Silence for a moment, while Scatch obeyed for the next moment.
“Here it is,” she called joyously. “And here are Harmony’s bedroom slippers. Oh, Harry, I found your slippers!” The girl got down off the chair and went to the door.
“Thanks, dear,” she said. “I’m coming in a minute.”
She went to the mirror, which had reflected the Empress Maria Theresa, and looked at her eyes. They were still red. Perhaps if she opened the window the air would brighten them.
Armed with the brush, little Scatchett hurried to the Big Soprano’s room. She flung the brush on the bed and closed the door. She held her shabby wrapper about her and listened just inside the door. There were no footsteps, only the banging of the gate in the wind. She turned to the Big Soprano, heating a curling iron in the flame of a candle, and held out her hand.
“Look!” she said. “Under my bed! Ten kronen!”
Without a word the Big Soprano put down her curling-iron, and ponderously getting down on her knees, candle in hand, inspected the dusty floor beneath her bed. It revealed nothing but a cigarette, on which she pounced. Still squatting, she lighted the cigarette in the candle flame and sat solemnly puffing it.
“The first for a week,” she said. “Pull out the wardrobe, Scatch; there may be another relic of my prosperous days.”
But little Scatchett was not interested in Austrian cigarettes with a government monopoly and gilt tips. She was looking at the ten-kronen piece.
“Where is the other?” she asked in a whisper.
“In my powder-box.”
Little Scatchett lifted the china lid and dropped the tiny gold-piece.
“Every little bit,” she said flippantly, but still in a whisper, “added to what she’s got, makes just a little bit more.”
“Have you thought of a place to leave it for her? If Rosa finds it, it’s good-bye. Heaven knows it was hard enough to get together, without losing it now. I’ll have to jump overboard and swim ashore at New York—I haven’t even a dollar for tips.”
“New York!” said little Scatchett with her eyes glowing. “If Henry meets me I know he will—”
“Tut!” The Big Soprano got up cumbrously and stood looking down. “You and your Henry! Scatchy, child, has it occurred to your maudlin young mind that money isn’t the only thing Harmony is going to need? She’s going to be alone—and this is a bad town to be alone in. And she is not like us. You have your Henry. I’m a beefy person who has a stomach, and I’m thankful for it. But she is different—she’s got the thing that you are as well without, the thing that my lack of is sending me back to fight in a church choir instead of grand opera.”
Little Scatchett was rather puzzled.
“Temperament?” she asked. It had always been accepted in the little colony that Harmony was a real musician, a star in their lesser firmament.
The Big Soprano sniffed.
“If you like,” she said. “Soul is a better word. Only the rich ought to have souls, Scatchy, dear.”
This was over the younger girl’s head, and anyhow Harmony was coming down the hall.
“I thought, under her pillow,” she whispered. “She’ll find it—”
Harmony came in, to find the Big Soprano heating a curler in the flame of a candle.
CHAPTER II
Harmony found the little hoard under her pillow that night when, having seen Scatch and the Big Soprano off at the station, she had come back alone to the apartment on the Siebensternstrasse. The trunks were gone now. Only the concerto score still lay on the piano, where little Scatchett, mentally on the dock at New York with Henry’s arms about her, had forgotten it. The candles in the great chandelier had died in tears of paraffin that spattered the floor beneath. One or two of the sockets were still smoking, and the sharp odor of burning wickends filled the room.
Harmony had come through the garden quickly. She had had an uneasy sense of being followed, and the garden, with its moaning trees and slamming gate and the great dark house in the background, was a forbidding place at best. She had rung the bell and had stood, her back against the door, eyes and ears strained in the darkness. She had fancied that a figure had stopped outside the gate and stood looking in, but the next moment the gate had swung to and the Portier was fumbling at the lock behind her.
The Portier had put on his trousers over his night garments, and his mustache bandage gave him a sinister expression, rather augmented when he smiled at her. The Portier liked Harmony in spite of the early morning practicing; she looked like a singer at the opera for whom he cherished a hidden attachment. The singer had never seen him, but it was for her he wore the mustache bandage. Perhaps some day—hopefully! One must be ready!
The Portier gave Harmony a tiny candle and Harmony held out his tip, the five Hellers of custom. But the Portier was keen, and Rosa was a niece of his wife and talked more than she should. He refused the tip with a gesture.
“Bitte, Fraulein!” he said through the bandage. “It is for me a pleasure to admit you. And perhaps if the Fraulein is cold, a basin of soup.”
The Portier was not pleasant to the eye. His nightshirt was open over his hairy chest and his feet were bare to the stone floor. But to Harmony that lonely night he was beautiful. She tried to speak and could not but she held out her hand in impulsive gratitude, and the Portier in his best manner bent over and kissed it. As she reached the curve of the stone staircase, carrying her tiny candle, the Portier was following her with his eyes. She was very like the girl of the opera.
The clang of the door below and the rattle of the chain were comforting to Harmony’s ears. From the safety of the darkened salon she peered out into the garden again, but no skulking figure detached itself from the shadows, and the gate remained, for a marvel, closed.
