Awakening at a late hour in a small bedroom bright with sunlight, Mr. Matthias treated himself to a moment of incredulity. Such surroundings were strange to his drowsy perceptions, and his transitory emotions on finding himself so curiously embedded might be most aptly and tersely summed up in the exclamation of the old lady in the nursery rhyme: "Lack-a-mercy, can this be I?"
Being, however, susceptible to a conviction of singular strength that he was himself and none other; and by dint of sheer will-power overcoming a tremendous disinclination to do anything but lie still and feel perfectly healthy, sound, and at peace with the world: he induced himself to roll over and fish for his watch in the pocket of the coat hanging on a nearby chair.
The hour proved to be half-past ten.
He fancied that he must have been uncommonly tired to have slept so late.
Then he remembered.
"One doesn\'t need to get drunk to be daft," was the conclusion he enunciated to his loneliness.
"I hope to goodness she doesn\'t go poking through my papers!"
The perturbation to which this thought gave rise got him out of bed more promptly than would otherwise have been the case. None the less he forgot it entirely in another moment, and had bathed and dressed and was knotting his tie before a mirror when the memory of the girl again flitted darkly athwart the glass of his consciousness.
"Wonder what it was that made me turn myself out of house and home for the sake of that girl, anyway? Something about her...."
But try as he might he could recall no definite details of her personality. She remained a shadow—a hunted, tearful, desperate wraith of girlhood: more than that, nothing.
He wagged his head seriously.
"Something about her!... Must\'ve been good-looking ... or something...."
With which he drifted off into an inconsequent and irrelevant reverie which entertained him exclusively throughout breakfast and his brief homeward walk: in his magnificent, pantoscopic, protean imagination he was busily engaged in writing the first act of a splendid new play—something exquisitely odd, original, witty, and dramatic.
A vague smile touched the corners of his mouth; his eyes were hazily lustrous; his nose was in the air. He had forgotten his guest entirely. He ran up the steps of Number 289, let himself in, trotted down the hall and burst unceremoniously into his room—not in the least disconcerted to find it empty, not, indeed, mindful that it might have been otherwise.
His hat went one way, his handbag into a corner with a resounding bang. He sat himself down at his typewriter, quickly and deftly inserted a sheet of paper into the carriage and ... sat back at leisure, his gaze wandering dreamily out of the long, open windows, into the world of sunshine that shimmered over the back-yards.
A subconscious impulse moved him to stretch forth a long arm and drop his hand on the centre-table; after a few seconds his groping fingers closed round the bowl of an aged and well-beloved pipe.
He filled it, lighted it, smoked serenely.
Half an hour elapsed before he was disturbed. Then someone knocked imperatively on the door. He recognized the knock; it was Madame Duprat\'s. Swinging round in his chair he said pleasantly: "Come in."
Madame Duprat entered, filling the doorway. She shut the door and stood in front of it, subjecting it to an almost total eclipse. She was tall and portly, a grenadier of a woman, with a countenance the austerity of whose severely classic mould was somewhat moderated by a delicate, dark little moustache on her upper lip. Her mien was regal and portentous, sitting well upon the person of the widow of a great if unrecognized French tragedian; but her eyes were kindly; and Matthias had long since decided that it needed a body as big as Madame Duprat\'s to contain her heart.
"Bon jour, monsieur."
"Bon jour, madame."
This form of salutation was invariable between them; but the French of Matthias rarely withstood much additional strain. He lapsed now into English, cocking an eye alight with whimsical intelligence at the face of the landlady. Madame possessed the gift (as it were an inheritance from the estate of her late husband) of creating an atmosphere at will, when and where she would. That which her demeanour now created within the four walls of the chamber of Monsieur Matthias was rather electrical.
"Something\'s happened to disturb madame?" he hazarded. "What\'s the row? Have we discharged our chef? Is it that the third-floor front is behindhand with his rent? Or has Achilles—that dachshund of Heaven!—turned suffragette—and proved it with pups?"
"The row, monsieur," madame checked him coldly, "has to do only with the conduct of monsieur himself?"
"Eh?" Matthias queried blankly.
"You ask me what?" The hands of madame were vivid with exasperation. "Is it that monsieur is not aware he entertained a young woman in this room last night?"
"Oh—that!" The cloud passed from monsieur\'s eyes. He smiled cheerfully. "But it was quite proper, indeed, madame. Believe me, I—"
"Proper! And what is propriety to me, if you please—at my age?" madame demanded indignantly. "Am I not aware that monsieur left my house almost immediately after entering it and spent the night elsewhere? Did I not from my window see him running up the street with his handbag through the rain? But am I to figure as the custodian of my lodgers\' morals?" The thought perished, annihilated by an ample gesture. "My quarrel with monsieur is that he left the young woman here alone!"
Matthias found the vernacular the only adequate vehicle of expression: "I\'ve got to hand it to you, Madame Duprat; your point of view is essentially Gallic."
"But what is the explanation of this conduct, monsieur? Am I to look forward to future escapades of the same nature? Do you intend to make of my house a refuge for all the stray unfortunates of New York? Am I, and my guests, to be left to the mercies of God-knows-who, simply because monsieur has a heart of pity?"
"Oh, here!" Matthias broke in with some impatience. "It wasn\'t as bad as that. It\'s not likely to happen again ... and besides, the girl was a perfectly good, nice, respectable girl. Madame should know that I wouldn\'t take any chances with people I didn\'t know all about."
"Monsieur knew the young woman, then?"
"Oh, yes; assuredly yes," Matthias lied nonchalantly.
By the happiest of accidents, his glance, searching the table for a box of matches wherewith to relight his pipe, encountered a sheet of typewriter paper on which a brief message had been scrawled in a formless, untrained hand:
"Dear Sir," he read with relief, "thank you—Your friend, Joan Thursby."
He found the matches and used one before looking up.
"Miss Thursby," he said coolly, "is the daughter of an eminently respectable family in reduced circumstances. Thinking to better her condition, she proposed to become an actress, but met with such violent opposition on the part of her father—a bigot of a man!—that she was obliged to leave her home in order to retain her self-respect. Quite naturally she thought first of her only friend in the profession, Miss Maizie Dean, and came here to find her. The rest you may imagine. Was I to turn her out to wander through the rain—at two o\'clock in the morning? Madame discredits her heart by suggesting anything of the sort!"
Madame\'s expression of contrition seemed to endorse this reproof. She hesitated with a hand on the doorknob.
"Monsieur is prepared to vouch for the young woman?"
"Certainly," he assented, with an imperturbable countenance masking a creepy, crawly feeling that perhaps he might be letting himself in for more than he bargained.
"Very good. I go, with apologies." Madame opened the door. "Thursday, you said?"
He repeated without bothering to correct her: "Joan Thursday."
"Barbarous names of these mad Americans!"
The door, closing, totally eclipsed the grenadier.
With thoughtful deliberation Matthias (smiling guiltily) tore Joan\'s note into minute bits and, dropping them in a waste-basket, dismissed her message and herself entirely from his mind.
Five minutes later the typewriter was rattling cheerily.
But its staccato chattering continued without serious interruption only for the time required to cover two pages and part of a third. Then came a long interval of smoke-soothed meditation, which ended with the young man cheerfully placing fresh paper in the machine and starting all over again. This time he worked more slowly, weighing carefully the value of lines already written before recasting and committing them to paper; but the third sheet was covered without evident error, and a fourth, and then a fifth. Indeed the type-bars were drumming heartily on the last quarter of page 6, when suddenly the young man paused, scowled, thrust back his chair and groaned from his heart.
He sat for a space, teetering on the rear legs of his chair, his lips pursed, forehead deeply creased from temple to temple. Then in a sepulchral tone uttering the single word "Snagged!" he rose and began to pace slowly to and fro between the door and the windows.
At the end of an hour he was still patrolling this well-worn beat—his way of torment by day and by night, if the threadbare length of carpet were to be taken as a reliable witness. And there\'s no telling how long he might have continued the exercise had not Madame Duprat knocked once again at his door.
Roused by that sound, he came suddenly out of profound speculations. Stopping short and bidding Madame enter, he waited with hands thrust deep in his trouser-pockets and shoulders hunched high toward his ears, a cloud of annoyance darkening his countenance.
Madame Duprat came in with a "Pardon, monsieur," and a yellow envelope. Placing this last upon the table, she announced with simple dignity, "A telegram, if you please," and retired.
Matthias strode to the table and with an air of some surprise and excitement tore open the message. He found its import unusual in more than one respect: it was not a "day-letter," and it had been written with a fine, careless extravagance of emotion that recked naught whatever of the ten-word limit.
He conned its opening aloud: "\'Beast animal coward ingrate poltroon traitor beast\'—"
At this point he broke off to glance at the signature and observe thoughtfully: "If Helena\'s going in for this sort of thing, I really must buy her a thesaurus: she\'s used \'beast\' twice in two lines...."
He continued: "\'How dared you run away last night? You promised. I was counting on you. I am disgusted with you and never want to see your face again. Return at once. Perhaps you won\'t be too late after all. Imperative. I insist that you return.\'"
The signature was simply: "Helena."
He said with considerable animation: "But—damn it!—I don\'t want to get married yet! I don\'t see what I\'ve done...."
Throwing back his shoulders and lifting a defiant chin, he announced with invincible determination: "I won\'t go. That\'s all there is about it. I will—not—go!...
"Besides," he argued plaintively, "I couldn\'t travel like this—clothes all out of shape from that drenching last night—no time to change—!"
Consultation of his watch gave flat contradiction to this assertion.
"And besides, I\'m just getting this thing started nicely!" This with reference to the play.
With another groan even more soulful than the first he sat down at the table, seized the telephone in a savage grasp, and in prematurely embittered accents detailed a suburban number to the inoffensive central operator. In the inevitable three minutes\' wait for the connection to be put through he found ample opportunity to lash himself to a frenzy of exasperation.
"Hello!" he roared suddenly. "Hel-lo, I say!... Who is this?... Oh, you, eh, Swinton? This is Mr. Matthias.... No—I say, no! Don\'t call Mrs. Tankerville. Haven\'t time.... Just tell her I\'m coming down on the six-thirty.... Yes.... And send something to meet me at the station.... Yes. Good-bye."