Chapter XVI: “dark Magdalen.”

Mr. Lovell sat earning his salary.

In a black temper he plodded through his developing, washed his hands, decided the afternoon was too gray for photographic printing, and walking out incontinently crossed Fleet Street and turned into a labyrinth of dingy thoroughfares. If his brown face were a little paler from spending his days over stuffy chemicals and his eyesight somewhat strained on retouching ugly people’s portraits, his long, light step was as usual. Half-a-dozen women glanced at the man as he passed them, with his look of being clean outside and in, of careless strength, of immaculate smartness in old blue serge clothes.

But Mr. Lovell had no eye for women, being engaged inwardly in cursing his nearest relative up in heaps. Not that he had learned anything new about him, nor heard anything tangibly annoying. But he had a perfectly involuntary trick of putting two and two together correctly; and the result to-day sickened him. So much so that as he walked he deliberately assured himself that he had imagined the whole thing--items added up and the result; after which he instantly reduced several fractions to a common denominator and did the whole thing over again.

“I wish to Heaven he’d marry again and migrate,” he thought in exasperation, and turned impatiently into a tobacconist’s and bought a handful of cigarettes. Good tobacco was wicked on a pound a week, and Mr. Lovell, to be accurate, was hungry. Also it was tea-time, and for a moment there came into his mind the carnal vision of his late club, where there were comfortable chairs, hot toast and men of his own class to speak to. His mouth set hard on his extravagant cigarette.

“I’ll go back when I’ve money to go,” he said to himself grimly, “unless I find it necessary to return and put the fear of God into a fool!” and his face was so forbidding that a girl who was coming down the street almost changed her mind. For it was all very well to clear out of an unpleasant and dependent situation, but when black suspicions followed you that you were playing into some one’s hands by so doing it spelled of cowardice.

“I’m ---- if it’s any business of mine!” thought Mr. Lovell angrily. “Let him hang himself;” but in his soul he knew it was not that which haunted him, but something quite Quixotic and outside the sympathy of a man who had fallen from high estate to retouching photographs.

A woman’s black skirt brushed his boot and he drew back civilly.

The next second he threw a just-lighted cigarette into the street and looked straight into a girl’s eyes.

“Mr. Lovell!” said Magdalen Clyde, her cheeks a pale flame, her eyes a dark one.

Lovell made no answer, good or bad, and she turned white as she looked away.

The lifting of his hat, the quick throwing away of his cigarette, had been ordinary good manners; his eyes were hard as steel, his face forbidding, and she had been glad to see him, gladder than of anything else she had ever known. There was no earthly reason that he should be pleased at seeing a girl he had only met twice in his life; but all the same her shamed disappointment made her angry.

“‘A hard man with a soft manner,’” she quoted to herself involuntarily, her eyes still on a grocer’s window opposite, so that she did not see the change on Dick Lovell’s face as he looked down at her.

“It was odd, my meeting you,” she said indifferently. “I was startled. Good-by,” with a little nod that she did not know was languid any more than that her averted face was beautiful.

“Odd?” said Mr. Lovell, taking a quick step to her side as she would have walked on. “I don’t know--I suppose so,” without a glimmer of just how odd it was. “It’s a great pleasure at all events. I had no idea you were even in town.”

“I came back three weeks ago,” she said, still without looking at him.

In Scotland, in a bad place, it had seemed so sure that this man was a friend; here and now she knew the thought had been the thought of a fool. She and Dolly, masquerading, could not dare to have friends picked up at random. In the waning light she turned, her face repellant, her eyes cold. She was worrying over unhatched chickens; Mr. Lovell had made no sign of either friendliness or pleasure at seeing her.

The sudden, sweet light in the eyes she met sent the blood to her face. She stood for one breathless instant stock-still, three times more beautiful than he had even dreamed, and all Dick Lovell’s uneasy thoughts were gone at the lovely sight.

“I feel as if you’d waked me from a bad dream,” he said slowly. “Do you know for a moment I could scarcely believe my eyes?”

“I know you terrified me,” observed Miss Clyde, marching on with a queer feeling that she must get away from his eyes if she were wise. “I never in my life saw anyone look more bad-tempered than you did when I spoke to you.”

Lovell laughed, and looked ten years younger for it.

“Was that why you wouldn’t look at me?” he said boyishly. “I’ve been in a black rage all day; more fool I! Are you going anywhere in particular?” with a sudden knowledge that she meant to dismiss him, and as sudden a determination that he would not submit to it.

“I’m going to that French bakery,” pointing across the street.

“So am I,” he calmly remarked. “I was going to have tea there. I wonder--if you----” he stammered. Lovell, who had been the best-beloved and worst-spoiled man in town, stammering at asking a girl to have tea!

A hundred thoughts went through Magdalen’s head before she answered. She was tired out, lonely; why should she never be happy because of Dolly’s cares? She threw the whole bundle of them aside and answered the half-finished question demurely:

“I would, if there were little hot cakes.”

In Lovell’s pocket was the change those cigarettes had left from ten shillings; his eyes smiled into hers with the reckless consciousness of wealth.

“There shall be,” he averred, and he also cast a black care behind him as they entered the little shop where the coffee was wonderful and the tea weird.

Lovell, as he gave an order to the white-capped man behind the counter, did not notice his companion pause and look back into the dingy street. She made a little self-contemptuous movement, as no one of the passers-by so much as glanced at Dufour’s.

It must have been fancy that ever since she stopped to speak to Lovell some one had never let her get out of sight.

“I’m getting to be an awful fool,” the girl reflected swiftly. “This hole-and-corner business of Doll’s, and her eternal cautions, are making me nervous. We’re all right; we’ve sunk in London like stones till I met him to-day. I don’t know why I’m so stupid; it was all so much easier and quicker than I thought. It all went swimmingly.”

It certainly had. At three o’clock one day three weeks ago “Mrs. Morton, child and maid” had departed from the Euston Hotel; at five Lady Barnysdale--after nearly frightening Mr. Barrow into a fit by her appearance, when he had just wired diplomatic condolences on her death to Lord Stratharden--had left the lawyer’s office for Charing Cross and Paris, with a hundred pounds in her pocket; at seven Mrs. Morton and party had reappeared again at a modest hotel, the poorer by the price of unused tickets to Paris, and Dolly had gone to bed and stayed there for a week, after which she had emerged quite recovered and gayer than the gay, had boldly gone out, trusting in a thick crepe veil and a plausible tongue, and taken the upper part of a house in Hare Street.

To the vacating tenant, a milliner, she gave an extra ten pounds for leaving her plate on the door, which was easily earned money to that lady, who was retiring in disgust from a phantom business. It was, therefore, from behind the neglected door-plate and the respectable blinds of “Madame Aline, Robes and Modes,” that Miss Magdalen Clyde had come out to-day in search of French bread; come out with an eye at every corner and a firm determination to take to her heels at the sight of the most innocuous Chinaman in London, and ended in Dufour’s shop, with a dismissal of all her nervous tremblings and groundless fears because a man’s hawk eyes were the eyes of a comrade as he came back to her side.

“I ordered coffee,” said Lovell, and perhaps he had no idea what a pleasant voice he had, nor what a tower of strength he looked in his worn blue serge. “Their tea is horrible, but the little hot cakes!” and he laughed as he stood back to let her pass into Mr. Dufour’s respectable family tea-room.

To his surprise “the girl whose name was Magdalen” sat down at the little marble table with undisguised fatigue. He wondered swiftly who and what she was. His quick glance took in her smart black gown, her chinchilla furs, the immaculate dressing of her lovely rust-colored hair, her long, white hands as she took off her gloves. The left one was no business of his, but a senseless pleasure made him smile as he looked at it. Whoever she was she was nobody’s wife; Mr. Lovell had no leaning toward other people’s property.

That she was a lady he did not even say to himself; it was too evident. No one who put on make-up every night could have that sort of skin; she was not an actress. Yet, somehow, she did not look like a girl who did nothing; he was pretty certain that care and responsibility fell on those shoulders; for every line of her was tired and lax in Mr. Dufour’s hard chair; and yet she looked anything but poor.

That a girl he had met in Krug’s half-caste restaurant without benefit of introduction, had followed it up by making no bones about coming to tea with him, never entered the man’s head. The very look of her told him there was never a girl in the world more unconscious of her strange beauty than she.

“This isn’t a very grand place to bring you to,” he said with a sudden consciousness that, for all he knew, she might be used to Prince’s Restaurant. “But it’s quiet.”

Remembering Krug’s, he kept his tongue from “respectable.”

“Yes,” she said simply. She looked straight at him. “I suppose I should not have come,” she observed calmly; “but I wanted to. I was tired. We have just found new quarters--my sister and I. And--did you ever move?” she suddenly and tragically inquired.

“I did. But as I had only myself and some clothes it was not fatiguing,” rather grimly, remembering the house from which he had departed in haste. “You look as if your removal had been tiresome. Will you pour out the coffee, or shall I?”

“You,” with the smile that made her lovely. “I don’t do those things well.”

“Non-sense!” said Lovell with a drawling sweetness that made the curt word civil.

In complete happiness, such as neither had ever tasted in their lives, the two sat at their little table. If for a moment the ghosts of the many rebukes she had given with some point to Dolly, on the subject of going to tea with unknown men, arose before Magdalen Clyde, she put them behind her with determination. Dolly’s men and this man were not alike; and for once she would let herself go, be young and gay and happy like other girls, with no silly hiding to worry them. As for Lovell, he was like a lost dog who has suddenly got home. No one would ever have said he was grave and unhappy to-day.

The economical soul of Mr. Dufour had not lighted the gas in his tea-room, which was getting dusky. With his hand on the matches, he glanced with pleased sympathy at the two who took their coffee so gaily, and were so appreciative of his hot cakes; glanced back at his shop window, and drew a curtain noiselessly over the tea-room door.

M. Dufour, where a pretty woman was concerned, was a man of impulse, to his own mind one of great insight; and----

He was putting cakes on a tray deliberately as a man entered his shop. If M. Dufour had not liked his looks from outside he liked them still less from in.

“The fat and furious husband!” said he to himself, with his best shop smile. He did not move from his place by the tea-room door.

“Monsieur wanted?” he asked blandly. “Bread, cakes?--all of the best.”

The man laughed. If his manner meant to be pleasant it was not. M. Dufour observed that utter silence reigned in his tea-room.

“Good food for women,” the new visitor returned patronizingly. “No; let me have a light, will you? By the way, did a lady come in here half an hour ago?”

“Several, monsieur.” M. Dufour’s box of matches was obsequiously held out on a tray.

“Oh, damn the several! A pale girl with reddish hair?”

M. Dufour was a judge of beauty and his gorge rose.

“I did not observe,” he said with a shrug, “any red hair. One tall lady arrived and has just departed through that door,” with a slighting wave of his hand to his back entrance.

“You’ve a tea-room,” the visitor bluntly remarked in spite of a thick-lipped smile. “I’ll have tea.”

“I regret it is impossible,” said the Frenchman smoothly. “My tea-room is to-day closed. My wife is indisposed.”

He was too clever to give the man any idea that he was lying; he began, apologetically, to recommend his little cakes. But it was to empty air.

The unwelcome customer--who had not paid for his box of matches--had left the shop by the little-used back door.

To the proprietor’s eyes rose the bland light of the successful diplomatist. The denied tea was of course a loss to business, but what M. Dufour had begun to oblige his old customer, M. Lovell, he had finished for personal dislike of a disagreeable man. He did not grudge his sixpence thrown away.

“Also, I can charge extra for the coffee!” he thought with a pleasant consciousness of having done a kind and tactful action.

It was a pity he could not have seen the reason for the sudden silence in the tea-room. Magdalen, sitting very straight, had held up a warning hand and sat listening. There was no mistaking Starr-Dalton’s voice; it was odd that he had been in her thought all day.

As the door closed behind him she rose with a little laugh.

“Did you hear?” she said. “That man was looking for me. He used to come to see us, and we hated him. We didn’t mean him to know we were in London.”

There was careless scorn in her face, but there was also the cold, intuitive hatred many a girl has for a bad man.

Lovell regarded her in silence. Whoever and whatever she was, there was nothing milk-and-water about her.

“He shan’t know now if you don’t want him to,” he said. “You’re not going because of him?” for she had risen.

“No,” truthfully enough. “It is quite time I was at home, though.”

Starr-Dalton was neither here nor there to her; it was not he who could shatter the dream of peace that had come to her; the time was gone by when she must be civil to him for the sake of borrowed money; she could afford to be angry at his insolence in dogging her.

“I won’t have it,” she thought. “He shan’t follow me home and find Dolly. I’ll drive,” but even as she thought her face fell; she had only sixpence; a hansom was impossible, and to walk might mean running into Starr-Dalton at the first corner.

She looked up and met Lovell’s eyes.

“Ready?” said he simply. “I’m going to take you home in a hansom if I may.”

At the modest door where Madame Aline’s door-plate shone meagerly in the gaslight she turned to him.

“You’ve been very kind,” she said a little uncomfortably, “and you don’t even know my name”--for “Madame Aline’s sister” had not thought of one, and did not dare to make one up on the spur of the moment.

“No.” Mr. Lovell perhaps helped her out with some haste. “I know--that is--Madame Aline is quite enough for me!” with a glance at the tarnished sign.

But when she had gone in and the hansom had driven off he put the two shillings that remained to him into his pocket and laughed. Her name had been settled for him long ago.

“Good-night, Dark Magdalen,” said he to a shut door, and lifted his hat as he turned away.