PAGE 7
The Claws Of The Tiger
by
“He wouldn’t like us to open it,” she said.
A dispute arose, presently a clamor; Linnevitch came in. There was a silence.
Linnevitch examined the locket. “Trible-plate,” he said judicially. “Maybe there’s a name and address inside.” As the locket opened for his strong thumb-nail, Daisy gave out a little sound as of pain. Linnevitch stood looking into the locket, smiling.
“Only hair,” he said presently, and closed the thing with a snap, “Put that in the cash-drawer,” he said, “until it is called for.”
Daisy turned the key on the locket and wondered what color the hair was. The stranger, of course, had a sweetheart, and of course the hair was hers. Was it brown, chestnut, red, blond, black? Beneath each of these colors in turn she imagined a face.
Long before the first habitues had arrived for supper Daisy was at her place. All the afternoon her imagination had been so fed, and her curiosity thereby so aroused, that she was prepared, in the face of what she knew at heart was proper, to open the locket and see, at least, the color of the magic hair. But she still hesitated, and for a long time. Finally, however, overmastered, she drew out the cash-drawer a little way and managed, without taking it out, to open the locket. The lock of hair which it contained was white as snow.
Daisy rested, chin on hands, looking into space. She had almost always been happy in a negative way, or, better, contented. Now she was positively happy. But she could not have explained why. She had closed the locket gently and tenderly, revering the white hairs and the filial piety that had enshrined them in gold (“triple-plated gold, at that!”). And when presently the stranger entered to recover his property, Daisy felt as if she had always known him, and that there was nothing to know of him but good.
He was greatly and gravely concerned for his loss, but when Daisy, without speaking, opened the cash-drawer and handed him his property, he gave her a brilliant smile of gratitude.
“One of the girls found it under your table,” she said.
“Is she here now?” he asked. “But never mind; you’ll thank her for me, won’t you? And–” A hand that seemed wonderfully ready for financial emergencies slipped into a trousers pocket and pulled from a great roll of various denominations a dollar bill. “Thank her and give her that,” he said. Then, and thus belittling the transaction, “I have to be in this part of the city quite often on business,” he said, “and I don’t mind saying that I like to take my meals among honest people. You can tell the boss that I intend to patronize this place.”
He turned to go, but the fact that she had been included as being one of honest people troubled Daisy.
“Excuse me,” she said. He turned back. “It was wrong for me to do it,” she said, blushing deeply, and looking him full in the face with her great, honest eyes. “I opened your locket. And looked in.”
“Did you?” said the young man. He did not seem to mind in the least. “I do, often. That lock of hair,” he said, rather solemn now, and a little sad, perhaps, “was my mother’s.”
He now allowed his eyes to rest on Daisy’s beautiful face for, perhaps, the first time.
“In a city like this,” he said, “there’s always temptations to do wrong, but I think having this” (he touched his breast pocket where the locket was) “helps me to do what mother would have liked me to.”
He brushed the corner of one eye with the back of his hand. Perhaps there was a tear in it. Perhaps a cinder.
V
It came to be known in the restaurant that the stranger’s name was Barstow, and very soon he had ceased to be a stranger. His business in that quarter of the city, whatever it may have been, was at first intermittent; he would take, perhaps, three meals in a week at Linnevitch’s; latterly he often came twice in one day. Always orderly and quiet, Barstow gradually, however, established pleasant and even joking terms with the waitresses. But with Daisy he never joked. He called the other girls by their first names, as became a social superior, but Daisy was always Miss Obloski to him. With Linnevitch alone he made no headway. Linnevitch maintained a pointedly surly and repellent attitude, as if he really wished to turn away a profitable patronage. And Barstow learned to leave the proprietor severely alone.