The Dark Star
Page 252"Do you c-care for tea, Jim?... What a night! What a fright you gave
us.... There are croissants, too, and caviar.... I would not permit
anybody to awaken you; and I was dying to see you----"
"I am so sorry you were anxious about me. And I'm tremendously
hungry.... You see, Sengoun and I did not mean to remain out all
night.... I'll help you with that tea; shall I?..."
He still retained her hands in his; she smiled and flushed in a
breathless sort of way, and looked sometimes at the tea-kettle as
though she never before had seen such an object; and looked up at him
as though she had never until that moment beheld any man like him.
"The Princess Naïa has left us quite alone," she said, "so I must give
you some tea." She was nervous and smiling and a little frightened and
confused with the sense of their contact.
She did not mention her manual inability to perform her promise, but
presently it occurred to him to release her hands, and she slid
gracefully into her chair and took hold of the silver kettle with
fingers that trembled.
He ate everything offered him, and then took the initiative. And he
talked--Oh, heaven! How he talked! Everything that had happened to him
and to Sengoun from the moment they left the rue Soleil d'Or the night
before, this garrulous young man detailed with a relish for humorous
circumstance and a disregard for anything approaching the tragic,
which left her with an impression that it had all been a tremendous
lark--indiscreet, certainly, and probably reprehensible--but a lark,
for all that.
but casualties he skimmed over, and of death he never said a word. Why
should he? The dead were dead. None concerned this young girl
now--and, save one, no death that any man had died there in the
shambles of the Café des Bulgars could ever mean anything to Rue
Carew.
Some day, perhaps, he might tell her that Brandes was dead--not where
or how he had died--but merely the dry detail. And she might docket
it, if she cared to, and lay it away among the old, scarcely
remembered, painful things that had been lived, and now were to be
forgotten forever.
The silence of intensest interest, shy or excited questions, and the
grey eyes never leaving his--this was her tribute.
brilliant at a crisis, now gentle, wondering, troubled, as he spoke of
Ilse Dumont and the Russian girl, now charmingly vague as her mind
outstripped his tongue and she divined something of the sturdy part he
had played--golden-grey eyes that grew exquisite with her pride in
him, tender with solicitude for him in dangers already passed
away--this was her tribute Engaging grey eyes of a girl with the splendour and mystery of
womanhood possessing her--attracting him, too, fascinating him,
threatening, conquering, possessing him--this, the Greek gift of Rue
Carew, her tribute.