“Fraulein!”
“Herr Georgiev!”
The little Bulgarian was profoundly stirred. His fervid eyes gleamed. He struggled against the barrier of language, broke out in passionate Bulgar, switched to German punctuated with an English word here and there. Made intelligible, it was that he had found her at last. Harmony held her spools of thread and waited for the storm of languages to subside. Then:—
“But you are not to say you have seen me, Herr Georgiev.”
“No?”
Harmony colored.
“I am—am hiding,” she explained. “Something very uncomfortable happened and I came here. Please don’t say you have seen me.”
Georgiev was puzzled at first. She had to explain very slowly, with his ardent eyes on her. But he understood at last and agreed of course. His incredulity was turning to certainty. Harmony had actually been in the same building with him while he sought her everywhere else.
“Then,” he said at last, “it was you who played Sunday.”
“I surely.”
She made a move to pass him, but he held out an imploring hand.
“Fraulein, I may see you sometimes?”
“We shall meet again, of course.”
“Fraulein,—with all respect,—sometime perhaps you will walk out with me?”
“I am very busy all day.”
“At night, then? For the exercise? I, with all respect, Fraulein!”
Harmony was touched.
“Sometime,” she consented. And then impulsively: “I am very lonely, Herr Georgiev.”
She held out her hand, and the little Bulgarian bent over it and kissed it reverently. The Herr Georgiev’s father was a nobleman in his own country, and all the little spy’s training had been to make of a girl in Harmony’s situation lawful prey. But in the spy’s glowing heart there was nothing for Harmony to fear. She knew it. He stood, hat in hand, while she went up the staircase. Then:—
“Fraulein!” anxiously.
“Yes?”
“Was there below at the entrance a tall man in a green velours hat?”
“I saw no one there.”
“I thank you, Fraulein.”
He watched her slender figure ascend, lose itself in the shadows, listened until she reached the upper floors. Then with a sigh he clapped his hat on his head and made his cautious way down to the street. There was no man in a green velours hat below, but the little spy had an uneasy feeling that eyes watched him, nevertheless. Life was growing complicated for the Herr Georgiev.
Life was pressing very close to Harmony also in those days, a life she had never touched before. She discovered, after a day or two in the workroom, that Monia Reiff’s business lay almost altogether among the demi-monde. The sewing-girls, of Marie’s type many of them, found in the customers endless topics of conversation. Some things Harmony was spared, much of the talk being in dialect. But a great deal of it she understood, and she learned much that was not spoken. They talked freely of the women, their clothes, and they talked a great deal about a newcomer, an American dancer, for whom Monia was making an elaborate outfit. The American’s name was Lillian Le Grande. She was dancing at one of the variety theaters.
Harmony was working on a costume for the Le Grande woman—a gold brocade slashed to the knee at one side and with a fragment of bodice made of gilt tissue. On the day after her encounter with Georgiev she met her.
There was a dispute over the gown, something about the draping. Monia, flushed with irritation, came to the workroom door and glanced over the girls. She singled out Harmony finally and called her.
“Come and put on the American’s gown,” she ordered. “She wishes—Heaven knows what she wishes!”
Harmony went unwillingly. Nothing she had heard of the Fraulein Le Grande had prepossessed her. Her uneasiness was increased when she found herself obliged to shed her gown and to stand for one terrible moment before the little dressmaker’s amused eyes.
“Thou art very lovely, very chic,” said Monia. The dress added to rather than relieved Harmony’s discomfiture. She donned it in one of the fitting-rooms, made by the simple expedient of curtaining off a corner of the large reception room. The slashed skirt embarrassed her; the low cut made her shrink. Monia was frankly entranced. Above the gold tissue of the bodice rose Harmony’s exquisite shoulders. Her hair was gold; even her eyes looked golden. The dressmaker, who worshiped beauty, gave a pull here, a pat there. If only all women were so beautiful in the things she made!
She had an eye for the theatrical also. She posed Harmony behind the curtain, arranged lights, drew down the chiffon so that a bit more of the girl’s rounded bosom was revealed. Then she drew the curtain aside and stood smiling.
Le Grande paid the picture the tribute of a second’s silence. Then:—
“Exquisite!” she said in English. Then in halting German: “Do not change a line. It is perfect.”
Harmony must walk in the gown, turn, sit. Once she caught a glimpse of herself and was startled. She had been wearing black for so long, and now this radiant golden creature was herself. She was enchanted and abashed. The slash in the skirt troubled her: her slender leg had a way of revealing itself.
The ordeal was over at last. The dancer was pleased. She ordered another gown. Harmony, behind the curtain, slipped out of the dress and into her own shabby frock. On the other side of the curtain the dancer was talking. Her voice was loud, but rather agreeable. She smoked a cigarette. Scraps of chatter came to Harmony, and once a laugh.
“That is too pink—something more delicate.”
“Here is a shade; hold it to your cheek.”
“I am a bad color. I did not sleep last night.”
“Still no news, Fraulein?”
“None. He has disappeared utterly. That isn’t so bad, is it? I could use more rouge.”
“It is being much worn. It is strange, is it not, that a child could be stolen from the hospital and leave no sign!”
The dancer laughed a mirthless laugh. Her voice changed, became nasal, full of venom.
“Oh, they know well enough,” she snapped. “Those nurses know, and there’s a pig of a red-bearded doctor—I’d like to poison him. Separating mother and child! I’m going to find him, if only to show them they are not so smart after all.”
In her anger she had lapsed into English. Harmony, behind her curtain, had clutched at her heart. Jimmy’s mother!
CHAPTER XXIII
Jimmy was not so well, although Harmony’s flight had had nothing to do with the relapse. He had found Marie a slavishly devoted substitute, and besides Peter had indicated that Harmony’s absence was purely temporary. But the breaking-up was inevitable. All day long the child lay in the white bed, apathetic but sleepless. In vain Marie made flower fairies for his pillow, in vain the little mice, now quite tame, played hide-and-seek over the bed, in vain Peter paused long enough in his frantic search for Harmony to buy colored postcards and bring them to him.
He was contented enough; he did not suffer at all; and he had no apprehension of what was coming. He asked for nothing, tried obediently to eat, liked to have Marie in the room. But he did not beg to be taken into the salon, as he once had done. There was a sort of mental confusion also. He liked Marie to read his father’s letters; but as he grew weaker the occasional confusing of Peter with his dead father became a fixed idea. Peter was Daddy.
Peter took care of him at night. He had moved into Harmony’s adjacent room and dressed there. But he had never slept in the bed. At night he put on his shabby dressing-gown and worn slippers and lay on a haircloth sofa at the foot of Jimmy’s bed—lay but hardly slept, so afraid was he that the slender thread of life might snap when it was drawn out to its slenderest during the darkest hours before the dawn. More than once in every night Peter rose and stood, hardly breathing, with the tiny lamp in his hand, watching for the rise and fall of the boy’s thin little chest. Peter grew old these days. He turned gray over the ears and developed lines about his mouth that never left him again. He felt gray and old, and sometimes bitter and hard also. The boy’s condition could not be helped: it was inevitable, hopeless. But the thing that was eating his heart out had been unnecessary and cruel.