whitewashed staircase.
The paved courtyard below was to be crossed and it was poorly lighted. She achieved the street, however, without molestation. To the street-car was only a block, but during that block she was accosted twice. She was white and frightened when she reached the car.
The Siebensternstrasse at last. The street was always dark; the delicatessen shop was closed, but in the wildgame store next a light was burning low, and a flame flickered before the little shrine over the money drawer. The gameseller was a religious man.
The old stucco house dominated the neighborhood. From the time she left the car Harmony saw it, its long flat roof black against the dark sky, its rows of unlighted windows, its long wall broken in the center by the gate. Now from across the street its whole facade lay before her. Peter’s lamp was not lighted, but there was a glow of soft firelight from the salon windows. The light was not regular—it disappeared at regular intervals, was blotted out. Harmony knew what that meant. Some one beyond range of where she stood was pacing the floor, back and forward, back and forward. When he was worried or anxious Peter always paced the door.
She did not know how long she stood there. One of the soft rains was falling, or more accurately, condensing. The saturated air was hardly cold. She stood on the pavement unmolested, while the glow died lower and lower, until at last it was impossible to trace the pacing figure. No one came to any of the windows. The little lamp before the shrine in the wildgame shop burned itself out; the Portier across the way came to the door, glanced up at the sky and went in. Harmony heard the rattle of the chain as it was stretched across the door inside.
Not all the windows of the suite opened on the street. Jimmy’s windows—and Peter’s—opened toward the back of the house, where in a brick-paved courtyard the wife of the Portier hung her washing, and where the Portier himself kept a hutch of rabbits. A wild and reckless desire to see at least the light from the child’s room possessed Harmony. Even the light would be something; to go like this, to carry with her only the memory of a dark looming house without cheer was unthinkable. The gate was never locked. If she but went into the garden and round by the spruce tree to the back of the house, it would be something.
She knew the garden quite well. Even the darkness had no horror for her. Little Scatchy had had a habit of leaving various articles on her windowsill and of instigating searches for them at untimely hours of night. Once they had found her hairbrush in the rabbit hutch! So Harmony, ashamed but unalarmed, made her way by the big spruce to the corner of the old lodge and thus to the courtyard.
Ah, this was better! Lights all along the apartment floor and moving shadows; on Jimmy’s windowsill a jar of milk. And voices—some one was singing.
Peter was singing, droning softly, as one who puts a drowsy child to sleep. Slower and slower, softer and softer, over and over, the little song Harmony had been wont to sing:—
“Ah well! For us all some sweet hope lies Deeply buried from human eyes. And in the—hereafter—angels may Roll—the—stone—from—its—grave—away.”
Slower and slower, softer and softer, until it died away altogether. Peter, in his old dressing-gown, came to the window and turned down the gaslight beside it to a blue point. Harmony did not breathe. For a minute, two minutes, he stood there looking out. Far off the twin clocks of the Votivkirche struck the hour. All about lay the lights of the old city, so very old, so wise, so cunning, so cold.
Peter stood looking out, as he had each night since Harmony went away. Each night he sang the boy to sleep, turned down the light and stood by the window. And each night he whispered to the city that sheltered Harmony somewhere, what he had whispered to the little sweater coat the night before he went away:—
“Goodnight, dear. Goodnight, Harmony.”
The rabbits stirred uneasily in the hutch; a passing gust shook the great tree overhead and sent down a sharp shower on to the bricks below. Peter struck a match and lit his pipe; the flickering light illuminated his face, his rough hair, his steady eyes.
“Goodnight, Peter,” whispered Harmony. “Goodnight, dear.”
CHAPTER XXIV
Walter Stewart had made an uncomplicated recovery, helped along by relief at the turn events had taken. In a few days he was going about again, weak naturally, rather handsomer than before because a little less florid. But the week’s confinement had given him an opportunity to think over many things. Peter had set him thinking, on the day when he had packed up the last of Marie’s small belongings and sent them down to Vienna.
Stewart, lying in bed, had watched him. “Just how much talk do you suppose this has made, Byrne?” he asked.
“Haven’t an idea. Some probably. The people in the Russian villa saw it, you know.”
Stewart’s brows contracted.
“Damnation! Then the hotel has it, of course!”
“Probably.”
Stewart groaned. Peter closed Marie’s American trunk of which she had been so proud, and coming over looked down at the injured man.
“Don’t you think you’d better tell the girl all about it?”
“No,” doggedly.
“I know, of course, it wouldn’t be easy, but—you can’t get away with it, Stewart. That’s one way of looking at it. There’s another.”
“What’s that?”
“Starting with a clean slate. If she’s the sort you want to marry, and not a prude, she’ll understand, not at first, but after she gets used to it.”
“She wouldn’t understand in a thousand years.”
“Then you’d better not marry her. You know, Stewart, I have an idea that women imagine a good many pretty rotten things about us, anyhow. A sensible girl would rather know the truth and be done with it. What a man has done with his life before a girl—the right girl—comes into it isn’t a personal injury to her, since she wasn’t a part of
