He attempted to grovel before Persis in apology for oversleeping. But she refused to take the offense seriously, and she congratulated him for having the courage and the honesty to confess the real excuse for absence. He told her that he was sure, from her alert and lustrous eye, that she too had overslept, but she vowed she had not, and he wondered again that such delicate beauty should be conjoined to such unfailing strength.
Save when it was interrupted by exclamations of applause for the choice of the dishes, or childish yum-yums for the exquisiteness of their preparation, the talk was all about the mayor's order closing thethés dansants.
"They call this a free country," Mrs. Neff grumbled, "and yet they tell us we may not dance with our tea!"
"A good thing, too!" said Enslee. "It was time somebody stepped in before the whole country went absolutely nutty over this dance business. A little more and they'd have had the waiters trotting in with soup."
"But what are we to do with our afternoons?" Winifred sighed.
"What did you do before?" said Willie.
"I don't know; but I'm sure it was stupid."
Ten Eyck, the consoler, came to the rescue. "Sigh no more, ladies! There'll be turkey-trotting in this old town when we're all trotted out to Woodlawn. Forbesy, were you ever in Yellowstone Park?"
"Yes."
"Did you see the Old Faithful geyser geyse?"
"Yes."
"Remember how she would lie quiet as a tub for an hour, and then blow off her head and explode a stream of water to the clouds, make an awful fuss for a few minutes, and then drop off to sleep again?"
"Yes."
"Well, that's reform in New York or any big town. There's wild excitement now; there'll be editorials and sermons and police raids and license-revoking for a few days. Then everything will quiet down, and in a week all the old dancing-stands will be running away as before."
Willie changed the subject with his usual abruptness. All this time he had been revealing an unexpected enthusiasm for the little purple forest of lilacs in the centerpiece. He kept pulling the nearest sprays to him and breathing their incense in.
"Do you know I simply adore lilacs," he smiled. "Up at my country place they must be glorious. My gardenerwrites me they have never been so good as this year. I wish I could see them."
Nobody paid much heed to his emotions until, a little later, he broke out suddenly:
"By Jove, I believe I'll take a run up in the country and see my lilacs and spend a night in real air."
"That's a fine idea," said Winifred; "we'll all go along."
"Oh no, you won't," said Willie. "The place isn't open yet. Nobody there but the gardener and his helpers."
This checked Winifred only for a moment, then she returned to the charge.
"All the more fun," she exclaimed. "Let's all go up and make a week-end of it."
"But there are no servants there, I tell you," Willie insisted.
"That's where the fun comes in," said Winifred, in love with her inspiration. "It would be a glorious lark. There's nothing to do here in town."
"We have to eat, you know," Willie reminded her, coldly; "and nobody to cook it."
"I'm a love of a cook," said Winifred. "And I've been through your kitchen up there. It's a model—electric dingblats and all sorts of things. I'll cook the meals if the rest of you will build the fires and make the beds and wash the dishes."
"Oh, Winifred, behave!" Willie sniffed.
But Winifred would not behave. She drummed up her scheme until she raised the others to a kind of amused interest in the venture. It would be a novelty at least.
"We can always cut and run at a moment's notice," Winifred explained, for a clincher. "A couple of hours in a car and we're back in town."
"But there are no servants there, I tell you," Willie reiterated. "You don't seriously expect us to go up there and do our own work?"
"Why not?" said Winifred. "It's time you learned to use your lazy hands before they drop off from neglect."
"No thank you!" Willie demurred. "If we've got to go, we'll take along some deck-hands. What do you say, Persis?"
"The only thing I like about it," said Persis, "is the absence of the servants. I can't remember a time when they haven't been standing round staring or listening through the doors. Oh, Lord, how good it would be to be out from under their thumbs for a few days!"
"We can't afford the scandal," said Willie. "Servants are the best chaperons there are. If we went up without them there'd be a sensation in the papers."
"You and your fear of the newspapers!" Winifred retorted. "They need never know."
"You can't go up to my place without some chaperon!" Willie snapped, with a pettish firmness. "I don't run a road-house, you know."
"If you've got to have a chaperon, maybe you'd take me," said Mrs. Neff.
"You!" Willie laughed cynically. "And who'll chaperon the chaperon? You'll make more mischief than anybody. Your affair with Mr. Lord—er, pardon me, Mr. Ward—is the talk of the town already."
Mrs. Neff's laugh was a mixture of ridicule at the possibility and yearning that it might not be impossible. Her comment was in the spirit of burlesque.
"But if I marry him afterward it will put a stop to the scandal."
"Mother, you are simply indecent!" her daughter piped up, with a kind of militant innocence.
The luxury of such a reproof was too dear to Mrs. Neff's unwithered heart to be neglected. She added her vote to those of Winifred and Persis.
Forbes dared not speak, but he was aglow with the vision of a few days with Persis in the country. As he crossed the continent he had seen the traces of spring everywhere; everywhere the mad incendiary had been kindling fires in tree and shrub and sward. From thetrain window he had watched the splendors unroll like a moving film. He had wished to leap from the car and wander with somebody—with a vague somebody. And now he had found her, and the golden opportunity tapped on the window.
Willie fenced with Winifred till the luncheon was finished. Then they retired to the lounge for coffee. Here women had the franchise for public smoking, and they puffed like small boys. Winifred renewed the battle for the picnic.
Ten Eyck had watched the contest with a grin. At last he spoke: "It's a pretty little war. Reluctant host trying to convince guests that they are not invited. Guests saying, 'We'll come anyway.' Better give in peacefully, Willie, or they'll take possession and lock you outside."
Then Willie gave in, but on the ground that Persis wanted it. He attempted a sheepish gallantry and a veiled romantic reference. He, too, had a touch of April in his frosty little heart. Forbes winced at the rivalry; but at any price he wanted to be with Persis where the spring was.
Willie, yielding to the rôle ofhôte malgré lui, announced that since they were determined to invade his respectable ancestral home, the sooner they got it over with the better. Persis and the rest were creatures of impulse, glad to have an impulse, and they agreed to the flight as quickly as a flock of birds. What engagements they had they dismissed. Their maids could send telegrams of "regret that, owing to unexpected absence from town," etc.
Willie went to call up his gardener and have the house thrown open to the air and fresh provisions ordered in.
He had just gone when a page came to Persis with the word that her father wanted to speak to her on the telephone.
She gave a start and looked afraid as she rose. Forbeswatched her go, and his heart prayed that no bad news might await her. She was so beautiful as she moved, and so plucky. He knew that she was frightened, but she spoke to various people she passed with all the light-hearted graciousness imaginable. She came back speedily with a look of anxiety vainly resisted. She explained that her father was leaving for Chicago on the Twentieth Century, and wanted to tell her good-by. She would barely have time to reach the house before he left.
Forbes offered to accompany her home. She insisted that he should not leave his guests. Winifred and Mrs. Neff rose at once, claiming that they must also leave to make ready for the excursion.
Forbes bade them good-by rather awkwardly. He regretted the disorder of his exit as a host, but he would not forfeit this chance to be alone with Persis.
She was so distressed about her father that she forgot Willie's existence, and left no message for him. When he had finished his tempest in a telephone-booth, and conveyed his orders to his head gardener, he found Mrs. Neff and Winifred waiting for their cars. They explained Persis' flight and made arrangements for the hour and place of meeting for the journey.
WHEN Forbes hastened after the hastening Persis and saw how distraught she was he felt the sharp cutting-edge of sympathy. It was his first sight of her in a mood of heartache, and his own heart ached akin.
When they reached the outer door they found to their amazement that it was raining hard. Within doors there had been such luxurious peace under such glowing lights that the sun was not missed and the rain was not heard. But along the street, gusts of wind swept furious, with long javelins of rain that made the awning almost useless. Women gathered their finery about them, and men clung to their hats while they waited for their cars, and then bolted for them as they came up dripping under the guidance of dripping chauffeurs.
While Persis waited for a taxicab Forbes tried to shelter her with his body. He ventured to hope that her father's absence would not distress her.
"Oh no," she answered, bravely, "not at all. He's going on business. He told me the other day he might have to leave town for a few days—on business."
Forbes hesitated over his next words.
"I hope this won't prevent you from going up to Mr. Enslee's."
"Oh no, quite the contrary," she said. "I'd be alone at home. I'll be glad of the—the diversion. Here's the taxi. It's really not necessary for you to go with me."
For answer he took her arm and ran with her to the door the footman opened. A blast of windy rain lashed them as they crept into the car. The door slammed andthey were under way, running cautiously on the skiddish pavement.
At last he was alone with her. The rain made their shelter cozier, and for all its bluster it was a spring rain. With its many-hoofed clatter it was a battalion of police clearing the way for the flower procession.
Thinking of this, Forbes said:
"I'm mighty glad you're not leaving town."
"But I am."
"With your father, I mean. You're leaving town with me, instead."
She looked him in the eye with some surprise.
"It's a good thing we put the blame for that luncheon on Mrs. Neff. It tickled her to death and—do you know that Willie really thinks you're flirting with her—or aiming at Alice? He can't tell which." She laughed deliciously. It did not grieve her to fool Willie.
The cab rocked in the wind, and the rain beat upon it with the sound of waves protesting against the rush of a yacht's prow. Forbes caught a glimpse of a street sign. It warned him that they were already passing Fiftieth Street. In a few minutes they would be at her home.
"I'm not flirting with anybody," he said. "I'm adoring you."
A little frown of bewilderment troubled the smile she gave him. She felt his hand on hers and tried to draw it away, but he held it fast.
"We're not at the opera, you know," she said. "That noise isn't the music of 'Tristan and Isolde.' That's rain."
"I know it," he answered, "and I don't want you to be Isolde. If only she had married Tristan in the first place—"
"They might have been divorced in the second place."
"Don't be—don't talk that way. I'm in deadly earnest," he pleaded, but she laughed evasively.
"That was very heady sherry you gave us to-day."
He shook his head sadly, as over the flippancy of a child, and took her hand in both of his.
"It's broad daylight, Mr. Forbes, and this is Madison Avenue."
"But nobody can see us," he answered. "Look at the rain."
"What difference does that make?" she answered, tugging at her hand. But she looked, and saw how they were closed away from the world. Sheets of water splashed and spread so thickly that they covered the windows with gray curtains.
It was as if a brief tropical flood had burst upon New York.
Somehow it did make a difference that nobody could see. It always makes a difference in us that nobody can see us.
Even Forbes felt the change in Persis. Perhaps it was only that her resistance was minutely diminished, or that one of her many fears was removed, one support gone. As a soldier he had sometime felt that slackening of morale across the space between firing-lines. It is then that the military genius orders a charge and turns the enemy's momentary weakness into a panic.
So Forbes charged Persis. In his face gathered a fierce determination. His fingers tightened upon hers, no longer caressingly, but cruelly, till they hurt. He pulled her right hand across him with his right, and thrust his left arm back of her, caught her farther shoulder in the crook of it, and drew her close till their faces almost touched, till her eyes were so close to his that they were grotesquely one.
And then he paused. He lacked the élan to seize the red flag of her lips. He paused weakly to stare at her and to beseech the kiss he might have captured.
"Kiss me!" he said.
So silly a phrase for so warm a deed. She shook herhead, and her fright was gone. She taunted him from her eyes as from an unconquered citadel.
"Kiss me!" he repeated, feeling poltroon and idiotic.
She did not upbraid him or feel any anger or any helplessness; she just studied him, ignoring the fact that he held her body close to him in a crushing embrace. After all, that meant nothing. Almost anybody might hold her so at a dance for all the world to see. Nothing mattered, she thought, so long as their souls did not embrace.
But therein she was wrong, for their souls were not dancing to music. He was demanding her love, her submission to his love. Their souls were debating that vital question, without speech, yet with every argument.
She enjoyed the struggle. She was striking the first of the matches. She would watch the pretty blue flame a moment before it blazed red, then she would blow it out with a little breath from the lips he demanded.
It was fascinating to see how tremendously excited he was over the privilege of touching his lips to hers. It was a quaint little act to make so much of. He was a splendid man, brave, charming, good to see, and now he was crimson and fierce-eyed and breathing hard, trembling with the struggle to keep from taking what was so close. She smiled at him triumphantly. She was about to puff out the flame with a whiff of sarcasm, when he said, with all the simplicity of truth:
"I couldn't take a kiss unless you gave it to me. I don't want to kiss you unless you want me to. May I?"
It was such a boyish plea that she could not be sophisticated in its presence. She could not answer such hunger with wit. She felt a sudden power from somewhere pressing her head forward to his lips and her heart closer to his.
She smiled tenderly with veiled eyes, and no longer held off. With a gasp of joy he understood and caught her against him. But just as their lips would have met another instinct saved her.
She had always felt a kind of sanctity about her mouth, a preciousness that must not be cheaply cast away. Among all the kisses she had given and taken there still remained this first kiss, still vestal and virgin. And that was the kiss he asked.
She turned her head swiftly, and it was her cheek that he touched. There was such a burning in the touch that the fire ran through her. Her cheeks crimsoned. She closed her eyes in a kind of sweet shame.
She was amazed to be there, huddled in his arms, with his lips preying upon her cheek. Her soul was in wild debate with itself, busy with reproaches and summons to battle against the invader. But it was like a senate without president. There was no one to give the order.
At last she opened her eyes to see again what manner of man this was that had conjured away all her pride and her wisdom and her strength. Her eyes saw that the curtain of rain was slipping from the windows. The downpour had abated. They were drawing up at her own curb.
She flung off his hands with a gasp of anger and terror. He stared at her in a daze. Then he understood.
"Forgive me!" he pleaded.
She was furious with him; but she blamed herself more, and breathed hard with rage as she straightened her hat and her hair.
An old footman was waiting at the top of the steps with an umbrella. He ran down and opened the door.
"Your father is waiting for you, miss," he said.
Forbes stepped forth into the light drizzle and helped her out.
"Good-by," he said. And again "Good-by." But she hurried up the steps. Forbes followed her with his eyes, and saw an elderly gentleman waiting for her at the door. There was a troubled look on his face. The door closed upon him as he caught Persis in his arms.
Forbes told the chauffeur to take him to his hotel, and crept back into the deserted nest of romance. The taxicab turned slowly round. As it passed the house again, Forbes saw another car stop at the curb. From it stepped Willie Enslee.
ALL the way back to the hotel, all the while he was selecting what clothes he should take, all the while he waited for the hour of the general rendezvous to arrive Forbes was troubled by the remembrance of Willie Enslee's appearance at Persis' home.
He had apparently come in hot pursuit. On the other hand, he might have come merely to make the final arrangements for the excursion to the country. And yet Willie must be accepted as a rival. Or, rather, it was Forbes that was the rival, since Enslee's infatuation for Persis was generally known long before Forbes reached New York.
Forbes did not approve of men who went after other men's sweethearts to take them away. But Persis had told him that she had never loved any man; ergo, she had not loved Enslee—if Enslee could be called a man.
Even so, Forbes would have preferred to make love to Mr. Enslee's sweetheart somewhere else than at Mr. Enslee's home. But how was he to fight his rival except where his rival was? How rescue the imprisoned princess but by invading the ogre's castle? Physically, Enslee was hardly more than a pocket ogre, but his wealth made him a giant. It was with the Enslee Estates that Forbes must grapple. He feared that Persis might drift into their wizard power, and he wanted to save her from that life of "luxurious misery" of which he had read so much, for that life of "blissful poverty with love" of which he had read so much.
Besides, in invading Enslee's own domain he was giving Enslee every advantage. All of the splendor of Enslee's château, the armor of riches and the sword of gold, would defend him, while Forbes would attack only with his empty hands and the power of love. If Goliath thought that David took an unfair advantage of him, why did not Goliath lay aside his buckler and his bludgeon and use a sling, too? Pebbles were plentiful enough.
Forbes reasoned at his scruples till they faced the other way. He argued till what he would have called vicious in other men became sincerely virtuous in his own special instance. So men and empires, republics and religions have always argued when they were about to try to take something away from somebody.
As Forbes folded his togs and wished them better and braver, he paused to laugh at what Persis had told him: Willie believed that Forbes was flirting with Mrs. Neff for herself or her daughter! What a blind little ape Enslee was! Then Forbes straightened up and flushed and called himself a double-dyed cad. He flung aside the things he was folding and resolved not to go to Enslee's home at all.
He sank into a chair and pondered. If he did not go he would be left alone in New York. Only a few days remained of his little vacation. By the time Persis came back Forbes would be at his army post, a slave of discipline and the everlasting round of the same dull duties. Persis would be angry and hurt, and she would marry Enslee; she would live in that home with Enslee; she would become part of the Enslee Estates, body and soul.
Forbes' gorge rose at the visions this brought to his mind. He ripped out an oath, and flung off the withes of such false honor. He would, he must, save Persis at any cost. If Enslee were foolish enough to think that Forbes was hunting Mrs. Neff or Alice, let him take the consequences. If Enslee had not thought so, he would not have asked Forbes to come along. To take advantage of an enemy's weaknesses was the first rule of warfare. To shoot from cover was the first business of a marksman.
This was not a contest in sharp-shooting at targets under strict rules, with a medal for a prize. This was a battle in rough country for the rescue of a beautiful girl.
Forbes granted himself a plenary indulgence, and resumed packing, smiling again at Willie's idea that he was a suitor for the post of third husband to Mrs. Neff.
He did not smile so well a few hours later, when Willie, with the kindliest of motives, assigned him to Mrs. Neff's automobile.
"You two sweethearts," Enslee said, with a matchmaker's grin, "will want to ride together, of course. Persis and I will keep out of your way as much as we can."
Forbes was sportsman enough to credit Willie with a bull's-eye. He smothered his chagrin and helped Mrs. Neff into her car, while his two suit-cases were strapped in the trunk-rack with the family baggage.
The motor-caravan was made up of three machines. Winifred ran her own roadster, nursing the steering-wheel to her bosom, while her fat elbows harried Ten Eyck's cramped form. Bob Fielding had been unable to get away from the troubled waters of Wall Street, and Winifred had adopted Ten Eyck as his understudy.
Mrs. Neff took her four-passenger touring-car. Forbes decided after several appalling bumps that it had belonged to her first husband. Alice sat with the chauffeur, dreaming of Stowe Webb, no doubt. In the rear Mrs. Neff, in her most garrulous mood, talked nonsense through a veil whose flying ends kept snapping in Forbes' face. And when they were beyond Broadway her cigarette ashes kept sifting into his eyes.
He was as polite as possible, but his thoughts were trying to pierce the dust-wake of the great six-cylinder touring-car in which Willie Enslee led the way with Persis. All Forbes could see of her was the top of her motor-hood and the veil that fled back like a signal beseeching him to make haste and save her.
Broadway in the late afternoon was thick with the home-going armies, and it seemed to stretch as long and as crowded as the Milky Way. On through Yonkers to Dobbs Ferry and Tarrytown the journey took them, passing an occasional monument of our brief history, a tablet to mark where Rochambeau met Washington and brought France to our rescue, or a memorial to the cowboys that arrested Major André.
In Forbes' then humor no small charms of nature or legend could have caught his mind from his jealousy. Even the epic levels of the Hudson River and the Valhalla walls of the Palisades hardly impressed him. What success they had with him was mainly due to his remembrance of seeing them first from the train that brought him to New York a few days, or a few eons, ago. He was full then of ambitions to shine as a soldier in an enlarged camp. Now his treasons and stratagems were concerned with a love-campaign whose spoils was Persis Cabot.
There was a pause by agreement for dinner at a road-house—"their last civilized meal," as Ten Eyck mournfully prophesied, "before they entered the Purgatory of Winifred's cooking at Willie's boarding-house."
When the task of fretting out a dinner was finished they got under way, pushing north again.
Eventually the pilot-car, or, rather, its guiding cloud of dust, swept off to the east, turning its back on the Hudson and plunging into the heart of Westchester County, an ocean of hills like green billows, and valleys like their troughs; peaceful castles set on high places, and pleasant villages dispersed in low; the homely roominess of farms, and now and then a huddle of crowded rookeries, where Italian peasants had set up a congenial little slums along some ugly waste.
Everything took on a wistfulness in the evening air, which the sunset was tincturing like claret poured into water. Forbes was aching to be with Persis, and he hoped that she was wistful to be with him. The moonhad loitered with torch half aglow in the wings of the sky until the sun was gone, and then its lamp was raised, and it entered its own scene. In the houses lights began to pink the dark with the trite but irresistible appeal of Christmas-card transparencies.
Forbes lost all sense of direction in the winding roads, and even Mrs. Neff's chatter yielded to the brow-caressing dusk. The swift progress of the car gave no suggestion of wheels, but rather of a flying keel on a smooth stream.
Finally the searchlights of Enslee's machine turned sharp at right angles. A beautiful granite bridge leaped into view as suddenly as if the great god Wotan had builded it with a word. At the farther side of the bridge stood a lodge-keeper's home, whose architecture seemed to shift the scene instantly to the France of the first Francis.
"Here we are!" Mrs. Neff cried. "And I'm half frozen. I hope the gardener has aired the rooms and put dry sheets on the beds, or I'm in for lumbago."
"Mother, you're just death to romance!" Alice protested. She had doubtless been thinking of Stowe Webb.
The car glided across the bridge, and the moon-whipped stream reveling below it, then preceded through a granite gateway with a portcullis suspended like a social guillotine. And then the sense of privacy began. The very moon seemed to become a part of the Enslee Estates.
The motors tilted backward as the hill rose; and Mrs. Neff's rheumatic car groaned and worried a spiraling road up and up through masses of anonymous shrubs pouring forth incense, through spaces of moon-swept hillside and thickets of somber velours. Then there was a glimpse of the radiant geometry of moon-washed roofs. A turn or two more, and the wheels were swishing into the graveled court of a stately mansion.
The door under the porte-cochère was open, and in its embrasure stood a leanish man and his fattish wife, hospitable as innkeepers, the warm light streaming back of them like peering children.
Enslee's voice came out of the silence:
"That you, Prout? H'are you, Martha?" And then, with characteristic originality, "Well, we got here."
To which Prout responded with equal importance:
"So you did, sir."
He and his wife had been working like mad since Enslee telephoned, trying to turn themselves into a troop of servants, whisking shrouds from table and piano and chairs, and mopping a cloth of dust from every surface. They were as respectful now as Philemon and Baucis welcoming Jupiter, and as apologetic as if the palace were their own unworthy cot.
"I've got a pack of Indians with me, Prout," said Enslee. "I didn't want 'em, but they would come, and now we've got to make the best of it. Don't let 'em trample your flower-beds. And if anybody breaks a flower-stem we'll have him or her shot at sunrise."
Martha giggled into her fat palm.
"Oh, 'e will 'ave 'is joke; 'e will so. And isn't this Miss Cabot? Of course it is."
Forbes, seated in the rear car, heard again that assumption of Persis and Enslee as a couple.
The cars rolled up to the door in turn. The women as they got out piled their wraps on Martha till she completely disappeared, except for a pair of clutching hands, and a voice from the depths.
The chauffeurs made off down the road to the distant garage, with instructions to stay there after one of them should have come back for Winifred's roadster.
The gardener, apologizing for his awkwardness in the office of a butler, led the little troop into the great living-room, where a big fire blazed, splashing walls and floors with banners of red and yellow.
Prout explained that he had been unable to start either the hot-water furnace that heated the house or thedynamo that lighted it. And, being short-handed like, and took with a stroke of sciatiky from the onseasonable cold of the backward spring, he had found time to make fires only in the master's room, his mother's room, and one other. The caretaker, who had kept a fire going all winter for the sake of the water-pipes, had let it go out at the first warm weather and gone for a visit to his wife's mother.
"That's what we get for coming up before the place has been set to rights," Willie grumbled. "I suppose you girls will have to draw lots for my room."
"Me for the nursery," said Winifred. "It's the sunniest place in the house, and—"
"You're not going to try to sleep on one of those children's beds?" Willie gasped.
"No, nor on two of them," said Winifred; "but there's a glorious window-seat a mile wide."
Willie's self-sacrifice was of the parsimonious sort that made acceptance impossible. None of the women would deprive him of his bed. Mrs. Neff was assigned to Willie's mother's room, and Alice and Persis to those on either side. Forbes and Ten Eyck were exiled to the southwest wing.
Prout and Martha could not believe that Mr. Enslee had come without the retinue of servants that ordinarily preceded his august appearance. In fact, the adventure was as unlike Enslee as it was uncongenial to him. He could not and would not see the fun of it.
Martha and Prout offered their service, but Winifred would not let them mar the perfection of her Swiss Family Robinson. She overawed Willie and drove the old couple back to their own cottage.
When they had retired with prophecies of disaster and evil the would-be gipsies felt relieved of all the encumbrances of civilization. Winifred called it a return to nature. For the time being, however, the chief emotion was one of blissful weariness. Host and guests had keptthemselves keyed up all season, like instruments in a concert, and now that the tension was released they seemed to collapse upon themselves.
In front of the great fireplace was a divan almost as big as a life-boat, and cushioned into such a cloud as the gods rested on. Winifred and Mrs. Neff and Alice were lolling on it, and Murray Ten Eyck sat on the edge. Back of it was the usual living-room table with a pile or two of books and magazines.
Persis paused for a moment, looking over the books to select something to take up to her room. She pushed them about with indifference.
"Last year's novels!" she smiled. "As thrilling as last year's birds' nests."
She turned up an illustrated society weekly of a former spring. The frontispiece held her a moment, and she shook her head.
"And last year's reputations. Here's a big portrait of Mrs. Richard Lanthorpe and her two children." She read the caption aloud: "'Prominent young matron who is just opening her Newport villa. Though a devoted mother to her charming little daughters, Mrs. Lanthorpe is also well known as a skilful whip.'"
"Good Lord!" said Winifred, reaching out her hand. "Let me see the cat. A whip, eh? You could drive a coach and four through her reputation now."
Mrs. Neff took the paper from her hand. "Her husband got the kiddies. Pretty little tikes, too."
"She sold 'em for the Newport villa," said Alice, looking over her mother's shoulder. Mrs. Neff turned on her with a glare of amazement.
"Where do you children pick up such things?"
"I'm not children," said Alice, "and the papers were full of it."
"Mrs. Dicky was up here last spring for a week-end with her husband," said Willie. "And so was the other man. What's his name? Later I heard that people hadbeen talking a lot even then, but I never suspected anything till later."
"You never would, Willie," said Mrs. Neff. She stared at the picture. "She's really very good-looking, and she wasn't a bad sort altogether. I wonder which one of us will be gone next winter?"
"You, probably," Willie snickered, and the others laughed lazily. But Mrs. Neff bristled.
"I don't see why you have to laugh. Am I too old to misbehave?"
"Far from it, darling!" said Willie. "You're just at the dangerous age. I—er—I don't mean exactly that, either."
Mrs. Neff turned a page hastily. "Here's a picture of Deborah Reeve in her coming-out gown."
"She came out so far and so fast she went right back," said Ten Eyck, and explained to Forbes: "Hesitated between her riding-master and her mother's chauffeur, and finally ran off with the first officer of her father's yacht. She was a born democrat."
"Here's a snapshot of Mrs. Tom Corliss at the Meadowbrook Steeplechase. Look, that's 'Pup' Mowat standing with her. Good Lord, he was hanging round her a year ago, and people are just beginning to notice. Haven't they been clever? A whole year under the rose and right under the public's nose."
"Tom Corliss will be finding it out before long," said Winifred.
"Oh no," said Willie, "I've discovered that the husband is always the last to find out." And he tossed his head in careless pride at the novelty of his pronouncement.
"Isn't Willie the observing little thing?" said Winifred. The others exchanged glances of contemptuous amusement while their host looked wise.
Persis strolled round to the divan, took Murray by the ear, and hoisted him from his place.
"No, thanks, Murray," she said. "I couldn't think of taking your seat." And dropped into it.
"What are we going to do for amusement to-night?" said Willie. "Who wants to play auction?"
"Hush!" said Mrs. Neff.
"Shall we have some music, then?" A general declination. "Some singing? A dance?"
They refused even that, and he grew desperate.
"Charades?"
"Shut up!" came from the crowd.
"I don't want to be entertained," said Persis. "I'm never so miserable as when I'm being entertained."
Everybody approved. Just to be let alone was a luxury.
Willie ventured a last retort: "Anybody want a drink?"
Everybody wanted a drink. Willie went to a side-wall and groped for a button, pushed it and held it, then resumed his place before the fire. After a time he pushed it again.
"Where is everybody?" he snapped. Then the truth dawned on him again. "Good Lord, we're marooned!"
Winifred chuckled at the situation. "You'll have to be your own barkeep, Willie. Go rustle us what you can find."
"But everything would be in the cellar," he answered. "If there's anything here at all, which I doubt. And the key is in town. Couldn't trust Prout with it. Fine old gardener—give his life to save a peony—but he's death on liquor. I couldn't trust him to order in drinkables—besides, I forgot."
There were groans of horror.
"'Water, water, everywhere,'" said Ten Eyck, "'and not a drop to drink.'"
"It's bad enough having no servants to wait on us," Mrs. Neff pondered, "but who's to do our thinking for us? Which'll we die of first? thirst or starvation?"
"We'll get in a supply from the village to-morrow," said Willie, handsomely.
"To-morrow never comes," said Winifred.
For lack of artificial stimulus the momentary enthusiasm lapsed again. Nobody cared even to read. The fireplace was books enough.
Forbes and Ten Eyck stood at either end of the mantel, mere supporting statuary, their heads in shadow. Willie teetered at the center of the hearth, toasting his coat-tails.
The four women occupied the divan, sketched out brilliantly against the dark like a group portrait of Sargent's. The light worked over their images as a painter works, making and illuminating shadows, touching a strand of hair or a cheek-bone with a high light, modeling with a streak of red some lifted muscle, then brushing it off again.
The poses of the women were as various as their bodies and souls. At one corner Mrs. Neff sat erect among the cushions in a sleepy stateliness. Winifred filled the other corner like another heap of cushions, hardly moving except to flick her cigarette ashes on the floor to the acute distress of Willie's neat soul. Alice drooped with arched spine in a young girl's slump, and clung to a hand of Persis', doubtless wishing it were Stowe Webb's. Persis sat cross-legged, a smoking Sultana, her chin on the back of one hand, one elbow on one knee.
From his coign of shadow Forbes watched them. Vague reverie held them all. The very shadows seemed to breathe unevenly in restless meditation. The fire-logs alone conversed aloud in mysterious whispers, with crackling epigrams.
Forbes wondered at the group, so real and so unreal. He wondered what they were thinking of, each in her castle of self, each with her yearnings backward and forward. Winifred was wishing her lover there, perhaps, and that her slim and gracile soul were not mislodged in so determinedly fat a body; Mrs. Neff was wishing, perhaps, that her gray hair and her calendar of years did not so thwart the young, romantic girl that housed in her body, and must sleep alone, perhaps, forever. Suddenly Forbes wished that he had not smiled so ruthlessly at the thought of her expecting to be courted. Her longings were pitiful, perhaps, but not ridiculous.
It was easy to guess at Alice's thoughts. She was wishing to be not so young and curbed by authority. She was years older than Juliet had been when she went to the church with Romeo and threw him the ladder and preceded him to the tomb; yet Alice's well-matured desires were smiled away and patronized as childish.
And Persis: what were the thoughts that burned within her soul and twitched at her fingers, or tugged at her eyebrows, shook her eyelids, or tightened her lips? Was she thinking of Forbes as he was thinking of her?
Suddenly her drooping bosom expanded with a great breath, her lips parted, her eyes widened, her hand rose. She was about to speak. What would she say?
She yawned. Her hand automatically came up for politeness' sake, but lingered to pat her straining lips as if in approval. Her eyes blurred and fairly writhed. All the muscles of her divine beauty were contorted. She was not so much yawning as yawned. She was enjoying it, too, and as it ended she sighed over it as over a sweetmeat. The musing goddess had been suddenly restored to humanity with a thump.
Her comfortable sigh was echoed and her yawn outdone by Winifred, who moaned:
"I'm so damned sleepy I'll turn in here if the rest of you will get off the bed."
Then Alice yawned and wriggled, and Mrs. Neff gaped with a slight restraint and staggered to her feet.
"I'm on my way. I'd be bored to death if I weren't so excited over the wonderful sleep I'm to have. I hope I don't wake up for a week."
"I hope you don't," said Willie, thrusting out his arms in an all-embracing oscitation.
There was an epidemic of yawns, and they staggered to the console table where a long row of candles waited. Ten Eyck lighted them and distributed them, and the line moved on like a drunken torchlight procession, helped and hindered one another up, and sang out faint "Good nights" as they dispersed in the upper hall.
Doors were closed, only to be flung open with wails of distress. Martha and Prout had lugged all the trunks and suit-cases and handbags to the wrong rooms.
The three men were compelled to act as porters. Willie was furious and full of "I told you so's"; but Ten Eyck impersonated the transfer-men he had met, and had a different dialect for every room.
Forbes went timidly into the exquisite apartment where Persis was ensconced. It was a shrine to him, and he averted his eyes from the carved and lace-adorned altar of her bed.
But Ten Eyck turned back to pound on the door and put in his palm, whining:
"Don't forget the poor baggage-smasher, lady."
Persis opened the door a trifle and gave him a twenty-five-cent piece. She held out another for Forbes, and he took it with a foolish rapture.
Ten Eyck bit his coin and touched his hat, with a husky murmur of:
"'Ch obliged, mum! 'Ch obliged!"
Forbes kept his for a lucky piece—the first keepsake he had had from her.
IF Persis and the others were rejoicing in their emancipation from formalities too familiar, Forbes was glad that he had escaped them for the reverse reason. Hospitality had been dispensed on a lavish scale at his own home in the South before his father's death, but the servants there were negroes, slaves, or descendants of slaves, and he knew just the right mixture of affection and tyranny to administer to them. But where servile white foreigners, with their curious humilities and pomposities, bowed heads and elevated eyebrows, he had not learned just how much to demand and how much to concede.
He was glad that there was no valet to unpack his things, for he was afraid that his secret wardrobe might not pass such experienced inspection. He laid out his own pajamas, brushes, and clean things against the morning.
Ten Eyck, who shared the same bathroom with Forbes, came in to borrow a match for his pipe, noted Forbes' industry, and quoted one of the few classics that he still read—Rabelais: "Panurge had it right when he said, 'I am never so well served as when I am my own valet.'"
"Is this your first experience as your own man?" said Forbes.
"I should say not!" Ten Eyck snorted, with a cloud of smoke. "I've roughed it as rough as any rough-neck going, Forbesy."
Forbes, from the experience of a campaigner, a wilderness hiker, lifted an eyebrow of patronizing incredulity. Ten Eyck retorted:
"You needn't grin. I don't mean any of this roughingde luxe. I had the real thing. I quarreled with the governor once. I was hitting it up pretty hard, and he gave me a call. I told him I didn't need his dirty money; I could earn my own, and I swore I'd never ask him for a cent. I lit out for the Wild and Woolly. What I took with me went fast. I couldn't get a job I'd look at; and by the time I was ready to look at any job I could get, nobody would look at me. Finally they took me on as unskilled labor in the construction camp of a railroad. I slept in cattle-cars, or on the ground, or in wooden bunks with Swedes and Finns, and Huns and coons, and other swine in the adjoining styes. I fought 'em, too, when I had to. Later I waited on the table in a cheap hashery.
"God knows where I'd have ended if my dear old dad hadn't got so homesick he put the Pinkertons on my trail. And when he found me he apologized and begged me to come back. And I very graciously accepted. I had had all the poverty I needed for a lifetime. Hereafter, Forbesy, I'm for the nap on the velvet and the plush on the peach. I tell you, Forbesy, we millionaires may have our little troubles, but we escape the worst of 'em, eh John D.?"
"I wish you'd cut out that talk about my being a millionaire," Forbes broke in, impatiently.
"Millionaire is a newspaper term," Ten Eyck explained, "for anybody who is worth more than a few thousand dollars."
"But I'm not worth anything and never shall be," Forbes confessed. "I'm not rich at all. I've nothing but a few hundred dollars and my picayune salary."
Ten Eyck took the great denial without emotion. "Then I congratulate you on being one of the poor but honest, instead of the criminal rich."
"I'm poor, but I'm not honest," Forbes said; "I'm obtaining courtesy under false pretenses."
"Rot!" said Ten Eyck. "Money couldn't buy whatyou're getting, and the lack of it couldn't lose what you've gained. They like you. You belong. That's all there is to it."
"I wonder."
"Of course that's all. What does anybody here care how much you've got or haven't got, so long as you're congenial and aren't proposing to marry anybody."
Forbes lifted his head with a quick, startled movement that did not escape Ten Eyck, who pretended to misunderstand.
"Of course, if you really are after Mrs. Neff or the little Neffkin, there might be a call for a show-down of bankbooks."
"I'd be just as much obliged if you people would drop that joke about my courting Mrs. Neff," Forbes grumbled. Ten Eyck was patient; his voice fell to a deep and earnest tone:
"What I say goes along the line, Forbesy. You were good to me when I was sick in Manila. Don't you go and get sick here. You told me what I mustn't eat and drink and wear out there, and I want to warn you against the dangers of this place. There's a tropics right here, too, with deadly miasmas and mosquitoes that buzz strange things and sting you full of delirious fevers. Don't fall in love too far, Forbesy. I like you mighty well and—naming no names—I like her mighty well, but don't get false notions in your head, and don't put false notions in hers."
"About my money, you mean?"
"Umm-humm."
"You think that money would make a difference to her?"
"Hah!" Ten Eyck snorted. "Would water make any difference to a fish?"
"But if she loved—"
"My boy, you can keep a mighty sweet canary in a mighty little cage, and it will sing away like mad and bevery fond of you; but you can't keep a bird of paradise there—or a sea-gull—can you?"
"I reckon not," said Forbes.
"It isn't the fault of the bird of paradise, either, is it?"
Forbes shook his head and sighed: "It's the fault of the man that puts it in the cage."
"Well, maybe he means well. He may be crazy about the bird, just crazy to keep it near him, but—he can't. That's all, he can't. It'll beat itself to death or break loose."
"Unless he lets it go," said Forbes.
"That's it! You understand me, don't you, old man?"
"I get you, Steve."
"And you won't feel too hard about it, will you? There's a lot of other birds besides the big ones. There's nothing cozier than a little canary—is there?"
"I reckon not," said Forbes, dismally.
"And there's a lot of them to be had. And some of them are very pretty."
They sat and smoked a long while. Then Ten Eyck yawned, and gripped Forbes' shoulder hard and went out, pausing to look at him sadly. For his good night he dropped into a cockney quotation: "'Wot I meanter s'y, Pip, is: allus the best o' friends?'"
He ended with a querying inflection, and Forbes echoed it with a period:
"Allus the best o' friends."
He sat smoking his cigar till it was gone. Then he made ready for bed, blew out the candle, raised the curtain, and paused to stare blankly into the dark mass of a green hill or a great cloud, whichever it was, piled up against a sky sprinkled over with a powder of little stars. Among them was one planet whose name he did not know. As he watched, it moved with imperceptible stealth out of his sight behind the hill.
He gave up Persis as completely as he gave up theplanet. A few days ago he did not know her name. A few days more and she would have slipped from his sky.
He was so tired, so full of the need of sleep, that despair was only another kind of night, black but blessed, without ecstasy, but void of torment.
THE only dream that Forbes knew that night—or remembered, at least—was a dream of his latest garrison, and the same bugle humming like the single nagging morning fly that frets a sleeper awake. It was warily intoning its old "I can't get 'em up, I can't get 'em up, I can't get 'em up in the morning."
He leaped from his bed, and was astonished to find himself standing in a strange room with an open window facing an unknown landscape. He screwed his fists into his eyes boyishly before he realized his whereabouts.
At night he had seen his room in vast shadows clouded about a meek candle. The window had shown him only a blur of gloom against a sky of star-dust.
Now he found himself in a sumptuously furnished chamber, whose window framed a scene of royally ordered beauty—a great lawn as level and almost as spacious as a parade-ground, and bordered with a marble balustrade that seemed to run on forever regardless of expense. Marble statues and bronzes and fountains were here and there. And up a noble hill a stairway, as beautiful as a sea-gull's wings, soared to a parked space where a little marble temple sheltered an image which he judged to be Cupid's.
Beyond the big hill reared aloft a primeval forest which the sunrise wind was shaking. The tips of the topmost trees were crimsoned, as if roses had bloomed at last on pines. The climbing sun had just reached them, its rays climbing down the hill as itself climbed the east.
Forbes crept back to bed, but only to reproach himselfwith sloth. He could not afford to miss a sunrise such as this would be. There would be occasions enough for sleep; but he was going to leave the Enslee Eden this very day forever. The flaming sword of gold would keep him from re-entering the Paradise he had got into as a boy crawls under a circus tent.
He flung himself from the alien linen and mahogany, and, hastening into the bathroom, stepped into the tub, drew the circular curtain around him quietly not to waken his neighbor, Ten Eyck, and turned the little wheels marked "shower" and "needle" and "cold," and received the responding rains. There was no question that they were cold.
But the reaction was a jubilee in every artery, and he dressed with eagerness for whatever the day might bring. He opened his door softly and went down the twilight of the stairway like an escaping thief. The servantless tenants had neglected to bolt and chain the outside door. He swung it back and stepped out.
He glanced with admiring awe at the dew-pebbled lawn, the colonnades, and the cloisters, but hastened to the eastern side to watch the day breaking over the sky-lines of Westchester. The scene was Alpine with the Alps removed, and the green herds of foothills left. Across a marble-walled pool stood a family of birches, and held the red sun prisoner in a web of green leaves and white boughs. The light that shot through them played upon shrubs and trees and walks arranged according to the highest canons of the landscaping art, taking nature's scenario and dramatizing it.
One imperial group of lilac-trees seemed to hold torches up for the sun to kindle. They blazed with purple flame.
Forbes thought: "Those are the lilacs Enslee loves and owns. This is Enslee's heaven. That is Enslee's sun. And she is Enslee's, too." Then, with all the bravery and optimism the dawn could lavish, he felt: "Well, she belongs here; I don't. She needs these things. I can't get 'em for her. So it's good-by, Persis, and no harm done."
He was sure that Enslee would never know of the kiss he had stolen from Enslee's property. And he was sure that Enslee would never miss a certain lilac cluster whose grace and color especially caught Forbes' fancy. He plucked it. Just as it snapped in his hand and flung a fragrant dew upon his face he heard another slight sound above. He glanced up.
The vision he saw smote him with beauty like a thunderbolt, and knocked him Saul-wise backward off the high horse of jaunty resolution into a new religion.
At an upper window, a few paces from where Forbes stood, Persis leaned out like another blessed damosel looking downward at the sun. It kindled her eyes as it kindled the lilacs, and she frowned a little against it. She did not see Forbes as her drowsy gaze swept the hills. She was not there, however, to adore the dawn. It had troubled her sleep, and she wanted to shut it out. Her hands were tugging drowsily at one of the blinds, but it was held by a catch in the wall. She must lean far out to release it.
The very homeliness of her motive and the act made her the more appealing to Forbes. A creamy nightcap of lace and bow-knots was all askew on her tousled hair, and a long loop of it slid down into her bosom as she bent far forward. She had not paused even to throw on a shawl, and her nightgown was so vaporous a drapery that it hardly mattered where it clung or lapsed.
Forbes blushed for her, but gazed entranced while she fumbled at the lock till it yielded. Then she reached out for the other shutter and stared forth into the sun, stared between her white arms, outstretched like the wings of an angel at a window in the sky.
Now Forbes knew that he loved her irretrievably. He would storm the clouds to win her. He could afford ahome with a pair of shutters, and she could close them against the sun and be as snug as a cuckoo in a clock.
After all, she was no bird of paradise, no sea-gull. She was just a fascinating sleepy-head pouting at the morning for interfering with her dreams.
He was so resolved upon winning her that he counted her already his, and, with a gesture like throwing up his cap, flung the lilacs he held straight at her. They missed her, but they caught her eye, and she followed them down to where he darted to catch them for another cast.
When he looked up again the blinds were shut. He was alone in the world, his lilacs and his heart barred out and rejected. She had retreated to Enslee's stronghold and shuttered herself in.
Forbes turned away to exile in a world of gloom. He heard a little sound above, and whirled quickly. The shutters were opening again. He saw her eyes. She was frowning fiercely; but that was because of the sharp sun, for her lips were smiling and she was whispering something.
He hurried to the spot beneath her window. He saw that her hair had been stuffed back into her nightcap. She was muffled to the ears in a heavy bathrobe, so shapeless and opaque that its big sleeves hid her very hands. But she smiled through like an Eskimo angel. And she was whispering in Eskimese.
He could not understand her, and she could not hear his whisper. They were afraid to waken the house with louder talk. So he beckoned to her to come down. She shook her head. He insisted with ardent gesticulation at the beauty of the scene. She shook her head so violently that her cap fell off. She clutched at it, and her hair fell all about her. He caught the cap as it drifted down like a tired butterfly. She brushed her hair back and pleaded for the cap. He shook his head and tossed her the lilacs. She refused to take them, and put out her hands for the cap. He beckoned her again to come down, and shefrowned ferociously. Then, at length, she smiled and nodded and turned away.
He waited, afraid to walk because the gravel crunched alarmingly. He could see the gardener's cottage down the hill, and he was glad that no one was stirring there; not a thread of smoke spun from the chimney.
After he had waited for a tiny eternity he heard her snap her fingers, and looked up to find her fully dressed, all kempt and shiny-faced and precise. She held out beseeching palms for her cap, but he pocketed it and commanded her to descend. She left the window with a look of angry amusement, and he knew that she was yielding to his orders.
It was his first command, and she had obeyed it.