CHAPTER I

“BROOK TROUT FOR TWO”

IT was twelve o’clock—a hot, sunny noon in the latter part of August. Broadway blazed with the last fiery effort of the passing summer; there was a steady stream of humanity pouring up and down on either side of the clanging cars, and occasionally swirling between them. In spite of the temperature, New York was as fervently busy as usual, especially here on what is affectionately known as the Rialto. For in nearly every theater in the Forties rehearsals had begun, and those actors who were not already employed were frantically hunting jobs. Gone the brief weeks in which they had forgotten calcium and make-up boxes; it was nearly September—time to work.

Chorus girls, half dead from three hours of ceaseless dancing, came hurrying from stage doors, wiping their dripping faces and talking shrilly of new steps, tired legs, and the brutalities of their stage managers. “Principals,” in scarcely less haste, repaired to one of the big restaurants for a cold buffet lunch, wearing the blank, concentrated expression that is born of trying to memorize lines or to estimate the cost of new costumes. Clean-shaven young men, all dressed precisely alike, forgathered on street corners or plunged pallidly into cafés. Shabby little actresses, out of work and wearing their best clothes of last year, scurried anxiously from agent to agent.

A few stars sank wearily into touring cars or limousines and flew homeward for an hour and a half of rest and refreshment before the long, grinding, sweltering afternoon. Stage managers, with scripts sticking out of their pockets and a grim and absent glare in their eyes, strode along, mentally blue-penciling the prompt book and cursing the company. Authors crept miserably away to eat without appetite and wonder if there would be any play at all left by the date of the opening. In short, theatrical Broadway was at one of its most vigorous seasons of activity, and to walk along it was like turning the pages of a dramatic newspaper.

At the side door of one of the big, cool, luxurious hotels extensively patronized by the profession when it has enough money in its pockets, two young women nearly ran into each other, laughed, and exchanged greetings:

“Miss Legaye! How nice to see you again!”

“It has been ages, hasn’t it? Are you lunching here, too, Miss Merivale?”

“I hardly know,” returned the younger and taller girl, adding, with a frank laugh: “I was wondering whether it would be too sinfully extravagant to blow myself to a gilt-edged meal all alone. However, I believe I had about succumbed to temptation; I have a manager to see this afternoon, and I really think I should fortify myself.”

“Lunch with me,” suggested Kitty Legaye. “I hate my own society, and I am all alone.”

“For a wonder!” laughed the other. “Yes, I’d love to, if you’ll let it be Dutch. I’ve been up and down a thousand pairs of stairs this morning, and I’m nearly dead.”

They went together into one of the most comfortable dining rooms in the city. They chose a little table so placed that an electric fan, artificially hidden behind flowering plants, swept it with a very fair imitation of aromatic summer winds.

Miss Legaye, who always knew exactly what she wanted, waved aside the menu proffered by the waiter and rapidly ordered: “Brook trout in aspic for two. I’ll tell you the rest later.”

Then she tossed off her fur neckpiece and turned to the other girl.

“I never asked you if you liked trout!” she exclaimed, in a sweet, rather high voice which her admirers called “larklike.” “Now, that’s so like me! Do you?”

“Very much,” said her companion, smiling. “I don’t often get it, though. You are looking awfully well, Miss Legaye!”

“I am always well,” replied Kitty Legaye.

She was an exceedingly pretty woman, already in her early thirties, but even by daylight she did not look more than twenty-five. On the stage, with the glamour of rouge and footlights to enhance her naturally youthful appearance, she passed easily for a girl in her teens. Very small, very dainty, with the clear, ivory-white skin which keeps its freshness so well, big dark eyes, brown curls, and a very red, tiny, full mouth, she still made an enchanting ingénue and captivated every one who saw her.

To-day she was entirely charming in one of the innocently sophisticated frocks she particularly loved to wear—a creation of black and white, most daring in effect, though demurely simple in cut. Always pale by nature, she was doubly so now from fatigue and heat, yet she still looked young and lovely, and her smile had the irresistible and infectious quality of a child’s.

If at times her eye grew a bit cynical or her pretty mouth a trifle hard, such slips in self-control occurred seldom. As a rule she kept a rigid guard upon herself and her expressions, not only because an obviously ugly mood or reflection made her look older, but because, if permitted to become a habit, it would be perilously and permanently aging.

Kitty Legaye was too truly clever not to know that her one valuable asset, both as an actress and a woman, was her quality—or illusion—of youth. When she lost that, she shrewdly judged, she would lose everything. She was not a sufficiently brilliant actress to continue successfully in character work after her looks had gone. And so far as her personal and private life was concerned she had lived too selfishly to have made a very cozy human place for herself in the world.

Not that she was a disagreeable or an unkind woman; she could even be generous on occasion, and she was almost always pleasant to her associates; but the spirit of calculation which she strove so hard to keep out of her face had left its mark upon her life. She had few close friends, though she liked many persons and many persons liked her. She had long since drifted away from her own people, and she had never been willing to give up her independence for the sake of any man. So, in spite of a great number of admirers and a remarkably handsome salary, her existence seemed just a little barren and chilly sometimes.

We have said that she never had been willing to give up her independence. That had been true all her life until now. To-day she was considering just that proposition. Did she care enough, at last, to marry? Love—she had had no small measure of that all her life, for Kitty was by way of being temperamental; but marriage! That was another and a vastly more serious matter.

She looked almost wistfully across the table at Sibyl Merivale. For a moment she had an unaccountable impulse to confide in her. She wished she knew her well enough. She looked, Kitty thought, like the sort of girl who would understand about this sort of thing—loving enough to get married, and—and all that.

Sybil was as unlike Miss Legaye as she well could be. She was tall, and built strongly though slenderly, like a young Artemis, and her eyes were very clear and starry and blue. Her hair was of that rare and delicious shade known as blonde cendrée, and the silvery, ashen nimbus about her face made her brown eyebrows and lashes effective. Her skin was very fair, and her color came and went sensitively. She was not a beauty; her nose was decidedly retroussé, and her mouth too large. But she was unquestionably sweet and wholesome and attractive, and her lovely forehead and the splendid breadth between her eyes suggested both character and intelligence.

Kitty looked disapprovingly at the dust-colored linen dress she wore; it was far too close to the tint of her hair to be becoming. Blondes, thought Kitty, could wear almost any color on the face of the earth except—just that! However, she felt rather pleased than otherwise that Miss Merivale was not looking her best. When she appeared in public with another woman, she was well satisfied to have the other woman badly dressed. She herself never was.

Both women were honestly and healthily hungry, and talked very little until they were half through the trout. Then they met each other’s eyes and laughed a little.

“Thank goodness you don’t pretend not to have an appetite, like most girls!” said Miss Legaye. “I’m starved, and not a bit ashamed of it! Boned squab, after this, waiter, and romaine salad.”

“If you let me eat so much I shall be dull and stupid,” declared Sybil. “And I want to be extra brilliant to talk to my manager. I simply have to hypnotize him into engaging me!”

“Who is he?”

“Altheimer.”

“Altheimer! You aren’t going into musical comedy, surely?”

Sybil flushed a bit and bent over her plate to hide her discomfort.

“I—I’m going into anything I can get,” she answered in a low voice. Then she smiled and went on more bravely: “I’ve been out of work since March, Miss Legaye. Beggars can’t be choosers.”

“Oh, dear—how horrid!” Miss Legaye felt sincerely sympathetic—for the moment. “It’s a thousand pities that you have to go into one of the Altheimer shows. You can really act, and there—well, of course, he doesn’t care about whether you can act or not; he’ll take you for your figure.” And she looked the other girl over candidly.

Sybil flushed again, but answered promptly: “I think he has some sort of part for me—a real part. He knows I don’t sing or dance. You are rehearsing, aren’t you, Miss Legaye?”

“Yes; with Alan Mortimer.”

“I wish you’d tell me what you think of him!” said Sybil, with interest. “He’s such a mystery to every one. His first play, isn’t it? As a star, I mean.”

“Yes; Dukane is trying an experiment—starring an unknown actor in a Broadway production. Pretty daring, isn’t it? But Dukane doesn’t make many mistakes. He knows Alan Mortimer will make good. He’s got a lot of personality, and he’s extremely attractive, I think. I—saw a good deal of him down at Nantucket during the summer.”

Kitty Legaye never blushed, but there was a certain soft hesitancy about the way in which she uttered the simple words that was, for her, the equivalent of a blush. Sybil, noting it, privately concluded that there had been something like a romance “down at Nantucket during the summer.”

Being a nice girl, and a tactful one, she said gently:

“Is it a good play, do you think?”

Miss Legaye shrugged her shoulders carelessly; the moment of sentiment had passed.

“It’s melodrama,” she rejoined; “the wildest sort. ‘Boots and Saddles’ is the name, and it’s by Carlton; now you know.”

They both laughed. Carlton was a playwright of fluent and flexible talent, who made it his business always to know the public pulse.

“What time is your appointment with Altheimer?”

“Quarter past one.”

“What an ungodly hour! Doesn’t the man ever eat? But finish your lunch comfortably; if you’re late he’ll appreciate you all the more. Besides——”

She paused, regarding the girl cautiously and critically; and that evanescently calculating look drifted across her face for the space of a breath.

“Besides what?” demanded Sybil. “If I lose that part, I’ll sue you for a job! Besides what?”

Kitty, for all her pretty, impulsive ways, rarely did things without consideration; so it was with quite slow deliberation that she answered Sybil’s question with another:

“Would you like to come with Alan Mortimer?”

“Mercy!” The girl put down her knife and fork and stared with huge blue eyes. “Do you mean to say that there’s a part open—after rehearsing ten days?”

“How do you know how long we’ve been rehearsing?” queried the older woman.

Sybil grew delicately pink. “I know a man in the company,” she confessed, laughing shyly. “Norman Crane—oh, he’s only got a little bit of a part; perhaps you haven’t noticed him, even. It’s a big company, isn’t it? But he’s quite keen about your play.”

“Norman Crane?” repeated the other thoughtfully. “Why, yes, I know him. A tall, clean-looking fellow with reddish hair and a nice laugh?”

“That’s Norman! He isn’t a great actor, but—he’s quite a dear.”

Miss Legaye nodded slowly, still regarding her. The notion which had come to her a minute before seemed to her more and more markedly a good notion, a wise notion—nay, even possibly an inspired notion! Mortimer’s leading woman, Grace Templeton, was a brilliant blonde with Isoldelike emotions, and Kitty had loathed and feared her from the first, for the new star swung in an orbit that was somewhat willful and eccentric, to say the very least of it, and his taste in feminine beauty was unprejudiced by a bias toward any special type.

For a long time Kitty had yearned to get rid of Miss Templeton. If the thing could possibly be managed, here was a girl of undoubted talent—she had seen her act and knew that she had twice the ability of the average young player—presentable, but not too radiantly pretty, and proper and conventional and all that—not at all the sort of girl who would be likely to have an affair with the star. And then, if she was interested in young Crane, why, it would be altogether perfect!

“So you know Norman Crane,” she said. “Then if you did come into the company, that would make it particularly nice for you, wouldn’t it?”

“Why, yes,” the girl returned, frankly enough. “We’re quite good friends, though I don’t see much of him these days. We used to play together in stock out West two years ago; we were both most awful duffers at acting.”

Kitty Legaye nodded as though fairly well satisfied. It was on the tip of her tongue to say that she would try to get Sybil a small part in the play, with the chance to understudy Miss Templeton—it was all she could even partially promise until she had conferred with Dukane and Mortimer—when her attention was sharply distracted by the sight of two men who had just entered the room and who were looking about them in choice of a table. She uttered a quick exclamation, as quickly suppressed.

“Look at those two men standing near the door!” she said. “There, close to the buffet. What do you think of them? Do tell me: I’ve a reason for asking.”

Sybil’s eyes followed hers.

The two men were both noticeable, but one of them was so striking in appearance that one hardly had eyes for any one else near by. He was a very tall, very broad, very conspicuous type of man. Everything about him was superlative—even the air of brooding ill temper which for the moment he seemed to wear. He was exceedingly dark, with swarthy coloring, coal-black hair, thick and tumbled, and deeply set black eyes. His features were strong and heavy, but well shaped. Indeed, he was in his general effect unquestionably handsome, and the impression which he made was one not lightly to be felt nor quickly to be forgotten.

“Well?” insisted Miss Legaye impatiently, as Sybil did not immediately speak. “I asked you what you thought of him.” This time she did not say “them,” but Sybil did not notice the altered word.

The girl continued to look at the tall, dark man as though she were mesmerized, and when she spoke it was in a curious, detached tone, as she might have spoken if she were thinking aloud.

“He is a very strange man,” she said. “He does not belong here in a Broadway restaurant. He should be somewhere where things are wild and wonderful and free—and perhaps rather terrible. I think he belongs in—is it Egypt? He would be quite splendid in Egypt. Or—the prairies——” She spoke dreamily as she stared at him.

“You look as though he were a ghost, not a man!” exclaimed Kitty, with a laugh. “I must tell him what you said——”

“Tell him?” repeated Sybil, rousing herself. “You know him, then?”

“My dear child,” said Kitty Legaye, “that is Alan Mortimer!”

At the same moment Mortimer caught sight of her and strode toward her, passing between the fragile little luncheon tables with the energy of a whirlwind.

“Guess what has happened now!” he exclaimed in a deep but singularly clear and beautifully pitched voice. “Dukane has fired Templeton, and apparently I open little more than two weeks from to-night without a leading woman! What do you know about that!”

“Without a leading woman? No, you don’t, either,” promptly rejoined Kitty, the inspired. She always liked a neat climax for a scene, especially when she could supply it herself. “I’ve just picked out Miss Merivale to play Lucille.”

Breathless and amazed, Sybil looked up to meet his eyes. They were dark and piercing. At first she thought only of that, and of their fire and beauty. Then something obscurely evil seemed for a transient second to look out of them. “What an awful man!” she said to herself. But he was holding out his hand.

“Did you think of that all by yourself, Kit?” he said. A faint but rather attractive smile lightening his moody eyes. “How do you do—Lucille? You may consider the engagement—ah—confirmed.”

But Sybil, as she drew her hand away, felt vaguely frightened—she could not have told why.