CHAPTER VI

THROUGH PURPLE CURTAINS

When Nan made up her mind, she acted with lightning rapidity. She would force Stuart to an avowal of love that would fix their relation beyond disturbance by the little singer. She had too fine a sense of values to permit herself to become entangled in an intrigue.

She could wait, and gain in power for the waiting. Her physician had told her that Bivens's days were numbered. Stuart had waited twelve years in silence; he could wait the few months more of her husband's flickering life.

But on one thing she was determined. Now that another woman had appeared on the scene she would not live in suspense, she must know that he loved her still, loved her passionately, madly as she believed he did. But he must say it. She must hear his voice quiver with its old fiery intensity. She wished this as she had never longed for anything on earth, and for twelve years she had lived in a magic world where she had only to breathe a desire to have it fulfilled.

Stuart had baffled and eluded her on every point when she had thought he was about to betray his passion. Here was something mere money had no power to command. Well, she had other powers. She would use them to the limit. She would no longer risk the danger of delay.

She had no difficulty in persuading Bivens to urge Stuart to visit their country estate in the mountains of North Carolina. The doctor had ordered him there to live in the open air.

The young lawyer refused to go at first, but Bivens urged with such pathetic eagerness he was compelled to accept.

It was a warm beautiful morning the last week in March when he alighted on the platform of the little railroad station on the estate, and took his seat beside Nan in her big touring car. The fruit trees were in full bloom, and their perfume filled the air. The hum of bees and the song of birds he had known in his boyhood thrilled his heart. He drew a deep breath of joy, and without a struggle resigned himself to the charm of it all.

"It's glorious, Nan!" he exclaimed.

"Your coming makes it perfect, Jim," she answered, tenderly, and turning to the chauffeur said:

"Drive for an hour before going to the house, Collins."

The chauffeur tipped his cap and the throbbing machine shot around a curve and swept along the river's edge down the green carpeted valley which stretches out for miles below the ramparts of the great chateau on the mountain-side above.

"There's the house, Jim!" Nan cried, pointing to the heights on the left.

Stuart could not suppress an exclamation of delight.

"Magnificent!" he said, with enthusiasm.

As the river made a graceful curve the great building swept into full view--a stunning pile of marble three hundred feet long, its tower piercing the turquoise sky in solemn grandeur. The stone parapet, on which its front wall was built, rose in massive strength a hundred feet from the ledge in the granite cliff before touching the first line of the white stones of the house itself.

At the end a formal garden had been built on the foundations of masonry which cost a hundred thousand dollars.

"What a background that row of live oaks make behind the garden!" he exclaimed.

"Don't they?" she answered. "You would hardly believe it, but we planted every one of those trees."

"Nonsense! They must be two feet in diameter."

"More; not one of them is less than three. We moved a hundred of them from the woods, without breaking the dirt from their roots--built special machinery to do it. I think Cal is prouder of those trees than he is of the house."

For an hour the car swept like a spirit over the miles of smooth macadam private roads Bivens had built. At each graceful turn his wonder increased at the luxurious outlay of millions which the little man had spent to gratify a whim.

From each hilltop, as the huge gleaming castle came into view from a new angle, revealing its marvellous beauty, he thought with a touch of pity of the shambling figure of the stricken man limping through its halls helpless, lonely, miserable. What strange pranks Fate plays with the mighty as well as the lowly! So frail was the broken body now he did not dare risk a cold by taking a ride with his wife.

The machine turned suddenly up a hill and glided through two iron gates opening on the lawn and the great white chateau loomed before them in a flash of blinding beauty. Stuart caught his breath.

Turning to Nan he shook his head slowly:

"Don't you like it?" she laughed.

"I was just wondering."

"At what?"

"Whether this is the Republic for which our struggling fathers fought and died? America you know, Nan, is the tall rude youth who saw a vision, made his way into the wilderness, slept on the ground, fought with hunger and wild beasts and grew strong by the labour of his right arm. It would be a strange thing if all he has learned is to crawl back to where he started and build a castle exactly like the one from which the tyrants drove him in the Old World."

"What a strange fellow you are, Jim." Her answer carried with it a touch of resentment. "This house is mine, mine--not America's--please remember that. Let the future American take of himself!"

"Certainly, I understand," he answered quickly, as the car stopped under the vaulted porte-cochère. "You wouldn't be a woman if you didn't feel that way. All right; I'm in your hands. To the devil with the future American!"

"That's better!" she laughed.

Stuart shook hands with Bivens and was shocked to find him so weak.

The little man held his hand with a lingering wistfulness as he looked into his friend's strong face.

"You don't know how rich you are, Jim," he said, feebly, "with this hand that grips like iron. I'd give millions to feel my heart beat like yours to-day."

"You'll get better down here," Stuart answered, cheerfully.

"I'm trying it anyhow," he said listlessly. "Make yourself at home, old boy. This house is my pride. I want Nan to show you every nook and corner in it. I wish I could trot around with you, but I can't."

"As soon as you've changed your clothes," Nan said, familiarly, "come down to the library and I'll show you around."

Stuart followed the man assigned as his valet to the electric elevator and in a minute stepped out on the fourth floor. He observed with a smile that his room number was 157.

"The idea of living in a huge hotel and calling it a home!" he mused, with grim humour. "Room 157; great Scott!"

His hostess showed him first the library. The magnificent room contained more than forty thousand volumes, bound in hand-tooled morocco.

"The funny thing, of course," Nan whispered, "is that Cal has never read one of these exquisitely bound books."

"Why on earth did he make this room the most stately and beautiful one in the house?"

"Maybe he didn't!" she laughed. "I'm going to give you a privilege no mere man has ever enjoyed in this house before--I am going to show you my own rooms. Will you appreciate the honour?"

The man answered with a bantering smile.

"If I live to tell the story!"

When the tour of inspection had been completed she led him to her own suite, which was located in the south-western corner, overlooking the magnificent formal gardens with their artificial lake, fountains, statuary and a wilderness of flowers, and farther on over the beautiful valleys of the Swannanoa and the French Broad rivers. Beyond the river valleys rose range after range of mountains until the last dim peaks were lost in the clouds.

The magnificence of her bed-room was stunning. Stuart rubbed his eyes in amazement.

The bedstead seemed a thing of life--so elaborate and wonderful was its art. Built of massive ebony with the most remarkable ivory carvings set in its gleaming black surface, artists, as many as could touch the material, had worked two years on the carving alone. The allegorical pictures cut into the broad band of ivory which ran around the frame had required the time of four art-workmen for eighteen months.

Stuart stood fascinated.

"You see that magnificent piece of ivory on the head, Jim?" she asked, with sparkling eyes.

"The most massive solid piece I ever saw!" he exclaimed. "I never dreamed the elephant had ever lived with such a tusk."

"We found him at last!" Nan cried, with pride. "It took the time of fourteen hunters in Africa for seven months."

"I can easily believe it," Stuart answered. "Ludwig of Bavaria surely never dreamed anything like this."

"The walls you see are panelled in Louis XV style, permitting the most elaborate carvings which I had heavily guilded on backgrounds of white enamel, but the thing I love best about this panelling, is not the panel at all--it's the rich purple and gold Genoese velvet. I had it made by a noted firm in Lyons. Don't you think it exquisite?"

"If I ever get rich I'll have a piece of it for the collar of my coat."

"I got my painters from Paris to do the ceilings. They worked very quickly, but they knew how to charge. The window curtains, you see, are of the same material as the purple and gold velvet in the panels, while the under curtains are hand-woven of Brussels net and interwoven with silk. The wardrobe, little washstand and dressing table are of ebony and ivory, the chairs, of solid ivory inlaid with gold and ebony, were all made to match the bedstead."

Stuart looked at his hostess curiously.

"I thought I knew you, Nan, but this is a revelation. I could never have guessed by the wildest leap of my imagination. It's beyond belief."

"Don't you like it?" she asked, with a hurt expression.

"I'm stunned. The most wonderful thing to me in the room, though, is not the bedstead, but the woman standing beside it."

A flash of light came from the dark eyes and the magnificent figure grew tense for a moment as she smiled with a look of inquiry.

"I'm lost in wonder at the riotous glory of your capacity for sensuous joy. I could imagine Juno on the heights of Olympus executing such a dream of mad luxury, but I could never have conceived of this, here, if I had not seen it. And yet, now that I see you in the setting, I'm sure you were made for it. The whole scheme is harmonious--it scares me----"

"Scares you?" she repeated with quick displeasure.

"Yes," he went on, jokingly. "It almost reconciles me to being a bachelor."

A look of pain swept the expressive face and he was sorry he had said it. The joke seemed out of harmony with her mood. She had taken herself seriously in the creation of this room, and had spent on it a round million. The effect it had produced on the man's mind was anything but flippant. He dared not tell how deeply he was moved, how every desire had awakened into fierce, cruel longing as the subtle scheme of sensuous dreaming had unfolded itself before his eyes. He began to wonder whether there were really any complexity or any mystery at all about her, whether she were not very simple and very elemental.

The picture she made standing in this wonderful room was one that never faded from his memory. The poise of her superb form; the fires that smouldered in the depths of her eyes; the tenderness with which her senses seemed to drink in the daring luxury; the smile that played about her lips, joyous, sensuous, cruel!

In vivid flashes he saw in her shining face the record of it all--the naked African hunters, crawling through forest jungles, stalking and bringing down in pools of blood the huge beasts who paid their tribute to her beauty; the army of toiling artists who bent their aching backs for days and weeks and months and years, carving the pictures in those white shining surfaces to please her fancy; the bowed figures of the weavers in Lyons and Brussels, these deft fingers working into matchless form the costly fabrics to please her eye and soothe the touch of her fingers as she drew back her curtains of purple and gold to let in the morning sunlight!

He wondered vaguely what such a woman, clothed with such power, would do if suddenly thwarted in a wish on which her heart was set?

And then it swept over him that she was no strange Egyptian princess, no sorceress of the Nile, no fairy of poet's fancy, but just the girl he had loved and lost and yet who had come back into his life in the dazzling splendour of her own day-dreams--one of the rulers of the world. He looked at her a moment and she seemed a being of another planet. He looked again and saw the laughing school-girl, his playmate on the red hills of his native state.

"Why so pensive, Jim?" she asked.

"It seems all a dream, Nan," he answered. "I'll rub my eyes and wake up directly. I thought your New York house a miracle. This is fairyland."

"Perhaps it would be," she said, looking at him a moment through half closed eyes, "if only the prince----"

A look of pain unconsciously clouded his face and the sentence was not finished.

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