SILVERSIDE
During that week-end at Silverside Boots behaved like a school-lad run
wild. With Drina's hand in his, half a dozen dogs as advanced guard, and
heavily flanked by the Gerard battalion, he scoured the moorlands from
Surf Point to the Hither Woods; from Wonder Head to Sky Pond.
Ever hopeful of rabbit and fox, Billy urged on his cheerful waddling
pack and the sea wind rang with the crack of his whip and the treble
note of his whistle. Drina, lately inoculated with the virus of
nature-study, carried a green gauze butterfly net, while Boots's pockets
bulged with various lethal bottles and perforated tin boxes for the
reception of caterpillars. The other children, like the puppies of
Billy's pack, ran haphazard, tireless and eager little opportunists,
eternal prisoners of hope, tripped flat by creepers, scratched and
soiled in thicket and bog, but always up and forward again, ranging out,
nose in the wind, dauntless, expectant, wonder-eyed.
Nina, Eileen, and Selwyn formed a lagging and leisurely rear-guard,
though always within signalling distance of Boots and the main body;
and, when necessary, the two ex-army men wig-wagged to each other across
the uplands to the endless excitement and gratification of the
children.
It was a perfect week-end; the sky, pale as a robin's egg at morn and
even, deepened to royal blue under the noon-day sun; and all the
world--Long Island--seemed but a gigantic gold-green boat stemming the
running purple of the sea and Sound.
The air, when still, quivered in that deep, rich silence instinct with
the perpetual monotone of the sea; stiller for the accentless call of
some lone moorland bird, or the gauzy clatter of a dragon-fly in reedy
reaches. But when the moon rose and the breeze awakened, and the sedges
stirred, and the cat's-paws raced across the moonlit ponds, and the far
surf off Wonder Head intoned the hymn of the four winds, the trinity,
earth and sky and water, became one thunderous symphony--a harmony of
sound and colour silvered to a monochrome by the moon.
Then, through the tinted mystery the wild ducks, low flying, drove like
a flight of witches through the dusk; and unseen herons called from
their heronry, fainter, fainter till their goblin yelps died out in the
swelling murmur of a million wind-whipped leaves.
Then was the moorland waste bewitching in its alternation of softly
checkered gray and shade, where acres of feathery grasses flowed in
wind-blown furrows; where in the purple obscurity of hollows the strange
and aged little forests grew restless and full of echoes; where shadowy
reeds like elfin swords clattered and thrust and parried across the
darkling pools of haunted waters unstirred save for the swirl of a
startled fish or the smoothly spreading wake of some furry creature
swimming without a sound.
Into this magic borderland, dimmer for moonlit glimpses in ghostly
contrast to the shadow shape of wood and glade, Eileen conducted Selwyn;
and they heard the whirr of painted wood-ducks passing in obscurity,
and the hymn of the four winds off Wonder Head; and they heard the
herons, noisy in their heronry, and a young fox yapping on a moon-struck
dune.
But Selwyn cared more for the sun and the infinite blue above, and the
vast cloud-forms piled up in argent splendour behind a sea of amethyst.
"The darker, vaguer phases of beauty," he said to Eileen, smiling,
"attract and fascinate those young in experience. Tragedy is always
better appreciated and better rendered by those who have never lived it.
The anatomy of sadness, the subtler fascination of life brooding in
shadow, appeals most keenly to those who can study and reflect, then
dismiss it all and return again to the brightness of existence which has
not yet for them been tarnished."
He had never before, even by slightest implication, referred to his own
experience with life. She was not perfectly certain that he did so now.
They were standing on one of the treeless hills--a riotous tangle of
grasses and wild flowers--looking out to sea across Sky Pond. He had a
rod; and as he stood he idly switched the gaily coloured flies backward
and forward.
"My tastes," he said, still smiling, "incline me to the garishly sunlit
side of this planet." And, to tease her and arouse her to combat: "I
prefer a farandole to a nocturne; I'd rather have a painting than an
etching; Mr. Whistler bores me with his monochromatic mud; I don't like
dull colours, dull sounds, dull intellects; and anything called 'an
arrangement' on canvas, or anything called 'a human document' or 'an
appreciation' in literature, or anything 'precious' in art, or any
author who 'weaves' instead of writes his stories--all these irritate
me when they do not first bore me to the verge of anæsthesia."
He switched his trout-flies defiantly, hopeful of an indignant retort
from her; but she only laughed and glanced at him, and shook her pretty
head.
"There's just enough truth in what you say to make a dispute quite
profitless. Besides, I don't feel like single combat; I'm too glad to
have you here."
Standing there--fairly swimming--in the delicious upper-air currents,
she looked blissfully across the rolling moors, while the sunlight
drenched her and the salt wind winnowed the ruddy glory of her hair, and
from the tangle of tender blossoming green things a perfume mounted,
saturating her senses as she breathed it deeper in the happiness of
desire fulfilled and content quite absolute.
"After all," she said, "what more is there than this? Earth and sea and
sky and sun, and a friend to show them to. . . . Because, as I wrote
you, the friend is quite necessary in the scheme of things--to round out
the symmetry of it all. . . . I suppose you're dying to dangle those
flies in Brier Water to see whether there are any trout there. Well,
there are; Austin stocked it years ago, and he never fishes, so no doubt
it's full of fish. . . . What is that black thing moving along the edge
of the Golden Marsh?"
"A mink," he said, looking.
She seated herself cross-legged on the hill-top to watch the mink at her
leisure. But the lithe furry creature took to the water, dived, and
vanished, and she turned her attention to the landscape.
"Do you see that lighthouse far to the south?" she asked; "that is
Frigate Light. West of it lies Surf Point, and the bay between is Surf
Bay. That's where I nearly froze solid in my first ocean bath of the
year. A little later we can bathe in that cove to the north--the Bay of
Shoals. You see it, don't you?--there, lying tucked in between Wonder
Head and the Hither Woods; but I forgot! Of course you've been here
before; and you know all this; don't you?"
"Yes," he said quietly, "my brother and I came here as boys."
"Have you not been here since?"
"Once." He turned and looked down at the sea-battered wharf jutting into
the Bay of Shoals. "Once, since I was a boy," he repeated; "but I came
alone. The transports landed at that wharf after the Spanish war. The
hospital camp was yonder. . . . My brother died there."
She lifted her clear eyes to his; he was staring at the outline of the
Hither Woods fringing the ochre-tinted heights.
"There was no companion like him," he said; "there is no one to take his
place. Still, time helps--in a measure."
But he looked out across the sea with a grief for ever new.
She, too, had been helped by time; she was very young when the distant
and fabled seas took father and mother; and it was not entirely their
memory, but more the wistful lack of ability to remember that left her
so hopelessly alone.
Sharper his sorrow; but there was the comfort of recollection in it; and
she looked at him and, for an instant, envied him his keener grief. Then
leaning a little toward him where he reclined, the weight of his body
propped up on one arm, she laid her hand across his hand half buried in
the grass.
"It's only another tie between us," she said--"the memory of your dead
and mine. . . . Will you tell me about him?"
And leaning there, eyes on the sea, and her smooth, young hand covering
his, he told her of the youth who had died there in the first flush of
manhood and achievement.
His voice, steady and grave, came to her through hushed intervals when
the noise of the surf died out as the wind veered seaward. And she
listened, heart intent, until he spoke no more; and the sea-wind rose
again filling her ears with the ceaseless menace of the surf.
After a while he picked up his rod, and sat erect and cross-legged as
she sat, and flicked the flies, absently, across the grass, aiming at
wind-blown butterflies.
"All these changes!" he exclaimed with a sweep of the rod-butt toward
Widgeon Bay. "When I was here as a boy there were no fine estates, no
great houses, no country clubs, no game preserves--only a few
fishermen's hovels along the Bay of Shoals, and Frigate Light
yonder. . . . Then Austin built Silverside out of a much simpler,
grand-paternal bungalow; then came Sanxon Orchil and erected Hitherwood
House on the foundations of his maternal great-grandfather's cabin; and
then the others came; the Minsters built gorgeous Brookminster--you can
just make out their big summer palace--that white spot beyond Surf
Point!--and then the Lawns came and built Southlawn; and, beyond, the
Siowitha people arrived on scout, land-hungry and rich; and the tiny
hamlet of Wyossett grew rapidly into the town it now is. Truly this
island with its hundred miles of length has become but a formal garden
of the wealthy. Alas! I knew it as a stretch of woods, dunes, and
old-time villages where life had slumbered for two hundred years!"
He fell silent, but she nodded him to go on.
"Brooklyn was a quiet tree-shaded town," he continued thoughtfully,
"unvexed by dreams of traffic; Flatbush an old Dutch village buried in
the scented bloom of lilac, locust, and syringa, asleep under its
ancient gables, hip-roofs, and spreading trees. Bath, Utrecht, Canarsie,
Gravesend were little more than cross-road taverns dreaming in the sun;
and that vile and noise-cursed island beyond the Narrows was a stretch
of unpolluted beauty in an untainted sea--nothing but whitest sand and
dunes and fragrant bayberry and a blaze of wild flowers. Why"--and he
turned impatiently to the girl beside him--"why, I have seen the wild
geese settle in Sheepshead Bay, and the wild duck circling over it; and
I am not very aged. Think of it! Think of what this was but a few years
ago, and think of what 'progress' has done to lay it waste! What will it
be to-morrow?"
"Oh--oh!" she protested, laughing; "I did not suppose you were that kind
of a Jeremiah!"
"Well, I am. I see no progress in prostrate forests, in soft-coal smoke,
in noise! I see nothing gained in trimming and cutting and ploughing and
macadamising a heavenly wilderness into mincing little gardens for the
rich." He was smiling at his own vehemence, but she knew that he was
more than half serious.
She liked him so; she always denied and disputed when he became
declamatory, though usually, in her heart, she agreed with him.
"Oh--oh!" she protested, shaking her head; "your philosophy is that of
all reactionaries--emotional arguments which never can be justified.
Why, if the labouring man delights in the harmless hurdy-gurdy and
finds his pleasure mounted on a wooden horse, should you say that the
island of his delight is 'vile'? All fulfilment of harmless happiness is
progress, my poor friend--"
"But my harmless happiness lay in seeing the wild-fowl splashing where
nothing splashes now except beer and the bathing rabble. If progress is
happiness--where is mine? Gone with the curlew and the wild duck!
Therefore, there is no progress. _Quod erat_, my illogical friend."
"But _your_ happiness in such things was an exception--"
"Exceptions prove anything!"
"Yes--but--no, they don't, either! What nonsense you can talk when you
try to. . . . As for me I'm going down to the Brier Water to look into
it. If there are any trout there foolish enough to bite at those
gaudy-feathered hooks I'll call you--"
"I'm going with you," he said, rising to his feet. She smilingly ignored
his offered hands and sprang erect unaided.
The Brier Water, a cold, deep, leisurely stream, deserved its name.
Rising from a small spring-pond almost at the foot of Silverside lawn,
it wound away through tangles of bull-brier and wild-rose, under arches
of weed and grass and clustered thickets of mint, north through one of
the strange little forests where it became a thread edged with a
duck-haunted bog, then emerging as a clear deep stream once more it
curved sharply south, recurved north again, and flowed into Shell Pond
which, in turn, had an outlet into the Sound a mile east of Wonder Head.
If anybody ever haunted it with hostile designs upon its fishy
denizens, Austin at least never did. Belted kingfisher, heron, mink, and
perhaps a furtive small boy with pole and sinker and barnyard
worm--these were the only foes the trout might dread. As for a man and a
fly-rod, they knew him not, nor was there much chance for casting a
line, because the water everywhere flowed under weeds, arched thickets
of brier and grass, and leafy branches criss-crossed above.
"This place is impossible," said Selwyn scornfully. "What is Austin
about to let it all grow up and run wild--"
"You _said_," observed Eileen, "that you preferred an untrimmed
wilderness; didn't you?"
He laughed and reeled in his line until only six inches of the gossamer
leader remained free. From this dangled a single silver-bodied fly,
glittering in the wind.
"There's a likely pool hidden under those briers," he said; "I'm going
to poke the tip of my rod under--this way--Hah!" as a heavy splash
sounded from depths unseen and the reel screamed as he struck.
Up and down, under banks and over shallows rushed the invisible fish;
and Selwyn could do nothing for a while but let him go when he insisted,
and check and recover when the fish permitted.
Eileen, a spray of green mint between her vivid lips, watched the
performance with growing interest; but when at length a big, fat,
struggling speckled trout was cautiously but successfully lifted out
into the grass, she turned her back until the gallant fighter had
departed this life under a merciful whack from a stick.
"That," she said faintly, "is the part I don't care for. . . . Is he out
of all pain? . . . What? Didn't feel any? Oh, are you quite sure?"
[Illustration: "Eileen watched the performance with growing
interest."]
She walked over to him and looked down at the beautiful victim of craft.
"Oh, well," she sighed, "you are very clever, of course, and I suppose
I'll eat him; but I wish he were alive again, down there in those cool,
sweet depths."
"Killing frogs and insects and his smaller brother fish?"
"Did he do _that_?"
"No doubt of it. And if I hadn't landed him, a heron or a mink would
have done it sooner or later. That's what a trout is for: to kill and be
killed."
She smiled, then sighed. The taking of life and the giving of it were
mysteries to her. She had never wittingly killed anything.
"Do you say that it doesn't hurt the trout?" she asked.
"There are no nerves in the jaw muscles of a trout--Hah!" as his rod
twitched and swerved under water and his reel sang again.
And again she watched the performance, and once more turned her back.
"Let me try," she said, when the _coup-de-grâce_ had been administered
to a lusty, brilliant-tinted bulltrout. And, rod in hand, she bent
breathless and intent over the bushes, cautiously thrusting the tip
through a thicket of mint.
She lost two fish, then hooked a third--a small one; but when she lifted
it gasping into the sunlight, she shivered and called to Selwyn:
"Unhook it and throw it back! I--I simply can't stand that!"
Splash! went the astonished trout; and she sighed her relief.
"There's no doubt about it," she said, "you and I certainly do belong
to different species of the same genus; men and women _are_ separate
species. Do you deny it?"
"I should hate to lose you that way," he returned teasingly.
"Well, you can't avoid it. I gladly admit that woman is not too closely
related to man. We don't like to kill things; it's an ingrained
distaste, not merely a matter of ethical philosophy. You like to kill;
and it's a trait common also to children and other predatory animals.
Which fact," she added airily, "convinces me of woman's higher
civilisation."
"It would convince me, too," he said, "if woman didn't eat the things
that man kills for her."
"I know; isn't it horrid! Oh, dear, we're neither of us very high in the
scale yet--particularly you."
"Well, I've advanced some since the good old days when a man went wooing
with a club," he suggested.
"_You_ may have. But, anyway, you don't go wooing. As for man
collectively, he has not progressed so very far," she added demurely.
"As an example, that dreadful Draymore man actually hurt my wrist."
Selwyn looked up quickly, a shade of frank annoyance on his face and a
vision of the fat sybarite before his eyes. He turned again to his
fishing, but his shrug was more of a shudder than appeared to be
complimentary to Percy Draymore.
She had divined, somehow, that it annoyed Selwyn to know that men had
importuned her. She had told him of her experience as innocently as she
had told Nina, and with even less embarrassment. But that had been long
ago; and now, without any specific reason, she was not certain that she
had acted wisely, although it always amused her to see Selwyn's
undisguised impatience whenever mention was made of such incidents.
So, to torment him, she said: "Of course it is somewhat exciting to be
asked to marry people--rather agreeable than otherwise--"
"What!"
Waist deep in bay-bushes he turned toward her where she sat on the trunk
of an oak which had fallen across the stream. Her arms balanced her
body; her ankles were interlocked. She swung her slim russet-shod feet
above the brook and looked at him with a touch of _gaminerie_ new to her
and to him.
"Of course it's amusing to be told you are the only woman in the world,"
she said, "particularly when a girl has a secret fear that men don't
consider her quite grown up."
"You once said," he began impatiently, "that the idiotic importunities
of those men annoyed you."
"Why do you call them idiotic?"--with pretence of hurt surprise. "A girl
is honoured--"
"Oh, bosh!"
"Captain Selwyn!"
"I beg your pardon," he said sulkily; and fumbled with his reel.
She surveyed him, head a trifle on one side--the very incarnation of
youthful malice in process of satisfying a desire for tormenting. Never
before had she experienced that desire so keenly, so unreasoningly;
never before had she found such a curious pleasure in punishing without
cause. A perfectly inexplicable exhilaration possessed her--a gaiety
quite reasonless, until every pulse in her seemed singing with laughter
and quickening with the desire for his torment.
"When I pretended I was annoyed by what men said to me, I was only a
yearling," she observed. "Now I'm a two-year, Captain Selwyn. . . . Who
can tell what may happen in my second season?"
"You said that you were _not_ the--the marrying sort," he insisted.
"Nonsense. All girls are. Once I sat in a high chair and wore a bib and
banqueted on cambric-tea and prunes. I don't do it now; I've advanced.
It's probably part of that progress which you are so opposed to."
He did not answer, but stood, head bent, looping on a new leader.
"All progress is admirable," she suggested.
No answer.
So, to goad him:
"There _are_ men," she said dreamily, "who might hope for a kinder
reception next winter--"
"Oh, no," he said coolly, "there are no such gentlemen. If there were
you wouldn't say so."
"Yes, I would. And there are!"
"How many?" jeeringly, and now quite reassured.
"One!"
"You can't frighten me"--with a shade less confidence. "You wouldn't
tell if there was."
"I'd tell _you_."
"Me?"--with a sudden slump in his remaining stock of reassurance.
"Certainly. I tell you and Nina things of that sort. And when I have
fully decided to marry I shall, of course, tell you both before I inform
other people."
How the blood in her young veins was racing and singing with laughter!
How thoroughly she was enjoying something to which she could give
neither reason nor name! But how satisfying it all was--whatever it was
that amused her in this man's uncertainty, and in the faint traces of an
irritation as unreasoning as the source of it!
"Really, Captain Selwyn," she said, "you are not one of those
old-fashioned literary landmarks who objects through several chapters to
a girl's marrying--are you?"
"Yes," he said, "I am."
"You are quite serious?"
"Quite."
"You won't _let_ me?"
"No, I won't."
"Why?"
"I want you myself," he said, smiling at last.
"That is flattering but horridly selfish. In other words you won't marry
me and you won't let anybody else do it."
"That is the situation," he admitted, freeing his line and trying to
catch the crinkled silvery snell of the new leader. It persistently
avoided him; he lowered the rod toward Miss Erroll; she gingerly
imprisoned the feathered fly between pink-tipped thumb and forefinger
and looked questioningly at him.
"Am I to sit here holding this?" she inquired.
"Only a moment; I'll have to soak that leader. Is the water visible
under that log you're sitting on?"
She nodded.
So he made his way through the brush toward her, mounted the log, and,
seating himself beside her, legs dangling, thrust the rod tip and leader
straight down into the stream below.
Glancing around at her he caught her eyes, bright with mischief.
"You're capable of anything to-day," he said. "Were you considering the
advisability of starting me overboard?" And he nodded toward the water
beneath their feet.
"But you say that you won't let me throw you overboard, Captain Selwyn!"
"I mean it, too," he returned.
"And I'm not to marry that nice young man?"--mockingly sweet. "No?
What!--not anybody at all--ever and ever?"
"Me," he suggested, "if you're as thoroughly demoralised as that."
"Oh! Must a girl be pretty thoroughly demoralised to marry you?"
"I don't suppose she'd do it if she wasn't," he admitted, laughing.
She considered him, head on one side:
"You are ornamental, anyway," she concluded.
"Well, then," he said, lifting the leader from the water to inspect it,
"will you have me?"
"Oh, but is there nothing to recommend you except your fatal beauty?"
"My moustache," he ventured; "it's considered very useful when I'm
mentally perplexed."
"It's clipped too close; I have told you again and again that I don't
care for it clipped like that. Your mind would be a perfect blank if you
couldn't get hold of it."
"And to become imbecile," he said, "I've only to shave it."
She threw back her head and her clear laughter thrilled the silence. He
laughed, too, and sat with elbows on his thighs, dabbling the crinkled
leader to and fro in the pool below.
"So you won't have me?" he said.
"You haven't asked me--have you?"
"Well, I do now."
She mused, the smile resting lightly on lips and eyes.
"_Wouldn't_ such a thing astonish Nina!" she said.
He did not answer; a slight colour tinged the new sunburn on his cheeks.
She laughed to herself, clasped her hands, crossed her slender feet, and
bent her eyes on the pool below.
"Marriage," she said, pursuing her thoughts aloud, "is curiously
unnecessary to happiness. Take our pleasure in each other, for example.
It has, from the beginning, been perfectly free from silliness and
sentiment."
"Naturally," he said. "I'm old enough to be safe."
"You are not!" she retorted. "What a ridiculous thing to say!"
"Well, then," he said, "I'm dreadfully unsafe, but yet you've managed to
escape. Is that it?"
"Perhaps. You _are_ attractive to women! I've heard that often enough to
be convinced. Why, even I can see what attracts them"--she turned to
look at him--"the way your head and shoulders set--and--well, the--rest.
. . . It's rather superior of me to have escaped sentiment, don't you
think so?"
"Indeed I do. Few--few escape where many meet to worship at my frisky
feet, and this I say without conceit is due to my mustachios. Tangled in
those like web-tied flies, imprisoned hearts complain in sighs--in fact,
the situation vies with moments in Boccaccio."
Her running comment was her laughter, ringing deliciously amid the trees
until a wild bird, restlessly attentive, ventured a long, sweet response
from the tangled green above them.
After their laughter the soberness of reaction left them silent for a
while. The wild bird sang and sang, dropping fearlessly nearer from
branch to branch, until in his melody she found the key to her dreamy
thoughts.
"Because," she said, "you are so unconscious of your own value, I like
you best, I think. I never before quite realised just what it was in
you."
"My value," he said, "is what you care to make it."
"Then nobody can afford to take you away from me, Captain Selwyn."
He flushed with pleasure: "That is the prettiest thing a woman ever
admitted to a man," he said.
"You have said nicer things to me. That is your reward. I wonder if you
remember any of the nice things you say to me? Oh, don't look so hurt
and astonished--because I don't believe you do. . . . Isn't it jolly to
sit here and let life drift past us? Out there in the world"--she nodded
backward toward the open--"out yonder all that 'progress' is whirling
around the world, and here we sit--just you and I--quite happily,
swinging our feet in perfect content and talking nonsense. . . . What
more is there after all than a companionship that admits both sense and
nonsense?"
She laughed, turning her chin on her shoulder to glance at him; and when
the laugh had died out she still sat lightly poised, chin nestling in
the hollow of her shoulder, considering him out of friendly beautiful
eyes in which no mockery remained.
"What more is there than our confidence in each other and our content?"
she said.
And, as he did not respond: "I wonder if you realise how perfectly
lovely you have been to me since you have come into my life? Do you? Do
you remember the first day--the very first--how I sent word to you that
I wished you to see my first real dinner gown? Smile if you wish--Ah,
but you don't, you _don't_ understand, my poor friend, how much you
became to me in that little interview. . . . Men's kindness is a strange
thing; they may try and try, and a girl may know they are trying and, in
her turn, try to be grateful. But it is all effort on both sides.
Then--with a word--an impulse born of chance or instinct--a man may say
and do that which a woman can never forget--and would not if she could."
"Have I done--that?"
"Yes. Didn't you understand? Do you suppose any other man in the world
could have what you have had of me--of my real self? Do you suppose for
one instant that any other man than you could ever obtain from me the
confidence I offer you unasked? Do I not tell you everything that enters
my head and heart? Do you not know that I care for you more than for
anybody alive?"
"Gerald--"
She looked him straight in the eyes; her breath caught, but she steadied
her voice:
"I've got to be truthful," she said; "I care for you more than for
Gerald."
"And I for you more than anybody living," he said.
"Is it true?"
"It is the truth, Eileen."
"You--you make me very happy, Captain Selwyn."
"But--did you not know it before I told you?"
"I--y-yes; I hoped so." In the exultant reaction from the delicious
tension of avowal she laughed lightly, not knowing why.
"The pleasure in it," she said, "is the certainty that I am capable of
making you happy. You have no idea how I desire to do it. I've wanted to
ever since I knew you--I've wanted to be capable of doing it. And you
tell me that I do; and I am utterly and foolishly happy." The quick
mischievous sparkle of _gaminerie_ flashed up, transforming her for an
instant--"Ah, yes; and I can make you unhappy, too, it seems, by talking
of marriage! That, too, is something--a delightful power--but"--the
malice dying to a spark in her brilliant eyes--"I shall not torment
you, Captain Selwyn. Will it make you happier if I say, 'No; I shall
never marry as long as I have you'? Will it really? Then I say it;
never, never will I marry as long as I have your confidence and
friendship. . . . But I want it _all_!--every bit, please. And if ever
there is another woman--if ever you fall in love!--crack!--away I
go"--she snapped her white fingers--"like that!" she added, "only
quicker! Well, then! Be very, very careful, my friend! . . . I wish
there were some place here where I could curl up indefinitely and listen
to your views on life. You brought a book to read, didn't you?"
He gave her a funny embarrassed glance: "Yes; I brought a sort of a
book."
"Then I'm all ready to be read to, thank you. . . . Please steady me
while I try to stand up on this log--one hand will do--"
Scarcely in contact with him she crossed the log, sprang blithely to the
ground, and, lifting the hem of her summer gown an inch or two, picked
her way toward the bank above.
"We can see Nina when she signals us from the lawn to come to luncheon,"
she said, gazing out across the upland toward the silvery tinted
hillside where Silverside stood, every pane glittering with the white
eastern sunlight.
In the dry, sweet grass she found a place for a nest, and settled into
it, head prone on a heap of scented bay leaves, elbows skyward, and
fingers linked across her chin. One foot was hidden, the knee, doubled,
making a tent of her white skirt, from an edge of which a russet shoe
projected, revealing the contour of a slim ankle.
"What book did you bring?" she asked dreamily.
He turned red: "It's--it's just a chapter from a little book I'm trying
to write--a--a sort of suggestion for the establishment of native
regiments in the Philippines. I thought, perhaps, you might not mind
listening--"
Her delighted surprise and quick cordiality quite overwhelmed him, so,
sitting flat on the grass, hat off and the hill wind furrowing his
bright crisp hair, he began, naïvely, like a schoolboy; and Eileen lay
watching him, touched and amused at his eager interest in reading aloud
to her this mass of co-ordinated fact and detail.
There was, in her, one quality to which he had never appealed in
vain--her loyalty. Confident of that, and of her intelligence, he wasted
no words in preliminary explanation, but began at once his argument in
favour of a native military establishment erected on the general lines
of the British organisation in India.
He wrote simply and without self-consciousness; loyalty aroused her
interest, intelligence sustained it; and when the end came, it came too
quickly for her, and she said so frankly, which delighted him.
At her invitation he outlined for her the succeeding chapters with terse
military accuracy; and what she liked best and best understood was
avoidance of that false modesty which condescends, turning technicality
into pabulum.
Lying there in the fragrant verdure, blue eyes skyward or slanting
sideways to watch his face, she listened, answered, questioned, or
responded by turns; until their voices grew lazy and the light reaction
from things serious awakened the gaiety always latent when they were
together.
"Proceed," she smiled; "_Arma virumque_--a noble theme, Captain Selwyn.
Sing on!"
He shook his head, quoting from "The Dedication":
"Arms and the Man!
A noble theme I ween!
Alas! I cannot sing of these, Eileen;
Only of maids and men and meadow-grass,
Of sea and tree and woodlands where I pass--
Nothing but these I know, Eileen--alas!
* * * * *
Clear eyes, that lifted up to me
Free heart and soul of vanity;
Blue eyes, that speak so wistfully--
Nothing but these I know, alas!"
She laughed her acknowledgment, and lying there, face to the sky, began
to sing to herself, under her breath, fragments of that ancient
war-song:
"Le bon Roi Dagobert
Avait un grand sabre de fer;
Le grand Saint Éloi
Lui dit: 'O mon Roi
Vôtre Majesté
Pourrait se blesser!'
'C'est vrai,' lui dit le Roi,
'Qu'on me donne un sabre de bois!'"
"In that verse," observed Selwyn, smiling, "lies the true key to the
millennium--international disarmament and moral suasion."
"Nonsense," she said lazily; "the millennium will arrive when the false
balance between man and woman is properly adjusted--not before. And that
means universal education. . . . Did you ever hear that old, old song,
written two centuries ago--the 'Education of Phyllis'? No? Listen then
and be ashamed."
And lying there, the back of one hand above her eyes, she sang in a
sweet, childish, mocking voice, tremulous with hidden laughter, the song
of Phyllis the shepherdess and Sylvandre the shepherd--how Phyllis, more
avaricious than sentimental, made Sylvandre pay her thirty sheep for one
kiss; how, next day, the price shifted to one sheep for thirty kisses;
and then the dreadful demoralisation of Phyllis:
"Le lendemain, Philis, plus tendre
Fut trop heureuse de lui rendre
Trente moutons pour un baiser!
* * * * *
Le lendemain, Philis, peu sage,
Aurait donné moutons et chien
Pour un baiser que le volage
À Lisette donnait pour rien!"
"And there we are," said Eileen, sitting up abruptly and levelling the
pink-tipped finger of accusation at him--"_there_, if you please, lies
the woe of the world--not in the armaments of nations! That old French
poet understood in half a second more than your Hague tribunal could
comprehend in its first Cathayan cycle! There lies the hope of your
millennium--in the higher education of the modern Phyllis."
"And the up-to-date Sylvandre," added Selwyn.
"He knows too much already," she retorted, delicate nose in the
air. . . . "Hark! Ear to the ground! My atavistic and wilder instincts
warn me that somebody is coming!"
"Boots and Drina," said Selwyn; and he hailed them as they came into
view above. Then he sprang to his feet, calling out: "And Gerald, too!
Hello, old fellow! This is perfectly fine! When did you arrive?"
"Oh, Gerald!" cried Eileen, both hands outstretched--"it's splendid of
you to come! Dear fellow! have you seen Nina and Austin? And were they
not delighted? And you've come to stay, haven't you? There, I won't
begin to urge you. . . . Look, Gerald--look, Boots--and Drina, too--only
look at those beautiful big plump trout in Captain Selwyn's creel!"
"Oh, I say!" exclaimed Gerald, "you didn't take those in that little
brook--did you, Philip? Well, wouldn't that snare you! I'm coming down
here after luncheon; I sure am."
"You will, too, won't you?" asked Drina, jealous lest Boots, her idol,
miss his due share of piscatorial glory. "If you'll wait until I finish
my French I'll come with you."
"Of course I will," said Lansing reproachfully; "you don't suppose
there's any fun anywhere for me without you, do you?"
"No," said Drina simply, "I don't."
"Another Phyllis in embryo," murmured Eileen to Selwyn. "Alas! for
education!"
Selwyn laughed and turned to Gerald. "I hunted high and low for you
before I came to Silverside. You found my note?"
"Yes; I--I'll explain later," said the boy, colouring. "Come ahead,
Eily; Boots and I will take you on at tennis--and Philip, too. We've an
hour or so before luncheon. Is it a go?"
"Certainly," replied his sister, unaware of Selwyn's proficiency, but
loyal even in doubt. And the five, walking abreast, moved off across the
uplands toward the green lawns of Silverside, where, under a gay lawn
parasol, Nina sat, a "Nature book" in hand, the centre of an attentive
gathering composed of dogs, children, and the cat, Kit-Ki, blinking her
topaz-tinted eyes in the sunshine.
The young mother looked up happily as the quintet came strolling across
the lawn: "Please don't wander away again before luncheon," she said;
"Gerald, I suppose you are starved, but you've only an hour to wait--Oh,
Phil! what wonderful trout! Children, kindly arise and admire the
surpassing skill of your frivolous uncle!" And, as the children and dogs
came crowding around the opened fish-basket she said to her brother in a
low, contented voice: "Gerald has quite made it up with Austin, dear; I
think we have to thank you, haven't we?"
"Has he really squared matters with Austin? That's good--that's fine!
Oh, no, I had nothing to do with it--practically nothing. The boy is
sound at the core--that's what did it." And to Gerald, who was hailing
him from the veranda, "Yes, I've plenty of tennis-shoes. Help yourself,
old chap."
Eileen had gone to her room to don a shorter skirt and rubber-soled
shoes; Lansing followed her example; and Selwyn, entering his own room,
found Gerald trying on a pair of white foot-gear.
The boy looked up, smiled, and, crossing one knee, began to tie the
laces:
"I told Austin that I meant to slow down," he said. "We're on terms
again. He was fairly decent."
"Good business!" commented Selwyn vigorously.
"And I'm cutting out cards and cocktails," continued the boy, eager as a
little lad who tells how good he has been all day--"I made it plain to
the fellows that there was nothing in it for me. And, Philip, I'm boning
down like thunder at the office--I'm horribly in debt and I'm hustling
to pay up and make a clean start. You," he added, colouring, "will come
first--"
"At your convenience," said Selwyn, smiling.
"Not at all! Yours is the first account to be squared; then Neergard--"
"Do you owe _him_, Gerald?"
"Do I? Oh, Lord! But he's a patient soul--really, Philip, I wish you
didn't dislike him so thoroughly, because he's good company and besides
that he's a very able man. . . . Well, we won't talk about him, then.
Come on; I'll lick the very life out of you over the net!"
A few moments later the white balls were flying over the white net, and
active white-flannelled figures were moving swiftly over the velvet
turf.
Drina, aloft on the umpire's perch, calmly scored and decided each point
impartially, though her little heart was beating fast in desire for her
idol's supremacy; and it was all her official composure could endure to
see how Eileen at the net beat down his defence, driving him with her
volleys to the service line.
Selwyn's game proved to be steady, old-fashioned, but logical; Eileen,
sleeves at her elbows, red-gold hair in splendid disorder, carried the
game through Boots straight at her brother--and the contest was really a
brilliant duel between them, Lansing and Selwyn assisting when a rare
chance came their way. The pace was too fast for them, however; they
were in a different class and they knew it; and after two terrific sets
had gone against Gerald and Boots, the latter, signalling Selwyn,
dropped out and climbed up beside Drina to watch a furious single
between Eileen and Gerald.
"Oh, Boots, Boots!" said Drina, "why _didn't_ you stay forward and kill
her drives and make her lob? I just know you could do it if you had only
thought to play forward! What on earth was the matter?"
"Age," said Mr. Lansing serenely--"decrepitude, Drina. I am a Was,
sweetheart, but Eileen still remains an Is."
"I won't let you say it! You are _not_ a Was!" said the child fiercely.
"After luncheon you can take me on for practice. Then you can just give
it to her!"
"It would gratify me to hand a few swift ones to somebody," he said.
"Look at that demon girl, yonder! She's hammering Gerald to the service
line! Oh, my, oh, me! I'm only fit for hat-ball with Billy or
cat's-cradle with Kit-Ki. Drina, do you realise that I am nearly
thirty?"
"Pooh! I'm past thirteen. In five years I'll be eighteen. I expect to
marry you at eighteen. You promised."
"Sure thing," admitted Boots; "I've bought the house, you know."
"I know it," said the child gravely.
Boots looked down at her; she smiled and laid her head, with its
clustering curls, against his shoulder, watching the game below with the
quiet composure of possession.
Their relations, hers and Lansing's, afforded infinite amusement to the
Gerards. It had been a desperate case from the very first; and the child
took it so seriously, and considered her claim on Boots so absolute,
that neither that young man nor anybody else dared make a jest of the
affair within her hearing.
From a dimple-kneed, despotic, strenuous youngster, ruling the nursery
with a small hand of iron, in half a year Drina had grown into a rather
slim, long-legged, coolly active child; and though her hair had not been
put up, her skirts had been lowered, and shoes and stockings substituted
for half-hose and sandals.
Weighted with this new dignity she had put away dolls, officially.
Unofficially she still dressed, caressed, forgave, or spanked Rosalinda
and Beatrice--but she excluded the younger children from the nursery
when she did it.
However, the inborn necessity for mimicry and romance remained; and she
satisfied it by writing stories--marvellous ones--which she read to
Boots. Otherwise she was the same active, sociable, wholesome,
intelligent child, charmingly casual and inconsistent; and the list of
her youthful admirers at dancing-school and parties required the
alphabetical classification of Mr. Lansing.
But Boots was her own particular possession; he was her chattel, her
thing; and he and other people knew that it was no light affair to
meddle with the personal property of Drina Gerard.
Her curly head resting against his arm, she was now planning his future
movements for the day:
"You may do what you please while I'm having French," she said
graciously; "after that we will go fishing in Brier Water; then I'll
come home to practice, while you sit on the veranda and listen; then
I'll take you on at tennis, and by that time the horses will be brought
around and we'll ride to the Falcon. You won't forget any of this, will
you? Come on; Eileen and Gerald have finished and there's Dawson to
announce luncheon!" And to Gerald, as she climbed down to the ground:
"Oh, what a muff! to let Eileen beat you six--five, six--three! . . .
Where's my hat? . . . Oh, the dogs have got it and are tearing it to
rags!"
And she dashed in among the dogs, slapping right and left, while a
facetious dachshund seized the tattered bit of lace and muslin and fled
at top speed.
"That is pleasant," observed Nina; "it's her best hat, too--worn to-day
in your honour, Boots. . . . Children! Hands and faces! There is Bridget
waiting! Come, Phil; there's no law against talking at table, and
there's no use trying to run an establishment if you make a mockery of
the kitchen."
Eileen, one bare arm around her brother's shoulders, strolled houseward
across the lawn, switching the shaven sod with her tennis-bat.
"What are you doing this afternoon?" she said to Selwyn. "Gerald"--she
touched her brother's smooth cheek--"means to fish; Boots and Drina are
keen on it, too; and Nina is driving to Wyossett with the children."
"And you?" he asked, smiling.
"Whatever you wish"--confident that he wanted her, whatever he had on
hand.
"I ought to walk over to Storm Head," he said, "and get things
straightened out."
"Your laboratory?" asked Gerald. "Austin told me when I saw him in town
that you were going to have the cottage on Storm Head to make powder
in."
"Only in minute quantities, Gerald," explained Selwyn; "I just want to
try a few things. . . . And if they turn out all right, what do you say
to taking a look in--if Austin approves?"
"Oh, please, Gerald," whispered his sister.
"Do you really believe there is anything in it?" asked the boy.
"Because, if you are sure--"
"There certainly is if I can prove that my powder is able to resist
heat, cold, and moisture. The Lawn people stand ready to talk matters
over as soon as I am satisfied. . . . There's plenty of time--but keep
the suggestion in the back of your head, Gerald."
The boy smiled, nodded importantly, and went off to remove the stains of
tennis from his person; and Eileen went, too, turning around to look
back at Selwyn:
"Thank you for asking Gerald! I'm sure he will love to go into anything
you think safe."
"Will you join us, too?" he called back, smilingly--"we may need
capital!"
"I'll remember that!" she said; and, turning once more as she reached
the landing: "Good-bye--until luncheon!" And touched her lips with the
tips of her fingers, flinging him a gay salute.
In parting and meeting--even after the briefest of intervals--it was
always the same with her; always she had for him some informal hint of
the formality of parting; always some recognition of their meeting--in
the light touching of hands as though the symbol of ceremony, at least,
was due to him, to herself, and to the occasion.
Luncheon at Silverside was anything but a function--with the children at
table and the dogs in a semicircle, and the nurses tying bibs and
admonishing the restless or belligerent, and the wide French windows
open, and the sea wind lifting the curtains and stirring the cluster of
wild flowers in the centre of the table.
Kit-Ki's voice was gently raised at intervals; at intervals some
grinning puppy, unable to longer endure the nourishing odours, lost
self-control and yapped, then lowered his head, momentarily overcome
with mortification.
All the children talked continuously, unlimited conversation being
permitted until it led to hostilities or puppy-play. The elders
conducted such social intercourse as was possible under the conditions,
but luncheon was the children's hour at Silverside.
Nina and Eileen talked garden talk--they both were quite mad about their
fruit-trees and flower-beds; Selwyn, Gerald, and Boots discussed
stables, golf links, and finally the new business which Selwyn hoped to
develop.
Afterward, when the children had been excused, and Drina had pulled her
chair close to Lansing's to listen--and after that, on the veranda,
when the men sat smoking and Drina was talking French, and Nina and
Eileen had gone off with baskets, trowels, and pruning-shears--Selwyn
still continued in conference with Boots and Gerald; and it was plain
that his concise, modest explanation of what he had accomplished in his
experiments with Chaosite seriously impressed the other men.
Boots frankly admitted it: "Besides," he said, "if the Lawn people are
so anxious for you to give them first say in the matter I don't see why
we shouldn't have faith in it--enough, I mean, to be good to ourselves
by offering to be good to you, Phil."
"Wait until Austin comes down--and until I've tried one or two new
ideas," said Selwyn. "Nothing on earth would finish me quicker than to
get anybody who trusted me into a worthless thing."
"It's plain," observed Boots, "that although you may have been an army
captain you're no captain of industry--you're not even a non-com.!"
Selwyn laughed: "Do you really believe that ordinary decency is
uncommon?"
"Look at Long Island," returned Boots. "Where does the boom of worthless
acreage and paper cities land investors when it explodes?"
Gerald had flushed up at the turn in the conversation; and Selwyn
steered Lansing into other and safer channels until Gerald went away to
find a rod.
And, as Drina had finished her French lesson, she and Lansing presently
departed, brandishing fishing-rods adorned with the gaudiest of flies.
* * * * *
The house and garden at Silverside seemed to be logical parts of a
landscape, which included uplands, headlands, sky, and water--a silvery
harmonious ensemble, where the artificial portion was neither
officiously intrusive nor, on the other hand, meagre and insignificant.
The house, a long two-storied affair with white shutters and pillared
veranda, was built of gray stone; the garden was walled with it--a
precaution against no rougher intruder than the wind, which would have
whipped unsheltered flowers and fruit-trees into ribbons.
Walks of hardened earth, to which green mould clung in patches, wound
through the grounds and threaded the three little groves of oak,
chestnut, and locust, in the centres of which, set in circular lawns,
were the three axes of interest--the stone-edged fish-pond, the spouting
fountain, and the ancient ship's figurehead--a wind-worn, sea-battered
mermaid cuddling a tiny, finny sea-child between breast and lips.
Whoever the unknown wood-carver had been he had been an artist, too, and
a good one; and when the big China trader, the _First Born_, went to
pieces off Frigate Light, fifty years ago, this figurehead had been cast
up from the sea.
Wandering into the garden, following the first path at random, Selwyn
chanced upon it, and stood, pipe in his mouth, hands in his pockets,
surprised and charmed.
Plunkitt, the head gardener, came along, trundling a mowing-machine.
"Ain't it kind 'er nice," he said, lingering. "When I pass here
moonlight nights, it seems like that baby was a-smilin' right up into
his mamma's face, an' that there fish-tailed girl was laughin' back at
him. Come here some night when there's a moon, Cap'in Selwyn."
Selwyn stood for a while listening to the musical click of the machine,
watching the green shower flying into the sunshine, and enjoying the raw
perfume of juicy, new-cut grass; then he wandered on in quest of Miss
Erroll.
Tulips, narcissus, hyacinths, and other bulbs were entirely out of
bloom, but the earlier herbaceous borders had come into flower, and he
passed through masses of pink and ivory-tinted peonies--huge, heavy,
double blossoms, fragrant and delicate as roses. Patches of late iris
still lifted crested heads above pale sword-bladed leaves; sheets of
golden pansies gilded spaces steeped in warm transparent shade, but
larkspur and early rocket were as yet only scarcely budded promises; the
phlox-beds but green carpets; and zinnia, calendula, poppy, and
coreopsis were symphonies in shades of green against the dropping pink
of bleeding-hearts or the nascent azure of flax and spiderwort.
In the rose garden, and along that section of the wall included in it,
the rich, dry, porous soil glimmered like gold under the sun; and here
Selwyn discovered Nina and Eileen busily solicitous over the tender
shoots of favourite bushes. A few long-stemmed early rosebuds lay in
their baskets; Selwyn drew one through his buttonhole and sat down on a
wheelbarrow, amiably disposed to look on and let the others work.
"Not much!" said Nina. "You can start in and 'pinch back' this prairie
climber--do you hear, Phil? I won't let you dawdle around and yawn while
I'm pricking my fingers every instant! Make him move, Eileen."
Eileen came over to him, fingers doubled into her palm and small thumb
extended.
"Thorns and prickles, please," she said; and he took her hand in his and
proceeded to extract them while she looked down at her almost invisible
wounds, tenderly amused at his fear of hurting her.
"Do you know," she said, "that people are beginning to open their houses
yonder?" She nodded toward the west: "The Minsters are on the way to
Brookminster, the Orchils have already arrived at Hitherwood House, and
the coachmen and horses were housed at Southlawn last night. I rather
dread the dinners and country formality that always interfere with the
jolly times we have; but it will be rather good fun at the
bathing-beach. . . . Do you swim well? But of course you do."
"Pretty well; do you?"
"I'm a fish. Gladys Orchil and I would never leave the surf if they
didn't literally drag us home. . . . You know Gladys Orchil? . . . She's
very nice; so is Sheila Minster; you'll like her better in the country
than you do in town. Kathleen Lawn is nice, too. Alas! I see many a
morning where Drina and I twirl our respective thumbs while you and
Boots are off with a gayer set. . . . Oh, don't interrupt! No mortal man
is proof against Sheila and Gladys and Kathleen--and you're not a
demi-god--are you? . . . Thank you for your surgery upon my thumb--" She
naïvely placed the tip of it between her lips and looked at him,
standing there like a schoolgirl in her fresh gown, burnished hair
loosened and curling in riotous beauty across cheeks and ears.
He had seated himself on the wheelbarrow again; she stood looking down
at him, hands now bracketed on her narrow hips--so close that the fresh
fragrance of her grew faintly perceptible--a delicate atmosphere of
youth mingling with the perfume of the young garden.
Nina, basket on her arm, snipping away with her garden shears, glanced
over her shoulder--and went on, snipping. They did not notice how far
away her agricultural ardour led her--did not notice when she stood a
moment at the gate looking back at them, or when she passed out, pretty
head bent thoughtfully, the shears swinging loose at her girdle.
The prairie rosebuds in Eileen's basket exhaled their wild, sweet odour;
and Selwyn, breathing it, removed his hat like one who faces a cooling
breeze, and looked up at the young girl standing before him as though
she were the source of all things sweet and freshening in this opening
of the youngest year of his life.
She said, smiling absently at his question: "Certainly one can grow
younger; and you have done it in a day, here with me."
She looked down at his hair; it was bright and inclined to wave a
little, but whether the lighter colour at the temples was really
silvered or only a paler tint she was not sure.
"You are very like a boy, sometimes," she said--"as young as Gerald, I
often think--especially when your hat is off. You always look so
perfectly groomed: I wonder--I wonder what you would look like if your
hair were rumpled?"
"Try it," he suggested lazily.
"I? I don't think I dare--" She raised her hand, hesitated, the gay
daring in her eyes deepening to audacity. "Shall I?"
"Why not?"
"T-touch your hair?--rumple it?--as I would Gerald's! . . . I'm tempted
to--only--only--"
"What?"
"I don't know; I couldn't. I--it was only the temptation of a second--"
She laughed uncertainly. The suggestion of the intimacy tinted her
cheeks with its reaction; she took a short step backward; instinct,
blindly stirring, sobered her; and as the smile faded from eye and lip,
his face changed, too. And far, very far away in the silent cells of his
heart a distant pulse awoke.
She turned to her roses again, moving at random among the bushes,
disciplining with middle-finger and thumb a translucent, amber-tinted
shoot here and there. And when the silence had lasted too long, she
broke it without turning toward him:
"After all, if it were left to me, I had rather be merciful to these
soft little buds and sprays, and let the sun and the showers take
charge. A whole cluster of blossoms left free to grow as Fate fashions
them!--Why not? It is certainly very officious of me to strip a stem of
its hopes just for the sake of one pampered blossom. . . .
Non-interference is a safe creed, isn't it?"
But she continued moving along among the bushes, pinching back here,
snipping, trimming, clipping there; and after a while she had wandered
quite beyond speaking distance; and, at leisurely intervals she
straightened up and turned to look back across the roses at him--quiet,
unsmiling gaze in exchange for his unchanging eyes, which never left
her.
She was at the farther edge of the rose garden now where a boy knelt,
weeding; and Selwyn saw her speak to him and give him her basket and
shears; and saw the boy start away toward the house, leaving her leaning
idly above the sun-dial, elbows on the weather-beaten stone, studying
the carved figures of the dial. And every line and contour and curve of
her figure--even the lowered head, now resting between both
hands--summoned him.
She heard his step, but did not move; and when he leaned above the dial,
resting on his elbows, beside her, she laid her finger on the shadow of
the dial.
"Time," she said, "is trying to frighten me. It pretends to be nearly
five o'clock; do you believe it?"
"Time is running very fast with me," he said.
"With me, too; I don't wish it to; I don't care for third speed forward
all the time."
He was bending closer above the stone dial, striving to decipher the
inscription on it:
"Under blue skies
My shadow lies.
Under gray skies
My shadow dies.
"If over me
Two Lovers leaning
Would solve my Mystery
And read my Meaning,
--Or clear, or overcast the Skies--
The Answer always lies within their Eyes.
Look long! Look long! For there, and there alone
Time solves the Riddle graven on this Stone!"
Elbows almost touching they leaned at ease, idly reading the almost
obliterated lines engraved there.
"I never understood it," she observed, lightly scornful. "What occult
meaning has a sun-dial for the spooney? _I'm_ sure I don't want to read
riddles in a strange gentleman's optics."
"The verses," he explained, "are evidently addressed to the spooney, so
why should you resent them?"
"I don't. . . . I can be spoons, too, for that matter; I mean I could
once."
"But you're past spooning now," he concluded.
"Am I? I rather resent your saying it--your calmly excluding me from
anything I might choose to do," she said. "If I cared--if I chose--if I
really wanted to--"
"You could still spoon? Impossible! At your age? Nonsense!"
"It isn't at all impossible. Wait until there's a moon, and a canoe, and
a nice boy who is young enough to be frightened easily!"
"And I," he retorted, "am too old to be frightened; so there's no moon,
no canoe, no pretty girl, no spooning for me. Is that it, Eileen?"
"Oh, Gladys and Sheila will attend to you, Captain Selwyn."
"Why Gladys Orchil? Why Sheila Minster? And why _not_ Eileen Erroll?"
"Spoon? With _you_!"
"You are quite right," he said, smiling; "it would be poor sport."
There had been no change in his amused eyes, in his voice; yet,
sensitive to the imperceptible, the girl looked up quickly. He laughed
and straightened up; and presently his eyes grew absent and his
sun-burned hand sought his moustache.
"Have you misunderstood me?" she asked in a low voice.
"How, child?"
"I don't know. . . . Shall we walk a little?"
When they came to the stone fish-pond she seated herself for a moment on
a marble bench, then, curiously restless, rose again; and again they
moved forward at hazard, past the spouting fountain, which was a driven
well, out of which a crystal column of water rose, geyser-like, dazzling
in the westering sun rays.
"Nina tells me that this water rises in the Connecticut hills," he said,
"and flows as a subterranean sheet under the Sound, spouting up here on
Long Island when you drive a well."
She looked at the column of flashing water, nodding silent assent.
They moved on, the girl curiously reserved, non-communicative, head
slightly lowered; the man vague-eyed, thoughtful, pacing slowly at her
side. Behind them their long shadows trailed across the brilliant grass.
Traversing the grove which encircled the newly clipped lawn, now
fragrant with sun-crisped grass-tips left in the wake of the mower, he
glanced up at the pretty mermaid mother cuddling her tiny offspring
against her throat. Across her face a bar of pink sunlight fell, making
its contour exquisite.
"Plunkitt tells me that they really laugh at each other in the
moonlight," he said.
She glanced up; then away from him:
"You seem to be enamoured of the moonlight," she said.
"I like to prowl in it."
"Alone?"
"Sometimes."
"And--at other times?"
He laughed: "Oh, I'm past that, as you reminded me a moment ago."
"Then you _did_ misunderstand me!"
"Why, no--"
"Yes, you did! But I supposed you knew."
"Knew what, Eileen?" "What I meant."
"You meant that I am _hors de concours_."
"I didn't!"
"But I am, child. I was, long ago."
She looked up: "Do you really think that, Captain Selwyn? If you do--I
am glad."
He laughed outright. "You are glad that I'm safely past the spooning
age?" he inquired, moving forward.
She halted: "Yes. Because I'm quite sure of you if you are; I mean that
I can always keep you for myself. Can't I?"
She was smiling and her eyes were clear and fearless, but there was a
wild-rose tint on her cheeks which deepened a little as he turned short
in his tracks, gazing straight at her.
"You wish to keep me--for yourself?" he repeated, laughing.
"Yes, Captain Selwyn."
"Until you marry. Is that it, Eileen?"
"Yes, until I marry."
"And then we'll let each other go; is that it?"
"Yes. But I think I told you that I would never marry. Didn't I?"
"Oh! Then ours is to be a lifelong and anti-sentimental contract!"
"Yes, unless _you_ marry."
"I promise not to," he said, "unless you do."
"I promise not to," she said gaily, "unless you do."
"There remains," he observed, "but one way for you and I ever to marry
anybody. And as I'm _hors de concours_, even that hope is ended."
She flushed; her lips parted, but she checked what she had meant to say,
and they walked forward together in silence for a while until she had
made up her mind what to say and how to express it:
"Captain Selwyn, there are two things that you do which seem to me
unfair. You still have, at times, that far-away, absent expression which
excludes me; and when I venture to break the silence, you have a way of
answering, 'Yes, child,' and 'No, child'--as though you were
inattentive, and I had not yet become an adult. _That_ is my first
complaint! . . . _What_ are you laughing at? It is true; and it confuses
and hurts me; because I _know_ I am intelligent enough and old enough
to--to be treated as a woman!--a woman attractive enough to be reckoned
with! But I never seem to be wholly so to you."
The laugh died out as she ended; for a moment they stood there,
confronting one another.
"Do you imagine," he said in a low voice, "that I do not know all that?"
"I don't know whether you do. For all your friendship--for all your
liking and your kindness to me--somehow--I--I don't seem to stand with
you as other women do; I don't seem to stand their chances."
"What chances?"
"The--the consideration; you don't call any other woman 'child,' do you?
You don't constantly remind other women of the difference in your ages,
do you? You don't _feel_ with other women that you are--as you please to
call it--_hors de concours_--out of the running. And somehow, with me,
it humiliates. Because even if I--if I am the sort of a girl who never
means to marry, you--your attitude seems to take away the possibility of
my changing my mind; it dictates to me, giving me no choice, no liberty,
no personal freedom in the matter. . . . It's as though you considered
me somehow utterly out of the question--radically unthinkable as a
woman. And you assume to take for granted that I also regard you as--as
_hors de concours_. . . . Those are my grievances, Captain Selwyn. . . .
And I _don't_ regard you so. And I--and it troubles me to be
excluded--to be found wanting, inadequate in anything that a woman
should be. I know that you and I have no desire to marry each
other--but--but please don't make the reason for it either your age or
my physical immaturity or intellectual inexperience."
Another of those weather-stained seats of Georgia marble stood embedded
under the trees near where she had halted; and she seated herself,
outwardly composed, and inwardly a little frightened at what she had
said.
As for Selwyn, he remained where he had been standing on the lawn's
velvet edge; and, raising her eyes again, her heart misgave her that she
had wantonly strained a friendship which had been all but perfect; and
now he was moving across the path toward her--a curious look in his face
which she could not interpret. She looked up as he approached and
stretched out her hand:
"Forgive me, Captain Selwyn," she said. "I _am_ a child--a spoiled one;
and I have proved it to you. Will you sit here beside me and tell me
very gently what a fool I am to risk straining the friendship dearest to
me in the whole world? And will you fix my penance?"
"You have fixed it yourself," he said.
"How?"
"By the challenge of your womanhood."
"I did not challenge--"
"No; you defended. You are right. The girl I cared for--the girl who was
there with me on Brier Water--so many, many centuries ago--the girl who,
years ago, leaned there beside me on the sun-dial--has become a
memory."
"What do you mean?" she asked faintly.
"Shall I tell you?"
"Yes."
"You will not be unhappy if I tell you?"
"N-no."
"Have you any idea what I am going to say, Eileen?"
She looked up quickly, frightened at the tremor in his voice:
"Don't--don't say it, Captain Selwyn!"
"Will you listen--as a penance?"
"I--no, I cannot--"
He said quietly: "I was afraid you could not listen. You see, Eileen,
that, after all, a man does know when he is done for--"
"Captain Selwyn!" She turned and caught his hands in both of hers, her
eyes bright with tears: "Is that the penalty for what I said? Did you
think I invited this--"
"Invited! No, child," he said gently. "I was fool enough to believe in
myself; that is all. I have always been on the edge of loving you. Only
in dreams did I ever dare set foot across that frontier. Now I have
dared. I love you. That is all; and it must not distress you."
"But it does not," she said; "I have always loved you--dearly,
dearly. . . . Not in that way. . . . I don't know how. . . . Must it be
in _that_ way, Captain Selwyn? Can we not go on in the other way--that
dear way which I--I have--almost spoiled? Must we be like other
people--must sentiment turn it all to commonplace? . . . Listen to me; I
do love you; it is perfectly easy and simple to say it. But it is not
emotional, it is not sentimental. Can't you see that in little
things--in my ways with you? I--if I were sentimental about you I would
call you Ph--by your first name, I suppose. But I can't; I've tried
to--and it's very, very hard--and makes me self-conscious. It is an
effort, you see--and so would it be for me to think of you sentimentally.
Oh, I couldn't! I couldn't!--you, so much of a man, so strong and
generous and experienced and clever--so perfectly the embodiment of
everything I care for in a man! I love you dearly; but--you saw! I
could--could not bring myself to touch even your hair--even in pure
mischief. . . . And--sentiment chills me; I--there are times when it
would be unendurable--I could not use an endearing term--nor suffer a--a
caress. . . . So you see--don't you? And won't you take me for what I
am?--and as I am?--a girl--still young, devoted to you with all her
soul--happy with you, believing implicitly in you, deeply, deeply
sensible of your goodness and sweetness and loyalty to her. I am not a
woman; I was a fool to say so. But you--you are so overwhelmingly a man
that if it were in me to love--in that way--it would be you! . . . Do
you understand me? Or have I lost a friend? Will you forgive my foolish
boast? Can you still keep me first in your heart--as you are in mine?
And pardon in me all that I am not? Can you do these things because I
ask you?"
"Yes," he said.