Part 15
A cold sweat broke out over the Professor. She knew, then—once again her infernal intuition had pierced his secret! In the train had she not discovered his name, identified him as the author of “The Elimination of Phenomena,” and guessed that he was actually engaged in the composition of another work? At the moment he had fancied that there was a plausible explanation for each of these discoveries; but he now felt that her powers of divination were in need of no outward aid. She had risen from her seat and was once more in possession of his hands.
“You have come to be thanked—and I _do_ thank you!” Her heavy lashes glittered with tears which threatened to merge with the drops of moisture rolling down the Professor’s agonized brow.
“Don’t—don’t, I beg!” He freed himself and shrank back. “If you’ll only let me speak ... let me explain....”
She raised a reproachful finger. “Let you belittle yourself? Let you reject my gratitude? No—no! Nothing that you can say can make any difference. The gipsy in the Caucasus told me long ago what you were going to do for me. And now that you have done it you want to stifle the thanks on my lips!”
“But you have nothing to thank me for. I have made no money for you—on the contrary, I—”
“Hush, hush! Such words are blasphemy. Look about you at all this luxury, this beauty. I expected to have to leave it tomorrow. And thanks to you, wealth has poured in on me at the moment when I thought I was face to face with ruin.”
“Madam, you must let me undeceive you. I don’t know who can have brought you such an erroneous report.” The Professor glanced about him in acute distress, seeking to escape from her devouring scrutiny. “It is true that I did make a considerable sum for you, but I—I afterward lost it. To my shame be it said.”
The Princess hardly appeared to hear him. Tears of gratitude still rained down her face. “Lost it? A little more, a little less—what does it matter? In my present pecuniary situation nothing of that sort counts. I am rich—rich for life! I should, in fact,” she continued with a gush of candour, “be an absolutely happy woman if I could only find an impresario who would stage my play.” She lifted her enchanting eyes to his. “I wonder, by the way, dear friend,” she proposed, “if you would let me read it to you _now_?”
“Oh, no, no,” the Professor protested; and then, becoming aware of the offence his words were likely to give, he added precipitately: “Before we turn to any other subject you must really let me tell you just how much money I owe you, and what were the unfortunate circumstances in which....”
But he was conscious that the Princess was no longer listening to him. A new light had dawned in her face, and the glow of it was already drying her tears. Slim, palpitating and girlish, she turned toward one of the tall French windows opening upon the terrace.
“My fiancé—your young compatriot! Here he is! Oh, how happy I am to bring you together!” she exclaimed.
The Professor followed her glance with a stare of fresh amazement. Through the half-open window a young man in tennis flannels had strolled into the room.
“My Taber,” the Princess breathed, “this is my benefactor—_our_ benefactor—this is....”
Taber Tring gently removed the perfect arms which were already tightening about his neck. “I know who he is,” he said in a hard high tone. “That’s why I’ve been running away from him ever since early this morning.”
His good-humoured boyish face was absolutely decomposed by distress. Without vouchsafing the least attention to the Princess he stood pallidly but resolutely facing her visitor.
“I’ve been running for all I was worth; at least till a quarter of an hour ago. Then I suddenly pulled up short and said to myself: ‘Taber Tring, this won’t do. You were born in the Middle West, but your parents came from New England, and now’s the time to prove it if you’re ever going to. Stern and rockbound coast, and _Mayflower_ and all the rest of it. If there’s anything in it, it ought to come out now.’ And, by George it _did_; and here I am, ready to make a clean breast of it.”
He drew a silk handkerchief from his pocket, and wiped his brow, which was as damp with agony as the Professor’s.
But the Professor’s patience had reached its final limit, and he was determined, whatever happened, to hold all interrupters at bay till he had made a clean breast of his own.
“I don’t know, sir,” he said, “why you avoided my presence this morning nor why you now seek it; but since you are connected with this lady by so close a tie, there is no reason why I should not continue in your presence what I had begun to tell her. I repeat then, Madam, that with your hundred franc note in my hand, I approached a table and staked the sum with results so unexpectedly and incredibly favourable that I left the gaming-rooms just before midnight in possession of—”
“Ninety-nine thousand seven hundred francs and no centimes,” Taber Tring interposed.
The Professor received this with a gasp of astonishment; but everything which was happening was so foreign to all the laws of probability as experienced at Purewater that it did not long arrest his attention.
“You have stated the sum accurately,” he said; “but you do not know that I am no longer in possession of a penny of it.”
“Oh, don’t I?” groaned Taber Tring, wiping a fresh outbreak of moisture from his forehead.
The Professor stopped short. “You do know? Ah, but to be sure. You were yourself a fellow-boarder at _Arcadie_. You were perhaps under its roof when that disastrous fire broke out and destroyed the whole of the large sum of money I had so negligently left—”
“Under the door!” shrieked Taber Tring. “Under the door of your room, which happened to be the one next to mine.”
A light began to dawn on the Professor. “Is it possible that you were the neighbour whose unseasonable agitation during the small hours of the night caused me, in the total absence of towels or other available material, to stuff the money in question under the crack of the door in order to continue my intellectual labours undisturbed?”
“That’s me,” said Taber Tring sullenly.
But the Princess, who had been listening to the Professor’s disquisition with a look of lovely bewilderment gradually verging on boredom, here intervened with a sudden flash of attention.
“What sort of noises proceeded from my Taber’s room at that advanced hour of the night?” she inquisitorially demanded of the Professor.
“Oh, shucks,” said her betrothed in a weary tone. “Aren’t they all alike, every one of ’em?” He turned to the Professor. “I daresay I _was_ making a noise. I was about desperate. Stony broke, and didn’t know which way to turn next. I guess _you_’d have made a noise in my place.”
The Professor felt a stirring of sympathy for the stricken youth. “I’m sorry for you—very sorry,” he said. “If I had known your situation I should have tried to master my impatience, and should probably not have crammed the money under the door; in which case it would not have been destroyed in the fire....”
(“How like the reflexions of a Chinese sage!” the Princess admiringly murmured.)
“Destroyed in the fire? It wasn’t,” said Taber Tring.
The Professor reeled back and was obliged to support himself upon the nearest chair.
“It wasn’t?”
“Trust me,” said the young man. “I was there, and I stole it.”
“You stole it—his money?” The Princess instantly flung herself on his bosom. “To save your beloved from ruin? Oh, how Christlike—how Dostoyevskian!” She addressed herself with streaming eyes to the Professor. “Oh, spare him, sir, for heaven’s sake spare him! What shall I do to avert your vengeance? Shall I prostitute myself in the streets of Cannes? I will do anything to atone to you for his heroic gesture in stealing your money—”
Taber Tring again put her gently aside. “Do drop it, Betsy. This is not a woman’s job. I stole that money in order to gamble with it, and I’ve got to pay it back, and all that I won with it too.” He paused and faced about on the Professor. “Isn’t that so, sir?” he questioned. “I’ve been puzzling over it day and night for the last two days, and I can’t figure it out any other way. Hard on you, Betsy, just as we thought our fortune was made; but my firm conviction, Professor Hibbart, as a man of New England stock, is that at this moment I owe you the sum of one million seven hundred and fifty thousand francs.”
“My God,” screamed the Professor, “what system did you play?”
Mr. Tring’s open countenance snapped shut like a steel trap. “That’s my secret,” he said politely; and the Professor had to acknowledge that it was.
“I must ask you,” the young man pursued, “to be good enough either to disprove or to confirm my estimate of my indebtedness to you. How much should you consider that you owed if you had stolen anybody’s money and made a lot more with it? Only the sum stolen or the whole amount? There’s my point.”
“But I did! I have!” cried the Professor.
“Did what?”
“Exactly what you have done. Stole—that is, gambled with a sum of money entrusted to me for the purpose, and won the large amount you have correctly stated. It is true,” the Professor continued, “that I had no intention of appropriating a penny of it; but, believing that my culpable negligence had caused the whole sum to be destroyed by fire, I considered myself—”
“Well?” panted Taber Tring.
“As indebted for the entire amount to this lady here—”
Taber Tring’s face became illuminated with sudden comprehension.
“Holy Moses! You don’t mean to say all that money under the door belonged to Betsy?”
“Every cent of it, in my opinion,” said the Professor firmly; and the two men stood and stared at each other.
“But, good gracious,” the Princess intervened, “then nobody has stolen anything!”
The load which had crushed the Professor to earth rolled from his shoulders, and he lifted the head of a free man. “So it would seem.”
But Taber Tring could only ejaculate once again: “Holy Moses!”
“Then we are rich once more—is it not so, my Taber?” The Princess leaned a thoughtful head upon her hand. “Do you know, I could almost regret it? Yes, I regret, dear friends, that you are both blameless, and that no sacrifice will be demanded of me. It would have been so beautiful if you had both sinned, and I had also had to sin to save you. But, on the other hand,” she reflected, with lifted eyes and a smile like heaven, “I shall now be able to have my play brought out at my own expense. And for that,” she cried, again possessing herself of Professor Hibbart’s hands, “for that too I have to thank you! And this is the only way I know of doing it.”
She flung her arms around his neck and lifted her lips to his; and the exonerated and emancipated Professor took what she offered like a man.
“And now,” she cried, “for my other hero!” and caught her betrothed to her heart.
These effusions were interrupted by the entrance of the resplendent footman, who surveyed them without surprise or disapproval.
“There is at the door,” he announced, “a young lady of the name of Betsy who is asking for Monsieur.” He indicated the Professor. “She would give no other name; she said that was enough. She knows Monsieur has been seeking her everywhere in Cannes, and she is in despair at having missed him; but at the time she was engaged with another client.”
The Professor turned pale, and Taber Tring’s left lid sketched a tentative wink.
But the Princess intervened in her most princely manner. “Of course! My name is Betsy, and you were seeking for _me_ at all the dressmakers’!” She turned to the footman with her smile of benediction. “Tell the young lady,” she said, “that Monsieur in his turn is engaged with another client, who begs her to accept this slight compensation for her trouble.” She slipped from her wrist a hoop of jade and brilliants, and the footman withdrew with the token.
“And now,” said the Princess, “as it is past three o’clock, we ought really to be thinking of _zakouska_.”
THE END
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_By EDITH WHARTON_
HERE AND BEYOND THE MOTHER’S RECOMPENSE OLD NEW YORK FALSE DAWN THE OLD MAID THE SPARK NEW YEAR’S DAY THE GLIMPSES OF THE MOON THE AGE OF INNOCENCE SUMMER THE REEF THE MARNE FRENCH WAYS AND THEIR MEANING
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TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
● Typos fixed; non-standard spelling and dialect retained. ● Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.