Ailsa and her sister-in-law, Mrs. Craig, had been unusually
reticent over their embroidery that early afternoon, seated
together in the front room, which was now flooded with sunshine--an
attractive, intimate room, restful and pretty in spite of the
unlovely Victorian walnut furniture.
Through a sunny passageway they could look into Ailsa's
bedroom--formerly the children's nursery--where her maid sat sewing.
Outside the open windows, seen between breezy curtains, new buds
already clothed the great twisted ropes of pendant wistaria with a
silvery-green down.
The street was quiet under its leafless double row of trees, maple,
ailanthus, and catalpa; the old man who trudged his rounds
regularly every week was passing now with his muffled shout:
Any old hats
Old coats
Old boots!
_Any_ old mats
Old suits,
Old flutes! Ca-ash!
And, leaning near to the sill, Ailsa saw him shuffling along,
green-baize bag bulging, a pyramid of stove-pipe hats crammed down
over his ears.
At intervals from somewhere in the neighbourhood sounded the
pleasant bell of the scissors grinder, and the not unmusical call
of "Glass put in!" But it was really very tranquil there in the
sunshine of Fort Greene Place, stiller even for the fluted call of
an oriole aloft in the silver maple in front of the stoop.
He was a shy bird even though there were no imported sparrows to
drive this lovely native from the trees of a sleepy city; and he
sat very still in the top branches, clad in his gorgeous livery of
orange and black, and scarcely stirred save to slant his head and
peer doubtfully at last year's cocoons, which clung to the bark
like shreds of frosted cotton.
Very far away, from somewhere in the harbour, a deep sound jarred
the silence. Ailsa raised her head, needle suspended, listened for
a moment, then resumed her embroidery with an unconscious sigh.
Her sister-in-law glanced sideways at her.
"I was thinking of Major Anderson, Celia," she said absently.
"So was I, dear. And of those who must answer for his gove'nment's
madness,--God fo'give them."
There was no more said about the Major or his government. After a
few moments Ailsa leaned back dreamily, her gaze wandering around
the sunny walls of the room. In Ailsa Paige's eyes there was
always a gentle caress for homely things. Just now they caressed
the pictures of "Night" and "Morning," hanging there in their round
gilt frames; the window boxes where hyacinths blossomed; the
English ivy festooned to frame the window beside her
sister-in-law's writing-desk; the melancholy engraving over the
fireplace--"The Motherless Bairn"--a commonplace picture which
harrowed her, but which nobody thought of discarding in a day when
even the commonplace was uncommon.
She smiled in amused reminiscence of the secret tears she had wept
over absurd things--of the funerals held for birds found dead--of
the "Three Grains of Corn" poem which, when a child, elicited from
her howls of anguish.
Little golden flashes of recollection lighted the idle path as her
thoughts wandered along hazy ways which led back to her own nursery
days; and she rested there, in memory, dreaming through the
stillness of the afternoon.
She missed the rattle and noise of New York. It was a little too
tranquil in Fort Greene Place; yet, when she listened intently,
through the city's old-fashioned hush, very far away the voices of
the great seaport were always audible--a ceaseless harmony of river
whistles, ferry-boats signalling on the East River, ferry-boats on
the North River, perhaps some mellow, resonant blast from the bay,
where an ocean liner was heading for the Narrows. Always the
street's stillness held that singing murmur, vibrant with deep
undertones from dock and river and the outer sea.
Strange spicy odours, too, sometimes floated inland from the sugar
wharves, miles away under the Heights, to mingle with the scent of
lilac and iris in quiet, sunny backyards where whitewashed fences
reflected the mid-day glare, and cats dozed in strategical
positions on grape trellis and tin roofs of extensions, prepared
for war or peace, as are all cats always, at all times.
"Celia!"
Celia Craig looked up tranquilly.
"Has anybody darned Paige's stockings?"
"No, she hasn't, Honey-bell. Paige and Marye must keep their
stockings da'ned. I never could do anything fo' myse'f, and I
won't have my daughters brought up he'pless."
Ailsa glanced humorously across at her sister-in-law.
"You sweet thing," she said, "you can do anything, and you know it!"
"But I don't like to do anything any mo' than I did befo' I had
to," laughed Celia Craig; and suddenly checked her mirth, listening
with her pretty close-set ears.
"That is the do'-bell," she remarked, "and I am not dressed."
"It's almost too early for anybody to call," said Ailsa tranquilly.
But she was wrong, and when, a moment later, the servant came to
announce Mr. Berkley, Ailsa regarded her sister-in-law in pink
consternation.
"I did _not_ ask him," she said. "We scarcely exchanged a dozen
words. He merely said he'd like to call--on you--and now he's done
it, Celia!"
Mrs. Craig calmly instructed the servant to say that they were at
home, and the servant withdrew.
"Do you approve his coming--this way--without anybody inviting
him?" asked Ailsa uneasily.
"Of co'se, Honey-bell. He is a Berkley. He should have paid his
respects to us long ago."
"It was for him to mention the relationship when I met him. He did
not speak of it, Celia."
"No, it was fo' you to speak of it first," said Celia Craig gently.
"But you did not know that."
"Why?"
"There are reasons, Honey-bud."
"What reasons?"
"They are not yo' business, dear," said her sister-in-law quietly.
Ailsa had already risen to examine herself in the mirror. Now she
looked back over her shoulder and down into Celia's pretty
eyes--eyes as unspoiled as her own.
In Celia Craig remained that gracious and confident faith in
kinship which her Northern marriage had neither extinguished nor
chilled. The young man who waited below was a Berkley, a kinsman.
Name and quality were keys to her hospitality. There was also
another key which this man possessed, and it fitted a little locked
compartment in Celia Craig's heart. But Ailsa had no knowledge of
this. And now Mrs. Craig was considering the advisability of
telling her--not all, perhaps,--but something of how matters stood
between the House of Craig and the House of Berkley. But not how
matters stood with the House of Arran.
"Honey-bud," she said, "you must be ve'y polite to this young man."
"I expect to be. Only I don't quite understand why he came so
unceremoniously----"
"It would have been ruder to neglect us, little Puritan! I want to
see Connie Berkley's boy. I'm glad he came."
Celia Craig, once Celia Marye Ormond Paige, stood watching her
taller sister-in-law twisting up her hair and winding the thick
braid around the crown of her head _a la coronal_. Little wonder
that these two were so often mistaken for own sisters--the matron
not quite as tall as the young widow, but as slender, and fair, and
cast in the same girlish mould.
Both inherited from their Ormond ancestry slightly arched and
dainty noses and brows, delicate hands and feet, and the same
splendid dull-gold hair--features apparently characteristic of the
line, all the women of which had been toasts of a hundred years
ago, before Harry Lee hunted men and the Shadow of the Swamp Fox
flitted through the cypress to a great king's undoing.
Ailsa laid a pink bow against her hair and glanced at her
sister-in-law for approval.
"I declare. Honey-bud, you are all rose colour to-day," said Celia
Craig, smiling; and, on impulse, unpinned the pink-and-white cameo
from her own throat and fastened it to Ailsa's breast.
"I reckon I'll slip on a gay gown myse'f," she added mischievously.
"I certainly am becoming ve'y tired of leaving the field to my
sister-in-law, and my schoolgirl daughters."
"Does anybody ever look at us after you come into a room?" asked
Ailsa, laughing; and, turning impulsively, she pressed Celia's
pretty hands flat together and kissed them. "You darling," she
said. An unaccountable sense of expectancy--almost of exhilaration
was taking possession of her. She looked into the mirror and stood
content with what she saw reflected there.
"How much of a relation is he, Celia?" balancing the rosy bow with
a little cluster of pink hyacinth on the other side.
Celia Craig, forefinger crooked across her lips, considered aloud.
"_His_ mother was bo'n Constance Berkley; _her_ mother was bo'n
Betty Ormond; _her_ mother was bo'n Felicity Paige; _her_
mother----"
"Oh please! I don't care to know any more!" protested Ailsa,
drawing her sister-in-law before the mirror; and, standing behind
her, rested her soft, round chin on her shoulder, regarding the two
reflected faces.
"That," observed the pretty Southern matron, "is conside'd ve'y bad
luck. When I was a young girl I once peeped into the glass over my
ole mammy's shoulder, and she said I'd sho'ly be punished befo' the
year was done."
"And were you?"
"I don't exactly remember," said Mrs. Craig demurely, "but I think
I first met my husband the ve'y next day."
They both laughed softly, looking at each other in the mirror.
So, in her gown of rosy muslin, bouffant and billowy, a pink flower
in her hair, and Celia's pink-and-white cameo at her whiter throat
Ailsa Paige descended the carpeted stairs and came into the mellow
dimness of the front parlour, where there was much rosewood, and a
French carpet, and glinting prisms on the chandeliers,--and a young
man, standing, dark against a bar of sunshine in which golden motes
swam.
"How do you do," she said, offering her narrow hand, and: "Mrs.
Craig is dressing to receive you. . . . It is warm for April, I
think. How amiable of you to come all the way over from New York.
Mr. Craig and his son Stephen are at business, my cousins, Paige
and Marye, are at school. Won't you sit down?"
She had backed away a little distance from him, looking at him
under brows bent slightly inward, and thinking that she had made no
mistake in her memory of this man. Certainly his features were
altogether too regular, his head and body too perfectly moulded
into that dark and graceful symmetry which she had hitherto vaguely
associated with things purely and mythologically Olympian.
Upright against the doorway, she suddenly recollected with a blush
that she was staring like a schoolgirl, and sat down. And he drew
up a chair before her and seated himself; and then under the
billowy rose crinoline she set her pretty feet close together,
folded her hands, and looked at him with a smiling composure which
she no longer really felt.
"The weather," she repeated, "is unusually warm. Do you think that
Major Anderson will hold out at Sumter? Do you think the fleet is
going to relieve him? Dear me," she sighed, "where will it all
end, Mr. Berkley?"
"In war," he said, also smiling; but neither of them believed it,
or, at the moment, cared. There were other matters
impending--since their first encounter.
"I have thought about you a good deal since Camilla's theatre
party," he said pleasantly.
"Have you?" She scarcely knew what else to say--and regretted
saying anything.
"Indeed I have. I dare not believe you have wasted as much as one
thought on the man you danced with once--and refused ever after."
She felt, suddenly, a sense of uneasiness in being near him.
"Of course I have remembered you, Mr. Berkley," she said with
composure. "Few men dance as well. It has been an agreeable
memory to me."
"But you would not dance with me again."
"I--there were--you seemed perfectly contented to sit out--the
rest--with me."
He considered the carpet attentively. Then looking up with quick,
engaging smile:
"I want to ask you something. May I?"
She did not answer. As it had been from the first time she had
ever seen him, so it was now with her; a confused sense of the
necessity for caution in dealing with a man who had inspired in her
such an unaccountable inclination to listen to what he chose to say.
"What is it you wish to ask?" she inquired pleasantly.
"It is this: are you _really_ surprised that I came? Are you, in
your heart?"
"Did I appear to be very much agitated? Or my heart, either, Mr.
Berkley?" she asked with a careless laugh, conscious now of her
quickening pulses. Outwardly calm, inwardly Irresolute, she faced
him with a quiet smile of confidence.
"Then you were not surprised that I came?" he insisted.
"You did not wait to be asked. That surprised me a little."
"I did wait. But you didn't ask me."
"That seems to have made no difference to you," she retorted,
laughing.
"It made this difference. I seized upon the only excuse I had and
came to pay my respects as a kinsman. Do you know that I am a
relation?"
"That is a very pretty compliment to us all, I think."
"It is you who are kind in accepting me."
"As a relative, I am very glad to----"
"I came," he said, "to see _you_. And you know it."
"But you _couldn't_ do that, uninvited! I had not asked you."
"But--it's done," he said.
She sat very still, considering him. Within her, subtle currents
seemed to be contending once more, disturbing her equanimity. She
said, sweetly:
"I am not as offended as I ought to be. But I do not see why you
should disregard convention with me."
"I didn't mean it that way," he said, leaning forward. "I couldn't
stand not seeing you. That was all. Convention is a pitiful
thing--sometimes--" He hesitated, then fell to studying the carpet.
She looked at him, silent in her uncertainty. His expression was
grave, almost absent-minded. And again her troubled eyes rested on
the disturbing symmetry of feature and figure in all the
unconscious grace of repose; and in his immobility there seemed
something even of nobility about him which she had not before
noticed.
She stole another glance at him. He remained very still, leaning
forward, apparently quite oblivious of her. Then he came to
himself with a quick smile, which she recognised as characteristic
of all that disturbed her about this man--a smile in which there
was humour, a little malice and self-sufficiency and--many, many
things she did not try to analyse.
"Don't you really want an unreliable servant?" he asked.
His perverse humour perplexed her, but she smiled.
"Don't you remember that I once asked you if you needed an
able-bodied man?" he insisted.
She nodded.
"Well, I'm that man."
She assented, smiling conventionally, not at all understanding. He
laughed, too, thoroughly enjoying something.
"It isn't really very funny," he said, "Ask your brother-in-law. I
had an interview with him before I came here. And I think there's
a chance that he may give me a desk and a small salary in his
office."
"How absurd!" she said.
"It is rather absurd. I'm so absolutely useless. It's only
because of the relationship that Mr. Craig is doing this."
She said uneasily: "You are not really serious, are you?"
"Grimly serious."
"About a--a desk and a salary--in my brother-in-law's office?"
"Unless you'll hire me as a useful man. Otherwise, I hope for a
big desk and a small salary. I went to Mr. Craig this morning, and
the minute I saw him I knew he was fine enough to be your
brother-in-law. And I said, 'I am Philip Ormond Berkley; how do
you do!' And he said, 'How do you do!' And I said, 'I'm a
relation,' and he said, 'I believe so.' And I said, 'I was
educated at Harvard and in Leipsic; I am full of useless
accomplishments, harmless erudition, and insolvent amiability, and
I am otherwise perfectly worthless. Can you give me a position?'"
"And he said: 'What else is the matter?' And I said, 'The stock
market.' And that is how it remains, I am to call on him
to-morrow."
She said in consternation: "Forgive me. I did not think you meant
it. I did not know that you were--were----"
"Ruined!" he nodded laughingly. "I am, practically. I have a
little left--badly invested--which I'm trying to get at. Otherwise
matters are gay enough."
She said wonderingly: "Had this happened when--I saw you that first
time?"
"It had just happened. I looked the part, didn't I?"
"No. _How_ could you be so--interesting and--and be--what you
were--knowing this all the while?"
"I went to that party absolutely stunned. I saw you in a corner of
the box--I had just been hearing about you--and--I don't know now
what I said to you. Afterward"--he glanced at her--"the world was
spinning, Mrs. Paige. You only remained real--" His face altered
subtly. "And when I touched you----"
"I gave you a waltz, I believe," she said, striving to speak
naturally; but her pulses had begun to stir again; the same
inexplicable sense of exhilaration and insecurity was creeping over
her.
With a movement partly nervous she turned toward the door, but
there sounded no rustle of her sister's skirts from the stairs, and
her reluctant eyes slowly reverted to him, then fell in silence,
out of which she presently strove to extract them both with some
casual commonplace.
He said in a low voice, almost to himself:
"I want you to think well of me."
She gathered all her composure, steadied her senses to choose a
reply, and made a blunder:
"Do you really care what I think?" she asked lightly, and bit her
lip too late.
"Do you believe I care about anything else in the world--now?"
She went on bravely, blindly:
"And do _you_ expect me to believe in--in such an exaggerated and
romantic expression to a staid and matter-of-fact widow whom you
never saw more than once in your life?"
"You _do_ believe it."
Confused, scarcely knowing what she was saying, she still attempted
to make light of his words, holding her own against herself for the
moment, making even some headway. And all the while she was aware
of mounting emotion--a swift inexplicable charm falling over them
both.
He had become silent again, and she was saying she knew not
what--fortifying her common-sense with gay inconsequences, when he
looked up straight into her eyes.
"I have distressed you. I should not have spoken as I did."
"No, you should not----"
"Have I offended you?"
"I--don't know."
Matters were running too swiftly for her; she strove to remain
cool, collected, but confusion was steadily threatening her, and
neither resentment nor indifference appeared as allies.
"Mrs. Paige, can you account for--that night? The moment I touched
you----"
She half rose, sank back into her seat, her startled eyes meeting
his.
"I--don't know what you mean."
"Yes--you know."
Flushed, voices unsteady, they no longer recognised themselves.
"You have never seen me but once," she said. "You cannot
believe----"
"I have not known a moment's peace since I first saw you."
She caught her breath. "It is your business worries that torment
you----"
"It is desire to be near you."
"I don't think you had better say such a thing----"
"I know I had better not. But it is said, and it is true. I'm not
trying to explain it to you or to myself. It's just true. There
has not been one moment, since I saw you, which has been free from
memory of you----"
"Please----"
"I scarcely know what I am saying--but it's true!" He checked
himself. "I'm losing my head now, which isn't like me!" He choked
and stood up; she could not move; every nerve in her had become
tense with emotions so bewildering that mind and body remained
fettered.
He was walking to and fro, silent and white under his self-control.
She, seated, gazed at him as though stunned, but every pulse was
riotously unsteady.
"I suppose you think me crazy," he said hoarsely, "but I've not
known a moment's peace of mind since that night--not one! I
_couldn't_ keep away any longer. I can't even hold my tongue now,
though I suppose it's ruining me every time I move it. It's a
crazy thing to come here and say what I'm saying."
He went over and sat down again, and bent his dark gaze on the
floor. Then:
"Can you forgive what I have done to you?"
She tried to answer, and only made a sign of faint assent. She no
longer comprehended herself or the emotions menacing her. A
curious tranquillity quieted her at moments--intervals in which she
seemed to sit apart watching the development of another woman,
listening to her own speech, patient with her own silences. There
was a droop to her shoulders now; his own were sagging as he leaned
slightly forward in his chair, arms resting on his knees, while
around them the magic ebbed, eddied, ebbed; and lassitude succeeded
tension; and she stirred, looked up at him with eyes that seemed
dazed at first, then widened slowly into waking; and he saw in them
the first clear dawn of alarm. Suddenly she flushed and sprang to
her feet, the bright colour surging to her hair.
"Don't!" he said. "Don't reason! There will be nothing left of me
if you do--or of, these moments. You will hate them--and me, if
you reason. Don't think--until we see each other again!"
She dropped her eyes slowly, and slowly shook her head.
"You ask too much," she said. "You should not have said that."
All the glamour was fading. Her senses were seeking their balance
after the incredible storm that had whirled them into chaos.
Fear stirred sharply, then consternation--flashes of panic pierced
her with darts of shame, as though she had been in physical contact
with this man.
All her outraged soul leaped to arms, quivering now under the
reaction; the man's mere presence was becoming unendurable; the
room stifled her. She turned, scarce knowing what she was doing;
and at the same moment her sister-in-law entered.
Berkley, already on his feet, turned short: and when she offered
him a hand as slim and white as Ailsa's, he glanced inquiringly at
the latter, not at all certain who this charming woman might be.
"Mrs. Craig," said Ailsa.
"I don't believe it," he said. "You haven't grown-up children!"
"Don't you really believe it, Mr. Berkley? Or is it just the
flattering Irish in you that natters us poor women to our
destruction?"
He had sense and wit enough to pay her a quick and really graceful
compliment; to which she responded, still laughing:
"Oh, it is the Ormond in you! I am truly ve'y glad you came. You
are Constance Berkley's son--Connie Berkley! The sweetest girl
that ever lived."
There was a silence. Then Mrs. Craig said gently:
"I was her maid of honour, Mr. Berkley."
Ailsa raised her eyes to his altered face, startled at the change
in it. He looked at her absently, then his gaze reverted to Ailsa
Paige.
"I loved her dearly," said Mrs. Craig, dropping a light, impulsive
hand on his. "I want her son to know it."
Her eyes were soft and compassionate; her hand still lingered
lightly on his, and she let it rest so.
"Mrs. Craig," he said, "_you_ are the most real person I have known
in many years among the phantoms. I thought your sister-in-law
was. But you are still more real."
"Am I?" she laid her other hand over his, considering him
earnestly. Ailsa looking on, astonished, noticed a singular
radiance on his face--the pale transfiguration from some quick
inward illumination.
Then Celia Craig's voice sounded almost caressingly:
"I think you should have come to see us long ago." A pause. "You
are as welcome in this house as your mother would be if she were
living. I love and honour her memory."
"I have honoured little else in the world," he said. They looked
at one another for a moment; then her quick smile broke out. "I
have an album. There are some Paiges, Ormonds, and Berkleys in
it----"
Ailsa came forward slowly.
"Shall I look for it, Celia?"
"No, Honey-bell." She turned lightly and went into the back
parlour, smiling mysteriously to herself, her vast, pale-blue
crinoline rustling against the furniture.
"My sister-in-law," said Ailsa, after an interval of silent
constraint, "is very Southern. Any sort of kinship means a great
deal to her. I, of course, am Northern, and regard such matters as
unimportant."
"It is very gracious of Mrs. Craig to remember it," he said. "I
know nothing finer than confidence in one's own kin."
She flushed angrily. "I have not that confidence--in kinsman."
For a moment their eyes met. Hers were hard as purple steel.
"Is that final?"
"Yes."
The muscles in his cheeks grew tense, then into his eyes came that
reckless glimmer which in the beginning she had distrusted--a gay,
irresponsible radiance which seemed to mock at all things worthy.
He said: "No, it is not final. I shall come back to you."
She answered him in an even, passionless voice:
"A moment ago I was uncertain; now I know you. You are what they
say you are. I never wish to see you again."
Celia Craig came back with the album. Berkley sprang to relieve
her of the big book and a box full of silhouettes, miniatures, and
daguerreotypes. They placed the family depository upon the table
and then bent over it together.
Ailsa remained standing by the window, looking steadily at nothing,
a burning sensation in both cheeks.
At intervals, through the intensity of her silence, she heard
Celia's fresh, sweet laughter, and Berkley's humorous and engaging
voice. She glanced sideways at the back of his dark curly head
where it bent beside Celia's over the album. What an insolently
reckless head it was! She thought that she had never before seen
the back of any man's head so significant of character--or the want
of it. And the same quality--or the lack of it--now seemed to her
to pervade his supple body, his well-set shoulders, his voice,
every movement, every feature--something everywhere about him that
warned and troubled.
[Illustration: "What an insolently reckless head it was!"]
Suddenly the blood burnt her cheeks with a perfectly
incomprehensible desire to see his face again. She heard her
sister-in-law saying:
"We Paiges and Berkleys are kin to the Ormonds and the Earls of
Ossory. The Estcourts, the Paiges, the Craigs, the Lents, the
Berkleys, intermarried a hundred years ago. . . . My grandmother
knew yours, but the North is very strange in such matters. . . .
Why did you never before come?"
He said: "It's one of those things a man is always expecting to do,
and is always astonished that he hasn't done. Am I unpardonable?"
"I did not mean it in that way."
He turned his dark, comely head and looked at her as they bent
together above the album.
"I know you didn't. My answer was not frank. The reason I never
came to you before was that--I did not know I would be welcomed."
Their voices dropped. Ailsa standing by the window, watching the
orioles in the maple, could no longer distinguish what they were
saying.
He said: "You were bridesmaid to my mother. You are the Celia
Paige of her letters."
"She is always Connie Berkley to me. I loved no woman better. I
love her still."
"I found that out yesterday. That is why I dared come. I found,
among the English letters, one from you to her, written--_after_."
"I wrote her again and again. She never replied. Thank God, she
knew I loved her to the last."
He rested on the tabletop and stood leaning over and looking down.
"Dear Mr. Berkley," she murmured gently.
He straightened himself, passed a hesitating hand across his
forehead, ruffling the short curly hair. Then his preoccupied gaze
wandered. Ailsa turned toward him at the same moment, and
instantly a flicker of malice transformed the nobility of his set
features:
"It seems," he said, "that you and I are irrevocably related in all
kinds of delightful ways, Mrs. Paige. Your sister-in-law very
charmingly admits it, graciously overlooks and pardons my many
delinquencies, and has asked me to come again. Will you ask me,
too?"
Ailsa merely looked at him.
Mrs. Craig said, laughing: "I knew you were all Ormond and entirely
Irish as soon as I came in the do'--befo' I became aware of your
racial fluency. I speak fo' my husband and myse'f when I say,
please remember that our do' is ve'y wide open to our own kin--and
that you are of them----"
"Oh, I'm all sorts of things beside--" He paused for a
second--"Cousin Celia," he added so lightly that the grace with
which he said it covered the impudence, and she laughed in
semi-critical approval and turned to Ailsa, whose smile in response
was chilly--chillier still when Berkley did what few men have done
convincingly since powdered hair and knee-breeches became
unfashionable--bent to salute Celia Craig's fingertips. Then he
turned to her and took his leave of her in a conventional manner
entirely worthy of the name his mother bore,--and her mother before
her, and many a handsome man and many a beautiful woman back to
times when a great duke stood unjustly attainted, and the Ormonds
served their king with steel sword and golden ewer; and served him
faithfully and well.
Camilla Lent called a little later. Ailsa was in the backyard
garden, a trowel in her hand, industriously loosening the earth
around the prairie roses.
"Camilla," she said, looking up from where she was kneeling among
the shrubs, "what was it you said this morning about Mr. Berkley
being some unpleasant kind of man?"
"How funny," laughed Camilla. "You asked me that twice before."
"Did I? I forgot," said Mrs. Paige with a shrug; and, bending over
again, became exceedingly busy with her trowel until the fire in
her cheeks had cooled.
"Every woman that ever saw him becomes infatuated with Phil
Berkley," said Camilla cheerfully. "I was. You will be. And the
worst of it is he's simply not worth it."
"I--thought not."
"Why did you think not?"
"I don't know why."
"He _can_ be fascinating," said Camilla reflectively, "but he
doesn't always trouble himself to be."
"Doesn't he?" said Ailsa with a strange sense of relief.
Camilla hesitated, lowered her voice.
"They say he is fast," she whispered. Ailsa, on her knees, turned
and looked up.
"Whatever that means," added Camilla, shuddering. "But all the
same, every girl who sees him begins to adore him immediately until
her parents make her stop."
"How silly," said Ailsa in a leisurely level voice. But her heart
was beating furiously, and she turned to her roses with a blind
energy that threatened them root and runner.
"How did you happen to think of him at all?" continued Camilla
mischievously.
"He called on--Mrs. Craig this afternoon."
"I didn't know she knew him."
"They are related--distantly--I believe----"
"Oh," exclaimed Camilla. "I'm terribly sorry I spoke that way
about him, dear----"
"_I_ don't care what you say about him," returned Ailsa Paige
fiercely, emptying some grains of sand out of one of her gloves;
resolutely emptying her mind, too, of Philip Berkley.
"Dear," she added gaily to Camilla, "come in and we'll have tea and
gossip, English fashion. And I'll tell you about my new duties at
the Home for Destitute Children--every morning from ten to twelve,
my dear, in their horrid old infirmary--the poor little
darlings!--and I would be there all day if I wasn't a selfish,
indolent, pleasure-loving creature without an ounce of womanly
feeling--Yes I am! I must be, to go about to galleries and dances
and Philharmonics when there are motherless children in that
infirmary, as sick for lack of love as for the hundred and one
ailments distressing their tender little bodies."
But over their tea and marmalade and toast she became less
communicative; and once or twice the conversation betrayed an
unexpected tendency to drift toward Berkley.
"I haven't the slightest curiosity concerning him, dear," said
Ailsa, attempting corroboration in a yawn--which indiscretion she
was unable to accomplish.
"Well," remarked Camilla, "the chances are that you've seen the
last of him if you showed it too plainly. Men don't come back when
a girl doesn't wish them to. Do they?"
After Camilla had gone, Ailsa roamed about the parlours, apparently
renewing her acquaintance with the familiar decorations.
Sometimes she stood at windows, looking thoughtfully into the empty
street; sometimes she sat in corners, critically surveying empty
space.
Yes, the chances were that he would scarcely care to come back. A
man of that kind did not belong in her sister-in-law's house,
anyway, nor in her own--a man who could appeal to a woman for a
favourable opinion of himself, asking her to suspend her reason,
stifle logic, stultify her own intelligence, and trust to a
sentimental impulse that he deserved the toleration and
consideration which he asked for. . . . It was certainly well for
her that he should not return. . . . It would be better for her to
lay the entire matter before her sister-in-law--that was what she
would do immediately!
She sprang to her feet and ran lightly up-stairs; but, fast as she
fled, thought outran her slender flying feet, and she came at last
very leisurely into Celia's room, a subdued, demure opportunist,
apparently with nothing on her mind and conscience,
"If I may have the carriage at ten, Celia, I'll begin on the
Destitute Children to-morrow. . . . Poor babies! . . . If they
only had once a week as wholesome food as is wasted in this city
every day by Irish servants . . . which reminds me--I suppose you
will have to invite your new kinsman to dine with you."
"There is loads of time for that, Honey-bud," said her
sister-in-law, glancing up absently from the note she was writing.
"I was merely wondering whether it was necessary at all," observed
Ailsa Paige, without interest.
But Celia had begun to write again. "I'll ask him," she said in
her softly preoccupied voice, "Saturday, I think."
"Oh, but I'm invited to the Cortlandt's," began Ailsa, and caught
her under lip in her teeth. Then she turned and walked noiselessly
into her bedroom, and sat down on the bed and looked at the wall.