Produced by Robert Shimmin and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
LITTLE EVE EDGARTON
BY
ELEANOR HALLOWELL ABBOTT
Author of "Molly Make Believe," "The White Linen Nurse," etc.
With Illustrations by
R.M. CROSBY
NEW YORK
THE CENTURY CO.
1914
_Published, September, 1914_
[Illustration: "Music! Flowers! Palms! Catering! Everything!"]
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
"Music! Flowers! Palms! Catering! Everything!"
"I am riding," she murmured almost inaudibly
"I would therefore respectfully suggest as a special topic of
conversation the consummate cheek of--yours truly, Paul Reymouth
Edgarton!"
"Your PAPER-DOLL BOOK?" stammered Barton
"Don't delay me!" she said, "I've got to make four hundred muffins!"
Suddenly full comprehension broke upon him and he fairly blurted out
his astonishing information
"You're nice," he said. "I like you!"
"Any time that you people want me," suggested Edgarton's icy voice, "I
am standing here--in about the middle of the floor!"
LITTLE EVE EDGARTON
CHAPTER I
"But you live like such a fool--of course you're bored!" drawled the
Older Man, rummaging listlessly through his pockets for the
ever-elusive match.
"Well, I like your nerve!" protested the Younger Man with unmistakable
asperity.
"Do you--really?" mocked the Older Man, still smiling very faintly.
For a few minutes then both men resumed their cigars, staring
blinkishly out all the while from their dark green piazza corner into
the dazzling white tennis courts that gleamed like so many slippery
pine planks in the afternoon glare and heat. The month was August, the
day typically handsome, typically vivid, typically caloric.
It was the Younger Man who recovered his conversational interest
first. "So you think I'm a fool?" he resumed at last quite abruptly.
"Oh, no--no! Not for a minute!" denied the Older Man. "Why, my dear
sir, I never even implied that you were a fool! All I said was that
you--lived like a fool!"
Starting to be angry, the Younger Man laughed instead. "You're
certainly rather an amusing sort of chap," he acknowledged
reluctantly.
A gleam of real pride quickened most ingenuously in the Older Man's
pale blue eyes. "Why, that's just the whole point of my argument," he
beamed. "Now--you look interesting. But you aren't! And I--don't look
interesting. But it seems that I am!"
"You--you've got a nerve!" reverted the Younger Man.
Altogether serenely the Older Man began to rummage again through all
his pockets. "Thank you for your continuous compliments," he mused.
"Thank you, I say. Thank you--very much. Now for the very first time,
sir, it's beginning to dawn on me just why you have honored me with
so much of your company--the past three or four days. I truly believe
that you like me! Eh? But up to last Monday, if I remember correctly,"
he added drily, "it was that showy young Philadelphia crowd that was
absorbing the larger part of your--valuable attention? Eh? Wasn't it?"
"What in thunder are you driving at?" snapped the Younger Man. "What
are you trying to string me about, anyway? What's the harm if I did
say that I wished to glory I'd never come to this blasted hotel? Of
all the stupid people! Of all the stupid places! Of all the
stupid--everything!"
"The mountains here are considered quite remarkable by some,"
suggested the Older Man blandly.
"Mountains?" snarled the Younger Man. "Mountains? Do you think for a
moment that a fellow like me comes to a God-forsaken spot like this
for the sake of mountains?"
A trifle noisily the Older Man jerked his chair around and, slouching
down into his shabby gray clothes, with his hands thrust deep into his
pockets, his feet shoved out before him, sat staring at his companion.
Furrowed abruptly from brow to chin with myriad infinitesimal wrinkles
of perplexity, his lean, droll face looked suddenly almost monkeyish
in its intentness.
"What does a fellow like you come to a place like this for?" he asked
bluntly.
"Why--tennis," conceded the Younger Man. "A little tennis. And golf--a
little golf. And--and--"
"And--girls," asserted the Older Man with precipitous conviction.
Across the Younger Man's splendidly tailored shoulders a little
flicker of self-consciousness went crinkling. "Oh, of course," he
grinned. "Oh, of course I've got a vacationist's usual partiality for
pretty girls. But Great Heavens!" he began, all over again. "Of all
the stupid--!"
"But you live like such a fool--of course you're bored," resumed the
Older Man.
"There you are at it again!" stormed the Younger Man with tempestuous
resentment.
"Why shouldn't I be 'at it again'?" argued the Older Man mildly.
"Always and forever picking out the showiest people that you can
find--and always and forever being bored to death with them
eventually, but never learning anything from it--that's you! Now
wouldn't that just naturally suggest to any observing stranger that
there was something radically idiotic about your method of life?"
"But that Miss Von Eaton looked like such a peach!" protested the
Younger Man worriedly.
"That's exactly what I say," droned the Older Man.
"Why, she's the handsomest girl here!" insisted the Younger Man
arrogantly.
"That's exactly what I say," droned the Older Man.
"And the best dresser!" boasted the Younger Man stubbornly.
"That's exactly what I say," droned the Older Man.
"Why, just that pink paradise hat alone would have knocked almost any
chap silly," grinned the Younger Man a bit sheepishly.
"Humph!" mused the Older Man still droningly. "Humph! When a chap
falls in love with a girl's hat at a summer resort, what he ought to
do is to hike back to town on the first train he can catch--and go
find the milliner who made the hat!"
"Hike back to--town?" gibed the Younger Man. "Ha!" he sneered. "A chap
would have to hike back a good deal farther than 'town' these days to
find a girl that was worth hiking back for! What in thunder's the
matter with all the girls?" he queried petulantly. "They get stupider
and stupider every summer! Why, the peachiest debutante you meet the
whole season can't hold your interest much beyond the stage where you
once begin to call her by her first name!"
Irritably, as he spoke, he reached out for a bright-covered magazine
from the great pile of books and papers that sprawled on the wicker
table close at his elbow. "Where in blazes do the story-book writers
find their girls?" he demanded. Noisily with his knuckles he began to
knock through page after page of the magazine's big-typed
advertisements concerning the year's most popular story-book heroines.
"Why--here are no end of story-book girls," he complained, "that could
keep a fellow guessing till his hair was nine shades of white! Look at
the corking things they say! But what earthly good are any of 'em to
you? They're not real! Why, there was a little girl in a magazine
story last month--! Why, I could have died for her! But confound it, I
say, what's the use? They're none of 'em real! Nothing but moonshine!
Nothing in the world, I tell you, but just plain made-up moonshine!
Absolutely improbable!"
Slowly the Older Man drew in his long, rambling legs and crossed one
knee adroitly over the other.
"Improbable--your grandmother!" said the Older Man. "If there's--one
person on the face of this earth who makes me sick it's the ninny who
calls a thing 'improbable' because it happens to be outside his own
special, puny experience of life."
Tempestuously the Younger Man slammed down his magazine to the floor.
"Great Heavens, man!" he demanded. "Where in thunder would a fellow
like me start out to find a story-book girl? A real girl, I mean!"
"Almost anywhere--outside yourself," murmured the Older Man blandly.
"Eh?" jerked the Younger Man.
"That's what I said," drawled the Older Man with unruffled suavity.
"But what's the use?" he added a trifle more briskly. "Though you
searched a thousand years! A 'real girl'? Bah! You wouldn't know a
'real girl' if you saw her!"
"I tell you I would!" snapped the Younger Man.
"I tell you--you wouldn't!" said the Older Man.
"Prove it!" challenged the Younger Man.
"It's already proved!" confided the Older Man. "Ha! I know your type!"
he persisted frankly. "You're the sort of fellow, at a party, who
just out of sheer fool-instinct will go trampling down every other man
in sight just for the sheer fool-joy of trying to get the first dance
with the most conspicuously showy-looking, most conspicuously
artificial-looking girl in the room--who always and invariably 'bores
you to death' before the evening is over! And while you and the rest
of your kind are battling together--year after year--for this special
privilege of being 'bored to death,' the 'real girl' that you're
asking about, the marvelous girl, the girl with the big, beautiful,
unspoken thoughts in her head, the girl with the big, brave, undone
deeds in her heart, the girl that stories are made of, the girl whom
you call 'improbable'--is moping off alone in some dark, cold
corner--or sitting forlornly partnerless against the bleak wall of the
ballroom--or hiding shyly up in the dressing-room--waiting to be
discovered! Little Miss Still-Waters, deeper than ten thousand seas!
Little Miss Gunpowder, milder than the dusk before the moon ignites
it! Little Miss Sleeping-Beauty, waiting for her Prince!"
"Oh, yes--I suppose so," conceded the Younger Man impatiently. "But
that Miss Von Eaton--"
"Oh, it isn't that I don't know a pretty face--or hat, when I see it,"
interrupted the Older Man nonchalantly. "It's only that I don't put my
trust in 'em." With a quick gesture, half audacious, half apologetic,
he reached forward suddenly and tapped the Younger Man's coat sleeve.
"Oh, I knew just as well as you," he affirmed, "oh, I knew just as
well as you--at my first glance--that your gorgeous young Miss Von
Eaton was excellingly handsome. But I also knew--not later certainly
than my second glance--that she was presumably rather stupid. You
can't be interesting, you know, my young friend, unless you do
interesting things--and handsome creatures are proverbially lazy.
Humph! If Beauty is excuse enough for Being, it sure takes Plainness
then to feel the real necessity for--Doing.
"So, speaking of hats, if it's stimulating conversation that you're
after, if you're looking for something unique, something significant,
something really worth while--what you want to do, my young friend, is
to find a girl with a hat you'd be ashamed to go out with--and stay
home with her! That's where you'll find the brains, the originality,
the vivacity, the sagacity, the real ideas!"
With his first sign of genuine amusement the Younger Man tipped back
his head and laughed right up into the green-lined roof of the piazza.
"Now just whom would you specially recommend for me?" he demanded
mirthfully. "Among all the feminine galaxy of bores and frumps that
seem to be congregated at this particular hotel--just whom would you
specially recommend for me? The stoop-shouldered, school-marmy Botany
dame with her incessant garden gloves? Or?--Or--?" His whole face
brightened suddenly with a rather extraordinary amount of humorous
malice: "Or how about that duddy-looking little Edgarton girl that I
saw you talking with this morning?" he asked delightedly. "Heaven
knows she's colorless enough to suit even you--with her
winter-before-spring-before-summer-before-last clothes and her voice
so meek you'd have to hold her in your lap to hear it. And her--"
"That 'duddy-looking' little Miss Edgarton--meek?" mused the Older Man
in sincere astonishment. "Meek? Why, man alive, she was born in a
snow-shack on the Yukon River! She was at Pekin in the Boxer
Rebellion! She's roped steers in Oklahoma! She's matched her
embroidery silks to all the sunrise tints on the Himalayas! Just why
in creation should she seem meek--do you suppose--to a--to
a--twenty-five-dollar-a-week clerk like yourself?"
"'A twenty-five-dollar-a-week clerk like myself?'" the Younger Man
fairly gasped. "Why--why--I'm the junior partner of the firm of Barton
& Barton, stock-brokers! Why, we're the biggest--"
"Is that so?" quizzed the Older Man with feigned surprise.
"Well--well--well! I beg your pardon. But now doesn't it all go to
prove just exactly what I said in the beginning--that it doesn't
behoove a single one of us to judge too hastily by appearances?"
As if fairly overwhelmed with embarrassment he sat staring silently
off into space for several seconds. Then--"Speaking of this Miss
Edgarton," he resumed genially, "have you ever exactly sought her
out--as it were--and actually tried to get acquainted with her?"
"No," said Barton shortly. "Why, the girl must be thirty years old!"
"S--o?" mused the Older Man. "Just about your age?"
"I'm thirty-two," growled the Younger Man.
"I'm sixty-two, thank God!" acknowledged the Older Man. "And your
gorgeous Miss Von Eaton--who bores you so--all of a sudden--is
about--?"
"Twenty," prompted the Younger Man.
"Poor--senile--babe," ruminated the Older Man soberly.
"Eh?" gasped the Younger Man, edging forward in his chair. "Eh?
'Senile'? Twenty?"
"Sure!" grinned the Older Man. "Twenty is nothing but the 'sere and
yellow leaf' of infantile caprice! But thirty is the jocund youth of
character! On land or sea the Lord Almighty never made anything as
radiantly, divinely young as--thirty! Oh, but thirty's the darling age
in a woman!" he added with sudden exultant positiveness. "Thirty's the
birth of individuality! Thirty's the--"
"Twenty has got quite enough individuality for me, thank you!"
asserted Barton with some curtness.
"But it hasn't!" cried the Older Man hotly. "You've just confessed
that it hasn't!" In an amazing impulse of protest he reached out and
shook his freckled fist right under the Younger Man's nose. "Twenty, I
tell you, hasn't got any individuality at all!" he persisted
vehemently.
"Twenty isn't anything at all except the threadbare cloak of her
father's idiosyncrasies, lined with her mother's made-over tact,
trimmed with her great-aunt somebody's short-lipped smile, shrouding a
brand-new frame of--God knows what!"
"Eh? What?" questioned the Younger Man uneasily.
"When a girl is twenty, I tell you," persisted the Older Man--"there's
not one marrying man among us--Heaven help us!--who can swear whether
her charm is Love's own permanent food or just Nature's temporary
bait! At twenty, I tell you, there's not one man among us who can
prove whether vivacity is temperament or just plain kiddishness;
whether sweetness is real disposition or just coquetry; whether
tenderness is personal discrimination or just sex; whether dumbness is
stupidity or just brain hoarding its immature treasure; whether indeed
coldness is prudery or just conscious passion banking its fires! The
dear daredevil sweetheart whom you worship at eighteen will evolve,
likelier than not, into a mighty sour prig at forty; and the
dove-gray lass who led you to church with her prayer-book ribbons
twice every Sunday will very probably decide to go on the vaudeville
stage--when her children are just in the high school; and the
dull-eyed wallflower whom you dodged at all your college dances will
turn out, ten chances to one, the only really wonderful woman you
know! But at thirty! Oh, ye gods, Barton! If a girl interests you at
thirty you'll be utterly mad about her when she's forty--fifty--sixty!
If she's merry at thirty, if she's ardent, if she's tender, it's her
own established merriment, it's her own irreducible ardor, it's
her--Why, man alive! Why--why--"
"Oh, for Heaven's sake!" gasped Barton. "Whoa there! Go slow! How in
creation do you expect anybody to follow you?"
"Follow me? Follow me?" mused the Older Man perplexedly. Staring very
hard at Barton, he took the opportunity to swallow rather loudly once
or twice.
"Now speaking of Miss Edgarton," he resumed persistently, "now,
speaking of this Miss Edgarton, I don't presume for an instant that
you're looking for a wife on this trip, but are merely hankering a bit
now and then for something rather specially diverting in the line of
feminine companionship?"
"Well, what of it?" conceded the Younger Man.
"This of it," argued the Older Man. "If you are really craving the
interesting why don't you go out and rummage around for it? Rummage
around was what I said! Yes! The real hundred-cent-to-the-dollar
treasures of Life, you know, aren't apt to be found labeled as such
and lying round very loose on the smugly paved general highway! And
astonishingly good looks and astonishingly good clothes are pretty
nearly always equivalent to a sign saying, 'I've already been
discovered, thank you!' But the really big sport of existence, young
man, is to strike out somewhere and discover things for yourself!"
"Is--it?" scoffed Barton.
"It is!" asserted the Older Man. "The woman, I tell you, who fathoms
heroism in the fellow that every one else thought was a knave--she's
got something to brag about! The fellow who's shrewd enough to spy
unutterable lovableness in the woman that no man yet has ever even
remotely suspected of being lovable at all--God! It's like being Adam
with the whole world virgin!"
"Oh, that may be all right in theory," acknowledged the Younger Man,
with some reluctance. "But--"
"Now, speaking of Miss Edgarton," resumed the Older Man monotonously.
"Oh, hang Miss Edgarton!" snapped the Younger Man. "I wouldn't be seen
talking to her! She hasn't any looks! She hasn't any style! She hasn't
any--anything! Of all the hopelessly plain girls! Of all the--!"
"Now see here, my young friend," begged the Older Man blandly. "The
fellow who goes about the world judging women by the sparkle of their
eyes or the pink of their cheeks or the sheen of their hair--runs a
mighty big risk of being rated as just one of two things, a sensualist
or a fool."
"Are you trying to insult me?" demanded the Younger Man furiously.
Freakishly the Older Man twisted his thin-lipped mouth and one
glowering eyebrow into a surprisingly sudden and irresistible smile.
"Why--no," he drawled. "Under all existing circumstances I should
think I was complimenting you pretty considerably by rating you only
as a fool."
"Eh?" jumped Barton again.
"U-m-m," mused the Older Man thoughtfully. "Now believe me, Barton,
once and for all, there 's no such thing as a 'hopelessly plain
woman'! Every woman, I tell you, is beautiful concerning the thing
that she's most interested in! And a man's an everlasting dullard who
can't ferret out what that interest is and summon its illuminating
miracle into an otherwise indifferent face--"
"Is that so?" sniffed Barton.
Lazily the Older Man struggled to his feet and stretched his arms
till his bones began to crack.
"Bah! What's beauty, anyway," he complained, "except just a question
of where Nature has concentrated her supreme forces--in outgrowing
energy, which is beauty; or ingrowing energy, which is brains! Now I
like a little good looks as well as anybody," he confided, still
yawning, "but when I see a woman living altogether on the outside of
her face I don't reckon too positively on there being anything very
exciting going on inside that face. So by the same token, when I see a
woman who isn't squandering any centric fires at all on the contour of
her nose or the arch of her eyebrows or the flesh-tints of her cheeks,
it surely does pique my curiosity to know just what wonderful
consuming energy she is busy about.
"A face isn't meant to be a living-room, anyway, Barton, but just a
piazza where the seething, preoccupied soul can dash out now and then
to bask in the breeze and refreshment of sympathy and appreciation.
Surely then--it's no particular personal glory to you that your friend
Miss Von Eaton's energy cavorts perpetually in the gold of her hair or
the blue of her eyes, because rain or shine, congeniality or
noncongeniality, her energy hasn't any other place to go. But I tell
you it means some compliment to a man when in a bleak, dour, work-worn
personality like the old Botany dame's for instance he finds himself
able to lure out into occasional facial ecstasy the _amazing_ vitality
which has been slaving for Science alone these past fifty years.
Mushrooms are what the old Botany dame is interested in, Barton.
Really, Barton, I think you'd be surprised to see how extraordinarily
beautiful the old Botany dame can be about mushrooms! Gleam of the
first faint streak of dawn, freshness of the wildest woodland dell,
verve of the long day's strenuous effort, flush of sunset and triumph,
zeal of the student's evening lamp, puckering, daredevil smile of
reckless experiment--"
"Say! Are you a preacher?" mocked the Younger Man sarcastically.
"No more than any old man," conceded the Older Man with unruffled
good-nature.
"Old man?" repeated Barton, skeptically. In honest if reluctant
admiration for an instant, he sat appraising his companion's
extraordinary litheness and agility. "Ha!" he laughed. "It would take
a good deal older head than yours to discover what that Miss
Edgarton's beauty is!"
"Or a good deal younger one, perhaps," suggested the Older Man
judicially. "But--but speaking of Miss Edgarton--" he began all over
again.
"Oh--drat Miss Edgarton!" snarled the Younger Man viciously. "You've
got Miss Edgarton on the brain! Miss Edgarton this! Miss Edgarton
that! Miss Edgarton! Who in blazes is Miss Edgarton, anyway?"
"Miss Edgarton? Miss Edgarton?" mused the Older Man thoughtfully. "Who
is she? Miss Edgarton? Why--no one special--except--just my daughter."
Like a fly plunged all unwittingly upon a sheet of sticky paper the
Younger Man's hands and feet seemed to shoot out suddenly in every
direction.
"Good Heavens!" he gasped. "Your daughter?" he mumbled. "Your
daughter?" Every other word or phrase in the English language seemed
to be stricken suddenly from his lips. "Your--your--daughter?" he
began all over again. "Why--I--I--didn't know your name was Edgarton!"
he managed finally to articulate.
An expression of ineffable triumph, and of triumph only, flickered in
the Older Man's face.
"Why, that's just what I've been saying," he reiterated amiably. "You
don't know anything!"
Fatuously the Younger Man rose to his feet, still struggling for
speech--any old speech--a sentence, a word, a cough, anything, in
fact, that would make a noise.
"Well, if little Miss Edgarton is--little Miss Edgarton," he babbled
idiotically, "who in creation--are you?"
"Who am I?" stammered the Older Man perplexedly. As if the question
really worried him, he sagged back a trifle against the sustaining
wall of the house, and stood with his hands thrust deep in his pockets
once more. "Who am I?" he repeated blandly. Again one eyebrow lifted.
Again one side of his thin-lipped mouth twitched ever so slightly to
the right. "Why, I'm just a man, Mr. Barton," he grinned very faintly,
"who travels all over the world for the sake of whatever amusement he
can get out of it. And some afternoons, of course, I get a good deal
more amusement out of it--than I do others. Eh?"
Furiously the red blood mounted into the Young Man's cheeks. "Oh, I
say, Edgarton!" he pleaded. Mirthlessly, wretchedly, a grin began to
spread over his face. "Oh, I say!" he faltered. "I _am_ a fool!"
The Older Man threw back his head and started to laugh.
[Illustration: 'I am riding,' she murmured almost inaudibly]
At the first cackling syllable of the laugh, with appalling
fatefulness Eve Edgarton herself loomed suddenly on the scene, in her
old slouch hat, her gray flannel shirt, her weather-beaten khaki
Norfolk and riding-breeches, looking for all the world like an
extraordinarily slim, extraordinarily shabby little boy just starting
out to play. Up from the top of one riding-boot the butt of a revolver
protruded slightly.
With her heavy black eyelashes shadowing somberly down across her
olive-tinted cheeks, she passed Barton as if she did not even see him
and went directly to her father.
"I am riding," she murmured almost inaudibly.
"In this heat?" groaned her father.
"In this heat," echoed Eve Edgarton.
"There will surely be a thunder-storm," protested her father.
"There will surely be a thunder-storm," acquiesced Eve Edgarton.
Without further parleying she turned and strolled off again.
Just for an instant the Older Man's glance followed her. Just for an
instant with quizzically twisted eyebrows his glance flashed back
sardonically to Barton's suffering face. Then very leisurely he began
to laugh again.
But right in the middle of the laugh--as if something infinitely
funnier than a joke had smitten him suddenly--he stopped short, with
one eyebrow stranded half-way up his forehead.
"Eve!" he called sharply. "Eve! Come back here a minute!"
Very laggingly from around the piazza corner the girl reappeared.
"Eve," said her father quite abruptly, "this is Mr. Barton! Mr.
Barton, this is my daughter!"
Listlessly the girl came forward and proffered her hand to the Younger
Man. It was a very little hand. More than that, it was an exceedingly
cold little hand.
"How do you do, sir?" she murmured almost inaudibly.
With an expression of ineffable joy the Older Man reached out and
tapped his daughter on the shoulder.
"It has just transpired, my dear Eve," he beamed, "that you can do
this young man here an inestimable service--tell him something--teach
him something, I mean--that he very specially needs to know!"
As one fairly teeming with benevolence he stood there smiling blandly
into Barton's astonished face. "Next to the pleasure of bringing
together two people who like each other," he persisted, "I know of
nothing more poignantly diverting than the bringing together of people
who--who--" Mockingly across his daughter's unconscious head,
malevolently through his mask of utter guilelessness and peace, he
challenged Barton's staring helplessness. "So--taken all in all," he
drawled still beamingly, "there's nothing in the world--at this
particular moment, Mr. Barton--that could amuse me more than to have
you join my daughter in her ride this afternoon!"
"Ride with me?" gasped little Eve Edgarton.
"This afternoon?" floundered Barton.
"Oh--why--yes--of course! I'd be delighted! I'd be--be! Only--! Only
I'm afraid that--!"
Deprecatingly with uplifted hand the Older Man refuted every
protest. "No, indeed, Mr. Barton," he insisted. "Oh, no--no indeed--I
assure you it won't inconvenience my daughter in the slightest! My
daughter is very obliging! My daughter, indeed--if I may say so
in all modesty--my daughter indeed is always a good deal of
a--philanthropist!"
Then very grandiloquently, like a man in an old-fashioned picture, he
began to back away from them, bowing low all the time, very, very low,
first to Barton, then to his daughter, then to Barton again.
"I wish you both a very good afternoon!" he said. "Really, I see no
reason why either of you should expect a single dull moment!"
[Illustration: "I would therefore respectfully suggest as a special
topic of conversation the consummate cheek of--yours truly, Paul
Reymouth Edgarton"]
Before the sickly grin on Barton's face his own smile deepened into
actual unctuousness. But before the sudden woodeny set of his
daughter's placid mouth his unctuousness twisted just a little bit
wryly on his lips.
"After all, my dear young people," he asserted hurriedly, "there's
just one thing in the world, you know, that makes two people
congenial, and that is--that they both shall have arrived at exactly
the same conclusion--by two totally different routes. It's got to be
exactly the same conclusion, else there isn't any sympathy in it. But
it's got to be by two totally different routes, you understand, else
there isn't any talky-talk to it!"
Laboriously one eyebrow began to jerk its way up his forehead, and
with a purely mechanical instinct he reached up drolly and pulled it
down again. "So--as the initial test of your mutual congeniality this
afternoon," he resumed, "I would therefore respectfully suggest as a
special topic of conversation the consummate cheek of--yours truly,
Paul Reymouth Edgarton!"
Starting to bow once more, he backed instead into the screen of the
office window. Without even an expletive he turned, pushed in the
screen, clambered adroitly through the aperture, and disappeared
almost instantly from sight.
Very faintly from some far up-stairs region the thin, faint, single
syllable of a laugh came floating down into the piazza corner.
Then just as precipitous as a man steps into any other hole, Barton
stepped into the conversational topic that had just been so aptly
provided for him.
"Is your father something of a--of a practical joker, Miss Edgarton?"
he demanded with the slightest possible tinge of shrillness.
For the first time in Barton's knowledge of little Eve Edgarton she
lifted her eyes to him--great hazel eyes, great bored, dreary, hazel
eyes set broadly in a too narrow olive face.
"My father is generally conceded to be something of a joker, I
believe," she said dully. "But it would never have occurred to me to
call him a particularly practical one. I don't like him," she added
without a flicker of expression.
"I don't either!" snapped Barton.
A trifle uneasily little Eve Edgarton went on. "Why--once when I was a
tiny child--" she droned.
"I don't know anything about when you were a tiny child," affirmed
Barton with some vehemence. "But just this afternoon--!"
In striking contrast to the cool placidity of her face one of Eve
Edgarton's boot-toes began to tap-tap-tap against the piazza floor.
When she lifted her eyes again to Barton their sleepy sullenness was
shot through suddenly with an unmistakable flash of temper.
"Oh, for Heaven's sake, Mr. Barton!" she cried out. "If you insist
upon riding with me, couldn't you please hurry? The afternoons are so
short!"
"If I 'insist' upon riding with you?" gasped Barton.
Disconcertingly from an upper window the Older Man's face beamed
suddenly down upon him. "Oh, don't mind anything she says," drawled
the Older Man. "It's just her cunning, 'meek' little ways."
Precipitately Barton bolted for his room.
Once safely ensconced behind his closed door a dozen different
decisions, a dozen different indecisions, rioted tempestuously through
his mind. To go was just as awkward as not to go! Not to go was just
as awkward as to go! Over and over and over one silly alternative
chased the other through his addled senses. Then just as precipitately
as he had bolted to his room he began suddenly to hurl himself into
his riding-clothes, yanking out a bureau drawer here, slamming back a
closet door there, rummaging through a box, tipping over a trunk, yet
in all his fuming haste, his raging irritability, showing the same
fastidious choice of shirt, tie, collar, that characterized his every
public appearance.
Immaculate at last as a tailor's equestrian advertisement he came
striding down again into the hotel office, only to plunge most
inopportunely into Miss Von Eaton's languorous presence.
"Why, Jim!" gasped Miss Von Eaton. Exquisitely white and cool and
fluffy and dainty, she glanced up perplexedly at him from her lazy,
deep-seated chair. "Why, Jim!" she repeated, just a little bit edgily.
"Riding? Riding? Well, of all things! You who wouldn't even play
bridge with us this afternoon on account of the heat! Well, who in the
world--who can it be that has cut us all out?"
Teasingly she jumped up and walked to the door with him, and stood
there peering out beyond the cool shadow of his dark-blue shoulder
into the dazzling road where, like so many figures thrust forth all
unwittingly into the merciless flare of a spot-light, little shabby
Eve Edgarton and three sweating horses waited squintingly in the dust.
"Oh!" cried Miss Von Eaton. "W-hy!" stammered Miss Von Eaton. "Good
gracious!" giggled Miss Von Eaton. Then hysterically, with her hand
clapped over her mouth, she turned and fled up the stairs to confide
the absurd news to her mates.
With a face like a graven image Barton went on down the steps into the
road. In one of his thirty-dollar riding-boots a disconcerting
two-cent sort of squeak merely intensified his unhappy sensation of
being motivated purely mechanically like a doll.
Two of the horses that whinnied cordially at his approach were rusty
roans. The third was a chunky gray. Already on one of the roans Eve
Edgarton sat perched with her bridle-rein oddly slashed in two, and
knotted, each raw end to a stirrup, leaving her hands and arms still
perfectly free to hug her mysterious books and papers to her breast.
"Good afternoon again, Miss Edgarton," smiled Barton conscientiously.
"Good afternoon again, Mr. Barton," echoed Eve Edgarton listlessly.
With frank curiosity he nodded toward her armful of papers. "Surely
you're not going to carry--all that stuff with you?" he questioned.
"Yes, I am, Mr. Barton," drawled Eve Edgarton, scarcely above a
whisper.
Worriedly he pointed to her stirrups. "But Great Scott, Miss
Edgarton!" he protested. "Surely you're not reckless enough to ride
like that? Just guiding with your feet?"
"I always--do, Mr. Barton," singsonged the girl monotonously.
"But the extra horse?" cried Barton. With a sudden little chuckle of
relief he pointed to the chunky gray. There was a side-saddle on the
chunky gray. "Who's going with us?"
Almost insolently little Eve Edgarton narrowed her sleepy eyes.
"I always taken an extra horse with me, Mr. Barton--Thank you!" she
yawned, with the very faintest possible tinge of asperity.
"Oh!" stammered Barton quite helplessly. "O--h!" Heavily, as he spoke,
he lifted one foot to his stirrup and swung up into his saddle.
Through all his mental misery, through all his physical discomfort, a
single lovely thought sustained him. There was only one really good
riding road in that vicinity! And it was shady! And, thank Heaven, it
was most inordinately short!
But Eve Edgarton falsified the thought before he was half through
thinking it.
She swung her horse around, reared him to almost a perpendicular
height, merged herself like so much fluid khaki into his great,
towering, threatening neck, reacted almost instantly to her own
balance again, and went plunging off toward the wild, rough,
untraveled foot-hills and--certain destruction, any unbiased onlooker
would have been free to affirm!
Snortingly the chunky gray went tearing after her. A trifle sulkily
Barton's roan took up the chase.
Shade? Oh, ye gods! If Eve Edgarton knew shade when she saw it she
certainly gave no possible sign of such intelligence. Wherever the
galloping, grass-grown road hesitated between green-roofed forest and
devastated wood-lot, she chose the devastated wood-lot! Wherever the
trotting, treacherous pasture faltered between hobbly, rock-strewn
glare and soft, lush-carpeted spots of shade, she chose the hobbly,
rock-strewn glare! On and on and on! Till dust turned sweat! And sweat
turned dust again! On and on and on! With the riderless gray thudding
madly after her! And Barton's sulky roan balking frenziedly at each
new swerve and turn!
It must have been almost three miles before Barton quite overtook her.
Then in the scudding, transitory shadow of a growly thunder-cloud she
reined in suddenly, waited patiently till Barton's panting horse was
nose and nose with hers, and then, pushing her slouch hat back from
her low, curl-fringed forehead, jogged listlessly along beside him
with her pale olive face turned inquiringly to his drenched,
beet-colored visage.
"What was it that you wanted me to do for you, Mr. Barton?" she asked
with a laborious sort of courtesy. "Are you writing a book or
something that you wanted me to help you about? Is that it? Is that
what Father meant?"
"Am I writing a--book?" gasped Barton. Desperately he began to mop his
forehead. "Writing a book? Am--I--writing--a--book? Heaven forbid!"
"What are you doing?" persisted the girl bluntly.
"What am I doing?" repeated Barton. "Why, riding with you! Trying to
ride with you!" he called out grimly as, taking the lead impetuously
again, Eve Edgarton's horse shied off at a rabbit and went sidling
down a sand-bank into a brand-new area of rocks and stubble and
breast-high blueberry bushes.
Barton liked to ride and he rode fairly well, but he was by no means
an equestrian acrobat, and, quite apart from the girl's unquestionably
disconcerting mannerisms, the foolish floppity presence of the
riderless gray rattled him more than he could possibly account for.
Yet to save his life he could not have told which would seem more
childish--to turn back in temper, or to follow on--in the same.
More in helplessness than anything else he decided to follow on.
"On and on and on," would have described it more adequately.
Blacker and blacker the huddling thunder-caps spotted across the
brilliant, sunny sky. Gaspier and gaspier in each lulling tree-top, in
each hushing bird-song, in each drooping grass-blade, the whole torrid
earth seemed to be sucking in its breath as if it meant never, never
to exhale it again.
Once more in the midst of a particularly hideous glare the girl took
occasion to rein in and wait for him, turning once more to his
flushed, miserable countenance a little face inordinately pale and
serene.
"If you're not writing a book, what would you like to talk about, Mr.
Barton?" she asked conscientiously. "Would you like to talk about
peat-bog fossils?"
"What?" gasped Barton.
"Peat-bog fossils," repeated the mild little voice. "Are you
interested in peat-bog fossils? Or would you rather talk about the
Mississippi River pearl fisheries? Or do you care more perhaps for
politics? Would you like to discuss the relative financial conditions
of the South American republics?"
Before the expression of blank despair in Barton's face, her own face
fell a trifle. "No?" she ventured worriedly. "No? Oh, I'm sorry, Mr.
Barton, but you see--you see--I've never been out before with
anybody--my own age. So I don't know at all what you would be
interested in!"
"Never been out before with any one her own age?" gasped Barton to
himself. Merciful Heavens! what was her "own age"? There in her little
khaki Norfolk and old slouch hat she looked about fifteen years
old--and a boy, at that. Altogether wretchedly he turned and grinned
at her.
"Miss Edgarton," he said, "believe me, there's not one thing to-day
under God's heaven that does interest me--except the weather!"
"The weather?" mused little Eve Edgarton thoughtfully. Casually, as
she spoke, she glanced down across the horses' lathered sides and up
into Barton's crimson face. "The weather? Oh!" she hastened anxiously
to affirm. "Oh, yes! The meteorological conditions certainly are
interesting this summer. Do you yourself think that it's a shifting of
the Gulf Stream? Or just a--just a change in the paths of the cyclonic
areas of low pressure?" she persisted drearily.
"Eh?" gasped Barton. "The weather? Heat was what I meant, Miss
Edgarton! Just plain heat!--DAMNED HEAT--was what I meant--if I may be
so explicit, Miss Edgarton."
"It is hot," conceded Eve apologetically.
"In fact," snapped Barton, "I think it's the hottest day I ever knew!"
"Really?" droned Eve Edgarton.
"Really!" snapped Barton.
It must have been almost half an hour before anybody spoke again.
Then, "Pretty hot, isn't it?" Barton began all over again.
"Yes," said Eve Edgarton.
"In fact," hissed Barton through clenched teeth, "in fact I know it's
the hottest day I ever knew!"
"Really?" droned Eve Edgarton.
"Really!" choked Barton.
Creakily under their hot, chafing saddles the sweltering roans lurched
off suddenly through a great snarl of bushes into a fern-shaded
spring-hole and stood ankle-deep in the boggy grass, guzzling noisily
at food and drink, with the chunky gray crowding greedily against
first one rider and then the other.
Quite against all intention Barton groaned aloud. His sun-scorched
eyes seemed fairly shriveling with the glare. His wilted linen collar
slopped like a stale poultice around his tortured neck. In his sticky
fingers the bridle-rein itched like so much poisoned ribbon.
Reaching up one small hand to drag the soft flannel collar of her
shirt a little farther down from her slim throat, Eve Edgarton rested
her chin on her knuckles for an instant and surveyed him plaintively.
"Aren't--we--having--an--awful time?" she whispered.
Even then if she had looked woman-y, girl-y, even remotely, affectedly
feminine, Barton would doubtless have floundered heroically through
some protesting lie. But to the frank, blunt, little-boyishness of her
he succumbed suddenly with a beatific grin of relief. "Yes, we
certainly are!" he acknowledged ruthlessly.
"And what good is it?" questioned the girl most unexpectedly.
"Not any good!" grunted Barton.
"To any one?" persisted the girl.
"Not to any one!" exploded Barton.
With an odd little gasp of joy the girl reached out dartingly and
touched Barton on his sleeve. Her face was suddenly eager, active,
transcendently vital.
"Then oh--won't you please--please--turn round--and go home--and leave
me alone?" she pleaded astonishingly.
"Turn round and go home?" stammered Barton.
The touch on his sleeve quickened a little. "Oh, yes--please, Mr.
Barton!" insisted the tremulous voice.
"You--you mean I'm in your way?" stammered Barton.
Very gravely the girl nodded her head. "Oh, yes, Mr. Barton--you're
terribly in my way," she acknowledged quite frankly.
"Good Heavens," thought Barton, "is there a man in this? Is it a
tryst? Well, of all things!"
Jerkily he began to back his horse out of the spring-hole,
back--back--back through the intricate, overgrown pathway of flapping
leaves and sharp, scratchy twigs.
"I am very sorry, Miss Edgarton, to have forced my presence on you
so!" he murmured ironically.
"Oh, it isn't just you!" said little Eve Edgarton quite frankly. "It's
all Father's friends." Almost threateningly as she spoke she jerked up
her own horse's drizzling mouth and rode right at Barton as if to
force him back even faster through the great snarl of underbrush. "I
hate clever people!" she asserted passionately. "I hate them--hate
them--hate them! I hate all Father's clever friends! I hate--"
"But you see I'm not clever," grinned Barton in spite of himself. "Oh,
not clever at all," he reiterated with some grimness as an alder
branch slapped him stingingly across one eye. "Indeed--" he dodged and
ducked and floundered, still backing, backing, everlastingly
backing--"indeed, your father has spent quite a lot of his valuable
time this afternoon assuring me--and reassuring me--that--that I'm
altogether a fool!"
Unrelentingly little Eve Edgarton's horse kept right on forcing him
back--back--back.
"But if you're not one of Father's clever friends--who are you?" she
demanded perplexedly. "And why did you insist so on riding with me
this afternoon?" she cried accusingly.
"I didn't exactly--insist," grinned Barton with a flush of guilt. The
flush of guilt added to the flush of heat made him look suddenly very
confused.
Across Eve Edgarton's thin little face the flash of temper faded
instantly into mere sulky ennui again.
"Oh, dear--oh, dear," she droned. "You--you didn't want to marry me,
did you?"
Just for one mad, panic-stricken second the whole world seemed to turn
black before Barton's eyes. His heart stopped beating. His ear-drums
cracked. Then suddenly, astonishingly, he found himself grinning into
that honest little face, and answering comfortably:
"Why, no, Miss Edgarton, I hadn't the slightest idea in the world of
wanting to marry you."
"Thank God for that!" gasped little Eve Edgarton. "So many of Father's
friends do want to marry me," she confided plaintively, still driving
Barton back through that horrid scratchy thicket. "I'm so rich, you
see," she confided with equal simplicity, "and I know so
much--there's almost always somebody in Petrozavodsk or Broken Hill
or Bashukulumbwe who wants to marry me."
"In--where?" stammered Barton.
"Why--in Russia!" said little Eve Edgarton with some surprise. "And
Australia! And Africa! Were you never there?"
"I've been in Jersey City," babbled Barton with a desperate attempt at
facetiousness.
"I was never there!" admitted little Eve Edgarton regretfully.
Vehemently with one hand she lunged forward and tried with her tiny
open palm to push Barton's horse a trifle faster back through the
intricate thicket. Then once in the open again she drew herself up
with an absurd air of dignity and finality and bowed him from her
presence.
"Good-by, Mr. Barton," she said. "Good-by, Mr. Barton."
"But Miss Edgarton--" stammered Barton perplexedly. Whatever his own
personal joy and relief might be, the surrounding country
nevertheless was exceedingly wild, and the girl an extravagantly long
distance from home. "But Miss Edgarton--" he began all over again.
"Good-by, Mr. Barton! And thank you for going home!" she added
conscientiously.
"But what will I tell your father?" worried Barton.
"Oh--hang Father," drawled the indifferent little voice.
"But the extra horse?" argued Barton with increasing perplexity. "The
gray? If you've got some date up your sleeve, don't you want me to
take the gray home with me, and get him out of your way?"
With sluggish resentment little Eve Edgarton lifted her eyes to his.
"What would the gray go home with you for?" she asked tersely. "Why,
how silly! Why, it's my--mother's horse! That is, we call it my
mother's horse," she hastened to explain. "My mother's dead, you know.
She's almost always been dead, I mean. So Father always makes me buy
an extra place for my mother. It's just a trick of ours, a sort of a
custom. I play around alone so much you know. And we live in such wild
places!"
Casually she bent over and pushed the protruding butt of her revolver
a trifle farther down into her riding boot. "S'long--Mr. Barton!" she
called listlessly over the other, and started on, stumblingly,
clatteringly, up the abruptly steep and precipitous mountain trail--a
little dust-colored gnome on a dust-colored horse, with the dutiful
gray pinking cautiously along behind her.
By some odd twist of his bridle-rein the gray's chunky neck arched
slightly askew, and he pranced now and then from side to side of the
trail as if guided thus by an invisible hand.
With an uncanny pucker along his spine as if he found himself suddenly
deserting two women instead of one, Barton went fumbling and squinting
out through the dusty green shade into the expected glare of the open
pasture, and discovered, to his further disconcerting, that there was
no glare left.
Before his astonished eyes he saw sun-scorched mountain-top,
sun-scorched granite, sun-scorched field stubble turned suddenly to
shade--no cool, translucent miracle of fluctuant greens, but a horrid,
plushy, purple dusk under a horrid, plushy, purple sky, with a rip of
lightning along the horizon, a galloping gasp of furiously oncoming
wind, an almost strangling stench of dust-scented rain.
But before he could whirl his horse about, the storm broke! Heaven
fell! Hell rose! The sides of the earth caved in! Chaos unspeakable
tore north, east, south, west!
Snortingly for one single instant the roan's panic-stricken nostrils
went blooming up into the cloud-burst like two parched scarlet
poinsettias. Then man and beast as one flesh, as one mind, went
bolting back through the rain-drenched, wind-ravished thicket to find
their mates.
Up, up, up, everlastingly up, the mountain trail twisted and scrambled
through the unholy darkness. Now and again a slippery stone tripped
the roan's fumbling feet. Now and again a swaying branch slapped
Barton stingingly across his straining eyes. All around and about them
tortured forest trees moaned and writhed in the gale. Through every
cavernous vista gray sheets of rain went flapping madly by them. The
lightning was incredible. The thunder like the snarl of a glass sky
shivering into inestimable fragments.
With every gasping breath beginning to rip from his poor lungs like a
knifed stitch, the roan still faltered on each new ledge to whinny
desperately to his mate. Equally futilely from time to time, Barton,
with his hands cupped to his mouth, holloed--holloed--holloed--into
the thunderous darkness.
Then at a sharp turn in the trail, magically, in a pale, transient
flicker of light, loomed little Eve Edgarton's boyish figure, drenched
to the skin apparently, wind-driven, rain-battered, but with hands in
her pockets, slouch hat rakishly askew, strolling as nonchalantly down
that ghastly trail as a child might come strolling down a
stained-glassed, Persian-carpeted stairway to meet an expected guest.
In vaguely silhouetted greeting for one fleet instant a little khaki
arm lifted itself full length into the air.
Then more precipitately than any rational thing could happen, more
precipitately than any rational thing could even begin to happen,
could even begin to begin to happen, without shock, without noise,
without pain, without terror or turmoil, or any time at all to fight
or pray--a slice of living flame came scaling through the
darkness--and cut Barton's consciousness clean in two!