"Good heavens!" said I, "there is twice too much for one!"
She appeared to be greatly disturbed by the discovery.
"Josephine has made a dreadful mistake," she said. "She has put up lunch
enough for two!"
"It mustn't be wasted," said I, gravely. "I'm afraid you'll have to
come fishing with me after all, Thusis."
There appeared to be no other way out of it. At least neither of us
suggested any other way.
"Oh, dear," she said, looking up at me, and the very devil was in her
gray eyes.
Which discovery preoccupied me when she went back to the house for her
hat and for another rod which she had, it seemed, discovered in the
laundry, all equipped for business.
The agreeable tingle of subdued excitement permeated me as she returned
with the rod but without any hat.
"I don't need one," she said, calmly, pulling out several hair pins.
And then I saw a thick mass of molten gold tumble down; and the swift
white fingers of Thusis dividing it into two heavy braids--a thrilling
sight--and once, in the thrall of that enchantment where I stood
motionless to watch her at this lovely office, I became aware of her
lifted eyes--two celestial assassins intent on doing me deep harm.
Then, still busy with her hair, she moved slowly forward across the
grass beside me, silently, almost stealthily--for, in the slow and
supple grace of her I seemed to divine something almost menacing to me.
Her account books and rod were in my pack-basket. She sauntered along
the shadow-flecked path beside me, at first paying me scant attention,
but singing carelessly to herself in a demi-voix snatches of any vagrant
melody that floated through her mind.
I recognized none of them. One strange little refrain seemed to keep on
recurring to her at intervals:
--"And Aphrodite's throat was white
As lilies opening at night
In Naxos,
In Naxos.
And red were Aphrodite's lips--
And blue her eyes and white her hips
As roses, sky, and surf that clips
The golden shore of Tenedos.
O Tenedos, my Tenedos,
Set in the purple sea!
O Naxos, my Naxos,
I hear you calling me!
The old gods have gone away;
I follow them with feet astray,
But in my heart I'll faithful be
To Tenedos and Naxos!"
She strolled on, singing to herself, an absent look in her starry eyes,
switching idly at the leaves with some dead stalk she had picked up.
And no matter what other fragments of melody occurred to her she was
ever coming back to her odd little song of Naxos and of Tenedos, where
flowers and sky and sea matched Aphrodite's charms.
Now and again I was conscious of a leisurely sideways glance from her as
though indifferently marking my continued but quite uninteresting
existence in the landscape.
When we came to the wooden bridge she rested both hands on the rail and
looked down at the limpid greenish pool. But her gaze seemed serious
and remote, and I became quite sure she was not thinking about trout.
However, I rigged up her rod for her and was preparing to impale a worm
upon her hook when she noticed what I was about and remarked that she
preferred an artificial fly.
"_That_ one," she added, coming up beside me and looking over my
shoulder at the open fly-book in my hand.
So, that matter settled, we took the leafy path which ran through ferns
along the northern bank of the stream.
*VII*
*CONSERVATION AND CONVERSATION*
Thusis hooked the first trout. It made a prodigious swirl in the pool
and rushed to and fro in the shadowy depths--a slim, frantic phantom
lacing the crystalline water with flashes of pallid fire.
She drew in the trout splashing and spattering in all its rainbow glory,
and I thankfully thumped it into Nirvana and placed it upon a catafalque
of wet green moss in my basket. Thusis looked on calmly while I
performed the drudgery of the episode, and I heard her singing
carelessly to herself:
"The old gods have gone away;
I follow them with feet astray,
But in my heart I'll faithful be
To Tenedos and Naxos!"
"There seems to be a dryad or two left," said I, looking up over my
shoulder where I squatted by the brookside, scrubbing my hands in the
under-water gravel.
"You mean me," she nodded absently, loosening and freeing her leader and
line.
"I sure do, Thusis."
"You're so funny," she said in the same tranquil, detached voice, as
though she were some young chatelaine and I her gillie.
We went on to the next pool where the green crystal water gushed in and
spread out calmly through the woodland, reflecting every fern and tree.
The silken whistle of her cast made a pretty whispering sound in the
mossy silence, and I watched her where she stood slim and straight as a
silvery sapling searching the far still reaches of the water with the
tiny tuft of tinseled feathers until the surface of the placid pool was
shattered into liquid splinters by the splash of a trout, and her line
vibrated and hummed like a taut violin string.
Like lightning the convulsive battle was joined there in the woodland
depths and the girl, all fire and grace, swayed like a willow under the
furious rhythmic rushes of the unseen fish.
Click-click went her reel, and the feathery whirr of the line accented
the silence. Then that living opalescent thing sprang quivering out of
its element, and fell back, conquered, in a shower of opal rain.
Toward noon we came to a pool into which poured the stream with a golden
sound between two boulders mantled thick with moss. And here Thusis
seated herself and laid aside her rod.
"I am hungry," she said, looking over her shoulder at me with the same
aloof composure that all the morning had reversed our roles as master
and maid.
But even as she spoke she seemed to realize the actual situation: a
delicate color came into her cheeks and then she laughed.
"Isn't it funny?" she said, springing to her feet. "Such presumption!
Pray condescend to unsling the basket and I shall give Don Michael his
lunch."
"Don Michael," said I, "will continue to do the dirty work on this
expedition. Sit down, Thusis."
"Oh, I couldn't permit----"
"Oh, yes, you could. You've been behaving like a sporting duchess all
this morning. Continue in that congenial role."
"What did you say?" she demanded, her gray eyes frosty and intent on me.
"I said you've been behaving like a duchess."
"Why do you say that?"
"Because it's so."
She sat on her mossy throne, regarding me intently and unsmilingly.
"Don't say that again,--please," she said, coldly.
"I was merely jesting."
"I know. But please don't say it in that way. Don't use that
expression."
"Very well," said I, not relishing the snub. And I laid out the lunch
in silence, during which operation I could feel Thusis was watching my
sulky features with amusement.
To make sure I looked up at her when I had finished, and caught the
little devils laughing at me out of both her eyes.
"Luncheon's ready," said I, infuriated by her mockery.
"Monsieur is served," said Thusis, in a voice so diabolically meek that
I burst out laughing; and the girl, as though flinging discretion to the
summer breezes, leaped to her feet with a gay little echo of my laughter
and dropped down on the moss beside the woodland banquet.
"What do I care after all!" she said. "From the beginning I've been at
no pains to deceive you. So in the name of the old gods let us break
bread together."
She picked up a bit of bread, sprinkled a pinch of salt on it, broke it,
and offered me half with a most adorable air. And we ate together under
the inviolate roof of the high blue sky.
"Now," she said, "you'll never betray me."
"You knew that in the beginning."
"Did I? I don't know. I've been perfectly careless concerning you, Don
Michael."
"Was it from instinctive confidence, Thusis, or out of disdain?"
The girl laughed, not looking up but continuing to poke for olives with
a fork too large for the neck of the flask:
"Disdain you, Don Michael? How could I?"
"I sometimes believe you do. You behave very often as though I were a
detail of the surrounding landscape and quite as negligible."
"But it's an attractive landscape and not negligible," she insisted,
still poking for elusive olives. "Your simile is at fault, Monsieur
O'Ryan."
"Thusis," said I, gravely consuming a sandwich, "you have made fun of me
ever since I laid eyes on you."
"You began it."
"How?"
"You made fun of my red hair."
"It is beautiful hair."
"Indeed?"
"You know it. You know perfectly well how pretty you are."
"Senor!"
"In fact," said I, offering myself another sandwich, "you are unusually
ornamental. I concede it. I even admit that you resemble _The Laughing
Girl_."
"The cherished photograph on Monsieur's dresser! Oh, that is too much
flattery. What would the Admiral think to hear you say such things to
your housekeeper! Don Michael, you are young and you are headed for
trouble. I beg of you to remember your ancestors."
"How about yours, Thusis?"
"Mine? Oh, they were poor Venetians. Probably they ran gondolas for
the public--the taxis of those days, Don Michael--and lived on the tips
they received."
"Thusis?"
"Monsieur?"
"I'd be grateful for a tip--if you don't mind."
"A tip?"
"Yes. Just a little one."
The girl held out her glass and I filled it with cool Moselle.
"You're such a nice boy," she said, and sipped her wine, looking at me
all the while. She was so pretty that it hurt.
"A tip," she repeated musingly. "That is the Anglo-Saxon slang for
information. Is it then that you request information?"
"If you are willing."
"About what, pray?"
"About yourself, Thusis."
"That is unworthy curiosity."
"No, it isn't curiosity."
She elevated her delicate nose, very slightly. "What, then, do you term
it, Don Michael?"
"Sympathy."
"Oh la! Sympathy? Oh, I know _that_ kind. It is born out of the
idleness of speculation and developed with an admixture of sentimental
curiosity always latent in men."
She laughed: "It's nothing but emotion, Monsieur. Men call it budding
friendship. But men really care for no women."
"Why do you say that?"
"It's true. Men seek friendship among men. Men like few or no women,
but almost any female. That is the real truth. Why dodge it?"
"How old are you, Thusis?"
"Not old--as you mean it."
She had finished her luncheon, and now she leaned over and bathed her
lips and fingers in the icy stream. There, like some young woodland
thing out of the golden age of vanished gods she hovered, playing at the
glimmering water's edge, scooping up handfuls of golden gravel from the
bottom and letting them slide back through her dripping fingers.
"I'll tell you this," she said, looking at the water: "I don't like men.
I never did. Any I might have been inclined to like I had already been
born to hate.... You don't understand, do you?"
"No."
She smiled, sat erect, and dried her fingers on her handkerchief.
"Be flattered," she said. "No other man before you has had even a
glimpse of my real self. And I really don't know why I've given you
that much. I ask myself. I don't know.... But,"--and her sweet,
reckless laughter flashed--"the very devil seemed to possess me when I
first saw you, Don Michael. I was amazingly careless. But you were so
funny! I was indiscreet. But you were so solemn and so typically and
guilelessly masculine."
"Was I?" said I, getting redder and redder.
"Oh, yes!" she cried, "and you are still! You are all man--the most
comprehensive type of your sex--the most logical, and the most
delightfully transparent! Oh, you are funny, Don Michael. You don't
know it; you don't suspect it; but you are! And that is why I read you
to the depths of your nice boyish mind and heart, and felt that I need
be at no pains to play my little role with you."
"Then," said I, "if you consider me harmless, why not trust me further?"
"I do trust you. You know I'm not born a servant. You know, also, that
nevertheless I'm in service. So is my sister. So is my friend,
Josephine Vannis. So is my friend, Raoul Despres. Well, then! It
seems to me that I have trusted you, and that you know a great deal
about us all."
"That is not very much to know," said I, so naively that Thusis showered
the woods with her delicious laughter.
"Of course it isn't much, Don Michael. But just think how you can amuse
yourself in dull moments by trying to guess the rest!"
"I can't imagine," said I, "what your object may be in taking service
here in this little lonely valley in the Swiss Alps. If, as seems
probable, you all are agents of some power now at war--what on earth is
the use of coming here?"
Thusis smiled at me, then, resting on one arm, leaned over the cloth on
the moss and made me a little signal to incline one ear toward her.
When I did so she placed her lips close to my ear:
"You have promised always to treat us like your servants in the presence
of others. Do you remember?"