_In Which Brinsley Speaks of the Way to Win a Woman._
AND now spring was coming to the countryside. The snow melted, and the
soft rains fell, and on sunny days Diogenes, splashing in the little
puddles, picked and pulled at his feathers as he preened himself in the
shelter of the south bank which overlooked the river.
Some of the feathers were tipped with shining green and some with brown.
Some of them fell by the way, some floated out on blue tides, and one of
them was wafted by the wind to the feet of Geoffrey Fox, as, on a certain
morning, he, too, stood on the south bank.
He picked it up and stuck it in his hat. "I'll wear it for my lady," he
said to the old drake, "and much good may it do me!"
The old drake lifted his head toward the sky, and gave a long cry. But it
was not for Anne that he called. She still gave him food and drink. He
still met her at the gate. If her mind was less upon him than in the
past, it mattered little. The things that held meaning for him this
morning were the glory of the sunshine, and the softness of the breeze.
Stirring within him was a need above and beyond anything that Geoffrey
could give, or Anne. He listened not for the step of the little
school-teacher, but for the whirring wings of some comrade of his own
kind. Again and again he sent forth his cry to the empty air.
Geoffrey's heart echoed the cry. His book was finished, and it was time
for him to go. Yet he was held by a tie stronger than any which had
hitherto bound him. Here in the big old house at Bower's was the one
thing that his heart wanted.
"I could make her happy," he whispered to that inner self which warned
him. "With her as my wife and with my book a success, I could defy fate."
The day was Saturday, and all the eager old fishermen had arrived the
night before. Brinsley Tyson coming out with his rod in his hand and a
broad-brimmed hat on his head invited Geoffrey to join him. "I've a motor
boat that will take us out to the island after we have done a morning's
fishing, and Mrs. Bower has put up a lunch."
"The glare is bad for my eyes."
"Been working them too hard?"
"Yes."
"There's an awning and smoked glasses if you'll wear them. And I don't
want to go alone. David went back on me; he's got a new book. It's a
puzzle to me why any man should want to read when he can have a day's
fishing."
"If people didn't read what would become of my books?"
"Let 'em read. But not on days like this." Brinsley's fat face was
upturned to the sun. With a vine-wreath instead of his broad hat and
tunic in place of his khaki he might have posed for any of the plump old
gods who loved the good things of life.
Geoffrey, because he had nothing else to do, went with him. Anne was
invisible. On Saturday mornings she did all of the things she had left
undone during the week. She mended and sewed and washed her brushes, and
washed her hair, and gave all of her little belongings a special rub and
scrub, and showed herself altogether exquisite and housewifely.
She saw Geoffrey start out, and she waved to him. He waved back, his hand
shading his eyes. When he had gone, she cleaned all of her toilet silver,
and ran ribbons into nicely embroidered nainsook things, and put her
pillows in the sun and tied up her head and swept and dusted, and when
she had made everything shining, she had a bit of lunch on a tray, and
then she washed her hair.
Geoffrey ate lunch on the island with Brinsley Tyson. He liked the old
man immensely. There was a flavor about his worldliness which had nothing
to do with stale frivolities; it was rather a thing of fastidious taste
and of tempered wit. He was keen in his judgments of men, and charitable
in his estimates of women.
Brinsley Tyson had known Baltimore before the days of modern cities. He
had known it before it had cut its hotels after the palace pattern, and
when Rennert's in more primitive quarters had been the Mecca for
epicureans. He had known its theaters when the footlight favorites were
Lotta and Jo Emmet, and when the incomparable Booth and Jefferson had
held audiences spellbound at Ford's and at Albaugh's. He had known
Charles Street before it was extended, and he had known its Sunday
parade. He had known the Bay Line Boats, the harbor and the noisy streets
that led to the wharves. He had known Lexington Market on Saturday
afternoons; the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad in the heyday of its
importance, and more than all he had known the beauties and belles of old
Baltimore, and it added piquancy to many of his anecdotes when he spoke
of his single estate as a tragedy resulting from his devotion to too many
charmers, with no possibility of making a choice.
It was of these things that he spoke while Geoffrey, lying in the grass
with his arm across his eyes, listened and enjoyed.
"And you never married, sir?"
"I've told you there were too many of them. If I could have had any one
of those girls on this island with 'tother dear charmers away, there
wouldn't have been any trouble. But a choice with them all about me
was--impossible." His old eyes twinkled.
"Suppose you had made a choice, and she hadn't cared for you?" said the
voice of the man on the grass.
"Any woman will care if you go at it the right way."
"What is the right way?"
"There's only one way to win a woman. If she says she won't marry you,
carry her off by force to a clergyman, and when you get her there make
her say 'Yes.'"
Geoffrey sat up. "You don't mean that literally?"
Brinsley nodded. "Indeed I do. Take the attitude with them of Man the
Conqueror. They all like it. Man the Suppliant never gets what he wants."
"But in these days primitive methods aren't possible."
Brinsley skipped a chicken bone expertly across the surface of the water.
"Primitive methods are always possible. The trouble is that man has lost
his nerve. The cult of chivalry has spoiled him. It has taught him to
kneel at his lady's feet, where pre-historically he kept his foot on her
neck!"
Geoffrey laughed. "You'd be mobbed in a suffrage meeting."
"Suffrage, my dear fellow, is the green carnation in the garden of
femininity. Every woman blooms for her lover. It is the lack of lovers
that produces the artificial--hence votes for women. What does the woman
being carried off under the arm of conquering man care for yellow banners
or speeches from the tops of busses? She is too busy trying to please
him."
"It would be a great experiment. I'd like to try it."
Brinsley, uncorking a hot and cold bottle, boldly surmised, "It is the
little school-teacher?"
Geoffrey, again flat on the grass, murmured, "Yes."
"And it is neck and neck between you and that young cousin of mine?"
"I am afraid he is a neck ahead."
"It all depends upon which runs away with her first."
Again Geoffrey murmured, "I'd like to try it."
"Why not?" said Brinsley and beamed over his coffee cup like a benevolent
spider at an unsuspecting fly. He had no idea that his fooling might be
taken seriously. It was not given to his cynicism to comprehend the mood
of the seemingly composed young person who lay on the grass with his hat
over his eyes--torn by contending emotions, maddened by despair and the
dread of darkness, awakened to new impulses in which youth and hot blood
fought against an almost reverent tenderness for the object of his
adoration. Since the night of the Crossroads ball Geoffrey had permitted
himself to hope. She had turned to him then. For the first time he had
felt that the barriers were down between them.
"Now Richard," Brinsley was saying, as he smoked luxuriously after the
feast, "ought to marry Eve. She'll get her Aunt Maude's money, and be the
making of him."
* * * * *
Richard, who at that very moment was riding through the country on his
old white horse, had no thought of Eve.
The rhythm of old Ben's even trot formed an accompaniment to the song
that his heart was singing--
"I think she was the most beautiful lady,
That ever was in the West Country----"
As he passed along the road, he was aware of the world's awakening. His
ears caught the faint flat bleating of lambs, the call of the cocks, the
high note of the hens, the squeal of little pigs, and above all, the
clamor of blackbirds and of marauding crows.
The trees, too, were beginning to show the pale tints of spring, and an
amethyst haze enveloped the hills. The river was silver in the shadow and
gold in the sun; the little streams that ran down to it seemed to sing as
they went.
Coming at last to an old white farmhouse, Richard dismounted and went in.
The old man bent with rheumatism welcomed him, and the old wife said,
"He is always better when he knows that you are coming, doctor."
The old man nodded. "Your gran'dad used to come. I was a little boy an'
croupy, and he seemed big as a house when he came in at the door. He was
taller than you, and thin."
"Now, father," the old woman protested, "the young doctor ain't fat."
"He's fatter'n his gran'dad. But I ain't saying that I don't like it. I
like meat on a man's bones."
Richard laughed. "Just so that I don't go the way of Cousin Brin. You
know Brinsley Tyson, don't you?"
"He's the fat twin. Yes, I know him and David. David comes and reads to
me, but Brinsley went to Baltimore, and now he don't seem to remember
that we were boys together, and went to the Crossroads school."
After that they spoke of the little new teacher, and Richard revelled in
the praise they gave her. She was worshipped, they said, by the people
roundabout. There had never been another like her.
"_I think she was the most beautiful lady,_
_That ever was in the West Country_----"
was Richard's enlargement of their theme. In the weeks just past he had
seen much of her, and it had seemed to him that life began and ended with
his thought of her.
When he rose to go the old woman went to the door with him. "I guess we
owe you a lot by this time," she remarked; "you've made so many calls. It
cheers him up to have you, but you'd better stop now that he don't need
you. It's so far, and we ain't good pay like some of them."
Richard squared his shoulders--a characteristic gesture. "Don't bother
about the bill. I have a sort of sentiment about my grandfather's old
patients. It is a pleasure to know them and serve them."
"If you didn't mind taking your pay in chickens," she stated as he
mounted his horse, "we could let you have some broilers."
"You will need all you can raise." Then as his eyes swept the green hill
which sloped down to the river, he perceived an orderly line of waddling
fowls making their way toward the house.
"I'd like a white duck," he said, "if you could let me take her now."
He chose a meek and gentle creature who submitted to the separation from
the rest of her kind without rebellion. Tucked under Richard's arm, she
surveyed the world with some alarm, but presently, as he rode on with
her, she seemed to acquiesce in her abduction and faced the adventure
with serene eyes, murmuring now and then some note of demure
interrogation as she nestled quite confidently against the big man who
rode so easily his great white horse.
And thus they came to Bower's, to find Anne on the south bank, like a
very modern siren, drying her hair, with Diogenes nipping the new young
grass near her.
She saw them coming. Richard wore a short rough coat and an old alpine
hat of green. His leggings were splashed with mud, and the white horse
was splashed, but there was about the pair of them an air of gallant
achievement.
She rose to greet them. She was blushing a little and with her dark hair
blowing she was "the most beautiful," like the lady in the song.
"I thought no one would be coming," was her apology, "and out here I get
the wind and sun."
"All the old fishermen will be wrecked on the rocks if they get a glimpse
of you," he told her gravely; "you mustn't turn their poor old heads."
And now the white duck murmured.
"The lovely dear, where did you get her?" Anne asked.
"In the hills, to cheer up Diogenes."
He set the white duck down. She shook her feathers and again spoke
interrogatively. And now Diogenes lifted his head and answered. For a few
moments he rent the air with his song of triumph. Then he turned and led
the way to the river. There was a quiet pool in the bend of the bank. The
old drake breasted its shining waters, and presently the white duck
followed. With a sort of restrained coquetry she turned her head from
side to side. All her questions were answered, all her murmurs stilled.
Richard and Anne smiled at each other. "What made you think of it?" she
asked.
"I thought you'd like it."
"I do." She began to twist up her hair.
"Please don't. I like to see it down."
"But people will be coming in."
"Why should we be here when they come? I'll put Ben in the stable--and
we'll go for a walk. Do you know there are violets in the wood?"
From under the red-striped awning of Brinsley's boat Geoffrey Fox saw
Anne's hair blowing like a sable banner in the breeze. He saw Richard's
square figure peaked up to the alpine hat. He saw them enter the wood.
He shut his eyes from the glare of the sun and lay quietly on the
cushions of the little launch. But though his eyes were shut, he could
still see those two figures walking together in the dreamy dimness of the
spring forest.
"What were the ethics of the primitive man?" he asked Brinsley suddenly.
"Did he run away with a woman who belonged to somebody else?"
"Why not?" Brinsley's reel was whirring. "And now if you don't mind, Fox,
you might be ready with the net. If this fish is as big as he pulls, he
will weigh a ton."
Geoffrey, coming in, found Peggy disconsolate on the pier.
"What's the matter?" he asked.
"I can't find Anne. She said that after her hair dried she'd go for a
walk to Beulah's playhouse, and we were to have tea. Beulah was to bring
it."
"She has gone for a walk with some one else."
"Who?"
"Dr. Brooks. Let's go and look for her, Peggy, and when we find her we
will tell her what we think of her for running away."
The green stillness of the grove was very grateful after the glare of the
river. Geoffrey walked quickly, with the child's hand in his. He had a
feeling that if he did not walk quickly he would be too late.
He was not too late; he saw that at a glance. Richard had dallied in his
wooing. It had been so wonderful to be with her. Once when he had knelt
beside her to pick violets, the wind had blown across his face a soft
sweet strand of her hair. It was then that she had braided it, sitting on
a fallen log under a blossoming dogwood.
"It is so long," she had said with a touch of pride, "that it is a great
trouble to care for it. Cynthia Warfield had hair like mine."
"I don't believe that any one ever had hair like yours. It seems to me as
if every strand must have been made specially in some celestial shop, and
then the pattern destroyed."
How lovely she was when she blushed like that! How little and lovely and
wise and good. He liked little women. His mother was small, and he was
glad that both she and Anne had delicate hands and feet. He was aware
that this preference was old-fashioned, but it was, none the less, the
way he felt about it.
And now there broke upon the silence of the wood the sound of murmuring
voices. Peggy and Geoffrey Fox had invaded their Paradise!
"We thought," Peggy complained, "that we had lost you. Anne, you promised
about the tea."
"Oh, Peggy, I forgot."
"Beulah's gone with the basket and Eric, and we can't be late because
there are hot biscuits."
Hurrying toward the biscuits and their hotness, Anne ran ahead with
Peggy.
"How about the eyes?" Richard asked as he and Geoffrey followed.
"I've been on the water, and it is bad for them. But I'm not going to
worry. I am getting out of life more than I hoped--more than I dared
hope."
His voice had a high note of excitement. Richard glanced at him. For a
moment he wondered if Fox had been drinking.
But Geoffrey was intoxicated with the wine of his dreams. With a quick
gesture in which he seemed to throw from him all the fears which had
oppressed him, he told his triumphant lie.
"I am going to marry Anne Warfield; she has promised to be eyes for me,
and light--the sun and the moon."
Richard's face grew gray. He spoke with difficulty. "She has promised?"
Then again Geoffrey lied, meaning indeed before the night had passed to
make his words come true. "She is going to marry me--and I am the
happiest man alive!"
The light went out of Richard's world. How blind he had been. He had
taken her smiles and blushes to himself when she had glowed with a
happiness which had nothing to do with him.
He steadied himself to speak. "You are a lucky fellow, Fox; you must let
me congratulate you."
"The world doesn't know," Geoffrey said, "not yet. But I had to tell it
to some one, and a doctor is a sort of secular father confessor."
Richard's laugh was without mirth. "If you mean that it's not to be told,
you may rely on my discretion."
"Of course. I told you she was to play Beatrice to my Dante, but she
shall be more than that."
It was a rather silent party which had tea on the porch of the Playhouse.
But Beulah and Eric were not aware of any lack in their guests. Eric had
been to Baltimore the day before, and Beulah wore her new ring. She
accepted Richard's congratulations shyly.
"I like my little new house," she said; "have you been over it?"
He said that he had not, and she took him. Eric went with them, and as
they stood in the door of an upper room, he put his arm quite frankly
about Beulah's shoulders as she explained their plans to Richard. "This
is to be in pink and the other one in white, and all the furniture is to
be pink and white."
She was as pink and white and pretty as the rooms she was planning, and
to see her standing there within the circle of her lover's arm was
heart-warming.
"You must get some roses from my mother, Beulah, for your little garden,"
the young doctor told her; "all pink and white like the rest of it."
He let them go down ahead of him, and so it happened that he stood for a
moment alone in a little upper porch at the back of the house which
overlooked the wood. The shadows were gathering in its dim aisles,
shutting out the daylight, shutting out the dreams which he had lost that
day in the fragrant depths.
When later he came with the rest of them to Bower's, the river was
stained with the sunset. Diogenes and the white duck breasted serenely
the crimson surface. Certain old fishermen trailed belatedly up the bank.
Others sat spick and span and ready for supper on the porch.
Brinsley Tyson over the top of his newspaper hailed Richard.
"There's a telephone call for you. They've been trying to get you for an
hour."
He went in at once, and coming out told Anne good-night. "Thank you for a
happy afternoon," he said.
But she missed something in his voice, something that had been there when
they had walked in the wood.
She watched him as he went away, square-shouldered and strong on his big
white horse. She had a troubled sense that things had in some fateful and
tragic way gone wrong with her afternoon, but it was not yet given to her
to know that young Richard on his big white horse was riding out of her
life.
It was after supper that Geoffrey asked her to go out on the river with
him.
"Not to-night. I'm tired."
"Just a little minute, Mistress Anne. To see the moon come up over the
island. Please." So she consented.
Helping her into the boat, Geoffrey's hands were shaking. The boat swept
out from the pier in a wide curve, and he drew a long breath. He had her
now--it would be a great adventure--like a book--better than any book.
Primitive man in prehistoric days carried his woman off captive under his
arm. Geoffrey, pursuing modern methods, had borrowed Brinsley's boat. A
rug was folded innocently on the cushions; in a snug little cupboard
under the stern seat were certain supplies--a great adventure, surely!
And now the boat was under the bridge; the signal lights showed red and
green. Then as they slipped around the first island there was only the
silver of the moonshine spread out over the waters.
Geoffrey stopped the motor. "We'll drift and talk."
"You talk," she told him, "and I'll listen, and we mustn't be too late."
"What is too late?"
"I told you I would stay just a little minute."
"There is no real reason why we shouldn't stay as long as we wish. You
are surely not so prim that you are doing it for propriety."
"You know I am not prim."
"Yes you are. You are prim and Puritan and sometimes you are a prig. But
I like you that way, Mistress Anne. Only to-night I shall do as I
please."
"Don't be silly."
"Is it silly to love you--why?"
He argued it with her brilliantly--so that it was only when the red and
green lights of a second bridge showed ahead of them that she said,
sharply, "We are miles away from Bower's; we must go back."
"It won't take us long," he said, easily, and presently they were purring
up-stream.
Then all at once the motor stopped. Geoffrey, inspecting it with a
flashlight, said, succinctly, "Engine's on the blink."
"You mean that we can't go on?"
"Oh, I'll tinker it up. Only you'll have to let me get into that box
under the stern seat for the tools. You can hold the light while I work."
As he worked they drifted. They passed the second bridge. Anne, steering,
grew cold and shivered. But she did not complain. She was glad, however,
when Geoffrey said, "You'd better curl down among the cushions, and let
me wrap you in this rug."
"Can you manage without me?"
"Yes. I've patched it up partially. And you'll freeze in this bitter
air."
The wind had changed and there was now no moon. She was glad of the
warmth of the rug and the comfort of the cushioned space. She shut her
eyes, after a time, and, worn out by the emotions of the day, she dropped
into fitful slumber.
Then Geoffrey, his hair blown back by the wind, stood at the wheel and
steered his boat not up-stream toward the bridge at Bower's, but straight
down toward the wider waters, where the river stretches out into the
Bay.