all his splendid length there, unmoving, that she would pass on?
Was this his method of once more conveying to her the information
that her presence was an intrusion? Oh, for a man--for some slim,
freckled, young American--to take this insolent foreigner by his
coat collar and jerk him to his unworthy feet! Perhaps it might be
better to have two of them--he was disgustingly tall. She swung
round the corner of the chair, flames dancing in her eyes.
“Are you--very busy?” she inquired in a dangerously polite little
voice.
Philippe le Gai showed all of his white teeth in another flashing
smile.
“But no!” he replied accurately, and made a swift motion as though
to rise, only to check himself more swiftly. “Be seated, I pray
you!”
The look of consuming rage that Fair flashed on him as she seated
herself in the small iron chair opposite him would have shrivelled
a normally sensitive soul to gray ashes. Her impervious host,
however, merely leaned deeper into his bright cushions, the smile
still edging his lips.
“Laure still plays?”
“Yes,” replied Fair. She spoke with considerable difficulty; the
royal condescension of that “Be seated” had left her feeling
slightly dizzy.
“I have here a paper which will need her sharp wits--she will not
be long, perhaps?”
“I don’t know,” replied Fair sombrely. Just how, she wondered, did
you lead up to telling a comparative stranger that you despised
him? It was harder than she had thought it would be, out there
in the meadow--it was the proud turn of the black head, and the
sure strength of the long brown hands, and the sheer beauty of the
flashing smile that made it hard. No one had a right to look like
that--and to be despicable. It wasn’t fair.
“I think that those poor Gods in Heaven must envy us our earth
to-day!” said the object of her scorn, turning his face to the deep
blue of the autumn sky. “So warm, so cold, so sweet--like some mad
Bacchante, bare of throat and arm for all her warm fur skins, with
grapes of purple weighing down her curls, and wine of gold tripping
up her light heels.... Once, you know, when I was the smallest of
little boys, Monsieur my grandfather call me to come down from my
sleep to drink the health of my very new sister--of young Laure.
There was a great banquet, a table brave with fruit and flowers
and lace and candles, and they put me onto that table, and give
me a little burning golden brandy to drink in a great cool glass
of crystal--and straight to my head it flew--ah, Dieu, the lucky,
curly head! I remember still, you see--I remember how the world
must feel to-day. The world and I, we have been fortunate.”
Fair’s mouth was a rose-red line of stern distaste. It might be all
very French to take a perfectly good autumn day and turn it into an
intoxicated heathen, but in her opinion, which was far from humble,
it was simply outrageous. And those detestable people, giving
brandy to that darling little boy--well, all little boys were more
or less darling. It was their truly lamentable degeneration at
about the age of twenty-nine that was occupying her at present. She
leaned forward swiftly, her hands very cold and her eyes very hot.
“Monsieur Philippe, don’t you ever, ever get tired of just sitting
around doing _nothing_?”
Perhaps the passion in the clear voice touched him--for a moment
Philippe le Gai belied his name. Then he made a slight gesture with
the hand that held the papers, a gesture of dismissal to such folly
as sober thought.
“Tired, Mistress Fairy? How should I be tired, doing nothing? And
how are you so sure that I do nothing while I sit around--how are
you so sure of that, I wonder?”
“Because I can see you,” replied Fair with despairing emphasis.
“Can you then, Wise Eyes? Can you see so well? Then you must see
that it is not nothing that I do.”
“Oh, isn’t it?” she whispered breathlessly, her heart in her voice.
“Isn’t it?”
“But never! While I sit around, I am being very, very busy,
me, being alive--and being amused--and being, believe me, most
eternally and most exultantly grateful. You call that doing
nothing?”
“Of course I call that doing nothing,” replied Fair fiercely.
“Now that is strange--because, you know, I am so busy doing it
that I can find time to do nothing else. To sit with the sun and
beauty and silence all about, that is better than heaven, I think.
Always I have loved Beauty better than life and once I thought that
I had lost her for ever--and, see, she is mine again! In other
fields--fields churned to madness, horrors of white clay and red
blood, with the proud trees stripped to dirty black stumps--in
other fields I remembered these, and I swore to that god of battles
that if he would send me back to this golden grace--to this
greenness and kind quiet--I would ask nothing more. And where those
stenches made the poor soul sicker than the body, I could sometimes
hold my breath, and smell apple-blossoms in the spring moonlight,
and yellow roses in the summer sunlight, and spiced wood burning
in the great chimneys, and cider blowing across the autumn winds.
Now--now I need not hold the breath to smell the good ripe fruit,
now I need not close my eyes to see my fields of gold, with the
little warm gray sheep against the hills. Now I have come home to
my fields, and I keep faith with the god of battles--I ask for
nothing more. Look before you, Wise Eyes; what do you see?”
“The alley of lime trees and the north gate and the meadow,” said
Fair, fighting to harden the voice that wanted only to break.
“Look farther----”
“I can see the thatch on Daudin’s roof and the road to the village
and the little steeple on the church.”
“Nothing more?”
“There’s nothing more to see.”
“You do not see a little boy climbing that iron gate and racing
home up that long alley, singing--racing quick, quick because it
begins to grow dark?”
“Of course I don’t see him,” replied Fair defiantly, but she leaned
forward, straining her eyes.
“Look farther--look far away; you cannot see the other little boys,
many, many, all hurrying while they sing to get home before it is
dark? No? Ah, poor Wise Eyes! Perhaps it is because it is years
that those little boys hurry down, instead of just an alley of lime
trees--they are hurrying home clean across the centuries. Since
that first Philippe came singing up from the south, they have loved
these gray stones best of all the earth--best, I think, of heaven.
And that last little boy, he did not love it least, believe me.
Perhaps he is singing louder than them all, because though they
have made it, those others, he has saved it.”
“He didn’t save it any more than a good many million other people,”
commented Fair ruthlessly.
Philippe le Gai threw back his black head with a ringing peal of
laughter. “Truly as you say, not more. But that is another reason
why he sings, believe me.”
“But what did you do before you started in to save it?” pursued the
remorseless inquisitor, and suddenly she sickened at her task. The
radiance flagged in the dark face before her; for a moment Philippe
le Gai looked mortally tired.
“Me? I was an artist--and an engineer.” He sat staring ahead of
him, tense and straight; and then he relaxed easily, the smile
playing again. “Not so good an artist, and not so bad an engineer.
I was oh, most young, and oh, most vain, and gray-headed old
gentlemen from far away came to beg a little advice as to what to
do with their sick mines.”
“Mines?” Fair’s face was alight. “That was what Dad used to do
before he went in for cotton. It was copper, you know. D’you know
about copper?”
“Every kind of mine that ever was I knew about,” he assured her
lightly. “But now I have forgotten.”
“How could you?” she cried. “How could you, when they need you so?
Don’t you think that that little boy would be ashamed if he could
see you sitting on this terrace--just sitting and sitting like a
great enormous lazy black cat? Don’t you?”
“Why, no,” replied Philippe le Gai. “No, I do not think that he
would be ashamed.”
Fair wrung her hands together; she felt defeat closing about her.
“Those fields that you talked about--don’t you want to make them
green and golden again, too?”
“They are very tired, those fields,” said the man. “Shall we not
let them rest?”
“Oh!” cried Fair, and the valiant voice struggled and broke. “Oh,
how can you--oh, oh, how can you?”
“Fair----”
He was on his feet at last--the swift move sent the paper flying,
and it came fluttering irresponsibly across the sunlit space
between them, dancing to a halt almost at her feet. It had blown
open, and her incredulous eyes were riveted on the letterhead--the
little thick black letters spelling out the name of Dad’s attorney,
Henry C. Forrester, Wall Street--she stared down blankly:
Dear Sir--
In further reply to your request for full details as to the
fortune left Miss Carter by her father----
A wave of scarlet swept over her from heel to brow; she felt as
though she were drowning, she felt as though she were being buried
alive, she felt as though a bolt of lightning had passed clean
through her body, leaving her quite dead and still.
“So that’s what you are?” she said. “You--you! I might have known.”
“What I am?” His voice was touched with a little wonder. “No, but I
do not understand; what is it that I am?”
“There’s no word for you,” she told him between her clicking teeth.
She was shaking violently, uncontrollably, like someone in a chill.
“Crawling to my lawyers--you--you--a common adventurer----”
“You are mad,” he said.
“It’s here,” cried Fair. “Look. It’s here in black and white--are
you going to deny it?”
“Give me that letter,” said Philippe le Gai.
“I wouldn’t touch it in a thousand years,” she flung at him. “Not
in a hundred hundred thousand. It’s filthy--it can lie there till
it rots.”
“Pick it up,” he told her.
“How dare you?” she whispered. “How dare you?”
“It is not so very greatly daring,” he assured her. “Pick it up, I
tell you.”
Fair stared at him voicelessly where he stood, tall and splendid
and terrible in the sunlight. No, no, this was nightmare--this was
not real. It was not she who bent to the bidding of this relentless
monster--it was some other Fairfax caught in a hideous dream. The
paper rattled in her fingers like goblin castanets.
“Now bring it to me.”
She crossed the little space of sun-warmed bricks, her eyes fixed
and brilliant as a sleep-walker.
“Closer,” bade the still voice. “Closer yet. Yes. Now put it in
my hand. That way--yes. It was not yours, you see; did you forget
that?”
Fair made no answer. She stood frozen, watching the brown fingers
folding the bit of white paper into a neat oblong.
“I would not, I think, say any word to Laure of this,” said the
voice. “And I would not, I think, stay here longer. I would forget
all this, and go.”
“I am going this afternoon,” she told him through her stiff lips.
“And I am going to tell Laure--everything.”
“Do not,” he said. “Do not, believe me.” He stood staring down at
the paper, and then he spoke again.
“I am, as you say, an adventurer,” said Philippe le Gai, in that
terrible and gentle voice. “And adventure is, as you say, common.
For which I thank my gods. You have nothing more to say to me?”
“Nothing.”
“Then that is all, I think, Miss Carter.”
Obviously, the audience was over, the courtier was dismissed. Oh,
for one word--one little, little word--to blast him where he stood,
gentle and insolent and relentless. She could not find that word,
and she would die before she would give him any other. The brown
boots stumbled in their haste on the terrace steps; at the foot she
turned once more to face him, flinging him a last look of terror
and defiance and despair--and deeper than all, wonder. But Philippe
le Gai’s face was turned once more to his golden fields.
Far away, at the end of the long alley, she could see the players
coming back; she could hear them, too, laughing and calling to
each other--Bravo was barking frenziedly, heedless of Diane’s
small, peremptory shouts--there, he was off, with Raoul and Diane
in pursuit, headed straight for the distant stables. She clung to
the stone railing for a moment, limp and sick, and then she flung
back her head, spurred her flagging feet, and set off down the
arching lime trees, running. Running because she was desperately
tired and desperately frightened; because it was toward battle that
she ran, and she must get there swiftly. Laure hailed from the far
end.
“Ah, small deserter, you come to surrender? Come quick, then, and
do penance.”
“I’ve not come to do penance,” said the deserter. She stood very
straight with her hands clasped tightly behind her. “I’ve come to
say good-bye.”
“Good-bye?” echoed Laure. “Here, André, take this mallet, this
ball. What folly is this, Fair?”
“It’s not folly; the folly’s been in staying. I’ve learned quite a
lot of things in the last few minutes, Laure. Monsieur de Lautrec
has some papers that he wants to show you.”
“Papers? Well, but what is all this mystery? Come, now, Fair,
you are not well, I know. The doctor he said you should not be
excited.”
“I am not in the least excited,” replied Fair, her eyes two
glittering danger signals. “Are you in this plot, too, Monsieur
André?”
“_Plot?_ No, decidedly, this is fever! Let me feel your hands, _mon
enfant_----”
“Don’t touch me, please,” said Fair, clearly and distinctly.
“Did I say fever? But it is delirium! I am not to touch you?”
“No.” She took a step farther away from Laure who stood looking
down at her, clear and quiet, with that incredulous lift to her
brows. “Don’t pretend any more, please; it makes me rather sick. I
know about everything, you see.”
“That is very exactly what I do not do, _ma petite_. No, André, do
not go--you, too, will wait and see. What is this nonsense, Fair?”
“You needn’t keep it up any longer, I tell you,” returned Fair
fiercely. “I’ve found out what you and Monsieur de Lautrec have
been doing. I thought that you loved me, Laure--you did it pretty
well--and all the time you were nothing but fortune hunters, were
you?”
“You told Philippe--that?” asked Laure. Every atom of colour had
drained out of her face, but she did not lift her voice. “No, wait,
André. I am not yet through. It would be a good hunter who could
find your fortune, Fairfax. You have none to hunt for.”
“I have two million dollars,” said Fair.
“You have not half a million centimes. It was all in cotton, that
great fortune; it is gone. Your lawyers had cabled to you while you
were ill in Germany, but the doctors they said you must not hear
that bad news then; they asked me to tell you, gently, when you
were much better. So I have waited, and Philippe, he has cabled
three--no, four times, to see whether skill and thought and work
might not save that so mighty fortune. To-day he thought perhaps
that we might have heard----”
“Oh,” said Fair in a small, childish voice. “Oh.” She put her hand
to her head; it hurt dreadfully. “Well, then, I can go to work----”
She made a vague gesture, as though if she stretched out her hand
work would be there for her to cling to--and Laure smiled, a fine,
cruel little smile. Something snapped in Fair’s head. “That sounds
ridiculous, doesn’t it, Laure? But you see, I’m not over six feet
tall, I’m not stronger than steel--I’m not busy twelve hours a day
sitting around in the sun being an ex-hero--so I’m going to work.”
“Did you, perhaps, tell my brother that you thought that of him,
too?” asked Laure.
“I told him that, and I told him more,” said Fair.
Laure came toward her, something so terrible in her white face that
for a moment Fair thought that she was going to kill her.
“Little fool!” she said very softly. “Little, wicked, wicked fool,
Philippe cannot work--Philippe is blind.”
“No!” cried Fair. She clapped her hands over her ears, to shut out
those dreadful words, her face a twisted mask of terror. “No, no,
no!”
“And I tell you yes, yes, yes,” repeated the tall girl before
her, closing her long fingers over the small wrists, wrenching
the clinging hands down relentlessly. “Blind like a stone, I tell
you--blind.”
“He couldn’t be--he couldn’t be--I’d have seen----”
“What have you ever seen that did not touch yourself?” asked
Philippe’s sister. “He is blind, but not so blind as you. When
you came to us, never, never did we think that you would not see,
though we could not talk of it--not yet. But Philippe--Philippe
he said: ‘No, no--let her alone. She has need of peace and mirth
and sunshine, those doctors said--darkness it must not touch her.
We will be careful, and perhaps she will not know.’ You have well
repaid that care, have you not, Fairfax?”
“But his eyes--his eyes----”
“His eyes--because they are still there, you think they see? They
saw too much, those eyes; they see no more. What made the light
behind them--that nerve behind them--it is paralyzed. You who
know so much about the war, you do not know that shock could do
that? That there are men blind because their eyes turned rebel,
and they would see no more horror--deaf because they would not
hear more horror--dumb because they could not tell their horror.
Philippe--Philippe he loved beauty--and after a long while his eyes
they went mad--and he is blind. Work--work, you little fool! All
day, all night, he works, he works. To learn to read--to learn to
write--to learn to live, to live, you hear----”
“Please let me go, Laure,” whispered Fair. “Please, Laure--please,
Laure.”
“I will tell Marie Léontine to help you with your packing,” said
Laure. “And I am glad indeed to let you go. Come, André.”
Fair watched them cutting across the garden to the east
entrance--not the terrace, not the terrace. She couldn’t run any
more--she felt as though she could never run again--but perhaps if
she started now and went very carefully, holding to the lime trees,
she could get there before he left. She must, she must get there
before he left.... Not until she was at the steps did she dare to
raise her eyes. He was still there.
“Laure?” he called. “Laure?”
“It’s Fair,” she said. “I came back.”
She saw him grind the paper between his hands--and then he turned
toward her, smiling a little.
“You had forgotten something?”
“Yes.” She was quite near now, but her voice was so low that it
barely reached him. “I came back to tell you--to tell you----”
The smile deepened on the dark young face. “Ah, _tiens_! There was
something, then, that you forgot to tell me? Never should I have
said it!”
“Please,” she entreated, in that shadow of a voice. “Please. I know
now about--about--Laure told me!”
“About why I lie like that cat in the sun? Good! Now you tell
Laure----” He broke off sharply. “She was not kind, our Laure? You
are weeping? Do not weep; those little jewels of tears, so small,
so shining, so empty, empty--you women love them best of all your
jewels, I think. But me, I do not think that they become you best!”
“I don’t cry often,” Fair told him. “Not often, really. You can ask
Dad--no, no--not Dad. It’s because I’m tired, probably. I came back
because I wanted to tell you----” She swallowed despairingly, the
tears salt on her lips.
“Why, because you were a good child,” he helped her gaily. “And
wanted to tell me that you were sorry.”
“No--no. Because I wanted to tell you that I was glad.”
“_Glad?_” He was on his feet, with that cry.
“How could I be sorry for you, Philippe? Oh, I can’t be sorry for
myself--not even now--not now, when I see myself. I wanted so to be
proud of you--you don’t know--you don’t--you don’t----”
“And why did you so want to be proud of me, may I ask?”
“Because I love you,” said Fair clearly.
Philippe le Gai caught at the cushioned chair. “You are mad,” he
said.
“Yes.” The voice tripped in its haste. “Yes, but you see I had
to tell you. You mustn’t mind; I’m going this afternoon--Marie
Léontine’s waiting now. Don’t mind, please, Philippe; I didn’t
know, myself, truly--not till Laure told me about--about you, and
I knew that I didn’t care at all how horrible and vile I had been,
because I was so glad that you--that you----”
“Hush!” He stood quite still, and then he raised his hand to his
eyes. “I should send you far from me, Fairfax.”
“Yes,” said Fair, “I’m not any good, you see. All I had to give you
was my money and my--my prettiness. I can’t give you either of
them, Philippe.”
“When I heard you laugh, that first night when you came,” he told
her, “I remembered--I remembered that laughter was not just a sound
to cover up despair--I remembered how to laugh that night.”
She stared at him, voiceless.
“When you spoke to me--when you spoke to me, my Music--I was glad
then that I could not see, because I wished to listen only, always.”
“Philippe,” she prayed. “Don’t, don’t send me away, Philippe.”
“We are mad,” he said. “Come closer.”
And once more she went toward him across that sunlit space, to
where he stood, tall and splendid and terrible. “Closer still,” he
said. “Closer still--still closer. Why do you weep, my Laughter?”
“Hold me--hold me--don’t let me go.”
“Blindness,” he said. “It is just a little word, a little, dark,
ugly word to frighten foolish children. Are you beautiful, my
Loveliness? Never, never could you be beautiful as I dream you!” He
touched her lips with his brown fingers.
“Smile!” he said. And she smiled.
“What is blindness to me who can touch your lips to laughter?” he
asked her, bending his black head until his lips swept her lashes.
“What is blindness to me, who can touch your eyes to tears?”
The sunlight fell across the bright hair of the last of the
fighting Carters--he could feel it warm against his lips and
suddenly he laughed aloud.
“What is blindness to me?” cried Philippe le Gai to the golden sun.
“What is blindness to me, who hold my light against my heart?”
GREEN GARDENS
Daphne was singing to herself when she came through the painted
gate in the back wall. She was singing partly because it was June,
and Devon, and she was seventeen, and partly because she had
caught a breath-taking glimpse of herself in the long mirror as
she had flashed through the hall at home, and it seemed almost too
good to be true that the radiant small person in the green muslin
frock with the wreath of golden hair bound about her head and the
sea-blue eyes laughing back at her was really Miss Daphne Chiltern.
Incredible, incredible luck to look like that, half Dryad, half
Kate Greenaway--she danced down the turf path to the herb garden,
swinging her great wicker basket and singing like a mad thing.
“He promised to buy me a bonnie blue ribbon,” carolled Daphne, all
her ribbons flying,
“He promised to buy me a bonnie blue ribbon,
He promised to buy me a bonnie blue ribbon
To tie up----”
The song stopped as abruptly as though someone had struck it from
her lips. A strange man was kneeling by the beehive in the herb
garden. He was looking at her over his shoulder, at once startled
and amused, and she saw that he was wearing a rather shabby tweed
suit and that his face was brown against his close-cropped tawny
hair. He smiled, his teeth a strong flash of white.
“Hello!” he greeted her, in a tone at once casual and friendly.
Daphne returned the smile uncertainly. “Hello,” she replied gravely.
The strange man rose easily to his feet, and she saw that he was
very tall and carried his head rather splendidly, like the young
bronze Greek in Uncle Roland’s study at home. But his eyes--his
eyes were strange--quite dark and burned out. The rest of him
looked young and vivid and adventurous, but his eyes looked as
though the adventure were over, though they were still questing.
“Were you looking for any one?” she asked, and the man shook his
head, laughing.
“No one in particular, unless it was you.”
Daphne’s soft brow darkened. “It couldn’t possibly have been me,”
she said in a stately small voice, “because, you see, I don’t know
you. Perhaps you didn’t know that there is no one living in Green
Gardens now?”
“Oh, yes, I knew. The Fanes have left for Ceylon, haven’t they?”
“Sir Harry left two weeks ago, because he had to see the old
governor before he sailed, but Lady Audrey only left last week. She
had to close the London house, too, so there was a great deal to
do.”
“I see. And so Green Gardens is deserted?”
“It is sold,” said Daphne, with a small quaver in her voice, “just
this afternoon. I came over to say good-bye to it, and to get some
mint and lavender from the garden.”
“Sold?” repeated the man, and there was an agony of incredulity in
the stunned whisper. He flung out his arm against the sun-warmed
bricks of the high wall as though to hold off some invader. “No,
no; they’d never dare to sell it.”
“I’m glad you mind so much,” said Daphne. “It’s strange that nobody
minds but us, isn’t it? I cried at first--and then I thought that
it would be happier if it wasn’t lonely and empty, poor dear--and
then, it was such a beautiful day, that I forgot to be unhappy.”