Gita was walking in her woods. She had had a canter on the beach and a
swim and was full of exultant life. The mood of two mornings earlier was
forgotten. It was glorious to be young and free from care and as healthy
and lively as a puppy. In these days, thank heaven, the young were
consciously young; no one could say they did not appreciate their youth
till too late.
She had come into the wood because there was no one to see her if she
looked as pagan as she felt, and she loved these beautiful silent pines
more than any of her possessions. Occasionally she danced, and kicked
the pine-needles and fallen cones about. Elsie had forbidden her to
whistle and engrave lines about her mouth, but she answered the trills
of the birds with sharp little cries almost as ecstatic. She wondered if
she had been a dryad in a former incarnation, or (her self-analytical
habit always kept pace with her imagination) if she were merely being
young for the first time; she could not recall feeling young even in her
childhood. She also wondered if she would ever have been unhappy, even
under the shadow of Gerald Carteret, if they had lived in the country.
“The Peninsula” below San Francisco had been far too decorated and
populous to be real country and the desert was a region set aside for
lost souls. But in these pine woods with their brooding but intimate
silences, their pungent fragrance, and lovely solitudes, she had a sense
of both space and friendliness, of stateliness and simplicity, vastly
different, she imagined, from the mighty forests of California.
And they were hers! She had never taken even Elsie into them. She had a
fancy that these straight slender trees had, perhaps a million years
ago, lived as men and women, whose souls had passed finally into a form
more beautiful than Nature had granted to mortals, and fortunately
inarticulate; but that they recognized her as an old playmate and
sheltered her jealously when she found her joy in their shade. She
picked up a cone and flung it into the arbors above, resenting even the
presence of a squirrel in her secret domain, and gave a whoop of delight
as he scampered angrily across his branch into another tree.
And then she came face to face with Eustace Bylant.
“You look like a wood-nymph,” he said, lifting his hat and
undisconcerted by the fierce blaze of her eyes. “For a moment I
hesitated to break the spell.”
Gita was speechless with amazement and wrath. She felt an impulse to
chase him out of her sacred wood as she would a stray cat from her
bedroom. Then she remembered her manners and said with bitter
politeness: “Good morning. You startled me, but this is the first time I
have ever met anyone in my woods.”
“Are they yours? I beg your pardon. New Jersey is covered with woods and
one gets into the habit of thinking of them—well, as just woods. And I
happen to be very fond of woods. But I am really sorry,” he added
contritely. “You looked so happy a moment ago—happier than any mere
mortal has a right to look. . . . And I think I understand. I’ll go if
you insist——” He broke off and looked about him at the sweet deep
aisles of the wood with an expression of longing in his fine eyes that
seemed to have eliminated herself.
The spell was broken and the creature was a friend of Elsie’s. “Oh,
well, as you are here you may as well stay,” she said with no attempt at
graciousness. “But I must go in presently. I have business letters to
write.”
“Oh, please! Business letters! What a horrible thought. How could it
enter your head in these woods? If they were mine I doubt if I should
write a line except when they were dripping in winter: I have a holy
horror of rheumatism.”
He strolled beside her, his hands in the pockets of his riding-coat, his
hat pushed to the back of his head. He had come to the wood deliberately
to meet her, casually if possible, and find her off guard, and he had
been rewarded by a full glimpse of something he had half suspected two
nights ago. She had haunting memories for him and he was determined to
study her, possibly to marry her. He smiled to himself as he reflected
that the first thought of another man no doubt would be to awaken the
womanhood so perversely sleeping in this girl who seemed to be
unconscious that sex ruled the world, but he was on a different track.
He had extracted something of her history from Elsie Brewster after Gita
had left them, and more from Polly Pleyden, with whom he had dined on
the following night. But the information had been sought less out of
sheer masculine curiosity than as a means for determining his tactics.
“May I smoke?”
Gita nodded sullenly. She had behaved uncommonly well, she told herself,
but if he were unable to take a hint nothing further could be expected
of her. A man in her woods! Men, individually, were not worth hating as
long as they behaved themselves, but her indifference when they did was
entire. This creature did not look predatory and his cool impersonal
gaze aroused in her no sense of wary disquiet. She walked straight and
silent beside him and he talked of the dinner at the Pleydens’.
“Polly was rather huffed when I told her I had met you at the Pelhams’,”
he said. “It seems you have refused to dine with her.”
“My grandmother has only been dead three months. Polly knows quite well
I don’t go out. Dining with Elsie is another matter.”
“Quite so. But I am delighted to hear that your period of mourning will
end in the winter and you will visit the Pleydens in New York.” There
was no emphasis in his cool quiet tones and he appeared merely to be
making conversation. Gita wondered impatiently why he didn’t go.
“I suppose I shall have to visit them for a week or two.”
“Ah? Mrs. Pleyden said she expected you to spend the winter with them.
It seems she had some understanding with your grandmother.”
“Oh, no!” Gita’s voice sounded such genuine alarm that he glanced about
the woods once more with a smile of sympathy.
“I understand,” he said softly.
Gita warmed to him for a moment. “If I’ve got to be introduced to this
Eastern Society I’ve got to, I suppose, but I shall live here and only
go to New York occasionally. And I’ll not be invited to parties because
I don’t dance. I don’t fancy I’ll be run after for dinners either. I
wish I were rich enough to have an apartment in town to spend half the
week in. I do want to go to the opera and all the new plays. But my
lawyer says I must be careful for a year or two.”
“Why don’t you rent the manor? I fancy there are a good many of the
backgroundless on the lookout for an incongruous setting. They would
give you a fancy price.”
Gita shook her head vigorously. “I did think of it once but I never
could do it now. It’s too much mine in too many ways. It seems to have a
soul of its own, a distillation of all the Carterets, perhaps. I could
as easily have rented out my grandmother.”
Bylant laughed heartily. He had a mellow laugh and it struck no false
note in the wood. “I have heard a good deal of Mrs. Carteret and I fancy
your old manor house would appreciate the compliment. I understand
exactly what you mean, for I too have an old house—in Albany—and my
mother would not live anywhere else. She insisted that old houses,
particularly old family mansions, had a very real and complex
personality, made up not only of those who had lived there—the direct
inheritors and the diverse strains introduced by marriage—but because
the windows, she said, were so many eyes looking out on history in the
process of making; the family ghost, perhaps, recording it all in the
invisible volumes that atmosphere shares with the subconsciousness of
man. An old house must have an atmospheric library as extensive as the
British Museum, and could hardly fail to have a personality. My
mother—Bladina, I called her, for, although she was the consummate
mother, she seemed little older than myself—used to say that if
anything could convert her to spiritualism it would be the hope of
making her old walls speak; the house was built by a Dutch ancestor when
Albany was Fort Orange and she refused to leave it when she married.”
Gita was regarding him with interested eyes. “How odd!” she exclaimed.
“I’ve been feeling just like that lately. Been reading a history of New
Jersey; and my old manor must have accumulated tomes. Primeval
wilderness and Indians. Dutch—West India Company. Swedes. English.
Dutch once more. English again. Constant disputes between governors and
between East and West New Jersey before they were reunited. Always on
the verge of war with New England. Jealousies, heart-burnings, shattered
careers. Governors who oppressed and provoked the people to rebellion,
and one who ‘dressed himself in a woman’s habit and patrolled his fort.’
Quakers. Witches. Lords Proprietors. Negro risings, and negro slaves
burned alive for assault. Then the American Revolution; there was a good
deal of fighting around here. And all the rest. And the Carterets lived
a wild life of their own. My baronial hall, as the historian calls it,
has an aloof, brooding, almost intolerably self-satisfied air, as if it
knew so much more than any mere mortal could ever learn. It is quite
haughtily reserved and withdrawn and only condescends to me because I
was born a Carteret. But it really makes me feel more at home than I
ever felt anywhere else, and I’d starve before I’d have its atmosphere
damaged by aliens.”
“I understand. I understand—perfectly.” He had turned a little pale,
but he continued to regard her with eyes that evinced mere friendly
interest. And as he had evidently been as devoted to his mother as she
to poor Millicent, and as he had without conscious effort made her talk
freely, and understood her at that, she decided—particularly as there
seemed to be no prospect of getting rid of him—to tolerate him for the
morning at least.
“I’m rather tired,” she said. “Let’s sit down.”
They had come to the edge of the pool, an oval sheet of water in the
heart of the wood, so densely surrounded by pines that their branches
were reflected in the water and there was hardly room to sit on the
turf. She propped herself against a tree and he selected one close by.
“Now,” she said, “tell me more of your mother. What did she look like?”
“Very much like you,” said Bylant.