The Bostonians (58 page)

“Oh murder!” Ransom muttered, beneath his breath, taking up his hat.

“Miss Chancellor has hidden her away; I have been scouring the city in search of her, and her own father hasn’t seen her for a week. We have got his ideas; they are very easy to get, but that isn’t what we want.”

“And what do you want?” Ransom was now impelled to inquire, as Mr. Pardon (even the name at present came back to him), appeared sufficiently to have introduced himself.

“We want to know how she feels about to-night; what report she makes of her nerves, her anticipations; how she looked, what she had on, up to six o’clock. Gracious! if I could see her I should know what I wanted, and so would she, I guess!” Mr. Pardon exclaimed. “You must know something, Mrs. Luna; it isn’t natural you shouldn’t. I won’t inquire any further where she is, because that might seem a little pushing, if she does wish to withdraw herself-though I am bound to say I think she makes a mistake; we could work up these last hours for her! But can’t you tell me any little personal items-the sort of thing the people like? What is she going to have for supper? or is she going to speak-a-without previous nourishment?”

“Really, sir, I don’t know, and I don’t in the least care; I have nothing to do with the business!” Mrs. Luna cried, angrily.

The reporter stared; then, eagerly, “You have nothing to do with it-you take an unfavourable view, you protest?” And he was already feeling in a side-pocket for his note-book.

“Mercy on us! are you going to put
that
in the paper?” Mrs. Luna exclaimed; and in spite of the sense, detestable to him, that everything he wished most to avert was fast closing over the girl, Ransom broke into cynical laughter.

“Ah, but do protest, madam; let us at least have that fragment!” Mr. Pardon went on. “A protest from this house would be a charming note. We must have it-we’ve got nothing else! The public are almost as much interested in your sister as they are in Miss Verena; they know to what extent she has backed her: and I should be so delighted (I see the heading, from here, so attractive!) just to take down ‘What Miss Chancellor’s Family Think about It!’ ”

Mrs. Luna sank into the nearest chair, with a groan, covering her face with her hands. “Heaven help me, I am glad I am going to Europe!”

“That is another little item—everything counts,” said Matthias Pardon, making a rapid entry in his tablets. “May I inquire whether you are going to Europe in consequence of your disapproval of your sister’s views?”

Mrs. Luna sprang up again, almost snatching the memoranda out of his hand. “If you have the impertinence to publish a word about me, or to mention my name in print, I will come to your office and make such a scene!”

“Dearest lady, that would be a godsend!” Mr. Pardon cried, enthusiastically; but he put his note-book back into his pocket.

“Have you made an exhaustive search for Miss Tarrant?” Basil Ransom asked of him. Mr. Pardon, at this inquiry, eyed him with a sudden, familiar archness, expressive of the idea of competition; so that Ransom added: “You needn’t be afraid, I’m not a reporter.”

“I didn’t know but what you had come on from New York.”

“So I have-but not as the representative of a newspaper.”

“Fancy his taking you——” Mrs. Luna murmured, with indignation.

“Well, I have been everywhere I could think of,” Mr. Pardon remarked. “I have been hunting round after your sister’s agent, but I haven’t been able to catch up with him; I suppose he has been hunting on his side. Miss Chancellor told me-Mrs. Luna may remember it-that she shouldn’t be here at all during the week, and that she preferred not to tell me either where or how she was to spend her time until the momentous evening. Of course I let her know that I should find out if I could, and you may remember,” he said to Mrs. Luna, “the conversation we had on the subject. I remarked, candidly, that if they didn’t look out they would overdo the quietness. Doctor Tarrant has felt very low about it. However, I have done what I could with the material at my command, and the ‘Vesper’ has let the public know that her whereabouts was the biggest mystery of the season. It’s difficult to get round the ‘Vesper.’ ”

“I am almost afraid to open my lips in your presence,” Mrs. Luna broke in, “but I must say that I think my sister was strangely communicative. She told you ever so much that I wouldn’t have breathed.”

“I should like to try you with something you know!” Matthias Pardon returned, imperturbably. “This isn’t a fair trial, because you don’t know. Miss Chancellor came round-came round considerably, there’s no doubt of that; because a year or two ago she was terribly unapproachable. If I have mollified her, madam, why shouldn’t I mollify you? She realises that I can help her now, and as I ain’t rancorous I am willing to help her all she’ll let me. The trouble is, she won’t let me enough, yet; it seems as if she couldn’t believe it of me. At any rate,” he pursued, addressing himself more particularly to Ransom, “half an hour ago, at the Hall, they knew nothing whatever about Miss Tarrant, beyond the fact that about a month ago she came there, with Miss Chancellor, to try her voice, which rang all over the place, like silver, and that Miss Chancellor guaranteed her absolute punctuality to-night.”

“Well, that’s all that is required,” said Ransom, at hazard; and he put out his hand, in farewell, to Mrs. Luna.

“Do you desert me already?” she demanded, giving him a glance which would have embarrassed any spectator but a reporter of the “Vesper.”

“I have fifty things to do; you must excuse me.” He was nervous, restless, his heart was beating much faster than usual; he couldn’t stand still, and he had no compunction whatever about leaving her to get rid, by herself, of Mr. Pardon.

This gentleman continued to mix in the conversation, possibly from the hope that if he should linger either Miss Tarrant or Miss Chancellor would make her appearance. “Every seat in the Hall is sold; the crowd is expected to be immense. When our Boston public does take an idea!” Mr. Pardon exclaimed.

Ransom only wanted to get away, and in order to facilitate his release by implying that in such a case he should see her again, he said to Mrs. Luna, rather hypocritically, from the threshold, “You had really better come to-night.”

“I am not like the Boston public-I don’t take an idea!” she replied.

“Do you mean to say you are not going?” cried Mr. Pardon, with widely-open eyes, clapping his hand again to his pocket. “Don’t you regard her as a wonderful genius?”

Mrs. Luna was sorely tired, and the vexation of seeing Ransom slip away from her with his thoughts visibly on Verena, leaving her face to face with the odious newspaperman, whose presence made passionate protest impossible-the annoyance of seeing everything and every one mock at her and fail to compensate her was such that she lost her head, while rashness leaped to her lips and jerked out the answer—“No indeed; I think her a vulgar idiot!”

“Ah, madam, I should never permit myself to print that!” Ransom heard Mr. Pardon rejoin, reproachfully, as he dropped the
portière
of the drawing-room.

XLI

H
e walked about for the next two hours, walked all over Boston, heedless of his course, and conscious only of an unwillingness to return to his hotel and an inability to eat his dinner or rest his weary legs. He had been roaming in very much the same desperate fashion, at once eager and purposeless, for many days before he left New York, and he knew that his agitation and suspense must wear themselves out. At present they pressed him more than ever; they had become tremendously acute. The early dusk of the last half of November had gathered thick, but the evening was fine and the lighted streets had the animation and variety of a winter that had begun with brilliancy. The shop-fronts glowed through frosty panes, the passers bustled on the pavement, the bells of the streetcars jangled in the cold air, the newsboys hawked the evening-papers, the vestibules of the theatres, illuminated and flanked with coloured posters and the photographs of actresses, exhibited seductively their swinging doors of red leather or baize, spotted with little brass nails. Behind great plates of glass the interior of the hotels became visible, with marble-paved lobbies, white with electric lamps, and columns, and Westerners on divans stretching their legs, while behind a counter, set apart and covered with an array of periodicals and novels in paper covers, little boys, with the faces of old men, showing plans of the play-houses and offering librettos, sold orchestra-chairs at a premium. When from time to time Ransom paused at a corner, hesitating which way to drift, he looked up and saw the stars, sharp and near, scintillating over the town. Boston seemed to him big and full of nocturnal life, very much awake and preparing for an evening of pleasure.

He passed and repassed the Music Hall, saw Verena immensely advertised, gazed down the vista, the approach for pedestrians, which leads out of School Street, and thought it looked expectant and ominous. People had not begun to enter yet, but the place was ready, lighted and open, and the interval would be only too short. So it appeared to Ransom, while at the same time he wished immensely the crisis were over. Everything that surrounded him referred itself to the idea with which his mind was palpitating, the question whether he might not still intervene as against the girl’s jump into the abyss. He believed that all Boston was going to hear her, or that at least every one was whom he saw in the streets; and there was a kind of incentive and inspiration in this thought. The vision of wresting her from the mighty multitude set him off again, to stride through the population that would fight for her. It was not too late, for he felt strong; it would not be too late even if she should already stand there before thousands of converging eyes. He had had his ticket since the morning, and now the time was going on. He went back to his hotel at last for ten minutes, and refreshed himself by dressing a little and by drinking a glass of wine. Then he took his way once more to the Music Hall, and saw that people were beginning to go in-the first drops of the great stream, among whom there were many women. Since seven o’clock the minutes had moved fast-before that they had dragged—and now there was only half an hour. Ransom passed in with the others; he knew just where his seat was; he had chosen it, on reaching Boston, from the few that were left, with what he believed to be care. But now, as he stood beneath the far-away panelled roof, stretching above the line of little tongues of flame which marked its junction with the walls, he felt that this didn’t matter much, since he certainly was not going to subside into his place. He was not one of the audience; he was apart, unique, and had come on a business altogether special. It wouldn’t have mattered if, in advance, he had got no place at all and had just left himself to pay for standing-room at the last. The people came pouring in, and in a very short time there would only be standing-room left. Ransom had no definite plan; he had mainly wanted to get inside of the building, so that, on a view of the field, he might make up his mind. He had never been in the Music Hall before, and its lofty vaults and rows of overhanging balconies made it to his imagination immense and impressive. There were two or three moments during which he felt as he could imagine a young man to feel who, waiting in a public place, has made up his mind, for reasons of his own, to discharge a pistol at the king or the president.

The place struck him with a kind of Roman vastness; the doors which opened out of the upper balconies, high aloft, and which were constantly swinging to and fro with the passage of spectators and ushers, reminded him of the
vomitoria
^by
that he had read about in descriptions of the Colosseum. The huge organ, the background of the stage-a stage occupied with tiers of seats for choruses and civic worthies-lifted to the dome its shining pipes and sculptured pinnacles, and some genius of music or oratory erected himself in monumental bronze at the base. The hall was so capacious and serious, and the audience increased so rapidly without filling it, giving Ransom a sense of the numbers it would contain when it was packed, that the courage of the two young women, face to face with so tremendous an ordeal, hovered before him as really sublime, especially the conscious tension of poor Olive, who would have been spared none of the anxieties and tremors, none of the previsions of accident or calculations of failure. In the front of the stage was a slim, high desk, like a music-stand, with a cover of red velvet, and near it was a light ornamental chair, on which he was sure Verena would not seat herself, though he could fancy her leaning at moments on the back. Behind this was a kind of semicircle of a dozen arm-chairs, which had evidently been arranged for the friends of the speaker, her sponsors and patrons. The hall was more and more full of premonitory sounds; people making a noise as they unfolded, on hinges, their seats, and itinerant boys, whose voices as they cried out “Photographs of Miss Tarrant-sketch of her life!” or “Portraits of the Speaker-story of her career!” sounded small and piping in the general immensity. Before Ransom was aware of it several of the arm-chairs, in the row behind the lecturer’s desk, were occupied, with gaps, and in a moment he recognised, even across the interval, three of the persons who had appeared. The straight-featured woman with bands of glossy hair and eyebrows that told at a distance, could only be Mrs. Farrinder, just as the gentleman beside her, in a white overcoat, with an umbrella and a vague face, was probably her husband Amariah. At the opposite end of the row were another pair, whom Ransom, unacquainted with certain chapters of Verena’s history, perceived without surprise to be Mrs. Burrage and her insinuating son. Apparently their interest in Miss Tarrant was more than a momentary fad, since—like himself—they had made the journey from New York to hear her. There were other figures, unknown to our young man, here and there, in the semicircle; but several places were still empty (one of which was of course reserved for Olive), and it occurred to Ransom, even in his preoccupation, that one of them ought to remain so—ought to be left to symbolise the presence, in the spirit, of Miss Birdseye.