?”

“God forbid. I was thinking.”

“Of what?” Encouragement this, surely.

“I was thinking how you had come into my life, and stirred it up.”

“Really? I?”

“You know that.”

“How did I stir it up?”

“That’s hardly the way I meant to put it. You’ve changed everything for me. I care for you–a very great deal.”

He was still carefully in hand, his voice steady. And still he did not touch her. Other men had made love to her, but never in this fashion, or was he making love?

“I’m very glad you like me.”

“Like you!” Almost out of hand that time. The thrill in his voice was unmistakable. “It’s much more than that, Anita, so much more that I’m going to try to do a hideously hard thing. Will you help a little?”

“Yes, if I can.” She was stirred, too, and rather frightened.

Stewart drew his chair nearer to her and sat forward, his face set and dogged.

“Have you any idea how you were hurt? Or why?”

“No. There’s a certain proportion of accidents that occur at all these places, isn’t there?”

“This was not an accident.”

“No?”

“The branch of a tree was thrown out in front of the sled to send us over the bank. It was murder, if intention is crime.”

After a brief silence–

“Somebody who wished to kill you, or me?”

“Both of us, I believe. It was done by a woman–a girl, Anita. A girl I had been living with.”

A brutal way to tell her, no doubt, but admirably courageous. For he was quivering with dread when he said it–the courage of the man who faces a cannon. And here, where a less-poised woman would have broken into speech, Anita took the refuge of her kind and was silent. Stewart watched her as best he could in the darkness, trying to gather further courage to go on. He could not see her face, but her fingers, touching the edge of the chair, quivered.

“May I tell you the rest?”

“I don’t think I want to hear it.”

“Are you going to condemn me unheard?”

“There isn’t anything you can say against the fact?”

But there was much to say, and sitting there in the darkness he made his plea. He made no attempt to put his case. He told what had happened simply; he told of his loneliness and discomfort. And he emphasized the lack of sentiment that prompted the arrangement.

Anita spoke then for the first time: “And when you tried to terminate it she attempted to kill you!”

“I was acting the beast. I brought her up here, and then neglected her for you.”

“Then it was hardly only a business arrangement for her.”

“It was at first. I never dreamed of any thing else. I swear that, Anita. But lately, in the last month or two, she–I suppose I should have seen that she–“

“That she had fallen in love with you. How old is she?”

“Nineteen.”

A sudden memory came to Anita, of a slim young girl, who had watched her with wide, almost childish eyes.

“Then it was she who was in the compartment with you on the train coming up?”

“Yes.”

“Where is she now?”

“In Vienna. I have not heard from her. Byrne, the chap who came up to see me after the–after the accident, sent her away. I think he’s looking after her. I haven’t heard from him.”

“Why did you tell me all this?”

“Because I love you, Anita. I want you to marry me.”

“What! After that?”

“That, or something similar, is in many men’s lives. They don’t tell it, that’s the difference. I ‘m not taking any credit for telling you this. I’m ashamed to the bottom of my soul, and when I look at your bandaged arm I’m suicidal. Peter Byrne urged me to tell you. He said I couldn’t get away with it; some time or other it would come out. Then he said something else. He said you’d probably understand, and that if you married me it was better to start with a clean slate.”

No love, no passion in the interview now. A clear statement of fact, an offer–his past against hers, his future with hers. Her hand was steady now. The light in the priest’s house had been extinguished. The chill of the mountain night penetrated Anita’s white furs; and set her–or was it the chill?–to shivering.

“If I had not told you, would you have married me?”

“I think so. I’ll be honest, too. Yes.”

“I am the same man you would have married. Only–more honest.”

“I cannot argue about it. I am tired and cold.”

Stewart glanced across the valley to where the cluster of villas hugged the mountain-side There was a light in his room; outside was the little balcony where Marie had leaned against the railing and looked down, down. Some of the arrogance of his new virtue left the man. He was suddenly humbled. For the first time he realized a part of what Marie had endured in that small room where the light burned.

“Poor little Marie!” he said softly.

The involuntary exclamation did more for him than any plea he could have made. Anita rose and held out her hand.

“Go and see her,” she said quietly. “You owe her that. We’ll be leaving here in a day or so and I’ll not see you again. But you’ve been honest, and I will be honest, too. I–I cared a great deal, too.”

“And this has killed it?”

“I hardly comprehend it yet. I shall have to have time to think.”

“But if you are going away–I’m afraid to leave you. You’ll think this thing over, alone, and all the rules of life you’ve been taught will come–“

“Please, I must think. I will write you, I promise.”

He caught her hand and crushed it between both of his.

“I suppose you would rather I did not kiss you?” humbly.

“I do not want you to kiss me.”

He released her hand and stood looking down at her in the darkness. If he could only have crushed her to him, made her feel the security of his love, of his sheltering arms! But the barrier of his own building was between them. His voice was husky.

“I want you to try to remember, past what I have told you, to the thing that concerns us both–I love you. I never loved the other woman. I never pretended I loved her. And there will be nothing more like that.”

“I shall try to remember.”

Anita left Semmering the next day, against the protests of the doctor and the pleadings of the chaperon. She did not see Stewart again. But before she left, with the luggage gone and the fiacre at the door, she went out on the terrace, and looked across to the Villa Waldheim, rising from among its clustering trees. Although it was too far to be certain, she thought she saw the figure of a man on the little balcony standing with folded arms, gazing across the valley to the Kurhaus.

Having promised to see Marie, Stewart proceeded to carry out his promise in his direct fashion. He left Semmering the evening of the following day, for Vienna. The strain of the confession was over, but he was a victim of sickening dread. To one thing only he dared to pin his hopes. Anita had said she cared, cared a great deal. And, after all, what else mattered? The story had been a jolt, he told himself. Girls were full of queer ideas of right and wrong, bless them! But she cared. She cared!

He arrived in Vienna at nine o’clock that night. The imminence of his interview with Marie hung over him like a cloud. He ate a hurried supper, and calling up the Doctors’ Club by telephone found Peter’s address in the Siebensternstrasse. He had no idea, of course, that Marie was there. He wanted to see Peter to learn where Marie had taken refuge, and incidentally to get from Peter a fresh supply of moral courage for the interview. For he needed courage. In vain on the journey down had he clothed himself in armor of wrath against the girl; the very compartment in the train provoked softened memories of her. Here they had bought a luncheon, there Marie had first seen the Rax. Again at this station she had curled up and put her head on his shoulder for a nap. Ah, but again, at this part of the journey he had first seen Anita!

He took a car to the Siebensternstrasse. His idea of Peter’s manner of living those days was exceedingly vague. He had respected Peter’s reticence, after the manner of men with each other. Peter had once mentioned a boy he was looking after, in excuse for leaving so soon after the accident. That was all.

The house on the Siebensternstrasse loomed large and unlighted. The street was dark, and it was only after a search that Stewart found the gate. Even then he lost the path, and found himself among a group of trees, to touch the lowest branches of any of which resulted in a shower of raindrops. To add to his discomfort some one was walking in the garden, coming toward him with light, almost stealthy steps.

Stewart by his tree stood still, waiting. The steps approached, were very close, were beside him. So intense was the darkness that even then all he saw was a blacker shadow, and that was visible only because it moved. Then a hand touched his arm, stopped as if paralyzed, drew back slowly, fearfully.

“Good Heavens!” said poor Harmony faintly.

“Please don’t be alarmed. I have lost the path.” Stewart’s voice was almost equally nervous. “Is it to the right or the left?”

It was a moment before Harmony had breath to speak. Then:–

“To the right a dozen paces or so.”

“Thank you. Perhaps I can help you to find it.”

“I know it quite well. Please don’t bother.”

The whole situation was so unexpected that only then did it dawn on Stewart that this blacker shadow was a countrywoman speaking God’s own language. Together, Harmony a foot or so in advance, they made the path.

“The house is there. Ring hard, the bell is out of order.”

“Are you not coming in?”

“No. I–I do not live here.”

She must have gone just after that. Stewart, glancing at the dark facade of the house, turned round to find her gone, and a moment later heard the closing of the gate. He was bewildered. What sort of curious place was this, a great looming house that concealed in its garden a fugitive American girl who came and went like a shadow, leaving only the memory of a sweet voice strained with fright?

Stewart was full of his encounter as he took the candle the Portier gave him and followed the gentleman’s gruff directions up the staircase. Peter admitted him, looking a trifle uneasy, as well he might with Marie in the salon.

Stewart was too preoccupied to notice Peter’s expression. He shook the rain off his hat, smiling.

“How are you?” asked Peter dutifully.

“Pretty good, except for a headache when I’m tired. What sort of a place have you got here anyhow, Byrne?”

“Old hunting-lodge of Maria Theresa,” replied Peter, still preoccupied with Marie and what was coming. “Rather interesting old place.”

“Rather,” commented Stewart, “with goddesses in the garden and all the usual stunts.”

“Goddesses?”

“Ran into one just now among the trees. ‘A woman I forswore, but thou being a goddess I forswore not thee.’ English-speaking goddess, by George!”

Peter was staring at him incredulously; now he bent forward and grasped his arm in fingers of steel.

“For Heaven’s sake, Stewart, tell me what you mean! Who was in the garden?”

Stewart was amused and interested. It was not for him to belittle a situation of his own making, an incident of his own telling.

“I lost my way in your garden, wandered among the trees, broke through a hedgerow or two, struck a match and consulted the compass–“

Peter’s fingers closed.

“Quick,” he said.

Stewart’s manner lost its jauntiness.

“There was a girl there,” he said shortly. “Couldn’t see her. She spoke English. Said she didn’t live here, and broke for the gate the minute I got to the path.”

“You didn’t see her?”

“No. Nice voice, though. Young.”

The next moment he was alone. Peter in his dressing-gown was running down the staircase to the lower floor, was shouting to the Portier to unlock the door, was a madman in everything but purpose. The Portier let him out and returned to the bedroom.

“The boy above is worse,” he said briefly. “A strange doctor has just come, and but now the Herr Doktor Byrne runs to the drug store.”

The Portier’s wife shrugged her shoulders even while tears filled her eyes.

“What can one expect?” she demanded. “The good Herr Gott has forbidden theft and Rosa says the boy was stolen. Also the druggist has gone to visit his wife’s mother.”

“Perhaps I may be of service; I shall go up.”

“And see for a moment that hussy of the streets! Remain here. I shall go.”

Slowly and ponderously she climbed the stairs.

Stewart, left alone, wandered along the dim corridor. He found Peter’s excitement rather amusing. So this was where Peter lived, an old house, isolated in a garden where rambled young women with soft voices. Hello, a youngster asleep! The boy, no doubt.

He wandered on toward the lighted door of the salon and Marie. The place was warm and comfortable, but over it all hung the indescribable odor of drugs that meant illness. He remembered that the boy was frail.

Marie turned as he stopped in the salon doorway, and then rose, white-faced. Across the wide spaces of the room they eyed each other. Marie’s crisis had come. Like all crises it was bigger than speech. It was after a distinct pause that she spoke.

“Hast thou brought the police?”

Curiously human, curiously masculine at least was Stewart’s mental condition at that moment. He had never loved the girl; it was with tremendous relief he had put her out of his life. And yet–

“So it’s old Peter now, is it?”

“No, no, not that, Walter. He has given me shelter, that is all. I swear it. I look after the boy.”

“Who else is here?”

“No one else; but–“

“Tell that rot to some one who does not know you.”

“It is true. He never even looks at me. I am wicked, but I do not lie.” There was a catch of hope in her voice. Marie knew men somewhat, but she still cherished the feminine belief that jealousy is love, whereas it is only injured pride. She took a step toward him. “Walter, I am sorry. Do you hate me?” She had dropped the familiar “thou.”

Stewart crossed the room until only Peter’s table and lamp stood between them.

“I didn’t mean to be brutal,” he said, rather largely, entirely conscious of his own magnanimity. “It was pretty bad up there and I know it. I don’t hate you, of course. That’s hardly possible after–everything.”

“You–would take me back?”

“No. It’s over, Marie. I wanted to know where you were, that’s all; to see that you were comfortable and not frightened. You’re a silly child to think of the police.”

Marie put a hand to her throat.

“It is the American, of course.”

“Yes.”

She staggered a trifle, recovered, threw up her head. “Then I wish I had killed her!”

No man ever violently resents the passionate hate of one woman for her rival in his affections. Stewart, finding the situation in hand and Marie only feebly formidable, was rather amused and flattered by the honest fury in her voice. The mouse was under his paw; he would play a bit. “You’ll get over feeling that way, kid. You don’t really love me.”

“You were my God, that is all.”

“Will you let me help you–money, I mean?”

“Keep it for her.”

“Peter will be here in a minute.” He bent over the table and eyed her with his old, half-bullying, half-playful manner. “Come round here and kiss me for old times.”

“No!”

“Come.”

She stood stubbornly still, and Stewart, still smiling, took a step or two toward her. Then he stopped, ceased smiling, drew himself up.

“You are quite right and I’m a rotter.” Marie’s English did not comprehend “rotter,” but she knew the tone. “Listen, Marie, I’ve told the other girl, and there’s a chance for me, anyhow. Some day she may marry me. She asked me to see you.”

“I do not wish her pity.”

“You are wasting your life here. You cannot marry, you say, without a dot. There is a chance in America for a clever girl. You are clever, little Marie. The first money I can spare I’ll send you–if you’ll take it. It’s all I can do.”

This was a new Stewart, a man she had never known. Marie recoiled from him, eyed him nervously, sought in her childish mind for an explanation. When at last she understood that he was sincere, she broke down. Stewart, playing a new part and raw in it, found the situation irritating. But Marie’s tears were not entirely bitter. Back of them her busy young mind was weaving a new warp of life, with all of America for its loom. Hope that had died lived again. Before her already lay that great country where women might labor and live by the fruit of their labor, where her tawdry past would be buried in the center of distant Europe. New life beckoned to the little Marie that night in the old salon of Maria Theresa, beckoned to her as it called to Stewart, opportunity to one, love and work to the other. To America!

“I will go,” she said at last simply. “And I will not trouble you there.”

“Good!” Stewart held out his hand and Marie took it. With a quick gesture she held it to her cheek, dropped it.

Peter came back half an hour later, downcast but not hopeless. He had not found Harmony, but life was not all gray. She was well, still in Vienna, and–she had come back! She had cared then enough to come back. To-morrow he would commence again, would comb the city fine, and when he had found her he would bring her back, the wanderer, to a marvelous welcome.

He found Stewart gone, and Marie feverishly overhauling her few belongings by the salon lamp. She turned to him a face still stained with tears but radiant with hope.

“Peter,” she said gravely, “I must prepare my outfit. I go to America.”

“With Stewart?”

“Alone, Peter, to work, to be very good, to be something. I am very happy, although–Peter, may I kiss you?”

“Certainly,” said Peter, and took her caress gravely, patting her thin shoulder. His thoughts were in the garden with Harmony, who had cared enough to come back.

“Life,” said Peter soberly, “life is just one damned thing after another, isn’t it?”

But Marie was anxiously examining the hem of a skirt.

The letter from Anita reached Stewart the following morning. She said:–

“I have been thinking things over, Walter, and I am going to hurt you very much–but not, believe me, without hurting myself. Perhaps my uppermost thought just now is that I am disappointing you, that I am not so big as you thought I would be. For now, in this final letter, I can tell you how much I cared. Oh, my dear, I did care!

“But I will not marry you. And when this reaches you I shall have gone very quietly out of your life. I find that such philosophy as I have does not support me to-night, that all my little rules of life are inadequate. Individual liberty was one–but there is no liberty of the individual. Life–other lives–press too closely. You, living your life as seemed best and easiest, and carrying down with you into shipwreck the little Marie and–myself!

“For, face to face with the fact, I cannot accept it, Walter. It is not only a question of my past against yours. It is of steady revolt and loathing of the whole thing; not the flash of protest before one succumbs to the inevitable, but a deep-seated hatred that is a part of me and that would never forget.

“You say that you are the same man I would have married, only more honest for concealing nothing. But–and forgive me this, it insists on coming up in my mind–were you honest, really? You told me, and it took courage, but wasn’t it partly fear? What motive is unmixed? Honesty–and fear, Walter. You were preparing against a contingency, although you may not admit this to yourself.

“I am not passing judgment on you. God forbid that I should! I am only trying to show you what is in my mind, and that this break is final. The revolt is in myself, against something sordid and horrible which I will not take into my life. And for that reason time will make no difference.

“I am not a child, and I am not unreasonable. But I ask a great deal of this life of mine that stretches ahead, Walter–home and children, the love of a good man, the fulfillment of my ideals. And you ask me to start with a handicap. I cannot do it. I know you are resentful, but–I know that you understand.

“ANITA.”

CHAPTER XXV

The little Georgiev was in trouble those days. The Balkan engine was threatening to explode, but continued to gather steam, with Bulgaria sitting on the safety-valve. Austria was mobilizing troops, and there were long conferences in the Burg between the Emperor and various bearded gentlemen, while the military prayed in the churches for war.

The little Georgiev hardly ate or slept. Much hammering went on all day in the small room below Harmony’s on the Wollbadgasse. At night, when the man in the green velours hat took a little sleep, mysterious packages were carried down the whitewashed staircase and loaded into wagons waiting below. Once on her window-sill Harmony found among the pigeons a carrier pigeon with a brass tube fastened to its leg.

On the morning after Harmony’s flight from the garden in the Street of Seven Stars, she received a visit from Georgiev. She had put in a sleepless night, full of heart-searching. She charged herself with cowardice in running away from Peter and Jimmy when they needed her, and in going back like a thief the night before. The conviction that the boy was not so well brought with it additional introspection–her sacrifice seemed useless, almost childish. She had fled because two men thought it necessary, in order to save her reputation, to marry her; and she did not wish to marry. Marriage was fatal to the career she had promised herself, had been promised. But this career, for which she had given up everything else–would she find it in the workroom of a dressmaker?

Ah, but there was more to it than that. Suppose–how her cheeks burned when she thought of it!–suppose she had taken Peter at his word and married him? What about Peter’s career? Was there any way by which Peter’s poverty for one would be comfort for two? Was there any reason why Peter, with his splendid ability, should settle down to the hack-work of general practice, the very slough out of which he had so painfully climbed?

Either of two things–go back to Peter, but not to marry him, or stay where she was. How she longed to go back only Harmony knew. There in the little room, with only the pigeons to see, she held out her arms longingly. “Peter!” she said. “Peter, dear!”

She decided, of course, to stay where she was, a burden to no one. The instinct of the young girl to preserve her good name at any cost outweighed the vision of Peter at the window, haggard and tired, looking out. It was Harmony’s chance, perhaps, to do a big thing; to prove herself bigger than her fears, stronger than convention. But she was young, bewildered, afraid. And there was this element, stronger than any of the others–Peter had never told her he loved her. To go back, throwing herself again on his mercy, was unthinkable. On his love–that was different. But what if he did not love her? He had been good to her; but then Peter was good to every one.

There was something else. If the boy was worse what about his mother? Whatever she was or had been, she was his mother. Suppose he were to die and his mother not see him? Harmony’s sense of fairness rebelled. In the small community at home mother was sacred, her claims insistent.

It was very early, hardly more than dawn. The pigeons cooed on the sill; over the ridge of the church roof, across, a luminous strip foretold the sun. An oxcart, laden with vegetables for the market, lumbered along the streets. Puzzled and unhappy, Harmony rose and lighted her fire, drew on her slippers and the faded silk kimono with the pink butterflies.

In the next room the dressmaker still slept, dreaming early morning dreams of lazy apprentices, overdue bills, complaining customers.

Harmony moved lightly not to disturb her. She set her room in order, fed the pigeons,–it was then she saw the carrier with its message,–made her morning coffee by setting the tiny pot inside the stove. And all the time, moving quietly through her morning routine, she was there in that upper room in body only.

In soul she was again in the courtyard back of the old lodge, in the Street of Seven Stars, with the rabbits stirring in the hutch, and Peter, with rapt eyes, gazing out over the city. Bed, toilet-table, coffee-pot, Peter; pigeons, rolls, Peter; sunrise over the church roof, and Peter again. Always Peter!

Monia Reiff was stirring in the next room. Harmony could hear her, muttering and putting coal on the stove and calling to the Hungarian maid for breakfast. Harmony dressed hastily. It was one of her new duties to prepare the workroom for the day. The luminous streak above the church was rose now, time for the day to begin.

She was not certain at once that some one had knocked at the door, so faint was the sound.

She hesitated, listened. The knob turned slightly. Harmony, expecting Monia, called “Come in.”

It was the little Georgiev, very apologetic, rather gray of face. He stood in the doorway with his finger on his lips, one ear toward the stairway. It was very silent. Monia was drinking her coffee in bed, whither she had retired for warmth.

“Pardon!” said the Bulgarian in a whisper. “I listened until I heard you moving about. Ah, Fraulein, that I must disturb you!”

“Something has happened!” exclaimed Harmony, thinking of Peter, of course.

“Not yet. I fear it is about to happen. Fraulein, do me the honor to open your window. My pigeon comes now to you to be fed, and I fear–on the sill, Fraulein.”

Harmony opened the window. The wild pigeons scattered at once, but the carrier, flying out a foot or two, came back promptly and set about its breakfast.

“Will he let me catch him?”

“Pardon, Fraulein, If I may enter–“

“Come in, of course.”

Evidently the defection of the carrier had been serious. A handful of grain on a wrong window-sill, and kingdoms overthrown! Georgiev caught the pigeon and drew the message from the tube. Even Harmony grasped the seriousness of the situation. The little Bulgarian’s face, from gray became livid; tiny beads of cold sweat came out on his forehead.

“What have I done?” cried Harmony. “Oh, what have I done? If I had known about the pigeon–“

Georgiev recovered himself.

“The Fraulein can do nothing wrong,” he said. “It is a matter of an hour’s delay, that is all. It may not be too late.”

Monia Reiff, from the next room, called loudly for more coffee. The sulky Hungarian brought it without a glance in their direction.

“Too late for what?”

“Fraulein, if I may trouble you–but glance from the window to the street below. It is of an urgency, or I–Please, Fraulein!”

Harmony glanced down into the half-light of the street. Georgiev, behind her, watched her, breathless, expectant. Harmony drew in her head.

“Only a man in a green hat,” she said. “And down the street a group of soldiers.”

“Ah!”

The situation dawned on the girl then, at least partially.

“They are coming for you?”

“It is possible. But there are many soldiers in Vienna.”

“And I with the pigeon–Oh, it’s too horrible! Herr Georgiev, stay here in this room. Lock the door. Monia will say that it is mine–“

“Ah no, Fraulein! It is quite hopeless. Nor is it a matter of the pigeon. It is war, Fraulein. Do not distress yourself. It is but a matter of–imprisonment.”

“There must be something I can do,” desperately. “I hear them below. Is there no way to the roof, no escape?”

“None, Fraulein. It was an oversight. War is not my game; I am a man of peace. You have been very kind to me, Fraulein. I thank you.”

“You are not going down!”

“Pardon, but it is better so. Soldiers they are of the provinces mostly, and not for a lady to confront.”

“They are coming up!”

He listened. The clank of scabbards against the stone stairs was unmistakable. The little Georgiev straightened, threw out his chest, turned to descend, faltered, came back a step or two.

His small black eyes were fixed on Harmony’s face.

“Fraulein,” he said huskily, “you are very lovely. I carry always in my heart your image. Always so long as I live. Adieu.”

He drew his heels together, gave a stiff little bow and was gone down the staircase. Harmony was frightened, stricken. She collapsed in a heap on the floor of her room, her fingers in her ears. But she need not have feared. The little Georgiev made no protest, submitted to the inevitable like a gentleman and a soldier, went out of her life, indeed, as unobtrusively as he had entered it.

The carrier pigeon preened itself comfortably on the edge of the washstand. Harmony ceased her hysterical crying at last and pondered what was best to do. Monia was still breakfasting so incredibly brief are great moments. After a little thought Harmony wrote a tiny message, English, German, and French, and inclosed it in the brass tube.

“The Herr Georgiev has been arrested,” she wrote. An hour later the carrier rose lazily from the window-sill, flapped its way over the church roof and disappeared, like Georgiev, out of her life. Grim-visaged war had touched her and passed on.

The incident was not entirely closed, however. A search of the building followed the capture of the little spy. Protesting tenants were turned out, beds were dismantled, closets searched, walls sounded for hidden hollows. In one room on Harmony’s floor was found stored a quantity of ammunition.

It was when the three men who had conducted the search had finished, when the boxes of ammunition had been gathered in the hall, and the chattering sewing-girls had gone back to work, that Harmony, on her way to her dismantled room, passed through the upper passage.

She glanced down the staircase where little Georgiev had so manfully descended.

“I carry always in my heart your image. Always so long as I live.”

The clatter of soldiers on their way down to the street came to her ears; the soft cooing of the pigeons, the whirr of sewing-machines from the workroom. The incident was closed, except for the heap of ammunition boxes on the landing, guarded by an impassive soldier.

Harmony glanced at him. He was eying her steadily, thumbs in, heels in, toes out, chest out. Harmony put her hand to her heart.

“You!” she said.

The conversation of a sentry, save on a holiday is, “Yea, yea,” and “Nay, nay.”

“Yes, Fraulein.”

Harmony put her hands together, a little gesture of appeal, infinitely touching.

“You will not say that you have found, have seen me?”

“No, Fraulein.”

It was in Harmony’s mind to ask all her hungry heart craved to learn–of Peter, of Jimmy, of the Portier, of anything that belonged to the old life in the Siebensternstrasse. But there was no time. The sentry’s impassive face became rigid; he looked through her, not at her. Harmony turned.

The man in the green hat was coming up the staircase. There was no further chance to question. The sentry was set to carrying the boxes down the staircase.

Full morning now, with the winter sun shining on the beggars in the market, on the crowds in the parks, on the flower sellers in the Stephansplatz; shining on Harmony’s golden head as she bent over a bit of chiffon, on the old milkwoman carrying up the whitewashed staircase her heavy cans of milk; on the carrier pigeon winging its way to the south; beating in through bars to the exalted face of Herr Georgiev; resting on Peter’s drooping shoulders, on the neglected mice and the wooden soldier, on the closed eyes of a sick child–the worshiped sun, peering forth–the golden window of the East.

CHAPTER XXVI

Jimmy was dying. Peter, fighting hard, was beaten at last. All through the night he had felt it; during the hours before the dawn there had been times when the small pulse wavered, flickered, almost ceased. With the daylight there had been a trifle of recovery, enough for a bit of hope, enough to make harder Peter’s acceptance of the inevitable.

The boy was very happy, quite content and comfortable. When he opened his eyes he smiled at Peter, and Peter, gray of face, smiled back. Peter died many deaths that night.

At daylight Jimmy fell into a sleep that was really stupor. Marie, creeping to the door in the faint dawn, found the boy apparently asleep and Peter on his knees beside the bed. He raised his head at her footstep and the girl was startled at the suffering in his face. He motioned her back.

“But you must have a little sleep, Peter.”

“No. I’ll stay until–Go back to bed. It is very early.”

Peter had not been able after all to secure the Nurse Elisabet, and now it was useless. At eight o’clock he let Marie take his place, then he bathed and dressed and prepared to face another day, perhaps another night. For the child’s release came slowly. He tried to eat breakfast, but managed only a cup of coffee.

Many things had come to Peter in the long night, and one was insistent–the boy’s mother was in Vienna and he was dying without her. Peter might know in his heart that he had done the best thing for the child, but like Harmony his early training was rising now to accuse him. He had separated mother and child. Who was he to have decided the mother’s unfitness, to have played destiny? How lightly he had taken the lives of others in his hand, and to what end? Harmony, God knows where; the boy dying without his mother. Whatever that mother might be, her place that day was with her boy. What a wreck he had made of things! He was humbled as well as stricken, poor Peter!

In the morning he sent a note to McLean, asking him to try to trace the mother and inclosing the music-hall clipping and the letter. The letter, signed only “Mamma,” was not helpful. The clipping might prove valuable.

“And for Heaven’s sake be quick,” wrote Peter. “This is a matter of hours. I meant well, but I’ve done a terrible thing. Bring her, Mac, no matter what she is or where you find her.” The Portier carried the note. When he came up to get it he brought in his pocket a small rabbit and a lettuce leaf. Never before had the combination failed to arouse and amuse the boy. He carried the rabbit down again sorrowfully. “He saw it not,” he reported sadly to his wife. “Be off to the church while I deliver this letter. And this rabbit we will not cook, but keep in remembrance.”

At eleven o’clock Marie called Peter, who was asleep on the horsehair sofa.

“He asks for you.”

Peter was instantly awake and on his feet. The boy’s eyes were open and fixed on him.

“Is it another day?” he asked.

“Yes, boy; another morning.”

“I am cold, Peter.”

They blanketed him, although the room was warm. From where he lay he could see the mice. He watched them for a moment. Poor Peter, very humble, found himself wondering in how many ways he had been remiss. To see this small soul launched into eternity without a foreword, without a bit of light for the journey! Peter’s religion had been one of life and living, not of creed.

Marie, bringing jugs of hot water, bent over Peter.

“He knows, poor little one!” she whispered.

And so, indeed, it would seem. The boy, revived by a spoonful or two of broth, asked to have the two tame mice on the bed. Peter, opening the cage, found one dead, very stiff and stark. The catastrophe he kept from the boy.

“One is sick, Jimmy boy,” he said, and placed the mate, forlorn and shivering, on the pillow. After a minute:–

“If the sick one dies will it go to heaven?”

“Yes, honey, I think so.”

The boy was silent for a time. Thinking was easier than speech. His mind too worked slowly. It was after a pause, while he lay there with closed eyes, that Peter saw two tears slip from under his long lashes. Peter bent over and wiped them away, a great ache in his heart.

“What is it, dear?”

“I’m afraid–it’s going to die!”

“Would that be so terrible, Jimmy boy?” asked Peter gently. “To go to heaven, where there is no more death or dying, where it is always summer and the sun always shines?”

No reply for a moment. The little mouse sat up on the pillow and rubbed its nose with a pinkish paw. The baby mice in the cage nuzzled their dead mother.

“Is there grass?”

“Yes–soft green grass.”

“Do–boys in heaven–go in their bare feet?” Ah, small mind and heart, so terrified and yet so curious!

“Indeed, yes.” And there on his knees beside the white bed Peter painted such a heaven as no theologue has ever had the humanity to paint–a heaven of babbling brooks and laughing, playing children, a heaven of dear departed puppies and resurrected birds, of friendly deer, of trees in fruit, of speckled fish in bright rivers. Painted his heaven with smiling eyes and death in his heart, a child’s heaven of games and friendly Indians, of sunlight and rain, sweet sleep and brisk awakening.

The boy listened. He was silent when Peter had finished. Speech was increasingly an effort.

“I should–like–to go there,” he whispered at last.

He did not speak again during all the long afternoon, but just at dusk he roused again.

“I would like–to see–the sentry,” he said with difficulty.

And so again, and for the last time, Rosa’s soldier from Salzburg with one lung.

Through all that long day, then, Harmony sat over her work, unaccustomed muscles aching, the whirring machines in her ears. Monia, upset over the morning’s excitement, was irritable and unreasonable. The gold-tissue costume had come back from Le Grande with a complaint. Below in the courtyard all day curious groups stood gaping up the staircase, where the morning had seen such occurrences.

At the noon hour, while the girls heated soup and carried in pails of salad from the corner restaurant, Harmony had fallen into the way of playing for them. To the music-loving Viennese girls this was the hour of the day. To sit back, soup bowl on knee, the machines silent, Monia quarreling in the kitchen with the Hungarian servant, and while the pigeons ate crusts on the window-sills, to hear this American girl play such music as was played at the opera, her slim figure swaying, her whole beautiful face and body glowing with the melody she made, the girls found the situation piquant, altogether delightful. Although she did not suspect it, many rumors were rife about Harmony in the workroom. She was not of the people, they said–the daughter of a great American, of course, run away to escape a loveless marriage. This was borne out by the report of one of them who had glimpsed the silk petticoat. It was rumored also that she wore no chemise, but instead an infinitely coquettish series of lace and nainsook garments–of a fineness!

Harmony played for them that day, played, perhaps, as she had not played since the day she had moved the master to tears, played to Peter as she had seen him at the window, to Jimmy, to the little Georgiev as he went down the staircase. And finally with a choke in her throat to the little mother back home, so hopeful, so ignorant.

In the evening, as was her custom, she took the one real meal of the day at the corner restaurant, going early to avoid the crowd and coming back quickly through the winter night. The staircase was always a peril, to be encountered and conquered night after night and even in the daytime not to be lightly regarded. On her way up this night she heard steps ahead, heavy, measured steps that climbed steadily without pauses. For an instant Harmony thought it sounded like Peter’s step and she went dizzy.

But it was not Peter. Standing in the upper hall, much as he had stood that morning over the ammunition boxes, thumbs in, heels in, toes out, chest out, was the sentry.

Harmony’s first thought was of Georgiev and more searching of the building. Then she saw that the sentry’s impassive face wore lines of trouble. He saluted. “Please, Fraulein.”

“Yes?”

“I have not told the Herr Doktor.”

“I thank you.”

“But the child dies.”

“Jimmy?”

“He dies all of last night and to-day. To-night, it is, perhaps, but of moments.”

Harmony clutched at the iron stair-rail for support. “You are sure? You are not telling me so that I will go back?”

“He dies, Fraulein. The Herr Doktor has not slept for many hours. My wife, Rosa, sits on the stair to see that none disturb, and her cousin, the wife of the Portier, weeps over the stove. Please, Fraulein, come with me.”

“When did you leave the Siebensternstrasse?”

“But now.”

“And he still lives?”

“Ja, Fraulein, and asks for you.”

Now suddenly fell away from the girl all pride, all fear, all that was personal and small and frightened, before the reality of death. She rose, as women by divine gift do rise, to the crisis; ceased trembling, got her hat and coat and her shabby gloves and joined the sentry again. Another moment’s delay–to secure the Le Grande’s address from Monia. Then out into the night, Harmony to the Siebensternstrasse, the tall soldier to find the dancer at her hotel, or failing that, at the Ronacher Music-Hall.

Harmony took a taxicab–nothing must be spared now–bribed the chauffeur to greater speed, arrived at the house and ran across the garden, still tearless, up the stairs, past Rosa on the upper flight, and rang the bell.

Marie admitted her with only a little gasp of surprise. There was nothing to warn Peter. One moment he sat by the bed, watch in hand, alone, drear, tragic-eyed. The next he had glanced up, saw Harmony and went white, holding to the back of his chair. Their eyes met, agony and hope in them, love and death, rapture and bitterness. In Harmony’s, pleading, promise, something of doubt; in Peter’s, only yearning, as of empty arms. Then Harmony dared to look at the bed and fell on her knees in a storm of grief beside it. Peter bent over and gently stroked her hair.

Le Grande was singing; the boxes were full. In the body of the immense theater waiters scurried back and forward among the tables. Everywhere was the clatter of silver and steel on porcelain, the clink of glasses. Smoke was everywhere–pipes, cigars, cigarettes. Women smoked between bites at the tables, using small paper or silver mouthpieces, even a gold one shone here and there. Men walked up and down among the diners, spraying the air with chemicals to clear it. At a table just below the stage sat the red-bearded Dozent with the lady of the photograph. They were drinking cheap native wines and were very happy.

From the height of his worldly wisdom he was explaining the people to her.

“In the box–don’t stare, Liebchen, he looks–is the princeling I have told you of. Roses, of course. Last night it was orchids.”

“Last night! Were you here?” He coughed.

“I have been told, Liebchen. Each night he sits there, and when she finishes her song he rises in the box, kisses the flowers and tosses them to her.”

“Shameless! Is she so beautiful?”

“No. But you shall see. She comes.”

Le Grande was very popular. She occupied the best place on the program; and because she sang in American, which is not exactly English and more difficult to understand, her songs were considered exceedingly risque. As a matter of fact they were merely ragtime melodies, with a lilt to them that caught the Viennese fancy, accustomed to German sentinental ditties and the artificial forms of grand opera. And there was another reason for her success. She carried with her a chorus of a dozen pickaninnies.

In Austria darkies were as rare as cats, and there were no cats! So the little chorus had made good.

Each day she walked in the Prater, ermine from head to foot, and behind her two by two trailed twelve little Southern darkies in red-velvet coats and caps, grinning sociably. When she drove a pair sat on the boot.

Her voice was strong, not sweet, spoiled by years of singing against dishes and bottles in smoky music halls; spoiled by cigarettes and absinthe and foreign cocktails that resembled their American prototypes as the night resembles the day.

She wore the gold dress, decolletee, slashed to the knee over rhinestone-spangled stockings. And back of her trailed the twelve little darkies.

She sang “Dixie,” of course, and the “Old Folks at Home”; then a ragtime medley, with the chorus showing rows of white teeth and clogging with all their short legs. Le Grande danced to that, a whirling, nimble dance. The little rhinestones on her stockings flashed; her opulent bosom quivered. The Dozent, eyes on the dancer, squeezed his companion’s hand.

“I love thee!” he whispered, rather flushed.

And then she sang “Doan ye cry, mah honey.” Her voice, rather coarse but melodious, lent itself to the negro rhythm, the swing and lilt of the lullaby. The little darkies, eyes rolling, preternaturally solemn, linked arms and swayed rhythmically, right, left, right, left. The glasses ceased clinking; sturdy citizens forgot their steak and beer for a moment and listened, knife and fork poised. Under the table the Dozent’s hand pressed its captive affectionately, his eyes no longer on Le Grande, but on the woman across, his sweetheart, she who would be mother of his children. The words meant little to the audience; the rich, rolling Southern lullaby held them rapt:–

“Doan ye Cry, mah honey–
Doan ye weep no mo’,
Mammy’s gwine to hold her baby,
All de udder black trash sleepin’ on the flo’,”

The little darkies swayed; the singer swayed, empty arms cradled.

She picked the tiniest darky up and held him, woolly head against her breast, and crooned to him, rocking on her jeweled heels. The crowd applauded; the man in the box kissed his flowers and flung them. Glasses and dishes clinked again.

The Dozent bent across the table.

“Some day–” he said.

The girl blushed.

Le Grande made her way into the wings, surrounded by her little troupe. A motherly colored woman took them, shooed them off, rounded them up like a flock of chickens.

And there in the wings, grimly impassive, stood a private soldier of the old Franz Josef, blocking the door to her dressing room. For a moment gold dress and dark blue-gray uniform confronted each other. Then the sentry touched his cap.

“Madam,” he said, “the child is in the Riebensternstrasse and to-night he dies.”

“What child?” Her arms were full of flowers.

“The child from the hospital. Please to make haste.”

Jimmy died an hour after midnight, quite peacefully, died with one hand in Harmony’s and one between Peter’s two big ones.

Toward the last he called Peter “Daddy” and asked for a drink. His eyes, moving slowly round the room, passed without notice the grayfaced woman in a gold dress who stood staring down at him, rested a moment on the cage of mice, came to a stop in the doorway, where stood the sentry, white and weary, but refusing rest.

It was Harmony who divined the child’s unspoken wish.

“The manual?” she whispered.

The boy nodded. And so just inside the door of the bedroom across from the old salon of Maria Theresa the sentry, with sad eyes but no lack of vigor, went again through the Austrian manual of arms, and because he had no carbine he used Peter’s old walking-stick.

When it was finished the boy smiled faintly, tried to salute, lay still.

CHAPTER XXVII

Peter was going back to America and still he had not told Harmony he loved her. It was necessary that he go back. His money had about given out, and there was no way to get more save by earning it. The drain of Jimmy’s illness, the inevitable expense of the small grave and the tiny stone Peter had insisted on buying, had made retreat his only course. True, Le Grande had wished to defray all expenses, but Peter was inexorable. No money earned as the dancer earned hers should purchase peaceful rest for the loved little body. And after seeing Peter’s eyes the dancer had not insisted.

A week had seen many changes. Marie was gone. After a conference between Stewart and Peter that had been decided on. Stewart raised the money somehow, and Peter saw her off, palpitant and eager, with the pin he had sent her to Semmering at her throat. She kissed Peter on the cheek in the station, rather to his embarrassment. From the lowered window, as the train pulled out, she waved a moist handkerchief.

“I shall be very good,” she promised him. The last words he heard above the grinding of the train were her cheery: “To America!”

Peter was living alone in the Street of Seven Stars, getting food where he might happen to be, buying a little now and then from the delicatessen shop across the street. For Harmony had gone back to the house in the Wollbadgasse. She had stayed until all was over and until Marie’s small preparations for departure were over. Then, while Peter was at the station, she slipped away again. But this time she left her address. She wrote:–

“You will come to visit me, dear Peter, because I was so lonely before and that is unnecessary now. But you must know that I cannot stay in the Siebensternstrasse. We have each our own fight to make, and you have been trying to fight for us all, for Marie, for dear little Jimmy, for me. You must get back to work now; you have lost so much time. And I am managing well. The Frau Professor is back and will take an evening lesson, and soon I shall have more money from Fraulein Reiff. You can see how things are looking up for me. In a few months I shall be able to renew my music lessons. And then, Peter,–the career!

“HARMONY.”

Her address was beneath.

Peter had suffered much. He was thinner, grayer, and as he stood with the letter in his hand he felt that Harmony was right. He could offer her nothing but his shabby self, his problematic future. Perhaps, surely, everything would have been settled, without reason, had he only once taken the girl in his arms, told her she was the breath of life itself to him. But adversity, while it had roused his fighting spirit in everything else, had sapped his confidence.

He had found the letter on his dressing-table, and he found himself confronting his image over it, a tall, stooping figure, a tired, lined face, a coat that bore the impress of many days with a sick child’s head against its breast.

So it was over. She had come back and gone again, and this time he must let her go. Who was he to detain her? She would carry herself on to success, he felt; she had youth, hope, beauty and ability. And she had proved the thing he had not dared to believe, that she could take care of herself in the old city. Only–to go away and leave her there!

McLean would remain. No doubt he already had Harmony’s address in the Wollbadgasse. Peter was not subtle, no psychologist, but he had seen during the last few days how the boy watched Harmony’s every word, every gesture. And, perhaps, when loneliness and hard work began to tell on her, McLean’s devotion would win its reward. McLean’s devotion, with all that it meant, the lessons again, community of taste, their common youth! Peter felt old, very tired.

Nevertheless he went that night to the Wollbadgasse. He sent his gray suit to the Portier’s wife to be pressed, and getting out his surgical case, as he had once before in the Pension Schwarz, he sewed a button on his overcoat, using the curved needle and the catgut and working with surgeon’s precision. Then, still working very carefully, he trimmed the edges of graying hair over his ears, trimmed his cuffs, trimmed his best silk tie, now almost hopeless. He blacked his shoes, and the suit not coming, he donned his dressing-gown and went into Jimmy’s room to feed the mice. Peter stood a moment beside the smooth white bed with his face working. The wooden sentry still stood on the bedside table.

It was in Peter’s mind to take the mice to Harmony, confess his defeat and approaching retreat, and ask her to care for them. Then he decided against this palpable appeal for sympathy, elected to go empty-handed and discover merely how comfortable she was or was not. When the time came he would slip out of her life, sending her a letter and leaving McLean on guard.

Harmony was at home. Peter climbed the dark staircase–where Harmony had met the little Georgiev, and where he had gone down to his death–climbed steadily, but without his usual elasticity. The place appalled him–its gloom, its dinginess, its somber quiet. In the daylight, with the pigeons on the sills and the morning sunlight printing the cross of the church steeple on the whitewashed wall, it was peaceful, cloisterlike, with landings that were crypts. But at night it was almost terrifying, that staircase.

Harmony was playing. Peter heard her when he reached the upper landing, playing a sad little strain that gripped his heart. He waited outside before ringing, heard her begin something determinedly cheerful, falter, cease altogether. Peter rang.

Harmony herself admitted him. Perhaps–oh, certainly she had expected him! It would be Peter, of course, to come and see how she was getting on, how she was housed. She held out her hand and Peter took it. Still no words, only a half smile from her and no smile at all from Peter, but his heart in his eyes.

“I hoped you would come, Peter. We may have the reception room.”

“You knew I would come,” said Peter. “The reception room?”

“Where customers wait.” She still carried her violin, and slipped back to her room to put it away. Peter had a glimpse of its poverty and its meagerness. He drew a long breath.

Monia was at the opera, and the Hungarian sat in the kitchen knitting a stocking. The reception room was warm from the day’s fire, and in order. All the pins and scraps of the day had been swept up, and the portieres that made fitting-rooms of the corners were pushed back. Peter saw only a big room with empty corners, and that at a glance. His eyes were Harmony’s.

He sat down awkwardly on a stiff chair, Harmony on a velvet settee. They were suddenly two strangers meeting for the first time. In the squalor of the Pension Schwarz, in the comfortable intimacies of the Street of Seven Stars, they had been easy, unconstrained. Now suddenly Peter was tongue-tied. Only one thing in him clamored for utterance, and that he sternly silenced.

“I–I could not stay there, Peter. You understood?”

“No. Of course, I understood.”

“You were not angry?”

“Why should I be angry? You came, like an angel of light, when I needed you. Only, of course,–“

“Yes?”

“I’ll not say that, I think.”

“Please say it, Peter!”

Peter writhed; looked everywhere but at her.

“Please, Peter. You said I always came when you needed me, only–“

“Only–I always need you!” Peter, Peter!

“Not always, I think. Of course, when one is in trouble one needs a woman; but–“

“Well, of course–but–I’m generally in trouble, Harry dear.”

Frightfully ashamed of himself by that time was Peter, ashamed of his weakness. He sought to give a casual air to the speech by stooping for a neglected pin on the carpet. By the time he had stuck it in his lapel he had saved his mental forces from the rout of Harmony’s eyes.

His next speech he made to the center table, and missed a most delectable look in the aforesaid eyes.

“I didn’t come to be silly,” he said to the table. “I hate people who whine, and I’ve got into a damnable habit of being sorry for myself! It’s to laugh, isn’t it, a great, hulking carcass like me, to be–“

“Peter,” said Harmony softly, “aren’t you going to look at me?”

“I’m afraid.”

“That’s cowardice. And I’ve fixed my hair a new way. Do you like it?”

“Splendid,” said Peter to the center table.

“You didn’t look!”

The rout of Harmony’s eyes was supplemented by the rout of Harmony’s hair. Peter, goaded, got up and walked about. Harmony was half exasperated; she would have boxed Peter’s ears with a tender hand had she dared.

His hands thrust savagely in his pockets, Peter turned and faced her at last.

“First of all,” he said, “I am going back to America, Harmony. I’ve got all I can get here, all I came for–” He stopped, seeing her face. “Well, of course, that’s not true, I haven’t. But I’m going back, anyhow. You needn’t look so stricken: I haven’t lost my chance. I’ll come back sometime again and finish, when I’ve earned enough to do it.”

“You will never come back, Peter. You have spent all your money on others, and now you are going back just where you were, and–you are leaving me here alone!”

“You are alone, anyhow,” said Peter, “making your own way and getting along. And McLean will be here.”

“Are you turning me over to him?”

No reply. Peter was pacing the floor.

“Peter!”

“Yes, dear?”

“Do you remember the night in Anna’s room at the Schwartz when you proposed to me?”

No reply. Peter found another pin.

“And that night in the old lodge when you proposed to me again?”

Peter turned and looked at her, at her slender, swaying young figure, her luminous eyes, her parted, childish lips.

“Peter, I want you to–to ask me again.”

“No!”

“Why?”

“Now, listen to me, Harmony. You’re sorry for me, that’s all; I don’t want to be pitied. You stay here and work. You’ll do big things. I had a talk with the master while I was searching for you, and he says you can do anything. But he looked at me–and a sight I was with worry and fright–and he warned me off, Harmony. He says you must not marry.”

“Old pig!” said Harmony. “I will marry if I please.”

Nevertheless Peter’s refusal and the master’s speech had told somewhat. She was colder, less vibrant. Peter came to her, stood close, looking down at her.

“I’ve said a lot I didn’t mean to,” he said. “There’s only one thing I haven’t said, I oughtn’t to say it, dear. I’m not going to marry you–I won’t have such a thing on my conscience. But it doesn’t hurt a woman to know that a man loves her. I love you, dear. You’re my heaven and my earth–even my God, I’m afraid. But I will not marry you.”

“Not even if I ask you to?”

“Not even then, dear. To share my struggle–“

“I see,” slowly. “It is to be a struggle?”

“A hard fight, Harmony. I’m a pauper practically.”

“And what am I?”

“Two poverties don’t make a wealth, even of happiness,” said Peter steadily. “In the time to come, when you would think of what you might have been, it would be a thousand deaths to me, dear.”

“People have married, women have married and carried on their work, too, Peter.”

“Not your sort of women or your sort of work. And not my sort of man, Harry. I’m jealous–jealous of every one about you. It would have to be the music or me.”

“And you make the choice!” said Harmony proudly. “Very well, Peter, I shall do as you say. But I think it is a very curious sort of love.”

“I wonder,” Peter cried, “if you realize what love it is that loves you enough to give you up.”

“You have not asked me if I care, Peter.”

Peter looked at her. She was very near to tears, very sad, very beautiful.

“I’m afraid to ask,” said Peter, and picking up his hat he made for the door. There he turned, looked back, was lost.

“My sweetest heart!” he cried, and took her in his hungry arms. But even then, with her arms about his neck at last, with her slender body held to him, her head on his shoulder, his lips to her soft throat, Peter put her from him as a starving man might put away food.

He held her off and looked at her.

“I’m a fool and a weakling,” he said gravely. “I love you so much that I would sacrifice you. You are very lovely, my girl, my girl! As long as I live I shall carry your image in my heart.”

Ah, what the little Georgiev had said on his way to the death that waited down the staircase. Peter, not daring to look at her again, put away her detaining hand, squared his shoulders, went to the door.

“Good-bye, Harmony,” he said steadily. “Always in my heart!”

Very near the end now: the little Marie on the way to America, with the recording angel opening a new page in life’s ledger for her and a red-ink line erasing the other; with Jimmy and his daddy wandering through the heaven of friendly adventure and green fields, hand in hand; with the carrier resting after its labors in the pigeon house by the rose-fields of Sofia; with the sentry casting martial shadows through the barred windows of the hospital; and the little Georgiev, about to die, dividing his heart, as a heritage, between his country and a young girl.

Very near the end, with the morning light of the next day shining into the salon of Maria Theresa and on to Peter’s open trunk and shabby wardrobe spread over chairs. An end of trunks and departure, as was the beginning.

Early morning at the Gottesacker, or God’s acre, whence little Jimmy had started on his comfortable journey. Early morning on the frost-covered grass, the frozen roads, the snap and sparkle of the Donau. Harmony had taken her problem there, in the early hour before Monia would summon her to labor–took her problem and found her answer.

The great cemetery was still and deserted. Harmony, none too warmly clad, walked briskly, a bunch of flowers in oiled paper against the cold. Already the air carried a hint of spring; there was a feeling of resurrection and promise. The dead earth felt alive under-foot.

Harmony knelt by the grave and said the little prayer the child had repeated at night and morning. And, because he had loved it, with some vague feeling of giving him comfort, she recited the little verse:–

“Ah well! For us all some sweet hope lies Deeply buried from human eyes:
And in the hereafter, angels may
Roll the stone from its grave away.”

When she looked up Le Grande was standing beside her.

There was no scene, hardly any tears. She had brought out a great bunch of roses that bore only too clearly the stamp of whence they came. One of the pickaninnies had carried the box and stood impassively by, gazing at Harmony.

Le Grande placed her flowers on the grave. They almost covered it, quite eclipsed Harmony’s.

“I come here every morning,” she said simply.

She had a cab waiting, and offered to drive Harmony back to the city. Her quiet almost irritated Harmony, until she had looked once into the woman’s eyes. After that she knew. It was on the drive back, with the little darky on the box beside the driver, that Harmony got her answer.

Le Grande put a hand over Harmony’s.

“I tried to tell you before how good I know you were to him.”

“We loved him.”

“And I resented it. But Dr. Byrne was right–I was not a fit person to–to have him.”

“It was not that–not only that–“

“Did he ever ask for me? But of course not.”

“No, he had no remembrance.”

Silence for a moment. The loose windows of the cab clattered.

“I loved him very much when he came,” said Le Grande, “although I did not want him. I had been told I could have a career on the stage. Ah, my dear, I chose the career–and look at me! What have I? A grave in the cemetery back there, and on it roses sent me by a man I loathe! If I could live it over again!”

The answer was very close now:–

“Would you stay at home?”

“Who knows, I being I? And my husband did not love me. It was the boy always. There is only one thing worth while–the love of a good man. I have lived, lived hard. And I know.”

“But supposing that one has real ability–I mean some achievement already, and a promise–“

Le Grande turned and looked at Harmony shrewdly.

“I see. You are a musician, I believe?”

“Yes.”

“And–it is Dr. Byrne?”

“Yes.”

Le Grande bent forward earnestly.

“My child,” she said, “if one man in all the world looked at me as your doctor looks at you, I–I would be a better woman.”

“And my music?”

“Play for your children, as you played for my little boy.”

Peter was packing: wrapping medical books in old coats, putting clean collars next to boots, folding pajamas and such-like negligible garments with great care and putting in his dresscoat in a roll. His pipes took time, and the wooden sentry he packed with great care and a bit of healthy emotion. Once or twice he came across trifles of Harmony’s, and he put them carefully aside–the sweater coat, a folded handkerchief, a bow she had worn at her throat. The bow brought back the night before and that reckless kiss on her white throat. Well for Peter to get away if he is to keep his resolution, when the sight of a ribbon bow can bring that look of suffering into his eyes.

The Portier below was polishing floors, right foot, left foot, any foot at all. And as he polished he sang in a throaty tenor.

“Kennst du das Land wo die Citronen bluhen,” he sang at the top of his voice, and coughed, a bit of floor wax having got into the air. The antlers of the deer from the wild-game shop hung now in his bedroom. When the wildgame seller came over for coffee there would be a discussion probably. But were not the antlers of all deer similar?

The Portier’s wife came to the doorway with a cooking fork in her hand.

“A cab,” she announced, “with a devil’s imp on the box. Perhaps it is that American dancer. Run and pretty thyself!”

It was too late for more than an upward twist of a mustache. Harmony was at the door, but not the sad-eyed Harmony of a week before or the undecided and troubled girl of before that. A radiant Harmony, this, who stood in the doorway, who wished them good-morning, and ran up the old staircase with glowing eyes and a heart that leaped and throbbed. A woman now, this Harmony, one who had looked on life and learned; one who had chosen her fate and was running to meet it; one who feared only death, not life or anything that life could offer.

The door was not locked. Perhaps Peter was not up–not dressed. What did that matter? What did anything matter but Peter himself?

Peter, sorting out lectures on McBurney’s Point, had come across a bit of paper that did not belong there, and was sitting by his open trunk, staring blindly at it:–

“You are very kind to me. Yes, indeed.

“H. W.”