“How do you like the office?” I asked somewhat dryly.
He met my eyes with his level look.
“Dear friend,” he said softly, “you see how inefficient I am. Even to
describe your charming christening toilet is my despair.”
“Hobart Eddy,” said I sharply, “take Enid in to breakfast.”
* * * * *
While May was still stepping about the fields loath to leave her
business of violets and ladywort, Madame Sally Chartres sent pleasant
word from Long Island that a dozen or more of her friends were to spend
a day with her, and no one would willingly disregard the summons. The
Chartres’ lived on the edge of an orchard and another edge of field.
I dare say they lived in a house although what I chiefly remember
is a colonnade of white pillars, a library shelved to the ceiling,
and a sprinkling of mighty cushioned window seats whereon the sun
forever streamed through lattices. Perhaps Madame Sally and Wilfred
had assembled these things near an orchard and considered that to be
house enough. At all events there could have been no fairer place for a
Spring holiday.
Pelleas and I went down by train, and the morning was so golden that
I wholly expected to divine a procession of nymphs defiling faintly
across the fields in a cloud of blossoms rooted in air. I have often
wondered why goblins, dryads and the like do not more frequently appear
to folk on railway trains. These shy ones would be quite safe, for
by the time the bell rope should have been pulled and the conductor
told why the train must be stopped and the engine and cars brought
effectually to a standstill, the little shadowy things could have
vanished safely against the blue. Perhaps they do not understand how
sadly long it takes a spirit to influence the wheels of civilization.
The others coached down to the Chartres’ with Hobart Eddy, although
there must be made one important exception: Madame Sally had insisted
that Enid bring the baby; and Enid and her husband, who since the
christening were lingering on in town, had given the baby and his new
nurse to the charge of Pelleas and me. We arrived ahead of the coach
and stood on the veranda to welcome the others.
Lisa was among these, with Eric at her side; and Madame Polly and
Horace Cleatam and Miss Lillieblade, all three in spite of their white
hair and anxiety about draughts stoutly refusing to ride inside. There
were four or five others, and from the box seat beside Hobart Eddy I
saw descending with what I am bound to call picturesque deliberation a
figure whom I did not remember.
“Pray who is that?” there was time for me to ask Madame Sally.
“My dear,” she answered hurriedly, “she is a Mrs. Trempleau. I used to
love her mother. And Hobart wanted her here.”
“Hobart!” I exclaimed. “That Mrs. Trempleau?” I comprehended. “You
don’t think ...” I intimated.
Madame Sally’s eyebrows were more expressive than the eyes of many.
“Who knows?” she said only, and made of her eyebrows a positive welcome
to our friends.
Mrs. Trempleau came toward us flickering prettily--I protest that
she reminded me of a thin flame, luminous, agile, seeking. She had
hair like the lights in agate, and for its sake her gown and hat were
of something coloured like the reflection of the sun in a shield of
copper. She had a fashion of threading her way through an hour of
talk, lighting a jest here, burning a bit of irony there, smouldering
dangerously near the line of daring. And that day as she moved from
group to group on the veranda the eyes of us all, of whom Hobart Eddy
was chief, were following her. I think it may have been because her
soul was of some alien element like the intense, avid spirit of the
flames, though when I told Pelleas he argued that it was merely the way
she lifted her eyes.
“Where is _Mr._ Trempleau?” Pelleas added, his nature as I have said
being built on straight lines.
“There may be one,” I answered, “but I think he lives on some other
continent.”
Pelleas reflected.
“Hobart Eddy and Pelham and Clox look in love with her,” he said; “if
she doesn’t take care there won’t be enough continents.”
In no small amusement during luncheon we watched Hobart Eddy,
especially Pelleas and I who, however, besides being amused, were also
a little sad. Mrs. Trempleau’s appropriation of him was insistent but
very pretty. Indeed, if she had on a night of stars appropriated Sirius
I dare say the constellations would have sung approval. She had the
usual gift of attractive faults. But above Mrs. Trempleau’s shoulders
and beyond the brightness of her hair I had, at luncheon, glimpses
which effectually besought my attention from the drama within. The long
windows overlooked the May orchards, white and sweet and made like
youth, and I was impatient to be free of the woman’s little darting
laughs and away to the fields. Some way, in her presence it was not
like May.
Therefore, when Pelleas had been borne to the stables by his host and
when the others had wandered back to the veranda, I went away down what
I think must have been a corridor, though all that I remember is a long
open window leading to the Spring, as if one were to unlatch an airy
door and reveal a diviner prospect than our air infolds. A lawn, cut
by a gravel walk bounded by tulips, sloped away from this window to the
orchard and I crossed the green in the frank hope that the others would
not seek me out. But when I turned the corner by the dial I came fairly
on two other wanderers. There, with the white-embroidered nurse-maid,
sat, like another way of expressing the Spring, Enid’s baby. Was ever
such happy chance befallen at the gate of any May orchard whatever?
“Ah,” I cried to the little nurse, “Bonnie! Come quickly. I see a
place--there--or there--or there--where you must bring the baby at
once--at once! Leave the perambulator here--so. He is awake? Then
quickly--this way--to the pink crab apple-tree.”
I sometimes believe that in certain happy case I find every one
beautiful; but I recall that Bonnie--of whom I shall have more to tell
hereafter--that day seemed to me so charming that I suspected her of
being Persephone, with an inherited trick of caring for the baby as her
mother cared for Demophoön.
_To the pink crab apple-tree!_ What a destination. It had for me all
the delight of running toward, say, the plane tree in the meadow of
Buyukdere. I remember old branches looking like the arms of Pan,
wreath-wound, and rooms of sun through which petals drifted ... who
could distinctly recall the raiment of such an hour? But at length by
many aisles we came to a little hollow where the grass was greenest,
hard by the orchard arbour, and we stood before the giant pink
crab apple-tree. Has any one ever wondered that Sicilian courtiers went
out a-shepherding and that the Round Table, warned to green gowns,
fared forth a-Maying?
“Spread the baby’s rug!” I cried to Bonnie; “here is a little seat
made in the roots for this very day. Pull him a branch of apple
blossoms--so. And now run away, child, and amuse yourself. The baby and
I are going to make an apple-blossom pie.”
Bonnie, hesitating, at my more peremptory bidding went away. I have no
idea whether she was caught up among the branches by friendly hands or
whether the nearest tree trunk hospitably opened to receive her. But
there, in May, with the world gone off in another direction, the baby
and I sat alone.
“O--o-o-o-o--” said the baby, in a kind of lyric understanding of the
situation.
I held him close. These hours of Arcady are hard to win for the
sheltering of dreams.
* * * * *
Voices, sounding beyond a momentary rain of petals, roused me. Enid’s
baby smiled up in my eyes but I saw no one, though the voices murmured
on as if the dryads had forgotten me and were idly speaking from tree
to tree. Then I caught from the orchard arbour Mrs. Trempleau’s darting
laugh. It was as if some one had kindled among the apple blossoms a
torch of perfumed wood.
“I am sailing on Wednesday,” I heard her saying in a voice abruptly
brought to sadness. “Ah, my friend, if I might believe you. Would there
indeed be happiness for you there with me, counting the cost?”
It was of course Hobart Eddy who answered quite, I will be bound, as
I would have said that Hobart Eddy would speak of love: with fine
deliberation, as another man would speak the commonplaces, possibly
with his little half bow over the lady’s hand, a very courtier of
Love’s plaisance.
She replied with that perpetual little snare of her laughter laid like
a spider web from one situation to the next.
“Come with me then,” she challenged him; “let us find this land where
it is always Spring.”
“Do you mean it?” asked Hobart Eddy.
I do not know what she may have said to this, for the new note in his
voice terrified me. Neither do I know what his next words were, but
their deliberation had vanished and in its stead had come something, a
pulse, a tremor....
I remember thinking that I must do something, that it was impossible
that I should not do anything. I looked helplessly about the great
empty orchard with its mock-sentinel trees, and down into Enid’s
baby’s eyes. And on a sudden I caught him in my arms and lifted him
high until his head was within the sweetness of the lowest boughs. He
did what any baby in the world would have done in that circumstance; he
laughed aloud with a little coo and crow at the end so that anybody in
that part of the orchard, for example, must have heard him with delight.
The two in the orchard arbour did hear. Mrs. Trempleau leaned from the
window.
“Ah,” she cried, in her pretty soaring emphasis, “what a picture!”
“Is he not?” I answered, and held the baby high. On which she said some
supreme nonsense about Elizabeth and the little John and “Hobart--see!”
she cried.
The two came out of the arbour, and Mrs. Trempleau made little dabs
at the baby and then went picturesquely about filling her arms with
blossoms. Hobart Eddy threw himself on the grass beside me and watched
her. I looked at them all: at the woman who was like thin flame, at
the man who watched her, indolent, confident, plainly allured, and at
Enid’s baby. And,
“There,” said I, abruptly to the baby, “is your godfather.”
Hobart Eddy turned on his elbow and offered him one finger.
“It’s like being godfather to a rose,” he said smiling, and his smile
had always the charm and spontaneity of his first youth.
“When the rose is twenty-one,” said I, “and this luncheon party which I
heard you prophesying the other day comes off, what sort of godfather
will you be then, do you think?”
“What sort am I now, for that matter?” he asked idly.
“Ah, well, then,” said I boldly; “yes! What sort are you now?”
When one is past seventy and may say what one pleases one is not
accountable for any virtue of daring.
He looked at me quickly but I did not meet his eyes. I was watching
Mrs. Trempleau lay the apple boughs against her gown.
“Ah, pray don’t,” he besought. “You make me feel as if there were
things around in the air waiting to see if I would do right or wrong
with them.”
“There are,” said I, “if you want me to be disagreeable.”
“But I!” he said lightly. “What have I to decide? Whether to have elbow
bits on the leaders for the coaching Thursday. Whether to give Eric
his dinner party on the eighth or the nineteenth. Whether to risk the
frou-frou figure at Miss Lillieblade’s cotillon. You don’t wish me to
believe that anything in the air is concerned with how I am deciding
those?”
“No,” said I with energy, “not in the air or on the earth or under the
sea.”
“Ah, well, now,” he went on with conviction, and gave to the baby a
finger of each hand--beautiful, idle, white fingers round which the
baby’s curled and clung, “what can I do?” He put it to me with an air
of great fairness.
With no warning I found myself very near to tears for the pity of it.
I laid my cheek on the baby’s head and when I spoke I am not even sure
that Hobart Eddy heard all I was saying.
“... ‘in the name of this child,’” I repeated, “was there not something
‘in the name of this child’--something of renouncing--and of not
following after nor being led by....”
For a moment he looked up at me blankly, though still with all his
urbanity, his conformity, his chivalrous attention.
“I’m not preaching,” said I briskly, “but a gentleman keeps his word,
and dies if need be for the sake of his oath, does he not? Whether it
chances to be about a bet, or a horse, or--or a sea lion. For my own
part, as a woman of the world, I cannot see why on earth he should not
keep it about a christening.”
Hobart Eddy turned toward me, seeking to free his fingers of that
little clinging clasp.
“Jove,” he said helplessly, “do they mean it _that_ way?”
“‘That way,’” I cried, past the limit of my patience. “I dare say that
very many people who are married would be amazed if they were told that
their oath had been meant ‘that way.’ But they would sell their very
days to pay a debt at bridge. ‘That way!’ Let me ask you, Hobart Eddy,
if ‘I will, by God’s help’ does not mean quite as much at a marriage or
a christening as it does in society?”
And at that Enid’s baby, missing the outstretched fingers, suddenly
leaned toward him, smiling and eager, uttering the most inane and
delicious little cries. A baby without genius would simply have paid no
attention.
Hobart Eddy took the baby in his arms and looked down at him with
something in his face which I had never seen there before. The baby
caught at his hand and pulled at the cord of his monocle and stared
up at the low blossoming boughs. As for me I fell gathering up stray
petals in a ridiculous fashion and I knew that my hands were trembling
absurdly.
I looked up as Mrs. Trempleau came toward us. She was dragging a burden
of flowering branches and she looked some priestess of the sun gone
momentarily about the offices of the blossoming earth.
“Ah, the baby!” she cried. “Let me have the baby.”
Hobart Eddy had risen and had helped me to rise; and I fancy that he
and Enid’s baby and I hardly heard Mrs. Trempleau’s pretty urgency. But
when she let fall the flowers and held out her arms, Hobart looked at
her and did not let the baby go.
“This little old man and I,” he said, “we understand each other. And
we’re going to walk together, if you don’t mind.”
* * * * *
On Wednesday Mrs. Trempleau sailed for Cherbourg alone. But when I told
Pelleas the whole matter he shook his head.
“If those two had intended eloping,” he said, “all the christenings in
Christendom wouldn’t have prevented.”
“Pelleas!” I said, “I am certain--”
“If those two had intended to elope,” he patiently began it all over
again, “all the--”
“Pelleas,” I urged, “I don’t believe it!”
“If those two--” I heard him trying to say.
“Pelleas!” I cried finally, “_you_ don’t believe it either!”
“Ah, well, no,” he admitted, “I don’t know that I do.”