The effect was like a pistol shot on lotus eaters. Slowly the players
came out of their absorption; color returned faintly to white, tense
faces.
"I suppose I may ask it?" added Mr. Rivett dryly. "I'm a heavy loser."
"Sure thing, dad," said Jack with a laugh. "I'm about even, and I
venture to ask it, too. _Does_ anybody here want to dance? You surely
won't object," he added mischievously to Silvette.
"I have no right to say anything at all," she laughed.
"Every right--the right of the conqueror! Accept my bow and spear--and
speak! ... How is it with your sister?"
"I'm afraid I haven't any voice in the matter, either," said Diana
serenely. "It is for the losers to decide."
They decided to dance. Mrs. Rivett came from the dim music room and
stood watching them with her little worn hands folded, while servants
lighted and cleared the larger drawing-room, designed for a ballroom,
with its little gilded balcony aloft and the great concert grand in its
carved and gilded foliations sprawling like a bedizened elephant in the
corner.
A servant was sent for "mademoiselle"--evidently somebody who lived
somewhere in the house whose duties included dance music. Meanwhile
Edgerton sat down at the piano, and began a fascinating Spanish waltz.
"Traitor," whispered a fresh, young voice at his elbow, and he looked up
into the winning eyes of Diana.
"Hello," he said; "how went the battle?"
"The cards?"
"Yes."
"As usual, thank you."
"Oh! And how do they usually go with you, fair cousin?"
"Well enough," she said briefly.
She stood leaning on the piano.
"You play cleverly," she observed.
"Oh, yes--cleverly. There's nothing else to anything I do."
"Isn't that enough?"
"_Is_ it, Diana?"
"Enough as far as music is concerned," she said impatiently. "Did you
ever see a musical virtuoso whom a real man didn't want to kick? And as
for you," she added, "you are a traitor. You said you would ask me to
dance. Now, if you ask me, I _won't_!"
Still playing, he continued to look up at her smilingly.
"What do you really care about me anyway?" he said. "I wish you'd tell
me, Diana."
"Honestly, or flippantly?"
"Honestly."
"Masks off, you mean?"
"Yes--as far off as they'll come."
"I care a lot about you."
"You say it too frankly," he laughed.
"What I say, I say.... Did you find Christine Rivett agreeable at
dinner?"
"She's interesting."
"Is _that_ all!" evidently disappointed.
"Well, she's very fetching."
"That is far more serious."
"Indeed, it is. I've qualified as an aspirant for her hand and fortune
already."
"I don't doubt it," she returned calmly. "That's one reason her father
decided to employ us."
She said it unsmiling, and after he had looked up at her once or twice
he said: "Of course you are joking."
"Ob, yes; it's one kind of a jest. Meanwhile here comes a young person
in black--doubtless mademoiselle.... I'm not going to dance with you;
don't compose your features in that smug fashion. You're a traitor, and
I won't."
She turned on her heel and advanced leisurely toward Colonel Curmew, who
immediately began to twirl his mustache and shoot his cuffs, when,
without warning, she sheered off into the receptive arms of Jack Rivett,
and was presently drifting across the room in a Viennese waltz.
Others were dancing now; Edgerton went over and asked his hostess--an
old New York custom now obsolete--who colored and smiled at him,
explaining that she had renounced that art with the advent of
rheumatism. So, after a while, he took out her daughter Christine--also
an obsolete custom--who soon, however, had enough of him as a dancer,
and took him into the conservatory.
The others danced until supper time; midnight found them separating on
the stairs. Edgerton and Christine Rivett had rather a prolonged
leave-taking, then shook hands cordially in plain view of everybody.
Diana, passing with Silvette, said a careless good night to him.
Silvette, retaining her sister's arm, detained him for a moment in
conversation; then they went away together, Diana dismissing him with an
inattentive nod.
But, as he was prepared for his pillow, a servant brought an envelope to
his door and tucked it under the sill.
Inside was a single line:
"Good night, Jim."
The handwriting was now familiar to him.
*CHAPTER VI*
*PACTA CONVENTA*
Guests arrived and guests departed from Adriutha, but the original
gathering remained.
The people who came and went were about the kind that Edgerton had
expected to encounter--people identified with nothing in particular
except money, and not always with that.
For, into the social mess at Adriutha an author or two was occasionally
stirred as seasoning; sometimes an artist became temporarily
englutenized over a week-end, emerging on Monday well fed and satiated
with hope of material results from cohabitation with wealth--which never
materialized.
Edgerton was inclined to take them all as cheerfully as he found
them--at their face value; and they were not always pretty.
Loyalty to obligation was inherent in his race, perhaps the strongest
trait in him; and all his inclinations toward what was easiest, his
content with the superficial, his tendency to drift, had not yet
radically altered this trait, nor perhaps other qualities latent under
the froth.
For a few days in the beginning, humorous curiosity, the novelty of his
anomalous position, the very rawness of the experience, amused him; but
the veneer of everything soon wore thin, revealing the duller surface
underneath. Then came uneasiness and impatience; but loyalty to his
bargain and to his kindred were matters of course, and he determined to
find in these people something to interest him and render his sojourn
among them at least endurable.
After that first stormy night in June, the splendor of a limpid,
rain-washed morning had revealed to him the gross outward impossibility
of this place of millions--the vast, new "villa," red-tiled and
yellow-walled, hideous in its multiplicity of roofs, angles, terraces
and bays, with outlying works of rubble, concrete, and railroad-station
floral embellishment.
Scarring the green crypt of nature, staining the glass of the stream
with painted reflections of its architectural deformities, Adriutha
Lodge sprawled monsterlike and naked in the summer sunshine.
Garage, hothouses, stables, barns, a farm, a model dairy, like grewsome
spawn of a common architectural dam, affronted the woods and meadows of
this little valley set among the remote Berkshires.
There was no reticence left in that desecrated valley all vibrant with
the scream of discordant color, texture, and design. Motor cars, too,
were noisy along the road; all day the silver-mounted trappings of
horses flashed in the sun. Staccato echoes from power boats on the
artificial lake offended. The House of Rivett challenged the Eternal
patience with a hundred lightning rods.
Edgerton, walking his horse beside Diana's, suddenly drew bridle with an
uncontrollable gesture of disgust.
"Listen to me," he said; "where man's despoiling labor pollutes nature,
sadness and resignation make heavy the hearts of her true lovers, but
where man's abominable ignorance desecrates, reigns a more shocking
desolation which no modest heart ever forgives!"
Diana, surprised by the sudden and unexpected outburst, drew bridle
beside his standing horse.
A moment previous they had been amiably exchanging idle gossip from
their saddles, gradually falling back behind the others--Silvette,
Christine, Jack, and Colonel Curmew--who had cantered on forward; and
now, suddenly out of a clear sky, not apropos of anything, Edgerton had
flashed out the bolt of his contempt for the House of Rivett--for his
ox, his ass, his servants, and all that was Rivett's.
"Jim," she remarked, "isn't it rather bad taste of you to say that?"
"Why? I am paid for being here." But he realized that she was right,
and it made him sullen.
"His roof shelters you none the less," she said quietly.
"Yours is rather a fine-drawn sense of hospitality, it seems to me," he
retorted.
"I can't snap at the hand that feeds me."
"Good Lord! May a man not have his own ideas?"
"Under lock and key, yes."
"All right," he said, reddening; "only I supposed I could be frank with
you."
"Are we actually on any such footing?" she asked quietly.
"I thought so--even a footing on which I permit myself to accept such a
rebuke from you."
She turned in her saddle.
"Permit yourself?" she repeated. "Do you mean _condescend_?"
"I mean what I say," he retorted sulkily, still smarting under her
rebuke.
Her cheeks were bright with anger, her lips compressed as though silence
had become an effort. Presently, however, she looked across at him with
perfect sweetness and composure.
"No, you don't mean what you say, Jim. If you did, you would be at a
disadvantage with me, and you don't want to be that; nor do I wish to
be, ever."