Linda Lee, Incorporated: A Novel

"You can give me a few minutes, surely. If you'll step into the reception-room with me for a minute – "

"Bel: I tell you it's too late."

Struggling to keep his temper, Bel caught his underlip between his teeth, while Lucinda cast witlessly about her for some way of escape. None offered. But she noticed that a young man standing nearby was observing them with keen interest, a rather brilliantly good-looking young man, brilliantly well dressed. As Lucinda's glance rested transiently on him, his face brightened with a tentative smile, and she thought he started as if he were impulsively minded to approach. If so, he reconsidered instantly. With a frown she looked back to Bel.

He made a gesture of entreaty. "You can't put me off like this, Linda, when I've come so far, gone through so much – "

"I can because I must, Bel – I will."

"No, by God! you can't and shan't!"

He caught her arm lightly as she tried to pass. She stopped, her face hardening.

"Are you going to make another scene, publicly disgrace me again even when sober?"

His hand dropped to his side. Lucinda began to walk rapidly toward the street entrance, but had taken few steps when Bellamy ranged alongside.

"Linda: you've got to listen to me! There's something I've got to tell you – "

"Then go back to New York and tell it to Harford Willis. If it's anything I want to hear, he will write me."

"Harford Willis! What's he – !" The significance of her words seemed to come to Bel all at once. "You don't mean to say you're going – ! You can't be meaning to – !" With a long stride Bel swung in front of her again at the head of the stairs to the street. "At least, tell me what you mean to do."

"I mean to go to Reno, as soon as you let me pass."

Bellamy's eyes narrowed as if in physical pain. He threw out a hand of inarticulate protest, and let it fall in despair. Subduing a strong desire to bolt for it, Lucinda began to descend at a pace not inconsistent with dignity. At the same time, sensitiveness to the situation, the feeling that they had been playing a scene of intimate domestic drama for the edification of an entire hotel, made her aware that the young man whose interest had first manifested near the elevators had followed and was now standing at the head of the steps, over across from Bellamy.

Pushing through the door, she breathed thankfully the stinging winter air. The canopy lamps made the sidewalk bright and discovered her bellboy shivering by the open door of a taxicab. As she moved toward it she heard the revolving door behind her buffet the air, then Bel's voice crying out her name.

Abandoning all pretense, Lucinda ran. The bellboy caught her arm to help her into the cab and chattered: "W-where t-t-to, m'm?" She was prevented from answering by Bel, who elbowed the boy aside and caught her by the shoulders.

"No!" he cried violently. "No, you shan't – d'you hear? – you shan't go without listening to me!"

By some means, she did not know quite how, Lucinda broke out of his hands and stepped back.

"Let me alone!" she insisted. "Let me – "

Somebody came between them. Startled, she identified the strange young man of the foyer.

"Can I be of service?" he suggested in an amused drawl.

Instinctively she gasped: "No, please – !" At the same time Bel tried to shoulder the other roughly out of his way; the gratuitous champion stood firm, merely counselling "Easy, old thing, easy!" Then Bel lost his head. Lucinda heard him damning the other. There was a slight scuffle, in which the two, locked in each other's arms, reeled to one side. The bellboy was shouting "Now, ma'm – now's your chance!" She stumbled into the taxi. Holding the door, the boy demanded: "Where to, ma'm – where to?" She gasped: "Anywhere – only, tell him, hurry!" The door crashed, gears meshed with a grinding screech, the cab leaped forward with such spirit that Lucinda was thrown heavily against the back of the seat.

When she recovered, the vehicle was turning a corner. Through its window she caught a glimpse of the sidewalk in front of the Blackstone, just a bare glimpse of two figures struggling, with several others running toward them. Then the corner blocked out the scene.

XVII

Darting and dodging through traffic-choked thoroughfares, the taxicab had travelled a mile and more before Lucinda felt able to give the next steps the careful consideration which this pinch of mischance imposed.

In the upshot, though street clocks advised that she had the best part of two hours to kill before she could board her train, she tapped on the window and directed her driver to proceed to the Santa Fé Station. She felt reasonably safe in assuming that Bel wouldn't look for her there. Since she had told him she was going to Reno, his natural inference would be that she meant to travel by the direct overland route, he would set himself to waylay her in the Union Pacific terminal if anywhere. Provided, of course, that he had succeeded in discouraging the attentions of the gallant busybody in fit shape to make himself a nuisance again that night.

She couldn't help giggling nervously over the picture painted by a superexcited imagination.

The remaining hours of the evening worked out as eventlessly as she had hoped. Bellamy didn't show up at the station, she dined after a fashion in its restaurant, with her nose in a newspaper none of whose intelligence meant anything to hers, as soon as the platform gates were opened she was conducted by a porter to her reservation in the last car of the train but one, the observation-car; and in the latter Lucinda waited till her berth had been made ready. Then she went to bed.

She had planned to read herself asleep, but the armful of books and magazines purchased at the station bookstall either purveyed only fiction of a peculiarly insipid sort or else life itself was just then too richly coloured, too swift of movement to admit of that self-surrender which is requisite if mere artistic effort is to take effect.

And then the thoughtful porter had fastened a folded sheet across the double windows to temper the penetrating breath of that bitter night. So it wasn't possible to divert oneself by watching the snow-clad land unroll its blurred vistas of blue nocturnal beauty.

One could do nothing, indeed, but try vainly not to think, watch the curtains swaying that shut out the aisle, listen to the tireless thrumming of the trucks and the melancholy hooting with which the engine saluted every cross-road, and pray for sleep.

Somewhere a peevish child wailed fitfully for hours on end, somewhere else a man snored as if strangling in his sleep. Till long after midnight noisy feet straggled intermittently to and from the observation car. And once Lucinda, at last on the verge of drifting off, started suddenly wide-awake, stabbed to the heart by tardy appreciation of the fact that, now Bel knew where she was bound, she could not be sure of finding even Reno a refuge from his persistence, his importunities.

For the matter of that, if Bel, or the detectives whom he had told Willis he might employ, had been cunning enough to trace her to Chicago, they would find her no matter where else she might seek to hide herself away.

Only perhaps by changing her name…

But how could she sue for divorce if she lived under an assumed name?

Toward morning she drifted into an uneasy form of semi-slumber, and from this into deep sleep. It was late when she was awakened by the bustle of people fighting with their garments and breaking the trails to the wash-rooms, and in the aisle a negro voice intoning musically: "Las' call fo' brekfus in the dinin'-cyar" – over and over.

To find the dining-car Lucinda had to make her way through so many sleeping-cars that she lost count, cars all alike as to aisles obstructed by people dressing, people passing to and fro, porters dismantling tumbled berths. By way of some slight compensation, she was allotted a small table with places for two, the other chair being untenanted, which she considered much preferable to the tables for four across the aisle. Then, too, the napery was spotless, the silverware lustrous, flowers were brave in a vase at her elbow, the waiter was civil and seemed eager to please.

Lucinda scribbled her order on the blank form provided, then rested her cheek on a hand and gazed moodily out at wheeling perspectives of a countryside blanketed with snow. Reminding herself that the train was due in Kansas City during the morning, she seriously thought of leaving it there and waiting over till accommodations could be had that would insure privacy for the remainder of the journey, even though this might involve weeks of delay.

Grape-fruit, coffee, and toast, all excellent, made her feel a bit better. Nevertheless she made up her mind to ask the conductor to arrange a stop-over for her at Kansas City.

As she was pouring herself a second cup of coffee, the vacant chair at her table was drawn out and an amiable, amused voice asked: "Do you mind my sitting here, Mrs. Druce?"

Lucinda jumped in consternation. The speaker bowed with an ingratiating smile: her unsought champion of the night before!..

She recollected herself and gave a jerky inclination of her head; but all she could find to say was "Oh!" Whereupon the young man laughed quietly and, construing her consent, sat down.

"I'm surprised, too," he confessed – "pleasantly, if you don't mind my saying so. And yet the dear public continually kicks about coincidences!"

Lucinda found her tongue but found it incompetent to frame any but formal phrases: "I have a great deal to thank you for – "

"Please don't think of it that way. To the contrary, I owe you all sorts of apologies – "

"Apologies!"

"For butting in where any rational angel would have been scared to death to tread, and particularly for being here – though that was my fault and this isn't. But I'm glad you're not angry with me – " The waiter thrust an order blank with the bill of fare under the young man's nose, and he concluded to give them attention with an easy: "If you'll excuse me…"

The head he bowed over the cards was well-modelled and thatched with a good quantity of hair, light brown in colour and amazingly lustrous. A skin whose patina of faint tan resembled that of old ivory, with never a blemish, covered boldly fashioned features. The mobile face had a trick of lighting up when its owner was talking as if aglow with the light of his thought, so that his look was in fact more eloquent than his speech. Lucinda thought she had never seen hands more strong and graceful, or any better cared for, not even Bel's. Nor had Bel ever dressed in better taste.

The object of her interest waved the waiter away and met her openly interested regard without loss of countenance.

"I guess it's time I introduced myself, Mrs. Druce. My name is Summerlad." After a slight pause and with a hint of self-consciousness, he amplified: "Lynn Summerlad."