"You must dress sensibly in a business-like way to go and see those people," said Fräulein. "It would never do if you went looking like a flimsy fly-away girl."
"No, indeed," said Nancy, smiling with pale lips. That evening she wrote to George. He came up to town at the lunch-hour next day, and asked to see her. She left Anne-Marie at table eating stewed steak, to go and speak to him.
"George," she said, keeping in hers the cool damp hand he held out, "I want money. I want a lot of money."
George slowly withdrew his hand, and pulled at a little beard he had recently and not very successfully grown on his receding chin.
"Then I guess you must have it," he said.
"But I want a great deal. Two or three hundred dollars," said Nancy. "Or four–"
"Stop right there," said George. "Don't go on like that, or I can't follow." And he pulled his beard again.
"Oh, George, how sweet of you! how dear of you!" And she clasped his moist left hand, which he left limply in hers.
"The bother of it is, I don't know how I shall get it," said George. "I'm just thinking that"–
"Oh, don't tell me—please don't tell me!" said Nancy. "I—I'd rather not know! I know you won't steal, or murder anyone, but get it, George! Oh, thank you! thank you so much! Good-bye!"
And Nancy, as she looked out of the window after him, at his cheap hat and his sloping shoulders, and saw him board a cable-car going down-town, felt that she was a vulture and a harpy.
"The Girl in the Letters has demoralized me," she said.
He brought her four hundred dollars on the following Monday, and she wept some pretty little tears over it, and covered her ears with her hands, and dimpled up at him, when he began to tell her how he had got them. She was the Girl in the Letters. She was practising. And with George it answered very well—too well! She had to stop quickly and be herself again. Then he went away.
And she went out and bought dresses. She bought drooping, trailing gowns and flimsy fly-away gowns, and an unbusiness-like hat, and shoes impossible to walk in. She bought Crème des Crèmes for her face, and Crème Simon for her hands, and liquid varnish for her nails, and violet unguent for her hair.
Then she waited for the Unknown's next letter, saying
"Come."
The letter did not arrive. A day passed, and another. And he did not write. A week passed, and another, and he did not write. Nancy sat in the boarding-house with her dresses and her hats and her Crème des Crèmes. The entire four hundred dollars of George, and fifteen dollars out of Fräulein's eighty, were gone.
Nancy sat and looked out of the window, and thought her thoughts. Could she write to the Unknown again? No. Hers had been the last letter. He had not answered it. Should she telegraph? Where to? And to say what? He had gone to Peru. She knew, she felt, he had gone to Peru. The pretty, silly, romantic story was ended—ended as she had wished it to end, without the banal dénouement of their meeting. Better so. Much better so. Nancy was really very glad that things were as they were.
And now what was going to happen to her? She said to herself that she must have been insane to borrow all that money and buy those crazy dresses, those idiotic hats. What should she do? The terror of life came over her, and she wished she were safely away and asleep in the little Nervi cemetery between her father and her mother, cool and in the dark, with quiet upturned face.
Oh yes, she was really exceedingly glad that things were as they were!
Half-way through the third week a telegram was brought to her. It came from Paris.
"Why not dine with me next Thursday at the Grand Hôtel?"
To-day was Thursday.
She cabled back.
"Why not? At eight o'clock.—Nancy."
Oh, the excitement, the packing, the telegraphing to Fräulein, the hurry, the joy, the confusion! The stopping every minute to kiss Anne-Marie; the sitting down suddenly and saying, "Perhaps I ought not to go!" And then, the jumping up again at the thought of the boat that left to-morrow at noon.
Fräulein came to fetch Anne-Marie at ten in the morning. She arrived joyful and agitated, bringing a fox-terrier pup in her arms, a present for Anne-Marie, to prevent her crying.
"Why should I cry?" said Anne-Marie, with the hardness of tender years.
"Why, indeed!" said Nancy, buttoning Anne-Marie's coat, while quick tears fell from her eyes. "Mother will come back very soon—very soon."
"Of course," said Anne-Marie, holding the puppy tightly round the neck, and putting up a shoe to have it buttoned.
"Don't let her catch cold, Fräulein," sobbed Nancy, bending over the shoe; and when it was fastened, she kissed it.
"No," said Fräulein, beaming. "She shall wear flannel pellipands that I am making for her."
The second shoe was buttoned and kissed. Her hat was put on with the elastic in front of her ears. Her gloves? Yes, in her coat-pocket. Handkerchief? Yes. The mice? Yes; Fräulein had them, and the violin, and the music-roll, and the satchel. The box was already downstairs in the carriage. They were ready.
"Let me carry down the puppy," said Nancy on the landing, with a break in her voice. "Then I can hold your dear little hand."
"Oh no!" said Anne-Marie. "I'll carry the puppy. You can hold on to the bannisters."
So Nancy walked down behind Anne-Marie and the puppy. Fräulein was in front, dreading the moment of leave-taking, and thinking with terror of the possibility of travelling all the way to Staten Island with a loud and tearful Anne-Marie. So she started a new topic of conversation.
"You shall have pudding every day," she said, trying to turn round on the second landing to Anne-Marie, close behind her, and nearly dropping the satchel and the mice, as the violin-case caught in the bannisters. "One day it shall be sago, another day tapioca...."
"I don't like tapioca," said Anne-Marie, walking down the stairs. "I don't like nothing of all that."
They were at the door. By request of Nancy, nobody was there to speak to them. But all the boarders who were in the house were looking at them from behind the drawing-room curtains.
"Then what do you like for dessert?" said Fräulein, going down the stone steps by Anne-Marie's side, while Nancy still followed.
"I like peppermint bullseyes," said Anne-Marie, "and pink jelly." And she added: "Nothing else," while the pimply boy and the maid hoisted her into her carriage. Fräulein got in after her, with the many packages. And the puppy barked at the mice.
"Good-bye, Anne-Marie! Good-bye, darling!" cried Nancy, kissing her with great difficulty through the carriage-window across Fräulein, and the violin, and the mice, that were on Fräulein's lap. "God bless you! God bless you and keep you, my own darling!"
The puppy barked deafeningly. The pimply boy nodded to the cabman, and off they were.
Nancy walked slowly back into the house, and up the stairs, and into the desolate rooms.
XV
Peggy and George accompanied her to the boat, Peggy excited and talkative, George depressed and silent. In his murky down-town office George had felt himself of late more poet than clerk, and now he was all elegy. She was leaving! She was going away with his heart, and she might perhaps never return! She might perhaps never return the four hundred dollars either. They belonged to a friend of George's—a mean and sordid soul. George stifled the unlovely thought, born of the clerk, and surrendered his spirit to the grief of the poet.
Farewell! Farewell! The ship turned its cruel side, and hid the little waving figure from his sight. It throbbed away like a great, unfaithful heart, abandoning the land. Farewell! What were four hundred dollars, belonging to a friend, compared with the torn and quivering heart-strings of a lover?