“The two girls sat in front of the confident young face looking out of the silver locket”
“The two girls sat in front of the confident young face looking out of the silver locket”
It was the second Saturday in June, and school was breaking up next week. Mrs. Mar had finished off the Braut von Messina in the dining-room, and barely begun with the Hindu Mission on the other side of the city. Hildegarde had retired to her room to watch, not for Bella’s coming (the window did not command the front), but for Mr. Mar’s going down the garden with rod and creel. What made him so dilatory to-day? While Hildegarde wondered, Bella came flying in, shut the door with agitated care, faced about with cheeks of crimson,hat over one ear and the whisper, “Hildegarde, I’ve seen him! I’ve seen him! Oh, Hildegarde, he’s here!” Wherewith she precipitated herself upon her friend’s neck and hugged her breathlessly.
“Who, who?”
“Why, ‘he.’He’shere! The only man I ever loved!”
Hildegarde took the dancing dervish by the shoulders. “You don’t mean—”
“Yes, yes, I do. He came in just before me. He’s perfectly glorious. Just to look at him makes you feel—makes you think you’ve got windmills shut up inside you. Everything goes whirling round. And when he asked” (Bella lowered her pipe to a masculine depth): “‘Is Mr. Mar at home?’ it sounded so beautiful, I thought for a moment he was talking poetry. Oh, Hildegarde!Hildegarde!” Again she sunk her ecstacy to whispering as she followed her friend out into the hall. Together they hung over the banisters. The visitor was talking more poetry apparently in the dining-room. The two girls stayed suspended there an eternity. At last with thumping hearts, upon Bella’s suggestion, they went down into the entry. “We’ll pretend to be putting on our overshoes. I’ll have Mrs. Mar’s!” whispered Bella, excitedly, ignoring the fact that the continued fine weather and dusty streets lent an air of eccentricity to the proceeding. She stopped after drawing on one big overshoe and shuffled softly to the dining-room door. She put her eye to the keyhole. No use. Notwithstanding Hildegarde’s whispered remonstrance, she glued her ear to the aperture. The door was suddenly opened and Miss Bella fell sideways into the arms of an astonished young man, who said: “Hello, what’s this?” Hildegarde,drowned in sympathetic confusion, helped Bella to regain her equilibrium, while she muttered the explanation “Overshoes!”
“This is my daughter Hildegarde, Mr. Cheviot,” said Mr. Mar, “and this is our little friend, Bella Wayne.”
“Ch-Cheviot!” stuttered the little friend.
The young man with the laughing eyes said: “Anything wrong with the name?” and having shaken hands with “my daughter Hildegarde,” he departed.
“Did you say his name was Cheviot?” Hildegarde asked her father.
“Yes. The new recruit at the bank. Seems to be an intelligent sort of fellow.”
With ease and celerity Miss Bella transferred her affections from a faded photograph, a packet of letters, and a book of travels, to a real live young man with a square jaw that looked as if he meant business, but with a ready laugh, too, as if the business were not without its diverting aspect. Then he had rough brown hair that “fitted” him. Bella would have told you this was a rarity, most people’s beginning too far back from the forehead, or growing too much away from the ears, leaving them with a bare and naked look. Or it grew in a peak. Or it didn’t grow low enough on the neck and was like a badly made wig, that had slipped forward. Or worse than anything, it forgot where to stop and grew down into the collar like Professor Altberg’s, prompting the irreverent Bella to whisper to her neighbor (while the grave instructor was sitting with head bent over a Latinexercise): “How far do you think it goes? Do you suppose he’s hairyalldown his back?”
However that might be, Cheviot’s hair fitted him. Moreover, he had, in Bella’s estimation, a fascinating, if somewhat mocking air toward little girls, and he helped one little girl gallantly through the dismal Sundays by the simple process of sitting in church where she could watch him. Once in a while in coming out, Bella would catch his eye, and he would laugh and give her a nod. On the rare occasions of his encountering Miss Bella at the Mars’, he never failed to stop and mimic her first greeting, “I’m ‘Ch-Cheviot,’ you know. Now what’s the matter with that name?” which was vastly entertaining, not to say “taking.”
John Galbraith came back to America that autumn, but he stayed in the East.
Bella didn’t much care what he did now, for she was thirteen, and in spite of the ugliness of their Hindu protégée Miss Wayne had joined the Busy Bees. That was because Hildegarde had told her that Louis Cheviot went to their dances. Bella saw at once the fitness of her doing the same. The result was that she seldom waltzed less than twice with the new hero, who, it must be admitted, was a better batsman than dancer. But nobody could help “getting through” with Bella as a partner, for she danced divinely. Cheviot should have been better pleased to get her for his partner, but it was plain that he was unduly preoccupied about “my daughter Hildegarde.” Several of the young men were. Bella told herself with a consciousness of native worth, that she hadnever minded in the least before. But this was different. She made up her mind that if “Ch-Cheviot” goaded her much further by this display of misplaced devotion, she would just take the misguided young man aside some day and talk to him “as a friend.”
She would tell him about Jack Galbraith.
Bella Wayne’s father had been in the royal navy. His health had given way about the same time as his patience on the vexed question of non-promotion. He retired from the service, went with his American wife and family to California on a visit, became enamoured of the climate, bought a place, and settled there. The three youngest of his seven children were born in Tulare County, but for him “home” was still England, however ungrateful. They all went back every second year to visit his father in Staffordshire, and when Bella’s two sisters found English husbands, there were three reasons for the recurrent visit to the old country. The eldest son, Tom Wayne, had made a fortune on the New York Stock Exchange and married a girl belonging to one of the old Knickerbocker families. Tom’s country house on Staten Island proved highly convenient as a half-way station between England and California. Mrs. Tom was a very charming person, and a certain portion of Bella’s satisfaction in going abroad lay in the chance it presented of making a visit to Staten Island, on the way over and back. Nevertheless, as she never failed to tell Hildegarde on her return, there was no place to be compared to California, no friend and no “in-law” who could make up to her for being away fromHildegarde, and she might have added, from the neighborhood of that obdurate creature with the cold blue eyes and the colder heart, Louis Cheviot. Those who thought about it at all were surprised that the friendship of the two girls was not more interrupted upon Hildegarde’s graduating from the school, when Bella was less than fifteen. But not upon community of tasks, rather upon something essential in the nature of each had their alliance been founded—kept vital by wants in each that the other could supply, excesses in each that the other helped to modify. They themselves thought their relation had its deeper roots in a conviction of the peculiar sanctity of girls’ friendships; a creed to which Hildegarde’s fidelity effected Miss Bella’s actual adhesion only by degrees and with notable backslidings.
But even in early days, Bella felt it was highly distinguished to stand in this relation to one who thought and talked about it as Hildegarde did. Hadn’t she said in that soft, deliberate way of hers, that it was capable of being one of the most beautiful things in all the beautiful world? It was something, she said, no man knew anything about. Why, they presumed to doubt its possibility even! Ah, they should have known Hildegarde Mar and Bella Wayne. Men believed that all girls were, at heart, jealous of all other girls. They thought meanly of the sex. They pointed to David and Jonathan, to Orestes and Pylades, to instances innumerable of men’s faithfulness to men. But what bard or legend celebrates woman’s friendship as toward woman? Well, you see, all the chroniclers since the beginning of the world have been of the scoffer’s sex. That was why women’s friendships had never been celebrated—though men said thereal reason was—oh, they spoke blasphemies!—and they hadn’t known Hildegarde and Bella. It was Hildegarde’s theme, but Bella agreed to every word. Yes, yes,theirfriendship would show the world!
For qualities alien to her own, Hildegarde came to look upon her little friend with an adoring admiration. Bella’s wit and Bella’s originality, Bella’s entire “mode of being,” were at once tonic and delight. Then, too, behind her provoking charm was a finished daintiness, which with her became elevated into a special quality, distinctive, all-pervading, a certain strangeness of fragility—a physical fineness like the peculiar fineness of a flower—a something suggesting evanescence, and having the subtle pathos of the thing that may not, cannot bide.
It would have been hard to say which was of most use to the other in making clearer the riddle of life, or more radiant the beauty of the world, or more wonder-waking, the mystery of a young girl’s heart. They read, and walked, and talked, and worked, together, paying their vaunted friendship a finer tribute than words, however honestly uttered; for they grew in each other’s company.
The younger, too, was cured of certain of her more inadmissible “ways,” while the elder learned from Butterfly Bella many a thing besides the art of making the most of her beauty.
Not that Hildegarde despised this last. She had none of the comfort of knowing it was part of her largeness of nature, that she should take more easily to beautifying her home than to making the best of herself. Indeed to the end of time, she required guidance in matters of dress. And who so well qualified as Miss Bella to giveadvice. She went further: with her own ingenious little hands she made the most becoming of “shirt-waists,” trimmed heavenly hats, and firmly forbade fripperies.
“No, no, they’re not for the massive.” She applauded her friend for not wearing trinkets—she didn’t like to see her even with her maternal grandmother’s emerald brooch. “No, I don’t like you in ‘didoes’ of any sort. They’re too insignificant for you. You ought to wear ropes of pearls, or a tiara of diamonds, or better still, something barbaric—what’s one little lady-like emerald set in a filigree of diamond chips? Why, it can’t even be seen—on you. Of course the emerald’s a pretty little stone, and the old setting’s nice. It would shine out on me, but—well, it’s simplylost, you know, on your heroic neck.”
Hildegarde deplored her size, she carried it even with a sense of humiliation just as she bore with her lack of elegant accomplishments. It was pretty terrible to have to put up with being such a great lump—especially with the ethereal Bella always by to point the advantage of the opposite. Still, there was no blinking the facts. “You’re right, I believe, didoes of any sortarerather wasted on me,” Hildegarde would say meekly, “I must have felt that when I hardly ever wore them—though I liked them. It takes you, Bella, to explain things.”
Nothing was ever allowed to come in the way of their spending their Saturday afternoons together, and if, as time went on, less was heard about Jack from Hildegarde, it was only because so very much more was heard about Cheviot from Bella.
It was a difficult moment when two girls with such lofty ideas of friendship met for the first time after Cheviothad said to Hildegarde at a dance: “When are you going to begin to care for me?” She had been so taken by surprise that she had only smiled and said: “I don’t know,” but she thought hardly less of Bella at the moment than she thought of Jack. So the next time that Bella remarked by the way: “Isn’t he perfectly fascinating?” Hildegarde had hesitated, and she—yes—she was actually getting red. Bella stared, “Why, areyoucoming to—to—”
“No;oh, no! Only—”
“Only what?”
“It’s dreadfully hard, but I haven’t forgotten our compact. So I suppose I’ve got to tell you what—what he said to me last night.”
Bella received the information with a half-hysterical pretense of carrying it off gaily. “Well, what’s there new in that? As if every soul in Valdivia hasn’t known for perfect ages that he cares about you frightfully. I don’t mindyou. Because you’re Hildegarde, and any man who didn’t love you must—well, there must be something pretty wrong about him. I shall give him a whole year—maybe even two, to go on like that, and then when I’m sixteen, or seventeen at the latest, I won’t have it any longer.”
Hildegarde, enormously relieved, laughed and kissed her. “Oh, you nice, funny child!”
“Only promise me again, cross your heart and hope you may die, if you ever keep anything from me about Louis Cheviot.”
Hildegarde complied and life went on as before—only that Hildegarde showed herself less ready to fall in with Bella’s ecstasies. An instinct to forestall a possiblejealousy made her cavil from time to time. “Don’t you think his shoulders are too broad for his height?”
“No, I don’t, and look how splendidly he carries them. You have to see him beside a huge man, like Mr. Mar, before you realize—”
“Yes, yes;that’strue,” Hildegarde hastened to heal the wound.
“And, anyhow, I don’t think it’s kind of you to run Louis down. I am always very nice about Jack.”
The end of it was that Cheviot came more and more to the Mar house, and seemed so diverted when he found the lively Bella there, that Hildegarde gave herself up without reserve to the three-cornered friendship.
He took the girls boating and organized parties to the Tule Lands, and was altogether a most invaluable ally in the agreeable pursuit of being a young lady in her first season.
Still, when Bella praised him absolutely without moderation, “Y-yes,” Hildegarde would respond, “he isnice, only—”
“Only what?” says Miss Bella, instantly on the defensive.
“Well, you know I prefer big men.”
“Of course you do. It’s being so massive yourself. But he’s exactly the right size for me.”
“Oh, yes, and he’s quite the nicest of all the Valdivia boys.”
“Well, that’s going pretty far,” says Bella, with an edge in her voice.
Then the other, with that recurrent though only half-conscious need to show that after all, she, Hildegarde, wasn’t dazzled—not being in Bella’s state,shecould seeblemishes—the older girl would add: “And yet somehow for all his niceness, and making us always have a good time when he’s there, to my thinking there’s something terribly unromantic about Louis Cheviot.”
“Now you only say that,” retorts Miss Bella, with sparkling eyes, “because he’s in a bank.”
“No—no,” vaguely, “but I don’t believe he’s got any soul.”
“Just because he isn’t hunting the North Pole!”
“No. That isn’t the reason. I assure you it isn’t.”
“Then itcanonly be because he likes to laugh at everything.”
“Heispretty frivolous,” said Hildegarde, “and he ridicules friendship. But no, it’s not that, either. It’s because he’s kind of chilling. Tome.”
“Chilling to you?” Bella beamed. “Oh, do tell me about that.”
“Sometimes he’s positively rude.”
“Toyou?” Bella could have danced.
“To anybody.”
“Oh, butwhenwas he positively rude to you? How black-hearted of you, Hildegarde, not to tell me that before! You might have known I’d simplylovehearing about that.”
Hildegarde laughed. “Why, I haven’t seen you since Thursday.”
“Was it at your birthday party?”
“Yes, at the birthday party.”
“Well, well, how did he do it? What did he say?”
“It was after we’d all been reading the poem that came with Eddie Cox’s present. Louis made fun of it.”
“That was only being rude to Eddie.” Bella’s face fell.
“Wait till you hear. I defended it, of course, and said: ‘It isn’t as easy as it looks to make birthday odes.’ ‘It certainly doesn’tlookdifficult—to makethatkind,’ he said. ‘Then why,’ I said, just to stand up for Eddie, ‘why have you never written a poem about my airy tread?’ And Louis said: ‘Well, there may be another reason, but no girl who stands five foot ten in her stockings and weighs a hundred and fifty pounds need ask it.’That’sthe kind of thing.”
It was an incident Miss Bella loved to recall. No man could be really in love with a girl he had saidthatto.
But some months later, Hildegarde was obliged, according to the code, to report that Cheviot had been “going on” again.
Bella insisted on having all the “horrid details.”
“It was last night at the taffy pulling. You know how we’d all been laughing at his stories of Miss Monk meeting the Carters’ black cow—”
“Yes, yes.”
“Well, I was laughing so I couldn’t stop, and it was so warm in that room the candy was melting. You remember he said—”
“Oh, yes,” said Bella, with feeling, “Iremember. He said you must come and pull with him.”
“—out in the porch where the candy and I would cool off.”
“And you went.”
“And he made more jokes on the way out. I begged him not to talk any more, for I’d got into a silly mood and everything he said made me laugh. ‘I know, I know,’ he said. ‘I labor under the fatal disadvantage of the funny man, but I could make you serious you know.’And then—then—he had the impertinence—to kiss me.”
“Oh, Hildegarde!”
“Yes. It was dreadfully grotesque, too—our hands were stuck together by that great yellow rope of taffy, and I could only stammer and get redder. But I did say I was not going to forgive him. Nobody had ever been so rude to me before. Then he got awfully serious and said all kinds of things—”
“Whatkind?”
“And at last he asked me what was wrong with Ch-Cheviot—your old joke, you know.”
Bella clenched her hands. Sacrilege! to presentherjoke to another girl! She had always imagined that would be just how he would propose to her. He would say: “Bella, my beautiful, what’s the matter with Ch-Cheviot?”
“Well, go on.”
“If I didn’t like him enough he said, what sort of manwasI going to like? And I thought it only fair to give him some idea, so I tried to soften it by laughing a little—I’d forgiven him by then, you know, for he’d saidsuchthings—”
“What things?”
“Oh, sorry kind of things, and he looked so—so—well, I’d forgiven him. But I told him plainly that if it ever is a question of the sort of man I am to care for, it won’t be some one who is just nice and makes me have a good time. It will be some great, gloomy creature who makes me cry—and lifts me to the stars. I was laughing, but I meant it—and I said: ‘I’d worshipthatkind of man.’”
“What did he say then?”
“Well, he looked sort of down I thought, so I said:‘You wouldn’t let me worship you, even if I could.’ ‘I’d let you love me,’ he said.”
“Oh-h. What else?”
“We went in after that.”
“And he was just as funny as ever,” said Bella, clutching at frail comfort.
“Oh, quite,” agreed Hildegarde.
It was small consolation to Miss Bella that Cheviot was singular in his obduracy. Before she was eighteen she was uncommonly well accustomed to seeing the stoutest masculine defenses go down before her. The two Mar boys had long been her devoted slaves. And Bella had flirted with both of them impartially, taking what she felt was only a becoming share in the interest all Valdivia felt in those go-ahead young men, whenever they came home for a visit. They were pointed to as models. Look how they “got on”—they did it visibly—while you looked they seemed to have to restrain themselves from rising out of your sight. They kept Miss Bella supplied with candy and flowers and they corresponded with her when she went abroad. Secretly dreading the fascinations of the Britisher, they asked in scoffing postscripts how the effete nations were getting on. Bella’s view of all this was that, provided the young men were “nice,” a girl could hardly have too many of them contending for her favor. It was what they were there for. Each time she came home, she brought the Mar boys a scarf-pin apiece, and pleased them still more by invariably demanding a cent in return. “I can’tgiveyou a thing with a point. Something dreadful would happen! you must buy them.” That looked, they felt, as if she were “taking it seriously”—but which was she taking?
The year that Bella was eighteen, after a summer in England, she arrived at Staten Island just in time to celebrate her birthday. She was full of joy at getting back.
The conscious approval that she bestowed on the greater splendor of the American autumn had been generously extended to the profusion of fine fruit that greets one here at breakfast, to the individual bathrooms, even to the spacious, drawered, behooked, and shelved clothes-closets so agreeably numerous in the American house. The same satisfaction with which she had noted these things consciously revisited her as she trod the wide, shallow steps of the staircase, that in its descent halted leisurely upon two broad landings, having each a large unglazed window opening upon the hall below. The observant young eyes paid a flitting tribute to the beautiful woodwork of the balusters and the great tall doors of the rooms she passed, deciding as she went, there’s nothing nicer than a new American house, unless it’s an old (and a very old) English one. Even then, tolivein, give her the American.
Like so many of the first generation born in “the States,” this child of an old-world father was more American in tastes and spirit than any daughter of the Revolution. But, partly as a matter of physical inheritance, partly, perhaps, because of her frequent visits to England, she bore about her still a good deal of the peculiar stamp of a certain type of English girl. As she came trailing slowly down the wide staircase of Tom Wayne’s country house on Staten Island, the practised eye would have little difficulty in detecting a difference between the figure on the stair and the typical “Americanbeauty,” a something less sumptuous and more distinguished. Her head held not quite so high, and yet in her carriage something indefinably more aloof. The longer waist, not quite so ruthlessly stayed and belted, giving an effect of greater ease; the longer neck, the shoulders a little more sloping, the eyes less eager and yet with more vision in them—something in the whole, gracious as the aspect was, a little reluctant and more than a little elusive. The Paquin gown Bella had brought back and wore to-night for the first time, was long, and straight, and plainer than prescribed by the New York fashion of the moment—a gauze, discreetly iridescent, showing over a white satin petticoat shifting lights of pink, and pearl, and silver, a gown that shimmered as the wearer walked, and clothed her in glancing light and soft-hued shadows.
Bella knew that she was very early, and she came down slowly, drawing a long glove up her slim, bare arm. When she reached the square window on the lower landing, she stopped, laid the other glove on the sill, and proceeded to button the one she had on. A slight noise in the hall below made her lean her arms on the broad, polished sill of the opening, and look down.
A man stood by a table facing her, but with eyes bent upon the books he was turning over—a man rather over medium height, sunburnt, with a lean, clean-shaven face, fair hair, and clean cut mouth and chin. That was all she had time to take in before he raised his eyes.
“Oh!” ejaculated Bella, involuntarily, and then after meeting a moment longer the wide, unwinking, upward look, “How do you do!” she said.
“How do you do,” echoed the sunburnt man, and hedid not bow nor move; just stood looking at the picture up there on the wall.
Miss Bella was not as a rule easily embarrassed, but she was conscious now of feeling a little at a loss.
“I don’t know exactly why I am in such a hurry to say ‘how do you do,’ that I can’t wait till I come down. But I do know you, don’t I?”
“Of course you know me”; but that time he smiled, and Bella said to herself, howcouldI have forgotten anybody so—so—
She picked up her glove with the intention of running down. But, I expect I look rather nice here in the window, she reflected, and instead of going down instantly she said: “It’s some time since I was here before.”
“Yes, it’s a long time,” he answered. His tone pleased her.
“And I run about the world such a lot, I can’t be expected to remember everybody’s name just all at once, can I?”
“Oh, the name doesn’t matter.”
“Does that mean you aren’t quite sure of mine?”
“I haven’t the faintest notion of it.”
“Then how do you know—what made you say, ‘Of course I knew you’?”
“Because I was sure you did.”
“Why should I remember you, any more than you should remember me? Are you somebody very special?”
“Veryspecial.”
“Who?”
“Oh, you’ll hear.”
“How shall I hear?”
“I’ll tell you myself.”
“Well, go on.”
“I can’t, now.”
“Why not?”
“You—you’re too far off.”
“When I come down, you’ll tell me?”
“Willyou?—will you ever come down?” He was smiling.
“Why shouldn’t I?” she said, bewildered.
“I never saw it tried before.”
“Never saw me try to come down-stairs!”
“Never, yet.”
Had he been here that time she sprained her ankle? “Do you imagine I’m lame?”
“On the contrary, I’m ready to believe you have wings. Please fly down.”
“What a very odd person you are! I can’t think how I came to forget—”
He made no answer. Just stood there leaning against the heavy table, half-smiling and never turning away his eyes.
She caught up her glove and ran down several steps, but just before she reached the open place where the stair turned abruptly, and the solid wall gave way to a procession of slender pillars, she stopped, overcome by a sudden rush of shyness. Behind that last yard of sheltering wall she waited breathless, while you might count seven, and then turned on a noiseless foot and fled up-stairs, bending low as she passed the square windows, so that not even the top of her brown head should be visible to that very odd man waiting for her down there in the hall.
She reappeared ten minutes later with the first batchof guests, and while they were speaking to their hostess, the sunburnt man made his way to Bella, and held out his hand.
“It took you a long time,” he said. “How did you manage it?”
“Manage what?”
“Getting down. You’re the cleverest picture I ever saw on any wall. How long do they give you?”
“Out of the frame?” she said, catching up his fancy with a laugh. “Oh, only long enough to find out what you’ve done to make you the special person you say you are.”
“It’s not what Ihavedone, but what I shall do.”
“Well, I’m very much disappointed. I thought you must be distinguished, and now I see you’re only conceited.”
He smiled—he was rather wonderful when he smiled.
“Of course, I know perfectly well we’ve met before,” Bella went on, “but I don’t remember who you are.”
“I’ll tell you some day.”
“Some day? How absurd. Why not now?”
“Because the surprise might be too great.”
She opened her eyes yet wider and laughed as a girl will in recognition of a point she sees as yet only with the eye of faith. “Didn’t you promise you’d tell me if I came down?”
“But you haven’t come down. You are still far out of reach.”
“It’s ridiculous of you not to tell me your name.”
“My name wouldn’t mean anything to you—not yet. You wouldn’t know it.”
“What!” She drew back.
“But we have met,” he reassured her hurriedly.
“I felt we must have, but where was it?”
“I can’t quite remember, either. It may have been when you were Queen in Babylon and I was a Christian slave.”
She drew nearer with lit face. “Oh, do you believe in all those delightful things?”
“I believe—” he began on a different and lower note and then he stopped suddenly. Bella’s upturned face silently begged him to go on with his profession of faith.
But just then, Bella’s brother, having passed a boring guest on to his wife, came between the two who stood so oblivious of the rest of the company. The apparition of Tom Wayne brought Bella back to the every-day world, and to a half-frightened self-criticism, in view of the long flight she had taken from it in the last few seconds.
Her brother laid an affectionate hand on the shoulder of the sunburnt man, and said, laughing, to Bella: “You must be careful with this person. He’s the most desperate flirt.”
Bella winced inwardly, but she disguised the little hurt with smiling mockery. “Really! I shouldneverhave thought it!”
“Oh, yes, goes off with first one heart and then another. And he goes so far! That’s the worst of him.”
“Where does he go?”
“Lord knows! Let’s see, what God-forgotten place was the last book about?”
“Oh, you write books? Then youaredistinguished—”
“You aren’t telling me you didn’t know who it was?” exclaimed her brother.
“Well, I thought I did, and I’ve been behaving as if I did.”
There was a general movement to the dining-room, but Tom paused long enough to say with mock formality: “Miss Wayne, Mr. John Galbraith.”
“Oh!” ejaculated the girl, growing pink with excitement. “Are you Hildegarde’s Jack?”
The sunburnt man looked mystified a moment, and then with sudden daring, “Is your name Hildegarde?” he said.
This was on the twenty-fourth of September. Six days later she began a letter to her friend.
“Oh, Hildegarde! Hildegarde! You’re quite right. He’s the most wonderful person in the world, and I hope you don’t mind, but we are engaged to be married—Jack Galbraith and I! It turns out that he’s an old friend of Marion’s family, and after she married my brother, when Jack came to see them last winter, Tom liked him awfully—of course everybody does that—and since then they’ve all three been great friends.“And one of the first things he asked me when he heard Tom came from near Valdivia, was all about you—I mean your father. He says such beautiful things about your father, and how kind he was when Jack was a poor, forlorn, little boy. But oh, Hildegarde! he’s the most glorious person now you ever saw in your life. The old faded photograph isn’t a bit like him. I am sending you a new one, and that isn’t like him, either. But I am going to get a silver frame for it and I shall be dreadfully hurt if you don’t put it on the altar-table, with the old locket and the roses—if you’re really glad of our happinessyou’ll even burn a joss now and then for our sake. I’m miserable when I think how little good any photograph of such a person is! You can’t imagine what it’s like when he smiles. All the whole earth smiles, too. I adore him when he smiles—and when he doesn’t. I adore him every minute, except when he talks about Franz Josef Land, or something disgusting like that. But then he doesn’t do it much—never, except when Mr. Borisoff is here. Mr. Borisoff is a man I can’t stop to tell you about, only I don’t like him, and I shall let Jack know some day that I don’t think he is a good influence.“But I began to say that you mustn’t think Jack is the least solemn as his letters used to sound and as the pictures make out. In fact, he began our acquaintance by flirting quite desperately, but he says it wasn’t flirting at all. He meant all those things! He says they were a profession of faith upon a miraculous revelation (that’s me—I’m the miraculous revelation!), and it only sounded flirtatious because I didn’t realize, as he did, that we had been waiting for one another.“He’s waited a good deal longer than I have, poor Jack! He’s more than twelve years older than I am; do you remember how you used to throw that in my face? But it doesn’t matter the least in the world. Besides, you’d never think he was so old—he’s such a darling; and he talks like a poet, and a painter, and an archangel, all rolled into one. I am so wildly happy I can’t write a proper letter, only I do want you to know that your mother is mistaken, as we always thought. Jack is a saint—simply a saint. When my father behaved quite horridly, and said he couldn’t have me marrying a man who went away for two or three years on long, scientific expeditions, Jack said he wouldn’t do it any more,though I think it cost him something to say that. He was quite silent for hours afterward, and didn’t even notice I’d done my hair differently. And that horrid Mr. Borisoff was in such a rage. He didn’t say anything, but oh! he looked. But now he’s gone away, thank goodness, and I shall try to make Jack not ever see him again. Then another thing, just to show you what a perfect angel Jack is. My mother said I was delicate and too young, and things like that, and she got father to agree that I was only eighteen and was the weakling of the family, and they made up their wicked old minds that I mustn’t be married right away as Jack and I had arranged. And what do you think? Jack said he would wait for me? A whole year! I cried when they settled that, but wasn’t he a seraph? Fathers and mothers are very selfish; I shall not treat my daughters like that.“How Jack and I will ever get through a year of waiting is more than either of us know. I am not coming home till the first week in December, and Jack’s coming to us for Christmas. And then you’ll see him! I hope you are pleased that I’m going to marry the man we’ve talked so much about. It seems like another bond, doesn’t it? How is Louis Cheviot? I can forgive him now for always liking you best. I can’t imagine how I ever looked at him. Oh, Hildegarde, Jack is a perfect—well, I never heard the word that was beautiful enough to describe him.“Good-by, I hear him now out in the garden. Jack is the most perfect whistler.“Your loving and devoted“Bella.”
“Oh, Hildegarde! Hildegarde! You’re quite right. He’s the most wonderful person in the world, and I hope you don’t mind, but we are engaged to be married—Jack Galbraith and I! It turns out that he’s an old friend of Marion’s family, and after she married my brother, when Jack came to see them last winter, Tom liked him awfully—of course everybody does that—and since then they’ve all three been great friends.
“And one of the first things he asked me when he heard Tom came from near Valdivia, was all about you—I mean your father. He says such beautiful things about your father, and how kind he was when Jack was a poor, forlorn, little boy. But oh, Hildegarde! he’s the most glorious person now you ever saw in your life. The old faded photograph isn’t a bit like him. I am sending you a new one, and that isn’t like him, either. But I am going to get a silver frame for it and I shall be dreadfully hurt if you don’t put it on the altar-table, with the old locket and the roses—if you’re really glad of our happinessyou’ll even burn a joss now and then for our sake. I’m miserable when I think how little good any photograph of such a person is! You can’t imagine what it’s like when he smiles. All the whole earth smiles, too. I adore him when he smiles—and when he doesn’t. I adore him every minute, except when he talks about Franz Josef Land, or something disgusting like that. But then he doesn’t do it much—never, except when Mr. Borisoff is here. Mr. Borisoff is a man I can’t stop to tell you about, only I don’t like him, and I shall let Jack know some day that I don’t think he is a good influence.
“But I began to say that you mustn’t think Jack is the least solemn as his letters used to sound and as the pictures make out. In fact, he began our acquaintance by flirting quite desperately, but he says it wasn’t flirting at all. He meant all those things! He says they were a profession of faith upon a miraculous revelation (that’s me—I’m the miraculous revelation!), and it only sounded flirtatious because I didn’t realize, as he did, that we had been waiting for one another.
“He’s waited a good deal longer than I have, poor Jack! He’s more than twelve years older than I am; do you remember how you used to throw that in my face? But it doesn’t matter the least in the world. Besides, you’d never think he was so old—he’s such a darling; and he talks like a poet, and a painter, and an archangel, all rolled into one. I am so wildly happy I can’t write a proper letter, only I do want you to know that your mother is mistaken, as we always thought. Jack is a saint—simply a saint. When my father behaved quite horridly, and said he couldn’t have me marrying a man who went away for two or three years on long, scientific expeditions, Jack said he wouldn’t do it any more,though I think it cost him something to say that. He was quite silent for hours afterward, and didn’t even notice I’d done my hair differently. And that horrid Mr. Borisoff was in such a rage. He didn’t say anything, but oh! he looked. But now he’s gone away, thank goodness, and I shall try to make Jack not ever see him again. Then another thing, just to show you what a perfect angel Jack is. My mother said I was delicate and too young, and things like that, and she got father to agree that I was only eighteen and was the weakling of the family, and they made up their wicked old minds that I mustn’t be married right away as Jack and I had arranged. And what do you think? Jack said he would wait for me? A whole year! I cried when they settled that, but wasn’t he a seraph? Fathers and mothers are very selfish; I shall not treat my daughters like that.
“How Jack and I will ever get through a year of waiting is more than either of us know. I am not coming home till the first week in December, and Jack’s coming to us for Christmas. And then you’ll see him! I hope you are pleased that I’m going to marry the man we’ve talked so much about. It seems like another bond, doesn’t it? How is Louis Cheviot? I can forgive him now for always liking you best. I can’t imagine how I ever looked at him. Oh, Hildegarde, Jack is a perfect—well, I never heard the word that was beautiful enough to describe him.
“Good-by, I hear him now out in the garden. Jack is the most perfect whistler.
“Your loving and devoted
“Bella.”
December did not bring Galbraith—nor even Bella.
“Jack found he couldn’t leave that odious Mr. Borisoff to settle up some business all alone, but my brother Tom has got mama to consent to stay over Christmas with me in New York at Marion’s. So Jack and I shan’t die, as we fully intended to if we were separated.”
Just as the girl and her mother, early in the new year, were at last going home, a cable came from England to say that Bella’s sister, Mrs. Hilton, had been badly hurt in a carriage accident.
The cable was couched in the most alarming terms—there seemed to be every prospect of three little children being left motherless. Bella and her mother took the first ship that sailed.
“If we have to stay any time, Jack says he will come over.”
“If we have to stay any time, Jack says he will come over.”
They did stay, and Jack was as good as his word. Mrs. Hilton did not die, but she lay for months in a critical condition, and her mother mounted guard over the new baby and the three other little people.
Bella meanwhile was amusing herself right royally.
“I’ve been presented and I’m having a perfect, rapturous time.“And now it’s decided we don’t have to wait quite a whole year—we are going to be married before we come back to America, some time in the summer. Just think of it, Hildegarde! You and I not to meet again till I’m married! Oh, do write and say you’ll love me just as much as ever.”
“I’ve been presented and I’m having a perfect, rapturous time.
“And now it’s decided we don’t have to wait quite a whole year—we are going to be married before we come back to America, some time in the summer. Just think of it, Hildegarde! You and I not to meet again till I’m married! Oh, do write and say you’ll love me just as much as ever.”
Then for a time no more long letters, but a shower of happy little notes, that descended with tolerable regularity. After that, the wedding invitation! Ten days’ interval and then two communications by the same mail. The first:
“Dearest Hildegarde:“Mother and I are just back from a week-end at Tryston. It was rather dull. All the men were immensely distinguished and at least eighty. I was glad to get back to town. Hengler’s Circus has been turned into a skating-rink. We all went to a delightful party there last week. The wife of the Governor-General of Canada skated most wonderfully. I wish I could. Jack didn’t take his eyes off her. Mr. Borisoff has come to London. I hate Mr. Borisoff as much as ever, if not worse.“I haven’t time for more if I’m to catch this post. But I can’t have you thinking I forget you in my happiness. Besides, I shall be happier when Mr. Borisoff goes back to his fellow-barbarians, and leaves me and Jack alone. The next, I promise, shall be a great, long letter. You’ll see! I do love you, Hildegarde.“From your loving“Bella.“P. S. I wish you were here.”
“Dearest Hildegarde:
“Mother and I are just back from a week-end at Tryston. It was rather dull. All the men were immensely distinguished and at least eighty. I was glad to get back to town. Hengler’s Circus has been turned into a skating-rink. We all went to a delightful party there last week. The wife of the Governor-General of Canada skated most wonderfully. I wish I could. Jack didn’t take his eyes off her. Mr. Borisoff has come to London. I hate Mr. Borisoff as much as ever, if not worse.
“I haven’t time for more if I’m to catch this post. But I can’t have you thinking I forget you in my happiness. Besides, I shall be happier when Mr. Borisoff goes back to his fellow-barbarians, and leaves me and Jack alone. The next, I promise, shall be a great, long letter. You’ll see! I do love you, Hildegarde.
“From your loving
“Bella.
“P. S. I wish you were here.”
It struck Hildegarde it was the first time she had said that since Jack had appeared on the scene.
The other letter was without date or beginning.
“Jack and I have quarreled. Oh, if you were here!“Bella.”
“Jack and I have quarreled. Oh, if you were here!
“Bella.”
Immediately after, a mysterious cable, that told simply the date of Bella’s homeward sailing. Had the quarrel frightened her lover and so hastened on the marriage? But no, for while Bella was still upon the sea came a formal notice that the marriage was “postponed.” It had been mailed some days before the cable was sent.
Hildegarde’s first feeling upon Bella’s return was that since the writing of that final note from London, and the dispatching of the postponement notice, the trouble, whatever it had been, was patched up. Impossible to think there was a cloud in her sky. Not matured at all; only a little thinner and, save for that, exactly the same Bella—“unthinking, idle, wild, and young.”
But as the minutes went by and she ran from one familiar thing to another in garden and house, with greeting and gay comment, spinning out the time till she and Hildegarde should be alone together, the older girl began to have her doubts. Was Bella as happy as she pretended, flitting about with all her “dear Mars?”
Nothing possible to gather from her eagerness to be assured that so far from being forgotten, she was more than ever an object of interest and devotion. Nothing new Bella’s little weakness for wanting everybody to be visibly enlivened by her return from “abroad,” bringingher adorable frocks (for Bella’s American mama had come into money, and Bella was helping her to come out of a certain portion), bringing remembrances for everybody, bringing a whiff of foreign airs, and a touch of something exciting, exotic, into the lives of stay-at-home folk. Bella had always been one of those who, however much adored, would like to be adored yet a little more. She couldn’t bear that any one within reach of her influence should escape caring about her, and she cast a net uncommon wide. It was meant to enmesh even Hildegarde’s mother, partly because that lady was so little lavish in bestowing her affection, but mostly because if you were much in the Mar house it mattered enormously upon what terms you were with Mrs. Mar. But, as ill-luck would have it, Bella never thought of the lady once she was away from her. Though she had brought back scarf-pins for the boys, and a silver-mounted blackthorn for Mr. Mar, and a quite wonderful necklace for Hildegarde, there was nothing—nothing at all for Mrs. Mar—and it was serious.
Bella never realized the awful omission till, having dispensed the other gifts, she stood with the rest of the family in the garden, not even asking where Mrs. Mar was, till looking up, she saw that lady at her bedroom window carefully trying on a new pair of gloves. “Everything depends on the way they’re put on the first time.” Bella could hear her saying it, and she looked up smiling and waving her hand, as much as to say, “Oh, please hurry down!You’rethe person I’m pining most of all to see again.” But, of herself, Miss Bella was silently asking, “WhatamI to do! What will happen if she should see she’s the only one I’ve forgotten?”Bella’s brain worked feverishly. Glancing down, her eye fell on a gold pencil she was wearing on a chain. Surreptitiously detaching this latest gift of her mother’s, Bella slipped it in her pocket, talking all the time; telling Mr. Mar what it felt like to see sunshine, real Californian sunshine again; offering up to public scorn the English girl who had disapproved of the unappreciative Californians for rooting arum lilies out of their gardens, and throwing them away in sheaves, which Bella admitted was what they did with the “pest.” “Just like your American extravagance,” the English girl had said.
Oh, it was so perfectly heavenly to be at home again! Bella beamed in her old conscienceless way at poor Trenn, who found a heady tonic—a hope new born, in hearing the adored one call the Mar house “home.”
But even while he was savoring the sweetness of that thought, there was the distracting creature linking her arm in Harry’s, and saying: “Come away a moment and tell me something I want to know.”
What could a boy like Harry possibly tell Bella that she could want to know!
Harry’s own huge satisfaction in the incident was cruelly damped upon Bella’s saying: “Does your mother still love stumps?”
“Stumps! Love s-stumps!” he muttered, in amazement.
“Yes. You haven’t forgotten how she always kept her pencils till they were so little nobody else could have held on to them.”
“Oh, that kind. Yes. Stumps! I see.”
“Well, does she dote on them as much as ever? Does she pick them out of the fender, when Mr. Mar hasthrown his away? Does she still say: ‘Well,I’mnot so well off that I can put a thing in the fire that’s only half-used?’ Does she do that the same as ever, or are you all too rich now?”
Harry laughed. “Oh, we’ll never be so rich that mother won’t use a pencil to its last grasp.”
“Well, then, I’ve got the very thing for her! A nice gold one—pencil, you know. But rather a stump, too. See?—just her size!”
Harry looked doubtfully down upon the somewhat massive pencil-case which Bella had drawn from her pocket and was telescoping in and out. “That’s an awfully fine one, but I can’t quite imagine mother giving up her—”
“Well, look here,” interrupted Bella, “Mrs. Mar’s a person you can’t take risks with. Do you mind going up-stairs and showing her this? Just ask her what she thinks of it—as though I’d brought it to you, you know.” Harry departed on the errand, while Bella returned to the others, but her emissary was back directly with a doubtful face, and Mrs. Mar following not far behind.
“Well?” Bella demanded in an undertone.
“Oh—a—I asked her if she didn’t think it was an awfully fine one, and all she said was: ‘The Lord was very good. He had delivered her many years ago from gold pencils.’”
“What on earth does she mean?”
“Haven’t the ghost—’Sh!”
“Oh, how do you do, dear Mrs. Mar!” Bella flew to embrace the lady, who received the advance with self-possession, but not without a glint of pleasure.
Harry still stood with the intended tribute in his hand. Mrs. Mar’s eye fell upon it critically.
“Is it true—a—you don’t think much of gold pencils?” hazarded Bella.
“Oh, if you’re a person of leisure—”
“What’s that got to do with it?”
“It’s a pursuit in itself, keeping a gold pencil going.”
“Oh, no. Look. This one goes beautifully.” Bella took it from Harry and shot it in and out.
“That’s just its wiliness. Wait till youneedit.”
“Really this one’s very good. It’s warranted—”
“I’llwarrant it’ll always be wanting a new lead. Especially at the moment when you can’t possibly stop to niggle about with fitting one in. Then you’ll put the thing away till you can take an afternoon off just to get your handsome gold pencil into working order again. And when you’ve done that and gone thoroughly into the subject, you’ll find there isn’t a store on the Pacific coast that keeps your size leads. No lead in any store will ever fit your pencil. Then you’ll write to New York to a manufactory. Then you’ll wait a month, maybe two. Then, by the time you’ve got them, you’ll find the pencil has forgotten how to assimilate leads. It will break them off short and spit them out. If you try to discipline the pencil, it’ll turn sulky and refuse to open. Or it stays open and refuses to shut.”
“I assure you, Mrs. Mar,thisone—”
“And I assure you, Miss Bella Wayne, that even if you’re under the special favor of Providence, and none of these things happen, you’ll still find you can never get the work out of a twenty-dollar gold pencil that you can out of a five-cent cedar.”
Bella was catching Harry’s eye and trying not to laugh.
“And remember what I tell you,” Mrs. Mar wound up, “you’ll have to treat that gold pencil as you treat Mrs. Harrington Trennor, with reverence and awe. If you don’t you’ll be sorry. If you lean on it, it will collapse. If you do anything but admire it, it will teach you better.” Bella opened her lips—Mrs. Mar stopped her with, “Unless you come to my way of thinking, you’ll use that pencil in fear and trembling till the merciful grave offers you a refuge from your slavery. As I told Harry”—she buttoned the last button on her new gloves (why hadn’t Bella brought her anything as sensible as gloves!) and she drew down her cuff with a business-like air—“the Lord has delivered me from many snares; gold pencils among the rest!” And she marched off toward the gate.
“Oh, mother,” said Hildegarde, at her side, “how could you! That dear little Bella brought the beautiful gold pencil for you all the way from Europe.”
“Do you suppose I didn’t guess that? Good-by!” She looked back and nodded to Bella. “I’ve got to go to the missionary meeting now, but I’ll see you at supper.”
“Oh, and you’ll tell me the rest then?” asked the wicked Bella, with an innocent look.
“The rest!” Mrs. Mar glanced sharply over her shoulder as she laid her hand on the latch of the gate. “There is no rest for anybody who depends on a contrivance like that. Whenever I see a person with a gold pencil, I know it won’t be long before she’s asking me to lend her my wooden stump. As a rule she likes my wooden stump so well she walks off with it.”
As Mrs. Mar vanished round the corner, Bella gave way to suppressed chuckles. Impossible to think she had a care in the world greater than a rejected gold pencil.
“Yes, Hildegarde. I’m coming directly; only Trenn hasn’t given me a spray of lemon verbena yet, to console me for the scandalous way his mother treats me. Don’t you remember youalwaysgive me lemon verbena when we’re in the garden?” She showed no impatience when Trenn prolonged the time-honored process—not a bit of it, went on laughing and chattering there in the sunshine and telling how they thought in England that the American girl was only keeping up the transatlantic reputation for “telling tall stories,” when Bella had said that verbena at home was a tree, and grew to the second-story window. Then having undone in half an hour any good of peace regained by the “Mar boys” through her absence and engagement, Miss Bella found her way up-stairs.
Her vivacity fell visibly from the moment she crossed the threshold of Hildegarde’s familiar little room. But she commented favorably upon the new home-worked counterpane, and then, as though without seeing it, walked past the familiar old altar-table, with its ferny background and the roses ranged below. There was the big silver locket hung above, like some peasant’s votive offering at a foreign shrine, and down there in front of the massed roses was that other picture, that had been new only a year ago, when Bella’s happiness was born.
She went straight to the window and stood quite silent, looking down upon Hildegarde’s flower borders. Thenwithout turning round, “Will you do something for me?”
“What?”
“Take that picture away. The locket, too.”
“Oh, Bella! Is it as bad as that?”
“You’ll put them out of sight?”
“Yes, yes; of course I will.”
“Now!” She might as well have said: I won’t turn round until they’re gone.
Hildegarde opened a drawer. “I’ll put them in here till things come right again.”
“Things aren’t ever coming right.”
“Bella!”
Not till she heard the drawer shut did the girl turn from the window, and Hildegarde could see that the small face was quivering.
“Bella, dear!” Her friend swept to her on a sudden wave of pity. “It will all come right.”
But the younger girl drew back. Although her tears were brimming she spoke with a certain half-choked hardness: “I’ve hurried mother back as fast as boats and trains could bring us; just to be with you again, but not to hear you say that. I wanted to be with you just because you will know better. Hildegarde—I—I’d like to stay with you awhile. May I?”
“I want nothing so much—we all want you.”
“Trenn, too?” she actually laughed through her tears. What a queer creature.
“Trenn, too. Only”—Hildegarde glanced from the empty place on the altar-table, to the shut drawer—“only you’ll be kind enough not to break Trenn’s heart as well.”
“As well as my own?”
Hildegarde’s face grew hard with the words, “As well as Jack Galbraith’s.”
Bella, too, was grave enough now; “I haven’t broken his heart. But—I’ve got a crack in my own. Only”—she lifted her pretty eyes with an air almost of panic—“only nobody else is to know. You”—she came nearer and laid a nervous hand on Hildegarde’s firm arm—“you must help me to keep everybody from knowing.”
“Dear,” was all Hildegarde’s answer, but she leaned her cheek against Bella’s thin face.
“And there’s another thing,” the younger girl went on a little feverishly, still clinging to Hildegarde’s arm, “I hate talking about it.”
“Of course. Just at first, it must be—”
“No, it isn’t ‘of course’ and it’s not only at first. It’s for always. Most girls talk their love affairs to tatters. I’ve noticed that. I want you to help me to—to keep my—” Her voice went out upon a sudden flood of tears. Hildegarde drew her into the window-seat and sat down beside her. They were silent for a time, until Bella laid her wet face down on her friend’s shoulder with, “Mind, Hildegarde! We aren’t to talk about it. Not even you and I. John Galbraith is too—too—” She raised her head, drew her small hand across her eyes, and then sprang up and faced the window, as if some enemy without had challenged her. “It may be that Idon’tunderstand what a great man he is, as Mr. Borisoff says. But, at least, I know he’s not the sort of person to be chattered over.”
Hildegarde remembered with a sting how for years shehad “chattered” with Galbraith for her theme. And she hadn’t little Bella’s excuse. Yes, it was always like this. She was for ever stumbling upon something dignified and fine in Butterfly Bella.
The pretty tear-stained face was lifted to the sunlight, and the childish red mouth, so used to laughter, was pitifully grave, as Bella, staring up into the square of sky over Hildegarde’s head said: “He is up there!”
“Jack!” Hildegarde exclaimed in a half-whisper.
“John Galbraith,” said Bella. “He is way up there, and I won’t be the one to pull him down.”
“Oh-h. I was half afraid you meant he was dead.”
“As good as dead.”
Fear took fresh hold on the older girl. He is going to marry some one else, Hildegarde said to herself. Yes, yes; as she looked at poor Bella’s face, she was sure of it. And now the slim little figure had sunk on its knees. She leaned against her friend for support. But she looked out across Hildegarde’s shoulder, searching space through tears. Hildegarde held tight the childish-looking hands, and asked the last question she was ever to put about the common hero of their girlhood. “Where is he?” she said.
“He’s gone off with Mr. Borisoff somewhere.”
“You mean you don’t know where?”
“Somewhere in the arctic.” She hid her face in Hildegarde’s lap.
They sat so a long, long time.
In spite of her year’s absence, Bella found nothing much changed in the Valdivia situation, except that the Mar boys had “got on” more than ever, and that their father’sform of progress seemed still more strikingly to consist in “getting on” in years.
It was a long time since his wife had given him the credit for doing more than his share at the bank with a view to promotion to be head cashier, or even a “silent partner.” Each time a vacancy occurred some one else had stepped into it; Louis Cheviot had been the last. But Mrs. Mar learned through the years that the reason her husband accepted increased tasks was that he was born to bear burdens, as the sparks to fly upward. If any extra work was “going,” so to speak, it gravitated unerringly to Nathaniel Mar. As to the question of his reward, what would be gained by giving a better position to a man who in any crisis could be depended on to do all the work of a higher office, and never ask for increased emolument? The only person who ever hinted such a thing to the Trennors had been Cousin Harriet. The Trennor Brothers’ success (which was proverbial in Valdivia) had long extended to avoidance of Cousin Harriet. Certainly Mr. Mar’s life-long ill-luck brought out more clearly the fact of his boys’ early prosperity. Not that it was enormous as yet, though quite sufficient to have enabled them to marry, had they so chosen.
Mrs. Mar’s satisfaction in her sons was checkered by the fact that each of these otherwise reasonable and enterprising young men clung to his boyish infatuation for Bella Wayne, long after their boyhood had gone the way of the years. It certainly did seem as though not till one or both were cut out by her marrying some one else, would either Trenn or Harry look at any of the girls Mrs. Mar considered more desirable. Not that the boys’ mother had been able wholly to escape the general Mardevotion to the disturber of their peace, but as the seasons passed, and Bella rejected one swain after another, it became increasingly vexatious to Mrs. Mar that her sons should not realize and amend the stupidity of caring about a girl who was more and more under suspicion of being handicapped by a silly passion for a mad fool who had given up the substance for the shadow, and had met his due reward—being now these many months lost in the arctic ice.
Hildegarde’s theory that since the unhappy issue of the love affair, Bella had greater need of her friend than ever before, and Hildegarde’s own consequent inaccessibility to others was the cause of some restiveness on Cheviot’s part. His old friendliness for Bella had vanished. He spoke of her with a humorous disparagement that did him ill-service with Hildegarde. But he was grave enough sometimes.
“I never get a word alone with you, nowadays,” he said one night, as he sat smoking on the steps of the porch at Hildegarde’s feet, while Bella walked about the garden with Trenn. Hildegarde made some perfunctory answer, and they sat silent for a time.
The light wind brought up waves of fragrance from the tangle of roses under Hildegarde’s window, and the little path stretched away to indefiniteness in the starlight, till it was lost long before it reached the garden’s end. The limits of the narrow inclosure, so sharply drawn by day, were nobly enlarged, lost even, at this hour, in the dim reaches of green turned silver and black, as the moon came over the tops of the conifers.
Down by the arbor vitæ hedge growing things thatHildegarde had planted sent their souls to her across the lawn, piercing the heavier air of roses with arrowy shafts of spicy sweetness.
On such a night no one is alone. Where two go down a darkling walk, or sit on the steps in the dusk, others gather round them. Invisible presences—the singers, the beautiful ones, the stern doers of great deeds—join us common folk, and give us a share in their glory or their steadfast pain. Hopes of our own, that look too large by day—too dim and inaccessible, they come walking in our garden at such an hour, beckoning us or looking, smiling, on. Living men, rumored to be far away, suddenly stand before us. Women who have been long aloof draw near. All the barriers go down. Even the dead come home.
John Galbraith was down there, where Bella’s white gown shone among the trees, and John Galbraith was sitting between those other two on the steps.
And Cheviot knew it.
Hildegarde was reminded of the visible presence by his saying, in a low voice, that he understood the reason of his ill-success with her.
“What do you mean?”
“Oh, Bella told me. Years ago. When she was so little you thought she—”
“Told you what?”
“That you had been in love with John Galbraith since you were sixteen.”
“But you must see that’s absurd. I’ve never even seen him!”
“I wish to God you had! Then you might get over it.”
Hildegarde roused herself to say with equal emphasis, “You are really talking the greatest foolishness—”
“Haven’t you got his picture in your room this moment?”
“I have the picture he—had taken for Bella.”
“Before he ever met Bella you had a picture of Galbraith. You used to wear it. Bella said—”
“You seem to forget you’re talking about what happened when I was a little school-girl, and about an old—a very old friend of my family. We all have pictures of Mr. Galbraith—and, why, there’s one of you there, too.”
“On the altar?”
(Oh, Bella! Bella! How could you!) “The one on the flower-table was put there because Bella asked me to. It’s not there any more. And while it was, I looked upon it as the future husband of my dearest friend.”
But the description of Bella sounded suddenly ironic. It hurt. For Cheviot was the man who all along had laughed at girls’ friendships, and all along he had known that Bella was capable of—
“It isn’t that I couldn’t forgive you for not being in love with me,” he said. “But for being in love with a photograph and a packet of letters—no!that wasn’t easy. At the same time I knew well enough that if your life hadn’t been so narrow, you wouldn’t have been so at the mercy of this one romantic figure in it. If you’d been able to travel, or even to go to the university—if you’d hadanyother door open, you wouldn’t have looked so long out of that one window.”
A scrap of one of Mrs. Browning’s letters flew across her mind—the dearer somehow for being a little incoherent,not fitted together at all, yet finely consequent to the inner spirit—those words: “The pleasantest place in the house is the leaning out of the window.”
Ah, it was very true of the Mar house.
“And your mother,” Cheviot went on, “always ready to puncture any home-blown bubble with the needle of her wit; mercilessly critical, for fear her children should have too low standards; ready to flay anybody alive in the cause of education. Never letting you rest satisfied for a moment with the attainable—you must always be reaching out—reaching out—and when you reached out you touched Galbraith.”
How strangely well he knew—this man. It was odd, but she could never again think him obtuse, at any rate. That comfort was gone.
“I was even sorry for you while the engagement lasted,” the low voice went on, unmindful of the uneasy stir of the figure sitting above him in the dusk. He took the half-smoked cigar from his lips and laid it by the pillar. Over the edge of the porch the tip shone red. “I saw how hard it was for you; you had been weaving romances round Galbraith for years—you had looked upon him for so long as your special property—” Hildegarde drew back into the deeper shadow. But by his own suffering urged to win a companion in pain, he persisted: “And you thought if it had beenyouhe had met, it would have been you that he—” Hildegarde’s skirts rustled as if she were getting up—“Look here, I’ve told you before you’ve got a genius for truth—I’m treating you on that basis.” She said nothing, but she sat still. “There was a moment,” Cheviot’s voice was unnaturally low, “last spring, when I knew I was gaining groundwith you. It was the day I came back from Mexico. I came here straight from the station, and you—you—” She heard him strike his hands suddenly together in the dusk, and a curious excitement took hold of her. “When I went home, I found the invitation to Bella’s wedding. It had been lying there for days. Then I understood. You had had all those days and nights to get accustomed to realizing it was the end of the old—where are you going? Can’t you even bear to have me speak of it this once!”
The white figure was still again.
“Oh, I understood!” He picked up the cigar again. “I felt just the same as you did. I knew the ghost that had stood so long between us was suddenly gone. He had moved out of the way, and you could see that I was there. For those next days you were—you were—I was full of hope. Then came word that Bella had broken her engagement.”
“No, that the marriage was postponed.”
He waited a moment, seemed about to speak, and then, instead of saying anything, with a sharp movement he threw his half-smoked cigar across the whitening silver of the path into the inky blotch the shrubbery made. Hildegarde’s eyes followed the flying red light till, against a tree trunk, it fell in a splash of sparks, and was swallowed up in shadow.