"Yes. But when he had found it Miss Hazelwood took it from him."
"I don't understand," Rulledge said.
"When he came in to breakfast, the third morning, prepared with an
excuse for cutting his week down to the dimensions it had reached, he
saw her sitting alone at the table. She had risen early as a consequence
of having arrived late the night before; and when Braybridge found
himself in for it, he forgot that he meant to go away, and said
good-morning, as if they knew each other. Their hostess found them
talking over the length of the table in a sort of mutual fright, and
introduced them. But it's rather difficult reporting a lady verbatim at
second hand. I really had the facts from Welkin, who had them from his
wife. The sum of her impressions was that Braybridge and Miss Hazelwood
were getting a kind of comfort out of their mutual terror because one
was as badly frightened as the other. It was a novel experience for
both. Ever seen her?"
We looked at one another. Minver said: "I never wanted to paint any one
so much. It was at the spring show of the American Artists. There was a
jam of people; but this girl--I've understood it was she--looked as
much alone as if there were nobody else there. She might have been a
startled doe in the North Woods suddenly coming out on a
twenty-thousand-dollar camp, with a lot of twenty-million-dollar people
on the veranda."
"And you wanted to do her as The Startled Doe," I said. "Good selling
name."
"Don't reduce it to the vulgarity of fiction. I admit it would be a
selling name."
"Go on, Wanhope," Rulledge puffed impatiently. "Though I don't see how
there could be another soul in the universe as constitutionally scared
of men as Braybridge is of women."
"In the universe nothing is wasted, I suppose. Everything has its
complement, its response. For every bashful man, there must be a bashful
woman," Wanhope returned.
"Or a bold one," Minver suggested.
"No; the response must be in kind to be truly complemental. Through the
sense of their reciprocal timidity they divine that they needn't be
afraid."
"Oh! _That's_ the way you get out of it!"
"Well?" Rulledge urged.
"I'm afraid," Wanhope modestly confessed, "that from this point I shall
have to be largely conjectural. Welkin wasn't able to be very definite,
except as to moments, and he had his data almost altogether from his
wife. Braybridge had told him overnight that he thought of going, and he
had said he mustn't think of it; but he supposed Braybridge had spoken
of it to Mrs. Welkin, and he began by saying to his wife that he hoped
she had refused to hear of Braybridge's going. She said she hadn't heard
of it, but now she would refuse without hearing, and she didn't give
Braybridge any chance to protest. If people went in the middle of their
week, what would become of other people? She was not going to have the
equilibrium of her party disturbed, and that was all about it. Welkin
thought it was odd that Braybridge didn't insist; and he made a long
story of it. But the grain of wheat in his bushel of chaff was that Miss
Hazelwood seemed to be fascinated by Braybridge from the first. When
Mrs. Welkin scared him into saying that he would stay his week out, the
business practically was done. They went picnicking that day in each
other's charge; and after Braybridge left he wrote back to her, as Mrs.
Welkin knew from the letters that passed through her hands, and--Well,
their engagement has come out, and--" Wanhope paused, with an air that
was at first indefinite, and then definitive.
"You don't mean," Rulledge burst out in a note of deep wrong, "that
that's all you know about it?"
"Yes, that's all I know," Wanhope confessed, as if somewhat surprised
himself at the fact.
"Well!"
Wanhope tried to offer the only reparation in his power. "I can
conjecture--we can all conjecture--"
He hesitated; then: "Well, go on with your conjecture," Rulledge said,
forgivingly.
"Why--" Wanhope began again; but at that moment a man who had been
elected the year before, and then gone off on a long absence, put his
head in between the dull-red hangings of the doorway. It was Halson,
whom I did not know very well, but liked better than I knew. His eyes
were dancing with what seemed the inextinguishable gayety of his
temperament, rather than any present occasion, and his smile carried his
little mustache well away from his handsome teeth. "Private?"
"Come in! come in!" Minver called to him. "Thought you were in Japan?"
"My dear fellow," Halson answered, "you must brush up your contemporary
history. It's more than a fortnight since I was in Japan." He shook
hands with me, and I introduced him to Rulledge and Wanhope. He said at
once: "Well, what is it? Question of Braybridge's engagement? It's
humiliating to a man to come back from the antipodes and find the nation
absorbed in a parochial problem like that. Everybody I've met here
to-night has asked me, the first thing, if I'd heard of it, and if I
knew how it could have happened."
"And do you?" Rulledge asked.
"I can give a pretty good guess," Halson said, running his merry eyes
over our faces.
"Anybody can give a good guess," Rulledge said. "Wanhope is doing it
now."
"Don't let me interrupt." Halson turned to him politely.
"Not at all. I'd rather hear your guess, if you know Braybridge better
than I," Wanhope said.
"Well," Halson compromised, "perhaps I've known him longer." He asked,
with an effect of coming to business: "Where were you?"
"Tell him, Rulledge," Minver ordered, and Rulledge apparently asked
nothing better. He told him, in detail, all we knew from any source,
down to the moment of Wanhope's arrested conjecture.
"He did leave you at an anxious point, didn't he?" Halson smiled to the
rest of us at Rulledge's expense, and then said: "Well, I think I can
help you out a little. Any of you know the lady?"
"By sight, Minver does," Rulledge answered for us. "Wants to paint her."
"Of course," Halson said, with intelligence. "But I doubt if he'd find
her as paintable as she looks, at first. She's beautiful, but her charm
is spiritual."
"Sometimes we try for that," the painter interposed.
"And sometimes you get it. But you'll allow it's difficult. That's all I
meant. I've known her--let me see--for twelve years, at least; ever
since I first went West. She was about eleven then, and her father was
bringing her up on the ranch. Her aunt came along by and by and took her
to Europe--mother dead before Hazelwood went out there. But the girl was
always homesick for the ranch; she pined for it; and after they had kept
her in Germany three or four years they let her come back and run wild
again--wild as a flower does, or a vine, not a domesticated animal."
"Go slow, Halson. This is getting too much for the romantic Rulledge."
"Rulledge can bear up against the facts, I guess, Minver," Halson said,
almost austerely. "Her father died two years ago, and then she _had_ to
come East, for her aunt simply _wouldn't_ live on the ranch. She brought
her on here, and brought her out; I was at the coming-out tea; but the
girl didn't take to the New York thing at all; I could see it from the
start; she wanted to get away from it with me, and talk about the
ranch."
"She felt that she was with the only genuine person among those
conventional people."
Halson laughed at Minver's thrust, and went on amiably: "I don't suppose
that till she met Braybridge she was ever quite at her ease with any
man--or woman, for that matter. I imagine, as you've done, that it was
his fear of her that gave her courage. She met him on equal terms. Isn't
that it?"
Wanhope assented to the question referred to him with a nod.
"And when they got lost from the rest of the party at that picnic--"
"Lost?" Rulledge demanded.
"Why, yes. Didn't you know? But I ought to go back. They said there
never was anything prettier than the way she unconsciously went for
Braybridge the whole day. She wanted him, and she was a child who wanted
things frankly when she did want them. Then his being ten or fifteen
years older than she was, and so large and simple, made it natural for a
shy girl like her to assort herself with him when all the rest were
assorting themselves, as people do at such things. The consensus of
testimony is that she did it with the most transparent unconsciousness,
and--"
"Who are your authorities?" Minver asked; Rulledge threw himself back on
the divan and beat the cushions with impatience.
"Is it essential to give them?"
"Oh no. I merely wondered. Go on."
"The authorities are all right. She had disappeared with him before the
others noticed. It was a thing that happened; there was no design in it;
that would have been out of character. They had got to the end of the
wood-road, and into the thick of the trees where there wasn't even a
trail, and they walked round looking for a way out till they were turned
completely. They decided that the only way was to keep walking, and by
and by they heard the sound of chopping. It was some Canucks clearing a
piece of the woods, and when she spoke to them in French they gave them
full directions, and Braybridge soon found the path again."