FOR convincing the human heart there is no argument like a parable or analogy, and there is no more worthless proof to the mind. So long as Persis could be called a bird of paradise, too rich for a canary cage, or a sea-gull, too wild, or a planet unattainable, Forbes admitted that his hopes of winning her and keeping her were foolish. He gave her up. So much for the metaphors. But when he saw her at the window in the daylight, and saw, not a sea-gull nor a planet, but just a pretty, drowsy girl with rumpled hair, he tossed aside all the arguments by parable and analogy, as candle-ends unfit for sunshine. She was only a woman, and he was all of a man, and this was America, and, by George Washington, he would have her to wife!
He would begin the day right with a wholesome morning smack. He tiptoed along the grass around to the door, and met her in the living-room. And as soon as he met her he set his arms about her. But she was almost sullen as she pushed him away.
"I won't have it!" she said, with a harshness that shocked him. "It's too early in the morning. And I don't like it. And I don't want gossip set going. And you must be doubly circumspect."
He fell back, baffled, and dropped his eyes in discontent. He saw that her little high boots were sprawling open. He smiled at the homely touch again.
"If you're so circumspect," he said, "you'd better button your shoes."
"I forgot to bring up a button-hook," she laughed, "andwhen I bent over with a hairpin I got so sleepy that I nearly fell back in bed."
"Permit me," he urged.
"No, thank you!"
"You can't walk with 'em falling off like that," he insisted. "A hairpin, please."
She took one from her hair, and he dropped to one knee. He could not seem to find the right position to work from. After hunching about from position to position he said:
"I reckon your feet are put on the wrong way."
"Thanks."
"For being buttoned, I mean."
"My maid buttons them every morning."
"Tell me how on earth she gets at your foot?"
"No, thanks. I'll button them myself."
"Oh no, you won't. How do the shoe clerks manage it?"
She set her foot on the rung of a chair, and he went at his task with all awkwardness. Her feet were small, yet the shoes were as tight as could be, and she winced as the buttons ground or bit. But she choked back the little cries of pain that rose to her lips.
"Get away," she said; "you're killing me."
But he would not surrender the privilege. He took her foot on his knee and wrought with all care. The hairpin was soon a twisted wreck, and he must have another, and another.
When the lowest buttons were done she checked him. "That's enough! I'd rather my shoes fell off than my hair. And that reminds me: where is my cap?"
"In my pocket next my heart."
"Give it to me, please."
"I'm going to keep it."
"By what right?"
"Conquest and possession."
"What if somebody should see you with it?"
"Nobody shall."
"Somebody always does. Nobody would believe it fell out of a window!"
"It fell straight into my heart."
She gave him up with a shrug. "Good Lord, you men! I don't suppose there's any coffee? I'm so used to having it in bed before I get up that I'm faint."
"I could make you some, if I knew where the coffee was, and the coffee-pot, and if there were any fire."
"Let's look into the kitchen."
She knew the way, and led him into a great food-studio—a place to delight a chef with its equipment and an artist with its coppers.
But the range was as cold as its white-glazed chimney. They cast about for fuel, and found that Prout had fetched kindling and coal the afternoon before.
Forbes soon had a fire snapping under one lid, and Persis hunted through cupboards and closets till she discovered a coffee-pot, evidently belonging to the servants' dining-room, and a canister half full of coffee.
"I haven't the faintest idea how much of that goes in, have you?" she said, helplessly. He nodded and made the measurements deftly.
"Where did you learn so much?" she asked, with a primeval woman's first wonder at a cave-man's first blaze and first cookery.
"A soldier ought to be able to build a fire and make a cup of coffee, oughtn't he?"
"Oh," she shrugged, "I always forget that you're a soldier. I've never seen you in uniform. You never tell me anything about yourself. I always think of you as just one of us loafers."
"It's mighty pleasant to be building a fire for you—for just us," he maundered.
"It is fine, isn't it?" she chuckled, with glistening eyes. "Rather reversing the usual, though, for idiotic womanto stand by while strong man boils the coffee—or are you baking it? I might be getting the dishes."
"I'd be willing to do this every morning—for you—for us," he ventured, his heart thumping at its own dauntlessness.
She evaded the implied proposal as she ransacked a cabinet. "I fancy it would rather lose its charm in time. As a regular thing, I like to see breakfast brought up on a tray by a nice-looking maid."
She brought out a perilous, double arm-load of cups and saucers, and a sugar-bowl.
"This is the service china, I suppose. You could drive nails with it."
He stared at her with idolatry. She was so variously beautiful; at the theater, the opera, the luncheon, here in a country kitchen—everywhere somebody else, and everybody of her beautiful. His hands went out to seize her again, but she tumbled the crockery crackingly on the table and waved a cup at him. "Stand back, or I'll brain you with this. There's no cream. I suppose even the cows aren't up yet. And I can't find any butter—or any bread—just these tinned biscuits."
They sat at the kitchen table. The coffee was not good, really; but she found it amusing, and he thought it was ambrosia—Mars and Venus at breakfast in an Olympian dining-room. He told her something of the sort, and implied once more that he longed to make the arrangement permanent.
"I wish you'd quit proposing before breakfast," she said. "I feel very material in the morning, anyway, and I'm having a bully time. I'm feeling far too sensible to listen to any nonsense about the simple life. I can enjoy a bit of rough road as well as anybody. I can turn in and work or do without, or dress in rags—anything for a picnic—for a while. But as a regular thing—ugh! To get breakfast once in somebody's else kitchen at an ungodly hour with a captivating stranger—glorious! But toget up every morning—every every morning, rain or shine, cold or hot, sleepy or sick or blue—no, thank you!"
"You think the rich are happier than the poor?"
"Of course they are. That's why everybody wants to be rich."
"But the rich aren't contented."
"Oh, contented! Nobody's contented except the blind, and hopeless invalids. Contentment is a question of being a sport. There's a lot of good losers that will grin if they have to walk home in the rain from the races, and there are a lot of what they call 'bum sports' that throw their winnings on the ground because the odds weren't longer. But don't tell me that there's any special joy in being poor. If I had to be poor, I suppose I'd put the best face I could on it. That happens to be my nature. It's the good sports making the best of poverty that cause so much talk; but all the poor and middlers that I've met have hated it and envied the rich.
"You see, the rich can buy everything the poor have, but the poor can buy hardly anything the rich have. Sometimes my father goes out in the field on his farm and tosses hay, or beds down the horses, or chops dead trees. Sometimes he likes to have just a bowl of milk and some crackers for his supper. But when he wants something else he can have it—at least, he always has been able to—up to now."
A little shiver agitated her like a flaw of wind running along a calm lake.
"It's cold and damp in here," she said. "Let's get out in the sunshine and quit talking poverty. We're neither of us poor—yet."
She rose and moved out to the kitchen porch, and, round the house, up a sweep of stairs to the main terrace.
"Look," she cried, "isn't it wonderful? Isn't it worth while? It costs thousands of dollars just to make that lawn smooth, and thousands more for the marble balustrades, and the fountains are a fortune, and the sunkengarden—the poor can't have a glimpse of it! They don't know it exists. Even Mr. Enslee's cook hardly knows it's here; he doesn't permit any of the servants except the house staff to come out front. Isn't it a shame? But don't you love it? Isn't it heavenly under your feet? My eyes fly over it like birds. It's splendid to have tea out here in the summer, and wear long sweeping gowns and picture-hats, and have delicious things brought to you on the finest of china. Oh, I never was meant for a poor man's daughter. Even if I feed the chickens or pat the cattle, I like to do it as Marie Antoinette did at the Petit Trianon just for a contrast—anhors d'œuvre."
Forbes thought of the bird of paradise and the sea-gull again, and he doubted the value of his cage again. They sauntered across the lawn and up the stairs. He took her arm to help her, but she shook her head.
"Please! Now, tell me all about yourself."
"There's nothing to tell."
"There must be. I've a right to hear it. Think of it, you've kissed me once, and I didn't fight. I let you. Good Lord, I nearly kissed you!" His arms rushed toward her; but she frowned. "Don't make me go back. I was saying, you've kissed me, and we've had a terrible escapade in a strange kitchen, and I hardly know your first name. So you're a soldier." He nodded. "West Point?" He nodded. "Did you ever get in a real fight?" He nodded. "Where?"
"Cuba. Philippines."
"You were in the Spanish War? Really! I didn't know you were so old."
"I wasn't so old then. I'm very ancient now."
She mused aloud: "They say a husband should be ten years older than his wife."
The implication enraptured him. It showed that she was at least toying with the thought. "Then there's no hope for me. I'm far too old for you."
"But I'm very ancient," she said. "I ought to have been married years ago."
"I'm sorry I kept you waiting so long. There's no need for further delay."
"Are you proposing again? The man's a regular phonograph with only one old broken record! So you've been in battles and battles. Were you afraid?"
"Afterward. I suppose it's because I'm slow and stupid: but I don't usually get scared till the trouble's over. Then I'm sick as a dog and as frightened as a girl."
"That's something like me. Only I get terribly scared of little things that don't count. A mouse or a spider or anything crawly—ugh! is that a caterpillar?"
She shrank back against him in a palsy of repugnance at about an inch of moving fuzz on a rhododendron. He held her with one hand, and with the other broke off the twig and cast the vermin into space. She put his arm away, and said:
"You are brave!"
"St. George and the dragon," he smiled.
"In those battles of yours," she resumed, "were you ever by any chance wounded or killed or anything?"
"I was never killed entirely," he answered, "but I stopped a few bits of lead."
She shuddered and caught his arm with a rush of sympathy none the less fierce for being belated.
"Wounded! You were wounded?"
He put his hand on hers where it lay on his sleeve. "Yes, you blessed thing. Does it make any difference to you?"
She drew her hand away gently. "I hate to think of—of anybody getting hurt. Did it hurt—to be wounded?"
"Afterward. I didn't notice it much at the time—except when I was shot in the mouth."
"Good Lord, how?"
"I was yelling something to my sergeant, and a bulletwent right in and out here." He put his finger on his cheek.
"Great heavens! I thought it was a dimple. I rather liked it."
"Then I'm glad I got it."
She writhed with pain for his sake.
"Did it hurt—hideously?"
"Not half as much as the two pellets I got in my side. They probed for them till I made them stop, partly because I wasn't enjoying it and partly because probing kills more than cartridges."
"How did they get them out, then?"
"They didn't."
She stared at him wild-eyed.
"You don't mean to say that you're standing there with a couple of bullets in you? Why, you're positively uncanny."
"I'm sorry, if it disturbs you."
"Oh, please! You're wonderful. But aren't you afraid they'll kill you—turn green or something?"
"They're neatly surrounded by now with aseptic sacs, the surgeon tells me. I'd forgotten all about them till you reminded me."
"And they never pain you?"
"The only wound I'm suffering now is from the arrow of this sharp-shooter."
They were standing in the little temple, between them a little marble rascal with a bow and arrow. Persis put her hand to her heart. He mistook the gesture and asked, with sudden zest:
"He didn't hit you, too, did he?"
"I was thinking of you," she murmured, staring at him with wet eyes. "Wounded and bleeding, your flesh all torn, and the surgeons gouging in the wounds. Oh!"
She toppled backward and sank on a marble bench before he could help her. He stared at her in bewilderedunbelief. He understood that she was nearly aswoon because he had suffered once.
"Why, God bless your wonderful sweet soul!" he gasped, and would have knelt and clasped his arms around her. But even in the swimming of her senses her prudence was on guard, and his indiscretion restored her to herself like a dash of water.
"I beg you to be careful," she said. "You are perfectly visible from the house."
"But nobody's awake. The blinds are closed."
"There are always eyes behind blinds."
"Then let them see me tell you how much I—"
"Not here!" she gasped. "Don't tell me that here."
"Why not?"
"Do you really want to know?"
"Yes."
"Mr. Enslee built this little temple to this little Cupid to propose to me in."
"And did he?" Forbes asked, in a voice that rattled. "Did he propose to you?"
"Regularly."
SHE studied Forbes closely and laughed aloud at the almost nausea he plainly felt.
"I thought that would shock the nonsense out of you," she triumphed. "Now let's be sensible while the sun shines, and get better acquainted. Tell me more about you, and I'll tell you some awful things about me."
She sauntered on in an arch and riant humor. He resented it, and yet he followed her, hating this mood of hers, yet finding her more precious as he found her more difficult. If he had known women better he would have guessed, or "reckoned," that her very effort to make herself difficult was a proof that she was not really so difficult as she would have him believe. The one who takes such joy in being pursued is not entirely unwilling to be caught.
She quizzed him about his life, his home, his earlier loves. She demanded descriptions of every sweetheart he had cherished, from the first chub of infancy to the girl he left behind in Manila; and she said she hated them all impartially.
She told him of her life: endowed with every material comfort, yet with a vague unhappiness for something or somebody—"perhaps it was for you," she added, but spoke teasingly. She had had nurses and governesses and maids from her first day on earth. She had been to school in France, and traveled round the world; she had been presented at the courts of England and Italy, Germany and Russia; had visited at castles and châteaux. Her sister was in England. She had married a title and was unhappy; but for the matter of that, so were thewives of most of the stanch Americans she knew, rich and poor.
Persis had had flirtations of cosmopolitan variety. Her ambition was to go on skimming the cream off of life. She had given up the hope of ever loving, at least with abandonment. There was too much else in the world. She had been so thoroughly and incessantly schooled in self-control that she doubted if even her heart could forget the rules of conduct. She did not want love to make the fool of her it had made of so many of her friends, and of the people she read about in newspapers and books.
She never took much enjoyment in adventures, anyway, she said, because her imagination was always busy with the appearance of her acts. She found herself considering: "How will this look? What gossip will that start?" She hated herself for the cold, calculating instinct; but she could not rid herself of it.
"This very minute," she admitted, "my fun is half spoiled by thinking of what those people down there in the house will say if they learn that I've been up here with you? Nothing could be more harmless than a stroll before breakfast in a highly illuminated forest, but they'd talk and—well, I'd rather they wouldn't."
She led the protesting Forbes homeward again, down the long flight of steps. The most he could exact was the promise of another walk together—sometime when it could be arranged without attracting attention or detracting from the duties toward the host and his other guests.
As they started across the lawn, whose dew the risen sun had pretty well imbibed, they met the gardener. Prout was yawning, and when he took off his hat he looked sleepy enough to fall over into it.
"You folks been up all night?" he asked, with a drowsy surliness.
Persis shook her head and smiled. "It's you that have overslept."
He changed the subject abruptly. "I just been buildin' a fire for Miss Mather."
"Good Lord, is she awake?" Persis gasped.
"Well," said Prout, "as to that, she's not wot you'd exackly call awake, but she's up an' doin' in the kitchin."
While the gardener shuffled away to play valet to his flowers, Persis stood irresolute.
"I hope Winifred hasn't seen us," she said. "The kitchen and the nursery are both to the east. We'll take a chance. You go on into the kitchen and help her, and I'll telephone down from my room.Au 'voir!"
She opened the outer door ever so slightly and oozed through the slit as narrowly as Bernhardt used to when she had murdered Scarpia. Forbes dawdled a few moments, then went into the kitchen.
He found Winifred playing the part of cook with a vengeance. Her hair was disheveled, her sleeves rolled back, and her face smudged from her smudgy fingers. She had assumed a cook's prerogative of wrath. The moment she saw Forbes she began with a savage, "Oh, it's you! And who's been littering up my clean kitchen?"
"I took the liberty of making myself a little coffee," said Forbes.
"There are two cups."
"I made two cups," said Forbes; and she was too busy to notice the evasion.
"Then, since you've had your breakfast," she snapped, "you can help me get something for the rest. You'd better put this on."
Like another Omphale, she fastened a womanish apron on Hercules, and set him at uncongenial tasks, retrieving butter, milk, salt, and eggs.
After a time there was a buzz, and a little hopper fell in a box on the wall. Winifred went to the house telephone and called out:
"Well! H'lo, Perse, what you doing awake so early? Insomnia? No, I will not send your breakfast up on atray! You can come down and get it. My little snojer man is helping me."
She hung up the ear-piece and turned to Forbes with her broad smile.
"A cook has no chance to entertain her gempman friends. The minute I get a policeman in here somebody rings."
She kept him wretchedly ill at ease by more of the same banter, which he hardly knew how to take. And she seized his arm with a gesture of culinary coquetry just as Persis sauntered in. Forbes was horrified to note a look of anger in Persis' eyes. He should have been flattered. She greeted Winifred, and also Forbes, with a discreet "Good morning!"
"Good get-busy!" Winifred growled.
"What can I do?" said Persis, helplessly.
"For one thing, you can rout the other loafers out of bed."
"How?"
"Use the telephone. Tell 'em the house is on fire."
While Forbes fetched and carried at Winifred's beck and call, Persis rang up the various rooms and conveyed Winifred's orders. But her gentle voice carried no conviction, and Winifred took her place at the instrument and howled in her best cook lingo:
"Get up and come down, or I'll quit you cold and lave you to starve. It's scrambled eggs and bacon the marnin', and no goods exchanged."
She went back to the range, only to be called to the telephone again. Mrs. Neff was imploring a brief respite. Water boiling over and scuttering in hot hailstones from the stove brought Winifred back with a screech. She upbraided Persis for a useless scullery maid and threatened Forbes with a skillet. She was enjoying herself tremendously. She ordered Persis to set the table in the breakfast-room, but refused Forbes permission to help her.
But he slipped away a little later, when she went to rummage the ice-room. He found Persis drifting about in a lake of golden sunshine, distributing delicate chinas and looking like a moving figurine of bisque. There was a pleasant clink of silver as she laid the knives and forks and spoons, and he thought how wonderful she would be in such a little home as he could offer her, how she would grace the quarters at an army post. She smiled on him, and her smile was sunshine. He went at her once more with that rush of desire. She put up her hand to fend him off, and he knocked a cup out of it.
They knelt together to pick up the pieces. He began:
"While I'm down here on my knees, I ask you again—" She put her hand to her lips in warning, but he seized the hand. She snatched it away and rose to her feet just as Willie Enslee came in.
Forbes, still on his knees, set busily to work picking up the scattered petals of the china. He felt guilty as a caught burglar, but the unsuspecting Willie paused on the threshold to yawn. Willie was always yawning on the threshold of discovery.
"'Morning! 'Morning!" was his almost swallowed greeting.
"We just broke one of your cups," said Persis, "while we were setting the table."
"So long as you don't break the table, I suppose I'm to be congratulated. Had a fearful time this morning without my man. Had to fill my own tub, put own buttons in, shave self—cut a map of Russia on face. Couldn't get tie tied to save life. Persis, you'll have to help your little Willie with his bib."
So Persis knotted his scarf for him while Forbes grew restive at the sight. Willie was proprietary in his tone, and he clung drowsily to Persis' arm while her hands hovered about his throat. But when the task was done he toddled through the swinging-door to see what wreck had been made of the kitchen.
"You see!" said Persis, reproachfully, putting down the silver very slowly. "You nearly got caught."
"But what of it?" Forbes broke out. "I love you. I'm not ashamed of my love or of you. I want you to be my wife."
The boyish manly sincerity of this convinced her and filled her eyes with a morning haze.
"You do? Really?" She moved on to the next place. He followed her.
"Of course I do. Will you?"
She continued slowly circling the table, with side trips to the sideboard, and he followed with a great ado of helping her. The two were making a slower job of it than either would have required alone.
"It's rather fun being proposed to while one is setting the table," Persis murmured. "We're getting terribly domestic already."
"You'd be so beautiful domesticated," Forbes urged.
"But so somebody else thinks—and we're on his grounds." And since it was characteristic of Persis to express a virtue in a sporting term, she shook her head. "We're not playing strictly according to Hoyle. It's not quite cricket."
"I know it," said Forbes. "And I—I dare you to come outside—off the place."
"All right. I will, the first chance I get."
"The first chance you get to what?" said Mrs. Neff, who appeared as suddenly as Cinderella's witch. And she looked a trifle witchy this morning without the rejuvenating spells of her maid. "I couldn't help overhearing, but my eyes aren't open. I didn't see anything."
Persis surprised Forbes and Mrs. Neff by her frankness.
"I was saying I would take a long walk with Mr. Forbes the first chance I get."
"Good work!" said Mrs. Neff, quite earnestly. "I wastelling him what a love of a couple you two would make."
Persis turned on her in amazement. "You were telling Mr. Forbes that?"
"Yes, I was. When a woman gets as old as I feel of mornings, she has the right to be a matchmaker. You two go on and work out your own salvation and I'll keep Willie off the scent. If I could prevent Alice from marrying Stowe Webb, and you from marrying Willie, I'd retire on my laurels. I dote on conspiracies. That's where Alice gets her knack for plots."
This to her daughter, who sauntered in just in time to receive the facer and gasp:
"Why, mother, what do you mean?"
"Oh, I can smell a mouse even if I can't trap it right away. I know you telephone him and write him and all that. I used to when I was your age. Only, I fooled my mother and married the man I wanted to. If I'd married the one she wanted me to, I'd be one of the richest women on earth instead of a starving twice-widow with a pack of children to drive to market."
"Isn't she the most appalling mother a poor child ever had?" Alice gasped. "Sometimes I think I ought to take her over my knee and spank her."
Forbes and Persis paid little heed to the usual duel of these two women. They were thinking of the complexity of outside interference in their own program of quiet communion.
Persis' mind was full of reproof for Mrs. Neff; but she was silenced by the presence of Alice, and Ten Eyck's appearance, and the irruption of Winifred with a great tray of egg-gold and bacon-bronze.
It was an informal gathering at that breakfast-table. Important articles of toilet had been forgotten, and there were no maids or men to repair the omissions. But too great correctness would have been an anachronism at Winifred's table. Everybody had gone to bed early andtired, and had slept longer and better than usual. Doing without was a new game to these people, and they made a picnic-ground of the breakfast-room.
Even Willie tried to romp with his guests, but he lacked the genius for hilarity, and his jokes consisted principally of repeating exactly what somebody else had just said, then laughing as hard as he could.
He told Persis that he wanted to show her the farm, and the new fountain in the sunken gardens, and he told her in such a way that the others felt themselves cordially invited not to go along. But they were used to tactlessness from Willie, and they merely winked mutually.
Willie seemed to feel the winks in the air, and to realize that he had not done exactly the perfect thing, so he reverted to his favorite witticism: "You take Mrs. Neff, Mr. Forbes" (he was getting the name right at times now). "You take Mrs. Neff and go where you please. You turtle-doves will find several arbors and summer-houses and lovers' lanes scattered around the place. I'll tell the gardener and his men to keep out of the way. Come along, Persis."
Forbes watched them off with a look of jealousy that did not escape Mrs. Neff. She put a kindly hand on his arm.
"After all, he owns the place; he's the host—a poor thing, but our host. She'd rather be with you, and you'd rather be with her; but you'll have to wait. You'll probably get plenty of each other soon enough."
Winifred detailed Alice and Ten Eyck to wash the breakfast dishes. The turn of the others would come later. Persis and Mrs. Neff were to make the beds.
"Winifred was born to be a poor man's wife," said Mrs. Neff, as she led Forbes across the lawn. "She dotes on cooking and pot-walloping and mending, and she had to be born with a mint of money, and the only man that ever cared for her is Bob Fielding, who will hardly let her lift her teacup to her lips, for fear she'll overwork herself.
"Now Persis is as dainty as a cat, and as hard to boss. And she has a fatal attraction for men who can't afford to keep her. Willie's the only suitor she ever had that has more money than she could spend. And I think she likes him less than anything on earth except work."
Forbes was tempted to confess to Mrs. Neff what he had divulged to Ten Eyck, but he postponed the miserable business. It was an uncongenial company for proclaiming one's poverty.
The surroundings were as tempting as Naboth's vineyard was to David. He understood why men grew unscrupulous in the hunt for great wealth.
Mrs. Neff led Forbes about the place, which she knew well. But the beauties were only torments to him. Below the climbing marble stairway to the temple there was a broken stairway winding down the hill. It meandered like the dry bed of a stream, between brick walls, bordered with flowers, with now and then a resting-place, or some quaint niche where a little statue smiled or a fountain trilled and tinkled.
At two stages of the descent there were circular levels with ornate shelters and aristocratic plants. From the lowest shelf there was only a path dropping down the long hill to a distant wall; beyond this a ragged woods like a mob of poor shut out from a rich man's place.
"That wall is the end of the Enslee estate," said Mrs. Neff.
"There is an end to it, then?" said Forbes, more bitterly than he intended.
"There's an end to everything, my boy," Mrs. Neff brooded, with a far-off bitterness of her own—"an end to wealth and love and—everything."
"Who owns that place off there, I wonder?" said Forbes.
"Nobody in particular," said Mrs. Neff. "Some old cantankerous absentee that won't sell. Do you want to buy it to be near Mrs. Enslee? Willie has offered him allsorts of money, but he won't let go. You might have better luck."
Forbes again ignored the assumption that he was wealthy, and said:
"There are things, then, that even the Enslee money can't buy?"
"Many things," said Mrs. Neff. "Persis' love, for one, and Willie's own happiness, and a foot more of height and a certain charm, and—but aren't we stupid and cynical this beautiful morning?"
"Are we?" Forbes smiled.
"We are, and I have a right to be," said Mrs. Neff. "But you haven't. You are not white-haired, nor old, nor a woman."
"Are those the only causes for unhappiness?"
"They are three of the worst, and the most incurable."
But Forbes was too young in his own anxieties to give much importance to her ancient plaints, though she was not too old to understand his. He was glancing upward now and then to the little temple. It was visible from here, though the two figures in it were small and blurred with light.
Forbes was sure that Enslee was proposing to Persis, for he gesticulated, pointed at the landscape and the house. He was evidently commending these to Persis, laying them at her feet, begging her to become at once the châtelaine of this splendor.
Forbes wanted to abandon Mrs. Neff and fly to the rescue of Persis. He wanted to break in on that proposal, prove to her how much better he loved her than Enslee did, how much greater happiness she could have with him than with Enslee. But he made no move in that direction. It was one of those simple things that almost nobody can find the courage to do. He loitered with Mrs. Neff, hating himself for a skulker.
He could not know that he pleaded well enough at a distance. His absence wrought for him against WillieEnslee's presence. Willie was indeed commending his estate to Persis, urging her to marry him at once and settle here for the summer, except what time they might spend abroad or on the yacht, or his other palace at Newport.
But while he pleaded Persis was searching Enslee's landscape for Forbes. The view had been entrancing from the temple with Forbes at her side. Now she felt that it was not after all so satisfying. The very fact that Willie praised it brought up suspicion. She would prefer to choose another landscape, one better suited to her and Forbes, not a second-hand landscape built along some other person's lines.
It would be a joy for Forbes and her to pick out a hundred acres or more—not too far from New York; perhaps among the hunting and poloing colonies on Long Island. While they were building they could cruise.
But perhaps Forbes could not afford a yacht. She must not run him into extravagances. Well, after all, the suitesde luxeon some of the ocean liners were not so bad, with their own dining-saloons attached. By omitting the yacht they could have a stunning town house. Mrs. Jimmie Chives wanted to sell her place for a song, and nearly every room in it was imported bodily from some European castle or mansion. With a few changes it could be made quite a habitable shack.
And so, while Willie pleaded in his nagging way, her own imagination was attorney for Forbes. Only it was imagining a Forbes that did not exist, a fairly rich and decently leisurely Forbes. Down below, looking up to her with such eyes as lovers in hell cast on their beloveds in heaven, was the real Forbes, poor, hard-worked, with no financial prospects beyond a minute increase of wage by slow promotion. And he had only a few days more of leisure before he resumed the livery of the nation.
LUNCHEON was breakfast again with a few additions. Winifred had lost the hang of the range, and what successes she had were ruined by her inability to corral the herd on time. The soup was salted beyond the sanction of even the most amiable palate. The chickens were guaranteed not to be resurrections from a cold-storage tomb; but they would have been the better for a little longer hanging and a little shorter cooking. The vegetables had not been salted at all, nor warmed quite through.
"The average is perfect," was Ten Eyck's verdict.
"And the salad's fine, Winifred," said Mrs. Neff, in a desperate effort to console the despondent cook, who retreated to the kitchen and cried a little more salt into the soup.
Ten Eyck rubbed his sagging waistcoat and groaned:
"This is the emptiest empty house-party I ever went to."
"It would have been a noble institution in Lent," Persis sighed.
"You would come," Willie snapped.
"Thank heaven," Alice purred, "I have a five-pound box of chocolates in my room."
Mrs. Neff glared at her. "He'd better save his money. Or has he an account at Maillard's? You can't live on candy, you know."
"It's quite as nourishing as the Congressional Record," said Alice.
"Deuce all!" cried Ten Eyck. "But family mattersaside, we've got to do something about food. I've survived the fireless and foodless cooking at breakfast and luncheon, but the dinnerless dinner would finish me. Winifred can afford to bant, I can't. I'm going to give a party. We'll all dine over at the Port of Missing Men and have dinner on me; that will get us through until to-morrow at least."
This was agreed upon with enthusiasm. Winifred was tactfully proffered a vote of thanks and a vacation. There remained only the afternoon to kill. Persis thought to steal a few minutes with Forbes, and they struck out for the sunken gardens, but Willie came panting after them and constituted himself their guide.
He was like one of those pests that can rob the Pitti Palace of interest and make the Vatican an old barn. He led them through the gardens, the greenhouses, the stables, and the kennels. Here a little sea of beagles flowed and frothed round Persis' feet. They were a relic of the days before the hunting fever left Westchester for Long Island. They were mad for exercise, and so were the horses in the stables.
"We must take these poor nags out for a run," said Persis, looking at Forbes, who accepted with his eyes.
"All right, we will. To-morrow morning," said Willie; and Forbes resigned with a look.
Unable to shake off Willie, Persis pleaded the need for a little sleep and retreated to her room. Forbes wandered about, puzzled at the appalling loneliness he could feel in so beautiful a place with so many people around and only one missing.
Eventually, however, the sun, which had begun the day with such ecstasy for him, began to approach the top of the western hill, and the caravan set out for the Port of Missing Men, which proved to be a little cottage of an inn set upon the edge of a small mountain and surveying a vast panorama.
On the piazza the crowd dined well, and returnedthrough the great park to the homeward roads, for when they reached the Enslee bridge it was like coming home. The wings of the motor had made it possible to run twenty-five miles to dinner and twenty-five miles back in almost negligible time; but the exultant speed of the journey and the multitude of sights that had fled past fatigued the mind like a long voyage, and it was once more a subdued company that gathered before the living-room fireplace.
Silence fell upon them all, and they sat once more staring into the flames, each finding there the glittering castles of desire.
Prout came in with more logs of wood and tiptoed out, shaking his head in stupefaction at this latest game of these amazing people.
At some vaguely later hour Persis rose and went into the adjoining music-room. Forbes longed to follow, but feared to move. She strummed a few inexpert chords on the piano. Then she went to the victrola and searched among the black disks. A little later she called out:
"Everything in this house is last year's. There's not a turkey-trot on the place, or a tango."
A little later she spoke again, "Here's a bit of ancient history." She cranked up the machine, set the needle to the disk, and "The Beautiful Blue Danube" came twanging forth from a scarred record that riddled the melody with curious spatterings.
The once world-victorious rhapsody had almost a dirge-like tameness now; but it brought Willie to his feet, and he began to circle the room with Persis. She drooped over his inferior shoulders like a wilted flower.
Ten Eyck scooped Alice off the floor and danced in double time. Forbes bowed to Winifred, but she waved him away with a heavy hand. Mrs. Neff beckoned him.
"I'd rather be second choice than a wallflower. That music takes me back a thousand years."
She glided with an old-time dignity. Forbes tried tokeep his eyes from Persis and heed Mrs. Neff's reminiscences.
"Waltzes, waltzes!" she wailed. "How much they meant once to me. There are no dances like the old dances."
"There never were," said Forbes. "I reckon that twenty years from now old folks will be shaking their heads and telling how sweet and dignified the turkey-trot was compared with the epileptic crawl and the hydrophobia skedaddle they'll be doing then."
"I reckon so," said Mrs. Neff. "I can just remember when the polka was considered immoral."
Other waltzes were played, but Willie's appetite for them was quenched after the first. He sank into a chair by the living-room table and took up a story in an old magazine.
Persis waltzed with Forbes more often than with the others; but Willie never knew. In fact, it was not long before his head grew heavier and heavier, and finally, with his chin in his necktie, he slept.
The dancing, the copious wine, and the sudden warmth of the weather soon led to the opening of doors. From the music-room one stepped out into a kind of cloister opening on the lawn.
Eventually Persis set a two-step record whirling on the machine. Forbes asked her to dance with him. As they were passing one of the doors a little gust of summer-night air blew upon them so appealingly that Forbes swung Persis across the sill and stepped out into the cloister, where the moonlight streamed like a distant searchlight.
The music followed them, but muffled, by the pat of their feet along the tiled floor. To silence this noise Forbes danced across the margin of stone out upon the smooth, short, silent grass. Persis made no resistance, and he danced always a little deeper into the lawn, a little farther from the house. He danced her round theinky plumes of a cluster of cedars. These shut out the lights from the door. The music was quite lost here, and Persis hummed the tune herself; seemed to croon it into his very heart.
The music must have stopped in the house long before they knew it, and some one must have put on a disk in whose hard-rubber surface was embedded the voice of Sembrich singing a waltz-song of Chopin's.
This angelic melody floated on the air as if it came from nowhere and everywhere, and Forbes and Persis fell into the swift rhythm of it. They must needs dance furiously fast to keep up; but the music brought with it some of its own resistless energy.
Out here in this moon-world they seemed to be utterly aloof from the earth. They seemed to whirl like twin stars in a cosmic dance to the music of the spheres, the song the stars sing together. The Milky Way was but moonlit dew on the lawn of the sky. And they darted between the planets in a divine rhythm on a vast orbit, until at last a breathlessness of soul and body compelled Persis to end the occult rite.
The moonlight fell about her in a magic veil, and Forbes could not let her go. He caught her closer to him. But before his lips could brush her cheek, she broke his clasp and said:
"We must get back."
"Oh, please!" he implored.
"The others will wonder."
"What of it?"
"We can't afford to set them talking."
"We can't afford to waste a night like this in a stuffy room."
"There will be other moonlight nights."
"How do you know? We can't be sure."
"The moon is pretty regular in its habits."
"But we may not be alive. It may rain to-morrow. And the day after I must be getting back to my post."
"Really? Oh, that is too bad!" There was such deep regret in her words that he took courage to say:
"If we could only walk together a long, long distance! Doesn't the moon seem to—to command you to march?"
"Yes; but—but my slippers are all wet with the dew."
"You could change them."
"And what would the others say?"
"Must they know?"
"How could they help knowing?"
"If you told them all good night and went to your room and changed your slippers, and came out later, and I met you—"
It was a very elaborate conspiracy for him, and she gasped:
"Do you think I'm quite mad?"
"I know I am, or it seems that I'll go mad unless I can be with you in this wonderful light."
"It is wonderful, but—even if I were crazy enough to do as you say you would spoil it all—you wouldn't be good."
"Oh yes, I would. I promise."
"Solemnly?"
"I solemnly promise that I will not annoy you. I will not presume to—to kiss you unless you ask me to."
"That ought to be safe enough," she laughed. "Well, I'll think it over. And now we really must get back. Alice and Murray are at the door looking this way."
They returned slowly to the cloister, discussing the beauty of the night and the brilliance of the moon. Persis told on herself; confessed that she had been foolish enough to dance on the grass, and her shoes and stockings were drenched.
Willie, who was partially awake, supplied the necessary excuse for absence. He demanded that she change at once and not risk pneumonia.
"If I'm sent to my room I won't come back," said Persis, and yawned convincingly. This set up a contagion of yawns. Everybody was instantly smitten with sleepiness. There was no necessity to keep awake, and they were all easy victims of the demands of long-deferred sleep.
There was some flurry over the nightcap drinks, and a leisurely exit of all except Persis, who left immediately. When the rest went up to their rooms Forbes went to his.
He waited with frantic impatience for the light to go out in Ten Eyck's room. It was nearly midnight when Forbes felt it safe to venture out into the hall and tiptoe down the stairs. He had just arrived there when Persis stole down and met him. There was no light except a shaft of moonshine weirdly recolored by a stained-glass window. They did not venture even a whisper. He took her arm and groped with his free hand through a black tunnel to a blacker door, which opened stealthily and admitted a flood of moonlight.
Persis was dressed warmly, and she had put on high boots and a short, thick mackinaw jacket. But she shivered with the midnight chill and with a kind of ecstatic terror.
Forbes had planned his route. He would avoid the ascending stairway to the temple of Enslee's worship, and lead her to the sunken gardens, which he had longed to explore with her at his side.
They did not wade out into the mid-sea of the lawn. He remembered Persis' dictum that behind the blinds there are always eyes. Like snickering truants they skirted the balustrade, the shadowy privet hedge, the masses of juniper and bay and box, till they reached the point where the winding stairway dropped down between its high brick walls.
The shadows were doubly dense here, and Persis hung back, but Forbes laughed at her for a poltroon, and she refused to take the dare. He was so afraid that she might fall that he finally suggested:
"If you are afraid of stumbling here, I—I'm not forgetting my promise; but I just wanted to say that I—I don't mind holding on to you, if you want to ask me to."
She declined with whispered thanks. Down, down the walk drifted. At length they heard a murmur—the mysteriously musical noise of a fountain. They rounded a few more curves and came upon a niched Cupid riding a dolphin, from whose mouth an arc of water poured with a sound of chuckling laughter. The green patina that covered the bronze was uncannily beautiful in the moonlight, and the water was molten silver.
They stood and watched it like children for a long while. Then Forbes urged Persis along to the lowest of the circular levels.
There he led her to a bench and dropped down beside her. They both looked off into the huge caldron of the hills, filled with moonlight as with a mist.
The ragged woods in the distance were superb now in blue velvet. Everything was ennobled—rewritten in poetry. Everything plain and simple and ugly took on splendor and mystic significance. Every object, every group of objects, became personal and seemed to be striving to say something.
Persis and Forbes sat worshiping like Parsees of the moon, in awesome silence, till Forbes could no longer hush the clamor in his heart.
"Miss Cabot," he said, "I promised not to annoy you. Would it annoy you if I told you that—that I love you with all my heart and soul and being?"
"How could you love me?" she answered, softly, hoping to be contradicted. "You've known me only a few days."
"There are some people we live with for years and never like nor understand; others we know and love the moment our eyes meet."
"And did you love me the moment our eyes met?"
"Long before that. I loved the back of your hat and one shoulder."
"Do you tell everybody you meet the same thing? It's rather a stale question to ask a man, but you do seem rather impulsive on so short an acquaintance."
"Short acquaintance? We've seen each other more than most people see of each other in six months. I know you and I know myself, and I know that I shall never be happy unless I can be trying to make you happy."
"I am very happy just now," she murmured.
"But we can't sit here forever, and we can't even be together for more than a day or two. I want you for my own. I don't want to see you only—only on—Mr. Enslee's property."
"Which reminds me," Persis said, with a tone of dispelled romance, "that we are still on Mr. Enslee's property, and it doesn't seem fair to him."
"Then let's leave Mr. Enslee's property."
"How? In an airship?"
"See that wall down there. That is one of the boundary lines. If we were over that I could tell you some things that I've got to tell you."
"It's an awfully long way."
"Not so long as you think."
"No, no; it's easy to descend to Avernus, or whatever it was; but to get back! I'd never have the strength for that."
"It's not far. Let's walk to keep warm. You are cold, aren't you?"
"Frozen, that's all. Well, come along, I'll go part way with you."
They set out upon the little path. There were no trees to shelter them now from the moon, and its light seemed to beat upon the hillside like waves. The moon that draws the sea along in tides could not but have its influence on these two atoms, and on the blood that sped through their tiny veins. The moon filled them with the love of love.
Constantly pausing to turn back, but finding it easier to drift on down than begin the upward climb, Persis went on and on, arm in arm with Forbes. By and by they reached the boundary wall. He helped her to set one knee upon it and mount awkwardly. He clambered up and sat down at her side. Their backs were toward the Enslee demesne, their feet in the unknown.
And there, without delay, Forbes told her that she must be his wife, told her that he loved her as woman had never been loved before.
His hands fought to caress her, his lips tingled to be again at her cheek, but he kept his promise.
Yet the influence of the promise was potent on her, too. She knew that he was in an anguish of temptation, and she glowed with his struggle. The moon and the width of the world, the silent night-cry of the world in the lonely dark, and the yearning light filled her with a need of love. She regretted the promise, she wished that he would break it, and her absolution waited ready for his deed.
But his sense of honor prevailed upon his hands, though he could not keep silent about his heartache.
"Couldn't you possibly love me, Miss Cabot? Couldn't you possibly?" he pleaded; and she whispered, with a sad sweetness:
"I could—all too easily, Mr. Forbes, but I am afraid to love. I thought I never should love anybody really. And now that I know I might, it is so terrible an awakening that I—I'm afraid of it."
"Don't be afraid," he implored. "Love me. Let yourself love me."
"I'm afraid, Mr. Forbes."
"Then if you're afraid to love, it's because you don't, because you—can't."
This hurt her pride. Her heart was so swollen with this new power that it would not be denied either by herself or him.
"Yes, I could! Oh, I could! But I mustn't—I mustn't let myself love you—not now—not so soon."
"Then I must wait," he sighed, and said no more. And she sat in a silence, though there was a great noise of heartbeats in her breast and in her temples and ears.
She began to shiver with the night and with her excitement. She wanted to say that they must start back; but her tongue stumbled thickly against her chattering teeth. The world was bitter cold—so far from him. In his arms would be warmth and comfort as at a fireplace. She was lonely, unendurably lonely and wistful.
And he sat at her side in an equal ague of distance and need.
Finally he took his eyes from the moon and bent his gaze on her. He saw how her shoulders quaked.
"You're cold, you poor, sweet child—you're cold. I'm dying to take you in my arms, but I promised—I promised."
She was afraid to surrender, and afraid to defy the will of the night. The chill shook her with violence again and again till she felt the world rocking, the stone wall wavering. Then she leaned toward him and whispered:
"Kiss me!"
He could hardly believe that he heard, but he caught her to him and sought her lips with his. Immediately she was afraid again. Again she hid the preciousness of her mouth from him, writhed and struggled and twisted her face, hid it in his breast. But now he fought her with gentle ruthlessness, took her cold cheeks in his cold hands, and, holding her face up to the moonlight, kissed her eyes, and her dew-besprent hair and her cheeks, and pressed the first great kiss on her lips. They fled from him no more.
Only a moment she lingered in Elysium, and then she sighed:
"We must go back—we must! I hate to, but there's to-morrow—and the people! What wouldn't they think if they saw us?"
He knew that they would not think the beautiful andholy thoughts that filled his heart and hers, so he consented to climb back from this lowly heaven to the Upper Purgatory.
Her strength was gone, and he had little of his own; but somehow he helped her up. Again and again they paused to rest, and every time he tried to tell her that he was poor, and at each pause found her lips so sweet that he could not speak of so mean a thing as money and the meaner lack of it.
And behind her aching brows there were wild decisions made and unmade to tell him that she had no right to his love until she had released herself from her pledge to Enslee. But at each pause she, too, put off the harsh truth. It was sacrilege to intrude the name of Enslee into this divine communion.
They could not harm the perfection of that bliss by any other confessions than their love.
And this is one of the pitifulest things in this world, that people lie mutely lest they spoil a beautiful truth; they put off till to-morrow what would mar to-night; they spare some heart-pain; they pay some virtue too exclusive court, and lo, they find afterward that they have brought about only corruption and confusion and damnation.
So Persis and Forbes climbed slowly the winding stairway, and their mood was one of hallowed reverence for God and His beautiful world. They paused to wish even the little bronze Cupid well, and his dolphin and the stream of living water; the moon had deserted it now, but still it chuckled. Forbes and Persis skirted the balustrade with a guilty rapture, avoiding the almost daylight of the moon-swept lawn. They opened the door with the innocent stealth of good fairies.
They mounted the stairway with their arms about each other's bodies, and in the hall above they kissed and whispered, "Good night! Good night! Good night!" and tiptoed in opposite directions.
At their remote doors they paused to throw kisses into the black dark toward each other's invisible presences.
Forbes turned the knob of his door with fierce caution, and waited to hear Persis close hers. There was a faint thud and a little click like a final kiss. He tiptoed across his sill, and was just closing his door after him when he heard somewhere in the hall the soft thud of another door, the click of another lock. His heart leaped as if a fist had seized it suddenly. Some one else had been in the hall. In the deep black there was no telling whose door it was. But some one else had been in the hall.