Archie didn't know that the note caused Isabel a great deal of trouble.
It was one thing to promise to tell a man who was all but a stranger
just how to alter his way of life with a view to a happier existence,
but to sit before a sheet of white paper and compose a letter on the
subject was a very different matter, as Isabel's waste-paper basket
could have testified. Her first experiments had been very serious, with
urgent recommendations of hard physical labor; but this proved
unsatisfactory. Then she attacked it from an ethical angle and suggested
social service as a means of destroying the selfishness which she
honestly believed to be one of his troubles.
She scribbled on a pad the titles of half a dozen hooks designed for
weary and disconsolate souls, but they hardly touched his case and
besides he had probably been deluged with just such literature.
Moreover, she must write a note that would not require an answer; this
she felt to be imperatively demanded by the circumstances. She thought
Archibald Bennett a nice fellow and she was sorry for him, but no more
and no less sorry than she would have been for any one else who failed
to find the world a pleasant place to live in. Something a little
cryptic, yet something that would discourage further confidences without
wounding him--this would solve the problem--and she spent an hour
turning over the pages of a book of quotations searching for some
stirring epigrammatic utterance. The wise of all the ages seemed to have
been strangely unmindful of the needs of neurasthenic young men, but
finally she hit upon these lines and copied them in her best hand:--
He either fears his fate too much,
Or his deserts are small,
That dares not put it to the touch
To gain or lose it all.
She wondered who the Marquis of Montrose was who had lived in the
seventeenth century and bequeathed this quatrain to posterity, but this
didn't matter, and after reading the lines aloud several times she
decided that they would serve her purpose admirably. If Mr. Bennett took
them seriously, well enough; and if he didn't like them it made no
difference as she would probably never meet him again.
She wrote on a calling card, "Best wishes and good luck," and put this
inside the note sheet, and as the hour was late she despatched it to Mr.
Bennett by special messenger.
The note reached Archie just as he was leaving his sister's house. When
he was seated in the train he drew it out and inspected the envelope
carefully, held it to the light and speculated fearfully as to the
nature of its contents. His thoughts had played about Isabel Perry most
of the day and he had listened to his sister's enthusiastic praise of
her with an unusual attention that had not been lost upon Mrs.
Featherstone. He had hoped for a long letter in the vein of the girl's
chaffing humor, and the size of the missive was a distinct
disappointment.
He opened it guardedly, and his face fell as he pondered the verse. It
was a neat, well-bred slap at him as a man without initiative or
courage. At the dinner table she had expressed much the same thought
that was condensed in the verse, but the quotation, unrelieved by her
smile, carried a sting. He read it over until the lines marched with a
nimble step through his memory. There was something oddly haunting in
them, and he experimented with a variety of emphases and pauses,
particularly as to the last line, which he found might be read in a
great number of ways. He decided finally that it was best interpreted by
a little pause after "gain," with the remaining words vanishing in a
despondent sigh. Perhaps this was the way Isabel Perry thought of him,
as a loser in the game of life; but he experienced a pleasant tingle in
the blood when he reflected that this may have been the wrong reading
and very different from the sense she meant to convey. His spirits
soared as he decided that the last line was intended to be read
unbrokenly and that it constituted a challenge, flung at him with a toss
of her head, a flash of the brown eyes.
This thought was wholly heartening and he dwelt upon it a long time. She
must have thought him capable of deeds of high emprise or she would not
have chosen this fragment as her last word to him. Her choice of a
message implied a certain faith that he might, if he chose, break the
shackles of fear and custom that bound him and do something that would
lift him out of himself. The card with the good wishes gave a soothing,
saving personal touch to the communication. She had drawn the pen across
a Chicago street number and supplied no other address; but after a dark
moment in which he accepted this as a delicate hint that the incident
was closed, he concluded that very likely she had deleted the address
hastily for the reason that she was to disappear into the woods for the
summer. Still, she might have substituted the camp address and he
fretted over this for an hour. She left him without excuse for a reply,
and he gravely reflected that the Marquis of Montrose was the only
person to whom he could protest, but as she had copied from the
quotation book the figures "1621-1640" and added them to the name for
his illumination, it was clearly impossible to ask the author for an
interpretation of his stanza.
Archie was lulled to sleep by the encouraging thought that what she had
done was to give him a commission to redeem himself by strange and
moving adventures, and he dreamed that he had climbed to the remote
fastnesses of the Rockies, and captured a mountain sheep alive and
walked into his sister's house with the animal under his arm and
presented it to Miss Perry at the tea table.
He changed trains at Boston and again at Portsmouth, where he checked
his bag. At two o'clock he reached Bailey Harbor, where he verified his
memorandum as to the return trip and found the telegram he expected from
the New York brokerage office in which he was a silent partner, saying
that his booking for Banff had been changed as requested. He never took
the chance of being stuffed into an upper berth, or riding in a day
coach, and he congratulated himself upon his forethought and the ease
with which he was proceeding upon his sister's errand.
He stepped into the only taxi in sight and drove to the village
druggist's for the key to the Congdon house.
"Just go in and take your time to it," said the man. "Lights and water
haven't been turned off and if you take the house your folks can step
right in. Mrs. Congdon left only yesterday. Suppose you'll be going on
the five eleven; it's your only chance of getting back to Boston
tonight. If you don't find it convenient to stop here again, just leave
the key under the door mat."
"I guess you'll find the place all shipshape," said the driver, as they
set off. "Folks came up early but didn't stay long. Left in a hurry;
kind o' funny, skippin' the way they did."
"There hadn't been sickness in the family?" asked Archie, apprehensively
thinking that he might be stumbling into infection.
"Lord no! Family troubles, I reckon! They been comin' here a long time
and usually came earlier and stayed later than anybody else. I don't
know nothin', mind ye, but there's talk she had trouble with her
husband."
"You mean Mr. and Mrs. Congdon have separated?"
"I'm sayin' nothin'! But the Congdons are all queer. His pap used to
have a house here and he was the worst ole crank on the shore. Young
Putney's a pretty decent fellow. Mighty fine woman, his wife. Ever'body
likes _her_."
The confidences of the weatherbeaten chauffeur only mildly interested
Archie, who was bent upon inspecting the house as quickly as possible
with a view to footing it back to the station, and thus crediting two
miles to the day's exercise account. It was unseasonably warm and the
air was lifeless and humid.
"Think it will rain?" asked Archie.
"Yep," replied the driver with a glance at the sea. "There's goin' to be
a lively kick-up before mornin'."
Archie eyed his top-coat and umbrella with the pardonable satisfaction
of a man who travels prepared for all weathers. To follow the shore path
in the teeth of a storm would do much toward establishing his
self-confidence and prove that he was not a mollycoddle. Isabel Perry
and her note were firmly imbedded in his subconsciousness and were
causing curious slips and shifts of his mental machinery. Certain of her
utterances at his sister's table rankled, and his thousandth conjecture
about the note was that it mocked his weaknesses and defied him to
prove that he was far from being the worthless social parasite she
believed him to be.