"Even if I hadn't been preoccupied, it would never have entered my head
that you seriously objected to being admired."
She received this in injured silence. Matthias chuckled to himself and
settled more comfortably into his seat. The motor-car turned off the
main road from the station to the village of Port Madison, down which
the greater number of its predecessors had clattered, and found
unclouded air on a well-metalled lane bordered with aged oaks and
maples. Through a funnel-like dip between hills, Matthias, looking past
his aunt, caught a fleeting glimpse of the cluttered roofs of Port
Madison, its shallow, land-locked harbour set with a little fleet of
pleasure boats, and the ineffable, burning blue of the distant Sound....
"I presume," Helena returned to the charge, disarmingly aggrieved, "you
think I ought to be grateful for your condescending to return at all!"
"Forgive me," he pleaded, not altogether insincerely; "I know it wasn't
right of me to run away like that, but I couldn't help it."
"You couldn't help it!" she murmured despairingly.
"That's just the way of it. I got to thinking about a play I wanted to
write, yesterday afternoon, and--well, along about ten o'clock it got
too strong for me. I just had to get back to my typewriter. You know how
that is."
"I? What do I know about your silly playwriting?"
Laughing, he bent nearer and patted the gloved hand on the cushions
beside him. "You know perfectly well, Helena dear, what it is to want to
do something so bad you simply can't help yourself. It's the Matthias
blood in both of us. That's why you ran off and married Tankerville
against everybody's advice. Of course, it did turn out beautifully; but
you didn't stop to wonder whether it would or not when you took it into
your head to marry him. The same with me: you decide that it's high time
for your delightful sister-in-law to get married, and you look round and
fix on your dutiful nephew for the bridegroom-elect--wholly because you
want it to be that way."
"Don't you?" she demanded sharply.
He took a moment to think this over. "I suppose I do," he admitted
almost reluctantly. "But--"
"You're in love with her!" Helena declared with spirit.
"Quite true, but--"
"Then why," she begged in tones of moderate exasperation--"why do you
object--hang fire--run away like a silly, frightened schoolboy as soon
as I get everything arranged for you?"
"But, you see, I'm not in a position to get married yet," he argued. "I
haven't--"
"How's that--'not in a position'?" she interrupted testily.
"You keep forgetting I'm the family pauper, the poor relation, whereas
Venetia has all the money there is, more or less."
"There you are!" Helena turned her palms out expressively; folded them
in resignation. "What more can you ask?"
"Something more nearly approaching an equal footing, at least."
"Jack!"--she turned to him with a fine air of innocence--"how much money
_have_ you got, anyway?"
"Thirty-six hundred per annum, as you know very well," he replied. "But,
my dear, dear aunty (you're one of the most beautiful creatures alive
and I'm awfully proud and fond of you) surely you must understand that
no decent fellow wants to go to the girl he's in love with and make a
proposition like this: 'I've got thirty-six hundred and you've got three
hundred and sixty thousand; let's marry and divide.'"
"How long have you been writing plays?"
"Oh ... several years."
"And how many have you written?"
"Quite a few."
"And how much have you made at it?"
"Next to nothing, but--"
"Then why do you persist?"
"Because it's the thing I want to do."
"But you can't make any money at it--"
"I may make a lot before long. Meanwhile, I like it."
"But if you'd only listen to reason and let Tankerville--"
"With all the best intentions in the world, dear Helena, Tankerville
couldn't make me a successful business man. It isn't in me. Permit me to
muddle along in my own, 'special, wrong-headed way, and the chances are
I'll make good in the end. But, once and for all, I refuse positively to
give up my trade and try to make sense of Wall Street methods."
Helena moved her shoulders impatiently. For an instant she was silenced.
Then: "But marriage needn't necessarily put an end to your playwriting.
A good marriage--as with Venetia--ought even to help, I should think."
"But you persist in forgetting I'm not a fortune hunter."
"But," she countered smartly, "Marbridge is."
He said: "Oh--Marbridge!" as if dumbfounded.
She smiled quietly, a very wise and superior smile.
To this point the car had been steadily ascending; the noise of the
motor, together with the frequent stutterings of the exhaust with the
muffler cut-out, had been sufficient to disguise the substance of their
communication from the ears of the operator. Now, however, they
surmounted the highest point and began the more gradual descent to the
Tankerville estate. And with less noise there was consequently very
little talking on the part of the two on the rear seat. For which
Matthias wasn't altogether sorry. He wanted time to think--to think
about Venetia Tankerville in the new light cast upon her by his aunt's
concluding remark: as affected by her friendship with Vincent Marbridge.
In the natural swing of events, it would never have occurred to him to
consider Marbridge's attentions seriously. Nobody ever took Marbridge
seriously, he believed, aside from a few exceptionally foolish women....
Noiselessly the car slipped down a mile-long avenue to the brow of a
promontory. On either hand Tanglewood's long parked terraces fell away
to the water: on the left the harbour of Port Madison, on the right,
Long Island Sound.
Matthias was barely conscious of these things; his mood was haunted by
an extraordinarily clear vision of Vincent Marbridge: not tall, but by
no means short; a trifle stout, but none the less a well-knit figure of
a man, and tremendously alive; dark, with a broad, blunt, good-humoured
face and seal-brown eyes that were exceedingly handsome and expressive;
keen-witted and accomplished, knowing almost everybody and every place
and thing worth knowing; hedonist and egoist, selfish, unscrupulous,
magnetic, fascinating.
Impressed, Matthias frowned. His aunt eyed him covertly, with a sly,
semi-affectionate, semi-malicious smile shadowing her mouth.
Slackening its pace, the car took the wide semicircle of the drive and
slid sedately to a dead stop by the carriage-block. Matthias pulled
himself together, jumped out, and gave his hand to his aunt. They turned
toward the house.
Tankerville's pretentious marble palace crowned the brow of the headland
with an effect as exquisite as a dream of an ancient French château
realized in snow. For this its owner had his wife to thank. Helena,
unable to curb her husband's desire for the most expensive and
ostentatious place obtainable, had at least guided his choice of design.
It was too magnificent, it was overpowering, but it was beautiful; and
it was more than ever beautiful at this hour, with its walls in part
bathed in a rose-pink light of sunset, in part shadowed as with a wash
of violet, and with all its admirable proportions stark against the
dusky sapphire of the Sound.
An unwonted stillness clung about the place. Matthias wondered.
"It might be the palace of the Sleeping Beauty," he said. "Why this
deadly and benumbing silence? What--"
"Oh, simply that Tankerville decided this morning to take everybody down
to Huntington for lunch. They got away quite early, in the Enchantress.
Come out on the terrace; we'll look for them."
They passed through a wide, cool, panelled hallway.
"Why didn't you go?"
"You know I hate the water. Besides, I had a headache--at least, I had
one until the Enchantress got under way; and furthermore I meant to stay
at home and meet you and talk it out."
"Venetia went, of course?"
"Of course--_and_ Marbridge--and everybody!"
He grunted thoughtfully. They descended to a terrace which jutted airily
out over the edge of a cliff, with a sheer drop of a hundred and fifty
feet to the beach.
Helena, dropping languidly into a wicker chair, motioned Matthias to the
broad marble balustrade.
"Any sign of the Enchantress, O perturbed nephew?"
He lingered there for an instant, marvelling with an inexhaustible
wonder at the magnificent sweep of the view, then remembering, raked the
waters until he discovered Tankerville's power-cruiser standing in
toward the dock from the bottle-neck mouth of Port Madison harbour.
Returning, he reported, seated himself near his aunt, lighted a
cigarette.
"Why did you ask him here anyway?" he demanded abruptly.
"Who?" she parried mischievously.
"Marbridge, of course," he admitted, sulking in the face of her manifest
amusement.
"Jealous, Jackie?"
"Oh--if you insist."
She laughed. "The most encouraging symptom you've yet betrayed!... I
didn't ask him. Tankerville did. He likes him. The man's amusing, after
all."
"But you like him?"
"He amuses me."
"He's not precisely a tame cat...."
"Dear boy!" she laughed again, "I didn't fetch you out here to worry
about me. I'm fire-proof. Venetia's quite another pair of shoes. Fret
about her as much as you like."
"When does he go--Marbridge, I mean?"
"Monday, I think. At least, I believe Tankerville asked him for a week
only."
"And that's why you asked me, this particular week?"
"I thought you'd be a good counter-irritant; and hoped you'd come to
your senses and secure Venetia against all Marbridges for all time to
come. You gave me to understand you would."
"Pardon," he corrected a trifle stiffly: "I admitted to you in strict
confidence that I was in love with Venetia. I never promised to ask her
to marry me."
"Well, that's what I understood you to mean. And anyway, you'd better.
Neither Tankerville nor I can control the girl; she's her own mistress
and headstrong enough to be a good match for any Matthias that ever
lived. If Marbridge ever convinces her that she likes him...."
She concluded with an eloquent ellipsis.
"Probably," mused Matthias after prolonged deliberation, "I'd have lost
my head before this if it hadn't been so full of that play."