XXIVTRANSFIGURATION
THEY were livelier at the table, but not nearly so noisy as Mamie Ford and Paul Reamer and their intimates would have been at a dinner party at home, Elsie thought; though this was but a hasty and vague comparison flitting through her mind. She was not able to think definitely about anything for a time: she was too dazzled by being dazzling. Her clearest thought was an inquiry: Was this she, herself, and, if she was indeed Elsie Hemingway, were these queer, kind, new people now about her quite sane?
The tall young man with the long face who sat at her left talked to her as much as he could, being hampered by the circumstance that the fair-haired short young man on her right did his best to talk to her all the time, except when she spoke. Then both of them listened with deference; and so did a third young man directly across the table from her. More than that, she could not look about her without encountering the withdrawing glances of other guests of both sexes, though some of these glances, not from feminine orbs, were in no polite flurry to withdraw, but remained thoughtfully upon her as long as she looked their way.Couldit be Elsie Hemingway upon whom fond eyes of youth thus so sweetly lingered?
Too centred upon the strange experience to think much about these amazing people except as adjuncts to her transfiguration, she nevertheless decided that she liked best the tall gentleman at her left. He was not so young as the others, appearing to be as far advanced toward middle-age as twenty-seven—or possibly even twenty-nine—and she decided that his long, irregular face was “interesting.” She asked him to “straighten out the names” of the others for her, hoping that he would straighten out his own before he finished.
He began with Lily Dodge. “Ourprettiest girl,” he explained, honestly unconscious of what his emphasis implied. “That is, she’s been generally considered so since your cousin Anne was married. The young man on Miss Dodge’s right and in such a plain state of devotion is named Henry Burnett just now.”
“Just now? Does his name change from time to time?”
“Poor Henry’s doesn’t, no; nor the condition in which Miss Dodge keeps him—probably because she likes to win golf tournament cups with him. I mean, the next time you see her at a dinner the man beside her in that state may have another name.Shechanges ’em.”
“I see,” Elsie said. She looked absently at Miss Dodge, not aware that there could be anything in common between them, much less that in a manner they had shared a day of agony, no great while past. “She seems very lovely.”
“In her own way, yes,” her neighbour returned without enthusiasm. “The man on her left——”
Elsie laughed and interrupted. “What I meant to get at—if you don’t mind—was the name of the man onmyleft!”
“Of course you wouldn’t have caught it,” he said. “You naturally wouldn’t remember, hearing it spoken with the others.”
“No,” she said. “Yet I think I do remember that Cornelia spoke it a little more impressively than she did any of theirs.”
“That’s only because I’m in her father’s firm. The most junior member, of course. They use me as a waste-basket.”
“As what?”
“A waste-basket. When Mr. Cromwell and the really important partners discover some bits of worthless business cluttering up the office they fill me up with it. Every good office has a young waste-basket, Miss Hemingway.”
“But you haven’t yet told me this one’s name.”
“Harley.”
He laughed ruefully, and she asked why. “Harley doesn’t seem a funny name to me,” she said. “I don’t understand your laughing.”
“It’s to keep from crying,” he explained. “My father was dead before I was born and my mother died just after. I was taken over by my grandfather, and he named me for three of Napoleon’s marshals—Berthier Ney Junot Harley. It takes a grandfather to do things like that to you!”
“But Junot wasn’t a marshal,” Elsie said. “He hoped to be, but the Emperor never made him one; Junot was too flighty.”
Mr. Harley stared. “I remember that’s true;—I spoke of three marshals hastily. I should have said two and a general. My grandfather brought me up on ’em, and I still collect First Empire books. But imagine your knowing!”
“You mean you think I don’t look——”
He interrupted earnestly. “I’m afraid it’s too soon for you to let me tell you how I think you look. But you do laugh at my names, don’t you?”
“No; they don’t seem funny to me.”
“Don’t you ever laugh except when things are funny?” he asked.
“Yes, I do,” she said. “I’ve laughed thousands of times when everything was horribly unfunny.”
“Then why did you laugh?”
For an instant she looked at him gravely. “To try to be ‘popular,’ ” she said.
Plainly he thought this funny enough for laughter. “Thatisa joke!” he said. “But if laughing makes you any more ‘popular’ than you would be without it, I hope for this one evening at least you’ll be as solemn as an obelisk.”
Of course Elsie said, “Why?”
“Because if you laugh I won’t get to see anything of you at all. I’m afraid I won’t anyhow.”
He spoke with gravity, meaning what he said; and the event proved his fear justified. He got halfway round the country club ballroom with her, after the theatricals, a surprising number of times, but seldom much farther. However, he conclusively proved his possession of that admirable quality, dogged persistence, and so did the other young gentlemen of the dinner party. So did more than these, including probably a majority of the men and youths, married or single, present that evening at the Blue Hills Club.
Elsie wondered when the spell would break. It seemed impossible that she wouldn’t be found out presently as a masquerader and dropped into her old homelike invisibility. But whether the break came or not, she knew she would never again be so miserable as she had been, because she was every moment more and more confidently daring to know that she was beautiful. She laughed at a great many things that weren’t funny during this gracious evening; for laughter may spring as freely from excited happiness as from humour; but she made no effort to be noisy—noisiness appeared to be not a necessity at all, but superfluous. And what pleased her most, the girls were “nice” to her, too, as she defined their behaviour;—they formed part of the clusters about her when the music was silent, and they eagerly competed to arrange future entertainment for her. Elsie loved them all, these strange, adorable people who had not seen the wrong thing about her.
The old walls built round her by her own town, enclosing her with such seeming massive permanence and so tightly, now at a stroke proved to be illusion; she was discovering that they were but apparitions all unreal, and that this world is mysterious and can be happily so. Something of its humorous mysteries in dealing with young hearts another person, near her, also learned that night; for Cornelia Cromwell, by coincidence, had a queer experience of her own.
Beyond the outer fringe of dancers she saw her mother standing among a group of the older people;—one of these was Miss Bailey, the principal of the suburban school in which Cornelia had once been a pupil. Cornelia had not seen her for several years and went conscientiously to greet her. Principal and former pupil made the appropriate exchanges; but Cornelia was rather vague with the grayish gentleman who had Miss Bailey upon his arm.
Mrs. Cromwell said something as in correction of an error; but it was too late, and the couple had moved away before Cornelia understood.
“You called her Miss Bailey,” Mrs. Cromwell explained. “She’s been married to Professor Bromley for two years.”
“What! Was that funny little old——” Cornelia checked herself; but the tactful mother had already turned away to speak to someone else. The daughter stood and gazed at the stiff little old-fashioned gentleman standing punctiliously arm-in-arm with his wife. “Oh, dearme!” Cornelia whispered.
Then she ran back, wide-eyed, to rejoin an anxious lad who had arrived late. “Look here,” he said. “You’ve missed another chance to let me meet your cousin. What did you run away like that for?”
“To learn something important,” Cornelia told him. “Come on;—I’ll get you through to Elsie somehow.”
For the unmasking of Elsie, that dreaded break in the spell, still postponed itself as the evening wore on. Her miraculous night continued to be a miracle to the end, and she was a girl grateful for wonders when she talked them over with her cousin in the big bedroom, after two o’clock in the morning.
“I never met such darling people in the whole world!” she declared. “I never knew——”
“What nonsense!” Cornelia laughed. “You must be perfectly used to being a sensation wherever you go, Elsie.”
“A ‘sensation’?” Elsie cried. “I?”
“Don’t tell me you don’t know it!”
“Cornelia, you don’t understand. Nobody was ever really nice to me at a party before to-night in my whole life.”
At that her cousin beamed upon her. “I believe that’s what I like best of all about you, Elsie.”
“You mean nobody ever being nice to me before?”
“No,” Cornelia laughed. “I mean your not admitting that you know it. Of course you do know, because it’s impossible for a girl like you not to realize the effect you have on people; but I love you for pretending you don’t see it.”
“But it’s true,” Elsie insisted. “Until to-night nobody ever——”
“Yes, yes! Go on! It’s very becoming, and it’s what placates the other girls so that you get both sexes in your train, you clever thing!”
“I’m not clever, though,” the visitor protested. “I’m no good at all at pretending things. I’m not——”
“Aren’t you?” Cornelia laughed. “Well, it’s nice of you totryto be modest, then. Your thinking you ought to be is one of your charms. It isn’t the biggest one, though. Everybody saw that one the instant you came downstairs to-night and stood in the drawing-room doorway, just before Father went to bring you in. It was very striking, Elsie.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“That’s right; you oughtn’t to know,” Cornelia said, seriously. “It has to be spontaneous, I suppose, and it probably can’t be imitated or done deliberately.”
“But I didn’t doanything!” Elsie cried.
“I know you didn’t; that’s just what I’m pointing out. Maybe it was something they call ‘magnetism’; but anyhow it was more than just being a beauty. Of course you’rethat——”
“Nobody ever told me so; not before——”
“Nonsense!” Cornelia interrupted; then she went on: “It seemed to lie in not only being a beauty, but in being a beauty with a kind of glow. I don’t know just how else to express it, because it’s better than having what they call the ‘come hither’ look. It was—well,charm, I suppose. People might never notice that a beauty is a beauty if she doesn’t have something of it. But ‘charm’istoo vague to express it exactly. It was a look as if—as if——” Cornelia hesitated, groping. “Well, I can’t find any way to tell it except to say it was as if you knew something mysterious and lovely about yourself. And it makes everybody else crazy to know it, too!”
She jumped up, pointing at the clock upon the mantel. “Good heavens! And we’ve got engagements for every minute of the next two weeks, beginning at half-past eight to-morrow morning! Don’t bother to put those flowers in water, Elsie; it’d only be a waste. There’ll be more to-morrow!”
“I’d like to keep these,” Elsie said. “I think I’d like to keep them forever.”
“Dear me! Did he make that great an impression on you?”
“Who?”
“Elsie, youarea hypocrite! Berthier Ney Junot Harley!”
“I didn’t even know it was he that sent them. I wanted to keep them because they’d remind me of—of everything.”
And when Cornelia, touched by the way this was spoken, had kissed her fondly and gone out, Elsie put the pretty bouquet in a vase of water. Then she took one of the rosebuds from the cluster of them and pinned it upon her breast for the night. She had liked Berthier Harley best; but it was not on his account that she wore his rosebud through her dreams; it was to remind her of—of everything!
She awoke early, smiling, and the bright wings of all her new fairy memories were fluttering in her heart. Then, reflecting, she became incredulous. Somewhere she had heard that every girl, no matter what her looks, has one night in her life when she is beautiful. Her own night had come at last; she could never doubt that. But what if it were the only one?
She jumped up and ran to the mirror. No;—tousled and flushed from warm and happy sleep, still drowsy, too, she was beautiful in the early sunshine. She knew it, and it was true. Last night had been her night, but it was not to be her only night;—and so, half laughing in her delight, she nodded charmingly to this charming mirror and began to think about what clothes to wear for the first day of her triumphant visit. She had no serious doubt now that it would remain triumphant, and so long as she kept upon her that glamour Cornelia had described as the look of “knowing something mysterious and lovely” about herself, Elsie was right not to doubt. She kept the look, and the longer she kept it, the easier it was to keep. Her visit was all glorious.
XXVGLAMOUR CAN BE KEPT
YOUNG Mr. Paul Reamer had been away, too, that winter. With no profession or business to localize his attention, and a heritage sufficient to afford him comfortable wandering, he had “tried California for a change,” as he said; and on his return he went at once to tell Miss Ford about Hollywood. She was not at home; but he waited;—she came in presently, and made a satisfactory noise over him.
“To think of my not being here when you came!” she exclaimed when she had reached a point of more subdued demonstrations. “I’d just run over to Elsie’s for half an hour——”
“Where?”
“To Elsie’s. I spend about half my time there, I expect, and——”
“You do?” He looked puzzled and a little amused. “What for?”
“Why, everybody does,” Mamie returned, surprised. “That is, when she’s home. She’s away a good deal of the time, you know.”
“You mean Elsie Hemingway?”
“Why, naturally. What other Elsie is there?”
“I don’t know.” He looked more puzzled and more amused. “You say, ‘everybody’ spends about half the time there?” He laughed. “That sounds funny! What on earth’s made her house such a busy place all of a sudden?”
“Oh, it isn’t sudden,” Mamie said, and she added, reflectively, “You know Elsie always was about the best-lookinggirl in town.”
“Oh, possibly. It never seemed to get anywhere though,” he returned. “She’s good-looking all right, I suppose, but not the way anybody would ever notice.”
“What?” Mamie cried. “Why, you don’t know what you’re talking about!”
“I don’t?” He laughed incredulously. “Look here. Whatisall this about little Elsie Hemingway? When I left town——”
Miss Ford interrupted: “Have you seen old Fred yet?”
“No. I haven’t seen anybody.”
“Well, you’d better see old Fred and ask him ‘Whatisall this about little Elsie Hemingway?’ He’ll probably fall in your arms and burst right out crying!”
“What for?”
“Why, for the same reason some of the others would do the same thing!”
Paul shook his head. “I don’t think it’s friendly to try to fill me up with fairy stories, Mamie—not just the first minute after I’ve come home anyhow. When I went away——”
“Oh, there’ve been lots of changes,” Miss Ford assured him. “You’ll have to get used to ’em. We’ve been used to the change about Elsie so long now I suppose we hardly realize therewasa change. I guess what happened was that we never used to appreciate her, and she had a way of not seeming to feel she counted much, herself; but now we’ve got a little older and have more sense, or something, and we all see what a wonderful girl she is. You ought to hear old Fred! When he gets started—well, of course, I think she’s great myself, but after I’ve listened to poor old Fred’s babble for a couple of hours I almost hate her!”
Again Mr. Reamer shook his head. “It doesn’t seem to me my hearing’s exactly right. Are you really telling me——”
“You better go see,” Mamie advised him. “Oh, you’ll get it, too! You think you won’t, but you will. You’ll get it as bad as any of ’em, Paul Reamer.”
The experienced young man laughed in sheerest incredulity; but that evening, his curiosity being somewhat piquantly aroused, he acted upon Miss Ford’s advice and went to find out if it could possibly be true that he had overlooked anything important in so long overlooking Elsie Hemingway. It didn’t seem probable, but if it proved to be the fact, he was somewhat amusedly prepared to make good to himself what he had lost by the overlooking.
The moment he saw her, when she came into the old-fashioned living-room of the quiet house that had once been too quiet, he understood that he had much more to repay himself for than he had dreamed could be possible. Elsie’s look of knowing something mysterious and lovely about herself was still upon her; and Mr. Reamer set himself ardently and instantly to the task of self-repayment.
“Elsie,” he said, “I’ve been away for a long, dreary time, and I’ve just got back. I’ve come to spend my very first evening with you.”
He was too late.
Following Elsie from the library, where the three had been having coffee and discussing the Battle of Waterloo, came two gentlemen. One was Elsie’s father, and he walked with his hand upon the other gentleman’s shoulder.
The other gentleman was a tall young man from out of town who had been named for two marshals and a general of the First Empire.
XXVIDESERT SAND
WE SPEAK now of that parent-troubling daughter of Mrs. Dodge’s as she came to be through weltering experience, most of it hurried and all of it crowded. For do we not know that there are maidens of twenty-three who have already lived a lifetime? Such is their own testimony. They have had a view of all the world can offer, and foresee the rest of their existence as mere repetition, not stirring to the emotions. Life henceforth is to be but “drab,” they say, several decades of them having strongly favoured the word; and this mood, often lasting for days at a time, usually follows one form or another of amatory anticlimax. Not infrequently the anticlimax is within the maiden herself; she finds herself lacking in certain supremities of feeling that appear not only proper but necessary, if the sentimental passions are to be taken at all seriously.
“It is all over—I shall never care for any man—I shall never marry—I shall never feel anything about anything again,” such a one wrote to a girl confidant abroad, and fully believed what she wrote. “I am tired of everything,” she continued. “I am all dead within me. I look at things, but I do not see them. I see nothing—nothing absolutely!”
And yet at that very moment, as she glanced absently out of the window beside her pretty green-painted desk, her attention became concentrated upon a young man passing along the suburban boulevard below. He was a stranger, but a modish and comely one; she could not accurately call him “nothing,” nor maintain that he was invisible;—her eyes followed him, in fact, until he had passed out of the range of her window. Then, with perfect confidence that she set forth the truth, she turned back to her letter and continued:
“I cannot by the farthest stretch of my imagination picture myself as feeling the least, the slightest—oh, the most infinitesimal!—featherweight of interest in any man again so long as my life shall last. I broke my engagement last night simply on that account. It was not in the most formal sense an engagement, since it hadn’t been announced; but Henry made as much fuss as if I had turned back at the altar. He was frantic, especially as I could give him no reason except that I did not feel for him what I had expected to. He begged and begged to know what he had done to change me. I could only tell him he had done nothing. I had simply become incapable of caring. I think now that I fell in love too often and too intensely in my younger days. My ‘grand passion’ came too soon and since then I have cared less and less each time that I have fancied my interest intrigued. The absurd boy was my Sun-god—and yet I see now that he is and always was a ridiculous person, and I laugh when I remember how I glorified him to myself. He meant nothing. Price Gleason meant nothing. Laurence Grover, Paul Arthur, Capt. Williams, and all the others meant nothing. Henry, so long and tediously a pursuer, means nothing now. None of them mean anything. The spring has gone dry and my heart, that bloomed once so eagerly, is desert sand—desert sand, my dear!”
“I cannot by the farthest stretch of my imagination picture myself as feeling the least, the slightest—oh, the most infinitesimal!—featherweight of interest in any man again so long as my life shall last. I broke my engagement last night simply on that account. It was not in the most formal sense an engagement, since it hadn’t been announced; but Henry made as much fuss as if I had turned back at the altar. He was frantic, especially as I could give him no reason except that I did not feel for him what I had expected to. He begged and begged to know what he had done to change me. I could only tell him he had done nothing. I had simply become incapable of caring. I think now that I fell in love too often and too intensely in my younger days. My ‘grand passion’ came too soon and since then I have cared less and less each time that I have fancied my interest intrigued. The absurd boy was my Sun-god—and yet I see now that he is and always was a ridiculous person, and I laugh when I remember how I glorified him to myself. He meant nothing. Price Gleason meant nothing. Laurence Grover, Paul Arthur, Capt. Williams, and all the others meant nothing. Henry, so long and tediously a pursuer, means nothing now. None of them mean anything. The spring has gone dry and my heart, that bloomed once so eagerly, is desert sand—desert sand, my dear!”
She was rather pleased with this bit of metaphor and read it over aloud, speaking the words lingeringly. Upon the wall beyond the pretty desk there was a mirror facing her; she could see herself when she chose, and she chose to see herself now in her mood of poetic melancholy. She saw a winsome picture in that mirror, too, when she made this choice—an exquisitely fair, delicate creature, slim, though not so fragile as she had been, and, in spite of her heart of desert sand, all alive indeed. Probably induced by pleasure in the metaphor just written, the young lady in the glass was at the moment more sparkling, in fact, than seemed suitable. Therefore, her face became poignantly wistful—an effect so excellent that a surprised approbation was added, a little incongruously, to the wistfulness. The approbation was removed in favour of an inscrutable pathos, which continued throughout a long exchange of looks between the image and its original; then both of these little blonde heads bent once more above their green-painted desks, in a charmingly concerted action, like two glints of sunshine glancing down through foliage;—and the letter was resumed.
“My dear, our suburb is trembling with excitement. The chief scion of all the McArdles is on the point of being Installed in Residence among us. I think it should be spoken of as at least an Installation, shouldn’t it? In our great Plutocracy, surely the McArdle dynasty is Royalty, isn’t it? Anyhow, you’d think so if you could see the excitement over the announcement that James Herbert McArdle, III, is coming here to represent the dynasty’s interests. That is, he’s supposed to be the new manager of the huge McArdle Works, which are the smallest, I believe, of the dozens of McArdle Works over the country. I understand he’s only to be nominal manager and is really to ‘learn the business’ under old Mr. Hiram Huston, the McArdles’ trusted ‘local representative.’ The youthful Dauphin is given command of an army—but under the advice of old generals strictly! However, you can guess what a spasm is happening here, with seventy million dollars (or is it seven hundred million?) walking around under one hat. I feel sorry for the poor agitated girls and their poor agitating mothers. The rich marry the rich;wesha’n’t get him!”
“My dear, our suburb is trembling with excitement. The chief scion of all the McArdles is on the point of being Installed in Residence among us. I think it should be spoken of as at least an Installation, shouldn’t it? In our great Plutocracy, surely the McArdle dynasty is Royalty, isn’t it? Anyhow, you’d think so if you could see the excitement over the announcement that James Herbert McArdle, III, is coming here to represent the dynasty’s interests. That is, he’s supposed to be the new manager of the huge McArdle Works, which are the smallest, I believe, of the dozens of McArdle Works over the country. I understand he’s only to be nominal manager and is really to ‘learn the business’ under old Mr. Hiram Huston, the McArdles’ trusted ‘local representative.’ The youthful Dauphin is given command of an army—but under the advice of old generals strictly! However, you can guess what a spasm is happening here, with seventy million dollars (or is it seven hundred million?) walking around under one hat. I feel sorry for the poor agitated girls and their poor agitating mothers. The rich marry the rich;wesha’n’t get him!”
She looked up thoughtfully at the mirror, frowned in sharp disapproval—not of the mirror—and continued: “It’s really disgusting, the manœuvring to be the first to meet and annex him. Eleanor Gray and her mother are accused of having gone to New York to try to be on the same train with him! Yesterday there was a rumour that he had arrived at the Jefferson Road Inn, which is to be his temporary quarters, and the story went all round that Harriet Joyce thought she recognized him there at tea and actually fainted away in order to make him notice her. My dear, Ibelieveit! Really, you simply couldn’t imagine the things that are going on. As for me, it is the piteous truth that this stupendous advent fails to stir me. I wish it could! But no, upon my life, I haven’t a flicker—not the faintest flicker of ordinary human curiosity to know even if he looks like his tiresome pictures. These curiosities, these stirrings are for the springtime of life, my dear, while I—as I told poor Henry last night—I am autumn!”
Thus wrote Lily that most April-like of all maidens and within the hour went forth, looking like the very spring itself, to meet an adventure comparable to adventures met only in the springtime of the world. The scene of this adventure should have been a wood near Camelot, or the Forest of Arden, and Lily a young huntress in a leathern kirtle and out with a gilded bow and painted arrows for hare or pheasant. Then, if one of her arrows had pierced the thicket and also the King’s Son on the other side of it, so that she came and took him, all swounding, in her arms, the same thing in all true essentials would have happened that happened to her to-day. The surroundings would have been more appropriate—especially for a damsel with a dead heart—than the golf course of the Blue Hills Country Club, but the hero and the heroine and the wounding and the swounding would have been identical.
In particular, there was little difference between James Herbert McArdle and a king’s son. From the time of his birth, which was announced by greater tongues than those of royal heralds, these greater tongues being the principal newspapers of the world, he was a public figure. At the age of four his likeness and those of his favourite goat and dog were made known to his fellow citizens up and down the land by means of photographic reproductions in magazines and in the Sunday prints. Lest there be fear on the part of the public that he might alter beyond recognition as he grew up, these magazines and prints continued reassuringly to present portraits of him, playing in the sea sand, or seated upon the knee of his portentous grandfather, or—with tutor and attendants—upon the platform of his father’s private car, and later, when he reached a proper age, being instructed in the technique necessary for driving his earliest automobile.
His first evening after matriculating as a freshman at a university was spent in dining and conversing with the university’s president. When, as a sophomore, he was found equal to a position in “left field” on the varsity nine, and the nine went out of town to play, reporters interviewed him and neglected to mention the captain. When he had graduated and his father and grandfather began to prepare him for the ponderous responsibilities that would some day rest upon his shoulders, there were spreading “feature articles” about him everywhere. Wherever he went, important old men hurried beamingly to his side, eager to be seen conversing with him; magnificent old ladies went beyond all amiability in caressing him; many of his contemporaries were unable to veil their deference; and lovely girls looked plentifully toward him. All his life he had been courted, attended, served, pointed out, focussed upon, stared at, and lime-lighted before the multitude. No wonder the poor young man liked solitude better than anything else!
When he contrived to be alone he protracted the experience as far as he was able; and to-day, having escaped from a welcoming committee and the mayor of the suburb that was to be his home for a year, he drove alone to the country club, which had already elected him to membership. Here he was delighted to find that the late hour and nipping air had divested the links of every player, and, attended by a lingering caddy who was unaware of his client’s identity, James Herbert set forth upon a round of the course with a leisureliness unmatched by the most elderly member of the club.
It was a leisureliness so extreme indeed that it annoyed a player who arrived in full equipment a quarter of an hour after young Mr. McArdle had made his first drive on that course. Her equipment was too complete to please her, as it happened, for he had taken the last caddy, which was another item in her list of indignations;—Lily had found time to acquire such a list since finishing her letter. Most of the items concerned that unfortunate Henry, mentioned as having been dismissed on the previous evening. Henry had called; had been turned away at the door with “Not at home”; and then, by an unworthy pretext—though his lamentable state of mind might have offered some excuse—he had secured her presence at the telephone, where merely what he said to her was furniture enough for any ordinary list of indignations. She decided to cool her temper by a solitary but vigorous round of the golf course.
Lily was one of those favoured creatures who have a genius for this most inviting yet most baffling of all the pastimes of mankind; and persistence had added so much to her native gift that a long shelf at home was needed to support the tournament prizes she had won. Various “ladies’ championships” were hers, too; and she was known among all the country clubs for miles around on account of a special talent, well practised, for marvellous little precisions of accuracy. Moreover, Lily was what players have been heard to call “conscientious” about her game. She wished ever to excel herself, to play excellently even when she played alone, and she was never quite at her best when she had no caddy; therefore she was annoyed with the gentleman ahead of her on that account, as well as because of his leisure.
If she could play “all the way round” with a fine score before darkness stopped her, Lily felt that her irritations within might be a little soothed; but she found them, on the contrary, increasing. She might have passed the laggard player if she had chosen; but his figure bore an accurate resemblance to that of a gentleman named in her letter as Captain Williams. Lily had her own reasons for avoiding any conversation with Captain Williams, to whom she had been as enigmatic, six months earlier, as she had yesterday been to Henry. She was almost certain, in fact, that the languid golfer was Captain Williams, and so kept far behind him—a difficult matter for one who wished to play at all.
She talked broodingly to herself, addressing him. “OldThing!” she called him between her teeth. “Slow Poke! Aren’t youevergoing to hit that ball! Oh, my heaven, what are you doingnow? Writing your score or writing a book? Snail! Tortoise!” And as his procrastinations continued, she called him worse. “Mule!” she said, and corroborated herself vehemently. “Mule, mule, mule! You’re a mule once, you’re a mule twice, you’re a mule a hundred and eighty-seven times over—and that’s onlycommencingto tell you what you are!” For now, as she waited and waited, withholding her strokes intolerably as the late light waned and waned, she hated him with that great hatred most human beings feel for all things unconsciously and persistently in their way.
But in the deepening twilight haze she felt safe to approach him more closely, until finally she was less than an arrow’s flight away. He was upon the last of the greens by this time, and she, unnoticed, stood waiting for him to leave it so that she might drive her ball upon it. But here he delayed interminably. He lay prone upon the ground to study a proper aim, though he studied it so long that his purpose might have been thought a siesta; and when he rose it was to examine the sod by inches. Finally, having completed all these preliminaries and benefited little by them in their consummation, he remained standing upon the green, preoccupied with his score card. “You go on!” Lily said, dangerously. “You aren’t writing a dictionary. Go on!”
But he continued to stand, amending and editing his card as though eternity were at everyone’s disposal. The long red ribbons in the western sky merged with the general fog colour of the dusk, and he was but a hazy figure when at last he moved. And as he turned his back and lifted a slow foot to leave the green, Lily, impatient beyond all discretion, cut the air with her heaviest implement.
“Mule!” she said, furiously, instead of “Fore!” and put that fury into her swing. Nevertheless, the ball sped true in direction, though in the thickened air it sped invisibly and would far have overshot the mark if nothing had stopped it. Straight to the short dark hair on the back of the languid player’s head the little white ball flew with fiercest precision, and being hard, and on its way to a place much farther on, it straightway rendered him more languid than ever. He dropped without a moan.
XXVIIMIRACULOUS ACCIDENT
“OH, MURDER!” Lily gasped, not greatly exaggerating when she used that word. She stood gazing toward him miserably, waiting for him to rise; and then, as the stricken player’s inertia remained complete, she ran forward, screaming to the caddy, who was disappearing toward the clubhouse.
He came back, and together they turned the prone figure over so that it lay upon its back, revealing an interesting young face of a disquieting pallor. “I guess you must of killed himthistime,” the caddy said, unreasonably, and then seemed to wish to solace the assassin, for he added: “He ain’t a member though.”
Lily was already on the ground beside her victim, rubbing his hands. “Run!” she cried. “Get a doctor! Run!”
She failed to recognize the fallen player, and so did the steward and three waiters from the clubhouse, which was just then vacant of members. James Herbert McArdle’s features were not so well known as those of the President of the United States, nor, probably, as those of the more conspicuous actors in moving pictures;—nevertheless, his face was familiar to those who now sought to identify it; and as they worked to restore the expression of life to it they were aware of elusive clews.
The steward said he was sure he knew the gentleman, who must often have been about the club, though he couldn’t quite place him. The waiters had the same impression and the same disability precisely, while the trembling Lily herself was troubled by stirrings of memory. Either she had once known her victim, she thought, or else he was like someone she knew; but a white face inanimate, upturned to the evening sky, is strange even to those who know it most intimately. The likeness remained evasive, and the prostrate young man both unconscious and unidentified.
Lily was relieved of her first horror;—at least he was not dead. On the other hand, certainly he was not well. And when she drove that ball she had hated him. Of course she had not intended this dolorous stroke, yet when she made it, had she really cared whether or not it laid him low? She had not—and now regret shook her. Perhaps she would have felt it less profoundly had the maddening player proved indeed to be Captain Williams; but with the lifeless head of this well-favoured and unoffending stranger upon her lap, her remorse was an anguish.
She would not leave him or cease to do what she could in every humble way. She chafed his hands and bathed his forehead;—she helped to carry him to the clubhouse; and, when the hospital ambulance came, she went in it to the hospital with him. She stood in the corridor outside the door of the room to which they carried him there, and waited while a surgeon examined him. Indeed, she waited, weeping.
She knew the surgeon, and when he came out of the room she rushed to him. “Doctor Waite, tell me! Don’t spare me!”
“He’s got a concussion. It’s no joke, but anyhow it isn’t a fracture. Funny about nobody knowing who he is;—I’m sure I’ve met him, or else he reminds me of somebody, I can’t think who.”
“Doctor, he isn’t—he isn’t going to——”
The surgeon looked upon her reassuringly. “No. We’ll pull him through. You quit thinking about him and go home and get your dinner and then go to bed and go to sleep.”
“I couldn’t,” Lily said, choking. “I couldn’t do any of those things.”
He laughed sympathetically. “Then I guess I’ll have to call up your mother and tell her to come and make you.”
But when not only her mother but her father, too, arrived in hurried response to the telephone, they could not get the tearful Lily to leave the hospital; and they remained with her, engaging in intermittent argument, until midnight. At that time Doctor Waite informed them that the unknown patient was in a torpid but not critical condition; he had mumbled a few words to the effect that he wanted to be let alone.
“And as that’s just what we’re doing with him,” the surgeon said to Lily rather sharply, “and as you can’t do any possible good to anybody in the world by staying here, I suggest that you take his advice, too, and obey your father and mother.”
Not until then would the suffering girl allow them to lead her away; but so far as sleep was concerned, she might as well have stayed at the hospital. So might her father and mother, almost; for she was at their door in her nightdress three times—three separated times, the last being at four o’clock in the morning. “Papa, doyouthink he’ll die?”
Mrs. Dodge wearily conducted her to bed again; but Lily only wept upon her pillow, and in whispers begged it to forgive her for not calling “Fore.” Sunrise found her dressed; and in the chilly November early morning she slipped out of the house, crossed the suburban park to the hospital, and immediately heard news indeed. Doctor Waite was already there, and with him were three other surgeons and a physician, all of them important. He came to speak to Lily.
“All this distinguishedness for your unknown patient,” he said, with a gesture toward the group he had just left; and, as her expression began to be grievous, he added hastily, “He’s perfectly all right. At least he’s going to be. The importance yonder is only because he turns out to be so unexpectedly important himself.”
“You’ve found out who he is?”
“Somewhat!” he returned with humorous emphasis. “We’ve managed to keep your name out of the papers—so far.”
“What papers?”
“All of them. Take your choice,” he said—and he offered her two; but one at a time was enough for Lily.
Headlines announced that a “Mysterious Accident” at the Blue Hills Country Club had “resulted in grave injury” to James Herbert McArdle. The illustrious youth had lain unconscious and unrecognized until a short time after midnight, the more sober text of the report informed her. Mr. H. H. Huston, the McArdle representative, had been alarmed by Mr. McArdle’s disappearance and continued absence, subsequent to the reception of an address by the suburban welcoming committee, and in the course of an exhaustive search Mr. Huston had caused inquiries to be made at the Blue Hills Country Club. Here it was learned that an unknown gentleman had been struck in the head by a golf ball driven with such force as to cause a concussion of the brain. The club’s employees had withheld the name of the person responsible for the injury; but a reporter had ascertained that it was a lady and that she had accompanied the wounded man—“wounded man” was the newspaper’s phrase—in the ambulance, and had “insisted upon remaining at the hospital until a late hour.” Mr. H. H. Huston had reached the hospital not long after midnight; Mr. McArdle had just become conscious and revealed his identity to the nurse in charge. Mr. Huston had said to a reporter that Mr. McArdle “positively declared himself ignorant of the name of the person who had caused his injury.” Altogether, there was “an air of mystery about the affair”; and Mr. McArdle’s condition was still grave, though the surgeons said that he would “probably recover.”
It is to Lily’s credit that the strongest emotion roused in her by this reading concerned these final two words. She repeated them pathetically to Doctor Waite. “ ‘Probably recover’? ‘Probably’?”
He laughed. “Don’t you know newspapers? Didn’t I tell you last night he’d be all right? We wired his family an hour ago that there was no reason for any of them to come on. All that surgical and medical impressiveness over yonder only represents old Hiram Huston’s idea of the right thing to do for a McArdle with a bump on his head. The young fellow may have to stay here quietly for a week or ten days possibly; but by that time he ought to be pretty nearly ready to stop a ball for you again.”
“Don’t joke about it,” Lily said, huskily. “When can I see him?”
“Think you better?”
“Why not?”
“The newspapers called it a ‘mystery,’ you know,” he explained. “They’ll probably be inquisitive. They might get your name.”
“What do I care?” she cried. “Do you think I’d let that stop me from asking him to forgive me?”
“So?” the doctor said, looking at her twinklingly. “So that’s why you want to see him?”
She stared, not understanding his humorous allusion. “Why, what else could I do?”
“Nothing,” he answered. “I was only thinking I’d heard that a good many young ladies were anxious to make his acquaintance. I imagine you’ll be the first, my dear.”
“Well, oughtn’t I to be?” she demanded. “If you’d done as terrible a thing as that to anybody, wouldn’t you think you were entitled to ask his pardon about as soon as he was able to listen?”
“Without doubt. In the meantime I think you’d better go home and to bed again.”
She protested, but proved meeker under advice than she had the night before. She went home, though not directly, for she stopped half an hour at some greenhouses that were a mile out of her way. She sent to Mr. James Herbert McArdle at the hospital a prodigious sheaf of flowers—enough to cripple her rather moderate monthly allowance from her father—and the following morning, since the allowance was already so far gone, she did the same thing. Having thus fallen into the habit, she was as lavish upon the third morning after the accident, so that at three o’clock of this same day, when Doctor Waite took her into his patient’s room, he seemed to be conducting her into a conservatory.
Like fair Elaine, James Herbert McArdle in a silken gown lay white and motionless, embowered among blooms; but his eyes glimmered in surprised appreciation when they beheld his serious visitor. Gray was becoming to the fair and slim Lily—her clothes didn’t depend upon her allowance—and she was never more charming than when she was serious.
“My goodness!” said the frank convalescent, with a feeble kind of forcefulness. “I didn’t expect anybody likeyou! I was sure it would turn out to be some old hag.”
Lily was a little given to the theatrical, though only when occasion warranted it, as this one did if any occasion could. She swept forward softly, her sensitive face all compassion and remorse. She knelt beside the iron bed.
“Some day you may forgive me,” she said, tremulously, and her voice was always stirringly lovely when it trembled. “Some day you may be able even to forget what I’ve done to you—but I want you to be sure that I shall never forget it or forgive myself.”
“Here!” he said. “There’s nothing to that. They tell me you came in the ambulance with me and hung around and did all sorts of things. And look at all these greenhouses you must have bought out! A person’s liable to get a clip on the head almost anywhere these days. Let’s shake hands—but not forget it.”
“You can’t——”
“I haven’t got anything to forgive you for, of course,” he said. “You don’t forgive accidents; you just forget ’em. What I mean is, I don’t want to forget this one—now I’ve seen you, I don’t.”
“Well——” Lily said, vaguely. “But I’d like you just tosayyou forgive me. Won’t you?”
“All right.” He moved his hand toward her and she took it for a moment. “I forgive you—but I think you ought to do something for me.”
“What?”
“How long did the doctor say you can stay here?”
“Five or ten minutes.”
“Well, then, I think you ought to come back to-morrow when you can stay half an hour or an hour.”
“I will,” she said.
But he had not finished. “And the next day, too. Maybe they’d let you read to me, or something. And as long as I’m laid up here—it won’t be long, at that—I think you ought to come every day and help me pass the time. I forgive you, but I think you do owe me that much. And as soon as they let me take a drive I think you ought to go along. How about it?”
“I will,” Lily said. “I will, indeed. I’ll do anything in the world you think might make up a little for the pain I’ve brought you. Nothing could make me happier.”
“That’s good news,” the young man told her, thoughtfully. “A clip on the head isn’t necessarily such a bad thing, after all.”
More and more he seemed to incline to this opinion;—in fact, he went so far as to assure Doctor Waite, three days later, that he preferred the hospital to the apartment old Hiram Huston was preparing for him. “I think I’d like to sort of settle down to the life here,” he said. “It’s nice and private and suits me exactly.”
“Yes,” said the doctor, thoughtfully. “It’s a pity you’re too important to do what you want to.” And lightly, as if to himself, he hummed a fragment of frivolous song: