Much light shatters much loveliness; but a pretty girl who looks
pretty outdoors on a dazzling hot summer morning is prettier then
than ever. Cora knew it; of course she knew it; she knew exactly
how she looked, as she left the concrete bridge behind her at the
upper end of Corliss Street and turned into a shrub-bordered
bypath of the river park. In imagination she stood at the turn of
the path just ahead, watching her own approach: she saw herself as
a picture--the white-domed parasol, with its cheerful pale-green
lining, a background for her white hat, her corn-silk hair, and
her delicately flushed face. She saw her pale, live arms through
their thin sleeves, and the light grasp of her gloved fingers upon
the glistening stick of the parasol; she saw the long, simple
lines of her close white dress and their graceful interchanging
movements with the alternate advance of her white shoes over the
fine gravel path; she saw the dazzling splashes of sunshine
playing upon her through the changeful branches overhead. Cora
never lacked a gallery: she sat there herself.
She refreshed the eyes of a respectable burgess of sixty, a person
so colourless that no one, after passing him, could have
remembered anything about him except that he wore glasses and some
sort of moustache; and to Cora's vision he was as near transparent
as any man could be, yet she did not miss the almost imperceptible
signs of his approval, as they met and continued on their opposite
ways. She did not glance round, nor did he pause in his slow walk;
neither was she clairvoyant; none the less, she knew that he
turned his head and looked back at her.
The path led away from the drives and more public walks of the
park, to a low hill, thoughtfully untouched by the gardener and
left to the shadowy thickets and good-smelling underbrush of its
rich native woodland. And here, by a brown bench, waited a tall
gentleman in white.
They touched hands and sat without speaking. For several moments
they continued the silence, then turned slowly and looked at each
other; then looked slowly and gravely away, as if to an audience
in front of them. They knew how to do it; but probably a critic in
the first row would have concluded that Cora felt it even more
than Valentine Corliss enjoyed it.
"I suppose this is very clandestine," she said, after a deep
breath. "I don't think I care, though."
"I hope you do," he smiled, "so that I could think your coming
means more."
"Then I'll care," she said, and looked at him again.
"You dear!" he exclaimed deliberately.
She bit her lip and looked down, but not before he had seen the
quick dilation of her ardent eyes. "I wanted to be out of doors,"
she said. "I'm afraid there's one thing of yours I don't like, Mr.
Corliss."
"I'll throw it away, then. Tell me."
"Your house. I don't like living in it, very much. I'm sorry you
_can't_ throw it away."
"I'm thinking of doing that very thing," he laughed. "But I'm glad
I found the rose in that queer old waste-basket first."
"Not too much like a rose, sometimes," she said. "I think this
morning I'm a little like some of the old doors up on the third
floor: I feel rather unhinged, Mr. Corliss."
"You don't look it, Miss Madison!"
"I didn't sleep very well." She bestowed upon him a glance which
transmuted her actual explanation into, "I couldn't sleep for
thinking of you." It was perfectly definite; but the acute
gentleman laughed genially.
"Go on with you!" he said.
Her eyes sparkled, and she joined laughter with him. "But it's
true: you did keep me awake. Besides, I had a serenade."
"Serenade? I had an idea they didn't do that any more over here. I
remember the young men going about at night with an orchestra
sometimes when I was a boy, but I supposed----"
"Oh, it wasn't much like that," she interrupted, carelessly. "I
don't think that sort of thing has been done for years and years.
It wasn't an orchestra--just a man singing under my window."
"With a guitar?"
"No." She laughed a little. "Just singing."
"But it rained last night," said Corliss, puzzled.
"Oh, _he_ wouldn't mind that!"
"How stupid of me! Of course, he wouldn't. Was it Richard
Lindley?"
"Never!"
"I see. Yes, that was a bad guess: I'm sure Lindley's just the
same steady-going, sober, plodding old horse he was as a boy. His
picture doesn't fit a romantic frame--singing under a lady's
window in a thunderstorm! Your serenader must have been very
young."
"He is," said Cora. "I suppose he's about twenty-three; just a
boy--and a very annoying one, too!"
Her companion looked at her narrowly. "By any chance, is he the
person your little brother seemed so fond of mentioning--Mr.
Vilas?"
Cora gave a genuine start. "Good heavens! What makes you think
that?" she cried, but she was sufficiently disconcerted to confirm
his amused suspicion.
"So it was Mr. Vilas," he said. "He's one of the jilted, of
course."
"Oh, `jilted'!" she exclaimed. "All the wild boys that a girl
can't make herself like aren't `jilted,' are they?"
"I believe I should say--yes," he returned. "Yes, in this
instance, just about all of them."
"Is every woman a target for you, Mr. Corliss? I suppose you know
that you have a most uncomfortable way of shooting up the
landscape." She stirred uneasily, and moved away from him to the
other end of the bench.
"I didn't miss that time," he laughed. "Don't you ever miss?"
He leaned quickly toward her and answered in a low voice: "You can
be sure I'm not going to miss anything about _you_."
It was as if his bending near her had been to rouge her. But it
cannot be said that she disliked his effect upon her; for the deep
breath she drew in audibly, through her shut teeth, was a signal
of delight; and then followed one of those fraught silences not
uncharacteristic of dialogues with Cora.
Presently, she gracefully and uselessly smoothed her hair from the
left temple with the backs of her fingers, of course finishing the
gesture prettily by tucking in a hairpin tighter above the nape of
her neck. Then, with recovered coolness, she asked:
"Did you come all the way from Italy just to sell our old house,
Mr. Corliss?"
"Perhaps that was part of why I came," he said, gayly. "I need a
great deal of money, Miss Cora Madison."
"For your villa and your yacht?"
"No; I'm a magician, dear lady----"
"Yes," she said, almost angrily. "Of course you know it!"
"You mock me! No; I'm going to make everybody rich who will trust
me. I have a secret, and it's worth a mountain of gold. I've put
all I have into it, and will put in everything else I can get for
myself, but it's going to take a great deal more than that. And
everybody who goes into it will come out on Monte Cristo's
island."
"Then I'm sorry papa hasn't anything to put in," she said.
"But he has: his experience in business and his integrity. I want
him to be secretary of my company. Will you help me to get him?"
he laughed.
"Do you want me to?" she asked with a quick, serious glance
straight in his eyes, one which he met admirably.
"I have an extremely definite impression," he said lightly, "that
you can make anybody you know do just what you want him to."
"And I have another that you have still another `extremely
definite impression' that takes rank over that," she said, but not
with his lightness, for her tone was faintly rueful. "It is that
you can make _me_ do just what you want me to."
Mr. Valentine Corliss threw himself back on the bench and laughed
aloud. "What a girl!" he cried. Then for a fraction of a second he
set his hand over hers, an evanescent touch at which her whole
body started and visibly thrilled.
She lifted her gloved hand and looked at it with an odd wonder;
her alert emotions, always too ready, flinging their banners to
her cheeks again.
"Oh, I don't think it's soiled," he said, a speech which she
punished with a look of starry contempt. For an instant she made
him afraid that something had gone wrong with his measuring tape;
but with a slow movement she set her hand softly against her hot
cheek; and he was reassured: it was not his touching her that had
offended her, but the allusion to it.
"Thanks," he said, very softly.
She dropped her hand to her parasol, and began, musingly, to dig
little holes in the gravel of the path. "Richard Lindley is
looking for investments," she said.
"I'm glad to hear he's been so successful," returned Corliss.
"He might like a share in your gold-mine."
"Thank heaven it isn't literally a gold-mine," he exclaimed.
"There have been so many crooked ones exploited I don't believe
you could get anybody nowadays to come in on a real one. But I
think you'd make an excellent partner for an adventurer who had
discovered hidden treasure; and I'm that particular kind of
adventurer. I think I'll take you in."
"Do you?"
"How would you like to save a man from being ruined?"
"Ruined? You don't mean it literally?"
"Literally!" He laughed gayly. "If I don't `land' this I'm gone,
smashed, finished--quite ended! Don't bother, I'm going to `land'
it. And it's rather a serious compliment I'm paying you, thinking
you can help me. I'd like to see a woman--just once in the
world--who could manage a thing like this." He became suddenly
very grave. "Good God! wouldn't I be at her feet!"
Her eyes became even more eager. "You think I--I _might_ be a
woman who could?"
"Who knows, Miss Madison? I believe----" He stopped abruptly, then
in a lowered, graver voice asked: "Doesn't it somehow seem a
little queer to you when we call each other, `Miss Madison' and
`Mr. Corliss'?"
"Yes," she answered slowly; "it does."
"Doesn't it seem to you," he went on, in the same tone, "that we
only `Miss' and `Mister' each other in fun? That though you never
saw me until yesterday, we've gone pretty far beyond mere
surfaces? That we did in our talk, last night?"
"Yes," she repeated; "it does."
He let a pause follow, and then said huskily:
"How far are we going?"
"I don't know." She was barely audible; but she turned
deliberately, and there took place an eager exchange of looks
which continued a long while. At last, and without ending this
serious encounter, she whispered:
"How far do _you_ think?"
Mr. Corliss did not answer, and a peculiar phenomenon became
vaguely evident to the girl facing him: his eyes were still fixed
full upon hers, but he was not actually looking at her;
nevertheless, and with an extraordinarily acute attention, he was
unquestionably looking at something. The direct front of pupil and
iris did not waver from her; but for the time he was not aware of
her; had not even heard her question. Something in the outer field
of his vision had suddenly and completely engrossed him; something
in that nebulous and hazy background which we see, as we say, with
the white of the eye. Cora instinctively turned and looked behind
her, down the path.
There was no one in sight except a little girl and the elderly
burgess who had glanced over his shoulder at Cora as she entered
the park; and he was, in face, mien, and attire, so thoroughly the
unnoticeable, average man-on-the-street that she did not even
recall him as the looker-round of a little while ago. He was
strolling benevolently, the little girl clinging to one of his
hands, the other holding an apple; and a composite photograph of a
thousand grandfathers might have resulted in this man's picture.
As the man and little girl came slowly up the walk toward the
couple on the bench there was a faint tinkle at Cora's feet: her
companion's scarfpin, which had fallen from his tie. He was
maladroit about picking it up, trying with thumb and forefinger to
seize the pin itself, instead of the more readily grasped design
of small pearls at the top, so that he pushed it a little deeper
into the gravel; and then occurred a tiny coincidence: the elderly
man, passing, let fall the apple from his hand, and it rolled
toward the pin just as Corliss managed to secure the latter. For
an instant, though the situation was so absolutely commonplace, so
casual, Cora had a wandering consciousness of some mysterious
tensity; a feeling like the premonition of a crisis very near at
hand. This sensation was the more curious because nothing whatever
happened. The man got his apple, joined in the child's laughter,
and went on.
"What was it you asked me?" said Corliss, lifting his head again
and restoring the pin to his tie. He gazed carelessly at the back
of the grandsire, disappearing beyond a bush at a bend in the
path.
"Who was that man?" said Cora with some curiosity.
"That old fellow? I haven't an idea. You see I've been away from
here so many years I remember almost no one. Why?"
"I don't know, unless it was because I had an idea you were
thinking of him instead of me. You didn't listen to what I said."
"That was because I was thinking so intensely of you," he began
instantly. "A startlingly vivid thought of you came to me just
then. Didn't I look like a man in a trance?"
"What was the thought?"
"It was a picture: I saw you standing under a great bulging sail,
and the water flying by in moonlight; oh, a moon and a night such
as you have never seen! and a big blue headland looming up against
the moon, and crowned with lemon groves and vineyards, all
sparkling with fireflies--old watch-towers and the roofs of white
villas gleaming among olive orchards on the slopes--the sound of
mandolins----"
"Ah!" she sighed, the elderly man, his grandchild, and his apple
well-forgotten.
"Do you think it was a prophecy?" he asked.
"What do _you_ think?" she breathed. "That was really what I asked
you before."
"I think," he said slowly, "that I'm in danger of forgetting that
my `hidden treasure' is the most important thing in the world."
"In great danger?" The words were not vocal.
He moved close to her; their eyes met again, with increased
eagerness, and held fast; she was trembling, visibly; and her
lips--parted with her tumultuous breathing--were not far from his.
"Isn't any man in great danger," he said, "if he falls in love
with you?"
"Well?"