MISS CARRINGTON, seated before the hearth in her sitting room and enjoying the wood fire partly because it crackled; partly because it was too warm for the day, heard Minerva moving about in her dressing room and called her.
“Isn’t Helen back yet?” she asked.
Minerva appeared in the doorway, disapproval in every line of her black taffeta gown.
“Miss Abercrombie came in three quarters of an hour ago; she went to her room and it’s likely is resting there, though not having seen her I am not able to say positively,” she replied.
“Oh, well, Minerva, it will never come to a trial for perjury,” observed Miss Carrington. “Ask her if she will not join me?”
Minerva withdrew and shortly there appeared in the same doorway a figure in sharp contrast to Minerva’s. It was Helen’s, tall and lithe, swathed in a pale blue Japanese negligée, heavily embroidered in white and faintest pink. Her golden hair was dishevelled; one hand carried a box of chocolates, the other clutched her robe and a novel.
“Want me?” she asked, and crossed the room as Miss Carrington invited by a gesture to a chair at her side.
Helen took it and piled three down pillows around her, twisting her body into perfect agreement with the pillows.
“How inconsiderate you are not to come without a summons!”Miss Carrington reproached her. “Aren’t stay-at-homes always eager for bulletins from abroad?”
“I thought you’d be napping, or would come into my room if you wanted me,” said Helen. “There isn’t much to report; a perfectly ordinary visit. Of course the most interesting things about it aren’t those that happened.”
“Precisely. And your keen eyes would see them,” agreed Miss Carrington. “First of all, is there the least ground for my suspicion of Kit?”
“Oh, dear me, yes,” said Helen, promptly. “I more than suspect him, but he doesn’t suspect himself. He is attracted by the girl; he likes her, is ready to range himself on her side if any one doesn’t unreservedly admire her, but the feeling has not taken on alarming proportions. I’m sure he has no notion that he’ll fall in love with her if he isn’t careful, that the ‛goblins will git him if he don’t watch out!’ He doesn’t think she’s a goblin, and he isn’t clever enough to watch out. Please don’t mind me, because you know what I think of Kit! She’s a pretty little thing enough, but not more than pretty. And she has a gentle, amiable way with her, unsophisticated and all that. One of thosegoodgirls! Men are drawn by sweetness and goodness at first, and then, when they have to live with it, they are sure to be drawn by the other thing! Beauty unadorned, beauty of character, is pretty deadly daily diet, Aunt Anne-elect!”
Miss Carrington laughed. “These are not original remarks, Helen, though they may be the result of your original research,” she said. “The point is not how wise you are, nor how accurate a prophet, but what Kit thinks of her.”
“Oh, well, do you suppose Kit thinks of her?” Helen asked, lightly. “It strikes me that it is only that she is here, and nobody else is, most of the time. There must be lots of pretty girls in a place this size, but this little brown thing is new. I suppose she must have brains, for Richard Latham finds her thegreatest help; he spoke of her as marvellously perceptive, says her criticisms are a great help to him. But Kit has been drawn to her simply because—he is! That’s the only reason it ever happens, of course! And I don’t imagine he has thought about her; not actual, appraising thoughts. She is essentially feminine. I am dead sure he is attracted to her, but I’m also sure he isn’t analyzing himself, nor her, and it ought to be possible to divert his attention. Have a chocolate?” Helen extended her box.
Miss Carrington accepted a chocolate with a twinkle in her eye and a laugh that was not wholly flattering to her guest.
Helen’s embroidered robe had fallen to the floor on each side of her; her white skin gleamed above and through the thin crêpe and lace of her underclothing; her white, lace-trimmed skirt was drawn tight above her knees as she sat back in the chair; her thin, lustrous silk stocking outlined the beautiful curve of her leg.
“If Kit could see you now he might be diverted,” said Miss Carrington.
In her youth, with girls of her own age, she had never been so unreserved.
“Call him in,” suggested Helen. “I’ll tell you in confidence, Miss Carrington, that I never found a trusting youth hard to divert, if I went about it.”
“What did Thackeray say? That any woman could marry any man if she had sufficient opportunity and had not a positive hump? Something like that inVanity Fair.”
“Anticipating G.B.S.? I remember Shaw better than Thackeray. I readVanity Fairwhen I was about fourteen. Of course everyone admits that the woman chooses, but how about two women choosing the same man, each with the ‛sufficient opportunity?’ Then it does seem as though the man cast the deciding vote, though that would be only another way of sayingthat one woman had the stronger attraction. I never heard that threshed out. It’s interesting, opens out vistas. The only thing I’ve heard that might bear on it is that once seven women laid hold of one man. I don’t know what came of that. I haven’t read the Book that’s in much, not even at fourteen!” Helen laughed, throwing herself back and crossing her ankle on her knee as if she had been a man.
Miss Carrington did not smile. Her brow contracted slightly, and her eyes did not applaud Helen.
“You funny old dear!” Helen cried. “When you are so emancipated, boast of your modernity, read the books, novels and philosophy, love the plays you do, why do you suppose you are half-scared of me at times? And you are. I jar you.”
“A matter of taste, Helen,” admitted Miss Carrington. “I was bred up in old-fashioned conservatism. I can theorize; I don’t mind the new ideas in print, on the stage, provided they are cleverly put, but I admit that I like to see young women what I was trained to consider well-mannered. I don’t defend my inconsistency; I’m explaining myself.”
“Atavism; Shintoism,” said Helen, carelessly. “No one is consistent. Taste is stronger than principles, I’ve always noticed that. It will take two generations to get our mental clothing fitted, and by that time the fashion will probably swing back; that’s the way it works. You’ve got your grandmother’s and mother’s minds grafted on your mind. You’ve survived; you were born before the old ways had passed. But to return to our muttons, which means the Dallas lambkin: Richard Latham is in love with her himself.”
“Oh, Helen, do you think so?” cried Miss Carrington.
“Know so,” Helen corrected her. “And I warned Kit. I went so far astotry to ingraft upon his trusting mind the suggestion that no one would snatch her from a man so important to the world, so afflicted as the poet. I hoped that it wouldseem to him later that he had thought of that himself. And, really, Miss Carrington, Richard Latham is a peach of a man, aside from his poetry. He is charming; modest, clever, gentle, and you feel that he is stainless. I wondered for a moment if it wouldn’t be worth while rescuing him, instead of Kit, from the little Dallas? I could put him on a pinnacle, give him the rewards of his genius while he lived, instead of after he is dead. I could do it alone, and I am always plus father. But I decided it would be a pity to waste my looks on a blind man.”
“Your conceit is so colossal, Helen Abercrombie, that it is raised above ordinary weaknesses,” declared Miss Carrington, energetically.
“Dear Aunt-elect, you are quite right. I do not think that I am in any way a small woman. If you call it conceit, so be it. But if I did not know that I am handsome I should be a fool, and like the fool say in my heart that ‛all men are liars.’ I am clever. Experience teaches me that, and my will is not easily downed. You may call it colossal conceit, but I call it an intelligent appraisal of myself. I know that I can do for the man I marry what few women can do, and that I shall do it, and I do think it would be a pity if my husband could not see me.” Helen ended her frank speech with a downward glance at her generously displayed beauty. It was her complete disregard of any sort of concealment that shocked the elder woman, who had been trained in the reserved manners of what used to be called “a gentlewoman.” Miss Carrington realized that in this she was at variance with her views which admitted freedom, equality, the right of every human being to be and to do what he, and she, as much, saw fit. But the application of the theory, especially in the case of a fair young girl, hurt her.
“Indeed, Helen, I know that you will do for your husband more than other women can,” Miss Carrington said, almost humbly. “That is why I want you for Kit, as you understandquite well. But just why do you want my boy? He is a fine, honest, loyal lad; has a good mind, nice manners; would be no end fond and unselfish, and he is personable—I like that word!—but there are others far richer, others with famous names, better placed in the world. I am glad that you do want Kit, but—why do you? I am sure you are too candid to mind telling me.”
Helen sat erect, drew her drapery around her, and leaned her elbows on her knees to elucidate.
“Aunt Anne,” she said with considerable earnestness, and omitting the restrictive word in the elder woman’s title, “I suppose no one quite understands these things. I don’t altogether. But I have decided that when I say I want Kit that about covers it. It’s precisely what I said awhile ago about Anne Dallas. Attraction attracts, and you can’t define wherein it lies. Kit’s strong, virile beauty—he really is an awfully well-set-up chap—attracts me. Others may have it, in fact they have; the average college boy gets a lot of it if he trains, but in Kit I like it best. I like the way he nods at me when he says something which he thinks is profound and which I’ve always known. I especially like the way his hair grows in the back of his neck, and he has one funny ear lobe, sort of kinky—ever notice it? He doesn’t know what fear is, either physical or moral; doesn’t stop to find it out that it exists. He has a dandy voice in talking, and he says deliciously fool things about girls! He’s strong, clean—I could do a lot with him if he’d love me. And I’m pretty sure he’d get taught how to love me if I married him. I’d put myself out to teach him, and I know how to teach! I think that’s about all there is to it. As I say, it comes to the one thing with which I started: I want Kit Carrington!”
Miss Carrington always sat straight in a straight chair, so she could not be more erect than she had been, yet she had the effect of sitting straighter as she listened to Helen; she became alert.
“Helen, child, all that you say must mean, itdoesmean, that you are in love with Kit! I never dreamed that you were in love with him, but you surely are. I am glad of it. This atavism of mine, as you call it, makes it easier for me to carry out our bargain knowing that you are in love with the boy,” she cried.
“Oh, come, now, Miss Carrington,” laughed Helen. “I play the game with you, cards face up on the table. You are the sort of woman with whom one can do that; you can’t with most of them. I’m not in love with Kit sentimentally; there isn’t a drop of the Elizabeth Barrett Browning slush in it! What’s that thing she wrote? ‛Unless you can muse in a crowd on the face that fixed you?’ Heavens! When I’m in the midst of a crowd I’m busy seeing to it that it knows I’m there! And no face ever fixed me—sounds like a spitted chicken! Stuff! If I get Kit—and I mean to—I’ll be as pleased as Punch, and so shall he, I promise you. But if I don’t get him I’ll take someone else and make a good thing of it. What I won’t do is to fail in life. I want Kit, do you see? He suits me; I want him. I like all the things about him that I enumerated, and then some. Simply and truthfully, I want Kit. We’d make a corking pair. He’s good material. As far as this is worth, I am in love with Kit. But you and I are wide-awake women, with the right labels on ourselves and our world, only I’m beginning to think I’m the elder, you nice old Anne Carrington! Help me to capture your boy and we’ll never repent it, you nor I, nor that silly Christopher, who thinks, or will think if we don’t straighten his thoughts for him, that he wants that demure mouse! She would make him gruel, possibly, but she would surely make any clever man who had to put up with her monotony sick to the point of needing gruel! She’s just the average woman since Eve, Aunt Anne!”
“There’s no such thing as an average woman, Helen Abercrombie!” laughed Miss Carrington. “Untold millions of themsince Eve, and every one of them a special creation—ending with you, who are, I confess, the least average of any I have known.”
Helen laughed with her and said:
“Helen fired Troy; it’s queer if she can’t set Kit afire. See here, Miss Carrington, why aren’t we riding, Kit and I? Don’t you know that on a horse I inevitably ride to victory?”
“I’ll have them here in the morning, Helen,” said Miss Carrington. “Make Kit start early enough to ride to the Daphne Woods. It’s the most exquisite, the most emotional road I’ve ever seen, here or abroad.”
“Its name is all of that; I remember it from other visits. I always thought there must have been a poet here before Mr. Latham’s time to name those woods. All right; Daphne Woods it shall be for Kit and me to-morrow morning. And thanks, Miss Carrington, for this satisfactory confession I’ve made. Do I understand that I am shriven?” Helen asked, rising.
“Of what you intend to do? Even an old pagan like me knows that you can’t be shriven of an intention to act, unless you give up the intention. And I hope you will not abandon your plan to steal Kit!”
“Not I!” declared Helen, her soft silks gathered into a spring-like mass of blue and white and blush pinks, turning to wave her hands, thus filled, from the doorway. “I’ll be an improved robber, not with a kit to steal, but a stolen Kit!”
Early the next morning the horses were at the door, Kit’s own horse, a fine-skinned, chestnut sorrel, and one that Miss Carrington had secured for Helen’s riding, a spirited black horse, high-headed, high-stepping, whose magnificent strength made a perfect pedestal for the girl’s blonde grace.
Helen came down the stairs in her golden-brown riding clothes, russet boots, trousers and full-skirted coat of russet-coloured cloth, wearing a silk beaver hat of the same colour, and russetgauntlets, her ivory-handled stock under one arm. Her hair glinted below her hat, brought down low and held by a net in golden masses above her high white collar and white cravat. Not everyone could have triumphed over this uniformity of tint, but it turned Helen into an autumnal sun-goddess, and Kit, buttoning his gloves as he waited for her, uttered a note of satisfaction on beholding her.
“You’re a sight, Helen!” he said, opening the door for her to pass.
“There are sights and sights, Kits! It doesn’t as a rule convey anything complimentary to call a person a sight, you know!” Helen said, gaily. She had decided that her rôle for that ride was to be youthful light-heartedness, that of the girl revelling in sunshine, air, and contentment.
Kit gave Helen a hand to mount, which she did not require, swung into his own saddle, and they were off with a wave of their stocks to Miss Carrington, who was smiling on them from the piazza.
“They are a glorious pair; Helen is right, and it does seem as though Kit must perceive the value of such a mate,” she thought.
After they had passed out of the city streets they trotted and galloped by turns eastward. The apple trees were in full blossom, and the orioles, those bits of flame amid the sweet delicacy of the springtime bloom, were singing their ecstatic warbling note.
“The May Day of the world and the heyday of youth, Kit! Aren’t we lucky to be so young, prosperous, well-mounted, healthy, and handsome among this ravishing beauty?” cried Helen. “I go into the world so much—the world in the other sense—that I often feel almost old; I see and learn so much that is not a part of youth. But when I come here and am out with you, a healthy, wholesome boy, though you are a year older than I am, it all falls away from me, and I feel like a nice little girl rolling her hoop!”
“Poor old Nell,” said Kit. “You are mixed up with a whole lot that you’d be better without. I’m glad that you get sips of the Fountain of Youth here. I seem to hate worldliness, do you know it? Now I know people here, Antony Paul and his fine little wife and that wife’s family; oh, you saw the child, little Anne, yesterday! They’re the most unworldly people——”
“Oh, well, you know, Kit, one mustn’t go to extremes,” interrupted Helen. “It’s a good thing to get the finish and knowledge given by contact with the world. I don’t like unworldliness. That’s only another name for stupidity. It’s no better than a badly furnished room, or poor music, or fake art, or any other ignorance. My idea is to conquer the world, to get the best it has to give you and rise superior to it; to be—what’s that trite way of putting it?—in it but not of it? Well, that’s the thing. I’d not give up the sense of power, moulding things and people, being one of the worth-while things in the world, for—well, for the world!”
She paused to laugh at herself, but went on: “Don’t you think, Kit, that what my father can do, and what he can put me into the way of doing, is great? And what’s the matter with using one’s advantages to improve things? Isn’t that quite possible, and isn’t that a worthy ambition? Frumpy folk can’t do anything for the keen old world; it knows a good thing when it sees it. You may be sure, Christopher, my son, that half the unworldliness is self-delusion. It is lazy-mindedness, or else an instinct that warns of unfitness for the world; that the person can’t play a part in it. He thinks he’s superior and renouncing; in reality, he’s inferior and thrown out.”
“Honest, Helen, that’s true!” cried Kit; he looked at Helen with cordial admiration. “I often wonder if I’m not too commonplace to amount to a whole lot, and so I think that I don’t want to make a splash. I never saw this side of you; that you cared to help and all that. You are a wonder, Nell; I take offmy hat to you. There isn’t much that you couldn’t do or be. I’m one of your ‛frumpy folk’ and couldn’t keep step with you.”
Helen drew up her horse beside his; she leaned toward him with her bright hair close to his face, her beauty within his reach.
“Ah, Kit,” she said, softly, “you are not frumpy! You are a dear, humble-minded fellow; all truly great men are humble; they are simpler than women. There is nothing that you might not do, if you would see yourself as your friends see you. Let me inspire you to self-confidence! Let me feel that when you are a man honoured by others for your benefits to the world, your achievements—for I am sure, Kit, that you could be a power for good with your clear vision and your simple incorruptibility—let me feel that I kindled in you the desire that bore such fruit. Even though after all is said I am but a pretty girl, yet I am one that can love what is worth loving though you think me only a shallow, vain creature!”
Helen’s face bent forward; she dropped her lids over her eyes as if to hide their flame, or their tears; her voice thrilled, her beautifully trained, silvery voice.
Kit’s hand went out as if to draw her to him; the space between them was slight. He flushed and quivered to her beauty as to her emotion. Then there arose before him a small figure, simply clad; a low, broad brow and beneath it steady eyes of brown, like a fire on a home hearth, and sweet, firm lips moved to let a soft alto voice say in memory to him again:
“It would be a pity for you to fail with your life, because you can use it well if you follow your instincts. And what is counted gain is often tragic failure.”
Kit straightened himself in his saddle.
“You are mighty kind, Helen,” he said. “I don’t mistake myself; you see I have my own measure fairly accurately. Miss Dallas was saying the other day what came to almost the samething that you’ve just said, only she didn’t get it from the same angle. I’ll try to play up when the time comes.” Helen’s horse leaped at the sudden pull which she gave the curb and the blow that she dealt him. The horse dashed away and Kit rapidly followed.
“Say, Helen, don’t give Jack-of-Spades surprise parties; he’s one of the sensible sort that doesn’t care for them, and he’s capable of giving a return surprise party,” Kit warned her, regaining his place at her bridle.
“I can conquer any fool brute I ever attempted!” said Helen, her colour high, her eyes flashing. Then she conquered herself.
“Did I scare you, good old Kit? You were the one I meant to surprise. Isn’t your aunt a dear to get me a horse like this? Isn’t she an old darling, anyway? She’s truly fond of me, I’m gratefully sure of that. It’s a big thing to win the love of a lonely old woman. She loves me next to you, Kit, and I’m not unappreciative. How these horses keep pace! What a pleasant thing it is to ride at the same gait, in unison of hoofbeats! That’s a sermon in brief, though unintentional, and it’s for you to draw the moral. So this is Daphne Woods! It’s the loveliest spot I ever saw. I’m glad that you are showing me this shadowy, green, mystic loveliness for the first time. We have many memories in common, my dear old pal. Daphne Woods is a dream. Don’t let me waken, Kit!”