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Page 105
As he approached the girl, leaning out of the open window of the
tonneau, dropped her glove as by inadvertence. The man stooped,
recovered it and returned it to her. The girl started with a
perceptible gesture. Then she cried out in her charming voice
"Merci, monsieur. I stopped a moment to thank you for the
flowers you sent me last night. It was lovely of you!" and she
indicated the bunch of roses pinned to her corsage.
The man seemed astonished. For a moment he hesitated as though
about to make some explanation, but the girl went on without
regarding his visible embarrassment.
"You shall not escape with a denial," she said. "There was no
card and you did not do me the honor to wait at the door, but I
know you sent them - an usher saw you; you shall not escape my
appreciation. You did send them?" she said.
The man laughed. "Sure," he said, "if you insist." He was
willing to profit by this unexpected error, and the girl went on:
"I have worn the roses to-day," she said, "for you. Will you
wear one of them to-morrow for me?"
She detached a bud and leaned out of the door of the motor. She
pinned the bud to the lapel of the man's coat. She did it
slowly, deliberately, like one who makes the touch of the fingers
do the service of a caress.
Then she spoke to the driver and the motor went on, leaving the
amazed man on the curb before the shabby Markheim Hotel with the
rosebud pinned to his coat - astonished at the incredible fortune
of this favor from an inaccessible idol about whom the city
raved.
The woman accepted the enigma of this interview as she had
accepted the wonder of the girl's sudden appearance and the
other, incidents of this extraordinary night. She did not
undertake to imagine what the drawing on the menu meant, the
words about the one-armed man, the glove dropped for Thompson to
pick up, the rose pinned on his coat; it was all of a piece with
the mystery that she had stumbled into.
When the motor stopped and she was taken through a little door by
an attendant into a theater box, she accepted that as another of
these things into which she could not inquire; things that
happened to her outside of her volition and directed by
authorities which she could not control.
The staging of the opera refined and extended the illusion that
she had been transported out of the world by some occult agency.
The wonderful creature that had taken her up out of her abandoned
misery before the sordid shop-shutter appeared now in a fairy
costume glittering with jewels. And the gnomes, the monsters and
goblins appearing about her were all fabulous creatures, as the
girl herself seemed a fabulous creature.
She sighed like one who must awaken from the splendor of a dream
to realities of which the sleeper is vaguely conscious. Only the
girl's voice seemed real. It seemed some great, heavenly reality
like the sunlight or the sweep of the sea. It filled the packed
places of the theater. She sang and one believed again in the
benevolence of heaven; in immortal love. To the distressed woman
effacing herself in the corner of the empty box it was all a sort
of inconceivable witch-work.
And it was witch-work, as potent if not as amply fitted with
dramatic properties as the witchwork of ancient legend.
The daughter of an obscure juge d'instruction of the Canton of
Vaud, singing in a Swiss meadow, had been taken up by a wealthy
American, traveling in Switzerland on an April morning-old,
enervated with the sun of the Riviera, and displeased with life.
And this rich old woman, her rheumatic fingers loaded with
jewels, had transformed the daughter of the juge d'instruction of
the Canton of Vaud into a singing wonder that made every human
creature see again the dreams of his youth before him leading
into the Elysian Fields.
And to the girl herself this transformation also seemed the
wonder of witch-work. Her early life lay so far below in a world
remote and detached; a little house in a village of the Canton of
Vaud with the genteel poverty that attended the slender salary of
a juge d'instruction, and the weight of duties that accumulated
on her shoulders. Her father's life was given over to the labors
of criminal investigation, but it was a field that returned
nothing in the way of material gain. Honorable mention, a medal,
the distinction of having his reports copied into the official
archives, were the fruits of the man's life. She remembered the
minutely exhaustive details of those reports which she used to
copy painfully at night by the light of a candle. The old man,
absorbed by his deductions, with his trained habits of
observation and his prodigious memory, never seemed to realize
the drudgery imposed upon the girl by his endless dictation.
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