Chapter 49
"Why, I might have killed him dead," he added. "I didn't want to kill a man dead just for a bit of fun. I started them guys off, see. They thought they'd got a slob. Dat's where I was laughing. I guess I'll sleep good to-night."
Sylvia spent a month seeing life with Carlos Morera; though she never had another experience so exciting as the first, she pa.s.sed a good deal of her time upon the verge of melodramatic adventure. She grew fond of this child-like creature with his spendthrift ostentation and bravado.
He never showed the least sign of wanting to make love to her, and demanded nothing from Sylvia but overdressing and admiration of his exploits. At the end of the month he told Sylvia that business called him to New York and invited her to come with him. He let her understand, however, that now he wanted her as his mistress. Even if she could have tolerated the idea, Sylvia was sure that from the moment she accepted such a position he would begin to despise her. She had heard too many of his contemptuous references to the women he had bought. She refused to accompany him, on the plea of wanting to go back to Europe. Morera looked sullen, and she had a feeling that he was regretting the amount he had spent upon her. Her pride found such a sensation insupportable and she made haste to return him all his jewels.
"Say, what sort of a guy do you think I am?" He threw the jewels at her feet and left her like a spoiled child.
An hour or two later he came back with a necklace that must have cost five thousand dollars.
"Dat's the sort of guy I am," he said, and would take no refusal from her to accept it.
"You can't go on spending money for nothing like this," Sylvia protested.
"I got plenty, ha'n't I?" he asked.
She nodded.
"And I believe it's my money, ain't it?" he continued.
She nodded again.
"Well, dat finishes dat argument right away. Now I got another proposition. You listening? I got a proposition dat we get married. I believe I 'ain't met no girl like you. I know you've been a cabaret girl. Dat don't matter a cent to me. You're British. Well, I've always had a kind of notion I'd like to marry a British girl. Don't you tink I'm always the daffy guy you've b.u.mmed around with in Buenos Aires. You saw me in dat dancing-saloon? Well, I guess you know what I can do.
Dat's what I am in business. Say, Sylvia, will you marry me?"
She shook her head.
"My dear old son, it wouldn't work for you or for me."
"I don't see how you figure dat out."
"I've figured it out to seventy times seven. It wouldn't do. Not for another mad month even. Come, let's say good-by. I want to go to Europe.
I'm going to have a good time. It'll be you that's going to give it to me. My dear old Carlos, you may have spent your money badly from your point of view, but you haven't really. You never spent any money better in all your life."
Morera did not bother her any more. With all his exterior foolishness he had a very deep perception of individual humanity. There was a boat sailing for Ma.r.s.eilles in a day or two, and he bought a
"It's a return ticket," he told her. "It's good for a year."
She a.s.sured him that even if she came back it could never be to marry him, but he insisted upon her keeping it, and to please him she yielded.
Sylvia left the Argentine worth nearly as much as Lily when she went away from Brazil, and as if her luck was bent upon an even longer run, she gained heavily at poker all the way back across the Atlantic.
When she reached Ma.r.s.eilles, Sylvia conceived a longing to meet Valentine again, and she telegraphed to Elene at Brussels for her address. It was with a quite exceptional antic.i.p.ation that Sylvia asked the _concierge_ if Madame Lataille was in. While she walked up-stairs to her sister's apartment she remembered how she had yearned to be friends with Valentine nearly thirteen years ago, forgetting all about the disappointment of her hope in a sudden desire to fill up a small corner of her present loneliness.
Valentine had always lingered in Sylvia's imagination as a rather wild figure, headstrong to such a pitch where pa.s.sion was concerned that she herself had always felt colorless and insignificant in comparison. There was something splendidly tropical about Valentine as she appeared to Sylvia's fancy; in all the years after she quitted France she had cherished a memory of Valentine's fiery anger on the night of her departure as something n.o.bly independent.
Like other childish memories, Sylvia found Valentine much less impressive when she met her again--much less impressive, for instance, than Elene, who, though she had married a shopkeeper and had settled down to a most uncompromising and ordinary respectability, retained a ripening outward beauty that made up for any pinching of the spirit.
Here was Valentine, scarcely even pretty, who achieved by neatness any effect of personality that she did. She had fine eyes--it seemed impossible for any of her mother's children to avoid them, however dull and inexpressive might have been the father's. Sylvia was thinking of Henry's eyes, but what she had heard of M. Lataille in childhood had never led her to picture him as more remarkable outwardly than her own father.
"Twelve years since we met," Valentine was murmuring, and Sylvia was agreeing and thinking to herself all the time how very much compressed Valentine was, not uncomfortably or displeasingly, but like a new dress before it has blossomed to the individuality of the wearer. There recurred to Sylvia out of the past a likeness between Valentine and Maudie Tilt when Maudie had dressed up for the supper-party with Jimmy Monkley.
When the first reckonings of lapsed years were over there did not seem much to talk about, but presently Sylvia described with much detail the voyage from La Plata to Ma.r.s.eilles, just as, when one takes up a long-interrupted correspondence, great attention is often devoted to the weather at the moment.
"_Alors, vous etes chanteuse?_" Valentine asked.
"_Oui, je suis chanteuse_," Sylvia replied.
Neither of the sisters used the second person singular: the conversation, which was desultory, like the conversation of travelers in a railway carriage, ended abruptly as if the train had entered a tunnel.
"_Vous etes tres-bien ici_," said Sylvia, looking round. The train had emerged and was running through a dull cutting.
"_Oui, je suis tres-bien ici_," Valentine replied.
There was no hostility between the sisters; there was merely a blank, a sundering stretch of twelve years, that dismayed both of them with its tracklessness. Presently Sylvia noticed a photograph upon the wall so conspicuously framed as to justify a supposition that it represented the man who was responsible for Valentine's well-being.
"_Oui, c'est mon amant_," said Valentine, in reply to the unspoken question.
Sylvia was faced by the problem of commenting satisfactorily upon a photograph. To begin with, it was one of those photographs that preserve the individual hairs of the mustache but eradicate every line from the face. It was impossible to comment on it, and it would have been equally impossible to comment on the original in person. The only fact emerging from the photograph was that in addition to a mustache the subject of it owned a pearl tie-pin; but even of the genuineness of the pearl it was unable to give any a.s.surance.
"Photographs tell one nothing, do they?" Sylvia said, at last. "They're like somebody else's dreams."
Valentine knitted her brows in perplexity.
"Or somebody else's baby," Sylvia went on, desperately.
"I don't like babies," said Valentine.
"_Vraiment on est tres-bien ici_," said Sylvia.
She felt that by flinging an accentuated compliment to the room Valentine might feel her lover was included in the approbation.
"And it's mine," said Valentine, complacently. "He bought it for me.
_C'est pour la vie_."
Pa.s.sion might be quenched in the slough of habitude; love's pinions might molt like any farm-yard hen's. What was that, when the apartment was hers for life?
"How many rooms have you?" Sylvia asked.
"Besides this one I have a bedroom, a dining-room, a kitchen, and a bath-room. Would you like to see the bath-room?"
When Valentine asked the last question she was transformed; a latent exultation flamed out from her immobility.
"I should love to see the bath-room," said Sylvia. "I think bath-rooms are often the most interesting part of a house."
"But this is an exceptional bath-room. It cost two thousand francs to install."
Valentine led the way to the admired chamber, to which a complicated arrangement of s.h.i.+ning pipes gave an orchestral appearance. Valentine flitted from tap to tap. Aretino himself could scarcely have imagined more methods of sprinkling water upon the human body.
"And these pipes are for warming the towels," she explained. It was a relief to find pipes that led a comparatively pa.s.sive existence amid such a convolution of fountainous activity.