Vestalia paused at the street entrance of the hotel, and looked doubtfully up the hill toward the shifting outline of the strident, crowded Strand.
The prospect repelled her, and she bent her slow steps in the other direction. Crossing the empty, sun-baked roadway of the Embankment, she strolled westward in the partial shade of the young lime-trees, which maintain a temerarious existence along the line of the river’s parapet.
She looked over the stonework to the water from time to time as she walked, and every glance instinctively wandered up-stream toward the stretch of Westminster Bridge, poised delicately in the noonday haze across the body of the sleepy flood. The stately beauty of the opposing piles of buildings which it linked one with the other, and brought together into the loftiest picture the Old World knows, came as she moved toward it to soothe and uplift her spirits. Her lips parted with pleasure at the spectacle, and at the thought that there, in that glorious span between St. Thomas’ and St. Stephen’s, her own romance had been born.
The warm serenity of the scene, the inimitable composure of its vast parts, lying under the sunshine in such majestic calm, seemed to chide the weak flutterings and despondencies to which she had surrendered her bosom. The romance which absorbed her mind, of which, indeed, her whole being had become a portion, had its home there, in the heart of that benignant grandeur. The grace and charm and noble strength of what she gazed upon rebuked her timid want of confidence in Destiny, as it shapes itself on Westminster Bridge. She walked forward with a firmer step, her head up, and her eyes drying themselves by the radiance of their own glance.
And so, being borne along by the powerful spell which this great vista has cast about her, she had no sense of surprise when it caught up also David Mosscrop in its train, and placed him at her side. It was at the corner of the bridge, and a momentary clustering of pedestrians brought to a stand-still by a policeman’s uplifted hand had diverted her thoughts, and then someone touched her on the arm.
She turned and drank in what had happened with tranquil, tenderly self-possessed eyes. She gave no start, as of a mind caught unawares. She was conscious of no wonder, no tremor of disturbance at the unexpected. The luminous regard in which she embraced the newcomer was as unreasoningly ready for him as are the spontaneous raptures of dreamland. No words came to her lips, but it was in the air that she had known he was coming.
“I was just going to hunt a fellow up at his club across there,” said Mosscrop, his coarser masculine sense suggesting an explanation, “and I chanced to look over here, and I made sure it was you, and——”
He stopped short too, and the slower fires kindled in the glance which met hers. They looked into each other’s eyes, in a long moment of silence. He drew her arm in his, while the glamour of this sustained gaze rested still upon them. Then, with a lengthened happy sigh she spoke.
“I want to go again to that dear little place where we breakfasted,” she said softly. “You must let me have my own way. I have money in my purse, now, and you must come and lunch with me. And it must be—oh, itmustbe there.”
They drove thither, this time in a high-hung, sumptuous, noiseless hansom, which sped with an entranced absence of motion through the busy streets.
“It is like fairyland again,” she whispered, nestling against him in the narrow, deeply-padded enclosure. And he, resting his hand upon hers under the shelter of the closed doors, breathed heavily, and murmured a cadence without words in ecstatic response.
In some ridiculous fraction of time they were at their journey’s end. The impression of having travelled on a magic carpet was in their minds as, almost ruefully, they woke from their day-dream of arrow-flight through space, stepped out, and paid the cabman. They laughed together at the thought, without necessity of mentioning what amused them. Vestalia, before they entered the restaurant, drew her companion a few doors up the street, and halted before the narrow window of the old French bootmaker’s shop. Here they laughed again, he merrily, she with a lingering, mellow aftermath of feeling in her tone.
It was only when they were seated in the little room above and she had drawn off her gloves, and after a joyous insistence upon doing it all herself, had chosen some dishes from the card and sent the waiter off with the order, that their tongues were loosened.
David leaned back in his chair, and beamed broad content. He began to talk in the measured, smooth-flowing tone which she remembered so well. “First of all, dear girl,” he said, “I want to put on the record my boundless delight at finding you once more. I take off my hat to the gods. They have devised in my behalf a boon which swallows up all the imaginable ills of a lifetime. I swear to complain of nothing they do for the rest of my days. They have given you back to me; and if I am dull enough to lose you again, why, I will bow my head submissively to the deserved mishaps of an ass.”
The girl’s blue eyes twinkled with a soft, glad light. “It is a great joy to hear your voice again,” she said, gently. “The echoes of it have kept up a little faint murmur in my ears ever since we parted, as if some spirit was holding a phantom shell close to my head. And now it is as if we hadn’t parted at all, isn’t it?—I mean, for the present.”
“Ah, it matters so little what you mean,” he replied, in affectionate banter. “I erred once, to my profound misfortune, in deferring to your mental processes, and permitting them to translate themselves into actions. Do not think that I shall be so weak again. The key shall never fail to be turned on you hereafter.”
She laughed gaily, and shook her head in playful defiance. “Ah, but suppose——” she began, and then let a glance of merry archness complete her sentence.
“I confess to curiosity,” he said. “I should prize highly your conception of the motives which prompted you to run away from me.”
Her mood sobered perceptibly. “I did it because it was right.”
“As a mainspring of human action, that is inadequate,” he commented. “Almost all painful and embarrassing things are right, but wise people avoid them as much as possible none the less.”
“No, it was right for me to go,” she persisted. “I couldn’t stay and be dependent upon someone else, no matter who that someone else was. Your kindness to me that whole day was more grateful to me than you can think. I was so frightened in that early morning there on the bridge, so desolate and helpless and sick with dread of what was going to become of me, that I didn’t dream of hesitating to take shelter in your—your friendship. It was like going under some hospitable roof while there was a drenching rain outside, and I was very thankful for the refuge. But when it cleared up, I couldn’t go on staying, just because I had been made welcome, now, could I?”
“Since you ask me, I declare with tearful emphasis that you could.”
“No, seriously,” urged Vestalia; “don’t you agree with me that women should be just as self-reliant and independent as men?”
“Me? I agree absolutely. I would have women insist upon the most unflinching independence, all the world over. I feel so keenly on that point, that out of the entire sex I would make only one exception. Very few people would take such an advanced position as that, I imagine. Just fancy how far I go! There are hundreds of millions of women, and I would have them all independent but just one. By a curious accident it happens that you are that one—but you will be fair-minded enough to recognise, I feel convinced, that this is the merest chance.”
She made a droll little mouth at him, and he went on:
“Yes, it is very strange. I cannot pretend to account for it, but you do undoubtedly form an exception to what would otherwise be a universal rule. The thought of other women earning their own living fills me with joy. I am fascinated by it, I assure you. I feel like bursting into song at the barest suggestion of the idea. But this very excess of reverence for the general principle begets a corresponding vehemence of feeling about the one solitary exception. That is in accordance with a natural law. Surely you respect natural laws? Well, the vaguest adumbration of an idea of your doing things for yourself convulses me with rage. The notion that my right to take entire charge of you is disputed seems monstrous and abominable to me. It is a denial of my mission on earth, and I am bound to combat it with all my powers.”
Vestalia smiled. “I see what you mean. You are just an old prehistoric savage like the rest of your sex. Your one idea is to drag a woman off into your cave and keep her there, with a big rock rolled up in front of the door when you’re away.”
“I would not have you disparage the primitive instincts,” urged Mosscrop, with an air of solemnity. “My word for it, we should be an extraordinarily uninteresting lot without them. They are the abiding bone and flesh and muscle of humanity, upon which it pleases each foolish generation in turn to stretch its own thin, trivial pelt of fashionable convention. My desire to seize you, and drag you off to my own cave, and make a life’s business of keeping you there, always beautiful, always happy, always replenishing the well-spring of joy in my existence—you choose that as something typical of the primeval man surviving within me. Let me tell you, sweet little Vestalia, that the human mind would cease tomorrow from its eternal wistful dream of progress if it were not for the hope that advancing civilisation will bring improved facilities for that sort of thing. The world would wilt, and curl up like a sapless leaf, and drop from its solar stem into gaseous space, if that anticipation were taken away. The race keeps itself going only by cherishing the faith that sometime, somewhere in the golden future, this planet will be arranged so that the right woman will always get into the right cave. That is what people mean when they speak of the millennium.”
“That is all very well,” said Vestalia, “but it deals with everything from the man’s point of view. Consider the other side of the case. What do you say to the woman’s disinclination for cave-life—is that not entitled to respect?”
“Possibly,” answered David, reflectively—“if one were able to believe in it.”
The waiter entered at this point with a burdened tray in his arms, and Vestalia took up the wine list. “Which is it that we had—that in the lovely high green bottles, with arms like a vase?” she asked Mosscrop. “We must have the same again.”
“You have told me nothing as yet,” said David, reproachfully, when they were alone again, “of all the thousand things I long to know.”
“It is so hard to tell,” she explained, with hesitation. “That is, there are things that I am supposed not to tell to anybody, at present, at least. And as for what I ought not to tellyou—why I have been instructed to avoid you altogether. I was even told not to write you—but I did all the same—just once.”
David took a crumpled envelope from an inner pocket over his heart, held it up for her inspection, and replaced it. But even as he did so sombre shadows began to gather on his face. He laid down his knife and fork, and, biting his lips, looked out of the window.
Vestalia swiftly recalled gruesome associations with that look. She stretched forth her hand, and laid it on his arm. “You mustn’t look out there,” she protested. “It has a bad effect on you. Look me in the face instead—please!”
He shook his head impatiently, and stared with dogged, blinking eyes at the opposite roofs. “You don’t realise what it has all meant to me,” he said at last, his gaze still averted. The quaver in his voice profoundly affected the girl.
“Listen to me—David,” she said, with something of his pathos reflected in her tone. “Turn and look at me. I haven’t the heart for even a moment of misunderstanding today. There isn’t anything on earth I won’t tell you. But you must look at me!”
He slowly obeyed her, and she saw that there were tears in his eyes. “But apparently there are things which it would be merciful not to tell me,” he said, struggling for an instant for composure. Then his brows knitted themselves, and flashes played in the darkness of his glance. “Who forbids you this or that?” he demanded, the angry metallic growl rising in his voice. “Four days ago you were all alone in the world! You told me so! In detail you assured me of your isolation. What are you talking about now? You speak of receiving instructions—to avoid me altogether, to write no letter to me! Oh, I ask for no explanations——” he went on stormily, pushing back his chair to rise from the table—“don’t think I claim any right to question you. But I find myself mistaken, that is all! I am a silly duffer at a game of this sort. I take things in earnest, while the others are laughing in their sleeves. Well, I’ve had my lesson. Before God, I’ll never——”
Vestalia screamed at him. She had half-risen in her place, gazing with bewildered, affrighted eyes, till some vague inkling of his meaning dawned upon her brain. “Foolish David! Foolish!” she cried aloud now. “Stop it! Stop it! You don’t know what you’re saying! Keep still, and let me talk to you!”
She bent across the table, and peremptorily shook his shoulder to enforce her words. “You’re all wrong!” she clamoured, as his tempest of wrathful words subsided. Upon the silence which followed she implanted firmly the added comment: “Oh, you goose!”
He looked up sullenly to her, as she stood now erect—and, meeting the glance in her eyes, felt himself clinging to it. There was for him the effect of sunshine in it—of clouds parted, of radiance and calm restored about him. Breathing hard, he gazed into her face, and came somehow to know from what he saw in it that he had been making a fool of himself. This perception assumed sharp outlines in his mind before she had spoken a word.
“Now, will you behave yourself, and listen to me?” she demanded, with austerity. His shattered aspect of contrition was a sufficient answer, and she seated herself confidently. “Now I will explain things to you—although you don’t deserve it in the very least,” she began, in formal tones. “To commence with, you remember that American father and daughter that we met at the Museum, down in the basement?—well, it happened that—happened that—Oh, my poor boy, howcouldyou think so stupidly of me?”
David had drawn up to his place again. He held Vestalia’s hands in his at this juncture, somehow, and the enchanted table narrowed itself until there was no barrier of space between their lips.
The little kiss sweetened the air. The two, even while they exchanged a glance of shy surprise, thought of it with reverence. They instinctively gave to its contemplation a moment of tender silence.
“How shrewd you were in discerning my leaven of savagery,” he remarked at last. “Or leaven? we’d better say principal ingredient!”
“I like you that way,” said Vestalia, quietly.
He smiled at her in dreamy incredulity. “I wonder if you do,” he mused. “They say women do like men who beat them. The police courts seem to support the idea. But there is a difficulty, you see. If you liked me because I behaved badly to you, then I should dislike you on precisely that account. So you mustn’t suggest approbation. No, I was very rude and stupid, and I am profoundly ashamed of myself. I should be ashamed to offer an excuse, too, if it were not just the one it is. I happen to be head over heels in love with you, dear little lady.”
“And precisely what is that an excuse for?” demanded the girl, with a fine show of ingenuous calm.
“For letting my luncheon get cold,” he replied, taking up his fork.
With the laughter of pleased children, they resumed the broken course of the meal.
“It doesn’t begin to be as nice asyourbreakfast,” she commented after a little.
“I don’t think it is a day for things to eat,” he said, pushing the plate aside. “I want to do nothing but just look at you—perhaps talk a little—but hear you talk much more. I am conscious of an indefinite hunger for the mere visual charm of you, sitting there opposite me. It seems as if it would take years to satisfy that alone. Do you know that you are very beautiful, dear, in your new clothes?”
She regarded his face with a keen, almost anxious glance, before she let the softer look dominate her own. “I am going to hurry to tell you where I got them,” she said. “They are the gift of my uncle—my father’s brother. This was what I was beginning to explain when—when you got so unhappy.”
“Yes—that is the merciful word—unhappy,” he assented, with gratitude. “I have been deeply out of sorts—mentally—since I lost you that night. There is a special devil inside of me, Vestalia, who sometimes lies low for long periods, and hardly reminds me of his existence, but since last Thursday he has been out on the war-path, night and day. My nerves are stretched like fiddle-strings, just with the effort of holding him. The sight of you is death to him, dear. He is gone now—clean out of existence. And while you stay, he won’t return. But the wretch has left me tired and a little tremulous. I want to rest myself by just looking at you.”
She, smiling with demure pleasure at his speech and his look, related to him briefly the story of the Skinner pedigree. “It occurred to me the minute I woke up in the early morning,” she declared. “I shall always believe that I really dreamed it first. Are you interested in dreams?”
“Oh immensely—at the time.”
“No; but thereissomething in them. I assure you, the idea never entered my head the day we met them. But before I was fairly awake next morning, lo, there it was, all worked out. The old gentleman was politeness itself. He came down immediately, when I sent my note upstairs. When I told him about wanting to make a pedigree of the Skinners, the notion appealed to him at once. Then I told him about something else, and that appealed to him a good deal more.”
Vestalia paused here, and began to regard her companion with signs of diminishing confidence. “I can’t go any farther without making a most humiliating confession to you,” she faltered.
“Then don’t go any farther, I beseech you,” he answered. “Truly, I do not find myself stirred very much by this entire demonstration of your ability to do things off your own bat. It is independent and praiseworthy and all that, no doubt, but I still have a lingering feeling that you ought to have stayed to breakfast, you know, and left mere commercial details to me. And I certainly shrink from humiliating confessions. Skip the unpleasant parts. We will have no skeletons at our feast to-day.”
“Ah, but they can’t be skipped,” sighed Vestalia. She drew nearer to him, across the table, and lowered her voice. “I foolishly told you some things that were not so—that first morning,” she confided in doleful tones. “It was a kind of romance about myself that I had built up in my own mind, and without much thought I gave it to you as truth. So long as I kept it to myself it did no harm; it even made life easier and more endurable for me, like a poor child making-believe that she and her rag doll are princesses. But it was different to tell you. My father was not a French gentleman. He was not an officer, and he wasn’t killed in a duel. He was never in France any more than I was. My motherwasScotch, but she did not belong to any noble or wealthy family. She did not leave any family jewels with a crest on them, and no one cheated her out of a private fortune, because she never had such a thing. It was just my individual fairyland that I described to you as real. I didn’t even tell you my true name.” David smiled solace upon her distressed aspect “You speak as if it were of importance. Dear child, do we value a rare and beautiful lily the less, because the gardener has put the wrong label on it by mistake? Tut—tut! Names and lineage and all that—it is the idlest stuff on earth to me. The story that you told me was pleasant in my ears only because it came from your lips. The discovery now that it wasallyours—that it was not the mere recital of dull facts, but was the child of your own inner imaginings—why that only makes it the more delightful to me. I simply gave it store-room in my memory before; I love it now—and at the same time I find I have quite forgotten it. There is a paradox for you!”
Vestalia essayed a smile through her tears. “You are always kinder than even I expect you to be,” she faltered; “but I did tell you a—a story, and by rights you should be very angry with me.”
David laughed. “Hans Christian Andersen told me many stories, but I worshipped him increasingly to the end. Dear lady, the stories are the only veritable things in life. The alleged realities of existence pass by us, or roll over us, and leave us colourless and empty. The genuine possessions of our souls—the things that shape and decorate and furnish our spiritual habitations—are the things that never happened. I note a twinkle in your eye. You fancy that I have said an inept thing. You think that I shall have to go back and explain that at least what has happened to us forms an exception to the rule. Ah, sweet little Vestalia, have you forgotten your own remark, here in this very room? ‘It isn’t like real life at all,’ you said; ‘it is the way things happen in fairy tales.’ I take my stand upon that definition. We have deliberately repudiated what are described as the realities of life. We discard them, cut them dead, decline to have anything whatever to do with them. We declare that it is fairyland that we are living in, and that we refuse to come out of it to the end of our days.”
Vestalia gazed into his eyes with wistful tenderness. “To the end of our days!” she murmured softly, wonderingly. Then she recalled the task still unfinished. “I took the name of Peaussier,” she forced herself to continue, “because it was a translation of my own name. I looked in the dictionary, and found that it was the French for Skinner.”
David lifted his brows. “You don’t mean——” he began, confusedly.
“Yes;” she forestalled his question. “The old gentleman at the Savoy is my father’s own brother. My father was Abram Skinner. He was not a lucky man, or, in his later years, a very nice man either. He was always poor, and toward the end he was in other troubles too. My home was a thing to shudder at the recollection of. I ran away from it after mother died, and he’s gone, too, now. I changed the name, to wash my hands of the whole miserable thing. And then to think of the wonderful chance—to stumble upon my own uncle, a man of fortune and education, and the kindest heart alive—is it not the most extraordinary thing that ever happened in this world?”
“Very possibly it might be regarded as extraordinary—out in the so-called world,” David assented, reflectively. “But it is just the thing that would be expected in fairyland. Yes, it seems, on the face of it, a beneficent occurrence. It is good for you to be seized and possessed of a rich uncle—from some points of view. But from others—a doubt suggests itself, Vestalia, whether your uncle is well-affected toward the fairies. Standard Oil does not lend itself without an effort to the fantastic. What if your uncle beckons you to come forth from fairyland?”
“And leave you behind—is that what you mean?” asked Vestalia, slowly. “That would depend—depend on how much you wanted me to stay.”
David put out his left hand to take hers, where it lay upon the cloth. With his right he drew out his watch. “The name Skinner,” he said, “is all right for the folk at the Savoy. It is not a suitable name for you. I sympathise fully with your impulse to abandon it. The expedient which you adopted was, no doubt, the best that offered itself at the moment, but I think I know a better. I must leave you now, and hurry into the City. This is Monday. Dear love, on Thursday I claim the whole day from you. We will breakfast here at eight—it is not too early, is it?—or say rather that at just eight I will come and find you on Westminster Bridge. The day must begin there, mustn’t it? And—strangely enough—Thursday is in a sort another birthday of mine.”
“And of mine too?” she asked, with a light in her eyes.
In the early afternoon of Thursday, David Mosscrop walked apart on shaded gravel-paths, beneath arches of roses and the feathered canopy of cedars high above, with Adele by his side.
“Oh, it’s all right. The waiter will come out and tell us when it is ready,” he said reassuringly, in comment upon her backward glance. “I want to speak with you. There was no such thing as a word with you by yourself on the road.”
“Why, we talked every mortal minute,” she protested.
“Ah yes, we talked, but I don’t recall that anything was said.”
“I daresaymyconversation is empty to the last degree,” she observed; “but I am usually spared such frank statements of the fact.”
“Ah, but I want to be thought of as something a little different from the usual,” urged David.
“Your efforts in that direction have been extraordinarily successful. Pray, do not imagine that they are unappreciated. I admit freely that you seem to have quite exhausted the unusual, my Lord.”
“No; I’ve still got something up my sleeve,” said David, lightly enough. But the tone in which she had uttered those final two words caught his attention. They carried a suggestion of emphasis which fell outside the bounds of genial banter. Meditating upon it he stole a covert glance at her, and encountered two wide-awake black eyes intently scrutinising him in turn. “It was about that I wished to consult you,” he added, conscious of an embarrassed tongue.
“Won’t it be better to stick to scenery?” she asked. Yes, there was undoubtedly a mocking touch in her voice. “That is so safe a subject. This dear old hotel here, now, how perfectly satisfying it is! Those wonderful trees out in front, and the white chalk hill behind, and this garden, and then the comfort and charm of everything inside, and the thought that people have been coming here for hundreds of years, or is it thousands?—it is so different from anything we have in America—even in Kentucky. And then the whole drive from London—through such delicious country, all so rich and smooth and neatly packed together, and so full of the notion that people are all the while planting and pruning and admiring every inch of it that you can’t help feeling affectionately toward it yourself! Perhaps thereisa certain hint of the artificial about it, but somehow that seems rather in keeping with the day than otherwise, doesn’t it, my Lord?”
While he hesitated about an answer, she touched him on the arm. “Here are papa and Mr. Linkhaw coming along after us—probably to tell us luncheon is ready. Shan’t we wait for them?”
“Heavens, no!” cried David, starting forward. “We’ve been chained to them on the top of the coach for two whole hours,” he went on, in defensive explanation of his warmth. “Really, we have earned the right to a few quiet words by ourselves.”
“Oh,Idon’t mind,” said Adele, quickening her pace to suit his. “Only it’s fair to warn you, though, that my temper has its limitations. I am a variable person. Sometimes it happens that all at once I weary of a joke, after it has been carried to a certain length, and then I can be as unpleasant as they make ’em.”
“I find that my own sense of humour has a tendency to flag under sustained effort, as I get older,” said David. “But there are so many pleasantries afloat—perhaps you wouldn’t mind indicating the one which particularly fatigues you, and I will put my foot on it at once.”
“Oh, by no means! That would be far too crude. We are all your guests, and you are in charge of the entertainment, and I couldn’t dream of suggesting anything.”
“Except that you find yourself no longer amused,” ventured David, cautiously.
“Oh. not at all.” She spoke with perfunctory languor, and simulated a little yawn. “I daresay it is all immensely funny, only I got up earlier than usual this morning, and no doubt that has dulled my wits somewhat.”
David perceived on the instant how matters stood. “I also rose at an extravagantly early hour,55 he said, and it is about my reasons for doing so that I want to tell you. But, first of all, let us be frank with each other. I have done nothing but accede to a situation created for me by Archie and yourself. It has been within your power to end it at any moment you choose. It has been all along much more your joke than mine. It isn’t fair to round on me for merely humouring your own conception of sport.”
Adele halted momentarily, and surveyed his composed, swarthy countenance with lifted brows. “So you saw all along thatIknew!” she exclaimed, in honest surprise.
“How could I have imagined that so clumsy a performance as mine would deceive so clever a young woman?” he rejoined, with a sprightly bow.
“Oh, you did it awfully well,” she assured him, complacently. “But tell me, did Archie suspect thatIknew?”
“I have been intimate with Archie from the cradle,” said David, “but I am still very shy about forming opinions as to his mental processes. In this case, however, I think it is safe to say he didn’t suspect—and still doesn’t suspect.”
“Poor old Archie,” mused Adele, with a ripening smile. “I knew who he was before I’d even laid eyes on him. A school-friend of mine in Galveston wrote to me that she had met a real Earl, who insisted on being known as Mr. Linkhaw, and that he was returning to England by way of Kentucky. I’ve had three months of the rarest fun in never letting on that I had the remotest suspicion. You can’t imagine how comical it was. He used to get, quite tearful sometimes, I abused the aristocracy so fiercely. And then, the joke was, papa began—his whole idea of conversation is to take up to-day what I’ve said yesterday, and multiply my words by a hundred and twelve, and produce the result as his own; and he worked up the anti-Earl agitation till Archie very nearly went off into chronic melancholia. It was better than any comedy that ever was written—but then you stumbled your way into the middle of it, and got it all twisted and tangled up—and it hasn’t been so amusing since then.”
“My dear Miss Skinner,” protested David, “I think my entrance upon the scene deserves a gentler verb. If you will search your memory, you will find that I came in by express invitation. It was you who deliberately thrust my mock honours upon me.”
“Oh, I know that,” she responded, readily enough. “I thought that would only make the thing funnier still—but somehow it hasn’t. It isn’t anything about Archie and me, you know. But there is another element in the case that I feel very keenly about. It has been puzzling me for days, but I only learned the truth last night. I simplymadepapa tell me. I refused flat-footed to come here to-day, or to do anything else that was reasonable, unless hedidtell me. I have a cousin here in England, Mr. Mosscrop, a daughter of my father’s own brother, and she is one of the dearest girls that ever lived.”
“I can readily credit that,” declared David, pointing his meaning with a little inclination of the head.
“Oh, she is far nicer than I am,” cried Adele. “Shewouldn’t trifle with the feelings of the man she loved, or play tricks with him just for the sake of fun. In fact, I almost blame her for taking such things too seriously. She hasn’t had too easy a time of it, poor girl, and it has made her,Ithink, altogethertoohumble. She met a young man in the midst of her troubles who, it seems, was civil to her, and even kind as men go, and what does she do but just sit down and worship the very memory of him, and cry out her pretty blue eyes over it—and he—he walks off and never gives her another thought. That’s themanof it!”
A gleam of indignation flashed through the moisture in her own eyes as she bent them upon her companion. Her bosom heaved the more as she discerned a broad smile extending itself upon his face.
“Although I might demur to details,” he said, restraining the gaiety which struggled for expression in his voice, “I must not pretend to fail to recognise the portrait you have drawn. I am the guilty man!”
“You laugh at it!” she exclaimed. “To you it seems a joke!”
“Are you so certain that there isn’t a joke concealed somewhere about it?” he suggested, calmly.
“I lose patience with you! You make a jest of everything. Tell me this much: Do you or do you not know her present address?”
“I know precisely where she is to be found at the present moment,” said David, speaking now with gravity.
“Well, and have you been there to see her? Have you written to her there? Have you given her the slightest sign since she has been there of any desire on your part to ever see her again?”
“I must answer ‘No’ to each question, I am afraid,” he responded, and had the grace to hang his head.
His evident humility only momentarily impressed her. “I am disappointed in you,” she said. “Where will you find a sweeter or truer woman? Don’t think I am throwing her at your head! Quite the contrary. If you were to ask for her now, I should advise with all my might against you. But you have behaved like a simpleton. I am going to have her always live with me, or near me. She is my own flesh and blood, and I love her as if she were my sister. She doesn’t know, as yet, that I am aware of the relationship; but I have written to her this very morning, telling her to come and see me to-night, when I get back. I am going to spend some money in Scotland.”
“It will be profoundly appreciated, believe me.”
She sniffed at his interjection. “I intend to buy land right and left in Elgin, and if Skirl Castle isn’t good enough—I don’t think much of it from the photographs—we’ll build a bigger one, and we’ll make that whole section hum; and Vestalia shall be as big an heiress as it contains, and the lucky man who marries her shall be treated like a brother of mine and Archie’s. And that is what you have thrown away. I say it to you frankly, because it is all over so far as you are concerned. She will listen to me, and my mind is quite made up—and papa can tell you whatthatmeans!”
“Even if your decision were not irrevocable,” said David, solemnly, “my answer would of necessity be the same. I would do much to please you, but I do not see my way to marrying your cousin.”
They had paused to exchange these last sentences, and now upon the instant the Earl and his elderly companion came up. David essayed a revelatory wink to the nobleman, but it fell upon the stony places in Lord Drum-pipes wondering stare.
Mr. Skinner wiped his brow decorously, and breathed appreciation of the halt. “Sir,” he began, addressing David, “I must assume that I am enjoying the opportunity of studying a district of England peculiarly favoured by Nature, and exceptionally embellished as well by the hand of man; but I wish to give expression to emotions of unmixed delight at all that I observe about me. We have inspected the internal appointments of the ancient hostelry, and have revelled, sir, in the luxurious yet studiously regulated beauties of this garden, and I confess that the novelty of the one and the charm of the other far surpass anything——”
“Papa,” interposed his daughter, with cold severity, “we will leave these gentlemen to enjoy the novelties and charms by themselves for a few minutes, if you please. I have an explanation to make to you, since no one else offers it, and I think it should be no longer deferred.”
She took her father’s arm as she spoke, and led him in a direct line across the sward toward the broad, low-lying, ivy-clad rear of the hotel. “Oh, it’s all right; they don’t mind your walking on the grass in England,” the two young men heard her say as she departed.
These partners in deception gazed after her for a space. Then they looked at each other.
“Davie, I don’t like it,” said the Earl.
“Don’t like what?”
“I’m afraid she’s got some kind of an inkling. It looks as if a suspicion were dawning in her mind. I warned you she was keen of scent.”
Mosscrop burst forth with a peremptory guffaw of laughter. “You duffer of the earth,” he cried, “she knew all about you before ever she laid eyes on you!” He unfolded the chuckling narrative forthwith, to the Earl’s profound astonishment and concern.
“Why then, man,” Drumpipes ejaculated at last, staring hard at the close-cropped lawn, “I can’t tell in the least if she loves me for myself alone.”
“Oh, you read that in some novel,” objected David. “It’s a mere phrase; it has no significance in real life.”
“Yes; but,” the other pursued, dejectedly, “I don’t see how I can make sure that she loves me in any kind of way.”
“At all events, she’s going to marry you,” David re-assured him. “She mentioned the fact to me, casually. And she’s going to buy up Elgin right and left, and build a new Skirl Castle as big as Olympia, and generally make everything else north of the Grampians ‘sing small’—I believe that’s the phrase.”
The Earl assimilated this intelligence with a kindling eye. “Man, it’s fine!” he cried, as the prospect spread itself out before his mental vision. “Ah, poor Davie, you dinna ken what it is to be in love!”
Mosscrop sighed. “When you talk Scots, Archie,” he said, “I know it’s going to cost me money. I foresee that you’ll kick about the bill. But, hurry, man, and catch up with them. She’s quite capable of flouncing out of the house, and dragging her father along, too, while the fit is on her; and that would only mean more bother to coax them back. Come on!”
He started at a brisk pace in pursuit, and Drumpipes strode eagerly beside him. They overtook their guests on the very threshold of the door, and the Earl called out a breathless, entreating “Adele!” The girl, upon reflection, turned, and surveyed the pair with an austere eye.
“Wait a moment, papa,” she said in her coldest tone; “one of these two gentlemen seems to feel authorised to address me by my Christian name, and apparently has also some communication to make to us.”
“Well,” stammered Drumpipes, hesitatingly, “there’s an awfully good luncheon been ordered, you know.”
Mosscrop emitted an abrupt, resonant note of laughter, and in the silence which ensued displayed violent muscular efforts to keep a grin from convulsing his face.
Adele preserved the severity of her aspect for a little. “I think it might occur toyou, Lord Drumpipes,” she began, markedly addressing her remarks to the rightful bearer of the title, “that after what has happened—and on this point, I can assure you my father feels exactly as I do——”
She stopped here, with the effect of appealing to her father for immediate confirmation of their inflexible joint attitude.
“I need scarcely observe,” began Mr. Skinner, putting up hispince-nezand looking down upon the two young men with sternness from the vantage of the door-step, “that whatever course my daughter deems it consistent with her dignity to pursue, in the face of the extraordinary, and, I may confidently add, unprecedented circumstances which we are called upon to—to confront, has my most unswerving adhesion.”
A waiter opened the door inward at this instant, and overlaid Mr. Skinner’s peroration with a clear-cut message, Germanic in its nonessentials, but broadly human in import.
The old gentleman gasped, twiddled the string of his glasses in his fingers, and leant his head sidewise toward his daughter. “Yes, but whatisit we’re going to do?” he inquired in a nervous whisper.
“Do?” cried Mosscrop, who had caught her glance in his own, and convicted it of latent merriment, “Do? Why we’re going to laugh at a harmless pleasantry happily ended, and pass in to luncheon.”
“Yes, papa,” said Adele, upon consideration, and with a dawning smile upon her lips, “I think thatiswhat we’re going to do.” When they found themselves standing about the table in the private room, overlooking through open French windows the delightful sunlit garden from which they had come, Mosscrop seized the moment of hesitation about seats to hold up his hand. Though he had been bereft of his borrowed dignities, the air of natural command sat easily upon him.
“I have to ask you for a minute or two of delay,” he said. “It will explain itself.”
He wrote something on a card as he spoke, and gave it to the waiter with a closely-guarded whisper of injunction. As the servant left the room, David turned to the others with a radiant face.
“Mr. Skinner,” he began, “and my younger friends, there is a toast which in England is always drunk standing. It occurs to me to propose it to you, on this single occasion, before we have taken our seats at all. As has been remarked with characteristic perspicacity, the circumstances which we find ourselves called upon to confront are extraordinary in character, and altogether unprecedented. Through the courtesy of my friends, I have for a brief period had devolved upon me the responsibility of behaving, at stated intervals, as a member of the Scotch peerage should behave. I view my deportment throughout this ordeal, in retrospect, with a considerable degree of satisfaction. I have spared no pains to realise my conception of the part. The essential thing about a successful peerage, I take it, is that it should be invested, for ordinary eyes, with a glamour of unreality. A Baron should be perceptibly romantic. A Viscount, if he respects his station should quite envelope himself in the mists of the improbable. As for an Earl, he should live frankly in fairyland. My imagination does not run to Marquises and Dukes, but I think I may say I have grasped the ideal of an Earl.”
“The true ideal of an Earl,” interposed Drumpipes, with inspiration, “is never to let victuals get cold.”
Mosscrop smiled and nodded. “Only a minute more,” he said. “I spoke about fairyland. I have been under its spell all this week. I have committed myself to its charm for the rest of my days. When you return to London this evening, northward, it is Archie Who will drive you. I go southward to the Loire country instead, under the magic of the enchantment which beckons and guides and propels me, all in one. To quit riddles, good people, you will notice that there is a fifth place laid here before us. To connect this fact with the toast, the seat is waiting formyQueen. This is Sherry, decanted from the ‘Anchor’s’ oldest bin. I suggest to you the filling of your glasses.”
He moved toward the door as he spoke, opened it, and turned to the others, with Ves-talia on his arm.
“Mr. Skinner,” he said gently. “We crave your approbation for what we have done. We were married by the registrar of St. Dunstan’s at ten o’clock this morning, and your niece came on here direct by train, bringing her luggage and my own, which I thank God devoutly will always travel together in future. We love each other very, very much.”
There fell here upon the masculine vision the spectacle of two women entwined in each other’s arms, and of two beautiful heads, one raven-black, one glowing like light through clouded amber, bent tenderly together. The sound of little moans proceeded from this swaying, interlocked group, and then of kisses and of subdued ecstatic sobbing laughter.
Lord Drumpipes, staring vacantly from these women to his boyhood friend, gulped his sherry in an absent-minded way. David, in rapid whispers, outlined meanwhile the situation to his bewildered ear.
“Eh!” he called out at last. “It is the same lassie? The yellow-haired one? The one who smashed my moosie?”
“Shut up, you loon!” growled David fiercely, under his breath. “Is this the time to blab about such things?Ikicked your your old cow into splinters, and I’ll serve the rest of the idiotic show the same way if you mention the word ‘moose.’ Chuck it, man! That’s a thing for the girls to tell each other a year hence, perhaps. Have some delicacy about you!” He turned to Mr. Skinner, who stood as one petrified, his gaze riveted upon the young women.
“I’ve been explaining to my friend, Lord Drumpipes,” David said, lifting his voice, “the romantic nature of my acquaintance with your niece, my wife. I think you have been told about it.”
Mr. Skinner shifted his glance to the speaker. “To some extent—to some extent,” he murmured weakly. “It has taken me greatly by surprise. I scarcely know——-”
David had advanced, and was holding out his hand, with a confident, masterful sort of smile.
“I suppose it’s all right,” the old gentleman said, sending confused, appealing glances toward his inattentive daughter. “Adele seems not to object—I take it for granted that——”
Adele lifted her head, and drew a protecting arm round Vestalia. “Hold up your chin,” she whispered, audibly. “They’re nothing to be frightened of. You know everybody except your cousin Archie, and he’s only to be feared by creatures who can’t shoot back.”
The bride, nestling against the other’s shoulder, raised a luminous face, and looked about her with a smile of frank happiness.
“Frightened?” she queried, and then shook her fair head joyously in answer.
The waiter came in with the tureen.