THE Helicon Club was at the end of the street. Women interested in literature, the arts, in social and public affairs could lunch, dine, entertain their friends in this oasis. Its pleasant rooms were large and cool, and, crowning boon in the very heart of modern Babylon, they offered even a measure of isolation. For the members’ roll did not respond too readily to the length of “the waiting list.”
A nook of the “silence” room enabled Helen to think her thoughts with the help of a well-earned cup of tea. And a second look at the evening paper cast one ray upon the darkness. “I believe in the Sword.” The phrase hurt like a blow, yet somehow it forced the conclusion upon her that the speech could not have been reported accurately. Knowing John Endor so well, she could not bring herself to believe that those were the words he had used. It hardly seemed credible that without some hint beforehand he should go back on all that he stood for in political life.
Bent on setting doubt at rest, she went presently to the telephone and rang up John’s chambers in Bury Street. She was informed that Mr. Endor had not yet returned from Blackhampton, but that he was expected home about half past seven. Thereupon she left a message, asking him, if not otherwise engaged, to come and dine with her, adding the little feminine proviso that “he was not to dress.”
It was then a quarter to six. Two hours slowly passed. Helen had letters to write, a book deeply interesting to look at. Much was said, all the same, for her mental habit that, with a grim specter in the outskirts of her mind, she could yet dragoon her will to the task of putting it away.
A few minutes before eight John arrived. She went to him at once. The glow of her greeting masked a tumult of feeling. None could have guessed from such entrain that she was facing a crisis upon whose issue her whole life must turn.
“What a piece of luck that you were able to come!”
The eyes and the laugh of a man deeply in love proclaimed this happy chance to be even more than that.
With no other preface, Helen led the way to the dining room. Before one question could be put to a hard-driven politician he must be fed. No matter what her own emotions might immediately dictate, she had a sense, almost masculine, of the rules of the game. Hers was a powerfully disciplined nature. A terrible phrase seared her like an acid, but for the time being sheer stoicism allowed her to bear the pain.
A table had been commandeered without difficulty in a favorite corner. Only a few of the Club habitués were dining, but John Endor brought a new interest into the room. It was no more than the emotion he was accustomed to excite. He leapt to the eye of every assembly. A force, a magnet, the lines of a rare personality made an effect of positive beauty. Nearly all women were attracted by him.
Well over six feet high, thin almost to emaciation, pale with the cast of thought, his high cheek-bones seemed to accentuate the hollows beneath them. The poise of the head and the features exquisitely bold might have been lures for the chisel of Pheidias; the deep eyes with their in-striking glances were those of a seer. Moving with freedom and grace, he had the look of a man who has seen a vision of the eternal. Nature at last seemed to have come near that which through the centuries she had been in search of. In the mind and mansion of John Endor her only concern was ultimate things.
As he crossed the wide room, intense curiosity tinged in some cases by an open admiration, was in the gaze of the other diners. Yet this did not apply to all. The curiosity was universal, but in one or two instances there was also a steady, level-lidded hostility. Helen was conscious of this as she piloted him to their table, perhaps because it was to be expected; but in this rising politician who had Gladstone’s power of arousing strong yet diverse emotion wherever he went there was an apartness which lifted him far beyond the plane whereon friend gives the countercheck to foe.
It was a good dinner. And the guest, for all his air of other-worldliness, had none of that rather dubious breeding which holds itself indifferent to what it eats and drinks. He complimented his hostess upon a modest sole Colbert and a poulet en casserole—the Club chef he assured her had nothing to learn from Saint James’s Street and Pall Mall; to the claret he rendered all the honors of a vintage wine; in a word, John Endor’s look of high ascetism did not taboo the minor arts of life.
It was this zest in everything which made him such a lovable companion. The seer, the visionary, was a man of the world. In spite of his dedication, in spite of the inward fire of the prophets of old, he had that subtle appreciation of the human comedy which is one of the final graces of a liberal education.
This evening, as always, he was charming. Helen could not help yielding to his attraction, no matter how strict her guard against it; she could not help being fascinated by his mental outlook and being lulled, even a little dangerously, by the personality of the man she loved. Listening to him now made it seem almost tragic that one should have to put the question she had summoned him to ask.
Delays are perilous. Twice before the enchanted meal was through she was at the point of sending for the evening paper, so that she might learn the truth. The fallibility of the newspaper press was still her hope. But while he talked as only he could, it seemed an act of barbarism to open the case so crudely. While his fancy and his humor played upon a hundred things how could one sidetrack him with such a doubt? There was some absurd mistake. High faith in this hero bade her take care.
Almost before she knew that she had let a precious moment go, she found herself bitterly rueing the fact. One of his odd, quick, unforeseen turns brought her up dead against an impasse she would have given much to avoid.
Plunging an impetuous hand in his coat, he suddenly produced a half sheet of notepaper, and tossed it over the table into her lap. “High time,” he laughed, “we let the dear old Morning Post into our secret de Polichinelle.”
She unfolded the slip of paper and read with a pang of dismay:
|
An engagement is announced between |
“Will it meet the case?” The question was whimsically direct, even without the enforcement of his amused eyes.
The blood burned slowly vivid in her face. Happily the quality or absence of quality in the electric light prevented his seeing it.
“Don’t you think?”—in a gay whisper.
There was no escape. “One shrinks——” Her will cut the phrase in two. To have completed it would have been to say too little or too much.
“Everybody’s secret,” he laughed.
As she felt the knife edge of the irony lurking in the situation, she gave a little gasp. There was only one thing for her now. She must harden her heart.
“I hadn’t realized,” she said, in her soft voice, a delicious blend of the Old World and the New, “that your speech to-day was going to be so important.”
“Quite the last word for it,” he said, lightly. “A heart-to-heart talk, don’t you know, with a few friends and constituents. For some dark reason they insisted on giving me a lovely bit of old Sheffield plate—and a scroll. One mustn’t forget the scroll. Perhaps the birds have been talking. Anyhow, the Chairman thought the salver would look very nice on the dining-room sideboard of a newly married couple!”
He waited for her laugh, but only one tiny segment of her mind was listening.
“It fills the entire placard of the Evening Press.” She dare not look at him. There was a clutch at her heart.
“What! My jawbation! Shade of the sea serpent and the giant gooseberry!”
She felt the beat of her heart strike upwards. Her throat was filled by it. He sounded hardly more than a laughing, irresponsible boy. And yet the hour was surely near when even his lighter grace notes must prove organ tones in the strained ear of the time.