"You forgot me last night."
"Yes, I did." Clavering smiled unrepentantly.
"You looked horribly primitive."
"No more so than I felt."
They were in a boat on the lake. The air was crisp and cold although
the sun blazed overhead. Clavering was happy in a disreputable old
sweater that he kept at the camp, and baggy corduroy trousers tucked
into leggins, but Mary wore an angora sweater and skirt of a vivid
grass green and a soft sport hat of the same shade, the rim turned down
over eyes that might never have looked upon life beyond these woods and
mountains. Clavering was hatless and smoked his pipe lazily as he
pulled with long slow strokes.
Other boats were on the lake, the women in bright sweaters and hats
that looked like floating autumn leaves, and the lake was liquid amber.
A breeze blew warm scents out of the woods. The water lilies had
opened to the sun and looked oddly artificial in their waxen beauty, at
the feet of those ancient trees. Stealthy footsteps behind that wall
of trees, or a sudden loud rustling, told of startled deer. The
distant peak looked to be enamelled blue and white, and the long slopes
of the nearer mountains were dark green under a blue mist, the higher
spruce rising like Gothic spires.
Clavering smiled into her dancing eyes. "You look about fourteen," he
said tenderly.
"I don't feel much more. I spent a month or two every year in these
woods--let us play a game. Make believe that I am Mary Ogden and you
have met me here for the first time and are deliberately setting out to
woo me. Begin all over again. It--you, perhaps!--was what I always
dreamed of up here. I used to row on the lake for hours by myself, or
sit alone in the very depths of the woods. Do you think that famous
imagination of yours could accomplish a purely personal feat? I
haven't nearly as much but I'm quite sure I could. And then--after--we
could just go on from here."
He looked at her in smiling sympathy. "Done. We met last night, Miss
Ogden, and I went down at the first shot. I'm now out to win you or
perish in the attempt. But before we get down to business I'll just
inform you of a resolution I took a day or two ago. I shall get a
license the day we return and marry you the morning you sail."
"Oh!" And then she realized in a blinding flash what she had fought
out of her consciousness: that she had shrunk from the consummation of
marriage, visualized a long period of intermittent but superficial
love-making and delightful companionship, an exciting but incomplete
idyl of mind and soul and senses. . . . Underneath always an undertone
of repulsion and incurable ennui . . . the dark residuum of immedicable
disillusion . . . that what she had really wanted was love with its
final expression eliminated.
But she realized it only as a fact, . . . a psychological study of
another . . . buried down there in an artificial civilization she had
forgotten . . . in that past that belonged to Marie Zattiany . . . with
which Mary Ogden had nothing to do . . . her mind at last was as young
as her body, and this man had accomplished the miracle. The present
and the future were his.
She looked up into his eyes, anxious but imperious, and answered
softly: "Why not?"
"Exactly. I've no desire to take that long journey with you, but I'm
not going to take any chances, either. . . . Ah! Here's an idea that
beats the other hollow. When the party breaks up we'll go down to
Huntersville with them, marry there, and return to the camp. I don't
see how your Dolomites could beat this for a honeymoon. Why in thunder
should we trail all the way over to Europe to find seclusion when we
must return in two or three months, anyhow? It's a scandalous waste.
We can go to the Dolomites for our second honeymoon--we'll have one
every year. And this is much more in the picture if you want to be
Mary Ogden again. She never would have proposed anything so elaborate
and unnecessary. Say yes, and don't be more than a minute about it."
Mary drew in her breath sharply. The plan made a violent and
irresistible appeal. There would be no long interval for possible
reversal, for contacts in which it might be difficult to hold fast to
her new faith. But what excuse could she make to leave him
later? . . . Later? Did Austria really exist? Did she care? Let the
future take care of itself. Her horizon, a luminous band, encircled
these mountains. . . . She smiled into his ardent eyes. "Very well.
I'll write to Hortense today and tell her to send me up a trousseau of
sorts. And now--you are to understand that you have not dared to
propose to me yet and are suffering all the qualms of uncertainty, for
I am a desperate flirt, and took a long walk in the woods this morning
with Mr. Scores."
"Very well, Miss Ogden, I will now do my best to make a fool of myself,
and as soon as we return to camp will telegraph to New York for a
five-pound box of chocolates."
"Hark! Hark! The Lark!" shouted Todd as he rowed past with Babette
Gold. "Only there isn't a lark or any other bird in these woods that
I've been able to discover."
"Birds sing one at a time," shouted back Clavering. "Choir of jealous
soloists."
He rowed into a little cove and they gazed into the dim green woods,
but the maple leaves grew almost to the ground, and it was like peering
through the tiny changing spaces of a moving curtain through which one
glimpsed green columns flecked with gold.
He beached the boat, and they walked, single file, up a narrow run-way
made by the deer. Everywhere was that leafy whispering curtain.
Between the rigid spruce and soft maples were fragrant balsams, and
ferns, and an occasional pine with its pale green spikes. They passed
enormous boulders detached from the glaciers that had ground mountains
in their embrace, but today things of mere beauty in their coats of
pink and green and golden moss.
Their footsteps made no sound on the mossy path, and they came suddenly
upon a deer and his doe drinking at a pool. But the antlered head was
flung back instantly, the magnificent buck wheeled on his hind legs,
gave a leap and went crashing through the forest snorting his
protesting fury. The doe scampered after, her white-lined tail
standing up perfectly straight.
They sat down on a log, dried and warmed by the sun in this open space,
and talked for two hours. There was no need for careful avoidance of
dangerous subjects. Clavering had come to these woods nearly every
year since he had made the north his home, and she had forgotten
nothing of her woodland lore. When one is "in the woods," as the great
Adirondacks are familiarly called, one rarely talks of anything but
their manifold offerings. It is easy enough to forget the world. They
both had had their long tramps, their rough campings-out, more or less
exciting adventures. When a loud bell, hung in a frame outside the
camp, summoned them to dinner, they walked out briskly. Once, as the
trail widened, he touched her fingers tentatively. She let her own
curl for a moment, then gave him a provocative glance over her shoulder
and hurried on.