Yes, it was M. Pelouse. “Oh, Madame!” he said, as before, but with an expressiveness doubly charged, “what a climate!” He was panting and was covered with fine snow. Behind him was Peter, looking very grave and dour.
“Shall I be wanted further?” asked Peter in a tense tone, and with no trace of his usual good-natured smile.
“What! Again?” cried Mrs. Phillips, while Helga, farther up the hall, was undoing the Professor; “three times on a night like this? No, indeed! Get back into the garage as fast as you can.”
“Oh, Madame!” said the Professor, now out of his wrappings and in better control of his voice. “They were so faithful to our beautiful France! The salle was almost full!”
“Well,” said Mrs. Phillips to herself, “they got there all right, then. I hope most of them will get back home alive!”
“What a climate!” M. Pelouse was still saying, as he entered the ballroom. He had not been there before. He ran an appraising eye over the pictures and said little. But as soon as he learned that some of them were the work of the late M. Phillips he found words. He led the company through a tasteful jungle of verbosity, and left the ultimate impression that Monsieur had been a remarkable man, whether as artist or as collector.
Yet he did not forget to say once more, “What a climate!”
“Is it really bad outside?” asked Pearson. M. Pelouse shrugged his shoulders. It was affreux.
“It is indeed,” corroborated Mrs. Phillips: she had spent her moment at the front door. “Nobody that I can find room for leaves my house tonight.” This meant that Cope and Lemoyne were to occupy the chintz chamber.
M. Pelouse gradually regained himself. Cope interested him. Cope was, in type, the more “American” of the two new arrivals. He was also, as M. Pelouse had heard, the pretendant—yes, the fiancé. Well, he was calm and inexpressive enough: no close and eager attendance; cool, cool. “How interesting,” said the observer to himself. “And Mademoiselle, quite across the room, and quite taken up”—happily, too, it seemed—“with another man: with the other man, perhaps? …”
At half past ten Pearson rose to leave; Cope and Lemoyne rose at the same time. “No,” said Mrs. Phillips, stopping them both; “you mustn’t think of trying to go. I can’t ask Peter to take you, and you could never get across on foot in the world. I can find a place for you.”
“And about poor Roddy?” asked Hortense.
“Roddy may stay with me,” declared Pearson. “I can put him up. Come on, Aldridge,” he said; “you’re good for a hundred yard dash.” And down they started.
“I don’t want to stay,” muttered Cope to Lemoyne, under cover of the others’ departure. “Devil take it; it’s the last thing in the world I want to do!”
“It’s awkward,” returned Lemoyne, “but we’re in for it. After all, it isn’t her house, nor her family’s. Besides, you’ve got me.”
Mrs. Phillips summoned Helga and another maid, who were just on the point of going to bed, and directed their efforts toward the chintz chamber. “Ah, well,” thought M. Pelouse, “the fiancé, then, is going to remain over night in the house of his fiancée!” It was droll; yet there were extenuating circumstances. But—such a singular climate, such curious temperaments, such a general chill! And M. Pelouse was presently lost to view among the welcome trappings of Louis Quinze.
XXII
Cope Shall Be Rescued
Next morning Cope left the house before breakfast. He had had the forethought to plead an exceptionally early engagement, and thus he avoided meeting, after the strain of the evening before, any of the various units of the household. He and Lemoyne, draping their parti-colored pajamas over the foot of the bedstead, left the chintz chamber at seven and walked out into the new day. The air was cold and tingling; the ground was white as a sheet; the sky was a strident, implacable blue. The glitter and the glare assaulted their sleepy eyes. They turned up their collars, thrust their hands deep into their pockets, and took briskly the half mile which led to their own percolator and electric toaster.
Cope threw himself down on the bed and let Lemoyne get the breakfast. Well, he had called; he had done the just and expected thing; he had held his face through it all; but he was tired after a night of much thought and little sleep. Possibly he might not have to call again for a full week. If phone messages or letters came, he would take them as best he could.
Nor was Lemoyne very alert. He was less prompt than usual in gaining his early morning loquacity. His coffee was lacking in spirit, and much of his toast was burnt. But the two revived, in fair measure, after their taxing walk.
They had talked through much of the dead middle of the night. Foster, wakeful and restless, had become exasperated beyond all power of a return to sleep. Concerns of youth and love kept them murmuring, murmuring in the acute if distant ears of one whom youth had left and for whom love was impossible. Beyond his foolish, figured wall were two contrasted types of young vigor, and they babbled, babbled on, in the sensitized hearing of one from whom vigor was gone and for whom hope was set.
“What do you think of her?” Cope had asked. Then he had thrown his face into his pillow and left one ear for the reply.
“She is a clinger,” returned Lemoyne. “She will cling until she is loosened by something or somebody. Then she will cling to the second somebody as hard as she did to the first. I’m not so sure that it’s you as an individual especially.”
Cope had now no self-love to consider, no self-esteem to guard. He did not raise his face from out the pillow
