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Read Ebook: Running Sands by Kauffman Reginald Wright
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Ebook has 2664 lines and 79816 words, and 54 pages
"But I'm going there myself."
"The devil you are. Where are you?"
Stainton produced his ticket.
Holt glanced at it and shook his head.
"I have not," said Stainton.
"I don't know," said Stainton.
"Well, you will, my boy; you will. That's just the point. We'll call a taxi and motor there together--it's just a step to the Metropolitan--and then, after the first act, I'll come round to you and take you over to meet 'em. What do you say?"
Stainton said what he was expected to say, which was, of course, that he would be delighted to meet any friends of Holt, and so it befell that the two men went to the opera-house together and parted at the door only with the certainty of meeting soon again.
Yet, the miner was still glowing with the thrill of his new life. "I'm young!" he repeated to himself as he was shown to his seat. And he felt young. He felt that he had never yet lived and that he was now about to live; and he thanked Heaven that he had kept himself trained for the experience.
About him swept the broad curve of boxes that has been called "The Diamond Horseshoe," filled with wonderful toilettes and beautiful women, but Stainton did not see these. In the particular box toward which he was looking there were three other people: there was a matronly woman in what appeared to be brocade; there was a sleek, weary-eyed, elderly man, and there was another man faintly suggested in the background, as the lover of the mistress is faintly suggested in Da Vinci's masterpiece--but Stainton was no more conscious of this trio than he was of the gowns and women of the broad horseshoe. He saw, or was conscious of seeing, only that girl.
And she was leaning far over the rail, at pause where, when their eyes met, his intense gaze had arrested her: a young girl, scarcely eighteen years old, her delicate, oval face full of the joy of life, aglow with the excitement, the novelty of place, people, music. The light was upon her--upon her slim, softly white-clad body trembling at the unguessed portal of womanhood just as it trembled also under his gaze. She had wonderful hair, which waved without artifice, as blue-black as a thunder-cloud in May; she had level brows and eyes large and dark and tender. Her lips were damp, the lower one now timidly indrawn. While he looked at her, there awoke in Stainton the Neolithic man, the savage and poet that sang what he felt and was unashamed to feel and sing: she was like a Spring evening in the woods: warm and dusky and clothed in the light of stars.
Stainton did not move, yet his heart seemed twisting in his breast. Was he mad? Was he alive, sane, awake and in New York of to-day? If so, if he were himself, then were the old stories true, and did the dead walk? Sitting there, stonily, there floated through his brain a line from a well-conceived and ill-executed poem:
"At Paris it was, at the opera there ..."
The girl was the one to break the spell. When Stainton would have ceased looking, he could never know. But the girl flushed yet more deeply and turned away, with a quick movement that was almost a reprimand but not enough of a reprimand to be an acknowledgment that she was aware of him.
Jim, his own cheeks burning at the realisation of his insolence, but his heart tumultuous for that other reason, himself started. He shifted clumsily in his chair and so became conscious of another movement in the box.
A man--the man that had been, at Stainton's first glimpse of the party, dimly outlined--was disentangling himself from the background, was bending forward to make vehement signs in Stainton's direction, was finally, and with no end of effort on Stainton's part, assuming recognisable shape. It was George Holt.
Holt waved his hand again and nodded toward the lobby. Then, as Stainton nodded a tardy comprehension, he faded once more into the background of the box.
They met a few moments later in the corridor.
"I see you found your friends," said Stainton. At least temporarily, he had regained his self-control.
"My who? Oh, the Newberrys? Of course. Come over; you must meet them."
"The Newberrys?" Stainton looked a misapprehension.
"Yes, I told you, you know. Good old Preston Newberry and his wife."
"What's her name?"
He stopped and blinked, his narrow eyes directed at Stainton, who had lifted to his face a hand that visibly trembled.
"What's the trouble?" asked Holt. "Too used to the desert to stand our nifty opera-house air? Don't wonder. Come out and have a drink. Plenty of time."
Stainton replied with compressed lips.
"I should like to meet Miss--Miss Stannard," he said.
But Stainton's firm fingers had closed so sharply about Holt's arm that, while the pain of the unexpected grip shot through him, Holt's laughter ended in a gasp.
"Don't joke about this," commanded Stainton. "You remember that we used to be friends."
"Sure. Aren't we friends now? What's hit you, Jim? We're friends still, I hope. You don't think I'm likely to forget what you once did for me, do you?"
"Very well, then: don't joke about Miss Stannard."
"No offence intended," said the perplexed Holt; "but why in thunder shouldn't I joke about her?"
Stainton's grip loosened, and his eyes twinkled.
"Strange? It looked like the asylum!" said Holt.
"And so," Stainton continued, "I dare say that I do owe you an explanation." He put out his hand again, but Holt dodged.
"No more of that!" said Holt.
"All right," Stainton answered. He laid a hand on Holt's shoulder. "Can you keep a secret, George?"
The clubman blinked in anticipation.
"Seems to me we've had a few together," he said.
"Then," said Stainton, "I'll tell you why I was a little sensitive about comments on Miss Stannard: I am going to marry her."
YOUNG BLOOD
Holt's jaw fell.
"I beg your pardon," he stammered; "but I didn't know you even knew her."
"I have never met her," said Stainton.
"What? Oh, quit your jollying."
"I have never met her."
"After all--that is, after the performance," said Stainton, "I shall explain. Just now I want you to take me to your friends' box and present me all round."
Holt recalled having heard that certain of the Caesars had been driven mad by their sudden acquisition of power. He recalled having read of stock-gamblers that went crazy when they achieved a great coup. He recalled having seen the Las Animas country, when the Las Animas country was really a prospectors' bedlam, one gold-seeker that had lost his wits in what were then the vast solitudes of the San Juan Triangle. All of these recollections rushed in detail through a brain warped by a few years of the most unnatural side of city life, and following them came the realisation, as the newspapers had brought it to him, of Stainton's unexpected success. Stainton had always, when Holt knew him in the West, been unlike his fellows, a man aloof. Stainton had once, Holt recollected, been practical, silent, slow; now, having come upon a gold mine after twenty-five years of adversity, in a country more desolate than the San Juan had ever been, this man was powerful, almost in a day, rich. He wondered if--
But Stainton was once more smiling his old self-reliant smile.
"But I am sane and sober. Come along and, honestly, I'll explain--later."
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