Chapter XXVI: Epilogue

It is very gay at the Hermitage, in Moscow, just after Easter, and so it was natural that Sonia Turgeinov should have been there on a certain bright afternoon some three years later. The theater, at which she once more appeared, was closed for the afternoon, and at this season following Holy Week and fasting, fashionables and others were wont to congregate in the spacious café and grounds, where a superb orchestra discourses classical or dashing selections. The musicians played now an American air.

"Some one at a table out there on the balcony sent a request by the head waiter for it," said a member of Sonia Turgeinov's party--a Parisian artist, not long in Moscow.

"An American, no doubt," she answered absently, sipping her wine. The three years had treated her kindly; the few outward changes could be superficially enumerated: A little more embonpoint; a tendency toward a slight drooping at the corners of the mobile lips, and moments when the shadows seemed to stay rather longer in the deep eyes.

"That style of music should appeal to you, Madam," observed the Frenchman. "You who have been among those favored artists to visit the land of the free. Did you have to play in a tent, and were you literally showered with gold?"

"Both," she laughed. "It is a land of many surprises."

"I have heard _es ist alles_ 'the almighty dollar'," said a musician from Berlin, one of the gay company.

"Exaggeration, _mein Herr_!" she retorted, with a wave of the hand. "It is also a _komischer romantischer_ land." For a moment she seemed thinking.

"Isn't that his excellency, Prince Boris Strogareff?" inquired abruptly a young man with a beyond-the-Volga physiognomy.

She started. "The prince?" An odd look came into her eyes. "Do you believe in telepathic waves, Monsieur?" she said gaily to the Frenchman.

"Not to any great extent, Madam. _Mais pourquoi?"_

"Nothing. But I don't see this prince you speak of."

"He has disappeared now," replied her countryman, a fellow-player recently come from Odessa. "It is his first dip again into the gaieties of the world. For several years," with the proud accents of one able to impart information concerning an important personage, "he has been living in seclusion on his vast estates near the Caspian Sea--ruling a kingdom greater than many a European principality. But have you never met the prince?" To Sonia Turgeinov. "He used to be a patron of the arts, according to report, before the sad accident that befell him."

"I think," observed Sonia Turgeinov, with brows bent as if striving to recollect, "I did meet him once. But a poor actress is forced to meet so many princes and nobles, nowadays," she laughed, "that--"

"True! Only one would not easily forget the prince, the handsomest man in Asia."

She yawned slightly.

"What was this 'sad accident' you were speaking of, _mein Herr_? observed the German, with a mind trained to conversational continuity.

"The prince was cruising somewhere and his yacht was wrecked," said the young Roscius from Odessa. "A number of the crew were drowned; his excellency, when picked up, was unconscious. A blow on the head from a falling timber, or from being dashed on the rocks, I'm not sure which. At any rate, for a long time his life was despaired of, but he recovered and is as strong and sound as ever. Only, there is a strange sequel; or not so strange," reflectively, "since cases of its kind are common. The injury was on his head, as I remarked, and his mind became--"

"Affected, Monsieur?" said the Frenchman. "You mean this great noble of the steppe is no longer right, mentally?"

"He is one of the keenest satraps in Asia, Monsieur. His brain is as alert as ever, only he has suffered a complete loss of memory."

Sonia Turgeinov's interest was of a distinctly artificial nature; she tapped on the floor with her foot; then abruptly arose. "Shan't we go into the garden for our coffee?" she said. "It is close here."

They got up and walked out. As they did so they passed a couple at one of the tables on the balcony and a slight exclamation fell from Sonia Turgeinov's lips. For an instant she exhibited real interest, then hastening down the steps, she selected a place some distance aside. A great bunch of flowers was in the center of the table and she moved her chair behind them.

"You see some one you know, _gnädige_ Madam?" asked the observant Teuton.

"A great many people," she answered.

"There's that American over there who asked for the Yankee piece of music," said the Frenchman, with eyes on the two people Sonia Turgeinov had started at sight of, a moment before. "_Mon Dieu!_ What charm! What beauty!"

"_Der Herr Amerikaner?_" blurted the surprised Berliner.

"No--_diable!_ His _belle_ companion!"

"Where?" said Sonia Turgeinov, well knowing. A face that her table companion regarded, she, too, saw beyond the flowers. The afternoon sunshine touched the golden hair of her she looked at; the violet eyes shone with delight upon bizarre details: of the scene--the waiters in blouses resembling street "white wings" in American cities, the coachmen outside, big as balloons in their quilted cloaks.

"_Der Herr Amerikaner_ has the passionate eyes of an admirer, a devout lover," murmured the sentimental musician from Berlin.

"Or an American husband!" said Roscius from Odessa.

"Sometimes!" added the Frenchman cynically.

"I haf met him," observed the _Herr Musikaner_, "at the hotel. We haf talked together, once or twice. He has been in South America--Argentine, _ich glaube_--and has made a fortune there. And madam, his wife, and he are making a grand tour of the world. Their wedding trip, I believe. _Sie kommt von einer der ersten Familien_--the Dalrymples. _Der Herr Direktor_ of the Russicher-Chinese bank told me. He cashes the drafts--_Her Gott_--_nicht kleine!_"

These prosaic details the Frenchman, pictorially occupied, hardly, heard. "_Mon Dieu_! What a _chapeau_!" he sighed. "No wonder he looks enchanted at that wonderful creation of the Rue de la Paix."

"He seems quite an exception to some husbands in that respect!" remarked the Berliner in deep gutturals.

Sonia Turgeinov lighted a cigarette and blew the smoke at the flowers. There was a resentful cynicism in the act; she leaned back with greater abandon in her chair. "After all, the unities have been observed," she said with an odd laugh.

"What unities?" asked Roscius, becoming keen as a young hound on the scent, at the sound of the trite phrase.

"Oh, I was thinking of a play." Stretching more comfortably. Suddenly her cigarette waved; behind the flowers, her eyes dilated. Prince Boris Strogareff was coming down the steps; he passed the American couple they had been talking about and looked at them. A light of involuntary admiration shone from his gaze, but there was no recognition in it--only the instinctive tribute that a man of the world and a gallant Russian is ever prone to pay at the sight of an unusually charming member of the other sex. Then, once more impassive--a striking handsome figure--he moved leisurely down and out of the gardens. The couple, engrossed at the time in a conversation of some intimate nature or in each other, had not even seen or noticed the august nobleman.

Sonia Turgeinov drew harder on the cigarette; a laugh welled from her throat. "Oh, I wouldn't have missed it for worlds!" she said.

Young Roscius with the Tartar eyes stared at her. She threw away the smoking cylinder.

"I'm off!"

"Why--"

"Has not the curtain descended?" enigmatically.

"I don't see any curtain," said the Frenchman.

"No? But it's there." At the gate, however, once more she paused--to listen, to laugh.

"_Was jetzt_?" asked the mystified Berliner.

She only shrugged.

The orchestra, having played a few conventional selections after _Dixie_, had now plunged into _Marching through Georgia_.

As Sonia Turgeinov disappeared through the gate, the golden head surmounted by the "wonderful _chapeau_", bent toward the clean-cut, strong-looking face of the young man on the other side of the small table.

"It's awfully extravagant of you, Harry,--twenty roubles, a tip for those musicians. But it makes it seem like home, doesn't it?"

"Yes, darling," he answered.

THE END

End of Project Gutenberg's A Man and His Money, by Frederic Stewart Isham