Read Ebook: The Palace of Darkened Windows by Bradley Mary Hastings Frederick Edmund Illustrator

Font size: 10 px 15 px 20 px 25 px 30 px 35 px

Background color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Text color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Apply/Save settings

Ebook has 1751 lines and 84075 words, and 36 pages

The young Englishman said a horrible thing. He said it with immense feeling.

"American goose!" he uttered, then stopped short. Precipitately he floundered into explanation:

"Oh, don't apologize," murmured the girl, with charming sweetness. "I don't mind what you say--not in the least."

The outraged man was not so befuddled but what he saw those danger signals now. They glimmered scarlet upon his vision, but his blood was up and he plunged on to destruction with the extraordinary remark, "But isn't there a reason why you should?"

She gazed at him in mock reflection, as if mulling this striking thought presented for her consideration, but her eyes were too sparkly and her cheeks too poppy-pink to substantiate the reflective pose.

"N-no," she said at last, with an impertinent little drawl. "I can't seem to think of any."

The young man looked at her. He was over the brink of ruin now; nothing remained of the interesting little affair of the past three weeks but a mangled and lamentable wreck at the bottom of a deep abyss.

Perhaps a shaft of compunction touched her flinty soul at the sight of his aghast and speechless face, for she had the grace to look away. Her gaze encountered the absorbed and excited countenance of Billy B. Hill, and the poppy-pink of her cheeks became poppy-red and she turned her head sharply away. She rose, catching up her gloves and parasol.

"Thank you so much for your tea," she said in a lowered tone to her unfortunate host. "I've had a delicious time.... I'm sorry if I disappointed you by not cowering before your disapproval. Oh, don't bother to come in with me--I know my way to the lift and the band is going to play God Save the King and they need you to stand up and make a showing."

Billy B. Hill stared across at the abandoned young man with supreme sympathy and intimate understanding. He was a nice and right-minded young man and she was an utter minx. She was the daughter of unreason and the granddaughter of folly. She needed, emphatically needed, to be shown. But this Englishman, with his harsh and violently antagonizing way of putting things, was clearly not the man for the need. It took a lighter touch--the hand of iron in the velvet glove, as it were. It took a keener spirit, a softer humor.

Billy threw out his chest and drew himself up to his full five feet eleven and one-half inches, as he passed indoors and sought the hotel register, for he felt within himself the true equipment for that delicate mission. He fairly panted to be at it.

Fate was amiable. The hotel clerk, coerced with a couple of gold-banded ones with the real fragrance, permitted Billy to learn that the blue-eyed one's name was Beecher, Arlee Beecher, and that she was in the company of two ladies entitled Mrs. and Miss Eversham. The Miss Eversham was quite old enough to be entitled otherwise. They were occupied, the clerk reported, with nerves and dissatisfaction. Miss Beecher appeared occupied in part--with a correspondence that would swamp a foreign office.

Now it is always a question whether being at the same hotel does or does not constitute an introduction. Sometimes it does; sometimes it does not. When the hotel is a small and inexpensive arrangement in Switzerland, where the advertised view of the Alpengl?hen is obtained by placing the chairs in a sociable circle on the sidewalk, then usually it does. When the hotel is a large and expensive affair in gayest Cairo, where the sunny and shady side rub elbows, and gamesters and d?butantes and touts and school teachers and vivid ladies of conspicuous pasts and stout gentlemen of exhilarated presents abound, in fact where innocent sightseers and initiated traffickers in human frailties are often indistinguishable, then decidedly it does not.

But fate, still smiling, dropped a silver shawl in Billy's path as he was trailing his prey through the lounge after dinner. The shawl belonged, most palpably, to a German lady three feet ahead of him, but gripping it triumphantly, he bounded over the six feet which separated him from the Eversham-Beecher triangle and with marvelous self-restraint he touched Miss Eversham on the arm.

"You dropped this?" he inquired.

Miss Eversham looked surprisedly at Billy and uncertainly at the shawl, which she mechanically accepted. "Why I--I didn't remember having it with me," she hesitated.

"You know whether this is yours or not, don't you, Clara?" interposed the mother.

"They all look alike," murmured Clara Eversham, eying helplessly the silver border.

Billy permitted himself to look at Miss Beecher. That young person was looking at him and there was a disconcerting gaiety in her expression, but at sight of him she turned her head, faintly coloring. He judged she recalled his unmannerly eavesdropping that afternoon.

"Pardon--excuse me--but that is to me belonging," panted an agitated but firm voice behind them, and two stout and beringed hands seized upon the glittering shawl in Miss Eversham's lax grasp. "It but just now off me falls," and the German lady looked belligerent accusation upon the defrauding Billy.

There was a round of apologetic murmurs, unacknowledged by the recipient, who plunged away with her shawl, as if fearing further designs upon it. Billy laughed down at the Evershams.

"I do think I had mine this evening, after all," murmured Clara, with a questioning glance after the departing one.

"An uncultured person!" stated Mrs. Eversham.

Miss Beecher said nothing at all. Her faint smile was mockingly derisive.

"Anyway you must let me get you some coffee," Billy most inconsequentially suggested, beckoning to the red-girdled Mohammed with his laden tray, and because he was young and nice looking and evidently a gentleman from their part of the world and his evening clothes fitted perfectly and had just the right amount of braid, Mrs. Eversham made no objection to the circle of chairs he hastily collected about a taborette, and let him hand them their coffee and send Mohammed for the cream which Miss Eversham declared was indispensable for her health.

Mrs. Eversham took up that "but" most eagerly, and recounted multiple and deplorable instances of nasal countrywomen doing the East and monopolizing the window seats in compartments, and Miss Eversham supplied details and corrections.

Still Miss Beecher said nothing. She had a dreamy air of not belonging to the conversationalists. But from an inscrutable something in her appearance, Billy judged she was not unentertained by his sufferings.

At the first pause he addressed her directly. "And how do you like Cairo?" was his simple question. That ought, he reflected, to be an entering wedge.

The young lady did not trouble to raise her eyes. "Oh, very much," said she negligently, sipping her coffee.

"Oh, very well!" said Billy haughtily to himself. If being her fellow countryman in a strange land, and obviously a young and cultivated countryman whom it would be a profit and pleasure for any girl to know, wasn't enough for her--what was the use? He ought to get up and go away. He intended to get up and go away--immediately.

But he didn't. Perhaps it was the shimmery gold hair, perhaps it was the flickering mischief of the downcast lashes, perhaps it was the loveliness of the soft, white throat and slenderly rounded arms. Anyway he stayed. And when the strain of waltz music sounded through the chatter of voices about them and young couples began to stroll to the long parlors, Billy jumped to his feet with a devastating desire that totally ignored the interminable wanderings of Clara Eversham's complaints.

"Will you dance this with me?" he besought of Miss Arlee Beecher, with a direct gaze more boyishly eager than he knew.

For an agonizing moment she hesitated. Then, "I think I will," she concluded, with sudden roguery in her smile.

Stammering a farewell to the Evershams, he bore her off.

It would be useless to describe that waltz. It was one of the ecstatic moments which Young Joy sometimes tosses from her garlanded arms. It was one of the sudden, vivid, unforgettable delights which makes youth a fever and a desire. For Billy it was the wildest stab the sex had ever dealt him. For though this was perhaps the nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-ninth girl with whom he had danced, it was as if he had discovered music and motion and girls for the first time.

The music left them by the windows.

"Thank you," said Billy under his breath.

"You didn't deserve it," said the girl, with a faint smile playing about the corners of her lips. "You know you stared--scandalously."

Grateful that she mentioned only the lesser sin, "Could I help it?" he stammered, by way of a finished retort.

The smile deepened, "And I'm afraid you listened!"

He stared down at her anxiously. "Will you like me better if I didn't?" he inquired.

"I shan't like you at all if you did."

"Then I didn't hear a word.... Besides," he basely uttered, "you were entirely in the right!"

"I should think I was!" said Arlee Beecher very indignantly. "The very notion--! Captain Kerissen is a very nice young man. He is going to get me an invitation to the Khedive's ball."

"Is that a very crumby affair?"

"Crumby? It's simply gorgeous! Everyone is mad over it. Most tourists simply read about it, and it is too perfect luck to be invited! Only the English who have been presented at court are invited and there's a girl at the Savoy Hotel I've met--Lady Claire Montfort--who wasn't presented because she was in mourning for her grandmother last year, and she is simply furious about it. An old dowager here said that there ought to be similar distinctions among the Americans--that only those who had been presented at the White House ought to be recognized. Fancy making the White House a social distinction!" laughed the daughter of the Great Republic.

"There aren't any Turkish ladies there," uttered Miss Beecher rebukingly. "Don't you know that? When they are on the Continent--those that are ever taken there--they may go to dances and things, but here they can't, although some of them are just as modern as you or I, I've heard, and lots more educated."

"You speak," he protested, "from a superficial acquaintance with my academic accomplishments."

"Are you so very--proficient?"

"I was--I am Phi Beta Kappa," he sadly confessed.

Her laugh rippled out. "You don't look it," she cheered.

Share on: WhatsApp @Hash Facebook Tweet