Mary Burton had not long been back from Europe when sealed windows and
boarded entrances began to give a sepulchral blankness to the houses of
the rich. Society was leaving town, and for Mary Burton to remain when
her set had gone would have been like reigning in an empty court, for
already she had entered upon her dominion and her triumph was secure.
New York society had at first received the over-seas report of her great
charm and loveliness with such sceptical indulgence as New York accords
to any excellence alien to the purlieus of her own boroughs.
Now New York had seen her, claimed her as its own--and capitulated.
Judged by every ordinary standard, Mary Burton should have been a very
happy young woman, sitting crowned and in state, while before her Life
passed in review. This afternoon, however, certain reflections brought
the harassment of unrest to her eyes and a droop of wistfulness to the
curve of her lips.
Self-analysis, that rude guest who comes sometimes, as unbidden and
unwelcome as a constable, to set all one's favorite vanities out of
doors and evict one's self-complacency, had intruded upon her thoughts.
Though she had the amelioration of a pier glass which gave her a view of
all her beauty, from the coronal of burnished hair to the satin points
of small slippers, she did not seem quite happy. Mary was discovering
that nature had endowed her with a brain which refused to accept longer
its heretofore placid function of augmenting her physical allurements
with its cleverness and its power of charm. Now it was in insurrection.
Vassal no longer to the sense-thrilling appeal of eyes and lips and
color and delicate curves, it was turning its batteries inward and
preying upon itself.
Self-accusation had come to dispossess self-adulation.
Perhaps the silent voices of the mountains were in part responsible.
Haverly Lodge lay in acres not only smooth, but elaborately beautified,
yet the margins of the estate met and merged with nature's ragged
fringe. Metaled roads ran out in lumber trails where the Adirondacks
reared turrets of granite and primal forests. In summer, ease-loving
guests took their pleasure here, but when winter held the hills, wild
deer came down and gingerly picked their way close to the sundials and
marble basins of the sunken gardens. Foxes, too, stole on cushioned feet
across the terraces at the end of the pergola.
The master of Haverly Lodge was the great little man who chewed always
at an unlighted cigar and built industries as a child rears houses of
blocks. This Adirondack "camp" was one of H.A. Harrison's favorite
playthings. Here alone the nervous restlessness that drove him gave
place to something like peace. Among the guests now gathered there was
Mary Burton. Hamilton Burton was absent, as he was always absent from
the purely social side of the world into whose center he had forced his
way. For such diversions he had neither time nor taste, but like a
general who, under the dim light of his tent lantern, sticks pins into
a war map, it pleased him to have his sister take her triumphant place
among the court idlers whom he scorned.
Now she sat in her room overlooking the terraces and gardens at the side
of the mansion. Just outside her window was a small gallery over whose
wide coping clambered a profusion of flowering vines. Through half-drawn
curtains as she lay in a long reclining chair she could see the purple
veil of the young summer draped along the distance where rosy fires
burned in the wake of day--or she could turn her eyes inward and have
the other picture which the mirror offered. Her slender hands lay
inertly quiet in her lap, holding an envelope.
Suddenly she turned her head and spoke to the only other occupant of the
room--her maid.
"Julie," she said, almost sharply, "you may go. Come back in half an
hour."
"But, mademoiselle," exclaimed the little French woman who had put by
dreams of a small millinery shop in Paris to come with her mistress to
America, "dinner is not far off, and you are not yet dressed."
Mary Burton did not answer. Her thoughts were elsewhere and after a
moment's hesitation Julie went out and closed the door quietly behind
her. The pearls lying near the mirror caught the light and echoed it in
their soft shimmer.
"Hamilton Burton's collar," she murmured.
Then she slowly drew from the envelope in her lap a letter.
Its writer subscribed himself with many adoring superlatives, "Thy
Carlos," but that was an abbreviated signature. In Andalusia, where his
estates lay, his prerogative was to sign himself Juan Carlos Matisto y
Carolla, Duke de Metuan.
She read the letter and let it fall from her listless fingers. Her eyes
went again to the portrait in the glass. Very slowly she rose and
studied herself standing. The lacy softness of her negligée fell away
from her slenderly rounded throat. The creamy whiteness of arms and
shoulders and bosom was touched with the rosiness of blossom petals.
"I suppose," she said with a short laugh, "I suppose--as men's ideas of
women go--I'm worth possessing." Then she turned impatiently to the
window and stood with one arm high above her head, resting on the white
woodwork of its frame. While her eyes went off to the sunset, they
became hungry for something she did not have, she who had so much.
In a few days, unless she forbade it, the duke would arrive, this note
from his New York hotel announced. There had been also a brief
communication from Hamilton, which she had angrily torn into small bits.
The duke had called on him, said her brother, and craved permission to
pay his addresses to Mary. Hamilton Burton had granted the boon with the
manner of a king contemplating a noble alliance in his family. Mary
Burton did not care for the manner.
It complicated matters, she admitted, that she herself had not precisely
discouraged the duke over there in Cairo and in Nice. He had fitted
rather comfortably into the artificial life she had been living, which
she had not then begun to question with analysis. As she looked back she
could not recall that she had definitely discouraged any of those titled
suitors. Now that her brain had turned on her, forcing her to take stock
of her life, many shapes and colors changed, as the light of day alters
the aspect of gas and bares its deceit. The idea of meeting Carlos de
Metuan brought a shiver of personal distaste.
"I never knew but one real man," she told herself bitterly. "I don't
even know that he was a real man. I wonder if he is still alive." Once
more she was in fancy a little girl, shyly twisting the toe of a rough
shoe in the dust of the mountain roadside. Once more she saw a pair of
eyes that won the heart with their honesty and seemed willing to have
other eyes look through them into a soul concealing nothing. Though
Jefferson Edwardes had been her first flatterer, he had flattered
without ulterior motive. She was a ragged child and he a rich young man
who might have to die. Suddenly she felt that the little girl who was
once herself had been more admirable in every way than this polished
woman who had succeeded her: the woman who was everything that little
girl had yearned to be and who stood self-revealed as brilliant and hard
as one of her own purely decorative diamonds.
A small clock chimed, and, with a somewhat weary step, Mary Burton
crossed the room and rang for her maid.
At dinner and later when the moon had risen and the guests danced on the
smooth mosaic floor of an outdoor pavilion cunningly fashioned in the
semblance of a Greek theater, her eyes were pools of laughter and her
repartee was like wine sparkle--for at least she had learned to act with
the empty bravery of her world.
In the constant attendance of men who chattered compliments she felt a
haunting sense of pursuit and a secret impulse for flight, so that at
the first opportunity she slipped away for the relief of solitude.
There were many vine-embowered retreats about the place where those who
did not wish to dance might talk softly in the blue shadows of Grecian
urns with star-shine and moon-mist for their tête-à-têtes. In such a
place sat Mary Burton, alone--looking about her for a means of more
secure escape. Her imagination kept disturbing her with the figure of a
small girl whose home was a soon-to-be-abandoned farm. A yearning
possessed her for the one thing which she could not command, the sort of
romance that sweeps one away like a torrent. That little girl had
yearned for the gifts of the world, for experience, wealth and
adulation, because she fancied that out of these things came romance and
its prize of happiness. The woman had them all--except the end of them
all for which she had wanted them. They were dulled and tarnished by
satiety and she still craved the coming of a lover whose forceful wooing
should frighten and dominate her. Never in her life had she known any
man upon whom she could not, with her trained self-reliance, set her own
metes and bounds. Surely somewhere in the world there must be the sort
of love-making that wrenches a woman out of her perfect self-composure
and bears her away on its flood tide of power and passion. Perhaps she
had been schooled and "finished" until humanity and its wonderful
reality had, for her, ceased to exist. Suddenly she felt an upflaming of
resentment against the generosity of her Napoleonic brother. In exchange
for life's golden chance of romance she had been given a wonderful
veneer of hard brilliancy--and she hated it! After a few moments of
rebellious introspection she shook her head and rose from her seat,
slipping behind the tall marble urn that rose from the end of the bench
into the enveloping shadows. She was seeking a refuge where she might
hide and hear the music softened by the distance and she kept walking,
lured on by the wildness of the surrounding hills which just now better
suited her mood than the clipped hedges.
She found a place at last from which, as one apart, she could look up at
the stars and down at the dancers.
There was a larger crowd dancing now than there had been. Evidently new
guests had arrived since dinner. She was beginning to feel the solace of
her escape from other human beings when she became conscious of a
white-clad figure approaching her, and gave a low exclamation of
annoyance. Yet something in the manner of the man's movement indicated
that he was, like herself, finding greater pleasure in solitude than in
the dance. It was only when he was almost upon her that she stood out
visible in the depth of the shadow. He halted then and bowed his
apology.
"I beg your pardon," said a voice which struck a vaguely familiar chord
of memory. "I didn't mean to intrude. I was just hunting for a spot
where I could watch things without having to talk to anyone."
Mary Burton laughed.
"You don't have to talk to me," she assured him, "because, as it
happens, that's why I'm here myself."
It was too dark for recognition of features, but there was a silvery
quality in the girl's voice which piqued the interest of the newcomer
and caused him to deviate from his avowed purpose of self-withdrawal. It
seemed to him that music sounded across a space of years--music
remembered and longed for.
"The dismissal is unmistakable in its terms," he answered. "Yet, since I
have come a long way, may I not sit here for a moment of rest--provided
I am very silent?"
Mary smiled and then quite unpremeditatedly she found herself
inquiring, "A long way? Where do you come from then?"
"From St. Petersburg," he enlightened in a casual fashion, and after a
moment he added, "to see you!"
"You just said you were seeking a place to be alone and why should you
look for me whom you never saw before and whom you can't see now, for
the dark? You don't even know what I'm like."
"I beg your pardon, Miss Burton.--There, you see I know your name."
The tantalizingly familiar note in his voice puzzled and interested her
with a cumulative force. "I have a very definite idea what you are like.
Not being a poet, I'm afraid I can't put it into words."
"But you haven't seen me!" Her speech became for an instant
mischievously whimsical. "Of course, if you have a burglar's lantern
about you--or a match I suppose you might."
The man drew a small case from his pocket and struck a wax match,
holding it close.
She met his gaze, and he stood motionless until the tiny blaze traveled
down the length of the shaft and burned his fingers. His eyes never left
her face. In those eyes she felt a strange power of magnetism, for they
did not burn as other eyes had burned. They did not shift or waver. When
the match fell he spoke quietly. "You are as beautiful as starlight on
water and I am a true prophet."
In the brief and limited illumination she had recognized him, too, and
she bent impulsively toward him. In his coming just now as though in
answer to her thoughts there seemed something almost occult.
"Then you didn't die? You won your fight with your even chance? Oh, I
am so glad!"
"Thank you," answered Jefferson Edwardes gravely. "That's worth refusing
to die for."
"It's strange, Mr. Edwardes," she spoke almost dreamily. "Perhaps it's
because I've been listening to the voice of the hills, but I have been
sitting here alone--hiding--and while I've been here I've been thinking
of you--wondering where you were."
"For that, too, I thank 'whatever gods there be,'" he assured her. "It
has been a long time since we met and I was afraid you had forgotten. Of
course, I've read of you and I knew that my prophecy was being
fulfilled. Twice I planned to leave St. Petersburg and pursue you to
London or Paris, but each time business matters intervened with their
relentless demands."
"What made you think of me?" An eager sincerity sounded through the
question. She was weary of compliments, but Jefferson Edwardes had a
manner of simple speech which gave worth to his utterances.
"Once upon a time," he began with a low laugh, "there lived a singularly
sickening little prig of a kid, pampered and spoiled to his selfish
marrow. Though I hate to roast a small boy, I am bound to say that this
one was pretty nearly a total loss--and he was I. He threatened to grow
into a more odious man, but Providence intervened in his behalf--with
disguised kindness. Providence threw him out by the scruff of his
arrogant neck to fight for his life or to die--which was what he needed.
He went to your mountains to scrap with microbes--and he had leisure to
discover what a microbe he was himself."
The girl's laugh was a peal of silvery music in the dark. "Were you a
microbe?" she demanded. "All these years I've thought you a fairy
prince." With a sudden gravity she added, "To one small girl, you opened
a gate of dreams, and brought her contentment--" she broke off and the
final words were almost whispered--"so long as they remained dreams."
"And now--" he took her up with grave and earnest interest--"now that
they have become realities, what of them?"
"That comes later," she reminded him. "We aren't through yet with the
little boy who won out with his fighting chance."
"When you knew him your hills had done something for him. They had
humanized him. He went as one goes to exile, full of bitterness. Your
hills were a miracle of wholesomeness. They cleansed and restored him
with the song of their high-riding winds and the whispers of their
pines. They confided to him those things that God only says to man in
His own out-of-doors. Your mountains were good to me. I became something
of a dreamer there, and in those dreams you have always stood as the
personal incarnation of those hills. That is why I have thought of you
unendingly ever since."
Mary Burton's answer was to shake her head and declare wistfully:
"I almost wish you hadn't seen me again. It would have been better if
the illusion could have lasted."
"Since then," he went on, "the little girl has grown up and been
crowned, but I shall prefer to think of her as she was before she knew
she was to wear Cinderella's slipper."
"I wonder," she murmured, "if you can."
For a time they were silent while the dance music reached them softened
by the distance, and then he inquired in a low voice:
"Do you by any miracle of chance remember an injunction I laid upon you
one afternoon by the roadside?"
Mary Burton looked up and answered with a nod of her head. "Does any
woman ever forget her first compliment?"
"What was it?"
"'Wield leniently the dangerous gift of your witchcraft--the--'" She
abruptly broke off in the quotation and found herself coloring like a
schoolgirl, so Jefferson Edwardes took up the injunction where she had
left it incomplete. "The freakish beauty of your perfect, unmatched
eyes," he prompted.
The girl felt a strange flutter in her breast. Just now she had blushed.
What had happened to the poise of her usual self-command? Some influence
was abroad tonight or some hypnotism in those steady eyes that gave her
a sense of vague apprehension. It was an apprehension though that
thrilled her strangely with a welcome fear--and a promise. Tides were
stirring that were all new tides. It was as though marvels were
possible. She heard him saying again as he had said once before, "You
are as beautiful as starlight on water."
"So was Cleopatra, my friend. So was Helen of Troy. So were ... Circe
and Faustina."
"But they," he laughed, "did not wield kindly the power of their eyes."
Mary Burton winced, then she turned and faced him. Her voice trembled.
"Why did I have to meet you tonight? It isn't fair! They have schooled
my brain into every useless vanity. They have fed my selfishness until
it has strangled my heart. Never until today did I face the truth. All
afternoon I've been sitting alone--hating myself. I am nothing but an
artificial little flirt, and I have not obeyed your injunction." She
paused, then hurried on with the forced manner of one resolved upon full
confession! "Perhaps so far I've hurt only myself--but I've done
that--mortally. Then you come and I learn that you've woven an illusion
about me--and I destroy it."
Jefferson Edwardes smiled in the dark, but spoke gravely.
"You call yourself an artificial little flirt. You haven't flirted with
me. Why?"
"With you I have talked ten minutes." She laughed suddenly as though at
some absurd thought. "Besides, did any woman ever flirt with you? Can
one lie to eyes that see through one?"
"My eyes do see something," he said. "They see that you have never had a
chance to be your real self. You have been surrounded by flatterers and
sycophants, when you needed sincere and truthful friends."
"Truthful friends!" She repeated the words after him incredulously. "I
wonder if such things exist."
"I am one," he announced bluntly. "I am going to give back to you the
message your hills gave me--without flattery and without adjectives."
He came a step nearer and an unaccountable wave of attraction and fear
thrilled her--flooded her heart until her temples burned. She had been
wishing for the coming of a man who would not be clay in her hands. To
Circe all men must have been swine, from the start, save the man who
could pass by. Now, of a sudden, every wile of coquetry became a lost
art to Mary Burton. She felt like an accomplished and intriguing
diplomat, facing an adversary who has no secrets to conceal and no
interest in the evasions of others. He roused a new eagerness because
she knew intuitively that to mere fascination he would surrender no
principle. With the realization came a sense of surprise and exaltation
and timidity, and she spoke slowly with an interval between her words.
"Why--will--you--assume this rôle?"
"Because--" his voice was confident and inspired a responsive
confidence--"there is such a thing as a chemistry of souls. Life is a
laboratory where Destiny experiments with test-tubes and reagents.
Powerful ingredients may be mixed without result because they hold in
common no element of reaction. Other ingredients at the instant of
mingling turn violet or crimson or explode or burst into flame--because
they were meant to mingle to that end. Nature says so. Does the reason
matter?"
She asked another question, rather faintly, because she felt herself
startlingly lifted on a tide against which it was a useless thing to
struggle. Something in her wanted to sing, and something else wanted to
cry.
"I'm afraid chemistry is one of the things they didn't teach me much
about. Probably because it was useful. Can you put it in words of one
syllable?"
"Yes." He was standing close, but he bent nearer and his voice filled
and amplified the brevity of his monosyllables. "In three. I love you."
Mary Burton started back, and a low exclamation broke incoherently from
her lips.
The man caught both her hands and spoke with tense eagerness.
"You say I have met you in the dark for a few minutes. True. I have
looked on your face while one match burned out ... but I have dreamed of
you ever since I shrined you in my heart--back there--long ago by the
roadside. If you are not the woman of my visions, you can be, and I mean
that you shall be. You are a woman trained in the ways of your world. If
you could help it, you would not let a man take your hands in his, like
this, at a first meeting--would you?"
She shook her head, but her hands lay as motionless as though their
nerves were dead. She could feel the throbbing pulses of his fingers and
suddenly he bent forward and pressed his lips to hers, while she stood
amazed and unresisting. "Or kiss your lips--like this--would you? With
women I am timid, because I have never before been a lover. I could not
do what I am doing unless something stronger than myself were acting
through me. It is the chemistry of souls. It is written." He let his
arms fall at his sides.
Mary Burton pressed her temples with her fingers. Her knees felt weak
and she stood unsteadily on her feet. The man passed a supporting arm
about her waist. Finally, she drew herself up and laughed with a
nervousness that bordered on the hysterical.
"I wonder," she said brokenly; and paused only to repeat again: "I
wonder whether it's the great adventure I've dreamed of--or just
moon-madness? Ought I to be very angry?"
"You will have time to decide," he told her. "What I have said and done
I shall say and do again--often."
"It's strange," she murmured as though talking to herself. "I thought I
understood men. I'm not a schoolgirl any more. Yet I'm as bewildered as
though you were the first man who ever said, 'I love you.'"
"Thank God for that."
She turned and laid a hand on his arm. Her voice came with a musical
vehemence.
"If I do come to love you, I think it will be heaven or hell to me. I'm
not going to be angry until I've thought about it--and thought hard, and
I'm not going to love you unless you make me. Come, let's go back."
As they turned into the path toward the house, she broke irrelevantly
into laughter.
"When you lighted your match--and burned your fingers--what did you
think of my pearls?"
"I didn't see them," he promptly replied. "Were you wearing pearls?"
Confused by the sudden and marvelous consciousness of all life being
changed at a stroke, of doors that had swung wide between all the old
and all the new, Mary Burton walked as in a daze, her fingers toying
with the gems about her neck. But before she had taken many steps the
man laid a hand on her arm and halted her. When she turned he caught her
by her shoulders and his words came tumultuously and with an impassioned
earnestness.
"You must not deny me the chance to say something more," he declared.
"What I have said is either too much or too little. You ask me whether I
saw your pearls. When I first spoke to you--a child with all autumn's
glory blazing at your back, did I have eyes for trees and skies and
landscapes; though they were splendid and profligate in their beauty?
No. I saw you--only you! If you had stood against a drab curtain it
would have been the same. You were a child, too young to stir an adult
heart to love or passion.... What was it then that fixed you from that
moment in my heart?"
She looked back at him and asked faintly, "What was it?"
"That same chemistry of souls," he declared. "That same writing of our
futures in one horoscope; a voice that decreed: 'You shall wait for
her,' though I did not understand its message--until now. And now that I
have seen you, how can I think of pearls?"
To hear words of love spoken in a wild onrush of feeling was no new
experience to Mary Burton, yet it was as though she had never heard them
before. In the past her ears had heard, but now her heart was listening,
and her heart pounded in her breast as it drank in what the man said. He
talked fast, with his eyes on her eyes, and his hands grasping her white
shoulders. His heart, too, rather than his tongue, was speaking.
"You will read in every book," he declared, "that such things as this
are impossible. Give our lives the chance to write their own pages and
you will know that they are true and inevitable. To me you have been a
dream--I have told myself over and over again that it was only a dream,
the whimsical imagination of a man who has lived too much to
himself--who was abnormal. Now I have seen you. Had I seen you every day
since that first day it could mean no more to me. At the first syllable
of your voice--I _knew_. I need no further test."
"But I--?" she faltered.
"You shall take all the time you need. I told you that you had stood in
my mind as the spirit of the hills that gave me back my life. I told you
what I have been telling myself. Now I know better. From that first
instant my life has been molded--for this. Though I did not then know
it, I lived because I _had_ to live. I had to live because it was
written that my life should complete itself by loving you. It was not
your hills that gave me health again--it was yourself. You do not
personify the hills, but the hills personify you. My dream is no longer
a dream, it is a reality. I love you."
"But I have told you," she persisted, "that I am not what you think."
"You are what I know. I love you."
She stood tremblingly before him, and her words came with a whispered
wonderment.
"Things like this don't happen," she said. Then she added, "All the
things you tell me are such things as life laughs at, and yet there is
another side--my side. I have yearned to feel something that had the
power to lift me out of myself and make me gloriously helpless,
something big enough to set my heart beating beyond control--and I never
have felt it--till now. I--I am not the same girl. I don't know
myself.... You have come and I am suddenly different."
"Love's chemistry," he assured her. "The Mary Burton of this moment is
to be the Mary Burton of always, until she becomes Mary Edwardes."
"At all events, I must be alone--to think," she told him. "You can go
and dance, if you like. I've been here two days and I know all the
secret passages. I'm going to slip into my room by a back stairway and
think hard about how angry I am to be with you tomorrow."
"And I," he answered, "shall not dance. I am going to sequester myself
in the woods and pray the gods of fair auspices that you won't be too
angry."