The City of Masks Part 10

"It is an animal that has an odour which--"

"Good G.o.d, you don't have to tell me what it is," she cried, but in suppressed tones. Her gaze swept the rear part of the shop. "It's a good thing for you, young fellow, that n.o.body heard you call me that name.

Thank the good Lord, it isn't a busy day here. If anybody _had_ heard you, I'd have you skinned alive."

"A profitless undertaking," he said, smiling without mirth, "but quite in your line, if reports are true. You are an expert at skinning people, alive or dead. But we are digressing. Are you going to turn against us?"

"I haven't said I was going to, have I?"

"Not in so many words."

"Well, then, what's all the fuss about? You come in here and shoot off your mouth as if--And say, who are you, anyhow? Tell me that! No, wait a minute. Don't tell me. I'll tell myself. When a man is kicked out of his own family because he'd sooner play a fiddle than carry a sword, I don't think he's got any right to come blatting to me about--"

"The cruelest monster the world has ever known, madam," he interrupted, stiffening, "fiddled while Rome was burning. Fiddlers are not always gentle. You may not have heard of one very small and unimportant incident in my own life. It was I who fiddled,--badly, I must confess,--while the Opera House in Poltna was burning. A panic was averted. Not a life was lost. And when it was all over some one remembered the fiddler who remained upon the stage and finished the aria he was playing when the cry of fire went up from the audience. Brave men,--far braver men than he,--rushed back through the smoke and found him lying at the footlights, unconscious. But why waste words? Good morning, madam. I shall not trouble you again about the overcoat. Be good enough to remember that I have kissed your hand only because you are a princess and not because you have lent me five dollars on the wretched thing."

The angry light in his brown eyes gave way to the dreamy look once more.

He bowed stiffly and edged his way out from behind the counter into the clogged area that lay between him and the distant doorway. Towering above him on all sides were heaps of nondescript objects, cla.s.sified under the generic name of furniture. The proprietress of this sordid, ill-smelling crib stared after him as he strode away, and into her eyes there stole a look of apprehension.

She followed him to the front door, overtaking him as his hand was on the latch.

"Hold on," she said, nervously glancing at the s.h.i.+fty-eyed, cringing a.s.sistant who toiled not in vain,--no one ever toiled in vain in the establishment of M. Jacobs, Inc.,--behind a clump of chairs;--"hold on a second. I don't want you to say a word to--to them about--about all this. You are right, de Bosky. I--I have not lost all that once was mine. You understand, don't you?"

He smiled. "Perfectly. You can never lose it, no matter how low you may sink."

"Well," she went on, hesitatingly, "suppose we forget it."

He eyed her for a moment in silence, shaking his head reflectively. "It is most astonis.h.i.+ng," he said at last.

"What's astonis.h.i.+ng?" she demanded sharply.

"I was merely thinking of your perfect, your exquisite French, madam!"

"French? Are you nutty? I've been talkin' to you in English all the time."

He nodded his head slowly. "Perhaps that is why your French is so astonis.h.i.+ng," he said, and let it go at that.

"Look at me," she exclaimed, suddenly breaking into French as she spread out her thick arms and surveyed with disgust as much of her ample person as came within range of an obstructed vision, "just look at me. No one on earth would take _me_ for a princess, would he? And yet that is just what I am. I _think_ of myself as a princess, and always will, de Bosky.

I think of myself,--of my most unlovely, unregal self,--as the superior of every other woman who treads the streets of New York, all of these base born women. I cannot help it. I cannot think of them as equals, not even the richest and the most arrogant of them. You say it is the blood, but you are wrong. Some of these women have a strain of royal blood in them--a far-off, remote strain, of course,--but they do not _know_ it.

That's the point, my friend. It is the _knowing_ that makes us what we are. It isn't the blood itself. If we were deprived of the power to _think_, we could have the blood of every royal family in Europe in our veins, and that is all the good it would do us. We _think_ we are n.o.bler, better than all the rest of creation, and we would keep on thinking it if we slept in the gutter and begged for a crust of bread.

And the proof of all this is to be found in the fact that the rest of creation will not allow us to forget. They think as we do, in spite of themselves, and there you have the secret of the supremacy we feel, in spite of everything."

Her brilliant, black eyes were flas.h.i.+ng with something more than excitement. The joy, the realization of power glowed in their depths, welling up from fires that would never die. Waldemar de Bosky nodded his head in the most matter-of-fact way. He was not enthralled. All this was very simple and quite undebatable to him.

"I take it, therefore, that you retract all that you said about its being poppyc.o.c.k," he said, turning up his coat collar and fastening it close to his throat with a long and formidable looking safety pin.

"It may be poppyc.o.c.k," she said, "but we can't help liking it--not to save our lives."

"And I shall not have to kill you as if you were a snake, eh?"

"Not on your life," said Mrs. Moses Jacobs in English, opening the door for him.

He pa.s.sed out into the cold and windy street and she went back to her dingy nook at the end of the store, pausing on the way to inform an a.s.sistant that she was not to be disturbed, no matter who came in to see her.

While she sat behind her glittering show-case and gazed pensively at the ceiling of her ugly storehouse, Waldemar de Bosky went s.h.i.+vering through the streets to his cold little backroom many blocks away. While she was for the moment living in the dim but unforgotten past, a kindly memory leading her out of the maze of other people's poverty and her own avarice into broad marble halls and vaulted rooms, he was thinking only of the bitter present with its foodless noon and of pockets that were empty. While maudlin tears ran down her oily cheeks and spilled aimlessly upon a greasy sweater with the spur of memory behind them, tears wrought by the sharp winds of the street glistened in his squinting eyes.

Memory carried him back no farther than the week before and he was distressed only by its exceeding frailty. He could not, for the life of him, remember the address of J. Bramble, bookseller,--a most exasperating lapse in view of the fact that J. Bramble himself had urged him to come up some evening soon and have dinner with him, and to bring his Stradivarius along if he didn't mind. Mind? Why, he would have played his heart out for a good square meal. The more he tried to remember J. Bramble's address, the less he thought of the overcoat with the fur collar and the soft leather lining. He couldn't eat that, you know.

In his bleak little room in the hall of the whistling winds, he took from its case with cold-benumbed fingers the cherished violin.

Presently, as he played, the s.h.i.+vering flesh of him grew warm with the heat of an inward fire; the stiff, red fingers became limp and pliable; the misty eyes grew bright and feverish. Fire,--the fires of love and genius and hope combined,--burnt away the chill of despair; he was as warm as toast!

And hours after the foodless noon had pa.s.sed, he put the treasure back into its case and wiped the sweat from his marble brow. Something flashed across his mind. He shouted aloud as he caught at what the flash of memory revealed.

"Lexington Avenue! Three hundred and something, Lexington Avenue! J.

Bramble, bookseller! Ha! Come! Come! Let us be off!"

He spoke to the violin as if it were a living companion. Grabbing up his hat and mittens, he dashed out of the room and went clattering down the hall with the black leather case clasped tightly under his arm.

It was a long, long walk to three hundred and something Lexington Avenue, but in due time he arrived there and read the sign above the door. Ah, what a great thing it is to have a good, unfailing memory!

And so it came to pa.s.s that Prince Waldemar de Bosky and Lady Jane Thorne met at the door of J. Bramble, bookseller, at five of the clock, and entered the shop together.

CHAPTER VII

THE FOUNDATION OF THE PLOT

MR. BRAMBLE had never been quite able to resign himself to a definitely impersonal att.i.tude toward Lord Eric Temple. He seemed to cling, despite himself, to a privilege long since outlawed by time and circ.u.mstance and the inevitable outgrowing of knickerbockers by the aforesaid Lord Eric.

Back in the good old days it had been his pleasant,--and sometimes unpleasant,--duty to direct a very small Eric in matters not merely educational but of deportment as well. In short, Eric, at the age of five, fell into the capable, kindly and more or less resolute hands of a well-recommended tutor, and that tutor was no other than J. Bramble.

At the age of twelve, the boy went off to school in a little high hat and an Eton suit, and J. Bramble was at once, you might say, out of the frying pan into the fire. In other words, he was promoted by his lords.h.i.+p, the boy's grandfather, to the honourable though somewhat onerous positions of secretary, librarian and cataloguer, all in one. He had been able to teach Eric a great many things he didn't know, but there was nothing he could impart to his lords.h.i.+p.

That irascible old gentleman knew everything. After thrice informing his lords.h.i.+p that Sir Walter Scott was the author of _Guy Mannering_, and being thrice informed that he was nothing of the sort, the desolate Mr.

Bramble realized that he was no longer a tutor,--and that he ought to be rather thankful for it. It exasperated him considerably, however, to have the authors.h.i.+p of _Guy Mannering_ arbitrarily ascribed to three different writers, on three separate occasions, when any schoolboy could have told the old gentleman that Fielding and Sterne and Addison had no more to do with the book than William Shakespeare himself. His lords.h.i.+p maintained that no one could tell _him_ anything about Scott; he had him on his shelves and he had read him from A to Izzard. And he was rather severe with Mr. Bramble for accepting a position as librarian when he didn't know any more than that about books.

And from this you may be able to derive some sort of an opinion concerning the cantankerous, bull-headed old party (Bramble's appellation behind the hand) who ruled Fenlew Hall, the place where Tom Trotter was reared and afterwards disowned.

Also you may be able to account in a measure for Mr. J. Bramble's att.i.tude toward the tall young man, an att.i.tude brought on no doubt by the revival, or more properly speaking the survival, of an authority exercised with rare futility but great satisfaction at a time when Eric was being trained in the way he should go. If at times Mr. Bramble appears to be mildly dictatorial, or gently critical, or sadly reproachful, you will understand that it is habit with him, and not the captiousness of old age. It was his custom to shake his head reprovingly, or to frown in a pained sort of way, or to purse his lips, or even to verbally take Mr. Trotter to task when that young man deviated,--not always accidentally,--from certain rules of deportment laid down for him to follow in his earliest efforts to be a "little gentleman."

For example, when the two of them, after a rather impatient half-hour, observed Miss Emsdale step down from the trolley car at the corner above and head for the doorway through which they were peering, Mr. Bramble peremptorily said to Mr. Trotter:

"Go and brush your hair. You will find a brush at the back of the shop.

Look sharp, now. She will be here in a jiffy."

And you will perhaps understand why Mr. Trotter paid absolutely no attention to him.

Miss Emsdale and the little violinist came in together. The latter's teeth were chattering, his cheeks were blue with the cold.