"But did you do it?"
"Oh, there was something of the sort." He honestly disliked to have his
supposedly heroic exploits praised, only from modesty perhaps, perhaps
from a super-sensitive consciousness that they were the results rather
of fear than of bravery. "Look at that sky. Isn't it glorious?"
"Then about the express robbery on the Rio Grande," said Muriel; "they
said you went after the robbers when the sheriff and his men were afraid
to go, and you captured them by yourself--three of them."
Stainton laughed, his broad, white teeth showing.
"The sheriff and his men," he said, "were along with me. It was not half
so exciting as that play last night. Didn't you like the play?"
"I loved it. But, Mr. Stainton----"
"Yes?"
"Won't you tell me about some of these things?"
"I am sure they are much more interesting in the form in which the
newspapers presented them."
"I always wanted to see a mine. Surely a mine must be lovely. Please
tell me about a mine."
He tried to tell her, but mining had been to him only a means to an end
and, the end now being attained, mining struck him as a dull subject. He
abruptly concluded by telling her so.
"Besides," he said, "it is merely a business: a mere business, like any
other. What can girls and women care for business?"
So he brought back the conversation to the play that they had seen the
night before. He discussed the plot with her, the plot having no
relation to business, or to anything else approaching actuality for that
matter, his iron-grey eyes all the while eagerly feeding on her beauty
and her youth.
"You think," he asked, "that the Duchess should not have tried to break
off the match?"
"Just because Arthur was young and poor?" inquired Muriel. "Of course I
think she shouldn't. He was far too nice for her daughter anyway."
"But there was the suspicion that he had cheated at cards. Lord Eustace
had told her so."
"She didn't really believe that; she only wanted to believe it. I think
she was horrid."
"And her daughter, Lady--Lady----" He hesitated for the name.
"Lady Gladys," supplied Muriel. "I think she was horrid, too. To give up
Arthur like that!"
Stainton smiled gravely.
"You would not have done it, Miss Stannard?"
"Indeed I would not!"
"What _would_ you have done?"
Muriel's chin became resolute.
"I should have gone right up to him before them all there in the
drawing-room, and I should have put my----" She broke off, rosy with
embarrassment. "You will think I am awfully silly," she said.
But Stainton did not think so. He urged her on.
"No, you will laugh," said Muriel.
"I should not," he answered her. "I really want to know."
Nevertheless, the illusion of the theatre, which her memory had
partially renewed, her self-consciousness finally dispelled, and her
conclusion was in lame contrast to her beginning:
"I should just have married him in spite of them all."
Of such material was Stainton's wooing made. Though it may seem but poor
stuff to you, it did not seem so to those who wove it, and it was, if
you will but reflect upon your own, the material generally in vogue.
Our modern method of courting is, of course, the most artificial phase
of modern artificial life. The period of courtship is, for most lovers,
what Sunday used to be for the small boy in the orthodox family of the
early 'seventies. As he then put on his best clothes for the Sabbath,
our men and women now put on their best manners for the courting. As he
then put off his real self at church-time, they now lay aside, for this
supposedly romantic interlude in an existence presently to return to the
acknowledged prosaic, all their crudities. It was thus with Muriel and
Stainton.
Not that the latter meant to appear other than he was. His great Plan
presumed, indeed, quite the reverse. He was intent that Muriel should
admire not his wealth or his reputation, but his inherent worth and the
genuine basis for his reputation. He was resolved that she should love
not any or all of the things that he might be, but the one thing, the
real self, that he had himself made. His fault, according to the
prevailing standards, if any fault resulted, consisted only in his
insistence upon a too introspectively observed ideal of just what that
thing happened to be.
Nor yet, and this is likewise intrinsic, would the severest scrutiny
have revealed in Muriel any realisation of a pose upon her own part. Her
aunt, trusting as do most guardians of youth to a natural intuition in
the ward, which has no standing in fact, refrained from informing the
girl in plain language what it was that Stainton wanted. Mrs. Newberry's
fears were ungrounded: the conventional calm had not been disturbed, and
Muriel, save for timid smiles at the butcher's boy when he called at the
school and furtive glances at the acolytes in church, had never yet
known love. Not guessing the truth, Muriel was merely, for the first
time, being accorded a glimpse of those kingdoms of this world of which
all schoolgirls have had their stolen dreams. With what she saw she was
frankly delighted, and when a pretty young girl is frankly delighted, a
pretty young girl is obviously not at her worst.
"You look very happy nowadays," said Mrs. Newberry at the
luncheon-table, looking, however, not at the subject of her remarks but
at the master of her affections, who, chancing to be lunching at home,
sat opposite her.
"I am, Aunt Ethel," said Muriel. "I always have been happy, but I am
happier than ever now."
Mrs. Newberry smiled meaningly at Preston, but Muriel could not see the
smile, and Preston would not.
"Why is that?" asked Ethel.
"Oh, because."
"Because why?"
"Because I am seeing so much. The city, you know, and these suppers and
things. Sitting up until to-morrow. And I do so love the theatres!"
Ethel's smile faded.
"Yes," she said, "Mr. Stainton is very kind."
"And generous," put in Preston so unexpectedly that his wife jumped.
"Thompson; the salmon."
"I think he's lovely," said Muriel.
"Do you?" Mrs. Newberry was bovine even in her playful moods. "He does
really run about like a boy, doesn't he?"
"Well," said Muriel, "I wouldn't say _just_ like a boy."
"He seems quite young--he actually seems very young indeed," mused
Ethel.
"Seems?" said Preston. "He is."
His positive tone startled Mrs. Newberry into indiscretion.
"He is fif----" she began, then, catching her husband's eye, she
corrected herself: "He must be nearly----"
"He is forty," said Newberry, scowling.
"Oh, Uncle Preston," protested Muriel, "Mr. Holt said----"
"George Holt is a fool," said Newberry, "and always was."
"Your uncle is quite right, Muriel," said Ethel. "Mr. Holt does gossip.
Besides, he is not the sort of person a young girl should quote."
"You quote him, Aunt Ethel--often."
"Your aunt," said Preston, "is not a young girl. Mr. Stainton is younger
than Holt, I dare say, for he has evidently taken good care of himself,
and Holt never takes care of anything, least of all his health."
The air of importance that her uncle and aunt seemed to attach to so
trivial a matter as a few years more or less in the age of any man past
thirty puzzled Muriel, and she betrayed her bewilderment.
"I don't see how it much matters," she said, "whether he's forty or
fifty."
"It doesn't matter in the least," said Newberry. "But you had better
make the most of him while you can."
"I don't see why," said Muriel.
"Because he is popular," Preston explained. "There are several
women--women and _girls_--anxious to marry him, and one or other of them
is sure to succeed."
Muriel winced. She did not relish the thought of losing her new friend,
and she wondered why, if he were really sought after in marriage, he had
so much time to devote to her and her aunt and uncle, and why he spoke
so little of women to her.
Stainton, indeed, held his tongue about his intentions for just the
length of time that, as he had previously concluded, a man must hold his
tongue in such matters. If, in the meantime, Muriel heard from both of
the Newberrys more interesting stories of his career in the West, and
was impressed thereby, if she got from the same reliable source equally
romantic accounts of his wealth and was, as the best of us could not in
like circumstances help being, a little impressed by these as well, she
was, nevertheless, honestly unprepared for his final declaration. She
regarded Stainton as a storybook hero, the more so since his
conversation never approached the sentimental, and she delighted in his
company for the "good time"--it was thus that she described it--which he
was "showing her."
In brief, she was at last ready to fall in love with Stainton. Stainton
was in love.
VI
A MAID PERPLEXED
So far as Stainton was privileged to know, the end of this first act in
their comedy came about in much the manner designed by him. He moved
quietly, as he moved in all the details of his life; he had the gift of
precision, and when he arrived at what Sarcey called the _scene a
faire_, though he was perhaps more in love, as that term is generally
understood, than most lovers, he arrived not at all breathless, and
found nothing to complain of in what awaited him.
Mrs. Newberry had ostentatiously deserted him and Muriel in the
white-and-gold Newberry drawing-room splendid with spindle-legged
mahogany and appropriately uncomfortable. It was evening, an evening
that Stainton had taken care should be unoccupied by any disturbing
theatre party or other frivolous forerunner to a declaration.
That Ethel and her husband had tacitly agreed to this arrangement,
Stainton did not notice as significant. Mrs. Newberry, after the spasm
of chaperonage that followed his first unwatched motor drive with
Muriel, had tactfully begun to withdraw from the role of duenna, and the
suitor had consoled himself in the ocular demonstration of the proverb
that two are company and three none. Hitherto he had enjoyed his
privilege like the temperate man that he was, which is to say that he
enjoyed it without abusing it. He belonged by birth to that class of
society which, though strong enough in the so-called natural affections,
seems to think it indecent to display emotion in public, and he was
unwilling, for both his own sake and that of the girl he loved, to hurry
an affair that might lose much by speed and gain much by circumspection.
Now, however, the time came to test the virtues of his plan of campaign,
and Stainton was glad that the combination of the time and the place and
the loved one was not marred by any extraneous interference.
The wooer was at his best. The clothes that are designed for those short
hours of the twenty-four when one is at rest without being asleep,
became him; they gave full value to his erect figure, his shapely hips,
and his robust shoulders; and, since he was about to win or lose that
which he now most prized in life, and since he had always felt sure that
the only courage he lacked was physical, his strong face looked far
younger than its years and his iron-grey eyes shone not with fear, but
with excitement.
While he leaned against a corner of the white mantelpiece above the
glowing fireplace, so much as it was possible for his upright figure to
lean, he was thinking that Muriel, opposite him, was more beautiful than
he had ever yet seen her--thinking, but without terror, how dreadful it
would be should he lose her and how wonderful should he win. Young
enough for her in that kindly light he almost looked and was sure he
was; worthy of her, though he felt more worthy than most, he was certain
that no man could be. He saw her as he had seen her that first night at
the opera, but more desirable.
Seated in the farther corner of a long, low couch drawn close to the
chimney-place and at right-angles to it, three or four rose-red pillows
piled behind the suggestion of bare shoulders only just escaping from
her gown of grey ninon draped over delicate pink, Muriel's slim body
fronted the dancing fire and warmed in the light that played from the
flames. Her blue-black hair waved about her white temples and the narrow
lines of her brows; her lips, the lower slightly indrawn, were like
young red roses after the last shower of Spring.
He felt again, as he had felt when he saw her in the Newberrys' box,
that she was lovely not only with the hesitant possibilities of girlhood
at pause before the door of maturity, but because she gleamed with the
gleam of an approaching summer night scented and starred. He noted how
the yellow rays from a high candelabrum standing near the couch cast
what might be an aureole about her head and set it in relief against the
distant, drawn curtains, the curtains of ivory plush, which shut the
heaven of this drawing-room from the earth of everywhere else. In his
every early adventure among the dreams of love, this lonely man of the
desert, reacting on his environment, had been less annoyed by the
demands of a body that clamoured in vain than by the dictates of a soul
that insisted upon the perfection of beauty among beautiful surroundings
beautifully encountered. Now he was to put into action forces that would
either realise or break those dreams, and, knowing that, he imprinted on
his memory this picture of her and always after remembered it: her white
hands clasped about the great bunch of violets he had brought to her,
the glory of her wayward hair, the curve of her throat, her dark eyes
with their curving lashes, her parted lips.
She had again been asking him of his life in the mining-camps of Alaska
and the West and about his solitary journeys prospecting for the gold
that it had often seemed was never to be found, and Stainton, wishing
not to capitalise his achievements and unable to understand why a girl
should interest herself in what was simply a business history, had again
evaded her.
"But you must have suffered a good deal," she said.
"Oh, yes," he said; "that is part of the price of Life."
"You did it all," she asked, "to win a fortune?"
"No," he answered, his glance as steady upon hers as it had been that
night at the opera. "I did it all to win Life. That has always been
what I wanted; that has always been what I never had: Life. I wanted--I
scarcely know how to say it: the full, sharp, clean joys of being. You
understand?"
"I think I understand," she said.
"I wanted them. I saw that no man could have them in these days, living
as we live, unless he was economically independent and morally straight.
I made up my mind to win economic independence and to keep morally
straight at any sacrifice."
She drew her fingers a little tighter about the tinfoil wrapping of the
violets. Over the purple tops of the flowers, as she raised them toward
her face, her intent, innocent face returned his steady scrutiny.
"And you've won?" she asked.
He wished to cross to her, to come to the couch and lean over its back,
and, with his lips close to her cheek, whisper his answer. But he would
not do that; he had decided that to do that at this point would be to
bring about for his benefit an unfair propinquity. Instead, he moved
only a step from the mantelpiece and stood upright, his arms folded.
Only a step, but to the girl he seemed somehow to draw much closer. The
atmosphere of the room was somehow strained to tension. She saw that his
eyes, although they did not waver, softened, and, to fill a pause of
which she began to be afraid, she heard herself repeating:
"And you've won?"
"That," said Stainton, "is for you to say--Muriel."
It was the first time he had called her by her given name. Her eyes
fell. She lowered the violets and, looking only at them, raised a hand
to finger them. The hand shook.
"For me?" she asked.
If there is one thing in which men are more alike than another, it is
the manner of their asking women to marry them. Generally it adds to
many pretences the cruelty of suspense. Stainton was not unusual.
"I have won my fight--yes," he said. "I have got the means. Can I gain
the end? It's you who must tell me that."
She saw now.
"How can I help?" she faltered.
"I wanted Life," he repeated, and wished that he could see her face.
"Life means more than money. Money will protect it, secure it; but Life
means Love. Long ago I knew your mother."
Very simply, but directly, he told her how he had loved that other
Muriel. His morbid fears he did not describe, but his first romance he
sketched with a gentleness that, while she, her heart steadied, looked
up at his reposed strength and remembered all the stories that she had
heard of his adventurous career, brought a quick mist of tears to her
eyes.
"Do you remember," he asked, when his story was finished, "how rudely I
looked at you when I first saw you in the Metropolitan Opera House?"
"It wasn't rude," she said.
"You must have thought it so then."
"I--I didn't know what to think--exactly."
"Well, now you know. It was an astonishing resemblance that made me
stare at you."
Her nether lip trembled.
"I didn't know my mother," she said.
"No," said Stainton, "but you are very like her." He waited a moment and
then, as her eyes were lowered, went on: "That was a boyish love of mine
for her. It was really not love at all--only the rough sketch for what
might have been, but never was, a finished picture. But I went away,
when your mother repulsed me, with the likeness of her in my heart. I
wanted love; I worked to be fit to win love and to keep it once I had
won it. Then I came back and saw in that box at the opera the living
original of the dream-woman that had all those years been with me."
He came another step nearer.
"I arranged to meet you," he said, "and I knew at last I was really in
love. I want to be to you what your mother would not let me be to her.
It is you whom I love, not a memory. I love you. I was young then and
didn't know. Now I am still young--I have kept myself young--but I
_know_." He bent forward and paused. Then, "Muriel," he said.
The girl drew back. She put her hand before her eyes. The violets rolled
to the floor.
"I--I can't tell," she stammered. "I didn't expect--I never thought----"
Even this Stainton had foreseen.
"Then don't hurry now," he said. He drew a chair beside her and quietly
took her free hand. "Take your time. Take a week, two weeks, a month, if
you choose."
"But it's so new; it's all so new," said Muriel. "I never
suspected----Oh, I know girls are always supposed to guess; but really,
really, I never, _never_----"
There was genuine pain in her voice.
"I don't know what is expected of most girls," said Stainton; "but of
you I shall never expect anything but the truth."
She looked up at him with eyes perplexed.
"Yes--yes, that is just what I want to be: honest. And--don't you
see?--that is just why--I am so uncertain--that is just why I can't,
right away, tell you----"
He pressed her hand and rose. He did not like to hurt her.
"I ask only that you will think it over," he said. "Will you think it
over, Muriel?"
She bowed her head.
"Yes," said she.
"And I may come back in----"
"Yes."
"In two weeks?"
"In two weeks." Her voice was low and shaken. "Oh, you don't mind if I
ask you to go now?" she pleaded.
"I understand," said Stainton. "I'll be back two weeks from this
evening. Good-night."
"Good-night, Mr. Stainton," said Muriel.
She waited for him to go. She waited until she heard the street door
close behind him. Then she hurried in retreat toward her own room.
But Mrs. Newberry was lying in ambush on the landing when the girl came
upstairs--Mrs. Newberry, broad in white satin, with diamonds at her neck
and in her hair.
"Well?" asked the aunt.
"Oh!" cried Muriel. She started. "Aunt Ethel!"
"Well?"
"You frightened me," Muriel explained. "I didn't see you until you
spoke."
"Well?" persisted Mrs. Newberry.
"Nothing. That's all," said Muriel. "Nothing--only that----"
Ethel became diplomatic:
"Mr. Stainton didn't stay very long?"
"Not very long, Aunty."
Ethel heard something ominous in her niece's tone.
"You didn't--you don't mean to say you sent him _away_?"
"No, Aunty. Good-night."
"It's early. You're going to bed so early?"
"Yes, I think I'll go to bed. I'm--I'm tired."
"But it's early," repeated Mrs. Newberry, who was accustomed to order
her life according to hours and not to reason.
"Is it?" said Muriel.
"It's scarcely ten. The library clock just struck."
"I think it struck some time ago."
"Did it?"
"I think I shall go to bed, Aunty."
Mrs. Newberry sought to bar the way, but she could not succeed in that
when she could think of no pretext for detaining the girl, so Muriel
brushed past her and went to her own room.
Ethel returned to the library--so called because it contained a few
hundred unread books, the newspapers, and all the current magazines. She
said to herself that she wanted to think it over, "it" being the
opportunity that she had so ceremoniously afforded Stainton and Muriel,
together with Muriel's sudden desire for privacy.
Nevertheless, think it over as she would, she made nothing of it. When
Preston returned from one of his clubs, several hours later, she was no
nearer to a solution than she had at first been, and she told him so.
"I don't understand it," said Ethel. "I don't understand it at all."
Preston enjoyed his clubs so much that he rarely returned from them in
his pleasantest mood.
"Then," he asked, "don't you think it might possibly be just as well for
you to let it alone?"
This occurred on a Thursday. As the week progressed and passed and James
Stainton did not reappear, Mrs. Newberry found it increasingly difficult
to follow the advice that her husband had pointedly suggested. She
assailed Muriel several times to no purpose. She wrote to Stainton,
asking him to come to dinner, but he replied that he was too desperately
engaged in some business that she surmised was vaguely connected with a
French syndicate and his mine. Then, Muriel's silence unbroken, she made
one or two tentative advances, merely inviting the confidence that she
had theretofore demanded as her consanguineous right; but her niece's
manner of meeting these advances merely served to simplify the task of
wifely obedience.
When light was at last cast on the puzzle, it was Muriel's free will
that vouchsafed it. On the Wednesday that fell thirteen days after
Stainton's mysteriously terminated call, Muriel entered Ethel's
boudoir--it was a pink boudoir--where Mrs. Newberry was attempting, at
eleven o'clock in the morning, to dress in time for a two o'clock
luncheon.
"Can you spare Marie?" asked Muriel. Marie was Mrs. Newberry's maid,
just then fluttering about her mistress, who, her dressing advanced only
beyond the ordeal of corsets, was seated, in a grandiose kimono, before
mirrors.
"In two hours and a half perhaps I can," said Ethel. "Why?"
"Because I want to talk with you."
This was odd. It was so odd that Mrs. Newberry should have scented its
import; only, it is difficult to scent the import of anything when one
has supped late the night before, when the first "rat" has not been
nested upon one's head, and when one has but an eighth part of a day in
which to make ready for a luncheon.
"Really, Muriel," complained Ethel. "You do choose the most remarkable
moments for conversation. It's only eleven o'clock! What on earth can
you want to talk about at such an hour?"
Muriel quietly seated herself by the window.
"About Mr. Stainton," she said.
Mrs. Newberry started so violently that a shower of gilt hairpins
clattered upon the dressing-table and floor.
"You may go, Marie," she gasped. She waited until the maid had shut the
door. Then she turned her gaze full upon her niece. "What is it?" she
cried.
"He wants to marry me."
Mrs. Newberry floundered to her feet and rushed upon Muriel. Her flowing
sleeves flew back to her sturdy shoulders. She flung plump arms around
Muriel's neck.
"My dear girl!" said she. She kissed the dear girl on both passive
cheeks. Then she inquired: "You've had a letter?"
"No," said Muriel. "He asked me."
"But, my dear, he hasn't been here for nearly two weeks. It was--let me
see--yes, it will be two weeks to-morrow evening."
"That was when he asked me, Aunty."
Mrs. Newberry's embrace relaxed. She looked hurt.
"And you never told me! I think that implies a lack of confidence--a
lack of affection, Muriel."
"I don't know. I wanted to think it over first."
"Think it over! What was there to debate, I should like to know?"