Mrs. Maze had no great trouble in making Gaites stay over Sunday. The
argument she used was, "No freight out till Monday, you know." The
inducement was June Alber, whom she said she had already engaged to go
canoeing with Gaites Sunday afternoon.
That afternoon was exquisite. The sky was cloudless, and of one blue
with the river and the girl's eyes, as Gaites noted while she sat facing
him from the bow of the canoe. But the day was of the treacherous
serenity of a weather-breeder, and the next morning brought a storm of
such violence that Mrs. Maze declared it would be a foolhardy risk of
his life for Gaites to go; and again she enforced her logic with Miss
Alber, whom she said she had asked to one-o'clock dinner, with a few
other friends.
Gaites stayed, of course, but he atoned for his weakness by starting
early Tuesday morning, so as to get the first Hill Country train from
Boston at Burymouth. He had decided that to get in as much change of air
as possible he had better go to Craybrooks for the rest of his vacation.
His course lay through Lower Merritt, and perhaps he would have time to
run out from the train and ask the station-master (known to him from his
former sojourn) who Miss Phyllis Desmond was. His mind was not so full
of Miss June Alber but that he wished to know.
It was still raining heavily, and on the first cut beyond Porchester
Junction his train was stopped by a flagman, sent back from a
freight-train. There was a wash-out just ahead, and the way would be
blocked for several hours yet, if not longer. The express backed down to
Porchester, and there seemed no choice for Gaites, if he insisted upon
going to Craybrooks, but to take the first train up the old Boston and
Montreal line to Wells River and across by the Wing Road through
Fabyans; and this was what he did, arriving very late, but quite in time
for all he had to do at Craybrooks.
The next day the weather cleared up cold, after the storm, and the fat
old ladies, who outnumber everybody but the thin young girls at summer
hotels, made the landlord put the steam on in the corridors, and toasted
themselves before the log fires on the spectacular hall hearth. Gaites
walked all day, and at night he lounged by the lamp, trying to read, and
wished himself at Kent Harbor. The blue eyes of June Alber made
themselves one with the sky and the river again, and all three laughed
at him for his folly in leaving the certain delight they embodied for
the vague good of a whim fulfilled. Was this the change he had come to
the mountains for? He could throw his hat into the clouds that hung so
low in the defile where the hotel lurked, and that was something; but it
was not so much to the purpose, now that he had it, as June Alber and
the sky and the river, which he had no longer. As he drowsed by the fire
in a break of the semicircle of old ladies before it, he suddenly ceased
to think of June Alber and the Kent sky and river, and found himself as
it were visually confronted with that pale, delicate girl in thread
gloves; she was facing him from the bow of a canoe in the train at
Boston, where he had first met her, and some one was saying, "Oh, she's
a Desmond, through and through."
He woke to the sound of a quick snort, in which he suspected a terminal
character when he glanced round the semicircle of old ladies and found
them all staring at him. From the pain in his neck he knew that his head
had been hanging forward on his breast, and, in the strong belief that
he had been publicly disgracing himself, he left the place, and went out
on the piazza till his shame should be forgotten. Of course, the sound
of the name Desmond had been as much a part of his dream as the sight of
that pale girl's face; but he felt, while he paced the veranda, the pull
of a strong curiosity to make sure of the fact. From time to time he
looked in through the window, without courage to return. At last, when
the semicircle was reduced to the bulks of the two ladies who had sat
nearest him, he went in, and took a place with a newspaper at the lamp
just behind them.
They stopped their talk and recognized him with an exchange of
consciousness. Then, as if compelled by an irresistible importance in
their topic, they began again; that is, one of them began to talk again,
and the other to listen, and Gaites from almost the first word joined
the listener with all his might, though he diligently held up his paper
between himself and the speaker and pretended to be reading.
"Yes," she said, "they must have had their summer home there nearly
twenty years. Lower Merritt was one of the first places opened up in
that part of the mountains, and I guess the Desmonds built the first
cottage there."
The date given would make the young lady whom he remembered from her
childhood romps on her father's lawn somewhat older than he imagined,
but not too old for the purposes of his romance.
The speaker began to collect her needlework into the handkerchief on her
lap as she went on, and he listened with an intensified abandon.
"I guess," she continued, "that they pass most of the year there. After
he lost his money, he had to give up his house in town, and I believe
they have no other home now. They did use to travel some, winters, but I
guess they don't much any more; if they don't stay there the whole
winter through, I don't believe they get much farther now than Portland,
or Burymouth, at the furthest. It seems to me as if I heard that one of
the girls was going to Boston last winter to take piano lessons at the
Conservatory, so as to teach; but--"
She stopped with a definite air, and rolled her knitting up into her
handkerchief. Gaites made a merit to himself of rising abruptly and
closing his paper with a clash, as if he had been trying to read and had
not been able for the talking near him. The ladies looked round
conscience-stricken; when they saw who it was, they looked indignant.