Conkling, on returning to the Keswick house for the second time, nursed
an elusive sense of frustration. He nursed, as well, a sense of playing
little more than a secondary rôle in a drama of deferment. For the
accessories of the drama were not arranging themselves as he might have
wished. On his way back to the manor-house he had come face to face with
Lavinia Keswick, and that austere old figure, seated in a decrepid
canopied phaëton drawn by a rawboned mare, had either failed or refused
to recognize him. He was further depressed by the ominous silence which
reigned when he pounded on the faded manor-door with the heavy brass
knocker in the form of an ape with laughter on its embittered metal
face. But in a minute or two the door was opened, and Julia Keswick
herself stood confronting him.
She was dressed in Quaker gray, and seemed more repressed and more
mature than when he had first caught sight of her. But she had the
power, for all her quietness, of once more making his pulse skip a beat
or two.
“I was to look over the pictures,” he explained, noticing her hesitancy.
“I’m afraid that won’t be possible to-day,” she told him in a tone of
constraint.
“But your aunt asked me to,” he reminded her.
“I know, but there has been an accident.”
“A serious one?” he asked.
“I hope not. But my Aunt Georgina slipped on the attic steps and
sprained her ankle. It’s paining her a great deal, and she has gone to
bed.”
“Could I possibly see her?”
A ghost of a smile appeared on the girl’s face. It would not be easy to
explain to him that no living man had ever beheld her Aunt Georgina in
bed. So she merely shook her head.
“Then how about your Aunt Lavinia?”
Again the girl shook her head.
“She has had to go to Weston to see a lawyer about a mortgage
foreclosure—and she has always hated the pictures.”
“Then why couldn’t you show them to me?” he suggested.
“I don’t think my aunt would approve of that.”
“But in an emergency like this?” he contended.
“I wouldn’t be allowed to,” she said with an odd flattening of the
voice. “Some of them are not——” she broke off. Her shoulder movement
was a half-ironic one. “Even my aunt objected to some of them. She was
carrying one of the bigger canvases down to her bedroom when she slipped
and fell.”
“That was unfortunate,” he perfunctorily exclaimed. His mind, for the
moment, seemed to be on other things. It was his glance into the girl’s
face, where he sensed pennons of valor behind the bastions of silence,
that brought his thoughts back to the present.
“But why to her bedroom?” he asked.
“To hide it away,” was the level-noted reply. And again their glances
came together.
“What was the nature of that canvas,” he finally asked, “the canvas that
caused the accident?”
There was a silence of several seconds before she answered.
“It was a Bouguereau!”
He was able to smile as he studied her in the shadow of the
weather-bleached doorway. He understood, at last, the grim valor of her
gaze. And she saw that he understood, and seemed glad of it.
“It’s all ridiculous, of course,” he said with his renewing smile of
comprehension. “But it’s at least given me the chance of seeing you
again.”
She in turn studied him for a moment or two with her intent eyes. Then
she slowly changed color.
“I’m sorry,” she finally said.
“About what?”
Her slow look back over her shoulder had not escaped him. But he was
quite satisfied to stand and stare at her. She seemed the only point of
life in that house of dead and silent mustiness.
“I can’t talk to you any longer,” she said in lowered tones. “I really
can’t!”
“Why not?” he demanded.
“I’d be punished for it,” she told him, without meeting his eye,
“cruelly punished.”
She had spoken quietly enough, but there was an undertone of passion in
her words.
“That doesn’t sound reasonable,” he expostulated. For she seemed, in her
present mood and posture, far removed from the child.
“It isn’t,” he heard her answering. “But there’s nothing I can do about
it.”
“How old are you?” he asked with a frankness sired by impatience.
“I’m nineteen—almost twenty,” she told him, with her habitual
impersonal candor.
“Then that makes it more unreasonable than ever,” he proclaimed with a
touch of triumph.
“All my life has been unreasonable.”
“But——” he began, and broke off. Still again their glances had met and
locked, and he seemed to drink courage from the quietness of her eyes.
“Why couldn’t I see you?”
“See me?” she echoed.
“Without them knowing it,” he explained, paling under his tan.
She stood silent a moment.
“Where?” she finally asked, in little more than a whisper.
“What’s the matter with that old arbor of yours at the foot of the
garden?” he suggested.
He still misunderstood her hesitation, for it was resolution and not
timidity which was so completely whitening her face.
“Why couldn’t you meet me there, about nine o’clock to-night?”
“That would be too early,” she said, bewilderingly composed.
“Then say ten,” he persisted, marveling at his own unpremeditated deadly
earnestness; and still again she stood silent. But she found the courage
to lift her intent eyes and let them rest on his face. It seemed
significant of tremendous capitulations. But when she spoke she spoke
very quietly.
“I’ll be there.”
Conkling watched her retreat into the shadow and watched the faded door
swing slowly shut between them. Then he turned and went down the steps.
He went away this time without thinking of the pictures, and he went
with no slightest sense of disappointment.