Louise, still bound by the discipline of school, was not a late sleeper.
As early as seven o'clock on the morning following Langdon Jesse's call
she was lying awake, striving to dispel, by the process of optimistic
reasoning, the sinister nimbus that seemed to be enshrouding her, when
the telephone bell in her dressing room began to ring persistently.
Louise sprang up to answer the call.
"I know it is a barbarous hour, dear," Laura's cheerful contralto came
over the wire, "but I've just been aroused from my juvenile slumbers by
the telephone, and of course I must have revenge upon somebody. Listen,
dear: I know that it only takes you about fifteen minutes to dress--of
course you are not dressed yet? Well, begin this instant. Put on
something for tramping and fussing around in the country. You must be
over here by eight o'clock. We are going to have a romping day in the
country. Now, hurry, won't you?"
"Just you and I, Laura?" asked Louise, delighted. A day in the country!
Open fields to dispel vapors! The thought of it made her eager and
excited.
"No, there'll be another," replied Laura. "I disregard the axiom, you
know, that 'Three is a crowd.' Three needn't be a crowd if one of the
three has a little tact and--and the knack of opportunely vanishing,"
and Louise heard her soft laughter. "A man I know has what he calls a
little tumbledown place, with some ground around it, over in Jersey. He
calls it Sullen Manor, because he says he always goes over there, in
preference to all other places, when he feels the imperative need to
sulk. Now, there is not another moment to be wasted in 'phoning. Start
to dress this very instant! Will you solemnly promise me to be here on
the stroke of eight? Very well. I shall be waiting. Goodbye."
Louise, "very trig and complete," as Laura remarked, in a suit of grey
with a matching fur-trimmed grey toque, was with the astonished Laura a
good quarter of an hour before eight.
"Heaven knows how you do it," said Laura, still in the hands of her
maid. "Go into the dining-room and have some coffee, dear. I shall be
with you directly."
Louise, humming happily at the thought of the care-free day ahead of
her, sped into the bright dining room. John Blythe, sipping coffee at
the table, rose to meet her. He looked fine and upstanding in his fresh,
rough tweeds, his close-shaven face ruddy and his clear grey eyes
showing an agate sparkle from the brisk walk to Laura's apartment from
his own.
Louise halted abruptly in her astonishment when she saw him. But she was
extremely glad to see him and said so frankly, resting her hand in his
muscular but gentle clasp for a moment.
"Laura packed me off here to take some coffee," she said. "Does she know
you are here? And how early you are abroad in the world. We are stirring
about at this sunrise hour because we are going for a day in the
country--and I am mad to get there! In my previous incarnation I must
have been a milkmaid, for I dearly love the country." Then she added,
with a little air of disappointment: "I do wish you were coming with
us!"
"That," replied Blythe, smiling his wide smile as he poured coffee for
her, "is precisely what I am going to do."
Louise, in the act of taking the cup from him, looked into his face with
an expression of pleased mystification on her own.
"Why, what is--how can--" She broke off suddenly and rose from her chair
in the intensity of a pleasure which she herself, at that moment, could
scarcely have analyzed. "Surely," she went on in a lower tone, her face
irradiated by a smile which it thrilled him to observe, "Surely you are
not the man who sulks?"
"One of Laura's agreeable fictions," he pronounced. "She calls my little
place Sullen Manor, and declares that it is my sulking cave, because
I've not had her over there to see it. I've had no chance to ask her
until now. Do you mean to say she did not tell you that I was the
organizer of this expedition?"
"The secretive creature did not even hint at such a thing," declared
Louise, not very successfully pretending to be miffed.
"Now I call that downright neglect of orders," said Blythe, also
striving to show a serious face. "I particularly charged Laura to tell
you who the party of the third part was to be in order that you might
have the privilege of refusing to accompany the expedition in case you
so desired. A shocking departure from discipline on Laura's part."
"Then it was you," said Louise, lighter in spirits than she had been for
a long time, "who invited me?"
"My dear, don't you know he would say so to you no matter whether it
were true or not?" said Laura, who had caught Louise's question,
breezing into the dining-room at that moment. "Come on, children. Your
antique chaperone is impatient to be on her disregarded way. Louise,
have you had your coffee? And some toast? Finish them this instant! Even
so ascetic and imaginative a person as Mr. Blythe knows that a girl
must have a little breakfast before venturing upon an expedition into
the jungles of Jersey."
Laura, perfect in a walking suit of shepherd's plaid and tan walking
shoes, had, on this morning, the animation as well as the beauty of a
girl. Blythe compared the two as they stood side by side, hastily
sipping coffee. Laura, with her Judith-black, glossy hair and fresh,
youthful color, and Louise with her thick coils of vivid, velvety auburn
and glowing ivory pallor--Blythe thought, studying them for a moment
over the rim of his cup, that he had never seen so splendid a contrast.
"_Allons!_" Laura broke in upon his reflection. "Are we to dawdle here
until luncheon time? Already it is," looking at her watch, "twenty-four
seconds past eight!"
Blythe, slipping into his greatcoat, turned a solemn face upon Laura
when they had reached the hall, outward-bound.
"There is one thing, Laura, in connection with this expedition, that I
am keenly sorry for," he said, assuming a sepulchral tone.
"Why, what is that?" asked Laura, a little alarmedly, taken off her
guard.
"Well," replied Blythe, still solemn, "you'll only be away from here for
about fifteen hours, and how are you possibly going to have your
apartment completely redecorated, from forepeak to mizzen, alow and
aloft, in that space of time?"
"Tush!" laughed Laura. "There will be plenty of time to have the place
done over--and it really does sorely need it, now doesn't it?" this with
a wistfulness at which Blythe and Louise laughed, "--when I take Louise
to Europe with me in May--less than three months off."
"Am I to go to Europe with you, dear--really?" asked Louise, surprised
and pleased; for Laura had said nothing about it before.
"Most assuredly you are," replied Laura, entirely in earnest. "If, that
is, you can make up your mind to be burdened by the companionship of one
so aged."
The topic was lost in the excitation of their arranging themselves in
Laura's car, which was to take them to the ferry. But the thought of it
recurred to Louise several times during the ride to the ferry. It was an
alluring prospect, barring the obstacles. How could she leave her
mother, even for a short time, now that she had rejoined her after a
separation of years? Finally she was able to dismiss such cogitations
and yield herself to the enjoyment of the day ahead.
It was one of those unseasonably mild days in late February that
occasionally "drop in" to point an accusing finger at the harshness of
winter. A brilliant sun swam in a cloudless sky, and the soft yet
invigorating balminess of late April was, as they noticed when they
sped by the Park, deluding the buds of tree and hedge into swelling
prematurely and even seducing the willows into a vague, timidly
displayed elusive green. Hardy, pioneering robins, advance couriers sent
forth to investigate the senile endurance of winter, hopped about the
Park sward. School-ward bound boys, out of sight of their homes, were
doffing their irksome overcoats, and thrusting them, blanket-wise, at
demure little schoolgirls who, in turn, were carrying their stuffy
jackets over their arms. Motormen and truckmen were smothering yawns
that denoted a premature spring fever. Business-bound men, going more
slowly than usual, glancing occasionally at the sky of sapphire, and
feeling on their cheeks gusty little zephyrs from the South, thought of
fishing "where the wild stream sings." Belated shopgirls, sensing the
morning's benign balm as they hurried through crowds, thought of hats
and furbelows for the season that, they surmised, was almost upon them.
In the ferry-bound automobile, John Blythe was thinking about a letter
hid in the pocket of his coat and wondering how the person whom the
letter most concerned would regard its contents. Louise was wondering if
her mother would be annoyed over the word she had left with her maid
that she would be with Laura for the entire day and part of the evening;
occasionally she glanced sidelongwise at John Blythe, when there was no
possibility of his catching her at it, and strove vaguely to analyze the
sense of power, mingled with kindliness, which his presence diffused.
Laura, leaning back, emitting an occasional absurdity, studied them both
and wondered, her eyes a little dreamy, if matters ever actually turned
out in real life as they did in novels.
They stood on the ferryboat's prow, bathing in the sun's relenting glow
and blinking at the gold-tipped river crests; and it was only ten
o'clock when, after half an hour's ride on the slam-bang little
accommodation train, they debarked at the spick-and-span little station,
at the side of which Blythe's care-taker, a grinning but stolid German,
had drawn up a fine and comfortable, if old-fashioned, surrey to which
was hitched a pair of glossy, mettlesome sorrels.
Louise and Laura felt like clapping their hands when, after the two-mile
drive through woodlands and past neat, well-cared-for little farms the
clean, sweet-smelling soil of which already was being turned up, they
drove on a firm, natural road through a wide wooden gate and came in
sight of the pretty Colonial house, with four bright yellow pillars,
topped by a balcony of snowy white, with wide-open shutters of an
intense green, and a big white double door at the sides of which were
little grooved columns surmounted by the inevitable Corinthian
capitals. The house, fresh and smart in its old-fashioned way, was
roomier than it looked from the front. It was divided by a wide hall
which ran its entire length on the ground floor; and a wide stairway ran
from the hall in front to the second floor, where, after the Colonial
fashion, the balcony gave upon sleeping rooms.
"Sullen Manor," announced Laura, assuming the megaphonic utterance of
the sight-seeing car's expounder. "But doesn't it beautifully belie its
name and its owner's doldrumish use of it? Why, it is as pretty and
cheerful as a pigeon-cote snuggling under sifting cherry blossoms! How
much ground is there around the place, John?"
"Twenty acres," replied Blythe, smiling a little gravely. "I suppose I
know every foot of the twenty acres, too, though I left here--it is
where I was born, you know--when I was seven years old. My father lost
the place, you see, through bad investments and what not, when I was at
that age. We moved to New Orleans, and a year later both my father and
mother were swept off by yellow fever. I only remember them in a shadowy
way. Oddly enough, I remember this old place much better than I do my
parents; its corners, clumps of trees, and that sort of thing. I had a
chance to get the place back a couple of years ago, and I seized it. A
good deal of the gear that was here when I was a tyke is still here,
stowed in the attic; for the place has not been often occupied since we
left it. I've refurnished it in a sort of a way. I hope you'll not find
it so bad, Laura; but I'm prepared right now to wilt under your
superior, and, I might say, your inveterate knowledge of interior
decoration."
Blythe looked a bit self-disdainful over what had been rather a long
speech for him, particularly when he observed that Louise had been
waiting to ask him something.
"You will not think me inquisitive, Mr. Blythe?" she prefaced. "But what
you said about the--the carrying away of your people by yellow fever not
only touched me but aroused my curiosity. You were only a child then, of
course. What did you do then? Were you taken in hand by relatives? You
are not annoyed because I ask?"
"Why should I be?" Blythe laughed. "Particularly when the reply is so
simple. I have no relatives--had none then. When my people died I was on
the streets. I believe I hold the record yet for the number of _New
Orleans Picayunes_ and _Times-Democrats_ sold in a given time. Whatever
else I became later, I certainly was a hustling newsboy. Then I came up
here and I've been working ever since. My annals, you see, Miss
Treharne, are distinctly dry."
"But your education?" Louise asked, her eyes alight with an interest
which caused Laura to smile.
"Well," said Blythe, "there are plenty of people living in Princeton
yet, I think, who will tell you, if ever you take the pains to inquire,
that I was an exceptionally successful furnace-tender, tinker,
chore-doer, and all-round roustabout. Oh, yes, I forget. I was a
persuasive peddler of soap and starch before the Lord, too. Likewise, I
acquired the knack of mending umbrellas. Not to overlook the fact that,
odd times, I drove a village hack. At Princeton, in short, I was
virtually everything and anything you can think of except a barber and a
policeman. I shied at those two occupations."
"And you took your degree?" inquired Louise.
"Just squeezed through," replied Blythe.
"Don't you believe anything of the sort, Louise," put in Laura. "He was
valedictorian of his class, and, worse than that, he played full-back
with his eleven, and a sensational full-back too. I ought to know. I am
old enough, woe is me, to have been a woman grown the year John Blythe
contributed a good three-fifths to the Tigers' victory over Yale."
Blythe, flushing embarrassedly, was holding up a protesting hand when
the surrey drew up in front of the clean, scrubbed porch and the
care-taker's wife, a freshly-ginghamed, bright-eyed German woman of
middle age, appeared to receive them. Then, from around the left side of
the house, a terrific yipping began. Two hysterically joyous fox
terriers, scenting their master, came tearing around the porch and
literally leaped upon Blythe. Then they "side-wheeled" in circles over
the lawn, first listing precariously over on starboard legs and then on
port, whimpering in their sheer delight as they tore around. A huge
Angora cat, as they entered the hall, made two bounds of it from the
huge fireplace, from which a pair of smouldering logs diffused a red
glow that contrasted oddly with the streaming sunlight, to rub her
sides, purring almost vociferously as she did so, against Blythe's
trousers legs. Later in the day, she was solemnly to conduct Blythe and
his guests to the cellar for the purpose of exhibiting a litter which
kept the women chained around the basket for nearly an hour.
In the lives of most men and women there are days--usually unanticipated
days--so encompassed, aureoled, by a memorable happiness that, ever
afterward, in hours of retrospection, they mark the beginning or denote
the closing of the eventful periods.
This was such a day for Blythe and Louise and Laura. They rambled
through miles of field and forest, chattering and laughing like children
a-berrying; the women's hair blowing free or tumbling down altogether,
their skirts caught by brambles, their deadliest fears aroused by the
inevitable ruminative cow. They climbed fences, while Blythe pretended
that something had just dropped out of his pocket back of him. They
romped with the dogs, they tossed pebbles at a mark in a garrulous
little just-thawed stream, they even sat down on an inviting little
mound, beneath an old elm, and played at mumblety-peg with Blythe's
jack-knife and quarrelled laughingly over the score of the game.
When they returned to the house in mid-afternoon, they found the German
woman preparing a meal for them. Laura and Louise insisted upon helping
her. In fact, they banished her from the kitchen altogether and did it
all themselves. Louise announced, her features set rather determinedly,
that she was going to make some biscuits, whereupon Blythe, asking her
if she'd learned that in the cooking class at Miss Mayhew's school,
incontinently fled in well-simulated alarm. But he came back to the
spotless kitchen to watch the two women, aproned to the neck, and their
arms bared to the shoulders, breeze about with their preparations. He
was repaid for his inquisitiveness by being swaddled in an apron and set
to peel the potatoes.
The meal was an unqualified success, including the biscuits, which, to
Louise's intense surprise, were superb, although Blythe impertinently
maintained that the German woman really had made them and that Louise
had merely heated them over. The light began to fall as they chatted
around the table, and Blythe, having no great liking for oil lamps,
tossed logs on to the dining-room fireplace for the flickering glow of
their light. Blythe lighted a cigar with his coffee and fell into a
silence of content when Louise and Laura began to hum, very low,
snatches of old songs in unison; Laura in her deep, moving contralto,
with an appealing little "break" in it, and Louise in a clear, sweet
soprano--she had been the honor girl of her school for her singing.
"More," Blythe would give the repressed command when they ceased; and
they would willingly obey. After a while, darkness having quite fallen,
Laura went to another part of the house for her after-dinner cigarette.
She made it a practice not to take her cigarettes in the presence of
quite young women.
Blythe, silent enough now, and his silence tacitly concurred in by
Louise, who also had become preoccupied, under the spell of the
flickering fire-light and her nearness, alone, to a man who made a
strong appeal to her imagination, brought up a deep leather chair before
the logs and motioned to Louise to take it. But she pulled an
old-fashioned three-legged footstool before the fire, and Blythe
himself had to take the chair. Thus they sat silent for a while,
listening to the sputtering of the green logs.
"Louise."
It was the first time he had called her that. But she did not even turn
her head. She was sitting near him on the low stool, chin in palm, her
face illumined by the fire's glow. It was agreeable to hear him call her
Louise. He knew her father. She had been thinking of her father while
she and Laura were singing softly.
"Yes," she said, quietly.
"I am to be your guardian, Louise. Does that please you?"
Blythe, leaning back in the deep chair, did not take his eyes from the
murmuring logs. Louise, chin still in palm, turned to look at him
calmly. Then she gazed back into the fire.
"Yes," she replied, no surprise in her tone. Perhaps, she thought
whimsically, the dancing, leaping flames had hypnotized her. But she was
not surprised. She was, instead, swept by a surge of deep gladness. "You
have a letter from my father?"
"Two," said Blythe. "One of them is for you."
She moved her little stool close to his chair and he handed her the
packet. The letter for her was under cover of the letter addressed to
Blythe. Louise studied, in the fire's glow, the bold, clear address on
the envelope. It was the first time she had ever seen her father's
handwriting. Her eyes became slightly suffused at that thought. Her
letter dropped out of the larger envelope.
"If you care to, read the one addressed to me first, Louise," said
Blythe.
Louise, turning a bit the better to catch the fire's glow, read her
father's letter addressed to Blythe--as far as she could read it. She
was nearly at the end when her unshed tears blinded her. Blythe's hand,
which she then felt, without surprise, softly clasping both of her own
as they rested in her lap, felt very cool and soothing to her.
After a while, nothing having been said by either, she broke the
envelope and read her father's letter to her. It was not a long letter,
but it took her a long time to read it; the tears would blot out the
words, try as she would to crowd them back.
Her father's letter to Blythe was couched in the tone a man assumes in
addressing his lawyer who also is his friend. It bore the postmark of
Lahaina, Island of Maui, Hawaii--George Treharne's sugar plantations
were on that island of the Hawaiian group. The letter concerned Louise
wholly. He was tied to his plantations, owing to labor troubles with
the Japanese, and there was no possibility of his visiting the States
for some time. He had been surprised to hear that Louise had left
school. She was now a woman grown. He had looked forward to the time
when, he hoped, she might feel an impulse to come to him. If that time
had not yet come he trusted implicitly to Blythe to see that she should
be properly bestowed, placed in a fitting environment, and shielded from
baneful influences. He knew that Blythe, the young partner of his old
lawyer, now dead, would not fail him in this. He desired that Blythe
should apply immediately for a court order appointing him his daughter's
legal guardian. He inclosed the necessary papers for the accomplishment
of that purpose. He was eager to see his daughter, and hoped to see her
within a year. In the meantime he confidently committed her to Blythe's
watchful guardianship.
His letter to Louise bespoke a deep and solicitous affection. He told
her of Blythe, adverting to him in terms of praise as a man of exalted
honor ("Poor father! as if I did not know that," thought Louise, when
she came to that passage), and beseeching her to follow Blythe's advice
in all matters in which his large experience would be invaluable to her.
He added that he felt that she would not find Blythe's suggestions
irksome. He inclosed a draft on a Honolulu bank for five thousand
dollars, which would suffice for her needs until she heard from him
again. He hoped to see her within a year. And he was hoping that she
would be glad to see her "always-affectionate father, George Treharne."
At length Louise conquered her tears and turned a fire-illumined smile
upon Blythe.
"I am glad," she said simply. "Even before you told me, this had been
the happiest day of my life. Now it is beautiful. I cannot even begin to
tell you how beautiful it is."
"Then I shall apply for the guardianship, Louise," said Blythe. "I wish
I could say how it pleases me to know you are willing that I should."
"Willing?" said Louise. "Do you know that, aside from Laura, you are the
only--" She had been close to saying "friend;" but she could not leave
her mother out in that way;--"the only adviser I have?"
Blythe, glancing from the logs into her eyes as she said that, longed to
take her in his arms.
Laura, at the piano in the music room on the other side of the hall,
began softly to play the barcarole from "The Tales of Hoffmann." They
listened for a little while, and then Blythe said, smiling gravely:
"As your father says, I shall not be, I hope, an exacting guardian.
There are many things upon which I shall not touch at all. I shall not
affect to believe that you do not know what I mean."
"I know," said Louise.
"Your duty is that to which your heart prompts you--I know that," said
Blythe. "It is not for me, nor for anyone else, to seek to alter your
conception of your duty. All that I ask is that you call upon me in your
time of need, if that time should ever come; and I hope it never shall.
For the rest, nothing is to be changed at my suggestion. The scroll is
in your hands, Louise. Only when you need me--I shall not fail you
then."
"Would it be unworthy," she asked him after a pause, "if I were not to
tell my father--just yet--that I am living with my mother?"
Blythe knew what a hard question that had been for her to ask.
"Not unworthy, or anything like it, I think," he replied promptly, "when
the motive is so pure and fine."
Impulsively she rose and held out both of her hands and he took them in
his.
"Call Laura," she said. "I want to tell her. I want my guardian angel to
meet my guardian."
Laura came into the room as she spoke. She walked over to Louise and
placed an arm around her.
"I knew it, dear," she said to Louise. "John told me last night. That is
why we are over here. He thought, and I agreed with him, that it would
be better to tell you at the close of a happy day. And was there _ever_
such a happy day since the world began?"
Blythe looked at his watch and whistled.
"We've half an hour to make the last New York train tonight, and a
two-mile drive to the station," he said. "If we miss the train we'll
have to stay here all night."
Laura gathered up her skirts and raced for her hat, Louise after her.
"Stay here all night!" gasped Laura. "You are making a glorious
beginning as a guardian, aren't you!"
It was past ten o'clock when Louise, in Laura's car, which had been
waiting at the ferry, reached the house on the Drive, Laura having been
dropped at her apartment. The sheer happiness of the day still absorbed
her. Up to the moment when the car pulled up at the curb she had been
going over and over, since parting with Blythe and Laura, the incidents
of the day that had made it such an oasis of happiness.
But it all disappeared like a suddenly-vanishing mirage when, upon
stepping to the pavement, she saw Langdon Jesse's car drawn up at the
curb.