“Now, I feel a bit responsible for you, and I want to help you. Maybe I can, too.”
Her eyes were fixed on his face. In them such an expression of hope attempting to combat her tragic circumstances and her dark, utterly hopeless future. It moved him. Her helplessness seemed to reach out to him. Though she herself made no attempt to grab his sympathy.
Because she was so forlorn, because her dark eyes, big in her pale, tear-stained face, were so stricken. Because absolutely nothing about her was anything but a living picture of shabby human pathos, he knew he had to help her.
“I have two friends who live in Paris,” he said. “They’re brother and sister. Kindest, most understanding people in the world. Come along with me, and let them decide what’s the best thing to be done about you. Does that sound rather as if you’re a little stray dog?”
He smiled at her.
She shook her head seriously.
“That is what I feel like. Lost. But I cannot come with you. It would be impossible. You are a busy man, you cannot be worried by my troubles. Your friends, too. How can I ask them to bother about an utter stranger?”
“You aren’t worrying me, you won’t bother them. So put that right out of your head. Julia and Leo—my friends—will take care of you until you feel more able to take care of yourself. Glad to do it, and they’ll think up something for you to do, find a job for you, so you won’t be destitute in a Parisian gutter—which, so I’m told, is a most unpleasant place!”
She started to say something, but he stopped her.
“Why, you can’t do anything else, but follow my suggestion! Don’t you see? There was nobody here to meet you—I enquired about that…”
“You mean…?”
“Poor Tallier had too much on his mind the last day or two. He’d forgotten all about you. His own world crashed. He was ruined. If anybody else knew about your coming to Paris, well, they forgot, too. All this business has been a bolt from the blue—not only for you, but for everybody else, Henri Tallier as well.”
He rose. Her eyes remained riveted to his face. Her fingers were intertwined convulsively in her lap. He saw her lower lip begin to tremble.
“Mitsi Linden!”
Her name came sharply, and the hard note in his voice stopped the tears that were about to come. She gulped, and blew her nose.
“Another thing—you’ll find it difficult to leave Le Bourget without answering a lot of questions. There are several people outside there who are very anxious to learn why you fainted just now. I had quite a job to keep them away from you. Understand?”
“I could not bear to talk to anybody. It would be horrible. Oh, M’sieu—Mr. Curtis, what shall I do…?”
“Cut the ‘Mr. Curtis’, anyway. I’m Larry to my friends, and we’re friends. Secondly, put your hat on—unless your head’s still aching, and we’ll go and have tea with Julia and Leo. You’d like some tea, wouldn’t you? And an aspirin?”
She smiled. There was that in her smile which affected him profoundly. So full of courage and new hope it was.
“Yes,” she said, “I would like a little tea—and some aspirin.”
She stood up shakily. He took her arm, and she looked straight into his eyes with a queer frankness.
“Oh, thank you! I can never repay you. Never, never…” she whispered tremulously.
He tried to laugh, but a sudden tightness in his throat prevented him.
“I’m glad you think so well of me!” he said lightly.
Ten minutes later found them in a car, and on the road to Paris.
A silence fell between them. She was busy with her thoughts. Thoughts which went round and round in her head, and which she found impossible to sort out. They started with the Frenchman’s stare when he had pushed his newspaper aside to answer her question about Tallier. Then those words leaping out at her in huge black letters suddenly dwindling to nothingness and oblivion.
Then the hammering at the back of her head. Larry’s face when she had first regained consciousness, his voice, the import of his words. And, last of all, wonderment about where she was going, the two friends of his whom she was about to meet.
Everything seemed possessed of a curious dream-like quality. As if everything that had happened to her in the last hour had not really happened at all. She was only dreaming it. Presently she would wake up, and find herself back in Zurich.
“Or perhaps I’m dead,” she thought once. “Perhaps the aeroplane did crash, after all!…”
She gave a quick, panic-stricken glance at the man beside her. No! He was here, with her, protecting her, there was nothing to be afraid of. She was alive. She wasn’t dreaming. All the things had happened, and she was in this car with this wonderfully kind Englishman—going to have tea with two friends of his. Tea and aspirins, which would take away the hammering in her head.
Larry said nothing, the smoke curled up from his cigarette as he sat back wondering, too.
Paris, and the future drew nearer.
CHAPTER 3
“She is a quaint little thing!” said Julia Green, as she fitted a cigarette into a long ivory holder and put it between her red lips. She was gracefully tall, and dark and attractive.
It was after dinner.
Larry, Leo and Julia were lounging comfortably in deep arm-chairs in the delightfully furnished sitting-room of the Greens’ flat. Julia had just come in from the visitor’s bedroom where she had tucked Mitsi in bed and given her a sleeping-draught.
Larry was smoking a pipe, and his eyes were closed. Leo also smoked a pipe, a heavy curved affair which hung from his teeth against the short, pointed beard which he affected. He had a pad perched on his knee, and was sketching on it, stopping every few minutes to survey his handiwork with a critical eye.
Julia looked at the two men, neither of whom made any reply to her remark. Smiling affectionately in the direction of Larry, she picked up a magazine and idly turned the pages.
There was a little silence.
Suddenly Leo, without looking up from his pencil, said:
“I think she has an amazingly interesting face—the bone structure’s grand.”
“Oh, do you think so?” his sister asked.
“Don’t you?”
“Yes… I think I see what you mean…in a way.”
“Which means you don’t see anything of the sort, my dear!”
Leo made a sucking noise in his pipe. He turned to Larry.
“D’you see, old man?”
“Oh, don’t wake the poor darling up, he’s having such a lovely nap!” Julia cried.
Larry opened his eyes and grinned.
“Liar! I was thinking,” he said. “What did you say, Leo?”
“I said this Linden kid has an amazingly interesting face. I also said the bone structure was all right, too, but you wouldn’t know anything about that!”
“Uhuh! painter-of-pretty-pictures!” the other jibed. “I know plenty about bone structure. But, no, I can’t say the child’s a ravishing beauty!”
“She’s very sweet and very pathetic,” put in Julia.
“I might have known,” muttered her brother. “You’re a pair of undiscerning fools!”
“Charming brother of mine!”
“Bah!”