“Holly Morgan sends her best,” it concluded, with kind, simulated reproach. “Perhaps she ought to be writing instead of me. I always thought you were fickle, and now I know it.”
The poor effort which she had made to hide her indifference made him shiver. He did not add the letter to a certain cherished package tied with blue ribbon, but burned it up in an ash tray—a tragic gesture which almost set his mother’s house on fire.
So he began his life in Boston, and the story of his first year there is a fairy tale too immoral to be told. It is the story of one of those mad, illogical successes upon whose substantial foundations ninety-nine failures are later reared. Though he worked hard, he deserved no special credit for it—no credit, that is, commensurate with the reward he received. He ran into a man who had a scheme, a preposterous scheme, for the cold storage of sea food which he had been trying to finance for several years. Juan’s inexperience allowed him to be responsive and he invested twelve hundred dollars. In his first year this appalling indiscretion paid him 400 per cent. His partner attempted to buy him out, but they reached a compromise and Juan kept his shares.
The inner sense of his own destiny which had never deserted him whispered that he was going to be a rich man. But at the end of that year an event took place which made him think that it didn’t matter after all.
He had seen Noel Garneau twice—once entering a theatre and once riding through a Boston street in the back of her limousine, looking, he thought afterwards, bored and pale and tired. At the time he had thought nothing; an overwhelming emotion had seized his heart, held it helpless, suspended, as though it were in the grasp of material fingers. He had shrunk back hastily under the awning of a shop and waited trembling, horrified, ecstatic, until she went by. She did not know he was in Boston—he did not want her to know until he was ready. He followed her every move in the society columns of the papers. She was at school, at home for Christmas, at Hot Springs for Easter, coming out in the fall. Then she was a debutante, and every day he read of her at dinners and dances and assemblies and balls and charity functions and theatricals of the Junior
League. A dozen blurred newspaper unlikenesses of her filled a drawer of his desk. And still he waited. Let Noel have her fling.
When he had been sixteen months in Boston, and when Noel’s first season was dying away in the hum of the massed departure for Florida, Juan decided to wait no longer. So on a raw, damp February day, when children in rubber boots were building darns in the snow-filled gutters, a blond, handsome, well-dressed young man walked up the steps of the Garneau’s Boston house and handed his card to the maid. With his heart beating loud, he went into a drawing-room and sat down.
A sound of a dress on the stairs, light feet in the hall, an exclamation—Noel!
“Why, Juan,” she exclaimed, surprised, pleased, polite, “I didn’t know you were in Boston. It’s so good to see you. I thought you’d thrown me over for ever.”
In a moment he found voice—it was easier now than it had been. Whether or not she was aware of the change, he was a nobody no longer. There was something solid behind him that would prevent him ever again from behaving like a self-centred child.
He explained that he might settle in Boston, and allowed her to guess that he had done extremely well; and, though it cost him a twinge of pain, he spoke humourously of their last meeting, implying that he had left the swimming party on an impulse of anger at her. He could not confess that the impulse had been one of shame. She laughed. Suddenly he grew curiously happy.
Half an hour passed. The fire glowed in the hearth. The day darkened outside and the room moved into that shadowy twilight, that weather of indoors, which is like a breathless starshine. He had been standing; now he sat down beside her on the couch.
“Noel——”
Footsteps sounded lightly through the hall as the maid went through to the front door. Noel reached up quickly and turned up the electric lamp on the table behind her head.
“I didn’t realize how dark it was growing,” she said rather quickly, he thought. Then the maid stood in the doorway.
“Mr Templeton,” she announced.
“Oh, yes,” agreed Noel.
Mr Templeton, with a Harvard-Oxford drawl, mature, very much at home, looked at him with just a flicker of surprise, nodded, mumbled a bare politeness and took an easy position in front of the fire. He exchanged several remarks with Noel which indicated a certain familiarity with her movements. Then a short silence fell. Juan rose.
“I want to see you soon,” he said. “I’ll phone, shall I, and you tell me when I can call?”
She walked with him to the door.
“So good to talk to you again,” she told him cordially. “Remember, I want to see a lot of you, Juan.”
When he left he was happier than he had been for two years. He ate dinner alone at a restaurant, almost singing to himself; and then, wild with elation, walked along the waterfront till midnight. He awoke thinking of her, wanting to tell people that what had been lost was found again. There had been more between them than the mere words said—Noel’s sitting with him in the half-darkness, her slight but perceptible nervousness as she came with him to the door.
Two days later he opened the Transcript to the society page and read down to the third item. There his eyes stopped, became like china eyes:
Mr and Mrs Harold Garneau announce the engagement of their daughter Noel to Mr Brooks Fish Templeton. Mr Templeton graduated from Harvard in the class of 1912 and is a partner in——
VI.
At three o’clock that afternoon Juan rang the Garneaus’ doorbell and was shown into the hall. From somewhere upstairs he heard girls’ voices, and another murmur came from the drawing-room on the right, where he had talked to Noel only the week before.
“Can you show me into some room that isn’t being used?” he demanded tensely of the maid. “I’m an old friend—it’s very important—I’ve got to see Miss Noel alone.”
He waited in a small den at the back of the hall. Ten minutes passed—ten minutes more; he began to be afraid she wasn’t coming. At the end of half an hour the door bounced open and Noel came hurriedly in.
“Juan!” she cried happily. “This is wonderful! I might have known you’d be the first to come.” Her expression changed as she saw his face, and she hesitated. “But why were you shown in here?” she went on quickly. “You must come and meet everyone. I’m rushing around today like a chicken without a head.”
“Noel!” he said thickly.
“What?”
Her hand was on the door knob. She turned, startled.
“Noel, I haven’t come to congratulate you,” Juan said, his face white and , his voice harsh with his effort at self-control. “I’ve come to tell you you’re making an awful mistake.”
“Why—Juan!”
“And you know it,” he went on. “You know no one loves you as I love you, Noel. I want you to marry me.”
She laughed nervously.
“Why, Juan, that’s silly! I don’t understand your talking like this. I’m engaged to another man.”
“Noel, will you come here and sit down?”
“I can’t, Juan—there’re a dozen people outside. I’ve got to see them. It wouldn’t be polite. Another time, Juan. If you come another time I’d love to talk to you.”
“Now!” The word was stark, unyielding, almost savage. She hesitated.
“Ten