The Flirt. Booth Tarkington

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      “Dear lady,” he began—and it was an effective beginning, for a sigh of pleasure parted her lips as he spoke—“there is nothing interesting to tell. I have spent a very commonplace life.”

      “I think not. You shouldn’t call any life commonplace that has escaped this!” The lovely voice was all the richer for the pain that shook it now. “This monotony, this unending desert of ashes, this death in life!”

      “This town, you mean?”

      “This prison, I mean! Everything. Tell me what lies outside of it. You can.”

      “What makes you think I can?”

      “I don’t need to answer that. You understand perfectly.”

      Valentine Corliss drew in his breath with a sound murmurous of delight, and for a time they did not speak.

      “Yes,” he said, finally, “I think I do.”

      “There are meetings in the desert,” he went on, slowly. “A lonely traveller finds another at a spring, sometimes.”

      “And sometimes they find that they speak the same language?”

      His answer came, almost in a whisper:

      “`Even as you and I.’ ”

      “`Even as you and I,’ ” she echoed, even more faintly.

      “Yes.”

      Cora breathed rapidly in the silence that followed; she had every appearance of a woman deeply and mysteriously stirred. Her companion watched her keenly in the dusk, and whatever the reciprocal symptoms of emotion he may have exhibited, they were far from tumultuous, bearing more likeness to the quiet satisfaction of a good card-player taking what may prove to be a decisive trick.

      After a time she leaned back in her chair again, and began to fan herself slowly.

      “You have lived in the Orient, haven’t you, Mr. Corliss?” she said in an ordinary tone.

      “Not lived. I’ve been East once or twice. I spend a greater part of the year at Posilipo.”

      “Where is that?”

      “On the fringe of Naples.”

      “Do you live in a hotel?”

      “No.” A slight surprise sounded in his voice. “I have a villa there.”

      “Do you know what that seems to me?” Cora asked gravely, after a pause; then answered herself, after another: “Like magic. Like a strange, beautiful dream.”

      “Yes, it is beautiful,” he said.

      “Then tell me: What do you do there?”

      “I spend a lot of time on the water in a boat.”

      “Sailing?”

      “On sapphires and emeralds and turquoises and rubies, melted and blown into waves.”

      “And you go yachting over that glory?”

      “Fishing with my crew—and loafing.”

      “But your boat is really a yacht, isn’t it?”

      “Oh, it might be called anything,” he laughed.

      “And your sailors are Italian fishermen?”

      Hedrick slew a mosquito upon his temple, smiting himself hard. “No, they’re Chinese!” he muttered hoarsely.

      “They’re Neapolitans,” said Corliss.

      “Do they wear red sashes and earrings?” asked Cora.

      “One of them wears earrings and a derby hat!”

      “Ah!” she protested, turning to him again. “You don’t tell me. You let me cross-question you, but you don’t tell me things! Don’t you see? I want to know what life is! I want to know of strange seas, of strange people, of pain and of danger, of great music, of curious thoughts! What are the Neapolitan women like?”

      “They fade early.”

      She leaned closer to him. “Before the fading have you—have you loved—many?”

      “All the pretty ones I ever saw,” he answered gayly, but with something in his tone (as there was in hers) which implied that all the time they were really talking of things other than those spoken. Yet here this secret subject seemed to come near the surface.

      She let him hear a genuine little snap of her teeth. “I thought you were like that!”

      He laughed. “Ah, but you were sure to see it!”

      “You could ’a’ seen a Neapolitan woman yesterday, Cora,” said Hedrick, obligingly, “if you’d looked out the front window. She was working a hurdy-gurdy up and down this neighbourhood all afternoon.” He turned genially to face his sister, and added: “Ray Vilas used to say there were lots of pretty girls in Lexington.”

      Cora sprang to her feet. “You’re not smoking,” she said to Corliss hurriedly, as upon a sudden discovery. “Let me get you some matches.”

      She had entered the house before he could protest, and Hedrick, looking down the hall, was acutely aware that she dived desperately into the library. But, however tragic the cry for justice she uttered there, it certainly was not prolonged; and the almost instantaneous quickness of her reappearance upon the porch, with matches in her hand, made this one of the occasions when her brother had to admit that in her own line Cora was a miracle.

      “So thoughtless of me,” she said cheerfully, resuming her seat. She dropped the matches into Mr. Corliss’s hand with a fleeting touch of her finger-tips upon his palm. “Of course you wanted to smoke. I can’t think why I didn’t realize it before. I must have——”

      A voice called from within, commanding in no, uncertain tones.

      “Hedrick! I should like to see you!” Hedrick rose, and, looking neither to the right nor, to the left, went stonily into the house, and appeared before the powers.

      “Call me?” he inquired with the air of cheerful readiness to proceed upon any errand, no matter how difficult.

      Mr. Madison countered diplomacy with gloom.

      “I don’t know what to do with you. Why can’t you let your sister alone?”

      “Has Laura been complaining of me?”

      “Oh, Hedrick!” said Mrs. Madison.

      Hedrick himself felt the justice of her reproof: his reference to Laura was poor work, he knew. He hung his head and began to scrape the carpet with the side of his shoe.

      “Well, СКАЧАТЬ