XVII

"Well?" the prince asked, as he handed Aida Calavera to her place at his right hand.

"I think not," she replied.

He raised his eyebrows slightly. For a moment he glanced down the supper-table with the care of a punctilious host, to see that his guests were properly seated. He addressed a few trivialities to the musical-comedy star who was sitting on his left. Then he leaned once more toward the great dancer.

"You surprise me," he said. "I should have thought that the enterprise would have commended itself to you. You do not doubt the facts?"

"They are obvious enough," she replied. "The young man is all that you say, even more ingenuous than I had believed possible, but I fancy I must be getting old. He tried to tell me that he was in love with another woman, and I felt suddenly powerless. I think I must be getting to that age when one prefers to achieve one's conquests with the lifting of a finger."

The prince sighed.

"I shall never understand your sex!" he declared. "I should have supposed that the slight effort of resistance such a young man might make would have provided just the necessary stimulus to complete his subjection."

She turned her beautiful head and looked at the prince through narrowed eyes.

"After all," she asked, "what should I gain? I am not like a child who robs an insect of life for a few moments' amusement. Even if I have no conscience, it gives me no pleasure to be wanton. Besides, the young man is, in his way, a splendid work of art. Why should I be vandal enough to destroy it? I shall ask you another question."

The prince slowly sipped the wine from the glass that he was holding to his lips. Then he set it down deliberately.

"Why not?"

"What is your interest? Is it a bet, a whim, or—enmity?"

"You may count it the latter," the prince replied deliberately.

Calavera laughed softly to herself.

"Now, for the first time," she confessed, "I feel interest. This is where one realizes that we live in the most impossible age of all history. The great noble who seeks to destroy the poor young man from the country is powerless to wreak harm upon him. You can neither make him a pauper nor have him beaten to death. Why are there princes any longer, I wonder? You are only as other men."

"It is an unhappy reflection, but it is the truth," the prince admitted. "My ancestors would have disposed of this young man as I should a troublesome fly, and it would have cost them no more than a few silver pieces and a cask of wine. To-day, alas, conditions are different. It will cost me more."

She trifled for a moment with the salad upon her plate, which as yet she had scarcely tasted.

"I am feeling," she remarked, "magnificently Oriental—like Cleopatra. The sensation pleases me. We are bargaining, are we not—"

"We shall not bargain," the prince interrupted softly. "It is you who shall name your price."

She raised her eyes and dropped them again.

"The prince has spoken," she murmured.

He touched her fingers for a moment with his, as if to seal their compact; then he turned once more to the lady upon his left.

Seyre House was one of the few mansions in London which boasted a banqueting-hall as well as a picture-gallery. Although the long table was laid for forty guests, it still seemed, with its shaded lights and its profusion of flowers, like an oasis of color in the middle of the huge, somberly lighted apartment. The penny illustrated papers, whose contributors know more of the doings of London society than anybody else, always hinted in mysterious terms at the saturnalian character of the prince's supper parties. John, who had heard a few whispers beforehand, and whose interest in his surroundings was keen and intense, wondered whether this company of beautiful women and elegant men were indeed a modern revival of those wonderful creations of Boccaccio, to whom they had so often been likened.

Some of the faces of the guests were well known to him through their published photographs; to others he had been presented by the prince upon their arrival. He was seated between a young American star of musical comedy and a lady who had only recently dropped from the social firmament through the medium of the divorce-court, to return to the theater of her earlier fame. Both showed every desire to converse with him between the intervals of eating and drinking, but were constantly brought to a pause by John's lack of knowledge of current topics. After her third glass of champagne, the lady who had recently been a countess announced her intention of taking him under her wing.

"Some one must tell you all about things," she insisted. "What you need is a guide and a chaperon. Won't I do?"

"Perfectly," he agreed.

"Fair play!" protested the young lady on his left, whose name was Rosie Sharon. "I spoke to him first!"

"Jolly bad luck!" Lord Amerton drawled from the other side of the table. "Neither of you have an earthly. He's booked. Saw him out with her the other evening."

"I sha'n't eat any more supper," Rosie Sharon pouted, pushing away her plate.

"You ought to have told us about her at once," the lady who had been a countess declared severely.

John preserved his equanimity.

"It is to be presumed," he murmured, "that you ladies are both free from any present attachment?"

"Got you there!" Amerton chuckled. "What about Billy?"

Rosie Sharon sighed.

"We don't come to the prince's supper parties to remember our ties," she declared. "Let's all go on talking nonsense, please. Even if my heart is broken, I could never resist the prince's pâté!"

Apparently every one was of the same mind. The hum of laughter steadily grew. Jokes, mostly in the nature of personalities, were freely bandied across the table. It was becoming obvious that the contributors to the penny illustrated papers knew what they were talking about. Under shelter of the fire of conversation, the prince leaned toward his companion and reopened their previous discussion.

"Do you know," he began, "I am inclined to be somewhat disappointed by your lack of enthusiasm in a certain direction!"

"I have disappointed many men in my time," she replied. "Do you doubt my power, now that I have promised to exercise it?"

"Who could?" he replied courteously. "Yet this young man poses, I believe, as something of a St. Anthony. He may give you trouble."

"He is then, what you call a prig?"

"A most complete and perfect specimen, even in this nation of prigs!"

"All that you tell me," she sighed, "makes the enterprise seem easier. It is, after all, rather like the lioness and the mouse, isn't it?"

The prince made no reply, but upon his lips there lingered a faintly incredulous smile. The woman by his side leaned back in her place. She had the air of accepting a challenge.

"After supper," she said, "we will see!"

A single chord of music in a minor key floated across the room, soft at first, swelling later into a volume of sound, then dying away and ceasing altogether. John, standing momentarily alone in a corner of the picture-gallery, found it almost incredible that this wildly hilarious throng of men and women could so soon, and without a single admonitory word, break off in the midst of their conversation, stifle their mirth, almost hold their breath, in obedience to this unspoken appeal for silence. Every light in the place was suddenly extinguished. There remained only the shaded lamps overhanging the pictures.

Not a whisper was heard in the room. John, looking around him in astonishment, was conscious only of the half-suppressed breathing of the men and women who lined the walls, or were still standing in little groups at the end of the long hall. Again there came the music, this time merged in a low but insistent clamor of other instruments. Then, suddenly, through the door at the farther end of the room came a dimly seen figure in white. The place seemed wrapped in a mystical twilight, with long black rays of deeper shadow lying across the floor. There was a little murmur of tense voices, and then again silence.

For a few moments the figure in white was motionless. Then, without any visible commencement, she seemed suddenly to blend into the waves of low, passionate music. The dance itself was without form or definite movement. She seemed at first like some white, limbless spirit, floating here and there across the dark bars of shadow at the calling of the melody. There was no apparent effort of the body. She was merely a beautiful, unearthly shape. It was like the flitting of a white moth through the blackness of a moonless summer night.

The impression it made upon John was indescribable. He watched with straining eyes, conscious of a deep sense of pleasure. Here was something appealing insistently to his love of beauty pure and simple; a new joy, a new grace, something which thrilled him and which left no aftermath of uneasy thoughts.

The music suddenly faded away into nothing. With no more effort than when she had glided into her poem of movement, the dancer stood in a pose of perfect stillness. There were a few moments of tense silence. Then came a crash of chords, and the slender white figure launched into the dance.

Her motions became more animated, more human. With feet which seemed never to meet the earth, she glided toward the corner where John was standing. He caught the smoldering fire in her eyes as she danced within a few feet of him. He felt a catch in his breath. Some subtle and only half-expressed emotion shook his whole being, seemed to tear at the locked chamber of his soul.

She had flung her arms forward, so near that they almost touched him. He could have sworn that her lips had called his name. He felt himself bewitched, filled with an insane longing to throw out his arms in response to her passionate, unspoken invitation, in obedience to the clamoring of his seething senses. He had forgotten, even, that any one else was in the room.

Then, suddenly, the music stopped. The lights flared out from the ceiling and from every corner of the apartment. Slender and erect, her arms hanging limply at her sides, without a touch of color in her cheeks or a coil of her black hair disarranged, without a sign of heat or disturbance or passion in her face, John found Aida Calavera standing within a few feet of him, her eyes seeking for his. She laid her fingers upon his arm. The room was ringing with shouts of applause, in which John unconsciously joined. Every one was trying to press forward toward her. With her left hand she waved them back.

"If I have pleased you," she said, "I am so glad! I go now to rest for a little time."

She tightened her clasp upon her companion's arm, and they passed out of the picture-gallery and down a long corridor. John felt as if he were walking in a dream. Volition seemed to have left him. He only knew that the still, white hand upon his arm seemed like a vise burning into his flesh.

She led him to the end of the corridor, through another door, into a small room furnished in plain but comfortable fashion.

"We will invade the prince's own sanctum," she murmured. "Before I dance, I drink nothing but water. Now I want some champagne. Will you fetch me some, and bring it to me yourself?"

She sank back upon a divan as she spoke. John turned to leave the room, but she called him back.

"Come here," she invited, "close to my side! I can wait for the champagne. Tell me, why you are so silent? And my dancing—that pleased you?"

He felt the words stick in his throat. The sight of her cold, alluring beauty, shining out of her eyes, proclaiming itself and her wishes from her parted lips, filled him with a sudden resentment. He hated himself for the tumult which raged within him, and her for having aroused it.

"Your dancing was indeed wonderful," he stammered.

"It was for you!" she whispered, her voice growing softer and lower. "It was for you I danced. Did you not feel it?"

Her arms stole toward him. The unnatural calm with which she had finished her dance seemed suddenly to pass. Her bosom was rising and falling more quickly. There was a faint spot of color in her cheek.

"It was wonderful," he told her. "I will get you the champagne."

Her lips were parted. She smiled up at him.

"Go quickly," she whispered, "and come back quickly! I wait for you."

He left the room and passed out again into the picture-gallery before he had the least idea where he was. The band was playing a waltz, and one or two couples were dancing. The people seemed suddenly to have become like puppets in some strange, unreal dream. He felt an almost feverish longing for the open air, for a long draft of the fresh sweetness of the night, far away from this overheated atmosphere charged with unnamable things.

As he passed through the farther doorway he came face to face with the prince.

"Where are you going?" the latter asked.

"Mme. Calavera has asked me to get her some champagne," he answered.

The prince smiled.

"I will see that it is sent to her at once," he promised. "You are in my sanctum, are you not? You can pursue your tête-à-tête there without interruption. You are a very much envied man!"

"Mme. Calavera is there," John replied. "As for me, I am afraid I shall have to go now."

The smile faded from the prince's lips. His eyebrows came slowly together.

"You are leaving?" he repeated.

"I must!" John insisted. "I can't help it. Forgive my behaving like a boor, but I must go. Good night!"

The prince stretched out his hand, but he was too late.

It was twenty minutes past two o'clock when John left Grosvenor Square, and it was twenty minutes to five when a sleepy hall-porter took him up in the lift to his rooms on the fourth floor at the Milan. The intervening space of time was never anything to him but an ugly and tangled sheaf of memories.

His first overwhelming desire had been simply to escape from that enervating and perfervid atmosphere, to feel the morning air cool upon his forehead, to drink in great gulps of the fresh, windy sweetness. He felt as if poison had been poured into his veins, as if he had tampered with the unclean things of life.

He found himself, after a few minutes' hurried walking, in Piccadilly. The shadows that flitted by him, lingering as he approached and offering their stereotyped greeting, filled him with a new horror. He turned abruptly down Duke Street and made his way to St. James's Park. From here he walked slowly eastward. When he reached the Strand, however, the storm in his soul was still unabated. He turned away from the Milan. The turmoil of his passions drove him to the thoughts of flight. Half an hour later he entered St. Pancras Station.

"What time is the next train north to Kendal or Carlisle?" he inquired.

The porter stared at him. John's evening clothes were spattered with mud, the rain-drops were glistening on his coat and face, his new silk hat was ruined. It was not only his clothes, however, which attracted the man's attention. There was the strained look of a fugitive in John's face, a fugitive flying from some threatened fate.

"The newspaper train at five thirty is the earliest, sir," he said. "I don't know whether you can get to Kendal by it, but it stops at Carlisle."

John looked at the clock. There was an hour to wait. He wandered about the station, gloomy, chill, deserted. The place sickened him, and he strolled out into the streets again. By chance he left the station by the same exit as on the day of his arrival in London. He stopped short.

How could he have forgotten, even for a moment? This was not the world which he had come to discover. This was just some plague-spot upon which he had stumbled. Through the murky dawn and across the ugly streets he looked into Louise's drawing-room. She would be there waiting for him on the morrow!

Louise! The thought of her was like a sweet, purifying stimulant. He felt the throbbing of his nerves soothed. He felt himself growing calm. The terror of the last few hours was like a nightmare which had passed. He summoned a taxicab and was driven to the Milan. His wanderings for the night were over.