Nobody

It was noteworthy that dear Abigail seemed to have no interests of any character that were not passionately indorsed by her faithful Mercedes.

Pondering this matter, Sally found time to wonder that Mercedes had not been deemed a sufficiently vigilant protector for the poor rich widow; it was her notion that Mercedes missed few bets.

A circumstance which Sally herself had overlooked turned out to be the tacit understanding on which the game had been made up; and when, at the conclusion of the third rubber, Mr. Trego summed up the score, then calmly presented her with a twenty-dollar bill and some loose silver-Mercedes with stoic countenance performing the same painful operation on her own purse in favour of dear Abigail-the girl was overcome with consternation.

"But-no!" she protested, and blushed. "We weren't playing for money, surely!"

"Of course we were!" Miss Pride snapped, with the more spirit since Sally's stupidity supplied an unexpected outlet. "I never could see the amusement in playing cards without a trifling stake-though I always do say five cents a point is too much for a friendly game."

"It's our custom," Mrs. Gosnold smiled serenely. "You haven't conscientious scruples about playing for money, I hope?"

"Oh, no; but" – Sally couldn't, simply couldn't confess her penniless condition before Miss Pride and Mr. Trego-"but I didn't understand."

"That's all right," Trego insisted. "You won it fairly, and it wasn't all beginners' luck, either. It was good playing; some of your inferences were as sound as any I ever noticed."

"It really doesn't seem right," Sally demurred.

None the less she could not well refuse the money.

"I must have my revenge!" Miss Pride announced briskly, that expression being sanctioned by convention. "To-night, dear Abigail? Or would you like another rubber now?"

Mrs. Gosnold shook her head and laughed. "No, thank you; I've had enough for one afternoon, and I'm sleepy besides." She thrust back her chair and rose. "If you haven't tried the view from the terrace, Miss Manwaring, I'm sure you'll find it worth while. And let your ill-gotten gains rest lightly on your conscience; put them in the war-chest against the rainy day that's sure to dawn for even the best players. I myself play a rather conservative game, you'll find, but there are times when for days on end I can't seem to get a hand much better than a yarborough."

"Do you," Sally faltered, timidly appreciating the impertinence, "do you lose very much?"

"I? No fear!" Mrs. Gosnold laughed again. "It amuses me to keep a bridge account, and there's seldom a year when it fails to show a credit balance of at least a thousand."

If Sally's bewilderment was only the deeper for this information, she was sensible enough to hold her tongue.

Why need Mrs. Standish deliberately have uttered so monumental a falsehood about the losses of her aunt at cards? She might, of course, be simply and sincerely mistaken, misled by over-solicitude for a well-beloved kinswoman.

On the other hand, the gesture of Adele Standish was not that of a woman easily deceived.

Thus the puzzle swung full circle.

"Mind if I show you the way, Miss Manwaring?"

"Oh, no!" Sally started from her abstraction to find Trego had lingered, and, smiling, turned to the steps that led down to the terrace. "I'll be very glad."

But the truth was that she was not glad of this unsolicited company; she wanted uninterrupted opportunity to think things over; furthermore, she thought the sheer weight and masculine force of Trego's personality less ingratiating than another's-Savage's, for instance, however shallow, was all ways amusing-or Lyttleton's, with his flashing insouciant smile, his easy grace and utter repose of manner.

But this Mr. Trego, swinging ponderously by her side down the terrace walks, maintaining what was doubtless intended as a civil silence but what achieved only oppressiveness, of a sudden inspired a sharp impression that he would prove a man easy to dislike intensely-the sort of man who is capable of inspiring fear and makes enemies without any perceptible difficulty.

And if that were so-if, as it seemed, she had already, intuitively, acquired a distaste for Mr. Trego-how could she at once retain her self-respect and his money-money which she had won in defiance of the rules of fair play?

It stuck in her fist, a hard little wad of silver wrapped in the bill; nearly twenty-one dollars, the equivalent of three weeks' pay for drudgery, the winnings of an idle hour, the increment of false pretences.

"There's your view," Trego's voice broke upon the reverie. "Pretty fine, isn't it?"

They paused in a corner of the terrace, where a low stone wall, grey, weathered and lichened, fenced the brow of the cliff; and Sally's glance compassed a panorama of sea and sky and rocky headlands, with little appreciation of its wild, exquisite beauty.

She uttered an absent-minded "Yes," hesitated, plunged boldly: "Mr. Trego, I do wish you'd let me give back this money!"

His slowness in replying moved her to seek an answer in his face. He was unquestionably sifting his surprise for some excuse for her extraordinary request; a deep gravity informed his heavy-lidded eyes that were keen with an intelligence far more alert than she had previously credited.

He said deliberately: "Why?"

"I'd rather not say." She offered the money in her open hand. "But I'd feel-well, easier, if you'd take it back."

He clasped his hands behind him and shook his head. "Not without good reason. I don't understand, and what I don't understand I can't be party to."

She tried the effect of a wistful smile. "Please! I wish you wouldn't make me tell you."

"I wish you wouldn't put me in such an uncomfortable position. I don't like to refuse you anything you've set your heart on, but my notion of playing the game is to lose like a loser and-win like a winner."

"That's just it. I can't win like a winner because-because I didn't win fairly."

"You never cheated."

It was less a question than an assertion.

"How do you know?"

"I'd have known quick enough if you'd tried. Anyway, you're not that kind."

"How do you know I'm not?"

There was a pause. Then Trego smiled oddly. "Better not ask me. You don't know me very well yet."

She coloured faintly. "Then I must tell you you are wrong. I did cheat. I did, I tell you! I played for money without a cent to pay my losses if I lost. You don't call that fair play, do you?"

"Depends. Of course, it's hard to believe."

"I'm penniless. You don't understand my position here. I'm-nobody. Mrs. Standish took pity on me because I was out of work and brought me here to act as secretary to Mrs. Gosnold."

Trego nodded heavily. "I guessed it. I mean I felt pretty sure you were-well, of another world." He jerked a disrespectful head toward the smiling face of Gosnold House. "The same as me," he added. "That's why I thought.. But it doesn't matter what I thought."

An unreasonable resentment held her true to the course of her purpose.

"Well, now you know, you must see it's impossible-"

"I don't," he contended stubbornly. "Maybe I'm the devil's advocate, but the way I see it-to begin with, I was playing for money; if I had won I'd have expected you to pay up."

"But I couldn't-"

"You would have; that is, Mrs. Gosnold would have paid for you. It was up to her. She meant it that way. She was staking you against the Pride person and myself; that's why you played together; if you and she had lost, she'd have paid for both. So, you see, you may as well quit trying to make me touch that money."

His sophistry baffled her. She shook her head, confused and a little angry in defeat, liking him less than ever.

"Very well. But I don't feel right about it-and I think it most unkind of you."

"Sorry. I only want to play the game as it lies, and this is my idea of doing it."

There was a brief pause while Sally, at a loss, stared out over the shining harbour, now more than ever sensible of the profound, peaceful beauty of its azure floor over which bright sails swung and swayed like slim, tall ladies treading a measure of some stately dance.

"If you ask my definition of unfair play," Trego volunteered, "it's this present attitude of yours-forcing a quarrel on me and getting mad because I stick up for my notion of a square deal!"

"Oh, you misunderstand!" she protested. "I'm only distressed by my conception of what's wrong."

"It's the worst of gambling," he complained: "always winds up in some sort of a row."

"Why gamble, then?"

"Why not? We've got to do something here to keep from yawning in one another's faces."

"Is there so much of it going on all the time-gambling-here?"

"Oh, not a great deal. Not bad gambling, at least." He smiled faintly. "Not what I call gambling. But I was bred on strong meat-in mining camps-where my father made his money. There men gambled with their lives. Here-hmp!" He grunted amusedly. "It's just enough like the real thing to make a fellow restless. Sometimes I wish the old man hadn't struck it quite so rich. If he hadn't, we'd both be happier. As it is, he fluffs around, making a pest of himself in Wall Street because he thinks it's the proper thing. And here am I, instead of earning dividends on what little knowledge I do happen to possess, sticking round with a set of idle egoists, simply because the old man's got his heart set on his son being in society! He won't be happy till he sees me married to one of these-er-women. Sometimes.."

Morosely he ruminated on the suppressed adjective for a moment. "Sometimes I feel it coming over me that the governor's liable to be happy, according to his lights, considerably quicker than I am."

CHAPTER VIII

A THIEF IN THE NIGHT

She sat beside the wide window of her bed-chamber, on that third midnight at Gosnold House, in a state of lawless exaltation not less physical than spiritual and mental, a temper that proscribed sleep hopelessly.

The window was open, the night air still and suave and warm, her sole protection a filmy negligee over a night-dress of sheerest silk and lace. And in that hour Sarah Manvers was as nearly a beautiful woman as ever she was to be-her face faintly flushed in the rich moonlight, faintly shadowed from within by the rich darkness of her blood, her dreaming eyes twin pools of limpid shadow, her dark lips shadowed by a slight elusive smile.

She was relishing the sensation of life intensely, almost painfully; she was intensely alive for the first time in all her life, it seemed; in throat and wrists and temples pulses sang, now soft, now loud; and all her body glowed, from crown of head to tips of toes nestling in silken mules, with the warmth and the languor of life.

She was deeply and desperately in love.

The genius of her curious destiny, not content with making her free of all the good material things of life, had granted her as well this last and dearest boon. For though her years were twenty-seven she had not loved before. She had dreamed of love, had been in love with love and with being loved, had believed she loved; but nothing in her experience compared with such rapture as to-night obsessed her being, wholly and without respite.

Life, indeed, grants no compensation for the ignominious necessity of love but this, that no other love was ever real but to-day's alone.

And so the beauty of that moonlight midnight seemed supernal. Becalmed, the island lay steeped in floods of ethereal silver, its sky an iridescent dome, its sea a shimmering shield of opalescence, its lawns and terraces argentine shadowed with deepest violet. There was never a definite sound, only the sibilance of a stillness made of many interwoven sounds, soft lisp of wavelets on the sands a hundred feet below, hum of nocturnal insect life in thickets and plantations, sobbing of a tiny, vagrant breeze lost and homeless in that vast serenity, wailing of a far violin, rumour of distant motor-cars. A night of potent witchery, a woman willingly bewitched..

In fancy she still could feel the pulsing of his heart against her bosom, the caressing touch of his hands, the warm flutter of his breath in her hair and upon her cheek, as in that last dance; and with an inexpressible hunger at once of flesh and soul she yearned to feel them all again, to be once more within the magic circle of his arms, to live once more in the light of his countenance.

It mattered nothing that she loved hopelessly a graceless runagate-and knew it well. She had not needed the indirect warnings of Adele Standish and Mercedes Pride that the man was nothing better than an engaging scamp. Who was she to demand worthier object for her love? She was precisely Nobody, and might waste her passion as she would, and none but herself the worse for it.

Nor did it matter that her love was desperate of return. She knew that he recognised and was a little amused and a little flattered by her unspoken admiration, but more deeply than that affected not at all. But that was his imperial prerogative; she did not mind; temporarily she believed herself quite content, and that she would continue so as long as permitted to hug to her secret heart the unutterable sweetness of being in love with him. Again, she was Nobody and didn't count, while he was precisely all that she had longed for ever since she was of an age to dream of love. He was not only of an admirable person, he wore the habit of distinction like a garment made for him alone. In short, the man was irresistible, and the woman didn't even want to resist but only despaired of opportunity ever to capitulate.

She was as love-sick as a schoolgirl of sixteen; a hundred times, if once, her barely parted lips breathed his name to the sympathetic night that never would betray her: "Donald-Donald-Donald Lyttleton.."

Now all the while she wasted sighing for him by the window Mr. Lyttleton spent idly speculating about her-lounging in a corner of the smoking-room, on the edge of a circle of other masculine guests making common excuse of alcohol to defer the tiresome formalities of going to bed and getting up again in the morning.

If this gentleman was Sally's junior in the matter of a year or two, he was overwhelmingly her senior in knowledge of his world-a world into which he had been brought neither to toil nor yet to spin, but simply to be the life and soul of the party. And at twenty-five he was beyond permitting sentiment to run away with judgment; he could resist temptation with as much fortitude as any man, always providing he could see any sound reason for resisting it-any reason, that is, promising a profit from the deed of abstinence.

Mr. Lyttleton had ten thousand a year of his own, income from a principal fortunately beyond his power to hypothecate; he spent twenty thousand with an easy conscience; he earnestly desired to be able to spend fifty without fear of consequences. Talents such as his merited maintenance-failing independent means, such maintenance as comes from marrying money and a wife above suspicion of parsimony. If only he had been able, or even had cared to behave himself, Mr. Lyttleton's fortunes might long since have been established on some such satisfactory basis. But he was sorely handicapped by the weakness of a sentimental nature; women would persist in falling in love with him-always, unhappily, women of moderate means. He couldn't help being sorry for them and seeking to assuage their sufferings; he couldn't forever be running away from some infatuate female; and so he was forever being found out and forgiven-by women. Most men, meanly envious, disliked him; all men held him in pardonable distrust. Devilish hard luck.

Take this Manwaring girl-pretty, intelligent, artless little woman, perhaps a bit mature, but fascinating all the same, affectingly naive about her trouble, which was simply spontaneous combustion, one more of those first-sight affairs. He had noticed the symptoms immediately, that night of her introduction to Gosnold House. He hadn't paid much attention to her during luncheon, and only sought her out-when they got up, on the spur of the moment, that informal after-dinner dance by moonlight on the veranda-partly because he happened to notice her sitting to one side, so obviously longing for him to ask her, partly because it was his business to dance, and partly because-well, because it was less dangerous, everything considered, than dancing with Mrs. Standish.

And then the eloquent treachery of Sally's eyes and that little gesture of surrender with which she yielded herself to his guidance. It was really too bad, he thought, especially since she had made occasion to tell him frankly she hadn't a dollar to bless herself with. Still, he must give himself credit for behaving admirably; he hadn't encouraged the girl. Not much, at all events. Of course, it wasn't in human nature to ignore her entirely after that; moreover, to slight her would have been conspicuous, not to say uncivil. But one must draw the line somewhere.

To-night, for example, he had danced with her perhaps too often for her own good, to say nothing of his own. And they had sat out a dance or two-awfully old-fashioned custom; went out years ago-still, one did it, regardless, now and then.

Curious girl, the Manwaring; one moment almost melting into his arms, the next practically warning him against herself. And curiously reticent-said she was "Nobody" – let it go at that. Very probably told the truth; she seemed to know nobody who was anybody; and though she was apparently very much at her ease most of the time, and not readily impressed, he noticed now and then a little tensity in her manner, a covert watchfulness of other women, as though she were waiting for her cue.

At this juncture in his reverie Mr. Lyttleton peremptorily dismissed luckless Miss Manwaring from his mind, compounded his nightcap at the buffet, and joined in the general conversation.

Coincidentally the reverie of Miss Manwaring at her bedchamber window digressed to review fragmentarily the traffic and discoveries of three wonderful days.

Days in whose glamorous radiance the romance of Cinderella paled to the complexion of a sordidly realistic narrative of commonplaces; contemplating them, Sally, for the sake of her self-conceit, felt constrained to adopt an aloof, superior, sceptical pose. Conceding freely the incredible reality of this phase of her history, she none the less contended that in it no more true permanence inhered than in a dream.

She recapitulated many indisputable signs of the instability of her affairs. And of all those the foremost, the most glaring, was her personal success, at once actual and impossible. She saw herself (from that remote and weather-beaten coign of scepticism) moving freely to and fro in the great world of the socially elect, unhindered, unquestioned, tacitly accepted, meeting, chatting, treating and parting with its denizens with a gesture of confidence that was never the gesture of S. Manvers of the Hardware Notions; a Nobody on terms of equality with indisputable Somebodies-vastly important Somebodies indeed, for the most part; so much so that by common consent mankind had created for them a special world within the world and set it apart for their exclusive shelter and delectation, for them to live in and have their being untroubled and uncontaminated by contact with the commonalty.

For all that, Sally couldn't see why they must be so cared for and catered to. The only thing that apparently distinguished them from those who lacked their advantages, who looked up reverently to them and read enviously of their doings in the papers, was their assurance, a quality ostensibly inimitable; yet she imitated it with seemingly flawless art. A contradiction that defied her wits to reconcile.

She wasted time in the endeavour; her own personality was prepossessing; she had sufficient tact never to seek to ingratiate herself; her solecisms were few and insignificant, and the introduction of Abigail Gosnold was an unimpeachable credential.

As for her antecedents, the lie which credited her to the city of Massillon passed unchallenged, while a conspiracy of silence kept private to the few acquainted with it that hideous secret of her department-store servitude. Mrs. Gosnold would have said nothing out of sheer kindness of heart even if it had not been her settled habit to practise the difficult arts of minding her own business and keeping her own counsel. Savage was still in New York, but had he been at Gosnold House would have imitated the example set by his amiable sister and held his tongue even when most exasperated with Sally. Mr. Trego, of course, knew no more than what he had been free to surmise from the girl's impulsive confession that she had been out of both work and money when befriended by Mrs. Standish; but, whatever his inferences, he kept them to himself.

A simple, sincere, stubborn soul, this Mr. Trego; so, at least, he made himself appear to Sally, persistently seeking her and dumbly offering a friendship which she, in the preoccupation of her grand passion, had neither time nor wish to cultivate, and which he himself ingenuously apologised for on the plea of self-defence. He frankly professed a mortal dread of "these women," one of whom, he averred mysteriously, was bent on marrying him by main strength and good-will first time she caught him with lowered guard.

His misgivings were measurably corroborated by the attitude toward Sally adopted by Mrs. Standish in her capacity as close friend, foil, and confidant of Mrs. Artemas. In the course of those three days the girl had not been insensible to intimations of a strong, if as yet restrained, animus in the mind of the older woman. In alarm and regret she did her futile best to discourage this gentleman without being overtly discourteous. She could hardly do more; impossible to explain to her benefactress that he was not the man of her heart's choice.

Unfortunately, Trego was indifferent to tempered rebuffs.

"If you don't mind," he interrupted one of Sally's protracted snubs, "I'll just stick around and keep on enjoying the society of a human being. Of course, I know these others are all human in their way, but it isn't your way or mine. Perhaps it only seems so to me because I don't understand 'em. It's quite possible. One thing's sure, they don't understand me. At least, the women don't; I can get along with the men-most of 'em. They're not a bad lot, if immature. You can stand a lot of foolishness from children once you realise their grown-uppishness is only make-believe."

"They don't know how to enjoy themselves," he expatiated; "they've got too much of everything, including spare time. What's a holiday to anybody who has never done a stroke of work? You and I know the difference; we can appreciate the fun of loafing between spells of work; but these people have got no standards to measure their fun by, so it's all the same to them-flat, vapid, monotonous, unless they season it up with cocktails and carrying on; and even that gets to have all the same flavour of tastelessness after a while. That's why so many of these women are going in for the suffragette business; it isn't that they care a whoop for the vote; it's because they want the excitement of wanting something they haven't got and can't get by signing a check for it."

"You're prejudiced," the girl objected. "You're at loose-ends yourself, idle and restless, and it distorts your mental vision. For my part, I've never met more charming people-"

"That's your astigmatism," he contended. "You've been wanting this society thing all your life, and now you've got it you're as pleased as a child with a new toy. Wait till the paint wears off and it won't shut its eyes when you put it down on its back and sawdust begins to leak out at the joints."

"Wouldn't it be more kind of you to leave me to discover the sawdust for myself?"

"It unquestionably would, and I ought to be kicked," Trego agreed heartily. "I only started this in fun, anyway, to make you see why it is you look so good to me-different-so sound and sane and wholesome that I just naturally can't help pestering you."

She did not know what to say to that. She suffered him..

Her duties as secretary to Mrs. Gosnold proved, when inaugurated the second morning after her arrival, to be at once light and interesting. Her employer was conservative enough in an unmannerly age to insist on answering all personal correspondence with her own hand; what passed between her and her few intimates was known to herself alone. But she carried on, in addition, an animated correspondence with numberless frauds-antique dealers, charities, professional poor relations, social workers, and others of that ilk-which proved tremendously diverting to her amanuensis, especially when it transpired that Mrs. Gosnold had a mind and temper of her own, together with a vocabulary amply adequate to her powers of ironic observation. This last gift came out strongly in her diary, a daily record of her various interests and activities which she dictated, interspersing dry details with many an acid annotation.