Yet in an instant their screams had been heard, three or four smoke-blackened fire-fighters from beyond the road ran forward with rakes, and in a twinkling the danger was past. Its disappearance was as incredible as its presence.
"Ain't that just like a fire in the woods?" said one of the men, an elderly farmer. He drew a long, tremulous breath. "It's so tarnationquick! It's either all over before you can ketch your breath, or it's got beyond you for good." It evidently did not occur to him to thank the girls for their part. They had only done what every one did in an emergency, the best they could. He looked back at the burned tract on the other side of the road and said: "They've got the best of that all right, too. I jest heard 'em shoutin' that the men from Chitford had worked round from the upper end. So they've got a ring round it. Nothin' to do now but watch that it don't jump. My! 'Twas a close call. I've been to a lot of fires in my day, but I d'know as I ever see aclosetercall!"
"It can't beover!" cried Sylvia, looking at the lurid light across the road. "Why, it isn't an hour since we—"
"Land! No, it ain'tover!" he explained, scornful of her inexperience. "They'll have to have a gang of men here watchin' it all night—and maybe all tomorrow—'less we have some rain. But it won't go no further than the fire-line, and as soon as there're men enough to draw that all around, it'sgotto stop!" He went on to his companion, irritably, pressing his hand to his side: "There ain't no use talkin', I got to quit fire-fightin'. My heart 'most gi'n out on me in the hottest of that. And yit I'm only sixty!"
"It ain't no job for old folks," said the other bitterly. "If it had ha' gone a hundred feet further that way, 'twould ha' been in where Ed Hewitt's been lumberin', and if it had got into them dry tops and brush—well, I guess 'twould ha' gone from here to Chitford village before it stopped. And 'twouldn't ha' stopped there, neither!"
The old man said reflectively: "'Twas the first load of men did the business. 'Twas nip and tuck down to the last foot if we could stop it on that side. I tell you, ten minutes of that kind o' work takes about ten years off'n a man's life. We'd just about gi'n up when we saw 'em coming. I bet I won't be no gladder to see the pearly gates than I was to see them men with hoes."
Molly turned a glowing, quivering face of pride on Sylvia, and then looked past her shoulder with a startled expression into the eyes of one of the fire-fighters, a tall, lean, stooping man, blackened and briar-torn like the rest. "Why, Cousin Austin!" she cried with vehement surprise, "what in the world—" In spite of his grime, she gave him a hearty, astonished, affectionate kiss.
"I was just wondering," said the man, smiling indulgently down on her, "how soon you'd recognize me, you little scatter-brain."
"I thought you were going to stick in Colorado all summer," saidMolly.
"Well, I heard they were short of help at Austin Farm and I came on to help get in the hay," said the man. Both he and Molly seemed to consider this a humorous speech. Then, remembering Sylvia, Molly went through a casual introduction. "This is my cousin—Austin Page—myfavoritecousin! He's really awfully nice, though so plain to look at." She went on, still astonished, "But how'd you gethere?"
"Why, how does anybody in Vermont get to a forest fire?" he answered. "We were out in the hayfield, saw the smoke, left the horses, grabbed what tools we could find, and beat it through the woods. That's the technique of the game up here."
"I didn't know your farm ran anywhere near here," said Molly.
"It isn't so terribly near. We came across lots tolerable fast. But there's a little field, back up on the edge of the woods that isn't so far. Grandfather used to raise potatoes there. I've got it into hay now," he explained.
As they talked, the fire beyond them gave definite signs of yielding. It had evidently been stopped on the far side and now advanced nowhere, showed no longer a malign yellow crest, but only rolling sullenly heavenward a diminishing cloud of smoke. The fire-fighters began to straggle back across the burned tract towards the road, their eyeballs gleaming white in their dark faces.
"Oh, they mustn't walk! I'll take them back—the darlings!" said Molly, starting for her car. She was quite her usual brisk, free-and-easy self now. "Cracky! I hope I've got gas enough. I've certainly been goingsome!"
"Why don't you leave me here?" suggested Sylvia. "I'll walk home.That'll leave room for one more."
"Oh, you can't do that!" protested Molly faintly, though she was evidently at once struck with the plan. "How'd you find your way home?" She turned to her cousin. "See here, Austin, why don'tyoutake Sylvia home? You ought to go anyhow and see Grandfather. Hell be awfully hurt to think you're here and haven't been to see him." She threw instantly into this just conceived idea the force which always carried through her plans. "Do go! I feel so grateful to these men I don't want one of them to walk a step!"
Sylvia had thought of a solitary walk, longing intensely for isolation, and she did not at all welcome the suggestion of adapting herself to a stranger. The stranger, on his part, looked a very unchivalrous hesitation; but this proved to be only a doubt of Sylvia's capacity as a walker.
"If you don't mind climbing a bit, I can take you over the gap between Hemlock and Windward Mountain and make a bee-line for Lydford. It's not an hour from here, that way, but it's ten miles around by the road—and hot and dusty too."
"Can sheclimb!" ejaculated Molly scornfully, impatient to be off with her men. "She went up to Prospect Rock in forty minutes."
She high-handedly assumed that everything was settled as she wished it, and running towards the car, called with an easy geniality to the group of men, starting down the road on foot, "Here, wait a minute, folks, I'll take you back!"
She mounted the car, started the engine, waved her hand to the two behind her, and was off.
The lean, stooping man looked dubiously at Sylvia. "You're sure you don't mind a little climb?" he said.
"Oh no, I like it," she said listlessly. The moment for her was of stale, wearied return to real life, to the actual world which she was continually finding uglier than she hoped. The recollection of Felix Morrison came back to her in a bitter tide.
"All ready?" asked her companion, mopping his forehead with a very dirty handkerchief.
"All ready," she said and turned, with a hanging head, to follow him.
For a time as they plodded up the steep wood-road, overgrown with ferns and rank grass, with dense green walls of beech and oak saplings on either side, what few desultory remarks they exchanged related to Molly, she being literally the only topic of common knowledge between them. Sylvia, automatically responding to her deep-lying impulse to give pleasure, to be pleasing, made an effort to overcome her somber lassitude and spoke of Molly's miraculous competence in dealing with the fire. Her companion said that of course Molly hadn't made all that up out of her head on the spur of the moment. After spending every summer of her life in Lydford, it would be surprising if so energetic a child as Molly hadn't assimilated the Vermont formula for fighting fire. "They always put for the nearest factory and get all hands out," he explained, adding meditatively, as he chewed on a twig: "All the same, the incident shows what I've always maintained about Molly: that she is, like 'most everybody, lamentably miscast. Molly's spirit oughtn't to have taken up its abiding place in that highly ornamental blond shell, condemned after a fashionable girl's education to pendulum swings between Paris and New York and Lydford. It doesn't fit for a cent. It ought to have for habitation a big, gaunt, powerful man's body, and for occupation the running of a big factory." He seemed to be philosophizing more to himself than to Sylvia, and beyond a surprised look into his extremely grimy face, she made no comment. She had taken for granted from the talk between him and Molly that he was one of the "forceful, impossible Montgomery cousins," and had cast her own first remarks in a tone calculated to fit in with the supposititious dialect of such a person. But his voice, his intonations, and his whimsical idea about Molly fitted in with the conception of an "impossible" as little as with the actual visible facts of his ragged shirt-sleeves and faded, earth-stained overalls. They toiled upwards in silence for some moments, the man still chewing on his birch-twig. He noticed her sidelong half-satirical glance at it. "Don't you want one?" he asked, and gravely cut a long, slim rod from one of the saplings in the green wall shutting them into the road. As he gave it to her he explained, "It's the kind they make birch beer of. You nip off the bark with your teeth. You'll like it."
Still more at sea as to what sort of person he might be, and now fearing perhaps to wound him if he should turn out to be a very unsophisticated one, Sylvia obediently set her teeth to the lustrous, dark bark and tore off a bit, which gave out in her mouth a mild, pleasant aromatic tang, woodsy and penetrating, unlike any other taste she knew. "Good, isn't it?" said her companion simply.
She nodded, slowly awakening to a tepid curiosity about the individual who strode beside her, lanky and powerful in his blue jeans. What an odd circumstance, her trudging off through the woods thus with a guide of whom she knew nothing except that he was Molly Sommerville's cousin and worked a Vermont farm—and had certainly the dirtiest face she had ever seen, with the exception of the coal-blackened stokers in the power-house of the University. He spoke again, as though in answer to what might naturally be in her mind: "At the top of the road it crosses a brook, and I think a wash would be possible. I've a bit of soap in my pocket that'll help—though it takes quite a lot of scrubbing to get off fire-fighting grime." He looked pointedly down at her as he talked.
Sylvia was so astonished that she dropped back through years of carefully acquired self-consciousness into a moment of the stark simplicity of childhood. "Why—ismyface dirty?" she cried out.
The man beside her apparently found the contrast between her looks and the heartfelt sincerity of her question too much for him. He burst into helpless laughter, though he was adroit enough to thrust forward as a pretext, "The picture of myowngrime that I get from your accent is tremendous!" But it was evidently not at his own joke that he was laughing.
For an instant Sylvia hung poised very near to extreme annoyance. Never since she had been grown up, had she appeared at such an absurd disadvantage. But at once the mental picture of herself, making inaudible carping strictures on her companion's sootiness and, all unconscious, lifting to observe it a critical countenance as swart as his own—the incongruity smote her deliciously, irresistibly! Sore heart or not, black depression notwithstanding, she needs must laugh, and having laughed, laugh again, laugh louder and longer, and finally, like a child, laugh for the sake of laughing, till out through this unexpected channel she discharged much of the stagnant bitterness around her heart.
Her companion laughed with her. The still, sultry summer woods echoed with the sound. "How human, how lusciouslyhuman!" he exclaimed. "Neither of us thought thathemight be the blackened one!"
"Oh, minecan'tbe as bad as yours!" gasped out Sylvia, but when she rubbed a testing handkerchief on her cheek, she went off in fresh peals at the sight of the resultant black smears.
"Don't, for Heaven's sake, waste that handkerchief," cautioned her companion. "It's the only towel between us. Mine's impossible!" He showed her the murky rag which was his own; and as they spoke, they reached the top of the road, heard the sound of water, and stood beside the brook.
He stepped across it, in one stride of his long legs, rolled up his shirt-sleeves, took a book out of his pocket, laid it on a stone, and knelt down. "I choose this formywash-basin," he said, indicating a limpid pool paved with clean gray pebbles.
Sylvia answered in the same note of play, "This'll be mine." It lay at the foot of a tiny waterfall, plashing with a tinkling note into transparent shallows. She cast an idle glance on the book he had laid down and read its title, "A History of the Institution of Property," and reflected that she had been right in thinking it had a familiar-looking cover. She had dusted books with that sort of cover all her life.
Molly's cousin produced from his overalls a small piece of yellow kitchen-soap, which he broke into scrupulously exact halves and presented with a grave flourish to Sylvia. "Now, go to it," he exhorted her; "I bet I get a better wash than you."
Sylvia took off her hat, rolled up her sleeves, and began on vigorous ablutions. She had laughed, yes, and heartily, but in her complicated many-roomed heart a lively pique rubbed shoulders with her mirth, and her merriment was tinctured with a liberal amount of the traditional feminine horrified disgust at having been uncomely, at having unconsciously been subjected to an indignity. She was determined that no slightest stain should remain on her smooth, fine-textured skin. She felt, as a pretty woman always feels, that her personality was indissolubly connected with her looks, and it was a symbolic act which she performed as she fiercely scrubbed her face with the yellow soap till its acrid pungency blotted out for her the woodland aroma of moist earth and green leaves. She dashed the cold water up on her cheeks till the spattering drops gleamed like crystals on the crisp waviness of her ruddy brown hair. She washed her hands and arms in the icy mountain water till they were red with the cold, hot though the day was. She was chilled, and raw with the crude astringency of the soap, but she felt cleansed to the marrow of her bones, as though there had been some mystic quality in this lustration in running water, performed under the open sky. The racy, black-birch tang still lingering on her tongue was a flavor quite in harmony with this severely washed feeling. It was a taste notably clean.
She looked across the brook at her companion, now sitting back on his heels, and saw that there had emerged from his grime a thin, tanned, high-nosed face, topped by drab-colored hair of no great abundance and lighted by a pair of extraordinarily clear, gray eyes. She perceived no more in the face at that moment, because the man, as he looked up at her, became nothing but a dazzled mirror from which was reflected back to her the most flattering image of her own appearance. Almost actually she saw herself as she appeared to him, a wood-nymph, kneeling by the flowing water, vital, exquisite, strong, radiant in a cool flush, her uncovered hair gleaming in a thousand loosened waves. Like most comely women of intelligence Sylvia was intimately familiar with every phase of her own looks, and she knew down to the last blood-corpuscle that she had never looked better. But almost at once came the stab that Felix Morrison was not the man who was looking at her, and the heartsick recollection that he would never again be there to see her. Her moment of honest joy in being lovely passed. She stood up with a clouded face, soberly pulled down her sleeves, and picked up her hat.
"Oh, why don't you leave it off?" said the man across the brook."You'd be so much more comfortable!" She knew that he meant her hairwas too pretty to cover, and did not care what he meant. "All right,I'll carry it," she assented indifferently.
He did not stir, gazing up at her frankly admiring. Sylvia made out, from the impression he evidently now had of her, that her face had really been very, very dirty; and at the recollection of that absurd ascent of the mountain by those two black-faced, twig-chewing individuals, a return of irrepressible laughter quivered on her lips. Before his eyes, as swiftly, as unaccountably, as utterly as an April day shifts its moods, she had changed from radiant, rosy wood-goddess to saddened mortal and thence on into tricksy, laughing elf. He burst out on her, "Whoareyou, anyhow?"
She remembered with a start. "Why, that's so, Molly didn't mention my name—isn't that like Molly! Why, I'm Sylvia Marshall,"
"You may benamedSylvia Marshall!" he said, leaving an inference in the air like incense.
"Well, yes, to be sure," rejoined Sylvia; "I heard somebody only the other day say that an introduction was the quaintest of grotesques, since people's names are the most—"
He applied a label with precision. "Oh, you know Morrison?"
She was startled at this abrupt emergence of the name which secretly filled her mind and was aware with exasperation that she was blushing. Her companion appeared not to notice this. He was attempting the difficult feat of wiping his face on the upper part of his sleeve, and said in the intervals of effort: "Well, you knowmyname. Molly didn't forget that."
"ButIdid," Sylvia confessed. "I was so excited by the fire I never noticed at all. I've been racking my brains to remember, all the way up here."
For some reason the man seemed quite struck with this statement and eyed her with keenness as he said: "Oh—really? Well, my name is Austin Page." At the candid blankness of her face he showed a boyish flash of white teeth in a tanned face. "Do you mean to say you've never heard of me?"
"ShouldI?" said Sylvia, with a graceful pretense of alarm. "Do you write, or something? Lay it to my ignorance. It's immense."
He shook his head. He smiled down on her. She noticed now that his eyes were very kind as well as clear and keen. "No, I don't write, or anything. There's no reason why you should ever have heard of me. I only thought—I thought possibly Molly or Uncle George might have happened to mention me."
"I'm only on from the West for a visit," explained Sylvia. "I never was in Lydford before. I don't know the people there."
"Well then, to avoid Morrison's strictures on introductions I'll add to my name the information that I am thirty-two years old; a graduate of Columbia University; that I have some property in Colorado which gives me a great deal of trouble; and a farm with a wood lot in Vermont which is the joy of my heart. I cannot endure politics; I play the flute, like my eggs boiled three minutes, and admire George Meredith."
His manoeuvers with his sleeve were so preposterous that Sylvia now cried to him: "Oh, don't twist around that way. You'll give yourself a crick in the neck. Here's my handkerchief. We were going to share that, anyhow."
"And you," he went on gravely, wiping his face with the bit of cambric, "are Sylvia Marshall, presumably Miss; you can laugh at a joke on yourself; are not afraid to wash your face with kitchen soap; and apparently are the only girl in the twentieth century who has not a mirror and a powder-puff concealed about her person."
All approbation was sweet to Sylvia. She basked in this. "Oh, I'm a Hottentot, a savage from the West, as I told you," she said complacently.
"You've been in Lydford long enough to hear Morrison hold forth on the idiocies of social convention, the while he neatly manipulates them to his own advantage."
Sylvia had dreaded having to speak of Morrison, but she was now greatly encouraged by the entire success of her casual tone, as she explained, "Oh, he's an old friend of my aunt's, and he's been at the house a good deal." She ventured to try herself further, and inquired with a bright look of interest, "What do you think of his engagement to your cousin Molly?"
He was petrified with astonishment. "Mollyengaged toMorrison!" he cried. "We can't be talking about the same people. I meanFelixMorrison the critic."
She felt vindicated by his stupefaction and liked him for it. "Why, yes; hadn't you heard?" she asked, with an assumption of herself seeing nothing surprising in the news.
"No, I hadn't, and I can't believe it now!" he said, blinking his eyes. "I never heard such an insane combination of names in my life." He went on, "What under thesundoes Molly want of Morrison!"
Sylvia was vexed with him for this unexpected view. He was not sodiscerning as she had thought. She turned away and picked up her hat."We ought to be going on," she said, and as they walked she answered,"You don't seem to have a very high opinion of Mr. Morrison."
He protested with energy. "Oh yes, I have. Quite the contrary, I think him one of the most remarkable men I know, and one of the finest. I admire him immensely. I'd trust his taste sooner than I would my own."
To this handsome tribute Sylvia returned, smiling, "The inference is that you don't think much of Molly."
"IknowMolly!" he said simply. "I've known her and loved her ever since she was a hot-tempered, imperious little girl—which is all she is now. Engaged … and engaged to Morrison! It's a plain case of schoolgirl infatuation!" He was lost in wonder, uneasy wonder it seemed, for after a period of musing he brought out: "They'll cut each other's throats inside six months. Or Molly'll cut her own. What under the sun was her grandfather thinking of?"
Sylvia said gravely, "Girls' grandfathers have such an influence in their marriages."
He smiled a rueful recognition of the justice of her thrust and then fell into silence.
The road did not climb up now, but led along the side of the mountain. Through the dense woods the sky-line, first guessed at, then clearly seen between the thick-standing tree-trunks, sank lower and lower. "We are approaching," said Page, motioning in front of them, "the jumping-off place." They passed from the tempered green light of the wood and emerged upon a great windy plateau, carpeted thickly with deep green moss, flanked right and left with two mountain peaks and roofed over with an expanse of brilliant summer sky. Before them the plateau stretched a mile or more, wind-swept, sun-drenched, with an indescribable bold look of great altitude; but close to them at one side ran a parapet-like line of tumbled rock and beyond this a sheer descent. The eye leaped down abrupt slopes of forest to the valley they had left, now a thousand feet below them, jewel-like with mystic blues and greens, tremulous with heat. On the noble height where they stood, the wind blew cool from the sea of mist-blue peaks beyond the valley.
Sylvia was greatly moved. "Oh, what a wonderful spot!" she said under her breath. "I never dreamed that anything could be—" She burst out suddenly, scarcely knowing what she said, "Oh, I wish mymothercould be here!" She had not thought of her mother for days, and now hardly knew that she had spoken her name. Standing there, poised above the dark richness of the valley, her heart responding to those vast airy spaces by an upward-soaring sweep, the quick tears of ecstasy were in her eyes. She had entirely forgotten herself and her companion. He did not speak. His eyes were on her face.
She moved to the parapet of rock and leaned against it. The action brought her to herself and she flashed around on Page a grateful smile. "It's a very beautiful spot you've brought me to," she said.
He came up beside her now. "It's a favorite of mine," he said quietly. "If I come straight through the woods it's not more than a mile from my farm. I come up here for the sunsets sometimes—or for dawn."
Sylvia found the idea almost too much for her. "Oh!" she cried—"dawn here!"
"Yes," said the man, smiling faintly. "It's all of that!"
In her life of plains and prairies Sylvia had never been upon a great height, had never looked down and away upon such reaches of far valley, such glorious masses of sunlit mountain; and beyond them, giving wings to the imagination, were mountains, more mountains, distant, incalculably distant, with unseen hollow valleys between; and finally, mountains again, half cloud, melting indistinguishably into the vaporous haze of the sky. Above her, sheer and vast, lay Hemlock Mountain, all its huge bulk a sleeping, passionless calm. Beyond was the solemnity of Windward Mountain's concave shell, full to the brim with brooding blue shadows, a well of mystery in that day of wind-blown sunshine. Beneath her, above her, before her, seemingly the element in which she was poised, was space, illimitable space. She had never been conscious of such vastness, she was abashed by it, she was exalted by it, she knew a moment of acute shame for the pettiness of her personal grievances. For a time her spirit was disembarrassed of the sorry burden of egotism, and she drank deep from the cup of healing which Nature holds up in such instants of beatitude. Her eyes were shining pools of peace….
They went on in a profound silence across the plateau, the deep, soft moss bearing them up with a tough elasticity, the sun hot and lusty on their heads, the sweet, strong summer wind swift and loud in their ears, the only sound in all that enchanted upland spot. Often Sylvia lifted her face to the sky, so close above her, to the clouds moving with a soundless rhythm across the sky; once or twice she turned her head suddenly from one side to the other, to take in all the beauty at one glance, and smiled on it all, a vague, sunny, tender smile. But she did not speak.
As she trod on the thick moss upspringing under her long, light step, her advance seemed as buoyant as though she stepped from cloud to cloud….
When they reached the other side, and were about to begin the descent into Lydford valley, she lingered still. She looked down into the valley before her, across to the mountains, and, smiling, with half-shut eyes of supreme satisfaction, she said under her breath: "It's Beethoven—just the blessedness of Beethoven! The valley is a legato passage, quiet and flowing; those far, up-pricking hills, staccato; and the mountains here, the solemn chords."
Her companion did not answer. She looked up at him, inquiringly, thinking that he had not heard her, and found him evidently too deeply moved to speak. She was startled, almost frightened, almost shocked by the profundity of his gaze upon her. Her heart stood still and gave a great leap. Chiefly she was aware of an immense astonishment and incredulity. An hour before he had never seen her, had never heard of her—and during that hour she had been barely aware of him, absorbed in herself, indifferent. How could he in that hour have …
He looked away and said steadily, "—and the river is the melody that binds it all together."
Sylvia drew a great breath of relief. She had been the victim of some extraordinary hallucination: "—with the little brooks for variations on the theme," she added hastily.
He held aside an encroaching briar, stretching its thorny arm across the path. "Here's the beginning of the trail down to Lydford," he said. "We will be there in twenty minutes. It's almost a straight drop down."
If Sylvia wondered, as she dropped down the heights to the valley, what her reception might be at her aunt's ceremonious household when she entered escorted by a strange hatless man in blue overalls, her fancy fell immeasurably short of the actual ensuing sensation. Mrs. Marshall-Smith, her stepson, Felix Morrison, and old Mr. Sommerville were all sitting together on the wide north veranda, evidently waiting to be called to luncheon when, at half-past one, the two pedestrians emerged through a side wicket in the thick green hedge of spruce, and advanced up the path, with the free, swinging step of people who have walked far and well. The effect on the veranda was unimaginable. Sheer, open-mouthed stupefaction blurred for an instant the composed, carefully arranged masks of those four exponents of decorum. They gaped and stared, unable to credit their eyes.
And then, according to their natures, they acted. Mrs. Marshall-Smith rose quickly, smiled brilliantly, and stepped forward with welcoming outstretched hands. "Why, Sylvia dear, how delightful! What an unexpected pleasure, Mr. Page!"
Old Mr. Sommerville fairly bounded past Sylvia, caught the man's arm, and said in an anxious, affectionate, startled voice, "Why, Austin! Austin! Austin!"
Morrison rose, but stood quietly by his chair, his face entirely expressionless, palpably and correctly "at attention." He had not seen Sylvia since the announcement of his engagement the day before. He gave her now a graceful, silent, friendly salute from a distance as she stood by her aunt, he called out to her companion a richly cordial greeting of "Well, Page. This is luck indeed!" but he indicated by his immobility that as a stranger he would not presume to go further until the first interchange between blood-kin was over.
As for Arnold, he neither stirred from his chair, nor opened his mouth to speak. A slow smile widened on his lips: it expanded. He grinned delightedly down at his cigarette, and up at the ceiling, and finally broke into an open laugh of exquisite enjoyment of the scene before him.
Four people were talking at once; Mr. Sommerville, a dismayed old hand still clutching at the new-comer, was protesting with extreme vigor, and being entirely drowned out by the others. "Of course he can't stay—as heis!I'll go home with him at once! His room at my house is always ready for him!—fresh clothes!—No, no—impossible to stay!" Mrs. Marshall-Smith was holding firm with her loveliest manner of warm friendliness concentrated on Page. "Oh, no ceremony, Mr. Page, not between old friends. Luncheon is just ready—who cares how you look?" She did not physically dispute with Mr. Sommerville the possession of the new-comer, but she gave entirely that effect.
Sylvia, unable to meet Morrison's eyes, absorbed in the difficulty of the moment for her, unillumined by the byplay between her aunt and old Mr. Sommerville, strove for an appearance of vivacious loquacity, and cast into the conversation entirely disregarded bits of description of the fire. "Oh, Tantine, such an excitement!—we took nine men with hoes up such a steep—!" And finally Page, resisting old Mr. Sommerville's pull on his arm, was saying: "If luncheon is ready, and I'm invited, no more needs to be said. I've been haying and fire-fighting since seven this morning. A wolf is nothing compared with me." He looked across the heads of the three nearest him and called to Arnold: "Smith, you'll lend me some flannels, won't you? We must be much of the same build."
Mrs. Marshall-Smith turned, taking no pains to hide her satisfaction. She positively gloated over the crestfallen Mr. Sommerville. "Sylvia, run quick and have Hélène smooth your hair. And call to Tojiko to put on an extra place for luncheon. Arnold, take Mr. Page up to your room, won't you, so that he—"
Sylvia, running up the stairs, heard her late companion protesting: "Oh, just for a change of clothes, only a minute—you needn't expect me to do any washing. I'm clean. I'm washed within an inch of my life—yellow soap—kitchen soap!"
"And our little scented toilet futilities," Morrison's cameo of small-talk carried to the upper hall. "What could they add to such a Spartan lustration?"
"Hurry, Hélène," said Sylvia. "It is late, and Mr. Page is dying of hunger,"
In spite of the exhortation to haste, Hélène stopped short, uplifted brush in hand. "Mr. Page, the millionaire!" she exclaimed.
Sylvia blinked at her in the glass, amazed conjectures racing through her mind. But she had sufficient self-possession to say, carelessly as though his identity was nothing to her: "I don't know. It is the first time I have seen him. He certainly is not handsome."
Hélène thrust in the hairpins with impassioned haste and deftness, and excitedly snatched a lace jacket from a drawer. To the maid's despair Sylvia refused this adornment, refused the smallest touch of rouge, refused an ornament in her hair. Hélène wrung her hands. "But see, Mademoiselle is not wise! For what good is it to be so savage! He is more rich than all! They say he owns all the State of Colorado!"
Sylvia, already in full retreat towards the dining-room, caught this last geographic extravagance of Gallic fancy, and laughed, and with this mirth still in her face made her re-entry on the veranda. She had not been away three minutes from the group there, and she was to the eye as merely flushed and gay when she came back as when she went away; but a revolution had taken place. Closely shut in her hand, she held, held fast, the key Hélène had thrust there. Behind her smile, her clear, bright look of valiant youth, a great many considerations were being revolved with extreme rapidity by an extremely swift and active brain.
Swift and active as was the brain, it fairly staggered under the task of instantly rearranging the world according to the new pattern: for the first certainty to leap into sight was that the pattern was utterly changed by the events of the morning. She had left the house, betrayed, defenseless save for a barren dignity, and she had re-entered it in triumph, or at least with a valid appearance of triumph, an appearance which had already tided her over the aching difficulty of the first meeting with Morrison and might carry her … she had no time now to think how far.
Page and Arnold were still invisible when she emerged again on the veranda, and Mrs. Marshall-Smith pounced on her with the frankest curiosity. "Sylvia, do tell us—how in the world—"
Sylvia was in the midst of a description of the race to the fire, as vivid as she could make it, when Arnold sauntered back and after him, in a moment, Page, astonishingly transformed by clothes. His height meant distinction now. Sylvia noted again his long, strong hands, his aquiline, tanned face and clear eyes, his thoughtful, observant eyes. There was a whimsical quirk of his rather thin but gentle lips which reminded her of the big bust of Emerson in her father's study. She liked all this; but her suspiciousness, alert for affront, since the experience with Morrison, took offense at his great ease of manner. It had seemed quite natural and unaffected to her, in fact she had not at all noticed it before; but now that she knew of his great wealth, she instantly conceived a resentful idea that possibly it might come from the self-assurance of a man who knows himself much courted. She held her head high, gave to him as to Arnold a nod of careless recognition, and continued talking: "Such a road—so steep—sand half-way to the hubs, such water-bars!" She turned to Morrison with her first overt recognition of the new status between them. "You ought to have seen your fiancée! She was wonderful! I was proud of her!"
Morrison nodded a thoughtful assent. "Yes, Molly's energy is irresistible," he commented, casting his remark in the form of a generalization the significance of which did not pass unnoticed by Sylvia's sharp ears. They were the first words he had spoken to her since his engagement.
"Luncheon is ready," said Mrs. Marshall-Smith. "Do come in." Every one by this time being genuinely hungry, and for various reasons extremely curious about the happenings back of Sylvia's appearance, the meal was dedicated frankly to eating, varied only by Sylvia's running account of the fire. "And then Molly wanted to take the fire-fighters home, and I offered to walk to have more room for them, and Mr. Page brought me up the other side of Hemlock and over the pass between Hemlock and Windward and down past Deer Cliff, home," she wound up, compressing into tantalizing brevity what was patently for her listeners by far the most important part of the expedition.
"Well, whatever route he took, it is astonishing that he knew the way to Lydford at all," commented Mrs. Marshall-Smith. "I don't believe you've been here before for years!" she said to Page.
"It's my confounded shyness," he explained, turning to Sylvia with a twinkle. "The grand, sophisticated ways of Lydford are too much for the nerves of a plain-living rustic like me. When I farm in Vermont the spirit of the place takes hold of me. I'm quite apt to eat my pie with my knife, and Lydford wouldn't like that."
Sylvia was aware, through the laughter which followed this joking remark, that there was an indefinable stir around the table. His turning to her had been pronounced. She took a sore pleasure in Morrison's eclipse. For the first time he was not the undisputed center of that circle. He accepted it gravely, a little preoccupied, a little absent, a wonderfully fine and dignified figure. Under her misanthropic exultation, Sylvia felt again and again the stab of her immense admiration for him, her deep affinity for his way of conducting life. Whatever place he might take in the circle around the luncheon table, she found him inevitably at the center of all her own thoughts. However it might seem to those evidently greatly struck with her extraordinary good luck, her triumph was in reality only the most pitiful of pretenses. But such as it was, and it gleamed richly enough on the eyes of the onlookers, she shook it out with a flourish and gave no sign of heartsick qualms. She gave a brilliantly undivided attention to the bit of local history Page was telling her, of a regiment of Green Mountain Boys who had gone down to the Battle of Bennington over the pass between Windward and Hemlock Mountain, and she was able to stir Page to enthusiasm by an appreciative comparison of their march with the splendid and affecting incident before Marathon, when the thousand hoplites from the little town of Plataea crossed the Cithaeron range and went down to the plain to join the Athenians in their desperate stand.
"How do youhappento come East just now, anyhow?" inquired old Mr.Sommerville, resolutely shouldering his way into the conversation.
"My yellow streak!" affirmed his nephew. "Colorado got too much for me. And besides, I was overcome by an atavistic longing to do chores." He turned to Sylvia again, the gesture as unconscious and simple as a boy's. "My great-grandfather was a native of these parts, and about once in so often I revert to type."
"All my mother's people came from this region too," Sylvia said. She added meditatively, "And I think I must have reverted to type—up there on the mountain, this morning."
He looked at her silently, with softening eyes.
"You'll be going back soon, I suppose, as usual!" said old Mr.Sommerville with determination.
"To Colorado?" inquired Page. "No, I think—I've a notion I'll stay on this summer for some time. There is an experiment I want to try with alfalfa in Vermont."
Over his wineglass Arnold caught Sylvia's eye, and winked.
"Still reading as much as ever, I suppose." Mr. Sommerville was not to be put down. "When I last saw you, it was some fool socialistic poppycock about the iniquity of private exploitation of natural resources. How'd they ever have been exploited any other way I'd like to know! What's socialism? Organized robbery! Nothing else! 'Down with success! Down with initiative! Down with brains!' Stuff!"
"It's not socialism this time: it's Professor Merritt's theories on property," said Sylvia to the old gentleman, blandly ignoring his ignoring of her.
Page stared at her in astonishment. "Are you a clairvoyant?" he cried.
"No, no," she explained, laughing. "You took it out of your pocket up there by the brook."
"But you saw only the title. Merritt's name isn't on the cover."
"Oh, it's a pretty well-known book," said Sylvia easily. "And my father's a professor of Economics. When I was little I used to have books like that to build houses with, instead of blocks. And I've had to keep them in order and dusted ever since. I'm not saying that I know much about their insides."
"Just look there!" broke in Arnold. "Did I ever see a young lady pass up such a perfectly good chance to bluff!"
As usual nobody paid the least attention to his remark. The conversation shifted to a radical play which had been on the boards in Paris, the winter before.
After luncheon, they adjourned into the living-room. As the company straggled across the wide, dimly shining, deeply shaded hall, Sylvia felt her arm seized and held, and turning her head, looked into the laughing face of Arnold. "What kind of flowers does Judy like the best?" he inquired, the question evidently the merest pretext to detain her, for as the others moved out of earshot he said in a delighted whisper, his eyes gleaming in the dusk with amused malice: "Go it, Sylvia! Hit 'em out! It's worth enduring oceans of Greek history to see old Sommerville squirm. Molly gone—Morrison as poor as a church mouse; and now Page going fast before his very eyes—"
She shook off his hand with genuine annoyance. "I don't know what you're talking about, Arnold. You're horrid! Judith doesn't like cut flowers at all,—any kind. She likes them alive, on plants."
"Shewould!" Arnold was rapt in his habitual certainty that every peculiarity of Judith's was another reason for prostrate adoration. "I'll send her a window-box for every window in the hospital." His admiration overflowed to Judith's sister. He patted her on the shoulder. "You're all right too, Sylvia. You're batting about three-sixty, right now. I've always told the girls when they said Page was offish that if they could only get in under his guard once—and somehow you've done it. I bet onyou—" He began to laugh at her stern face of reproof. "Oh, yes, yes, I agree! You don't know what I'm talking about! It's just alfalfa in Vermont! Only my low vulgarity to think anything else!" He moved away down the hall. "Beat it! I slope!"
"Where are you going?" she asked.
"Away! Away!" he answered. "Anywhere that's away. The air is rank with Oscar Wilde and the Renaissance. I feel them coming." Still laughing, he bounded upstairs, three steps at a time.
Sylvia stepped forward, crossed the threshold of the living-room, and paused by the piano, penetrated by bitter-sweet associations. If Morrison felt them also, he gave no sign. He had chosen a chair by a distant window and was devoting himself to Molly's grandfather, who accepted this delicate and entirely suitable attention with a rather glum face. Mrs. Marshall-Smith and Page still stood in the center of the room, and turned as Sylvia came in. "Do give us some music, Sylvia," said her aunt, sinking into a chair while Page came forward to sit near the piano.
Sylvia's fingers rested on the keys for a moment, her face very grave, almost somber, and then, as though taking a sudden determination, she began to play a Liszt Liebes-Traum. It was the last music Morrison had played to her before the beginning of the change. Into its fevered cadences she poured the quivering, astonished hurt of her young heart.
No one stirred during the music nor for the moment afterward, in which she turned about to face the room. She looked squarely at Morrison, who was rolling a cigarette with meticulous care, and as she looked, he raised his eyes and gave her across the room one deep, flashing glance of profound significance. That was all. That was enough. That was everything. Sylvia turned back to the piano shivering, hot and cold with secret joy. His look said, "Yes, of course, a thousand times of course, you are the one in my heart." What the facts said for him was, "But I am going to marry Molly because she has money."
Sylvia was horrified that she did not despise him, that she did not resent his entering her heart again with the intimacy of that look. Her heart ran out to welcome him back; but from the sense of furtiveness she shrank back with her lifetime habit and experience of probity, with the instinctive distaste for stealth engendered only by long and unbroken acquaintance with candor. With a mental action as definite as the physical one of freeing her feet from a quicksand she turned away from the alluring, dim possibility opened to her by that look. No, no! No stains, no smears, no shufflings! She was conscious of no moral impulse, in the usual sense of the word. Her imagination took in no possibility of actual wrong. But when, with a fastidious impulse of good taste, she turned her back on something ugly, she turned her back unwittingly on something worse than ugly.
But it was not easy! Oh, not at all easy! She quailed with a sense of her own weakness, so unexpected, so frightening. Would she resist it the next time? How pierced with helpless ecstasy she had been by that interchange of glances! What was there, in that world, by which she could steady herself?
"How astonishingly well you play," said Page, rousing himself from the dreamy silence of appreciation.
"I ought to," she said with conscious bitterness. "I earn my living by teaching music."
She was aware from across the room of an electric message from Aunt Victoria protesting against her perversity; and she reflected with a morose amusement that however delicately phrased Aunt Victoria's protests might be, its substance was the same as that of Hélène, crying out on her for not adding the soupçon of rouge. She took a sudden resolution. Well, why not? Everything conspired to push her in that direction. The few factors which did not were mere imbecile idealism, or downright hypocrisy. She drew a long breath. She smiled at Page, a smile of reference to something in common between them. "Shan't I play you some Beethoven?" she asked, "something with a legato passage and great solemn chords, and a silver melody binding the whole together?"
"Oh yes, do!" he said softly. And in a moment she was putting all of her intelligence, her training, and her capacity to charm into the tones of the E-flat Minuet.
The millionaire proprietor had asked them all over to the Austin Farm, and as they drew near the end of the very expensive and delicately served meal which Page had spoken of as a "picnic-lunch," various plans for the disposition of the afternoon were suggested. These suggestions were prefaced by the frank statement of the owner of the place that whatever else the others did, it was his own intention to take Miss Marshall through a part of his pine plantations and explain his recent forestry operations to her. The assumption that Miss Marshall would of course be interested in his pine plantations and lumbering operations struck nobody but Miss Marshall as queer. With the most hearty and simple unconsciousness, they unanimously felt that of course Miss Marshallwouldbe interested in the pine plantations and the lumbering operations of any man who was worth nobody knew how many millions in coal, and who was so obviously interested in her.
Sylvia had been for some weeks observing the life about her with very much disillusioned eyes and she now labeled the feeling on the part of her friends with great accuracy, saying to herself cynically, "If it were prize guinea-pigs or collecting beer-steins, they would all be just as sure that I would jump up and say, 'Oh yes,doshow me, Mr. Page!'" Following this moody reflection she immediately jumped up and said enthusiastically, "Oh yes,doshow me, Mr. Page!" The brilliance in her eyes during these weeks came partly from a relieved sense of escape from a humiliating position, and partly from an amusement at the quality of human nature which was as dubiously enjoyable as the grim amusement of biting on a sore tooth.
She now took her place by the side of their host, and thought, looking at his outdoor aspect, that her guess at what to wear had been better than Aunt Victoria's or Molly's. For the question of what to wear had been a burning one. Pressure had been put on her to don just a lacy, garden-party toilette of lawn and net as now automatically barred both Aunt Victoria and Molly from the proposed expedition to the woods. Nobody had had the least idea what was to be the color of the entertainment offered them, for the great significance of the affair was that it was the first time that Page had ever invited any one to the spot for which he evidently felt such an unaccountable affection. Aunt Victoria had explained to Sylvia, "It's always at the big Page estate in Lenox that he entertains, or rather that he gets his mother to do the absolutely indispensable entertaining for him." Morrison said laughingly: "Isn't it the very quintessence of quaintness to visit him there! To watch his detached, whimsical air of not being in the least a part of all the magnificence which bears his name. He insists, you know, that he doesn't begin to know his way around that huge house!" "It was his father who built the Lenox place," commented Mrs. Marshall-Smith. "It suitedhistaste to perfection. Austin seems to have a sort of Marie-Antoinette reaction towards a somewhat painfully achieved simplicity. He's not the man to take any sort of pose. If he were, it would be impossible not to suspect him of a little pose in his fondness for going back to his farmer great-grandfather's setting." Guided by this conversation, and by shrewd observations of her own, Sylvia had insisted, even to the point of strenuousness, upon wearing to this first housewarming a cloth skirt and coat, tempering the severity of this costume with a sufficiently feminine and beruffled blouse of silk. As their car had swung up before the plain, square, big-chimneyed old house, and Page had come to meet them, dressed in khaki-colored forester's garb, with puttees, Aunt Victoria had been generous enough to admit by an eye-flash to Sylvia that the girl knew her business very well. There was not, of course, Sylvia reflected, the slightest pretense of obscurity between them as to what, under the circumstances, her business was.
All this lay back of the fact that, as Sylvia, her face bright with spontaneous interest in pine plantations and lumbering operations, stepped to the side of the man in puttees, her costume exactly suited his own.
From the midst of a daring and extremely becoming arrangement of black and white striped chiffon and emerald-green velvet, Molly's beautiful face smiled on them approvingly. For various reasons, the spectacle afforded her as much pleasure as it did extreme discomfort to her grandfather, and with her usual masterful grasp on a situation she began to arrange matters so that the investigation of pine plantations and lumber operations should be conducteden tête-à-tête. "Mrs. Marshall-Smith, you're going to stay here, of course, to look at Austin's lovely view! Think of his having hidden that view away from us all till now! I want to go through the house later on, and without Austin, so I can linger and pry if I like! I want to look at every single thing. It's lovely—the completest Yankee setting! It looks as though we all ought to have on clean gingham aprons and wear steel-rimmed spectacles. No, Austin, don't frown! I don't mean that for a knock. I love it, honestly I do! I always thought I'd like to wear clean gingham aprons myself. The only things that are out of keeping are those shelves and shelves and shelves of solemn books with such terrible titles!"
"That's a fact, Page," said Morrison, laughing. "Molly's hit the nail squarely. Your modern, economic spasms over the organization of industrialism are out of place in that delightful, eighteenth century, plain old interior. They threwtheirfits over theology!"
The owner of the house nodded. "Yes, you know your period! A great-great-grandfather of mine, a ministerial person, had left a lot of books on the nature of the Trinity and Free Will and such. They had to be moved up to the attic to make room for mine. What books will be on those shelves a hundred years from now, I wonder?"
"Treatises on psychic analysis, on how to transfer thought without words, unless I read the signs of the times wrong," Morrison hazarded a guess.
Molly was bored by this talk and anxious to get the walkers off. "You'd better be starting if you're going far up on the mountain, Austin. We have to be back for a tea at Mrs. Neville's, where Sylvia's to pour. Mrs. Neville would have a thing or two to say to us, if we made her lose her main drawing card."
"Are you coming, Morrison?" asked Page.
"No, he isn't," said Molly decidedly. "He's going to stay to play to me on that delicious tin-panny old harpsichordy thing in your 'best room.' You do call it the 'best room,' don't you? They always do in New England dialect stories. Grandfather, you have your cards with you, haven't you? You always have. If you'll get them out, Felix and Arnold and I'll play whist with you."
Only one of those thus laid hold of, slipped out from her strong little fingers. Arnold raised himself, joint by joint, from his chair, and announced that he was a perfect nut-head when it came to whist. "And, anyhow," he went on insistently, raising his voice as Molly began to order him back into the ranks—"And, anyhow, I don't want to play whist! And I do want to see what Page has been up to all this time he's kept so dark about his goings-on over here. No, Molly, you needn't waste any more perfectly good language on me. You can boss everybody else if you like, but I'm the original, hairy wild-man who gets what he wants."
He strolled off across the old-fashioned garden and out of the gate with the other two, his attention given as usual to lighting a cigarette. It was an undertaking of some difficulty on that day of stiff September wind which blew Sylvia's hair about her ears in bright, dancing flutters.
They were no more than out of earshot of the group left on the porch, than Sylvia, as so often happened in her growing acquaintanceship with Page, found herself obliged entirely to reconstruct an impression of him. It was with anything but a rich man's arrogant certainty of her interest that he said, very simply as he said everything: "I appreciate very much, Miss Marshall, your being willing to come along and see all this. It's a part of your general kindness to everybody. I hope it won't bore you to extremity. I'm so heart and soul in it myself, I shan't know when to stop talking about it. In fact I shan't want to stop, even if I know I should. I've never said much about it to any one before, and I very much want your opinion on it."
Sylvia felt a decent pinch of shame, and her eyes were not brilliant with sardonic irony but rather dimmed with self-distrust as she answered with a wholesome effort for honesty: "I really don't know a single thing about forestry, Mr. Page. You'll have to start in at the very beginning, and explain everything. I hope I've sense enough to take an intelligent interest." Very different, this, from the meretricious sparkle of her, "Oh yes,doshow me, Mr. Page." She felt that to be rather cheap, as she remembered it. She wondered if he had seen its significance, had seen through her. From a three weeks' intensive acquaintance with him, she rather thought he had. His eyes were clear, formidably so. He put her on her mettle.
Arnold had lighted his cigarette by this time, offered one to Page with his incurable incapacity to remember that not every sane man smokes, and on being refused, put his hands deep in his pockets. The three tall young people were making short work of the stretch of sunny, windy, upland pasture, and were already almost in the edge of the woods which covered the slope of the mountain above them up to the very crest, jewel-green against the great, piled, cumulus clouds.
"Well, Iwillbegin at the beginning, then," said Page. "I'll begin back in 1762, when this valley was settled and my ever-so-many-greats-grandfather took possession of a big slice of this side of Hemlock Mountain, with the sole idea that trees were men's enemies. The American colonists thought of forests, you know, as places for Indians to lurk, spots that couldn't be used for corn, growths to be exterminated as fast as possible."
They entered the woods now, walking at a good pace up the steeply rising, grass-grown wood-road. Sylvia quite consciously summoned all her powers of attention and concentration for the hour before her, determined to make a good impression to counteract whatever too great insight her host might have shown in the matter of her first interest. She bent her fine brows with the attention she had so often summoned to face a difficult final examination, to read at the correct tempo a complicated piece of music, to grasp the essentials of a new subject. Her trained interest in understanding things, which of late had been feeding on rather moldy scraps of cynical psychology, seized with energy and delight on a change of diet. She not only tried to be interested. Very shortly she was interested, absorbed, intent. What Page had to say fascinated her. She even forgot who he was, and that he was immensely rich. Though this forgetfulness was only momentary it was an unspeakable relief and refreshment to her.
She listened intently; at times she asked a pertinent question; as she walked she gave the man an occasional direct survey, as impersonal as though he were a book from which she was reading. And exactly as an intelligent reader, in a first perusal of a new subject, snatches the heart out of paragraph after paragraph, ignoring the details until later, she took to herself only the gist of her host's recital. Yes, yes, she saw perfectly the generations of Vermont farmers who had hated trees because they meant the wilderness, and whose destruction of forests was only limited by the puniness of the forces they matched against the great wooded slopes of the mountains they pre-empted. And she saw later, the long years of utter neglect of those hacked-at and half-destroyed forests while Page's grandfather and father descended on the city and on financial operations with the fierce, fresh energy of frontiersmen. She was struck by the fact that those ruthless victors of Wall Street had not sold the hundreds of worthless acres, which they never took the trouble to visit; and by the still more significant fact that as the older ones of the family died, the Austins, the Pages, the Woolsons, the Hawkers, and as legacy after legacy of more worthless mountain acres came by inheritance to the financiers, those tracts too were never sold. They never thought of them, Page told her, except grumblingly to pay the taxes on them; they considered them of ridiculously minute proportions compared to their own titanic manipulations, but they had never sold them. Sylvia saw them vividly, those self-made exiles from the mountains, and felt in them some unacknowledged loyalty to the soil, the barren soil which had borne them, some inarticulate affection which had lived through the heat and rage of their embattled lives. The taproot had been too deep for them to break off, and now from it there was springing up this unexpected stem, this sole survivor of their race who turned away from what had been the flaming breath of life in their brazen nostrils, back to the green fragrance of their mutilated and forgotten forests.
Not the least of the charm of this conception for Sylvia came from the fact that she quarried it out for herself from the bare narration presented to her, that she read it not at all in the words, but in the voice, the face, the manner of the raconteur. She was amused, she was touched, she was impressed by his studiously matter-of-fact version of his enterprise. He put forward with the shy, prudish shamefacedness of the New Englander the sound financial basis of his undertaking, as its main claim on his interest, as its main value. "I heard so much about forestry being nothing but a rich man's plaything," he said. "I just got my back up, and wanted to see if it couldn't be made a paying thing. And I've proved it can be. I've had the closest account kept of income and outgo, and so far from being a drain on a man to reforest his woodland and administer it as he should, there's an actual profit in it, enough to make a business of it, enough to occupy a man for his lifetime and his son after him, if he gives it his personal care."
At this plain statement of a comprehensible fact, Arnold's inattention gave place to a momentary interest. "Is there?" he asked with surprise. "How much?"
"Well," said Page, "my system, as I've gradually worked it out, is to clear off a certain amount each year of our mediocre woodland, such as for the most part grows up where the bad cutting was done a couple of generations ago—maple and oak and beech it is, mostly, with little stands of white birch, where fires have been. I work that up in my own sawmill so as to sell as little of a raw product as possible; and dispose of it to the wood-working factories in the region." (Sylvia remembered the great "brush-back factory" whence Molly had recruited her fire-fighters.) "Then I replant that area to white pine. That's the best tree for this valley. I put about a thousand trees to the acre. Or if there seems to be a good prospect of natural reproduction, I try for that. There's a region over there, about a hundred acres," he waved his hand to the north of them, "that's thick with seedling ash. I'm leaving that alone. But for the most part, white pine's our best lay. Pine thrives on soil that stunts oak and twists beech. Our oak isn't good quality, and maple is such an interminably slow grower. In about twenty years from planting, you can make your first, box-board cutting of pine, and every ten years thereafter—"
Arnold had received this avalanche of figures and species with an astonished blink, and now protested energetically that he had had not the slightest intention of precipitating any such flood. "Great Scott, Page, catch your breath! If you're talking to me, you'll have to use English, anyhow. I've no more idea what you're talking about! Who do you take me for?Idon't know an ash-tree from an ash-cart. You started in to tell me what the profit of the thing is."
Page looked pained but patient, like a reasonable man who knows his hobby is running away with him, but who cannot bring himself to use the curb. "Oh yes," he said apologetically. "Why, we cleared last year (exclusive of the farm, which yields a fair profit)—we cleared about two thousand dollars." Arnold seemed to regard this statement as quite the most ridiculous mouse which ever issued from a mountain. He burst into an open laugh. "Almost enough to buy you a new car a year, isn't it?" he commented.
Page looked extremely nettled. An annoyed flush showed through the tan of his clear skin. He was evidently very touchy about his pet lumbering operations. "A great many American families consider that a sufficient income," he said stiffly.
Sylvia had another inspiration, such as had been the genesis of her present walking-costume. "You're too silly, Arnold. The important thing isn't what the proportion with Mr. Page's own income is! What he was trying to do, and what hehasdone, only you don't know enough to see it, is to prove that sane forestry is possible for forest-owners of small means. I know, if you don't, that two thousand is plenty to live on. My father's salary is only twenty-four hundred now, and we were all brought up when it was two thousand."
She had had an intuitive certainty that this frank revelation would please Page, and she was rewarded by an openly ardent flash from his clear eyes. There was in his look at her an element of enchanted, relieved recognition, as though he had nodded and said: "Oh, youaremy kind of a woman after all! I was right about you."
Arnold showed by a lifted eyebrow that he was conscious of being put down, but he survived the process with his usual negligent obliviousness of reproof. "Well, if two thousand a year produced Judith, go ahead, Page, and my blessing on you!" He added in a half-apology for his offensive laughter, "It just tickled me to hear a man who owns most of several counties of coal-mines so set up over finding a nickel on the street!"
Page had regained his geniality. "Well, Smith, maybe I needn't have jumped so when you stepped on my toe. But it's my pet toe, you see. You're quite right—I'm everlastingly set up over my nickel. But it's not because I found it. It's because I earned it. It happens to be the only nickel I ever earned. It's natural I should want it treated with respect."
Arnold did not trouble to make any sense out of this remark, and Sylvia was thinking bitterly to herself: "But that's pure bluff! I'mnothis kind of a woman. I'm Felix Morrison's kind!" No comment, therefore, was made on the quaintness of the rich man's interest in earning capacity.
They were now in one of the recent pine plantations, treading a wood-road open to the sky, running between acres and acres of thrifty young pines. Page's eyes glistened with affection as he looked at them, and with the unwearied zest of the enthusiast he continued expanding on his theme. Sylvia knew the main outline of her new subject now, felt that she had walked all around it, and was agreeably surprised at her sympathy with it. She continued with a genuine curiosity to extract more details; and like any man who talks of a process which he knows thoroughly, Page was wholly at the mercy of a sympathetic listener. His tongue tripped itself in his readiness to answer, to expound, to tell his experiences, to pour out a confidently accurate and precise flood of information. Sylvia began to take a playful interest in trying to find a weak place in his armor, to ask a question he could not answer. But he knew all the answers. He knew the relative weight per cubic foot of oak and pine and maple; he knew the railroad rates per ton on carload lots; he knew why it is cheaper in the long run to set transplants in sod-land instead of seeding it; he knew what per cent to write off for damage done by the pine weevil, he reveled in complicated statistics as to the actual cost per thousand for chopping, skidding, drawing, sawing logs. He laughed at Sylvia's attempts to best him, and in return beat about her ears with statistics for timber cruising, explained the variations of the Vermont and the scribner's decimal log rule, and recited log-scaling tables as fluently as the multiplication table. They were in the midst of this lively give-and-take, listened to with a mild amusement on Arnold's part, when they emerged on a look-out ledge of gray slate, and were struck into silence by the grave loveliness of the immense prospect below them.
"—and of course," murmured Page finally, on another note, "of course it's rather a satisfaction to feel that you are making waste land of use to the world, and helping to protect the living waters of all that—" He waved his hand over the noble expanse of sunlit valley. "It seems"—he drew a long breath—"it seems something quite worth doing."
Sylvia was moved to a disinterested admiration for him; and it was a not unworthy motive which kept her from looking up to meet his eyes on her. She felt a petulant distaste for the calculating speculations which filled the minds of all her world about his intentions towards her. He was really too fine for that. At least, she owed it to her own dignity not to abuse this moment of fine, impersonal emotion to advance another step into intimacy with him.
But as she stood, looking fixedly down at the valley, she was quite aware that a sympathetic silence and a thoughtful pose might make, on the whole, an impression quite as favorable as the most successfully managed meeting of eyes.