Athalie was having a wonderful summer. House and garden continued to
enchant her. She brought down Hafiz, who, being a city cat, instantly
fled indoors with every symptom of astonishment and terror the first
time Athalie placed him on the lawn.
But within a week the dainty Angora had undergone a change of heart.
Boldly, now he marched into the garden all by himself; fearlessly he
pounced upon such dangerous game as crickets and grasshoppers and the
little night moths which drifted among the flowers at twilight,--the
favourite prowling hour of Hafiz, the Beautiful.
Also, early in July, Athalie had acquired a fat bay horse and a double
buckboard; and, in the seventh heaven now, she jogged about the
country through leafy lanes and thistle-bordered by-roads long
familiar to her childhood, sometimes with basket, trowel, and garden
gloves, intent on the digging and transplanting of ferns, sometimes
with field-glasses and books, on ornithological information bent. More
often she started out with only a bag of feed for Henry the horse and
some luncheon for herself, to picnic all alone in a familiar woodland,
haunted by childish memories, and lie there listening to the bees and
to the midsummer wind in softly modulated conversation with the little
tree-top leaves.
She had brought her maid from the city; Mrs. Connor continued to rule
laundry and kitchen. Connor himself decorated the landscape with his
straw hat and overalls, weeding, spraying, rolling, driving the
lawn-mower, raking bed and path, cutting and training vines, clipping
hedges,--a sober, bucolic, agreeable figure to the youthful chatelaine
of the house of Greensleeve.
Clive had come once more from town to say that he was sailing for
England the following day; that he would be away a month all told, and
that he would return by the middle of August.
They had spent the morning driving together in her buckboard--the
happiest morning perhaps in their lives.
It promised to be a perfect day; and she was so carefree, so
contented, so certain of the world's kindness, so shyly tender with
him, so engagingly humorous at his expense, that the prospect of a
month's separation ceased for the time to appal him.
Concerning his interview with his wife she had asked him nothing; nor
even why he was going abroad. Whether she guessed the truth; whether
she had come to understand the situation through other and occult
agencies, he could not surmise. But one thing was plain enough;
nothing that had happened or that threatened to happen was now
disturbing her. And her gaiety and high spirits were reassuring him
and tranquillising his mind to a degree for which, on reflection, he
could scarcely account, knowing the ultimate hopelessness of their
situation.
Yet her sheer good spirits carried him with her, heart and mind, that
morning. And when it was time for him to go she said good-bye to him
with a smile as tenderly gay and as happy and confident as though he
were to return on the morrow. And went back to her magic house of
dreams and her fairy garden, knowing that, except for him, their
rainbow magic must vanish and the tinted spell fade, and the soft
enchantment dissolve forever leaving at her feet only a sunlit ruin
amid the stillness of desolation.
But the magic held. Every day she wrote him. Wireless messages came to
her from him for a while; ceased; then re-commenced, followed
presently by cablegrams and finally by letters.
So the magic held through the long sunny summer days. And Athalie
worked in her garden and strayed far afield, both driving and afoot.
And she studied and practised piano, and made curtains, and purchased
furniture.
Also she wrote letters to her sisters, long since wedded to husbands,
babies, and homes in the West. Her brother Jack, she learned, had
joined the Navy at Puget Sound, and had now become a petty officer
aboard the new battle-cruiser _Bon Homme Richard_ in Asiatic waters.
She wrote to him, also, and sent him a money order, gaily suggesting
that he use it to educate himself as a good sailor should, and that he
save his pay for a future wife and baby--the latter, as she wrote,
"being doubtless the most desirable attainment this side of Heaven."
In her bedroom were photographs of Catharine's children and of the
little boy which Doris had brought into the world; and sometimes, in
the hot midsummer afternoons, she would lie on her pillow and look at
these photographs until the little faces faded to a glimmer as slumber
dulled her eyes.
Captain Dane came once or twice to spend the day with her; and it was
pleasant, afterward, for her to remember this big, blond, sunburnt man
as part of all that she most cared for. Together they drove and walked
and idled through house and garden: and when he went away, to sail the
following day for those eternal forests which conceal the hearthstone
of the Western World, he knew from her own lips about her love for
Clive. He was the only person she ever told.
A few of her friends she asked to the house for quiet week-ends; the
impression their visits made upon her was pleasant but colourless.
And it seemed singular, as she thought it over, how subordinate, how
unaccented had always been all these people who came into her life,
lingered, and faded out of it, leaving only the impressions of
backgrounds and accessories against which only one figure stood clear
and distinct--her lover's.
Yes, of all men she had ever known, only Clive seemed real; and he
dominated every scene of her girlhood and her womanhood as her mother
had been the only really living centre of her childhood.
All else seemed to her like a moving and subdued background,--an
endless series of grey scenes vaguely painted through which figures
came and went, some shadowy and colourless as phantoms, some soberly
outlined, some delicately tinted--but all more or less subordinate,
more or less monochromatic, unimportant except for balance and
composition, as painters use indefinite shapes and shades so that the
eyes may more perfectly concentrate on the centre of their
inspiration.
And the centre of all, for her, was Clive. Since her mother's death
there had been no other point of view for her, no other focus for the
forces of her mind, no other real desire, no other content. He had
entered her child's life and had become, instantly, all that the
child-world held for her. And it was so through the years of her
girlhood. Absent, or during his brief reappearances, the central focus
of her heart and mind was Clive. And, in womanhood, all forces in her
mind and spirit and, now, of body, centred in this man who stood out
against the faded tapestry of the world all alone for her, the only
living thing on earth with which her heart had mated as a child, and
in which now her mind and spirit had found Nirvana.
All men, all women, seemed to have their shadowy being only to make
this man more real to her.
Friends came, remained, and went,--Cecil Reeve, gay, charmed with
everything, and, as always, mischievously ready to pay court to her;
Francis Hargrave, politely surprised but full of courteous admiration
for her good taste; John Lyndhurst, Grismer, Harry Ferris, Young
Welter, Arthur Ensart, and James Allys,--all were bidden for the day;
all came, marvelled in the several manners characteristic of them,
and finally went their various ways, serving only, as always, to make
clearer to her the fadeless memory of an absent man. For, to her, the
merest thought of him was more real, more warm and vivid, than all of
these, even while their eager eyes sought hers and their voices were
sounding in her ears.
Nina Grey came with Anne Randolph for a week-end; and then came Jeanne
Delauny, and Adele Millis. The memory of their visits lingered with
Athalie as long, perhaps, as the scent of roses hangs in a dim, still
room before the windows are open in the morning to the outer air.
The first of August a cicada droned from the hill-top woods and all
her garden became saturated with the homely and bewitching odour of
old-fashioned rockets.
On the grey wall nasturtiums blazed; long stretches of brilliant
portulaca edged the herbaceous borders; clusters of auratum lilies
hung in the transparent shadow of Cydonia and Spirea; and the first
great dahlias faced her in maroon splendour from the spiked thickets
along the wall.
Once or twice she went to town on shopping bent, and on one of these
occasions impulse took her to the apartment furnished for her so long
ago by Clive.
She had not meant to go in, merely intended to pass the house, speak
to Michael, perhaps, if indeed, he still presided over door and
elevator.
And there he was, outside the door on a chair, smoking his clay pipe
and surveying the hot and silent street, where not even a sparrow
stirred.
"Michael," she said, smiling.
For a moment he did not know her, then: "God's glory!" he said
huskily, getting to his feet--"is it the sweet face o' Miss
Greensleeve or the angel in her come back f'r to bless us all?"
She gave him her hand, and he held it and looked at her, earnestly,
wistfully; then, with the flashing change of his race, the grin broke
out:
"I'm that proud to be remembered by the likes o' you, Miss Athalie!
Are ye well, now?--an' happy? I thank God for that! I am
substantial--with my respects, ma'am, f'r the kind inquiry. And Hafiz?
Glory be, was there ever such a cat now? D'ye mind the day we tuk him
in a bashket?--an' the sufferin' yowls of the poor, dear creature.
Sure I'm that glad to hear he's well;--and manny mice to him, Miss
Athalie!"
Athalie laughed: "I suppose all your tenants are away in the country,"
she ventured.
"Barrin' wan or two, Miss. Ye know the young Master will suffer no one
in your own apartment."
"Is it still unoccupied, Michael?"
"Deed it is, Miss. Would ye care f'r to look around. There is nothing
changed there. I dust it meself."
"Yes," said the girl in a low voice, "I will look at it."
So Michael took her up in the lift, unlocked the door for her, and
then with the fine instinct of his race, forbore to follow her.
The shades in the square living-room were lowered; she raised one. And
the dim, golden past took shadowy shape again before her eyes.
[Illustration: "'Michael,' she said, smiling."]
She moved slowly from one object to another, touching caressingly
where memory was tenderest. She looked at the furniture, the
pictures,--at the fireplace where in her mind's eye she could see
_him_ bending to light the first fire that had ever blazed there.
For a little while she sat on the big lounge, her dreamy eyes fixed on
the spot where Clive's father had stood and she remembered Jacques
Renouf, too, and the lost city of Yhdunez.... And, somehow her
memories receded still further toward earlier years; and she thought
of the sunny office where Mr. Wahlbaum used to sit; and she seemed to
see the curtains stirring in the wind.
After a while she rose and walked slowly along the hall to her own
room.
Everything was there as she had left it; the toilet silver, evidently
kept clean and bright by Michael, the little Dresden cupids on the
mantel, the dainty clock, still running--further confirmation of
Michael's ministrations--the fresh linen on the bed. Nothing had been
changed through all these changing years. She softly opened the
clothes-press door; there hung her gowns--silent witnesses of her
youth, strangely and daintily grotesque in fashion. One by one she
examined them, a smile edging her lips, and, in her eyes, tears.
All revery is tinged with melancholy; and it was so with her when she
stood among the forgotten gowns of years ago.
It was so, too, when, one by one she unlocked and opened the drawers
of dresser and bureau. From soft, ordered heaps of silk and lace and
sheerest linen a faint perfume mounted; and it was as though she
subtly renewed an exquisite and secret intimacy with a youth and
innocence half-forgotten in the sadder wisdom of later days.
* * * * *
From the still and scented twilight of a vanished year, to her own
apartment perched high above the sun-smitten city she went, merely to
find herself again, and look around upon what fortune had brought to
her through her own endeavour.
But, somehow, the old prejudices had gone; the old instincts of pride
and independence had been obliterated, merged in a serene and tranquil
unity of mind and will and spirit with the man in whom every atom of
her belief and faith was now centred.
It mattered no longer to her what material portion of her possessions
and environment was due to her own efforts, or to his. Nothing that
might be called hers could remain conceivable as hers unless he shared
it. Their rights in each other included everything temporal and
spiritual; everything of mind and matter alike. Of what consequence,
then, might be the origin of possessions that could not exist for her
unless possession were mutual?
Nothing would be real to her, nothing of value, unless so marked by
his interest and his approval. And now she knew that even the world
itself must become but a shadow, were he not living to make it real.
* * * * *
It was a fearfully hot day in town, and she waited until evening to go
back to Spring Pond.
When she arrived, Mrs. Connor had a cablegram for her from Clive
saying that he was sailing and would see her before the month ended.
Late into the night she looked for him in her crystal but could see
nothing save a blue and tranquil sea and gulls flying, and always on
the curved world's edge a far stain of smoke against the sky.
Her mother was in her room that night, seated near the window as
though to keep the vigil that her daughter kept, brooding above the
crystal.
It was Friday, the twenty-first, and a new moon. The starlight was
magnificent in the August skies: once or twice meteors fell. But in
the depths of her crystal she saw always a sunlit sea and a gull's
wings flashing.
Toward morning when the world had grown its darkest and stillest, she
went over to where her mother was sitting beside the window, and knelt
down beside her chair.
And so in voiceless and tender communion she nestled close, her golden
head resting against her mother's knees.
Dawn found her there asleep beside an empty chair.