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[Illustration: HE IMPRISONED THE SMALL HAND]
GLORY OF
YOUTH
BY
TEMPLE BAILEY
AUTHOR OF
CONTRARY MARY
ILLUSTRATED BY
HENRY HUTT and C. S. CORSON
NEW YORK
GROSSET & DUNLAP
PUBLISHERS
Made in the United States of America
[Illustration: Publishers mark]
First printing, August, 1913 Second printing, February, 1916 Third
printing February, 1917 Fourth printing August, 1919
Manufacturing Plant
Camden, N. J.
The Glory of Youth
_To
My Mother_
Contents
I. BETTINA 9
II. IN THE SHADOWY ROOM 21
III. IN WHICH DIANA REAPS 36
IV. WHITE LILACS 51
V. IN WHICH BETTINA DANCES 64
VI. "FOR EVERY MAN THERE IS JUST ONE WOMAN" 80
VII. HARBOR LIGHT 94
VIII. THE EMPTY HOUSE 105
IX. THE GOLDEN AGE 116
X. STORM SIGNALS 127
XI. THE WHITE MAIDEN 141
XII. YOUTH AND BEAUTY 155
XIII. HER LETTER TO ANTHONY 170
XIV. THE LITTLE SILVER RING 185
XV. IN WHICH BETTINA FLIES 199
XVI. VOICES IN THE DARK 213
XVII. GLORY OF YOUTH 227
XVIII. PENANCE 242
XIX. HER FATHER'S RING 257
XX. THE "GRAY GULL" 272
XXI. BROKEN WINGS 285
XXII. THE ENCHANTED FOREST 300
XXIII. THE PROCESSION OF PRETTY LADIES 316
XXIV. THE AFTERGLOW 323
Glory of Youth
CHAPTER I
BETTINA
The girl knelt on the floor, feverishly packing a shabby little trunk.
Outside was a streaming April storm, and the rain, rushing against the
square, small-paned windows, shut out the view of the sea, shut out the
light, and finally brought such darkness that the girl stood up with a
sigh, brushed off her black dress with thin white hands, and groped her
way to the door.
Beyond the door was the blackness of an upper hall in a tall century-old
house. A spiral stairway descended into a well of gloom. An ancient iron
lantern, attached to a chain, hung from the low ceiling.
The girl lighted the lantern, and the faint illumination made deeper the
shadows below.
And from the shadows came a man's voice.
"May I come up?"
As the girl bent over the railing, the glow of the lantern made of her
hair a shining halo. "Oh," she cried, radiantly, "I'm so glad you've
come. I--I was afraid----"
The thunder rolled, the waves pounded on the rocks, and the darkness
grew more dense, but now the girl did not heed, for what mattered a mere
storm, when, ascending the stairs, was one who knew fear neither of life
nor of death, nor of the things which come after death?
When at last her visitor emerged from the gloom, he showed himself
beyond youthful years, with hair slightly touched with gray, not tall,
but of a commanding presence, with clear, keen blue eyes, and with
cheeks which were tanned by out-of-door exercise, and reddened by the
prevailing weather.
"I just had to come," he said, as he took her hand. "I knew you'd be
frightened."
"Yes," she said, "Miss Matthews is at school, and I am alone----"
"And unhappy?"
Her lips quivered, but she drew her hand from his, and went on into the
shabby room, where she lighted a candle in a brass holder, and touched a
match to a fire which was laid in the blackened brick fireplace.
The doctor's quick eye noted the preparations for departure.
"What does that mean?" he asked, and pointed to the trunk.
"I--I am going away----"
"Away?"
"Yes," nervously; "I--I can't stay here, doctor."
"Why not?"
"Oh," tremulously, "it was all right when I had mother, because she was
so sick that I was too busy to realize how deadly lonely it was here. I
knew she needed the sea air, and she could get it better in the top of
this old house than anywhere else. But now that she's gone--I can't
stand it. I'm young, and Miss Matthews is away all day teaching--and
when she comes home at night we have nothing in common, and there's the
money left from the insurance--and so--I'm going away."
He looked at her, with her red-gold hair in high relief against the worn
leather of the chair in which she sat, at the flower-like face, the
slender figure, the tiny feet in childish strapped slippers.
"You aren't fit to fight the world," he said; "you aren't fit."
"Perhaps it won't be such a fight," she said. "I could get something to
do in the city, and----"
He shook his head. "You don't know--you can't know----" Then he broke
off to ask, "What would you do with your furniture?"
"Miss Matthews would be glad to take the rooms just as they are. She was
delighted when you asked her to stay with me after mother died. She
loves our old things, the mahogany and the banjo clock, and the
embroidered peacocks, and the Venetian heirlooms that belonged to Dad's
family. But I hate them."
"Hate them--why?"
"Because, oh, you know, because Dad treated mother so dreadfully. He
broke her heart."
His practiced eye saw that she was speaking tensely.
"I wish you'd get me a cup of tea," he said, suddenly. "I'm just from
the sanatorium. I operated on a bad case--and, well, that's sufficient
excuse, isn't it, for me to want to drink a cup of tea with you?"
She was busy in a moment with her hospitality.
"Oh, why didn't you tell me? And you're wet." Her hand touched his coat
lightly as she passed him.
"The rain came so suddenly that I couldn't get the window of my car
closed; it's an awful storm.
"And now," he said, when she had brought the tea on an old Sheffield
tray, and had set it on a little folding table which he placed between
them on the hearth, "and now let's talk about it."
"Please don't try to make me stay----"
"Why not?"
"Because, oh, because you can't know what I suffer here; it isn't just
because I've lost mother, but the people--they all know about her and
about Dad, and they aren't nice to me."
"My dear child!"
"Perhaps it's because father was a singer and an Italian, and mother
came of good old Puritan stock. They seem to think she lowered herself
by marrying him. They can't understand that though he was unkind to her,
he belonged to an aristocratic Venetian family----"
"It's from those wonderful women of Venice, then, that you get that
hair. Do you remember Browning's:
"'Dear dead women, with such hair, too--what's become of all the gold
Used to hang and brush their bosoms? I feel chilly and grown old.'"
There was no response to his thought in her young eyes.
"I've never read Browning," she said, negligently, "and I hate to think
of 'dear dead women.' I want to think of live things, of bright things,
of gay things. It seems sometimes as if I should die here among the
shadows."
She was sobbing now, with her head on the table.
"Bettina," the doctor bent over her, "poor child, poor little child."
"Please let me go," she whispered.
"I can't keep you, of course. I wish I knew what to do. I wish Diana
were here."
"Diana?"
"I forgot that you did not know her. She has been away for two years.
She's rather wonderful, Bettina."
The girl raised her head. The man was gazing straight into the fire. All
the eager light that had made his face seem young had gone, and he
looked worn and tired. Bettina had no worldly intuitions to teach her
the reason for the change a woman's name had wrought, and so absorbed
was she in her own trouble that she viewed the transformation with
unseeing eyes.
"What could she do if she were here?" she asked with childish
directness.
"She would find some way out of it--she is very wise." He spoke with
some hesitation, as a man speaks who holds a subject sacred. "She has
had to decide things for herself all her life--her father and mother
died when she was a little girl; now she is over thirty and the mistress
of a large fortune. She spends her winters in the city and her summers
down here by the sea--but for the past two years she has been staying in
Europe with a widowed friend who was a schoolmate of hers in Berlin."
"When is she coming back?"
Out of a long silence, he answered, "I am not sure that she will come
back. Her engagement was announced last fall--to a German, Ulric Van
Rosen--she is to be married in June."
The fact, to him so pregnant of woeful possibilities, meant little to
Bettina.
"Of course if she's not here, she can't do anything--and anyhow most
people don't care to do practical things to help, do they?"
She looked so childish, so appealing, so altogether exquisite and young
in her black-robed slenderness, that he answered her as he would have
answered a child.
"It's too bad that the world should hurt you."
"But I'm going to do wonderful things in the city."
"Wonderful things--poor little girl----"
As he brought his eyes back from the fire to her face, he seemed to
bring his thoughts back from an uneasy reverie.
"You ought," he said, "to marry----"
The color flamed into the girl's cheeks. "Mother was always saying that,
in those last days. But I hated to have her; it seemed so dreadful to
talk of marriage--without love. I know she didn't mean it that way, poor
darling! She married for love and her life was such a failure. But I
couldn't--not just to get married, could I--not just to have some one
take care of me?"
He stood up, and thrust his hands in his pockets. "No," he agreed
bluffly, "you couldn't, of course."
"And there's never been any one in love with me," was her naive
confession, "and I've never been in love, not really----"
He was looking down at her with smiling eyes. "There's plenty of time."
"Yes--that's what I always told mother--but she dreaded to think of
me--alone."
The eager, dying woman had said the same thing to the doctor, and it had
seemed to him, sometimes, that her burning eyes had begged of him a
favor which he could not grant.
For there had always been--Diana!
He straightened his shoulders. "I'm going to ask you to stay here," he
said, "instead of going to the city. I haven't any real right to keep
you, for I'm not legally your guardian, but I promised your mother to
look after you. I can find work for you. We need some one at the
sanatorium to look after the office----"
For a moment she set her will against his. "But I'd rather go to the
city."
He put his strong hands on her shoulders. "Little child, look at me," he
said, and when she flashed up at him a startled glance, he went on,
gently, "Your mother wanted me to take care of you--to keep you from
harm. In the city you'll be too far away. I want you to stay here. Will
you?"
And presently she whispered, "I will stay."
Outside the rain was rushing and the wind was blowing, and plain little
Miss Matthews battled with the storm. Miss Matthews, who, every day in
the year, taught a class of tumultuous children, and whose life dealt
always with the commonplace. And it was plain little Miss Matthews who,
having weathered the storm and climbed the winding stairs, came in,
rain-coated and soft-hatted, to find by the fire the doctor drawing on
his gloves and Bettina hovering about him like a gold-tipped butterfly.
"It's a dreadful storm," said Miss Matthews, superfluously, as Bettina
went to get boiling water. "There's a young man down-stairs who wants to
speak to you, Dr. Blake. He said that he couldn't find you at the
sanatorium. He saw your car in front of the house and knew you were
here. But the bell wouldn't ring, and so he waited. I told him the bell
was broken and that you'd come down at once. He's hurt his hand."
"They would have fixed him up at the sanatorium."
"He said he wanted you, and nobody else, and that he came into the hall
because he was like a pussy cat and hated the rain. He is a queer
looking creature in a leather cap and leather leggins."
The doctor gave an amused laugh. "That's Justin Ford," he said; "the
pussy-cat speech sounds like him, and he wears the leather costume when
he flies."
Bettina, coming back with fresh tea for Miss Matthews, asked, "How does
he fly?"
"In an aeroplane. He's to try out his hydro-aeroplane to-morrow. He's
probably been at work on the machinery and hurt his hand."
Bettina sparkled. "Think of a man who can fly," she said. "Doesn't it
sound incredible?"
"It's the most marvelous thing in the world," said the big-hearted
surgeon, not knowing that he, as a man of healing, was more marvelous,
for he had to do with the mechanics of flesh and blood, while Justin had
to do only with steel and aluminum and canvas, which are, at best,
unimportant things when compared with nerves and ligaments and bones.
"Would you mind if Ford came up?" the doctor asked. "I've got to go
straight to my old man with the pneumonia after I leave here, and I
could look at his hand."
Bettina shivered. "Shall I have to look at it?" she asked in a little
voice.
He laughed. "Of course not. You can go in the other room."
But when the young man, who had answered the doctors call, entered, she
did not go, for the face which was framed by the leather cap was that of
a youth whose beauty matched her own, and whose mocking eyes, as he
acknowledged the introduction, seemed to beat against the door of her
maiden heart and demand admission.