“YOUR daughter has not been rescued this time, Mrs. Berkley; I am merely her favoured cavalier,” explained Kit, delivering little Anne into her mother’s hands.
“Thank you, Kit.” Mrs. Berkley spoke with difficulty for little Anne had her around the neck in a hug that implied a long separation. “Mr. Berkley is on the side piazza with Peter, and Antony is here. Joan has taken the baby and left him. Why don’t you join them there?”
“I always knew it would come to a separation between Joan and Antony,” said Kit, gratefully accepting a respite from returning home.
“And you knew it would be only for the length of a day and night, didn’t you?”
Mrs. Berkley looked sharply at Kit’s perturbed face. “Come, Anne; you must be made presentable for dinner. Stay to dinner with us, please, Kit.”
“I can’t be made presentable,” he said, glancing at his tramping clothes, and betraying his desire to stay.
“That doesn’t matter; we are alone. Anne has obligations. One is that her clothes are here; yours aren’t! Stay, Kit, dear, won’t you?” Mrs. Berkley urged him.
“Gratefully,” said Kit, “if you’ll put up with me. I think I may go away to-morrow.”
“Yes? For long?” asked Mrs. Berkley. Her eyes and her wits were working fast; Kit looked badly perturbed.
“I don’t know, Mrs. Berkley. It all depends; I may not go,” Kit said.
“Depends on Helen Abercrombie’s going,” Mrs. Berkley supplemented him in her thoughts. “She appeared well here, but Joan didn’t like her, and I couldn’t help seeing that she meant to marry this boy.”
“Then you must surely stay to dinner; tramping clothes are all right when they are not what might be called worn in malice! We like you better than evening garments, Kit. Come, Anne!” she said aloud.
Upstairs with little Anne, Mrs. Berkley had difficulty in restraining the questions that she wanted to ask. She made it a rule not to encourage Anne in comments on her elders, to which her precocity and ever-ready interest inclined her, but now her mother cast about in her mind for ways to get Anne’s story without her knowing it.
To her relief, little Anne, emerging from the bathroom, rubbing her thin arms dry with a rotary motion from shoulder to wrist, asked:
“Why should Kit hate to have Miss Abercrombie hunt for four-leafed clovers?”
“Does he?” asked her mother.
“She was kneeling, hunting them, and he looked awful. I thought he was sick. She was almost on his shoes, Mother! I was singing, but I saw him look sick before he heard me. Then he looked for what was singing. Do you suppose he thought ’twas a brownie? Brownies couldn’t sing hymns. Fairies don’t either, do they? I was singing a hymn, that French one. Kit said it was nice. Miss Abercrombie said she was hunting for four-leafed clovers. You’d suppose they wouldn’t be so near Kit’s feet. And she didn’t have any. Kit didn’t want her to hunt ’em, I’m most sure. I couldn’t tell whether he was mad or what. But she got mad, very mad, indeed!She said I ought to read the Bible about Joseph. Did she mean St. Joseph, Mother? He’s in the Bible, isn’t he? ’Course! All about the angel and his dream! Well, I don’t see why they were so queer. She said something about a lady—Mrs. Potfar—or for—or something, how she got what she deserved. I’m ’fraid I don’t know hist’ry very well, Mother. Is that hist’ry?”
“Why, yes. It is ancient and modern history, Anne,” said Mrs. Berkley. She had learned more than she had the least desire to know, and without a word on her part.
“Shall we put on the straight linen frock, with the little leather belt? I think so. And perhaps it would be as well not to speak of four-leafed clovers, perhaps not of meeting Kit, nor of your hymn. If he was annoyed, though we don’t know that he was, we should not care to remind him of it and spoil his appetite for our rather nice dinner! Raspberry shortcake and raspberry ice, little Anne!”
“Kit can’t be coming in to dinner, Helen,” said Miss Carrington, pausing at her guest’s chamber door on her way downstairs.
Helen had been thinking hard since she had left Kit. Anger still blazed in her eyes and flamed in her cheeks, but she had decided upon her line of action. However frank she might have been in prearranging her course, now that it had failed, her candour should be curtailed. She would not admit to Miss Carrington how completely she had missed her aim. She knew perfectly well that Kit’s aunt would condemn her, not only because she retained the manners of a past generation, but because she would feel that Helen would inevitably have repelled Kit by what she had done. Helen would not admit this. If little Anne had not come along precisely when she came; if Kit had once taken her in his arms, Helen felt sure that she would have fastened herself within them for all his life.
“Oh, didn’t Kit come back?” asked Helen, indifferently, when Miss Carrington said that she thought he was not returning to dinner. “He took home that thin little dark marplot. She came wandering where we were sitting. Kit left me here and went home with her. How common youngsters do go about without being looked after, and nothing happens to them! Kit probably went with this scrawny little beast for pleasure. He has strange tastes and ways!” Helen’s fury escaped her.
Miss Carrington clutched the back of the chair by the door and stared at her.
“What under heaven do you mean, Helen?” she gasped. “Little darkmarplot? Anne Berkley? Good heavens, was she a marplot? Did she spoil anything?”
“Only all our plans, Miss Carrington,” Helen said, turning from the mirror with a laugh that was not pleasant. “I had Kit where I wanted him; a moment more and I’d have been your niece. But it was against his will. I’d have changed his will; he was past choosing. Then that brat came singing through the trees, a fool French hymn like a shepherdess in a badly cast musical comedy, and——” Helen waved her hands to signify the dispersion of everything.
Miss Carrington rallied.
“But it’s not final. If he was entranced, as you imply, it is only deferred.”
“Not at all,” cried Helen. “Kit had resisted my arguments in favour of our sensible marriage. He doesn’t approve in the least of Christopher Carrington and Helen Abercrombie compounding the felony of sacrilege—or some such fool notion. And now he’ll be on his guard against my attraction. Frankly, never-to-be aunt, I won’t bother any more with Kit. I don’t want him; he’s a fool, a milk-white milk-sop! I’ll marry George Lanbury soon. He has money enough to buy up the whole of Cleavedge, and when it comes to appreciating mybeauty——” Helen again ended with a gesture, this time conveying boundlessness. “I hope that Kit will wait for that child to grow up, and that he will marry her and have a string of black imps as long as the rosary he’ll be forced to rattle off at Roman shrines, decked out in tinsel!” Helen bit her lip, angry that at the last moment she had fully betrayed the fury that is renowned as exceeding anything known in hell.
Miss Carrington meekly followed Helen downstairs. She was angry with Kit, but had not given up hope. She also felt a malicious satisfaction in Helen’s rage; it somewhat compensated her baffled ambition for the boy, if it were finally baffled, that he could scorn and infuriate such a woman as Helen Abercrombie. She still wanted Helen to be Kit’s wife, but what fun it was to see her gnashing her teeth in desire for him! Miss Carrington thirsted for entertainment; it was entertaining to see the humiliation of a woman who held every advantage over her own years and withered face.
They dined with but little talk between them, slowly, and Helen regained her self-control at the orderly, well-served table, by the help of the food and wine that she needed.
“I’ll spare Kit’s blushes to-night, Miss Carrington,” Helen said, laughing, as she put an arm around the old lady and went with her into the drawing room. “I will go to my room before he comes in. And then, if you please, I’ll leave you in a day or two. I think I’ll go down to the sea, I and none other, and let Mr. Lanbury come there to see me.”
“You will do nothing of the kind, Helen Abercrombie! You will stay with me. Your father is coming here if you remain. Why should I lose my pleasure because of my foolish nephew? For that matter, have this Lanbury here later, if Kit doesn’t come to his senses. Though something tells me, your manner I suppose, that I shall not like him. Helen, I beg of you not to go away! Don’t you know that I should miss you, myhandsome girl? I am not feeling well lately. Stay!” begged Miss Carrington.
“Better see a doctor,” said Helen, carelessly. “Well, we’ll consider my staying, but the seashore is livelier.”
Helen went to her room. Now that the motive for taking pains was gone, she took no trouble to entertain Miss Carrington. She was rather pleased to be free of the duty; she did not find Kit’s aunt nearly as interesting and up-to-date as that lady considered herself.
When Kit came in and upstairs, he found his aunt’s door ajar and she waiting for him in kimono and slippers on its sill.
“Here, Kit!” she whispered, motioning to him and opening her door wider. “One word with you!”
His heart sank. He had spent a pleasant evening talking with Mr. Berkley and Antony, and had enjoyed Peter the Second’s exposition of a plan he had for making an improved ski, a timely subject for a warm evening.
Kit had been diverted from his discomfort and the puzzle as to his next step, but it had closed down upon him on the way home, and he knew that it was now to become articulate in the person of his aunt. He went into Miss Carrington’s room: she followed and closed the door behind them.
“Kit, what have you done to Helen?” Miss Carrington demanded.
“Nothing, Aunt Anne; I’ve done nothing to Helen,” Kit replied, hoping that he did not look as much like a small boy called to the teacher’s desk as he felt.
Miss Carrington chuckled; her sense of humour was unreliable.
“I believe that. Not even kissed her!” she said. “But I meant you to kiss her and be engaged to her, then marry her, in a pretty and prudent sequence, as you perfectly well know.” She suddenly became fiercely serious. “See here, Kit, you’re to marry Helen, do you hear me? I wonder whatbetter you could ask of fate? That quiet little brown girl, Anne Damask, Darrar, whatever she is, with whom you fancied yourself in love—oh, dear me, yes; I saw it, but it was utter tom-foolishness—is going to marry the poet. A good thing all around! You are to marry Helen. Please make a point of being engaged to her to-morrow at this time.”
It was a mistake, of course, but Kit laughed.
“Sounds like ordering the car, or chops, or something, Aunt Anne!” he said, his cheerfulness restored. “I shall never marry Helen, and never make a point of being engaged to her; I’ll make a point of not being! And to-morrow I’ll get out of her way; go down to New York to see a man there whom I want to see anyway, and then hang around somewhere till Helen is gone. In September I’m going into business.”
“Good heavens, Kit!” gasped Miss Carrington. “And my heart has been weak lately!”
She yielded everything so swiftly that Kit was bewildered.
“Very well, then, don’t marry Helen! It will be you, not I, who loses. But don’t go away. Stay at home. There won’t be awkwardness; Helen knows how to break most of the commandments, but she wouldn’t know how to behave stupidly. Stay here, Kit, at least awhile.”
“Poor auntie! I am a trial, I know. But you wouldn’t have me be a regular bounder and marry Helen for her father, now would you? Don’t answer; it’s bad enough not to be able to handle me without granting I’m right! I’ll stay on—if I can! Honest, Aunt Anne, I’m not sure I can,” Kit said.
“Certainly, you can; nonsense! Good-night, Kit! I’ll try to be grateful for the concession that keeps you under my roof,” said Miss Carrington, letting him out softly, as if she wanted to let sleeping dogs lie, and their kennels were near at hand.
Miss Carrington had reckoned, if not without her host, yet without her guest. Helen had been in the cupola star-gazing,or so it appeared. She came down the narrow stairs which led to the cupola of this house, built after the manner of ambitious houses erected immediately after the Civil War. She encountered Kit in the hall.
“Hallo, Kit!” she said, softly, lest Miss Carrington should hear, but in such an off-hand, nothing-happened manner that Kit had a fleeting wonderment whether he had been in bed and dreamed the afternoon’s adventure.
“Come in here.” Helen opened the door to her room and drew Kit inside. “No more occupied chambers, thank goodness, except the servants’, and I’m not going up there!” Kit thought, with a desperate sense upon him of an endless chain of bedroom interviews, and no small dread of this one.
“Nice little Kit-boy,” Helen began, carelessly. “I want to tell you, for your own sake, because I know you’re unsophisticated enough to worry over it, that this afternoon I was trying out a wager I had with myself. I won it, you’ll be pleased to hear; the real me! I was straight about asking you to fix up a marriage with me. I truly think, or rather I did think so then, that it would be a good, sensible, rather all-around nice arrangement. I don’t think so now, Kit, my dear! You were right and I wrong. I’m not your sort, and, please don’t mind one last bit of frankness: I’d simply die of you as steady diet! I’m like Becky Sharp: I don’t like bread and butter! But the rest of the racket was—what do you boys call it, chucking a bluff?—was chucking a bluff. Ithoughtyour decency was the real thing, but it is a foible of mine to study people, preferably on pins, like grubs. I don’t mind what I do with you, so I put you on a pin, and mighty well did you wriggle, true to the compass. Though I couldn’t be sure you wouldn’t have kissed me if that nas—nice little girl hadn’t happened along! I’m not really a vamp, you know, Kits! It was a mean trick for your old chum to play on you, but you came out fine; a bitcrude, not too clever, but a mighty nice kid, just as you always were! So don’t let any constraint creep in, Kit! It was a game and you won it—and so did I! I wanted to get this said before you slept; it’s an error to allow embarrassment to develop at breakfast; fearfully hard to get rid of it in daylight! Shake hands, Kit. I won’t squeeze yours! Only please tell me I did it well! I have every kind of vanity, but I’m especially vain of my acting!”
Kit conquered his natural impulse to speak the truth, to set straight anything distantly resembling a misstatement.
“You’ve got Bernhardt and them all beaten a mile, Helen,” he said. “Upon my honour, till you told me, I thought it wasn’t acting! Well as I’d known you, for so long, too, you fooled me! Go on the boards, Helen; it was great! But a trifle exhausting. I’m sleepy. Aren’t you? You’ve earned the right to rest. Good-night, Siddons-Rachel-Bernhardt! Good-night, Helen of Troy, whose face lighted fires enough, and still does!”
Kit left the room quickly. Helen went over to her mirror studying, yet hardly consciously seeing her face, now hard and not beautiful.
“Well, at least I’ve helped him to act like a man! He accepted the lie quite decently, played up better than I thought he would. It’s bye-bye, Kit! He’s still to be coveted. If I were sentimental, I’d say I was in love with him, but, since I’m not sentimental, I’ll say, instead, that I’m going to marry St. George—also his dragon—and be ridiculously rich and handsome and haughty.”
Helen turned off the light to undress in the dark; she did not like to see herself in the mirror just then.
Kit had promised to bring a book from his boyhood’s library, containing illustrations of Canadian winter sports, to young Peter Barkley on the following day.
He found Anne Dallas there, in the deep window seat withlittle Anne. The smoothly coiled masses of dark hair bent over the bobbed, bright ribbon-tied darker hair, as the grown-up Anne fitted a worldly pink dancing gown on the little Anne’s big doll whose serious-minded name was Scholastica.
Kitca, larger and apparently whiter, sat on Anne Dallas’s shoulder, her round Christmas-card face set off by a complex blue satin ribbon bow that formed its background from ear to ear. It was a pretty picture, Kit thought, as he stood for an instant before he was discovered, looking at it.
He had so completely given up Anne, even excluding thoughts of her as honour compelled, that he looked at her quietly with a slight tightening around his heart, a little quickening of his breath—but not with the perturbation which the sight of her had aroused when he was free to allow himself to go out to her. Anne’s smile was sweetly friendly, her eyes unclouded as she looked up and greeted him.
“Are you still in Cleavedge?” she asked. “Mr. Latham was wondering the other day. Are you well? You look tired.”
Kit blushed. He had not slept well; he could not bear to recall Helen in this maidenly presence.
“I’m all right, thanks: perhaps a little sleepy. I’m going to see Mr. Latham soon. How about the play?” Kit asked.
“He has done a great deal of the fourth act; almost all of it. There is a famous manager coming to lunch with Mr. Latham, so I ran away. I don’t want to meet him, and Mr. Latham admitted that I couldn’t talk to him,” Anne laughed, and Kit joined her, thinking this were likely to be true.
“Will you take this book to Peter, little Anne?” Kit asked. “Tell him I’ve marked the pages.”
Little Anne sped away with the book and Kit still stood by the table, fluttering magazine pages, while Anne still sat in the deep window seat, fondling Kitca.
There was nothing to explain it, but with the going of littleAnne something had come. There was between Anne and Kit constraint, unforeseen, oppressive. Nothing like it had happened before; each was conscious of it now, each wondered at it, was powerless against it. They had not been alone together since Anne had promised to marry Richard. Now they did not look at each other; for a while they could not. Then Kit raised his eyes and met Anne’s, dilated, marvelling, suffused with light, fixed on his. They gazed at each other utterly unconscious of everything, mastered by a feeling that burned in the blue and the brown eyes, mutually calling and answering.
“Anne, I love you! I love you! And you love me!” Kit did not know that he spoke till the words were uttered, never to be unsaid.
Anne did not speak, except with her eyes, and they were illumined.
“Anne, think of it! You love me! I love you!” repeated Kit, and crossed to her.
Then Anne recovered sufficiently to remember. She clasped her throat with both hands and fear drove the light from her eyes.
“No, no, no! Richard!” she whispered.
Little Anne came back, but she stopped short in the doorway, not understanding what she saw, but enthralled by it. Neither Anne nor Kit knew that she was there.
“Richard—can’t be helped!” said Kit, fiercely. “How did we know this? You don’t love him; you love me! You didn’t know that; neither did I. I knew that I loved you, but—well, yes! Once I did feel sure that you loved me, but when you were going to marry Richard Latham I gave in, thought I was mistaken. Now you are mine, Anne, Anne!”
“No, Kit, never,” Anne checked him with a gesture. “Would you blight Richard’s life? We did not know this awful thing——”
“Stop!” Kit cried. “You shall not speak so of it! It is a heavenly, a blessed thing! Out of pity for a blind man, notknowing yourself, you promised to marry him. Do you think that counts againstthis? Would you go on with it, marry a man whom you do not love, when you love another man? A crime! No less! I myself will go to Latham and tell him exactly what has happened. Are we to blame? Did we know this glorious love would leap out of us, leap from one to the other as we looked at each other? When our lips were silent it tore its way out through our eyes. It is a miracle, tremendous, no more guilty than the river hewing its way through the rock of the Grand Cañon! I’ll tell Latham exactly what has happened to us when we were lying quietly upon the knees of the gods. He’ll see it; Latham’s a great man; no one knows that better than I!”
“Thank you, Kit Carrington, for your praise of my future husband,” said Anne, tremulous, but fighting for self-control. “You will never tell him these things. When you’ve had time to consider you will know that this is false, specious reasoning and cowardly. Neither of us will do anything selfish or dishonourable. I shall keep my word, Kit, and you will help me keep it. At any cost we will guard our honour. If Richard were another man—— But even then, how could we? But he being what he is, and I being to him what I am—ah, no! He loves me, heaven knows, but it is not that most. Kit, be true and fine as Richard is, and help me, for indeed this is cruelly hard! On my honour, I’d no idea you cared for me, nor did I know that I loved you as I do, oh, as I do!”
“Say that again, Anne!” Kit implored her, mercilessly. “At least let me hear it again and yet again! And don’t think this is hard only for you. Kiss me, sweet, and tell me how you love me. Your eyes said it first! You’re not any man’s wife. You shall be mine!”
“No, Kit.” Anne put both her hands, palms outward, between her face and Kit. “I am not free, but bound. Richard trusts me, he has my word; he may trust me!”
Her deep, quivering voice broke and shrilled. She had reached the end of her endurance.
“Go away from me, Kit Carrington, go away! I will never again tell you how I love you, I love you, oh, how I love you! Shame to make me weak! Horrible, horrible! Richard, come, come, dear, kind, tender Richard! Kit is cruel to me. Anne, little Anne, come back quick!”
Little Anne had obeyed an instinct that sent her, frightened and white, mystified, yet understanding much, away from the door after she had heard and seen almost all that had passed, but before the actors in the scene discovered her.
Now, when Anne called, she came hastily, young as she was, proving her ability to play a part, saying as she came:
“Yes, Miss Anne, dear, did you want me?”
But little Anne was not equal to the demand made upon her by Anne’s hysterical weeping. She threw her thin arms around the girl, and drew her head down into the hollow of her very hollow shoulder, mothering her and patting her.
“I’m sure I don’t see how you can bother her, Kit, for you are always so very dear, but I do certainly think you’d better run right away! It’ll make her sick to cry so. Just go right home, dear Kit, and you’d better say a prayer to St. Joseph, ’cause he’s the one for husbands. There, there, my poor darling, please try to feel better! Don’t cry! I know it’ll come all right. See how I didn’t die when I was so sick; often things turn out better’n you’d think! Anne, little Anne, will take care of you. Good-bye, dear Kit. I’m sorry, but Mother’s out, and I truly think you’d better go home, just this one time!” she said, coaxing both of her patients purringly.
“Oh, little Anne, little Anne, I used to be little Anne, too! Don’t grow up, child!” sobbed Anne, not lifting her head as Kit went slowly out of the room.