Royal looked elegant in his new black suit, and Peggy was a vision in her white gown, or so all the guests whispered. Royal made his answers in a deep, mellow voice that would have done credit to any Shakespearean king. Peggy’s soft replies were so sweet that every actress hearing them marked them down in her memory should she ever have to do an ingenue again. Before anyone had time to get up a really good show of tears, it was done, and Royal was kissing Peggy, his wife.
“I wish you wouldn’t cry, Hannah,” Peggy said tearfully when Hannah gave her congratulations, and at the same time, her good-byes. Because although they’d all been invited to the wedding breakfast, the reverend’s schedule had conflicted with the New York train’s, and they’d no time for anything but farewells now.
“It’s only because I’m so happy for you,” Hannah lied. “Oh, I’ll miss you,” she added in truth.
“Not for long, Miz Hannah,” Royal said, grinning. “I’m taking Peggy East for our honeymoon. Well, it’s the best way to pick up her kin,” he said as Peggy gazed up at him with surprise and dawning joy, “and some things for the house. We’ll be there in a week or so…if you agree, darling,” he added very softly into Peggy’s ear.
“Oh, but that’s everything wonderful!’ Peggy cried.
As did Hannah. If for different reasons—one of them being the look on Peggy and Royal’s faces, another being for the way she felt so alone when they turned to greet other well-wishers.
“I was thinking of traveling East then, as well,” Gray said at her side, startling her.
“Oh. Is it a western custom to take friends on a honeymoon?” she asked.
He smiled. “There’s a limit to friendship, even out here. But it’s a big city. And one I know. So I thought I might smooth things for them before they arrive. Would you care to help me do it?” he asked lightly.
“Oh. Oh, of course,” she said, but before she could explain that was absolutely all she could do, there were more things to say to Peggy, and then Kyle consulted his watch, and they knew they had to be gone.
Royal, Peggy, and Gray went with them to the station, which as Kyle said, was a nice original change of pace from the usual, where the guests go to see the honeymooners off. There was a flurry of hurried final farewells and kisses. Although Gray had the time and the excuse for more, his kiss, very properly, only grazed Hannah’s proffered cheek. She’d only a second to note his amusement with her too tardily concealed pang of disappointment, before she had to board. Then she’d only another moment to quickly scan the platform as the train pulled out. But the platform wasn’t a stage, so Blayne Darling wasn’t there, of course. The train moved on and she waved at Peggy, Royal, and Gray until she could no longer see them, and was glad she was going so fast they couldn’t see exactly who it was she stared at until he was completely out of sight.
It wasn’t really bad for her until that night. When she lay in her berth and, like an accountant, thought of all she’d gained on this trip, and then realized that she’d left it all behind her just where she’d found it, in the West.
It was a wakeful night. Kyle lay back in his berth and thought of figures. He’d made enough profit to begin something new in New York, and he’d a few ideas along those lines. Thinking along other, equally entrancing lines, he remembered his assistant, the new Hannah, the one who now had no distractions to distract her from him. He’d just have to think of some new distractions for her, he thought, smiling to himself as the train bore him home, because he knew he was a man of endless resources, and not a few ideas.
They left a clear cold night behind them in the mountains. But Royal and Peggy had little need of the hotel’s feather comforters now. There’d been awkwardness between them for only a moment, when after a long day of talking and planning, they’d finally come into their hotel room, alone, together. Then she’d stepped into his arms, or he into hers. And then they discovered that shyness could be banished with laughter, and that laughter could pave the way for love. Then he discovered that Gray had been right, even as she found Hannah’s advice perfectly true. That was before they forgot all else but each other.
Because in time, he forgot Gray’s excellent advice and forgot to act as though her body was his own, instead of only a miracle and his chiefest desire, he was so dazzled by the wonder of it. She remembered to forget she was a lady, just as Hannah had suggested, before she forgot the meaning of any words but “yes” and “Oh!” Then they were lost in the newness of the oldest act of mankind.
When they became one in act as well as name, he grieved that he’d brought her even a moment of pain with his love, although she’d wounded him more by suffering it. Then they discovered how to console one another. Finally, only a day and a half night into their marriage, they needed no more advice, from anyone. Because having pleased each other and finding how much that pleased themselves, they were both experts at physical love. They’d never been anything else but expert at the spiritual sort.
As they clung to each other’s naked bodies and found ever new comforts there. Royal’s adviser lay back alone in his hotel bed, staring at the ceiling, wondering if he’d ever sleep easy again. He, who’d never been afraid of any man, beast or fatehe’d ever faced, had found something at last that he feared. Because he’d just realized how alone he was in the night.
He began to wonder if it would always be so, and worried for the plans he’d so blithely made before this revelation. There was more to being a man than his educations. East or West, had prepared him for, and he perceived it was a thing that all a man’s cleverness, strength, and courage mightn’t be enough to win for him. Because he began to see that a man needed more than himself in order to be a complete man. He needed just one particular woman, but he needed her to love him in return. And though he realized he’d finally found the one, he knew the other was what mightn’t come easy—or at all. And so that night he also made the acquaintance of some of fear’s old comrades: doubt, envy, and worry, and had the whole of the rest of the night to do it in, too.
Peggy’s wise counselor, miles away in a train that screamed in the night as it streamed farther away from Gray, finally gave up. And having always known how alone she was, knew how alone she’d be again, and wept into her pillow for all her bitter wisdom.
Chapter Twelve
“We, like the phoenix, have ended only to rise up again,” Kyle said, “but our new incarnation will be much brighter.”
Hannah stirred uneasily in her chair. It was partially because she was weary with sitting, the train ride had been long, although it had gotten her back to the reality of her circumstances too quickly. It was also because Kyle was promising something.
“I see you doubt me,” he sighed, and looked around the crowded restaurant in Grand Central Depot as though he expected a horde of travelers to leave off what they were doing to stare in amazement at what he’d said. But, as usual, he said it with such conviction that Hannah looked with him, half expecting them to, too.
“I asked you to stay a moment, after the others left, because I’d a proposition to put to you that I didn’t want them to hear. About the future. Not that some of them won’t find a home with me again in the near future—but because some of them will not. Ah well, but as Mr. Darwin says, ‘only the fittest will survive, such is life,’?” Kyle shrugged and turned his attention to Hannah again. They sat at a small table in the tearoom at the depot, their traveling cases all around them.
“I’ve put away more than a bit of money, it was, if not the most glorious, then certainly a most successful tour,” he said smugly, neglecting to mention that a large part of the profits had been made larger as the salaries he had to pay had shrunken as his troupe had done. But it had been successful nevertheless, and more so because he’d learned a few lessons in the West, lessons he meant to put to the test now that he was back East. He only needed the usual: luck and opportunity. And this time, in order to do it faster, the unusual: a lovely, knowledgeable, honorable, and clever well-connected assistant—Hannah.
“I’ve some ideas,” he said. “What we did was good, but it could be better. Far better. I’d prefer to do drama, only drama, but I’ve learned that variety is the spice of theater. Not just vaudeville: music, dance, magic, animal acts, and spectacle, but vaudeville with a tidbit of drama thrown in. Four or five acts culminating in a drama—fun for the kiddies and the weak-minded, with a morsel of the heavierstuff for those who have pretensions. It will work. Itdidwork. But I know a way to make it work better,” he said, his lean, dark face alight with liveliness.
“There are too many lost opportunities,” he said as Hannah listened, caught up in his enthusiasm. “The solution needs vision. I have that. You see, much of the profit we made was eaten up, not by our charming troupe, but by rentals. Theater rentals. The Silver Circuit and all the other trouping companies accept that as part of their natural expenses. But it’s unnatural, really. For if a man owned those theaters, and could send his troupe touring through a chain of them as they wended their way cross-country, it would be pure profit. A simple idea, but a revolutionary one. But also an idea that needs the right people to implement it.”
Hannah sighed. Now she understood. She had suspected Kyle might offer her another position with him when they got home, and had been half-hoping he would. But now the other half she’d not, had shown up—the reason why he’d offered.
“That would take a fortune,” she commented.
“Yes,” he said musingly.
