Part 33

She was an honest and sturdy little soul, however, and she tried to console herself with the reflection that, if she continued to be honest, industrious, and virtuous, she might some day have all that Mrs. Robinson had, and more. Even in boarding school she had known that she was going to marry a millionaire, and now she was so situated that she might meet one at almost any minute. Who could tell what might not happen at the house of this sister in Greenwich?

So she did her work; and when it was done, and the trunks had gone off, she sat down to rest for a little. It was at this minute, when her busy little hands were idle, that temptation assailed her. She wondered what Mrs. Robinson had in her jewel case. She discovered that the key was in the lock. She did not see what harm it could possibly do just to look at the jewels; and then she did not see what harm it could possibly do just to try on a few of them.

She tucked in her blouse, so as to leave her slender neck and shoulders bare. She took the net off her smooth, neat coiffure, and produced a fascinating effect of wildness by a few deft touches. Cosmetics she needed not, for her eyes were starry, her cheeks flushed with delight. She slipped two or three rings on her fingers and a broad gold bracelet on one childish arm. She put on a long rope of pearls, and clasped about her throat a short necklace of emeralds.

Then she found a jeweled butterfly, the use of which she didn’t comprehend, but she fastened it in her hair, just above her eyebrows; and she stared and stared at her image in the mirror, enthralled by the magical glimmer of the jewels. She was altogether the most amazingly lovely little creature, and the man standing in the doorway behind her was very properly overwhelmed. He never forgot that first glimpse of Miss La Chêne.

“I--I--I--” he stammered.

She spun around, as white as a ghost. He was a slender, well dressed man, with a thin, harassed face, pleasant brown eyes, and hair a little gray. He was greatly embarrassed, and she was terrified; and that made conversation difficult.

III

Miss La Chêne was the first to recover.

“Who are you?” she demanded in a small, defiant voice.

“I?” said he, surprised. “B-but the thing is, who are _you_? I’m Robinson.”

Impossible! This mild and nervous gentleman the heartless brute who had ruined Mrs. Robinson’s life, shattered her illusions, and made her the nervous wreck she was? And yet, looking at him, Miss La Chêne could not doubt him. He seemed authentic.

“I’m Mrs. Robinson’s companion,” she said. “I--she--”

Then, so abashed was she, so humiliated at being caught thus, bedecked in Mrs. Robinson’s jewels, that she began to cry. She would not admit that she was crying, however. With great tears rolling down her cheeks and her lashes like wet rays, she explained, in a formal tone, that Mrs. Robinson had left her behind to pack, and that she had just tried on the--the jewels.

“W-well, what of it?” he said cheerfully. “Th-there’s no harm done. See here! Please don’t cry! Why shouldn’t you t-try on the things? Very natural!” He paused. “And very becoming,” he added, with a singularly nice sort of smile.

She liked him. He was kind and courteous, and he evidently admired her. When he asked where his wife had gone, Miss La Chêne found that she was sorry for him. He was so innocent, so absolutely unaware of his latest crime. He said that he had “popped in to surprise her.”

For an instant the tactful and zealous companion was at a loss. She was not very old and not very experienced, and this seemed to be rather a delicate matter; but she was a warm-hearted little thing, and pretty sharp-witted, and she was convinced now that Mr. Robinson was an old darling, and badly misunderstood. So she told him the truth, in the most tactful way she could.

“B-but, good Lord!” cried the unfortunate man. “There might be t-ten Robinsons in a b-big hotel!”

“I know,” Miss La Chêne agreed. “I said that to Mrs. Robinson, but you know how--sensitive and high-strung she is.”

“Yes,” he said ruefully. “Yes, she is.” He sighed. “Well!” he said, and sighed again.

Miss La Chêne took advantage of his abstraction to retire to another room, to take off her borrowed ornaments, and to restore her costume to its usual demure neatness. When she came back with the jewels in her hand, to restore them to the case, she found Mr. Robinson sitting in a chair, staring before him, profoundly dejected. The only thought that entered her kind little heart was a very admirable and very feminine desire to cheer and comfort this unhappy man.

“Wouldn’t you like a cup of tea, Mr. Robinson?” she asked.

“Why, yes, I should,” he replied, very much pleased.

So Miss La Chêne telephoned downstairs to the restaurant, and a tea was sent up, but it did not suit the fastidious young woman. She did magical things to it with various electric devices; and the tea itself was so delectable, and the temporary hostess was so gay and amusing and delightful and kind, that Robinson soon completely recovered his spirits. He was a very good sort of fellow, too, when he had half a chance, and altogether they were so cozy and jolly that they quite forgot the time, until the clock struck.

Then, startled as _Cinderella_ was by the same sound, Miss La Chêne sprang up from the tea table.

“_Mon Dieu!_” she cried. “_Quatre heures! Madame sera bien fâchée! Mais que je suis bête! Mon Dieu!_”

All this sounded very alarming to Robinson. He was relieved to hear that the only trouble was that the bank had closed at three o’clock, and Miss La Chêne could not deposit the jewels, as she had been directed to do.

“Well, if that’s all,” said he, “I’ll take ’em myself to-morrow morning. You run along and catch your train, and don’t worry.”

Then he had to spoil all that cheerful, innocent little hour they had had together. His face grew red, and he did not care to look at Miss La Chêne.

“Er,” he stammered, “I--I--I think it would be just as well not to mention to Mrs. Robinson--”

“Very well, Mr. Robinson,” said she.

IV

Mandeville Ryder sat in a corner of the screened veranda, reading. It was a good place for reading, cool and breezy; the electric lamp afforded an excellent light, and his book was an interesting one. Twice his young niece, Elaine Milner, had come out to entreat him to come in and dance, but with a smile of lofty amusement he had refused. He said he preferred reading.

Yet, as a matter of fact, he hadn’t read one page. From where he sat he could look through the window, through the long room where the dancing was going on, into the smaller room beyond, where sat his two sisters, Mrs. Robinson and Mrs. Milner, and with them Miss La Chêne. He could look, and he did look.

Elaine was a pretty girl, and she had collected two or three rather pretty young things and a proper number of young fellows. All in all, they were a cheerful, well dressed, well mannered lot of young people, and the spectacle of their harmless merriment might well have brought a smile to the lips of any observer; yet Mandeville did not smile.

He was looking at Miss La Chêne, sitting there with the two ladies, silent, decorous, and patient, in her plain little dark silk dress, the very model of a companion. Only her enormous black eyes moved restlessly, following the dancers with a look which Mandeville could hardly endure.

“Poor little thing!” he said to himself. “_Poor_ little thing! It’s a confounded shame!”

There wasn’t a girl there half so pretty as she, not a girl with anything like her style, her charm, her grace. She was beyond measure superior to all of them, yet there she had to sit, looking on.

“And I let her in for this!” young Ryder thought. “She has no business being a companion, anyhow. By George, if she had half a chance!”

And, with a rather touching naïveté, he thought he could remedy all this, could notably assist and hearten the poor little thing. He rose, put down his book, entered the house, threaded his way among the dancers, and presently stood beside Miss La Chêne’s chair. She raised those big eyes to his face with a startled look.

“We’ll try a dance, eh?” said the lordly, blond-crested youth.

For a moment she hesitated. She knew she shouldn’t accept. Elaine wouldn’t like it, Elaine’s mother wouldn’t like it, Mrs. Robinson wouldn’t like it; but Miss La Chêne couldn’t resist. With another glance at Mandeville she rose, he put his arm about her, and off they went.

And, as he put it, they stopped the show. He was a wonderful dancer, and she was incomparable. They danced with the curious gravity of professionals. They did not smile, they did not speak, except when he gave a low, brief order for a change of step.

“Put on a tango!” said he, when the fox trot was ended.

Somebody did this, and now they had the floor to themselves. They stepped out with splendid arrogance, in absolute accord, lithe, utterly easy, utterly and disdainfully sure of themselves. Mandeville looked down at the dark, glowing little creature before him with a fine fire in his blue eyes.

“You’re the prettiest girl in the world!” he whispered. “And the sweetest!”

Well, this went to her head. When the tango was at an end, young Lyons, who was Elaine’s latest interest in life, came entreating Miss La Chêne for a dance. She forgot all worldly wisdom and discretion, she forgot everything, except that she was young and pretty, and that the handsomest and most distinguished young man in the room--or perhaps in the universe--had singled her out for his attentions, and that all the other men admired her.

She _liked_ to be admired, and she _loved_ to dance. The music had got into her blood. Her slender shoulders moved restlessly. She smiled, and dimples showed in her olive cheeks. Her eyes were as bright as stars.

“I just will!” she thought. “I’ll have one happy evening, anyhow!”

She did. Penniless and obscure, in her plain, dark little dress, she had come among these luxurious girls and eclipsed them all. Every one of the young men was dazzled by her dainty coquetry, the faint foreign flavor of her allurement. The girls were prodigiously civil. They jolly well had to be, when this little intruder stood so high in favor with the opposite sex.

And all this was due to Mandeville Ryder. He had raised her up from her sorrowful obscurity. She made no secret of her gratitude. Her eyes were forever seeking his, and she generally found him looking at her. They smiled at each other with a sort of friendly understanding.

“He thinks he’s invented her,” said Elaine, to one of her friends.

But there came, of course, that moment so dear to sour and middle-aged moralists--the moment when the party breaks up, the music stops, and fatigue comes across laughing faces. The guests went away, and there was nobody left but the family and Miss La Chêne. She had danced, and now she must pay the piper; and his bill was likely to be a large one.

Elaine whispered something to her mother, Mrs. Milner whispered something to Mrs. Robinson, and they all looked at Miss La Chêne in a certain way. Mandeville had gone out on the veranda for a smoke, and she had no friend here.

“You needn’t wait,” said Mrs. Robinson, in a tone she had never used before.

V

There were two things the matter with Mandeville Ryder, and neither of them was fatal. He was too young, and he was spoiled. He was a handsome fellow, the only son of a well-to-do father; and he was so much run after and so much flattered that he had acquired a manner and an outlook lamentably toploftical. At heart, however, he was wholly honest, generous, and chivalrous.

On the morning after the dance, he went off to the city, resolved not to come back to his sister’s house, and not to think any more of Miss La Chêne; but even before lunch time he had resolved that he would go back. He was a conceited ass, he told himself, and a girl like Miss La Chêne was too good for any man.

So back he went, arriving a little before the dinner hour. Perhaps he was a little too consciously heroic in his determination to show the greatest deference toward Miss La Chêne; but he soon got over that, for he had no chance to display his heroism.

All the sparkle and gayety had gone from the poor girl. When he began to speak to her, she answered him with a hurried little nervous smile, and flitted away. He couldn’t even catch her eye. She fairly clung to Mrs. Robinson, hiding in the shadow of that regal lady. She was so pale, so subdued, so startlingly changed from the charming little creature of the evening before, that Mandeville was worried.

It never occurred to him that he was responsible for this lamentable change, and he went ahead, making a sufficiently unpleasant situation worse and worse by his well meant efforts. At the dinner table he tried to bring the pale and downcast Miss La Chêne into the conversation, and wondered at her very brief answers and her flat, small voice. He knew that she _could_ talk.

“I’ll try a dance with you, Elaine,” he said to his niece, benevolently, after dinner.

“No, _thank_ you, Mandy,” said she, with a very peculiar smile.

“Well, what about you, Miss La Chêne?” he asked, in all innocence.

There was a terrific silence.

“N-no, thank you, Mr. Ryder,” she finally managed.

The wisdom of the past is very clearly demonstrated in the story of _Cinderella_. You will remember that that long-suffering girl maintained a canny silence regarding her _succès fou_ at the court balls until the prince had made a frank declaration of his honorable intentions. Otherwise her life between balls, with those stepsisters and that stepmother, would have been unendurable--as Miss La Chêne’s life was now. Naturally Mrs. Robinson and Mrs. Milner did not like to see their adored and only brother making an idiot of himself about a girl who was just a little nobody, and naturally they firmly believed it was all the girl’s fault. They didn’t actually _say_ anything, but they managed remarkably well with implications.

Miss La Chêne could not defend herself. Never before in her brief life had she shown herself deficient in spirit or in proper pride, but now a terrible humility had come over her. She thought Mandeville Ryder was so marvelous that he couldn’t possibly be interested in her. She thought he hadn’t really meant it when he said she was the prettiest girl in the world, and the sweetest. She thought he hadn’t really looked at her like that. How was it possible, when the most beautiful and charming and brilliant girls were all competing for his favor? No--he had only been kind to her, because it was his dear, splendid way to be kind to every one.

And, after all, his kindness had brought her nothing but misery. It seemed to her sometimes that she couldn’t bear the slights and the innuendoes of Mrs. Milner and Mrs. Robinson another moment; and yet she couldn’t quite make up her mind to go back to some cheap little boarding house, to wait there until she could find another position, possibly worse than this--and never, never to see Mandeville Ryder any more. She generally cried after she got into bed at night.

As for young Mandeville, he generally sat out on the veranda alone, smoking, and meditating in a very miserable way. Miss La Chêne as a dancing partner, gay and sparkling and lovely, had charmed him, but Miss La Chêne subdued and obviously unhappy touched him to the heart. What was the matter with her?

A week went by, and then the household was thrown into turmoil by a dramatic and tremendous reconciliation between Mrs. Robinson and her husband. Mrs. Robinson enjoyed it very much, Mr. Robinson not quite so much. Indeed, he had a pretty sheepish look when his wife sat beside him on the sofa, weeping, with her head on his shoulder, and announced to the assembled family:

“Lucian and I are going to make a fresh start, and all the miserable, miserable past is to be as if it had never been!”

That evening Elaine sang Tosti’s “Good-by” for them:

“Hark, a voice from the far-away! ‘Listen and learn,’ it seems to say; ‘All the to-morrows shall be as to-day, All the to-morrows shall be as to-day!’”

Her dancing eyes met Mandeville’s. He was obliged to get up and walk over to the window, to hide a reluctant and irresistible grin; but Mrs. Robinson noticed nothing. She had no sense of humor. She was too intense.

The next evening Robinson brought out his wife’s jewel case from the city, and, knowing what was expected of him in any reconciliation, he brought also a gift--a diamond pendant on a gold chain. It was impossible for Mrs. Robinson not to show to the other members of the household this proof of her husband’s penitent devotion. She took it downstairs, and Mrs. Milner and Elaine hastened to her, and they all three stood by the piano lamp, vehemently admiring the glittering thing.

Robinson was rather pleased with himself; but then, unfortunately, he caught sight of little Miss La Chêne standing outside the charmed circle, pointedly disregarded by the others, and trying her valiant best to look as if she didn’t care. Though he was years and years older than Mandeville, and most bitterly experienced, the same dangerous notion came into Mr. Robinson’s head--the wish to be kind to the luckless young creature. He remembered how nice she had been to him, how kind and jolly over that impromptu tea, how loyal and discreet in never mentioning it to Mrs. Robinson.

He crossed the room to her side, and stood there, talking to her. Miss La Chêne, in the joy and comfort of being spoken to like a real, human girl, came to life. Her face grew bright and piquant again, and she said funny, amusing things that made Robinson laugh. They both forgot their terribly precarious positions, and were happy and cheerful.

Mrs. Robinson saw this; and that evening, when she went upstairs to her room, she discovered that one of her bracelets was missing from the jewel case. She had given the case to Miss La Chêne unlocked, and no one else had touched it.

“I c-can’t tell her!” thought the thrice-wretched Robinson. “Not now! If I’d mentioned it in the beginning--but now, after all this t-time! If she knew that we had t-tea together, and that I t-took the infernal case! I can’t stand another of these rows--I simply c-can’t! I’ll make it right, somehow.”

So he persuaded his outraged wife not to summon policemen, or detectives, or sheriffs that night, but to wait until the morning. Then he pretended to go to sleep, but it was a long time before sleep really came to him. He felt certain that Miss La Chêne would not betray him, and he felt equally certain that to count upon her loyalty was about as contemptible a thing as his sorry weakness had ever led him into doing.

VI

Mandeville Ryder returned to his sister’s house the next evening at the usual hour, and found Elaine sitting alone on the veranda.

“Hello, Mandy!” she greeted him.

“Afternoon, Elaine,” he vouchsafed.

“Golly, such a row!” said she.

“Who? Sheila and Lucian?” he asked, not much interested.

“No--Aunt Sheila and mother and that poor little French girl--”

“_What?_”

“Yes!” said Elaine. “They’ve been looking for a chance to destroy her ever since you danced with her. We’ve all been pretty beastly. _I’m_ sorry. I don’t believe she ever stole--”

“She--_stole_?”

“That’s the tale--that she stole Aunt Sheila’s bracelet--the one you gave her two years ago on her fifth anniversary.”

“She?” cried Mandeville. His healthy face grew pale. His eyes narrowed. “That’s a damned lie!” he said.

Elaine was enchanted by this dramatic outburst.

“You never heard such a row!” she continued, with unction. “You know what mother and Aunt Sheila are when they get going. I feel sorry for the poor girl.”

“Where is she?” demanded Mandeville.

“Oh, she’s gone!” said Elaine cheerfully. “But--oh, here’s Uncle Lucian! Better and better! _Poor_ Uncle Lucian! He--”

But Mandeville waited to hear no more. He ran up the stairs, to face his sister, and to find out where Miss La Chêne had gone.

At first he could find neither of his sisters, although he heard their voices. He flung open door after door, and at last he discovered them in the little room that had been Miss La Chêne’s.

Sheila Robinson was very busy there. She was emptying out the bureau drawers, ransacking the wardrobe, and unpacking a trunk. All over the floor lay Miss La Chêne’s dainty belongings--filmy little garments, shoes, bits of ribbon, a pathetic wreath of flowers from a hat. The sight of these things--her things--trampled underfoot, was more than the young man could endure.

“What are you doing in here?” he shouted.

“My bracelet is gone,” said his sister, “and I’m going to search that girl’s room thoroughly.”

“Clear out of here!” he ordered. “I won’t have it!”

“_You_ won’t have it?” said she. “And pray--”

“Look here!” said he. “Maybe you’ve forgotten the time you accused that poor little chambermaid of stealing your ring, when it was in your purse all the time; but I haven’t. I won’t have Miss La Chêne called--”

“Lucian!” she cried, spying her husband in the doorway. “Don’t let Mandeville insult me like this!”

The unhappy Robinson essayed a smile.

“I--I--I say, Mandy!” he stammered. “Sheila’s upset, you know, and--”

“Get her out of here, Lucian!” cried Mandeville.

“This is my house,” said Mrs. Milner, “and Sheila has a perfect right to be here. That little French thing has robbed--”

“Stop that!” shouted Mandeville. “Look here, Lucian, if you don’t get them both out of here--”

“Lucian, are you a man?” his wife demanded wildly. “Will you allow your own wife to be insulted and ordered out--”

Mandeville advanced toward his brother-in-law until he stood towering above him.

“If you don’t keep her quiet--” he said.

“Lucian, protect me!” wailed Sheila.

“I--I--I--” began Robinson.

With one glance at him, Mandeville turned away. Only one glance--but it might better have been a blow.

VII

Elaine Milner was sitting on the veranda again, the next afternoon, all ready with an astounding piece of news. A station taxi came up the drive, and out stepped Mandeville Ryder.

“Oh, Mandy!” she cried, when her attention was diverted by the arrival of a second taxi, from which descended her Uncle Lucian.

“For Heaven’s sake!” thought she. “Separate taxis--and they’re not even speaking to each other!”

Before she had recovered herself, both men had gone into the house. Robinson went to his wife’s room, where she was not. Mandeville went to Mrs. Milner’s boudoir, where she was. He knocked on the door.

“Come in!” called his two sisters, and in he went.

“Sheila!” he said. “Look here! I--I want you to send for Miss La Chêne to come back--”

“I dare say you do!” his sister interrupted.