there surely was never such another breakfast in the world!
she spoke with frank sincerity. upon afterthought she added: “i don’t believe any woman could order a meal like that. you men always know so much about eating.” mosscrop leant back in his chair, crossed his knees, and took a cigar from his pocket. his mind ran in pleasurable retrospect over the dishes—a fragrant omelette with mushrooms, a sole marguerite, a delicate little steak that had been steeped in oil over night, a pulpy italian cheese which he never got elsewhere than here. the tall-shouldered, urnshaped green bottle on the table still held a little capri, and he poured it into her glass.
“yes,” he assented, “i find myself paying more attention to food as i get older. it is the badge of advancing years. it is a good little restaurant, isn’t it? i come here a great deal.”
“and that is how you are able to order such wonderful breakfasts for hungry young ladies. it comes of practice. do they all enjoy it as much as i have?”
“you mustn’t ask things like that,” he remonstrated, smilingly, as he lit a match. “i hope you don’t mind?—thanks.” he regarded her contemplatively through the dissolving haze of the first mouthful of smoke. they had the small upstairs dining-room to themselves, and she, from her seat by the window, let her glances wander from him to the street below, and back again, with a charming, child-like effect of being delighted with everything. the sight of her opposite him stirred new emotions in his being. he imported a gentle gravity into his smile, and dropped the jesting tone from his voice. “no—we must play that i have never breakfasted with anybody before—like this—either here or anywhere else. let us both start fresh on our birthday. we wipe everything off the slate, and make a clean beginning. first of all, you haven’t told me your name.”
“my name is vestalia peaussier.”
“then you are not english? i could have sworn you were the most typically english girl i’d ever laid eyes on.”
“my father was a french gentleman—an officer, and a man of position. he died—killed in a duel—when i was very young. i do not remember him at all. my mother brought me away from france at once. she was dreadfully crushed, poor lady. she was the daughter of a very old scottish house—it had been a runaway love match—and her people, my grandparents——”
“what part of scotland? what was their name? i am a scot myself, you know.”
vestalia paused briefly, and sipped at her wine. “i was going to say—my grandparents behaved so unfeelingly to my mother that she never permitted herself to mention their name. i do not know it myself. i gathered as a child from poor mother’s words that they were extremely wealthy and proud, and had a title in the family. it is not probable that i shall ever learn more. i should not wish to, either, for it was their hard cruelty which broke my mother’s heart. she died two years ago. poor unhappy lady!”
mosscrop nodded sympathetically. “and were you left without anything?”
“my mother’s private fortune had been diminished to almost nothing by bad investments and the treachery of others before her death. i had no one to advise me—i was all alone—and the lawyers and others probably robbed me cruelly. only a few of her old family jewels were left to me—and one by one i had to part with these. some of them, i daresay, were of great antiquity and priceless value, if i had only known, but i was forced to sell them for a song. there were wonderful signet-rings among them, all with the crest of the family—i suppose it must have been her family—and at first i thought of using it to trace them—but then my girlish pride——”
“what was the crest?” asked david. “perhaps it wouldn’t be too late, now.”
again vestalia hesitated. then she shook her head. “no; dear mamma’s wishes are sacred to me. i do not wish to learn what she thought it best to keep from me.”
“well—and when the jewels were all sold?”
“long before that i had begun to work for my living. i write a good hand naturally. i got employment as a copyist, but that did not last very long. i was ambitious, and i thought i might work my way into literature. but it is a very disheartening career, you know.”
mosscrop had lifted his brows in some surprise. he nodded again, with a cursory “ay!”
“the editors were not at all kind to me,” she went on. “i toiled like a slave, but i hardly ever got anything accepted, and then you had to wait months for your pay, and perhaps not get it at all. i should have starved long ago, if i hadn’t met an american woman at the museum who was over here getting up pedigrees. oh, not for herself. she made a regular business of it. rich americans paid her to hunt up their english ancestors, in genealogies and old records, and on tombstones and so on. i was her assistant for nearly a year, and things went fairly well with me. but three months ago she was taken ill and had to go home, and there i was stranded again. i tried to go on with some of the jobs she left unfinished, but the people had gone away, or hadn’t confidence in so young a person, and well—that’s all. my landlady turned me out at six o’clock this morning, and she has seized the few poor things i had left—and here i am.”
the young man lifted his glass, and clinked it against hers. “i am very glad that you are here,” he said; and they smiled wistfully into each other’s eyes as they finished the capri.
“it is a heavenly little break in the clouds, anyway,” she went on, dreamily. “it isn’t like real life at all: it is the way things happen in fairy stories.”
“quite so. why shouldn’t we have a fairy story all by ourselves? it is every whit as easy as the stupid, humdrum other thing, and a million times nicer. oh, i’m on the side of the fairies, myself.”
she looked out, in an absent fashion, at the windows across the way. the light began to fade from her countenance, and the troubled lines returned. “every day for a fortnight i have been answering advertisements,” she went on, pensively; “some by letter, some in person. there were secretaries’ places, but you had to know shorthand, and the typewriter, and all that. then somehow all the vacancies for shop-women got filled before i applied, or else people with experience in the business were preferred to me. i even went in for the ‘lady-help’ thing—a kind of domestic servant, you know, only you get less pay and don’t wear a cap—but nobody would have me. my hair was too good and my boots were too bad. the lady of the house just stared at these two things, every place i applied at, and said she was afraid i wouldn’t answer.”
the picture she drew was painful to moss-crop, and he made an effort to lighten it with levity. “i confess i didn’t think very highly of your boots, myself,” he said, cheerily, “but i admire your hair immensely.”
“oh, but you are a man!”
he chuckled amiably at the implication of her retort, and she laughed a little, too, in a reluctant way. “it occurs to me,” he ventured, pausing over his words, “that men seem to have played no part whatever in the story of your life.”
“no, absolutely none,” she answered, with prompt decision. “i have never before been beholden to a man for so much as a biscuit or a shoe-button. i don’t know that you will believe me when i tell you, but i’ve never even been alone in a room with a man before in my life.”
“of course, i believe what you say. it is remarkably interesting, though. come! first impressions are the very salt of life. i should dearly like to know what you think of the novel experience, as far as you’ve gone.”
she seemed to take him seriously. placing her elbows on the table, and poising her chin between thumbs and forefingers, she bestowed a frank scrutiny upon his face, as intent and dispassionate as the gaze which a professor of palmistry fastens upon the lines of the client’s hand.
“first of all,” she said, deliberately, “i am not so afraid of you as i was.”
“delightful!” he cried. “then i did inspire terror at the outset. it has been the dream of my life to do that—if only just once. i feared i should never succeed. my dear lady, you have rescued me from my own contempt. my career is not a blank failure after all. we must have coffee and a liqueur after that!”
he pressed the bell at his side. she frowned a little at his merry exuberance.
“i am not joking,” she complained. “you asked me to say just what i felt.”
he nodded his contrition as the waiter left the room.
“yes, do,” he urged. “i will keep as still as a mouse.”
“i am not as afraid of you as i was,” she repeated, dogmatically. “but i think, even if i knew you ever so well, i should always be just the least weeny bit afraid. i can see that you are very kind—my heavens! nobody else has ever been a hundredth part as kind to me as you are—but all the same—yes, there is a but if i can explain it to you—i get a feeling that you are being kind because it affords you yourself pleasure, rather than because it helps me. no—that is not quite what i mean either. it seems to me that a man will be much kinder than any woman knows how to be, so long as he feels that way; but when he doesn’t feel that way any more—well, then he’ll chuck the whole thing, and never give it another thought.”
“that is very intelligent,” said mosscrop.
he had the appearance of turning it over in his mind, and liking it the more upon consideration. “yes, that is soundly reasoned. i can well believe your mother was a scots lass.”
vestalia flushed, no doubt with pride.
“well, then, hear me out,” she said, with a pleasant little assumption of newly-gained authority. “now, i’ve hardly known a man to speak to—that is, a gentleman, as a friend, you know—if i’m justified in calling you so on such short acquaintance—or no, i mustn’t say that, must i? we are friends—but it’s a new experience, quite, to me. as you say, i have my first impression of what it is like to have a man for a friend.”
the waiter, pushing the door open with his foot, brought in a tray with white cups and silver pots, and wee tinted glasses, and a tall, shapeless bottle encased in a basket-work covering of straw.
“i ordered maraschino,” remarked moss-crop, as the man poured the coffee. “if you prefer any other, why, of course——”
“oh no; whatever you say is good, i take with my eyes shut.”
she sipped at the little glass he had filled for her, and then, with a movement of lips and tongue, mused upon the unaccustomed taste. an alert glance shot at him from her eyes.
“i hope——” she began to say, and stopped short.
“you hope what?”
“no; i won’t say what i was going to. it would have been a very ungrateful speech. only, you must bear in mind that i hardly know one wine from another, and i am leaving myself absolutely in your hands. you will see to it, won’t you, that—that i don’t drink more than i ought.”
mosscrop waved his hand in smiling reassurance.
“but now for that famous first impression of yours.”
she narrowed her eyelids to look at him, and he found her glance invested with something like tenderness of expression. her head was tilted a bit to one side, so that the light from the window fell full upon the face. it was a more beautiful face than he had thought, with exquisitely faint and shell-like gradations of colour upon the temples and below the ears, where the strange but lovely primrose hair began. a soft rose-tint had come into her cheeks, which had seemed pallid an hour before. the whole countenance was rounded and mellowed and beautified in his eyes, as he answered her lingering, approving gaze.
“my impression?” she spoke slowly, and with none of the assurance which had marked her earlier deliverance. “well, you know, i don’t feel as if i knew men any more than i did before. i only know one man—a very, very little. i don’t believe that other men are at all like him, or else we should hear about it. the world would be full of it. no one would talk of anything else. but the man i do know—that is, a little—well, i’d rather know him than all the women that ever were born, even if i had to be afraid of him all the while into the bargain.”
mosscrop laughed.
“we did well to label it in advance as a first impression. it is the judgment of a babe just opening its eyes. my dear child, i’m afraid this isn’t your birthday, after all. you’re clearly not a year old yet.”
“you always joke, but i’m in sober earnest.” she indeed spoke almost solemnly, and with an impressive fervour in her voice. “you do impress me just like that. i wish you’d believe that i’m saying exactly what i feel. mind, i expressly said, i don’t suppose for a minute that other men are like you.”
“no, you’re right there,” he broke in. her manner, even more than the speech, affected him curiously. he drained his liqueur at a gulp, stared out of the window, fidgetted on his chair, finally rose to his feet.
“you’re right there!” he reiterated, biting his cigar and thrusting his hands deep in his pockets. she would have risen also, but he signed to her to sit still. “other men are not like me, and they can thank god that they’re not. they know enough to keep sober; i don’t. they are of some intelligent use in the world; i’m not. they lead cleanly and decent lives, they control themselves, they make names for themselves, they do things which are of some benefit at least to somebody. ah-h! you hit the nail on the head. they are different from, me!”
she gazed up at him, dumb with sheer surprise. he took a few aimless steps up and down, halted to scowl out of the window at the signs opposite, and then flung himself into the chair again. sprawling his elbows on the table, he bent forward and fastened upon her a look of such startled intensity that she trembled under it and drew back.
“why, do you know, you foolish little girl,” he began, in a hoarse, declamatory voice, “that a few minutes before you came along, there on the bridge, i was going to throw myself into the river, because i wasn’t fit to live. do you realize that i had sat in judgment upon myself, and condemned myself to death—death, mind you!—because i was an utterly hopeless creature, a waste product, a drunkard, a sterile fool and loafer, a veritable human swine? that is the truth! do you know where i spent last night—where i woke up, sick with disgust for myself, this morning? no, you don’t; and there’s no need that i should tell you.”
“i don’t care!” the girl’s lips propelled the words forth with extraordinary swiftness, but the eyes with which she regarded her companion, and the rest of her face, grown pale once more, remained unmoved.
“no, you don’t care!” he groaned out a long sigh, and went on with waning vigour. “but i care! it is something to one that i am what i am; that i have wasted my life, that i have done nothing, and worse than nothing, with my chances, that i——”
“you misunderstand me,” vestalia interposed, with a perturbed simulation of calm. “what i meant was that whatever happened last—that is, at any time before this morning—makes no difference whatever in my—my liking for you.” her eyes brightened at the thought of something. “it was you yourself who said we would wipe the slate clean, and begin all over again quite fresh. don’t you remember? and we were to have our own fairy story, all to ourselves. you do remember, don’t you?”
he still breathed heavily, but the gloom upon his face began to abate as he looked at her. he moved one of his hands forward on the table to the neighbourhood of hers, and stroked the cloth gently as if it were her hand he touched. a weary smile, born in his eyes, strengthened and spread to soften his whole countenance.
“yes, i remember everything,” he mused, with a kind of forlorn gladness in his tone. it seemed an invitation to silence, and they sat without words for a little.
with a constrained air of having convinced herself by argument that it was the right thing to do, vestalia all at once lifted her hand, and laid it lightly on his. he fancied that it trembled a little. his own certainly shook, though he pressed it firmly upon the table.
“now the bad spirits have all gone,” he said; “it is fairyland again.”
“ah, we must keep it so,” she answered, and pressed his hand softly before she withdrew her own. the black mood had fled from him as swiftly as it came. vestalia’s eyes beamed at the sight of his restored good-humour with himself, and she nodded gay approbation.
“i fancy we’ve about exhausted the delights of this place,” he remarked, after a brief silence filled for both of them with a pleasantly sufficient sense of friendship at its ease. “i’ll pay the bill, and we’ll toddle.”
she glanced about her. “i shall always remember this dear little stuffy old room. i almost hate to leave it at all. i want to fix in my mind just how it looks.”
“oh, we’ll come often again,” he remarked, lightly. then it occurred to him that this assurance contained perhaps an element of rashness. “have you got anything special to do to-day?” he asked, with awkward abruptness.
the question puzzled and troubled her. “i was going to celebrate my birthday,” she murmured, with a wistful, flickering smile ready to fade into depression.
“of course you are; that’s all settled,” he responded, making up by the heartiness of his tone for the forgetful stupidity of his query. “what i meant was—what were you thinking of doing before—before you knew you had a birthday on hand?”
vestalia examined the bottom of her coffee-cup, and poked at it with the spoon. “me? oh, i had several things to do,” she made reply, hesitatingly. “i had to find something to eat, and contrive how to earn some money, and hunt up a new lodging, and see how i was going to feed myself to-morrow, and—and other small matters of that sort.”
his comment was prefaced with a kind, sad little laugh.
“you must go to the old place, and get your things,” he said. “how much do you owe?”
“i’d rather not go back at all.” she ventured to look up at him now. “i don’t want ever to lay eyes on that old hag again.”
“but your things. if i sent a commissionaire, would she give them up?—on payment of the bill, of course.”
“they’re not worth a bus-fare—they’re really not. you see,” she went on with her reluctant confidences, “i had to pawn everything. these clothes i have on are every rag i have left.”
mosserop, regarding her with a sympathetic gaze, recalled very clearly the gown she used to wear at the museum. it was a queer colour—a sort of rusty greenish-blue; it was of common stuff, and made without a waist, in some outlandish grosvenor gallery fashion novel to his eye. the practical side of him stumbled at this memory. “but if you had to pawn things,” he said, “i should have thought these silks you have on would have gone first. that frock you used to wear at the museum, for instance—you could only have raised a few pence on that—whereas these things—i’m afraid, my young friend, that you haven’t a good business head.”
“oh, better than you think,” she retorted, with downcast eyes. her further words cost her a visible effort. “i thought it all out, and i saw that my only chance was to hang on to these clothes. if people didn’t happen to look at my boots, i was all right. men don’t notice such things much—you yourself didn’t at first. and my skirt would hide them, more or less.”
he looked at her averted face, slowly assimilating the meaning of what she said. then he hastily turned his chair sidewise, rang the bell for the waiter, lit a fresh cigar, and blew out the match with a sigh which deepened into an audible groan.
“what else could i do?” she faltered, with a flushing cheek, and a tear-dimmed stare out of the window. “nothing but throw myself into the river. and that i won’t do. they have no right to insist upon my doing that. if i was old and horrid, it wouldn’t matter so much. but i’m young, and i want to live. that’s all i ask—just the chance to live. and that i won’t let them rob me of, if i can help it.”
the waiter, counting out the change, embraced the couple in a series of calm, sidelong glances. he expressed polite thanks for the shilling pushed aside toward him, and closed the door behind him when he left the room with an emphasized firmness of touch.
mosscrop rose. “come, child,” he said, briskly. “cheer up! look up at me—let’s sec a smile on your face. a little brighter, please—that’s more like it. how we have wiped the slate clean! we begin absolutely fresh. dry your eyes, and we’ll make a start. we’ve got those celebrated birthdays of ours to look after—and it’s high time we set about it.”
she stood up, and smilingly obeyed him by dabbing the napkin against her nose and brows. she moved across to the mirror above the mantel, and smiled again at what she saw. then she looked down at her boots, and her face took on a radiance, which it kept, as she descended close behind him the narrow stairway.
