Sylvia Arden Decides
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Title: Sylvia Arden Decides
Creator: Margaret Piper Chalmers
Illustrator: Haskell Coffin
Release date: February 28, 2015 [eBook #48385]
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/48385
Credits: Produced by Al Haines
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SYLVIA ARDEN DECIDES ***
Produced by Al Haines.
[Illustration: Sylvia Arden]
SYLVIA ARDEN
DECIDES
BY
MARGARET REBECCA PIPER
AUTHOR OF
SYLVIA'S EXPERIMENT: THE CHEERFUL BOOK, (Trade Mark)
SYLVIA OF THE HILL TOP: THE SECOND CHEERFUL
BOOK, ETC. (Trade Mark)
FRONTISPIECE BY
HASKELL COFFIN
GROSSET & DUNLAP
PUBLISHERS NEW YORK
_Copyright, 1917_,
BY THE PAGE COMPANY
_All rights reserved_
First Impression, September, 1917
*CONTENTS*
CHAPTER
I Of Futures and Other Important Matters
II Reasons and Wraiths
III Twenty-Two
IV The Ways of a Maid
V September Afternoon
VI Of Missions, and Omissions
VII October Developments
VIII Fire and Frost
IX The Moth and the Star
X The City
XI Margins
XII "Such Stuff as Dreams"
XIII Into Haven
XIV "And Having Eyes"
XV The City and Sylvia
XVI As Might Have Been Expected
XVII Barb Diagnoses
XVIII The Cause and the Career
XIX Oh, Suzanne!
XX Sylvia and Life
XXI A Chapter of Revelations
XXII Unto the Forest
XXIII Aftermath
XXIV High Tide
XXV Warp and Woof
XXVI The End and the Beginning
*SYLVIA ARDEN
DECIDES*
*CHAPTER I*
*OF FUTURES AND OTHER IMPORTANT MATTERS*
"I know what the trouble with Sylvia is," announced Suzanne, elevating
herself on one elbow and leaning forward out of the hammock just enough
to select and appropriate a plump bonbon from the box on the wicker
stand near by.
"Well," encouraged Sylvia, "what _is_ the trouble with me?"
At the moment as she stood leaning against the massive white pillar with
a smile on her lips and in her dark eyes, the sunshine glinting warm,
red-gold lights in her bronze hair, it seemed as if it would be hard
indeed to find any trouble with her so completely was she a picture of
radiant, joyous, care-free youth.
Suzanne demolished her bonbon, then proceeded to expatiate on her
original proposition.
"The trouble with you," she averred oracularly from her cushions, "is
that you are addicted to the vice of contentment."
"Well, why shouldn't she be?" demanded Barbara from the depths of the
huge arm-chair which nearly swallowed her diminutive figure. "I'd like
to know who has a better right? Hasn't Sylvia this minute got
everything anybody in the world could want? If I had been born to live
on a hill top, like Sylvia, I'd never leave it."
Suzanne sat up, brandishing a reproachful forefinger at the speaker.
"Barbie Day! I am shocked at you. What would your Aunt Josephine say?
Sylvia, she must be packed off at once. She mustn't be allowed to stay
even for the party. The flesh pots have gone to her head. Another day
at Arden Hall will ruin her for the Cause." And, with a prophetic shake
of her head, Suzanne helped herself to a "Turkish Delight" and relaxed
among her cushions, the leaf green color of which, contrasting with the
pale pink of her gown, made her look rather like a rose, set in its
calyx. Suzanne was extraordinarily pretty, much prettier, in fact, than
was at all necessary for a young person of distinct literary bent and a
pronounced--audibly pronounced--distaste for matrimony. Thus Nature,
willfully prodigal, lavishes her gifts.
"Speak for yourself," retorted Barbara with unusual spirit. "If the
flesh pots are ruining me they shall continue on their course of
destruction without let or hindrance until Wednesday next. I was born
poor, I have lived poor and I shall probably die poor, but I am not
above participating in the unearned increment when I get a heavenly
chance like this blessed week and if anybody says 'Votes for Women' to
me in the next five days he or she is likely to be surprised. I am
going to turn Lotus Eater for just this once. Don't disturb me." And
by way of demonstration Barb tucked one small foot up under her,
burrowed even deeper in the heart of the big chair and closed her eyes
with a sigh of complete satisfaction.
In the meanwhile Sylvia had absentmindedly plucked a scarlet spray from
the vine which was swaying in the September breeze just above her head
and her eyes were thoughtful. Unwittingly, the others had stirred
mental currents which lay always fairly near the surface with her,
suggested problems which had been asserting themselves of late rather
continuously. The generous-hearted little schoolgirl Sylvia who had
wanted to gather all the lonely people in the world into her Christmas
family, the puzzled Sylvia who even five years ago had been tormented by
the baffling question why she had so much and others so little was still
present in the Sylvia of almost two and twenty who considered herself
quite grown up and sophisticated and possessed a college diploma.
"I don't know that I am so viciously contented as you seem to think,
Suzanne," she said, "and I haven't the slightest intention of staying on
my hill top, as you mean it, Barb. But I can't just come down off it
and go tilting at windmills at random. I've got to know what my job is,
and I don't at all, at present--can't even guess at it. All the rest of
you girls had your futures neatly outlined and sub-topiced. Nearly
every one in the class knew, when she graduated last June, just what she
wanted to do or had to do next. Every one was going to teach or travel,
or 'slum' or study, or come out or get married. But poor me!" Sylvia
shrugged humorously, though her eyes were still thoughtful. "I haven't
any startling gifts or urgent duties. I haven't the necessity of
earning bread and butter, nor any special cause to follow. It is really
hopeless to be so--" She groped for a word then settled on
"unattached."
"There is more than one male who would be willing to remedy that defect,
I'm thinking," chuckled Suzanne wickedly. "How about the person who
disburses these delectable bonbons? Won't he do for a cause?"
"I am afraid not, the person being only Jack."
"Only Jack, whom the mammas all smile upon and the daughters don their
fetchingest gowns and their artfullest graces for--quite the most
eligible young man in the market. Sylvia, you are spoiled if Jack
Amidon isn't good enough for you!"
"I didn't say he wasn't good enough for me." Sylvia came over to the
table to provide herself with one of Jack's bonbons before seating
herself on the India stool beside the hammock facing out over the lawn.
"Jack is a dear, but I've known him nearly all my life, seems to me, and
even to oblige you it would be hard to get up any romantic thrills over
him."
"Too bad!" murmured Suzanne, regretfully. "He is so good looking. You
two would look lovely prancing down the aisle together a la Lohengrin."
"Suzanne!" Barb opened her eyes to expostulate. "You are so dreadfully
flippant. I don't believe anything is sacred to you."
Suzanne laughed. "Maybe not," she admitted. Then she sat up abruptly to
add, "I forgot my Future. I have that shrined and canonized and burn
incense to it every night. It is the only thing in the world or out of
it I take seriously. I-am-going-to-write-plays." She thumped a plump
green cushion vigorously, allotting a single thump to each staccato
syllable. "I may not succeed this year or next year or in five years,
but some day I shall arrive with both feet. You two shall come and sit
in my first-nighter box and it will be _some_ play!" She vaunted
slangily, imparting a last emphatic punch upon the acquiescent cushion
before she relinquished it.
"We'll be there," promised Sylvia. "I only wish I had convictions like
that about my Future. Mine is just a nebular hypothesis at present. How
about you, Barbie? Are you as certain about your Cause as Suzanne is
about her Career?"
Barb uncurled herself to testify. "Not a bit," she sighed. "You see,
my Cause is a sort of inherited mantle, and I am never sure whether it
fits or not, though I never have the slightest doubt as to the propriety
of my attempting to wear it even if I have to take tucks in it."
Barbara's eyes crinkled around the corners in a way they had when she
was very much in earnest. "You know it has been understood all along
that I was to be Aunt Jo's secretary and general right-hand man as soon
as I graduated. That was what she educated me for. Of course I believe
in suffrage and all that. When I hear Aunt Jo talk I just get thrills
all up and down my spinal column and feel as strong as Samson making
ready to topple over the pillars, as if I could do anything and
everything to give women a chance. But when I get away from Aunt Jo I
cool off disgracefully. That is what makes me think sometimes it isn't
the real fire I have but a sort of surface heat generated by Aunt Jo's
extraordinary personal magnetism and fearful and wonderful vocabulary.
It worries me dreadfully sometimes."
Barb's small, brown, child-like face puckered in perplexity and her blue
eyes blinked as if they beheld too much light.
"It needn't," commented Suzanne sagely. "I know you. By the time you
have been flinging out the banner six weeks you will be white hot for
the Cause, especially if you can somehow manage to martyrize yourself
into the bargain. You would have made a perfect early Christian. I can
see you smiling with glad Pollyannaism into the faces of the abashed
lions."
"Oh, Suzanne!"
Barbara had spent many minutes all told during the past four years of
her college life saying, "Oh, Suzanne!" in precisely that shocked,
protesting, helpless tone. The two were the best of friends, but in
code of conduct and mode of thought they were the meeting extremes.
"Aren't you going to prescribe for me now you have diagnosed my case?"
Sylvia came to the rescue.
"I did prescribe, but you wouldn't swallow Mr. Jack Amidon, sugar-coated
pill though he is. How about your tawny-maned, giant, ex-football-hero
M.D.? He isn't so good looking as Jack but--"
"I think he is much nicer looking," Barb interposed surprisingly, then
blushed and subsided.
"Oho!" laughed Suzanne. "Better keep your eye on our Barbie if you want
to keep Doctor Philip Lorrimer on your waiting list, Sylvia. Such
unprecedented enthusiasm! And she has beheld him but once at that. Oh,
the witchery of that Commencement moon! I inadvertently nearly promised
to marry Roger Minot myself in its specious glamour. I'll wager our
demure Barbie flirted with your six-foot medicine man when you rashly
left him on her hands on the outskirts of Paradise. 'Fess up, Barb.
Didn't you flirt a teeny weeny little flirt in the moonshine?"
"No, I didn't," denied Barbara, flushed and indignant. "But I did like
Doctor Lorrimer. He talked sense, and I was awfully interested in his
work in the free clinic."
"Sense! Shop! By moonlight! Ye gods!" mocked Suzanne. "Never mind,
Barbie. Your tactics were admirable. Listen to 'em. Keep on listening
to 'em. It's what the sex likes. It gets 'em every time."
"But I don't want to get 'em," protested Barbara earnestly.
Whereupon Suzanne giggled and tossed her victim a silver sheathed bonbon
by way of reconciliation. Then she returned to her charge upon Sylvia,
who had sat silent during the last sally, meditatively playing with the
spray of scarlet creeper in her lap.
"Sorry, Sylvia, belovedest. But I can't seem to think of a single
suitable job for you except matrimony. You are eminently fitted for
that."
Sylvia looked up with an expression half mirthful, half dissenting.
"Thanks. But at this juncture I don't happen to want to get married one
bit more than you do, which to judge from your protestations and your
treatment of poor Roger isn't much."
"Right you are. No such 'cribb'd, cabin'd and confined' business as
matrimony for this child. What was the advice old Bacon cites as to when
a man should marry? 'A young man not yet, an elder man, not at all.'
Read woman for man and you have my sentiments in a nutshell."
"Oh, Suzanne!" Thus the refrain from the big chair. But Sylvia only
laughed, knowing what Barbara seemed never to be able to learn, that
Suzanne rarely meant more than a half or at best a quarter of what she
said and thoroughly delighted in being iconoclastic, especially if the
idols made considerable noise smashing, as she would have put it
herself.
"Look at your neighbor, Mrs. Doctor Tom." Suzanne warmed her to her
subject. "She used to write for all the best magazines and travel and
live the broadest, freest, splendidest kind of life. How does she put in
her time now? Eternally making rompers for Marjory, trying to keep
Thomas Junior's face clean and his vocabulary expurgated, seeing that
the dinner is warm and the cook's temper cool when Doctor Tom is late to
meals, and so on and so on to the end of the chapter. Only there isn't
any end to the chapter. It goes on forever like Tennyson's stupid
brook. Bah! Excuse me!" And Suzanne's gesture betokened insuperable
scorn for the ways of the wifely.
"But Mrs. Daly looks as if she enjoyed doing all those things, and I
think it is lovely to have babies." There was a little wistful note in
Barb's voice as she made the statement.
"H-mp! Maybe so. But I say it is a shame for anybody who could write
the way she could to give it up. Don't you, Sylvia?"
"O dear!" groaned Sylvia. "Yes and no. Why do I always have to see both
sides of things? Lois _is_ happy. At least I think she is. You can't
always tell about Lois, she is so cool and serene and deep. Anyway, the
babies are lovely. But I can't help agreeing with you a little,
Suzanne. It does seem a pity."
"Of course it is a pity. And there is your Felicia. She is another
case in point. She gave up her work and a fortune to marry a man who
lived just long enough to leave her with a big heartache to carry round
inside her and two children to provide immediate bread and butter for.
You can say what you like. I say it was too much of a price."
"O, but, Suzanne, Marianna and Donald are such dears!" pleaded Barb.
"Of course they are dears. They are adorable. But you can't deny they
have kept her back. She is just beginning to be a real sculptor after
all these years. And now she is beginning appears this Kinnard person
to spoil it all."
Sylvia looked up a trifle startled.
"What do you mean, Suzanne? Mr. Kinnard isn't spoiling anything. He is
helping. Felicia hasn't a bit of faith in herself. She never would
have thought of entering into that mural relief competition if he hadn't
made her. And I know her designs are going to be splendid. Mr. Kinnard
says they are, and he knows."
Suzanne shrugged.
"I fear the Greeks bearing gifts. No man ever gave a woman something
for nothing since time began. You'll see."
"What shall I see?"
"You might have seen the way he looked at your Felicia yesterday
afternoon. You needn't stare. She is the loveliest thing imaginable;
and, anyway, widows always marry again. They can't seem to help it. It
is in the system."
"Oh, he looks at every woman. How can he help it with eyes like that?
He is much more likely to be wooing Hope. He has been sketching her all
summer and she makes lovely shy dryad eyes at him while he works. I
don't see how he can resist her myself, she is so deliciously pretty."
"'A violet by a mossy stone.' Mr. Kinnard isn't looking for violets.
You'll see, as I said before."
And in spite of her denial, Sylvia couldn't help wondering if there were
any truth in Suzanne's implications. She had accepted Stephen Kinnard
quite simply as Felicia had explained him, an old friend and fellow
artist of Paris days. He had been in Greendale nearly all summer doing
some sketches of Southern gardens for a magazine, and it had seemed
perfectly natural to Sylvia that he should come often up the hill to see
Mrs. Emory. They were both artists and had much in common beside their
old friendship. That any factors deeper than those which appeared on
the surface might be keeping Stephen Kinnard in Felicia's proximity had
not until the moment occurred to Sylvia. For a moment it flashed across
her mind how sadly Arden Hall would fare without Felicia who with the
dear "wonder babies" had come to help Sylvia keep Christmas nearly six
years ago and had remained in the old house ever since to its young
owner's infinite content and well being.
"I never thought of Felicia's marrying again," she said after a moment
of silence.
"Well, Stephen Kinnard has thought of it, if you haven't," pronounced
Suzanne. "By the way, he said a rather nice thing about you yesterday.
He said you had a genius for happiness."
Sylvia smiled a little as her gaze strayed past the white pillars, past
the giant magnolia-tree lifting its shining leaves to the sun, past the
pink and white glory of cosmos and the dial beyond, dedicating itself
discreetly to none but sunny hours; beyond still farther to the clear
turquoise space of sky visible behind it all.
"Being happy isn't much of an art when you can't help being it," she
said, her gaze and her thoughts coming back from their momentary
journey.
"Oh, but he didn't mean just your being happy," put in Barb in her
quick, serious way. "He meant your way of making other people happy.
It's true. I noticed it often in college. But it is truer than ever
here. Everybody in Arden Hall is happy. It is like Shakespeare's
forest. It makes you feel different--not just only happy but better,
being here."
"That is the house. It has been like that ever since I had my Christmas
family here. Of course, it is realty mostly Felicia. She is the
mainspring of it all. But we like to pretend there is something magic
about the house itself. You don't know how I love every stick and brick
of it. I have never had half enough of it. I have been in school so
much, I've only snatched a few vacations on the wing, as it were, and
even that only in the last few years since I captured Felicia. Ugh!
Nobody knows how I hated those dreadful holidays in hotels after Aunt
Nell died and I came to America. And nobody knows how I love this."
Her expansive gesture made "this" include house and lawn and magnolia
and pink and white bloom and sun dial and all the rest, perhaps even the
turquoise stretch of sky. "I've never had my fill of homeness," she
concluded.
"Funny!" mused Suzanne. "Now, I don't want to be at home at all.
Norton is such a stuffy, snippy, gossipy, little town, and I loathe
being officially the 'parson's daughter.' Sometimes it used to seem to
me I'd rather throw myself in the river than go to another prayer
meeting and hear Deacon Derby drone out minute instructions to the Lord
as to how he should manage his business. And being home isn't so sweet
and simple as it seems either. I adore my mother, but we don't see two
things alike in the wide world. She likes the chairs stiff and straight
against the walls, just in the same position year in, year out. I like
'em at casual experimental angles, different every day. That is typical
of our two viewpoints. She likes things eternally straight and the
same. I like 'em eternally on the bias and different. We can't either
of us help it. We are made that way. And we're both more or less
miserable, whether we give in or whether we don't. Mother and Dad are
regular darlings, both of them, but I don't mean to stay at home with
them a bit more than I can help. They don't need me. They are perfectly
used to doing without me and are really much happier sans Suzanne. I
just stir things up and they like to snuggle down in their nice
comfortable ruts. I've got to live in New York. I'd smother in Norton,
Pa."
"Roger doesn't seem to be smothering in Norton," Sylvia reminded her.
"Jack stopped over to see him last week and he said Roger was stirring
things up with a vengeance since he has been sitting among the city
fathers."
"Oh, Roger!" Suzanne shrugged Roger away as entirely negligible.
"Roger Minot would stir things up in a graveyard. He likes to live in a
small town. I don't. The biggest city in the world isn't one bit too
big for me. New York for mine. Better change your mind, Sylvia, and
come on, too. There will be plenty of room in my garret. More room than
anything else probably. Aunt Sarah's legacy has its limits, more's the
pity. But come on and share my crust."
"Maybe I will, temporarily. I've promised Jeanette Latham to visit her
next winter and I'll include you and Barb in my rounds if invited."
"Jeanette Latham? Mrs. Francis VanDycke Latham? _The_ Mrs. Latham who
figures in 'Vanity Fair' and the Sunday supplement? The only Jack's
sister? There will be some contrast between visiting her and visiting
me. She inhabits a Duplex on the Drive, doesn't she? One of the
utterly utter."
"That depends. Mr. Latham is awfully rich and old family, if that is
what you mean, and Jeanette does like to be at the extreme of
everything, but underneath all her dazzle and glitter she is really as
simple and genuine as Jack is. I like her, and she is Jack's favorite
sister."
"Which helps," murmured Suzanne. "See here, Sylvia, if you once get
into that high society labyrinth you'll never get out."
"Oh, yes I shall--unless the Minotaur gets me. I just want a bit of
Jeanette's kind of life to see what it is really like. In fact, I want
to try all kinds."
Sylvia smiled as she spoke, but she meant her last assertion for all
that. Hers was an eager, active, questing temperament. She was avid
for life in its entirety, with a healthy zest for experience whose sword
blades rather than poppy seeds appealed to her just now, as is natural
with youth. The college world from which she had been recently
emancipated, full and various and strenuous as it had often been, had
never fully satisfied her free, quick, young spirit. She had always the
memory of those early rich years in Paris with her aunt from which to
draw comparison. She had once complained to Felicia that college was
too much like the Lady of Shallott's tower whose occupants perceived
life in a polished mirror instead of in direct contact. She was already
frankly a little tired of "shadows," ready for the real thing, whatever
that was.
"Maybe I am glad I don't have to do any one thing," she continued. "All
through school you are so pushed and guarded and guided and instructed
you don't have half a chance to be yourself. I'm thankful for a
breathing space to find out who I really am."
"Why, Sylvia! How funny!" puzzled Barb. "Don't you know all about
yourself?"
"No, do you?"
Barbara shook her head with a faint sigh.
"Maybe not. Or, if I do, I don't let myself look at the real Barb for
fear--" She broke off and Suzanne intervened.
"Well, I know all there is to know about Suzanne Morrison. I have taken
considerable pains to get acquainted, in fact. It is great to know
precisely what you want and that you are going to get it sooner or
later." Thus the sublime arrogance of the young twenties.
"I wish I did!" said Sylvia quickly.
"Which?"
"Both," parried Sylvia.
But Barb, who was watching her, was aware of something in her friend's
face which she could not quite fathom. Was it possible there was
anything in the world Sylvia Arden wanted and could not have? It was a
startling thought to Barb, who was accustomed to considering Sylvia as
the Princess of all the Heart's Desires.
Just then the Japanese gong from within sent out its silver-tongued
invitation. With the alacrity of the healthily hungry and heart-free
the three friends rose, the conclave ended, consigning to temporary
oblivion Causes, Careers and all Concomitant Problems.
*CHAPTER II*
*REASONS AND WRAITHS*
Mrs. Emory laid down her sewing on the porch table and rose to greet
Stephen Kinnard, a tall, lean man with a rather angular but interesting
face, with hair slightly graying on the temples, and remarkably
beautiful eyes, slate-gray shot with tiny topaz colored flecks, eyes
which as Sylvia said "looked" at women. They looked now, which was
scarcely strange considering how beautiful Felicia Emory was at
thirty-three.
"Will you have tea?" inquired Felicia.
"Thanks, no." He shook his head with a humorous gesture. "I've taken
tea at the Oriole Inn--almost forcible feeding, in fact. It seems they
are serving a new kind of sandwich to-day and Sylvia waylaid me and
insisted on trying it on the dog so to speak. She and Suzanne and
Barbara and Martha and Hope all stood by to watch the effect. I was
never so nervous in my life. May I smoke to calm my spirit?"
Felicia nodded assent and sat down, resuming her sewing.
"I am glad to see you still survive," she said, as he lit his cigarette
and dropped into a near-by chair.
"Oh, yes, I still survive. It was really an excellent sandwich in its
way, though I should hate to have to pass an examination on its
contents. It was one of Sylvia's inventions it seems. Tell me, does
she have the whole Hill on her hands? First it's a garden party at
'Hester house,' Sylvia at the helm; then it is the Byrd sisters who have
to be petted or scolded or braced, or a patient of Doctor Tom's who
needs attention, or his babies that have to be story-told to, or
Marianna and Donald who have to have her assistance in a dramatic
performance of Lord Ullin's Daughter. I heard her shouting 'I'll
forgive your Highland Chief' yesterday while the kids eloped in the
hammock, amidst high billows, I judge from the way the boat was rocking.
To-day it is the Oriole Inn sandwich. She is a most remarkable young
person, this Sylvia of yours, with a most insatiable energy."
"She is, indeed," agreed Felicia heartily. "The Hill can hardly get
along without Sylvia. We all mope and get selfish and lazy, what she
calls 'rutty' when she is away from it. I am so glad she is home for
keeps now. The Hill is never quite the same without her."
"But she won't stay on it forever," warned Stephen Kinnard. "She is a
live wire--that young lady. She isn't going to be content to settle
down on even so lovely a hill as hers. Also she is more than likely to
get married."
"I suppose so," sighed Felicia.
"What a lugubrious tone to vouchsafe to the holy state!" he teased.
"It isn't the holy state in itself. It is Sylvia. I hate to have her
get grown up and married and settled down. I'd like to keep things just
as they are for awhile. The dread of changes seems to grow on me as I
get old."
Felicia smiled as she made the statement but there was genuine feeling
behind it.
"Would you dread change for yourself?"
"For myself? I don't know. I wasn't thinking especially about myself."
"Do you ever?"
"Not oftener than is agreeable. I am getting to be a very placid,
settled sort of person. That is the comfort of being in the thirties.
You don't expect so much of life. Now, ten years ago if I had been
thinking of submitting designs for a competition I should have been
frightfully excited. Now, I think I would almost rather not win, which
is fortunate considering how little chance there is of my doing so."
"There is all the chance in the world," objected Stephen. "You need a
little of the virus of vanity instilled into you. Felicia, do you
remember back there in Paris when old Regnier used to insist you had
more talent than any man in his class?"
Felicia tranquilly snipped off her thread and admitted that she
remembered.
"And do you remember how he raved when you told him you were going to
marry Syd?"
Felicia nodded. She remembered that, too; remembered also, though she
did not say so, how she had smiled at the old master's ravings, sure
that love would prove no hindrance to her art, sure that she and Sydney
would work and achieve fame together. She had not dreaded changes in
those days. She had welcomed them, taken risks blithely, unafraid. And
there had been risks. Her aunt had raved also, to more purpose than the
Master, and in a moment of rage had changed her will, cutting off from
inheritance the willful girl who chose to reject the French count her
judicious relative had selected for her and insisted on marrying instead
a penniless artist. The loss of her inheritance had seemed to Felicia
at the time a trifle light as air, quite as irrelevant indeed as the
Master's gloomy prediction as to the eternal incompatibility of art and
matrimony. All these things she had thrown into the scales with love in
the opposite balance and love had weighed immeasurably heaviest.
There had followed a few years of idyllic happiness. Though with the
coming of the babies the art she loved had been temporarily suspended;
both she and her husband promised themselves eagerly that it was only a
suspension, that she would go back to it again as soon as Marianna and
Brother were just a little older. But before Marianna and Brother were
much older Felicia was left alone with a "big heartache to carry round
inside her and two children to provide immediate bread and butter for,"
as Suzanne had put it. And so the old dreams had been thrust out of
sight, and the young woman whom the Master pronounced to have possessed
more talent than twenty talented young men, fell to earning a living for
herself and her little folk by painting place cards and Christmas
greetings and calendars and such like small ilk. All this drifted in
retrospect through Felicia Emory's mind as she bent over her sewing, and
something in the droop of her mouth touched Stephen as he perceived it.
Impulsively he threw away his cigarette and leaned forward letting his
hand touch hers.
"Felicia, forgive me! I didn't mean to hurt you."
"You didn't. It just came back to me for a moment how fearfully young
and happy and ignorant I was in those days. But with all the wisdom
I've garnered since, if I had it to do over again, I suppose I should
travel precisely the same road. Isn't it queer, Stephen? Don't you
feel that way about the past, too?"
"No, my road was too devilish rough. I'd like it different."
Felicia looked up, surprised both at his words and the unusual passion
in his voice.
"Do you suppose I have ever forgotten I didn't get what I wanted?
Felicia, I loved you before Syd ever saw you."
"I know. I'm sorry. I was always sorry. You know that, Stephen."
"You needn't be. Loving you made a man of me, though it did make the
road rough. Things had come my way rather too easily up to that time.
Syd was the better man. I always owned that."
"You were fine, Stephen. I've never forgotten how fine. And Sydney
cared more for you than for any one else in the world--barring us." She
smiled a little and her eyes strayed out to the magnolia tree beneath
whose generous shade Marianna and Donald were laboriously engaged in the
construction of a kite with much chatter and argument.
"Felicia."
"Yes?"
"Are you so afraid of change you wouldn't risk beginning over
again--with me?"
Felicia's sewing dropped in her lap and her blue eyes opened wide with
surprise and consternation as she looked up to meet his dark, eager
eyes.
"Stephen!"
"Well? Is it so impossible to conceive? Haven't you guessed I was going
to ask it sooner or later?"
"No. Oh, Stephen, I wish you hadn't."
"Why? I don't expect the same kind of love you gave Syd. You couldn't
give it, of course. That is past. But you are too young to have life
stop altogether for you--too young and too lovely. Other men will ask it
if I don't, and I--well, I want to get in ahead." He laughed boyishly,
but his eyes, which were grave enough, never left her face. "Is there
any reason you couldn't say yes?" he asked.
"I am afraid there are many. One of them--rather two of them--are out
under the tree at present."
His gaze followed her gesture.
"Are they really a reason? I love the kiddies and they like me. Surely
it would be no injustice nor detriment to them. Why should it?"
"Not to them--rather to you--to any man I married. They are a very
piece of me. They are me. If there ever came to be a decision between
them and--well, call the man you--I should decide for them. Is that
fair to you? Would you risk it?"
"Willingly. Why should there be any decision or division? What do you
think I am? If I marry you I marry them too. I am crazy over children.
I've always wanted them."
"Exactly," said Felicia quietly. "That would be part of the injustice
to you. I don't want children. Marianna and Donald are enough."
"So they would be for me. Felicia, can't you understand, I want nothing
except what you want--what will make you happy? Is there any other
reason?"
"Yes, she is coming up the Hill now."
He turned quickly and saw Sylvia, with her friends on either side, just
going up the path which led to the door of the Byrd sisters preparatory
to an afternoon call.
"What nonsense!" He turned back to Felicia to protest. "Sylvia would
be the last to stand in the way of your happiness."
"Oh, I know that. But listen, Stephen. You accused me of not
understanding a moment ago. Now it is you who do not understand. Do you
know what Sylvia has been to me all these years? No, you couldn't
possibly know. No man could. Six years ago I was weary almost unto
death, and discouraged with a weight of hopelessness which was beginning
to make even the children seem a burden. That Christmas was the
blackest time of all the months since Sydney went. I tell you honestly
it didn't seem as if I could go on with it all. I was too near the
breaking point. And then straight out of the delightful good fairyland
where she lives came Sylvia begging me to be her Christmas sister and
bring the babies to round out her magic Christmas circle. I believe it
was Sylvia's smile and Sylvia's pleading eyes that began to heal the
hurt in me then and there. I have had lonely moments since, of course,
and some black ones, too, but they have never been so bad since that
Christmas. Do you wonder that next to my own children I care more for
Sylvia and her happiness than for anything else in the world?"
Stephen shook his head soberly, trying his best to understand since she
desired it.
"After the Christmas family scattered I came to be what Sylvia calls her
homekeeper and that I have been for over five years now. You can see a
little what it has meant to me to have a home like Arden Hall for the
children to grow up in instead of a cramped city apartment with no
outdoors except public parks to play in. It has made all the difference
in the world to them and to me, body, mind and soul. I couldn't have
been half a mother to them the way I was working and living. And all of
this we owe to Sylvia."
"But you have rendered good measure. You have given her a home no less
than she has given you one. It has been a fair exchange."
"I know. It has meant almost as much to Sylvia as it has to me. It has
given us both what we wanted most. I don't pretend it hasn't been give
and take. It has. But this one year is the one of all the six since
I've known Sylvia that she needs me most. I wouldn't fail her now for
anything."
"And they say women have no sex loyalty," muttered Stephen Kinnard.
"See here, Felicia, do you realize you have as good as accepted me?"
"Accepted you! I have been refusing you with reasons for fifteen
minutes." Felicia's serene voice was a bit ruffled and there was a
flush in her cheeks.
"You've been giving reasons, I grant you, but not refusal. Look at me,
Felicia. If there weren't any Marianna and Donald and Sylvia in the
world wouldn't you say this minute, 'Stephen, I'll marry you just as
soon as you can get the license'? No quibble now. Honest."
Felicia laughed softly and her flush deepened.
"If there weren't any Marianna and Donald and Sylvia in the world I
should be so desperately lonesome I should tell the first man that asked
me I would marry him as soon as he could get the license, but seeing
that there are Marianna and Donald and Sylvia, not only in the world but
on this very Hill, I am not in the least lonesome and quite satisfied
with my mothering-sistering job, thank you."
"Then it is really no?"
The mirth died out of her eyes at the gravity of his tone.
"Yes, Stephen. I am sorry, but it is really no. Aside from Sylvia and
the children there would always be Sydney. You are too fine to be a
second best, Stephen, dear. Do go and find somebody who is fresher and
younger and less--tired than I am."
At her words there rose to both their minds a vision of Hope Williams'
dainty, wild rose beauty and wistful "dryad" eyes. Stephen had been
sketching her only that morning in the Oriole Inn garden and every line
of her exquisite, fragile, flower-like face and lithe, graceful young
body was in his head still. And Felicia had more than once surprised an
unforgettable expression in Hope's eyes when the artist had come
suddenly into the girl's presence. Hope was young, younger than Sylvia,
and Stephen Kinnard was forty. But he was of the eternally young type
of man, brimming over with that inexplicable, irresistible thing we call
charm, and his years abroad had stamped him with a picturesque, foreign
quality which was sure to appeal to the romantic fancy of youth. One
ardent gaze from those strange, gold-flecked eyes of his had no doubt
been enough to set many a maid dreaming ere this, and he had been kind
to Hope, perhaps more than kind for all Felicia knew.
But already the vision of Hope had vanished from Stephen's mind. He saw
only the mature grace and loveliness of the woman who had long ago been
the one fixed star of his errant youth and to whom he now brought the
homage of ripened manhood.
"I don't want anybody in the smallest particular different from
yourself, sweet Lady Love. Don't worry though," as he saw her troubled
eyes. "I am not going to pester you. I shall take myself off to-morrow
but I shall come back and some day I shall surprise you in a lonely hour
and you will say, 'Stephen, do hurry and get the license.'"
Seeing his whimsical, reassuring smile, Felicia smiled back, half
relieved, and indeed not quite knowing how much of it all had been in
earnest; glad, at all events, to have him slip back so easily into the
familiar channels of friendliness.
And just then the girls, having finished their call, came gayly
chattering up the walk, demanding of Stephen whether he had suffered any
ill effects from the experimental sandwich he had so manfully
encountered. And amidst the general confusion of talk and laughter
Stephen rose to take his departure, giving no hint of finality about his
leave taking, except a slightly lengthened clasp of Felicia's hand and a
steady gaze into her blue eyes. Consequently the girls, at least, were
considerably surprised the next day to receive three boxes of sweet peas
each with Stephen Kinnard's card, rose pink for Suzanne, shell pink for
Barb, delicate lavendar for Sylvia. Sylvia's box also contained a
charming little note thanking the girl for her summer's hospitality and
regretting that the writer was called out of town without opportunity
for formal farewells. For Felicia had come violets, but no word at all,
not even a card.
"H-m-m," murmured the astute Suzanne, when the girls were alone, "Called
out of town, indeed! Needn't tell me. Your Felicia didn't have such a
becoming extra bloom yesterday for nothing. You are safe for the
present, Sylvia. She evidently dismissed him."
Down the Hill, at the Oriole Inn, Hope and Martha Williams reigned in
the absence of the young proprietor who since her grandmother's death
had been traveling in Europe with the Armstrongs, her sister Constance
and her husband, Sylvia's erstwhile gardener. And to the Oriole Inn
also came flowers, dainty, half-open, pink rosebuds nestled in
maidenhair fern. Came also a brotherly affectionate note of thanks and
adieu from the artist.
"The sketches are bound to be a success," he wrote, "for you are the
very spirit of Southern gardens, the veriest rose of them all." So he
had put it, poet fashion, and Hope, with fluttering pink and white in
her cheeks, ran off to enjoy her treasures in happy solitude, leaving
her sister Martha stolidly measuring lengths for the new dining-room
curtains. No one had ever sent roses to Martha in all her life. Nor
had any one ever written poet lines about her or to her. She was not
that kind, as she would herself have explained. But it was not that
that brought a wry twist to her lips and a worried look to her eyes as
she bent over her work.
"Why couldn't he a been a little meaner to her?" she demanded of the
curtains. "'Twould have been a whole lot kinder than being kind."
In which theory she unconsciously paraphrased the words of a person she
had never heard of, another perturbed guardian of another flower-like
maid, the Lily Maid of Astolat. Of Launcelots and Elaines there are a
plenty in this somewhat uneconomical world.
*CHAPTER III*
*TWENTY-TWO*
"Please, Felicia. Look at me. Am I all right?"
Mrs. Emory turned from her mirror before which she had been adjusting a
last hairpin in her blond hair and smiled at the radiant vision which
hovered on her threshold. But before she had time to render verdict the
vision ceased to be stationary and became before her eyes a vivid,
ecstatic flash and whirl of white chiffon and silver.
"Bless us, child!" laughed Felicia. "You are as bad as Marianna. How
can I tell anything about you when you are spinning like a Dervish? You
look as if you might float out the window any minute and join the moon
sprites."
Sylvia laughed, too, and came to a halt, though one silver slipper
paused tip toe as if it scorned prosaic levels and held itself ready for
further airy revolutions.
"And leave my birthday party! Not much! The moon sprites shan't get me
to-night. Honest, Felicia, I just can't keep still. I'm too alive."
The chiffons and silver began to shimmer and quiver again in testimony
and Felicia smiled understandingly. But even as she smiled she felt a
sharp little pang--the pang of chastened maturity for exuberant youth.
A vagrant bit of verse flashed through her mind.
"Pity that ever the jubilant springs should fail at their flow
And that youth so utterly knowing it not should one day know."
Yes, that was the pity. Here was Sylvia Arden, glad, and young, and
free, smiling into the future with fearless eyes, challenging
experience. Must she too, one day know? At any rate, the hour of too
much knowing was as yet afar off. At twenty-two Sylvia was still very
close to the jubilant springs. But even as she reached this comforting
conclusion Felicia saw the girl's eyes grow sober.
"Felicia, sometimes I think it's a dreadful thing to grow up. Life is
so fearfully complex somehow. All sorts of questions jump out and 'Boo'
at you from behind every tree."
"What kind of questions?"
"Oh, all kinds!" Sylvia dropped down on the low window seat, like a
bird suddenly alighting, and clasped her hands around her knees in
reckless disregard of her billowing chiffons. "I'm a little afflicted
with socialism and that is a sad disease for a person who has as much
money as I have. But that isn't all. I am so at sea about so many
things, and there are so many strings pulling in all directions.
Suzanne thinks New York is the only place in the world to really live in
and she wants me to come and live with her and study or do something.
She doesn't think it matters much what, so long as I breathe New York,
and Barb is nearly as bad. They are both full of up-to-date notions and
they think I'm just going to slip behind if I stay here and maybe I
shall. I can see pretty easily how I could. Everybody here expects me
to do the regular coming out performance, teas and dinners and balls and
the rest, with maybe a little discreet charity work thrown in, and
possibly a paper on art or ethics for the literary club. You know what
Greendale is. The Gordons want me to go to Japan with them and Hilda
wants me to join her in Berlin, or did before the war. Goodness knows
where she is now. I haven't heard since July. And--well, there are
other things."
Felicia quite understood that Jack Amidon might possibly be another
string pulling the girl. It was no secret from the Hill, and certainly
not from the wise-eyed "Big Sister," that that devoted, persistent and
"magerful" young man had every intention of storming Sylvia's hill top
and carrying off its princess if such a feat were humanly possible.
"And you don't want to do any of these things?"
Sylvia smiled dubiously.
"Oh, yes, a little of me wants to do all those things. But the most of
me wants to stay right here at Arden Hall and do nothing particular.
I'd like a kind of year o' grace I think. I don't seem to have any
especial ambitions nor desires except to learn to live as broad and deep
and quick as I can." She shifted her position slightly and looked out
into the night where her beloved rose garden lay in magical moonlight
and shadow and a faint sigh escaped her, born of the very beauty,
poignant almost as pain, so quick was her response to it. Suddenly she
turned back and her eyes smiled at Felicia.
"Life's funny, isn't it?" she said, springing up. "Felicia, what ever in
the world should I do without you?" She eyed a little sternly the bunch
of violets Felicia was wearing, a fresh bunch which had arrived that
day. "Felicia, Mr. Kinnard isn't--you aren't--?"
Felicia laughed.
"Your observations lack a certain finished coherence but I assure you I
am not, nor is he--at least, not seriously."
"I'm so glad!" sighed Sylvia. "I know I'm a pig but I should simply
hate Stephen Kinnard if I thought he were going to carry you off, and I
should hate to hate him he is so exceedingly nice. I wish he could have
stayed for the party to-night. Oh me! We ought to be downstairs this
blessed minute. _Am_ I all right, Felicia? You never did tell me."
And Sylvia whirled around to the mirror for a last critical survey.
Felicia, whose eyes also sought the reflected figure in the glass,
thought she had never seen the girl lovelier than she was to-night in
all her shimmering bravery of white and silver. But there was always
something more than mere prettiness about Sylvia, something which seemed
to shine from within out. She was so exquisitely alive like the fire in
the heart of an opal or a jet of pure flame.
"Aren't you coming, Syl?" Suzanne's voice called from the hall as she
knocked and entered almost simultaneously, followed by Barbara.
"'The feast is set,
The guests are met.
May'st hear the merry din.'"
she chanted gayly, looking more impishly charming even than usual in her
beruffled corn yellow taffeta, which set off her sparkling brunette
beauty to perfection. "Do come down quick and get the hand shaking over
so we can begin to dance. It is a shame to waste a moment of that
heavenly music. And here's Barb just dying to get to cracking the hearts
of the Greendale swains. Look at her. Behold my handiwork. She even
let me apply the faintest soupcon of Nature's sweet reenforcer. Madame
Delphine's Parisian Bloom. Isn't she adorable? Barbie, my child,
revolve for the ladies."
"Oh, Suzanne!" The roses in Barb's cheeks needed no further
reenforcement at the moment. "Do please rub it off. It's dreadful.
Does it show, Sylvia? She would do it."
"Nothing shows except that you're the cunningest mite I ever laid eyes
on," approved Sylvia. "Felicia, do look at her. Doesn't she look
precisely like one of Marianna's dolls? In that darling white baby
dress and blue sash to match her eyes, would you ever suspect her of
being a Summa cum Laude and a frightfully new woman?"
"You all look new enough when it comes to that," laughed Felicia. "You
haven't a notion how young you really are. Now, shoo, every one of you.
I'll follow as soon as I have rounded up Donald and Marianna."
It was a rather heterogeneous assembly which met at the Hall that night,
as Sylvia's parties were apt to be. The guests ranged from "Grandpa
McIntosh," getting to be rather an old gentleman these days but still
hale and a little crusty as became a good Scotchman, down to little Mary
Lane, the youngest, shyest member of the "Hester house" family which
continued to hold its hospitable doors open to those who needed a home
"with some one to care" as Sylvia had stipulated from the beginning.
Marianna, still fairy-like, in spite of her eleven-year-old dignity,
flitted happily among the guests feeling delightfully grown up and
important, but Donald, younger and shyer, boyishly conscious of his
hands and feet, slipped into unobtrusive corners save for the rare
moments when he could squeeze into an empty space beside his mother.
Of course the Hill was all there, Miss Priscilla, and Miss Rosalie and
Julietta feasted their eyes delightedly on Sylvia, telling every one who
would listen what a very picture of her Aunt Eleanor Arden the child
was, rapturously reminiscent of other days and other parties when they,
too, like Arden Hall were younger than at present, and Doctor Tom and
Lois were there also, rallying each other on being such old fogies that
a party was an event and the new dances utterly beyond their ken.
"Hester house" was present too in full force, including Mrs. Lorrimer
and all the family of girls who had the luck to be mothered by her
skillful hands and warm heart. All kinds of girls they were, big and
little, pretty and plain, stupid and clever, but all of the workaday
world and all otherwise homeless, united by one common bond, a warm
adoration for Sylvia through whom they felt themselves linked to the
world of their rosiest dreams. Sylvia would no more have omitted them
from her list of guests on this birthday celebration than she would have
omitted the Byrds or Doctor Tom. To be of the Hill was open sesame to
Sylvia's favor, and moreover these girls were every one of them her
personal friends and she wanted them here for their own sakes.
Hope and Martha, too, had come up from the Oriole Inn, the former still
a little inarticulate and somber but happily having lost the old-young,
pinched look about the mouth and the bitterness about the eyes which had
been hers that night in Sylvia's garden when she had charged the owner
so sternly with possessing "Hundreds of roses when Hope hasn't even
one;" a charge which Sylvia had never since been able to forget for
long. It was to her a symbol of the mesh of inequality and injustice of
the world in which she herself was caught and struggled. For Sylvia
wanted to share her roses. She always had wanted to, as Martha had long
since learned. Hope was even sweeter and lovelier at twenty than she
had been at fifteen, still a little frail in appearance though perfectly
well. This summer there was an added grace about her, a sort of
suppressed joyousness, a glow which transformed her rather ethereal
charm into an even more appealing human guise. During the sunny summer
days past when Stephen Kinnard had been using her as the incarnation of
gardens, Hope herself had bloomed from a shy bud of a rose into a
half-blown flower, though perhaps only Martha's keen, devoted eyes saw
what had happened.
Professor Lane and his wife, Sylvia's original "Christmas Mother," were
unfortunately unable to be present, though they sent warm greetings and
hearty congratulations from the Western university to which the
professor had recently been called. With them, too, was Elizabeth, also
of the original famous family, who had come of late to be almost like a
daughter in their childless home.
Gus Nichols was here, however, a slim, dark youth, extremely quiet,
though not in the least awkward; unobtrusive, grave, giving the
impression somehow of banked fires behind those solemn dark eyes of his,
which followed Sylvia Arden wherever she passed. Though Gus was
thoroughly American in dress and manner and articulation, the trail of
his Italian ancestry was upon him. Even after all these years he looked
"different," an odd contrast to the grim conservative old man, Angus
McIntosh, whose adopted son and idol he was. Gus had been studying
abroad for several years, had indeed just returned to America, ready to
start his career on the concert stage. If this profession elected by
the boy were at all a bitter pill for the old Scotchman to swallow he
made no protest about it and had even furthered the lad's ambition. Mr.
McIntosh was not one to indulge in half-way measures and Sylvia had long
since driven home her point that if he was to transform Gus Nichols,
office boy, into Augustus Nichols, his adopted son, he had no right to
change the currents of the boy's being in the process. He quite
understood that if Gus "had to play the music that was in him," he _had_
to. That was the end of it. Angus McIntosh was enough of a
predestinarian to perceive that. At any rate, Sylvia and her Christmas
family had inoculated the fast hardening old man with a certain infusion
of human tolerance and human understanding and he had all the reward for
his kindness that he desired and more in the boy's usually silent but
none the less deep gratitude and devotion.
Other friends there were of Greendale and the near-by city, assembled to
do honor to the young mistress of Arden Hall who had at last come home
to take her place among them no longer a half-fledged school girl, but a
poised and very lovely young woman.
"I suppose you will be marrying her off next," observed Mr. McIntosh
curtly, with bent brows, to Mrs. Emory who chanced to be standing near
by as Sylvia sped past in Jack Amidon's arms.
"Not I," smiled Felicia. "I should be sorry to have her marry for a
year or so yet. One is young such a very short time in this world at
best. I should like to keep her just as she is for awhile if I could."
"You'll have some trouble doing it unless you muzzle that young man, I'm
thinking." The speaker frowned thoughtfully at Jack Amidon's back. "I
suppose that is what most people would call a suitable match, eh?" he
wheeled on Felicia to ask.
"I suppose so," admitted Felicia.
"H-mp!" snorted her companion. "Most people are fools."
Whether fools or not there were plenty of people to note with interest,
pleasure or alarm, according to their several viewpoints, when as the
music ceased Sylvia stepped through the French window into the balcony
beyond, followed by Jack Amidon. Perhaps more than one guest would have
echoed Suzanne's verdict that Sylvia was spoiled indeed if Jack Amidon
were not good enough for her; handsome, debonair, thoroughly charming as
he was. Health, wealth, good looks and good old family on both sides.
What more could be desired? Who but a canny old Scotchman would have
"H-mped" in the face of such a very obviously appropriate combination?
Yet Sylvia herself was still to be reckoned with; Sylvia who wore her
heart on her sleeve as little now as in the old St. Anne days, Sylvia,
who wanted to learn to live as broad and deep and quick as she could.
*CHAPTER IV*
*THE WAYS OF A MAID*
"You look mighty sweet and cool and moonshiny!"
Jack stooped to draw Sylvia's scarf about her bare shoulders with the
protecting chivalrous touch which was characteristic of him. His
ancestors had been cavaliers and none of them all knew better than he
the art of little, tender, intimate, endearing ways which women--even
new women--love. The ardently adoring expression in his eyes was also
characteristic. Jack Amidon's eyes were accustomed to looking adoring.
He could no more help making love to a pretty girl than he could have
been rude to an ugly one. It was constitutional. To do him justice,
however, this time the adoration came from rather deep. There had been
girls and girls in his life but never but one Sylvia.
"Ah, but it's good to have you home for good and all." And he let his
hands rest for a moment on her shoulders as he spoke and permitted the
ardentness of his eyes to deepen.
But Sylvia slipped away from his hands and his too eloquent gaze. She
turned to rest her hands on the railing and look down at the fountain
which flashed and gurgled pleasantly below in the moonlight. Perhaps
she knew that all the summer day playing had been leading up to this
night, that a serious question was likely to "Boo" at her at any minute
unless she could keep it at a safe distance, which as Jack's eyes just
now betrayed was not going to be so easy.
"I am not sure I _am_ home--for good and all," she said, still with her
eyes on the fountain. "I have to find something to do. Just being
'out' isn't going to satisfy me. I have to be in something or rather.
I am looking for a Cause," she turned back to him with a smile to add.
Jack dropped on the railing by her side and bent his handsome head until
it was very near the girl's.
"Won't I do--for a Cause?" he asked, unconsciously echoing Suzanne.
Sylvia smiled.
"Scarcely. I am afraid you are more like an effect."
"An effect!"
"You are a fearful example of what I don't want to be and what I am
bound to be if I don't watch out."
"What?"
Sylvia paused for a word, then, "A derelict," she pronounced.
Jack's head went up quickly, his self-complacency shattered for the
moment. Sylvia's word had stung.
"Do I honestly remind you of anything so--dilapidated, not to say
rotten?" he asked.
Sylvia caught the hurt sound in his voice and looked up, taking in at a
glance his wholesome, young vigor, his essential cleanness and fineness.
Excellent things these in themselves as the girl knew, though she asked
for more.
"No," she admitted. "It wasn't a good figure after all. You are more
like a freshly rigged, beautifully appointed yacht, without a rudder or
a pilot, going nowhere--anywhere."
Jack settled back on the railing with a shrug.
"Same old Sylvia! You always did hit straight from the shoulder. What
do you want me to do? There is more money in the family now than is good
for us. What's the infernal use of my scrapping and scrambling for
more? I'm a nincompoop at the business anyway."
"Then for goodness' sake find one you aren't a nincompoop at," retorted
Sylvia.
"Easier said than done, young woman."
"Oh, I know," relented his mentor. "I haven't any right to preach till
I find my own job."
"You! Girls don't need a job. Their job is to look pretty and get
married."
Sylvia frowned at that.
"Heretic! That's not twentieth-century lingo. You are positively
mediaeval. I shall set Barb on you."
Jack smiled.
"Barb knows it's true just as well as I do for all her theories. She
would marry the right man in a minute if he turned up and forget the
suffrage stuff. She's by all odds the most domestic of the three of
you."
Sylvia looked thoughtful. She remembered Barb's opinion about the
"loveliness" of having babies and wondered. For all his inconsequence
Jack had a somewhat startling habit at times of getting beneath the
surface of things. She suspected he had hit upon a truth now but would
not give him the satisfaction of acknowledging the fact. Therefore she
said nothing, and her silence gave her companion the opening he had been
waiting for. He had not brought Sylvia out in the moonlight to talk
"twentieth-century lingo."
"You didn't wear my orchids," he observed irrelevantly, at least
irrelevantly to everything except his ardent eyes. From the beginning
his eyes had been talking a language older than that of feminism.
"I didn't wear anybody's flowers. I had too many."
"And I am not different from just anybody?" There was a caressing,
proprietary note in his voice. "Sylvia, sweetheart, you _know_ I am."
Sylvia faced him and the issue then, aware that she could fend no
longer.
"Of course you are different, Jack. I've known you so much longer than
the rest, but--I am afraid you are not different in the way you want me
to say it. Please, Jack, don't spoil what we have by asking too much."
Impulsively she put out her hand and let it rest on his. "Can't we keep
on being--just friends?" She pleaded after the immemorial fashion of
woman.
"I'm afraid not. You see, I don't want to be just friends. I want a
whole lot more as it happens. I know I'm not much good, but I could be
with you at the helm. You could do anything with me. You always could.
Oh, Sylvia, wouldn't you try it? Couldn't you?" He stooped and lifted
her hand to his lips. "Sylvia, isn't there any hope?" he implored, all
his boy's heart in his eyes.
Sylvia couldn't help being stirred deeply. When one is loved it is not
so hard to believe one loves in return and the call of youth and life is
strong. But for both their sakes she steadied herself knowing the time
was not ripe for yielding, if, indeed, it ever would be. This was one
of the things among others that she was at sea about. She was not yet
sure she knew herself, as she had told her friends.
"I am afraid there isn't--much," she said gently, apropos of his word
_hope_.
His hand clinched.
"Sylvia, is there any one else?"
She shook her head hastily, but her eyes fell beneath his penetrating
gaze.
"It isn't--Sylvia, it isn't Phil?"
Sylvia's head went up and there was a flash in her brown eyes, a deeper
flush on her cheeks.
"It is nobody. Jack, you haven't any right to ask that," she rebuked
him hotly.
"Sorry," he apologized. "Consider it unasked." "So it is old Phil," he
thought.
"I don't want to marry anybody--not for a long, long time," Sylvia went
on swiftly. "Anyway, I couldn't marry anybody who was just a boy. I've
got to marry a _man_." In her confusion Sylvia hit hard again; harder
perhaps than she really meant.
Jack rose and made one or two quick turns tip and down the balcony.
Then he came to a halt before Sylvia.
"Maybe I deserve that," he said soberly. "No doubt I do. See here,
Sylvia, if I can show you I am a man, will it help any?"
Sylvia hesitated. It would help a great deal and she knew it. And yet
could she promise anything while she was still so uncertain of herself?
Had she any right to hold out any hope?
"Sweetheart, wouldn't there be any chance for me?" he pleaded.
"I don't know," said Sylvia honestly. "I'm sorry, Jack. I'm all in a
muddle myself. I do care a lot. How could I help it? You are always
so dear and nice to me, and you are so twisted up with so many of the
happiest times I've ever had I couldn't help caring. But it isn't
enough at present, and I am not at all sure it ever could be enough of
the right kind. We are awfully good playmates, but there is more ahead
for both of us than play. At least I hope there is. Anyway, I don't
want to belong to anybody but myself for awhile."
"I'll wait. I'll work like the devil. I'll do anything if you'll only
say there is the slightest shadow of a chance."
Sylvia couldn't help smiling at the boyishness of his protestations,
earnest as they were and touching in their unwonted humility. She shook
her head.
"That is all there is--just a shadow of a chance. I'm sorry it isn't
more. Truly I am. And don't--please, don't--hope too much," she
begged.
"I'll hope all there is," he retorted grimly.
"Well, here you are! My word! Your partners are tearing their hair and
rushing round like mad dogs. Pretty way for a hostess to behave,
vanishing like the original Cheshire puss! Amidon, your life isn't
worth a nickle if you go in there." Thus challenged a blond young
medical student from the near-by University suddenly appearing in the
window, blithely unconscious that he had interrupted anything more than
a moonlight interlude.
"Then I'll stay out," announced Jack coolly as Sylvia rose with
apologies and followed her captor.
Left alone, Jack lit a cigarette and strode to and fro in the little
balcony thinking as hard as perhaps he had ever thought in his
twenty-six rather heedless happy-go-lucky years. If ever a man takes
square account of himself it is at the moment when he desires with all
his heart and soul to win a woman. As young men go, Jack Amidon was as
clean and fine as most, considerably more so than might have been
expected, in fact, considering his easy-going temperament and unlimited
income. But being merely negatively decent was not enough to offer
Sylvia Arden. Not even shrewd old Angus McIntosh knew that better than
Jack himself.
"Man indeed!" he muttered in the course of his march. "I suppose if I
had studied like sin and turned into a saw bones like old Phil she would
have had some use for me." The thought of Phil Lorrimer sent his
thoughts on a different tangent. For with that uncanny perceptive power
which Sylvia herself granted him he knew far better than Sylvia knew
that if it had been Phil instead of himself who had been besieging the
Princess of the hill top that evening for the boon of her hand and heart
a different answer might have been forthcoming. Phil, at least,
fulfilled the initial requirement. He was a man, every inch of him.
Jack vouchsafed him that just as he had admitted the other lad deserved
Sylvia's favor even at his own expense back in the days of the Christmas
family.
It was odd how history repeated itself. Just as in that old time,
Sylvia had set himself a task to "mend his fences" as she had
whimsically expressed it, so she was again bidding him gird on his armor
if he would win her respect without which her love was an impossibility.
As if it were yesterday Jack remembered that night among the snow-laden
pines, out under the stars, when Sylvia had gravely and simply without
any preaching, Sylvia fashion, turned him aside from paths already
beginning to be dangerous to safer, cleaner ways. Come to think of it,
it had always been Sylvia who had pointed him starward, Sylvia only who
believed in him enough to swear him into knighthood. Now that they were
no longer boy and girl it was the prize of her love which would send him
into the fray. Already he had experienced his accolade.
"Poor old Lorry!" he thought. "Why didn't he cut his blooming
operations and come down here and speak for himself to-night? Thank the
Lord he didn't though or yours truly would be ditched and done for. I
never had a show with Lorry in the foreground. Well, here's to the
breach. Sylvia will never forgive me if I omit to dance with one of her
precious orphans."
So it happened that a few moments later shy little Mary Lane watching
the dancers with longing eyes from a corner caught her breath with
astonishment and delight as Jack Amidon stood before her, his eyes
smiling encouragement and friendliness, his lips begging the boon of a
dance quite as earnestly as if she had been one of the belles of the
ball. So it happened also that Sylvia, being whirled past the two,
smiled happy gratitude at Jack over her partner's shoulder, and he knew
that his careless kindness to her little guest had scored him a high
mark in her favor.
"Jack is such a dear," thought Sylvia. "He is a real knight. I wonder
if I am all wrong to try to turn him into a plain workaday person. He
is so thoroughly delightful as he is. When men get too much absorbed in
their work you can't count on them for the little things, and, after
all, the little things mean a whole lot."
Possibly this sage conclusion had some vague connection with the fact
that a certain very much "absorbed in work" young doctor way off in a
distant city had permitted Sylvia's birthday to come and almost go with
no word or sign. If so certainly Sylvia would have been the last to
admit the connection even to herself.
"Please, Miss Sylvia, there's some one downstairs in the hall asking for
you," whispered a maid in Sylvia's ears as her partner brought her to a
chair. "He didn't give any name."
Sylvia excused herself and slipped away wondering as to the identity of
her late arriving guest. At the foot of the stairs was an
extraordinarily tall, blond young man, with the bluest and friendliest
of eyes and the biggest, most crushing hand grip in the world.
"Why, Phil!" gasped Sylvia. "I had no idea you could come." This as
soon as she was able to regain her wits and the possession of her hands.
"Nor I. As a matter of fact, I couldn't. I just did," grinned Phil
Lorrimer, cheerfully. "Here I am, B. and O. grime and all. May I come
to the party just as I am without one plea?"
"You surely may. I'm so glad." And Sylvia's face corroborated her
words.
"Here's a nosegay for you," and Phil's fingers fumbled with the string
on the box he had deposited in a convenient chair while he had used both
hands greeting Sylvia. In a moment a charming bouquet of cream yellow
roses, shell pink at the heart, was disclosed.
"How lovely!" Sylvia buried her face in the nosegay. "I just have to
wear them. Oh, dear, I haven't a pin."
"Here you are!" And the young doctor solemnly produced the needful
article.
"Trust you!" laughed Sylvia. "There, aren't they perfect? Come on,
quick. Let's not waste the music."
"Ditto my sentiments. Is this my dance?"
"It's Doctor Tom's, but he won't care. Hurry."
And in a moment the onlookers had something new to think of as Sylvia's
white and silverness flashed back into the ballroom with a tall figure
in plain traveling clothes by her side.
"Another country heard from," grunted Angus McIntosh as he watched the
two swing into step.
Perhaps in the whole room there was no one who had more cause for a
sudden reaction of feeling than Jack Amidon, whose quick eye took in
even at the length of the hall that Sylvia was at last wearing
somebody's flowers. But it was with apparent nonchalance and entire
good will that he came to offer Phil Lorrimer a cordial greeting a few
moments later, though even as he chatted with the other young man it did
not escape him that there was an added radiance to Sylvia's
"moonshininess," as if she had tasted some magic draught of youth and
joy during those few moments in which she had been out of the room. As
has been observed, Jack Amidon was a rather unexpectedly perspicuous
person at times.
*CHAPTER V*
*SEPTEMBER AFTERNOON*
"Oh, me! Just think! By to-morrow afternoon at this time we'll all be
scattered to the four winds," sighed Barbara. "Don't you hate to have
things get different?"
"Can't say I do. The differenter the better so far as I am concerned as
I have hitherto remarked," put in Suzanne. "I hate staying still,
physically, mentally, or morally. I'm ready for new pricks every
minute. I feel like saying to life every morning 'Come on. Do your
worst. I'm ready. Give me anything--everything--except stagnation.'"
"You don't look as if you were going to stagnate just this minute,"
laughed Sylvia, surveying her friend, who, indeed, from the tip of her
impatiently tapping shoe to the crown of her rebellious blue-black, wavy
hair, appeared sufficiently dynamic for any purpose.
"I don't intend to. That is why I am transferring my spiritual and
bodily allegiance from Norton, Pa., to New York City. I'd rather live
on a crust in that blessed city of enchantment than fare on nectar and
ambrosia elsewhere. I wish you would change your mind and come along,
Sylvia. I know you are going to be discontented here or even contented,
which is worse. Arden Hall is a perfect dream of a place, and I've
loved every minute of this week with you, but it would swamp me with its
placidity if I settled down in it, and that's the truth."
"Oh, Suzanne!" Thus Barb, always sensitive to the possibility that some
one's feelings might be going to be hurt.
"Don't mind her, Barb. I know what she means precisely, and it is all
more or less true. Arden Hall is placid and remote. I have to find a
way to link it somehow with big moving things outside--below--or the
very thing Suzanne threatens me with will happen."
"You'll find a way," prophesied Barb earnestly.
"Of course she'll find it," seconded Suzanne. "If there is anybody on
this green earth capable of squeezing the traditional camel through the
needle's eye it is the young person I see before me. Isn't it time our
cavaliers arrived? I begin to pine for action already."
"Jack said he would be here at four sharp. We are going to take you to
the most heavenly spot, right over the river with the whole Ridge for a
background. Some day when you are being compressed to a wafer in the
Subway in your precious old city you will remember it and be willing to
give your second-most-becoming hat for a magic carpet to take you back."
"I shouldn't wonder," murmured Barb. "I believe Suzanne would rather
hear the roar of the El than the wind in the pines though. She is the
most urban person I ever knew."
Suzanne laughed at this arraignment.
"It isn't the music of the El, _per se_ that I delight in. That's
nearer like the thing it rhymes with. But it's a symbol. It means
hurrying human beings, the rush and stir of things. I love crowds."
"And I detest them," groaned Barb. "I'm afraid of New York in spite of
all its wonderfulness. It is so big and hard and impersonal. If it
weren't for being with Aunt Jo I know it would scare me to bits to live
there."
"You poor babe!" Sylvia smiled sympathetically at the speaker. "It is
unthinkable that a little shrinking infant like you should be dedicated
to a great screaming cause. You ought to live in a cozy cottage, in a
friendly little village, where everybody knows everybody and grow
pansies."
"And babies," added Suzanne, an addition which brought a quick flush to
Barb's cheeks and made her put out her hand with a deprecating gesture.
"You'll never be able to stand the pace. Better wire your Aunt
Josephine you have decided to bury the mantle."
"For mercy's sake, what do you two think I am? I guess I don't have to
be packed away in rose petals and pink cotton." There was a strain of
indignation in Barb's voice. "I don't belong in the sheltered woman
class, and I wouldn't stay in it if I did. How long do you suppose I'd
have any peace in my cozy cottage, in my friendly little village,
remembering all the other women who don't live in cozy friendly places
but have to work in horrid, noisy, sweaty factories or worse? What
pleasure would I get out of my pansies--and babies--so long as I knew
there was a child in the world who wasn't free to chase butterflies in
the sunshine? You two think I am just playing at this woman game. I'm
not. Sylvia can act Lady Bountiful from the top of her Hill and you can
write about woman, Suzanne, but I'm going to fight for her, so there!"
"Bravo! I stand reproved and beg a thousand pardons. You're a trump,
Barbie. You are right, too. Sylvia and I are likely to play with this
thing called Feminism, but you'll fight for it to the last trench like
the wee bit heroine you are. Oh, there's Mr. Amidon's car. There is
Mr. Amidon and Dr. Lorrimer and--Sylvia, _who_ is the third man?"
"If my eyes do not deceive me the third man is Roger Minot. Did you
know he was imminent?"
"I did not. Moreover, I am extremely displeased with him for
appearing," frowned Suzanne. "I told him distinctly I didn't want to
see him again unless I sent for him."
"Well, you will have to look the other way then," observed Sylvia. "He
is in plain sight."
So indeed it proved, for three minutes later, Roger Minot, a tall young
man with hazel eyes and a firm chin, was shaking hands with the
assembled group and explaining with considerable explicitness that he
had happened to be in Baltimore on business and had also happened to
call up Jack Amidon by telephone, who, in turn, had happened to be
taking Sylvia and her guests on an excursion and had been kind enough to
include himself in the invitation.
At all of which elaborate eloquence Suzanne had shrugged her displeasure
and pointedly turned her back on the young barrister and devoted herself
to the doctor. So much "happening" in the face of her expressed command
deserved punishment and Suzanne was a firm disciplinarian where her
lovers were concerned, especially the unfortunate Roger.
"Sylvia, you will have to sit with me to show me the way," ordered Jack
in his usual "magerful" way, taking things into his own hands. "All
aboard, everybody? Sure Madame Felicia won't go?" He turned to Sylvia
to inquire.
"No, she said not. Felicia is not exceedingly devoted to picnics, and I
suspect she has had more than enough of them this summer. Ready?"
Sylvia turned back to her guests to ask and in a moment they were off
down the hill.
The rich, vivid-hued Maryland fields and meadows lay indeed, "fair as
the garden of the Lord" as the car sped out of Greendale beyond to the
open country, along the smooth, hard, white pike. The afternoon shadows
fell cool and long, and already there was a faint autumnal hint of
crispness in the air and a mellow, misty gold to the sunshine. The
mountains were outlined, palely blue, against the deeper azure of the
cloudless September skies. Here and there a buzzard sailed and dipped
above some wooded slope or a blue jay screamed and flashed out of an oak
thicket.
Amidst the chatter of the rest Barbara fell silent and gave herself
blissfully to the serene beauty of the outdoor world so utterly remote
from that other world of din and traffic, of strenuous toil and keen
competition in which she was to merge her own existence on the morrow.
She was profoundly grateful for this last opportunity to feel the benign
presence of Nature in field and sky and mountain. Her quick eye took in
every patch of purple aster bloom, every scarlet glory of sumach and
warm bronze hue of oaks. Even the corn shocks spreading their brown
skirts as if indulging in some quaint minuet stamped themselves upon her
inner vision to be remembered long after. She did not wish to talk,
scarcely even to think. She desired only to feel--to let the
benediction of the jewel-tinted day possess her spirit.
Suzanne, less susceptible to the mood of tranquillity, was bubbling over
with gayety, her attention centering chiefly on Phil Lorrimer sitting in
the seat opposite her. She chose to ignore Roger Minot's steady hazel
eyes. He need not think his coming made any difference to her. Whether
he came or went was a matter of supreme indifference. He might just as
well have stayed in his grim little, trim little, office in Norton, Pa.,
as to have pursued a will-o'-the-wisp to Arden Hall so far as Suzanne
was concerned. Some women were made unhappy by men. Suzanne had a
cousin to whom this had befallen and had long since determined none
should have power to hurt her. She meant to guard well the citadel
which was Suzanne Morrison. If there were any casualties in the attempt
to scale the walls the responsibility would not be on her head. Let men
look to themselves. Suzanne had small compassion. Though she thoroughly
enjoyed the stimulus of the society of the other sex and dearly loved to
clash swords with them she wished nothing at their hands. She meant to
show the world that a woman could stand alone, strive and conquer alone,
fail if need be, alone, sufficient unto herself unto the end. There
should be no doll's house for her, no more confining limits than life
itself, wide as ether and deep as the sea, for her abiding place.
On the driver's seat were Jack and Sylvia, the latter a little silent.
Though she had made no protest against her companion's rather
high-handed disposition of herself it had not wholly pleased Sylvia.
For one thing, she thought it assumed too much on the basis of that half
promise of last night. She did not desire that Phil or indeed any of
the party should infer that she and Jack must necessarily pair off like
a couple of Noah's ark animals; moreover she considered it extremely
thoughtless, not to say selfish, of Jack to leave Phil to the society of
a group of almost strangers when his time in Greendale was so limited;
for Phil was taking the midnight train back to New York having allowed
himself little more than twenty-four hours for a holiday.
"Too bad everybody has to go away," Jack was saying. "May I come over
often and help cheer your lonely hours?" His voice was lowered and his
head bent toward Sylvia in an intimate fashion.
"No." The negative was sufficiently decisive to make the driver send a
sharp glance at his companion.
"Why not?"
"Several why nots. One is because you said last night you were going to
work in earnest. You can't do that and keep flying out to Greendale
every other day the way you have been doing all summer. Besides, I
expect to be busy myself."
"You! May I ask what you are going to do that is so almighty
important?"
"You may ask but I am not likely to inform you if you take that tone."
Jack whistled softly.
"Gee! Am I in as bad as all that?"
"As all what? Did I sound cross?" Sylvia smiled relentingly. "Well,
maybe I was. I hate the lordly male attitude you assume at times. Your
tone bristled with it just then."
"Did it?" he chuckled. "Sorry. Honest, I didn't mean to patronize your
ladyship. So far from feeling lordly in your presence you usually make
me feel infernally infinitesimal, not to say atomic. I have a fearful
and wonderful respect for your serene high mightiness. I truly did want
to know what you were going to do."
"I am going to get to work on my music for one thing. I've promised to
practice with Gus. Then I am going to learn to cook."
"In the name of heaven why?"
"Because I want to, chiefly. Also I think everybody--male and
female--ought to know how."
Jack groaned.
"Thence to dressmaking and millinery, I suppose?"
"Hardly. I haven't the slightest interest in sewing, though I could do
it on a pinch I believe. I know I couldn't trim a hat--at least not one
I would wear. But cooking is different. I believe I could get up quite
a passion for it. Hilda used to. She claimed it was just as much an
art to create a perfect salad as to write a sonnet."
"I'd vote for the salad personally. By the way, where is Hilda? Heard
lately?"
"No, and I'm worried. One hears such horrid stories of what is
happening over there. I don't know whether she and the Armstrongs can't
get back or don't want to."
"Most likely the latter. Johnny Armstrong is darned likely to do what
he wants. He is just the boy not to want to get back to safe and sane
America. He is much more apt to be down in a trench or up in a 'plane
by this time."
"I know. He's a wonder--one of the finest men I know. Just to think he
was my gardener once! Wasn't it funny?"
"He got mighty good pay for that piece of masquerading. Constance is a
shade too much on the grand duchess order for my taste but she suits him
down to the ground. Only wish Isabel had drawn a man like John instead
of the rotter she took a fancy to marry." For a moment Jack's serene
brow looked thundery. "Queer world!" he muttered. "Sometimes I think
we Amidons are doomed to go amuck one way or another. Jeanette's not
much better off. Guess we're all sort of rudderless as you say,
excepting Dad. He knows where he is going all right."
"You had better get on to his ship then," suggested Sylvia a little
dryly.
"I am going to. You needn't think I didn't mean what I said last night.
I did mean it, every word. If sticking to a job is going to mean
getting what I want, I'll stick tighter than a stamp."
There was a ring of determination in his voice which startled Sylvia a
little, it sounded so alarmingly conclusive.
"Jack! I didn't promise," she protested.
"Oh, I know. I'm not such a cad as to throw it up at you if even the
sticking isn't enough. But if it's the one chance I'm too good a
gambler not to take it--or to kick if I fail in the end." And Jack's
lips came together with a firmness which avouched the sincerity of his
statement.
Sylvia watching the landscape flit by looked thoughtful. It suddenly
occurred to her that her companion had spoken the literal truth. Jack
Amidon was first and last a good gambler, ready to play high stakes, to
win or lose like a gentleman, without vainglory or bitterness. If she
had said yes to his impassioned plea last night Sylvia could not help
wondering if a little of the ardor of his love might not have abated in
spite of himself. Wasn't it the chase itself he loved? If so, he was
only his father's own son. Jackson Amidon, Senior, went on quietly
bagging his millions, not because he cared a snap of his fingers for the
money but because the exhilaration of achieving it in the face of
obstacles was the breath of life to him. Like the biblical war horses he
metaphorically trumpeted "Ha Ha!" in the battle hour. With father and
son the game itself was the thing. The nature of the stake did not
matter so much. With one it was Power, with the other Love, as it
happened, but with both the zest lay, not in the end, but in the
pursuit. Of course Sylvia did not reason all this out clearly, but
vaguely she sensed the truth which the boy's words had revealed. Many
months later the revelation recurred to her and she wondered if Jack,
too, had understood himself as clearly as for a moment she had
understood him. She thought it possible with his keen power of
intuition, he had always understood. Perhaps he had.
So through the deepening autumnal twilight sped Youth with its visions
and its questionings, Youth unproved, pressing forward toward some
unknown mark in challenging mood, knowing little of the eternal mystery
of Life and less of that even more baffling mystery, the mystery of
Self.
*CHAPTER VI*
*OF MISSIONS, AND OMISSIONS*
"H-mm!" Suzanne meditatively surveyed the depleted feast. "Thermos
bottles! Silver spoons! Sophisticated salads! Is this your notion of
roughing it, Mr. Jack Amidon? Of all Sybaritical picnics!"
"Same old bugs! Same old sticks in the lemonade!" retorted Jack,
leaning forward to extract a leaf from Sylvia's cup with the prong of a
salad fork. "The good old times aren't utterly gone."
"Oh, but think of the bacon bats of yesteryear!" mourned Suzanne. "The
fingers I've burned! The clothes I've spoiled! The smudges wherewith
I've smudged my nose! I begin to feel fatally reminiscent. Give me
some more lemonade, I pine to drown my grief."
"And I pine to see the sunset from Lover's Leap." And Sylvia sprang up
hastily, perceiving that the sun was already glinting flame and gold
through the trees. "Come on everybody or it will be too late." The
others rose to follow her lead. Phil fell into step beside Sylvia,
leaving Jack to Barbara's society, as Suzanne and Roger had at last
struck up a conversation, albeit a rather non-amicable one and strayed
off together.
"Are you sure your name isn't Pease Blossom or Mustard Seed? I could
swear you were a fairy. Are you really a Militant? Would you resist
forcible feeding? Here, let me test you with a pickle."
But Barb only laughed and accepted the pickle.
"I'm nothing militant to-night. I'm at peace with the whole world."
"Even the menacing male?" teased Jack.
"The menacing male is a spoiled baby, biting off his own nose. Mr.
Amidon, it would serve you right if I delivered a suffrage lecture here
and now. I don't believe you know a thing about the movement,"
severely.
"Heaven forbid!" he ejaculated piously.
"You will sing a different tune before many years. You'll have it
forcibly fed to you unless you take to it of your own accord as babies
take to their thumbs."
"I believe I could bear to have even Suffrage rammed into me at your
hands, Mademoiselle Mustard Seed, especially if you would make pansy
eyes at me while you did it," he added audaciously. "What are you going
to do with those eyes of yours anyway? They are altogether too
expressive to be wasted on a Cause."
Barb frowned.
"You wouldn't wear a last year's hat. Why do you use last century
methods with women? They hate compliments."
"Do they? I wonder." And his wonder was genuine. He honestly
reflected a moment. Sylvia did hate compliments he knew. But then he
never offered her any. He never even flirted with Sylvia, though she
was about the only pretty girl of his acquaintance of whom as much could
be said. He had been perfectly willing to play the game a deux with
this demurely charming, pansy-eyed, little suffragist however. But he
was evidently not going to be permitted to have his will. Were Barbara
Day and Sylvia and the sharp-tongued Suzanne really a new breed of
womankind? Were his own sisters and the dozens of other girls of their
kind with whom he had played and danced and flirted for the past five or
six years really an older type, soon to be as extinct as the Dodo? Only
for a moment, however, he wondered. Jack was not much given to serious
thinking. He took life and the feminine sex on the whole rather as he
found them. He was always genially ready to "play up" to both. He was
now. It was rather agreeable he thought to watch Barb's eyes shine and
the color surge in her cheeks, so he laid the match to the tow chiefly
from an artistic impulse to see the flame.
"Tell me," he urged. "What is this thing you girls are up to? What is
it you are going to New York to do?"
Barb shot him a shrewd rather indignant glance. Then she laughed.
"You don't really care, but, just to punish you, I'm going to tell you.
You deserve it."
And then she did tell him, a little reservedly at first, but soon losing
both her resentment and her shyness she forgot herself entirely and
warmed to her loved theme, betraying something of the dream of her Aunt
Josephine, of herself, of all women who think and feel and are forever
disenchanted with any Pisgah heights they themselves might have the luck
to attain, so long as the great weary horde of the "dispossessed" wait
without the gates, scarcely even knowing in the apathy of their misery
that there is a Promised Land. And her listener did not scoff even to
himself at the revelation he was vouchsafed. He had the grace to
recognize with suitable humility that he unworthy had been permitted a
brief glimpse into a holy of holies. And irreverence was not one of
Jack's failings, for all his habitual levity of mood.
In the meanwhile, not far ahead, Roger and Suzanne were quarreling
hotly. At least Suzanne was quarreling. Roger never quarreled, which
was perhaps one of his most glaring defects in Suzanne's eyes.
"I told you not to come and you came," was the burden of Suzanne's
complaint.
"I didn't come to see you. I didn't even know you were in Greendale
until Jack told me. And when I knew, how could I resist a chance to see
you, especially as it will be months before I can see you again? Be
reasonable, Suzanne. Why are you so angry at me for coming?"
Suzanne shot him an exasperated and somewhat malicious glance.
Unfortunately, Mr. Minot was a lawyer and not a clairvoyant and
therefore was totally without means of knowing that the chief reason for
Suzanne's anger was the fact that she had been so foolishly glad to see
him. For every quickened beat of her pulse in his near presence poor
Roger had to pay with a lash of her tongue. Angry, indeed, was Suzanne
at Roger Minot for disobeying her royal mandates, but angrier still was
she at Suzanne Morrison for being automatically glad of his nearness.
Scant wonder the young lawyer had a very bad quarter of an hour as he
mounted the pine-needled slope toward the sunset.
Phil and Sylvia had less to say than either of the other couples,
strange to say, though it had seemed to both beforehand they would have
volumes. The hush of the forest and the hour seemed to have cast a spell
upon them, or was it an even more potent enchantment that held them fast
bound in silence? They had seen so little of each other during this
brief visit of Phil's. Last night had been too full and joyous and
excited for much conversation, even had Sylvia's responsibilities as
hostess left her much time for her latest arrived guest. Those few
moments on the stairs had been practically--indeed, the only ones--they
had enjoyed alone, and this morning Phil had given to his mother while
Sylvia and her guests slept away the hours up at the Hall. Both had
felt a little aggrieved and cheated at the way circumstances had
curtailed the pleasure of their being together for the first time since
the June Commencement at college. Yet now that the awaited moment had
come at last neither seemed to have anything particular to do with it.
It was strange, and both felt slightly embarrassed by the strangeness,
suddenly grown shy, after all their years of friendship.
"Oh!" Sylvia uttered the exclamation as she stepped out upon the great
ledge of rock from which she could see the sun's gold rim just dipping
behind the crest of the topmost purple peak leaving a sea of tulip
colors in its wake.
For a moment neither spoke again. A mood of complete serenity was upon
them that forbade speech, a sense of nearness, each to the other, and to
some high other Presence which might have been God or Nature or Love or
a mystic commingling of all three. Were the three, indeed, a new
Trinity, perfect and indivisible? There was a crackling among the
bushes behind, the sound of voices. The others were near. The
enchanted moment passed. Sylvia sighed, and, turning, met Phil's eyes
and her own drooped before what she saw there. No word was spoken, nor
needed, yet something unforgettable had been communicated. Sylvia's
heart was beating a little more quickly than usual and there was dew and
star shine in her eyes as she smiled at Jack and Barbara, a shine which
was lost on neither of the two new arrivals, though later it suited both
to pretend they had never seen it. For the moment Barbara's only
feeling was a quick compunction lest they had interrupted something
which they had no right to share. As for her companion, sharp fear and
half resentful jealousy went through him like keen-bladed knives. Had
he lost just at the moment when he seemed to have gained something
almost tangible? And then Suzanne and Roger reached the rock also,
arriving rather dilatorily by another path, having arrived also
apparently at a state of something faintly resembling truce, for Suzanne
was wearing a spray of vivid scarlet berries which Roger had risked
thorns and a possible broken neck to acquire. The risk had been worth
it, it seemed, for Roger was looking happier than at any moment since
Suzanne had first snubbed him several hours ago on Sylvia's piazza.
Barb, standing apart, watching the whole pageant from the outside, felt
oddly cold and lonely all of a sudden. There seemed to be so much love
in the world somehow and yet so little left over, as it were. And
Sylvia and Suzanne--did they know? Did they even begin to know how
precious love was? How one needed it in this great lonely world? She
walked to the edge of the cliff and looked down at the river whose rapid
current whirled fiercely, down below her. She remembered Sylvia's story
of how the rock was named. There are so many Lover's Leaps in the world
and their stories are all somewhat the same story. An Indian girl and
her lover had been forbidden to marry because they belonged to hostile
tribes and here they had gladly taken the consecrated leap together,
hand in hand, into space and eternity, one in death as they could never
have been in life.
What a strange thing love was! So Barb meditated. Was it something to
be avoided as Suzanne insisted because it demanded too high toll? The
others had seated themselves on the rock to watch the shifting panorama
of color in the western skies, but Barb wandered off by herself, still
pondering about that strange thing love. And the others scarcely
noticed her going, which was in its way a symbol.
Suddenly a single sharp cry broke the silence of the dusk and then
ceased. They all sprang to their feet in alarm, but it was Phil
Lorrimer's quick eye that first discovered what had happened. Below
them, and somewhat at the right of the outcropping ledge on which they
stood, hung Barbara, clinging to a slender sapling whose trunk bent, it
seemed almost to snapping beneath her slight weight. Sylvia saw, too,
almost at the same instant.
"There she is!" Her finger pointed. "Oh, Phil!"
But Phil had not waited for his embassy. He was already speeding down
the steep bank on his way to the scene of the accident.
"Hold on," he called cheerfully. "I'm coming. Can I reach you from
above?"
"No." Barb's voice sounded faraway but steady as Phil's own. "Don't
try. It's all crumbly."
"Hang tight then. I'll be there in a minute."
In what appeared to be an endless stretch of time to everybody, but
which was in reality an astonishingly brief interval, Phil's tall form
appeared on the river bank precisely beneath the tiny figure suspended
as it seemed in midair, but still clinging pluckily to the stout ash
sapling which held her weight gallantly. The distance between Phil and
the girl was perhaps ten feet, though it looked much more in the gulfing
darkness to them both.
"All right. Let go. I'll catch you."
A shudder shook Barb's whole body. That slim, tough little ash-tree
seemed all that kept her from the greedy swirl of the black river. Her
hands were grooved and cut with clinging and her arms ached until it
seemed as if she could not bear the pain, but for all that she felt as
if the one thing she could not do was to release her hold and slip into
the darkness. But there below loomed Phil Lorrimer's comforting size
and strength and Barb's courage grew as she looked down into his
uplifted face.
"Come on, Barbie, I'm right here." He had never called her anything but
Miss Day before, not even Barbara. Barbie was Sylvia's name, as it had
once been her mother's in the dear long ago. Somehow it seemed right and
natural and sweet that Phil should use it now. Suddenly she became the
trusting, obedient little girl Barbie again and without a quiver of
dread and with a heart at peace and full of faith she let go her hold on
the ash and went down, down, down into space--a surprisingly long
journey it seemed, though she felt perfectly comfortable taking it. She
had even time to notice that a star had come out and was smiling at her
friendlily out of the dusk over a sycamore-tree. She knew somehow or
rather that Phil would not fail her. Most people felt that about Phil
Lorrimer. More than one of his patients had been willing and unafraid
to go down the dark valley if he would stand by and help them on the
way.
Certainly he did not fail Barbara. Though the shock of the impact of
even her "fairy" figure made him sway and stagger a little, he caught
her as deftly as he had been wont in his college days to catch a
dazzling outfielder. In a second he had deposited her gently on the
soft moss on the river bank. Whereupon Barb gave a quick breath of a
sob then laughed a little rippling gurgle of a laugh, though there were
tears in her eyes.
"D-don't mi-nd me," she begged. "I'm just being g-glad I let go."
"All safe!" Phil's big voice boomed out of the darkness to the relief
of the anxious waiters above on the cliff. "All right, little lady?
Seeing as you wouldn't walk down, suppose we say you shan't walk up."
And Barb was swept like a sudden victim to a bird of prey into his arms.
"Oh, don't," she begged. "Please put me down. I can walk perfectly
well. I'm dreadfully heavy."
"So are thistledown and dewdrops," he laughed. "Please forget you are a
feminist for once and succumb to the eternal masculine superiority of
brawn and muscle."
And in spite of herself, Barb felt oddly content to let herself lie
passive in his arms, so much so that she closed her eyes and said never
a word. At the top of the ascent, which had been short though somewhat
steep, Phil put down his burden, and the rest crowded around the two,
full of excitement, anxiety and questions. But Phil exercised his
doctor's prerogatives and ordered them to let Barb alone and make a
speedy start for home. These orders were meekly obeyed, though they
managed little by little to get the information of how the accident had
occurred. It had been simple enough. The rock on which Barb had been
standing had been "crumbly" as she had said, and before she had had time
to realize what had happened she had slipped with the shelving stone and
soil and had only by the greatest of good fortune managed to snatch at
the ash in her descent and thus save herself from the disastrous fall
into the turbulent rock-filled bed of the river. It had been obviously
a sufficiently narrow escape to make them all rather silent and sober as
they packed up the remains of the feast and made their way to the road
just beyond the glade where the car waited.
"Want to have a try at the wheel, old man?" asked Jack, laying an
affectionate hand on Phil's shoulder when they were ready to start.
"She's a bird."
"Why, yes." Phil's frank face lit up with pleasure. "Sure you don't
mind, Jackie Horner?"
"Not a bit. Glad to have a rest," acquiesced Jack cheerfully. "Pile
in, Sylvia. Phil's waiting."
Sylvia's eyes flashed quick inquiry at Jack as he helped her into the
seat beside the driver. He met her gaze imperturbably but she was not
deceived by his noncommittal expression. Well she knew that the owner
of the "bird" suffered the tortures of the damned when any hand beside
his own was on the wheel. Well she knew also that he was deliberately
giving Phil a chance to do more than run his car. It was so precisely
like Jack, impulsively selfish one minute, impulsively generous the
next. Through the white star-lit wonder of the night the car sped, while
its occupants sat almost silent, wrapped in an incommunicable garment of
dreams. Later, after they had taken leave of the girls, Jack and Roger
went with Phil to the station at Baltimore. But Roger stayed in the car
while Jack went to the train with Phil. Just as the train pulled in
Jack stirred himself to say what was on his mind.
"Phil! Forgive the impertinence, old man, but I've got to know. If she
has decided for you, I'll clear out. You're the better man--always
were."
Phil Lorrimer drew a long breath and set his lips rather as he used to
set them before a tackle in the field.
"You needn't clear out, so far as I am concerned. I haven't asked
Sylvia to marry me. How can I? I've only just finished paying my
college debts and she is worth something like a million. Is thy servant
a fool?" he added a little bitterly.
"Yes," said Jack Amidon. "The biggest kind of fool. Do you suppose the
money matters a hang to her?"
"Well, it matters to me," curtly. "Train's under way. 'By." And with
a hasty but warm pressure of the hand which went out to meet his, Phil
boarded the moving train, leaving Jack staring after.
"Confound the fellow!" he muttered. "Hanged if I know whether to be mad
or glad he's such an idiot. How did he dare not ask Sylvia when her
eyes looked like that? Gee! Perhaps he didn't see."
But Phil Lorrimer had seen, and all that night he stared sleeplessly out
at the stars and the twinkling lights of villages and cities, love and
pride battling within him. Once or twice he made up his mind feverishly
to telegraph Sylvia the first thing in the morning. Then he would
decide it would be better to write her a letter, tell her exactly how it
all was and ask if she cared enough to wait for him until he had
something worth while to offer her. And all the time he knew he would
do nothing of the kind. He would fight on grimly by himself, and if in
the meantime somebody else--Jack or another--slipped in ahead, well,
that would mean she was not for him, if he knew Sylvia. And so on and
so on and so on. But never in all his reasonings did it occur to him
that the money was as nothing between him and Sylvia Arden, neither of
advantage or disadvantage, simply a zero. Jack Amidon knew it and had
generously endeavored to tell his rival. Sylvia knew it and her eyes
had also tried to tell him that night in the sunset. But poor Phil,
blind as the clearest sighted man sometimes becomes when a woman is
involved, saw Sylvia's money as a huge, hateful, insurmountable,
mountain peak behind which stood Sylvia herself, only to be reached by
accumulating another pile of gold from which he could make the leap to
her.
And in all that long wakeful night he never once thought of little
Barbara Day. He was too used to saving people, one way or another, to
think much about this latest exploit in the salvation line; and,
besides, his mind was full of other things.
But Barbara dreamed of Phil and heard his deep voice calling out of the
darkness, "Come on, Barbie. I'm right here." And all through her
dreams the star over the sycamore-tree kept smiling at her friendlily
but its smile was oddly mixed up with Phil Lorrimer's.
*CHAPTER VII*
*OCTOBER DEVELOPMENTS*
A deeper bronze to the oaks and a more vivid scarlet to the sumach. A
sharper tang to the air, mornings. Hilltops veiled in amethyst and
golden haze on the meadows, afternoons. At sundown, ghost-like wraiths
of mists rising up from the river valley. Now and then a clanging wedge
of wild geese speeding southward through the night. October!
It must be admitted that in spite of Sylvia's "vicious contentedness"
she did feel the Hall a little too peaceful and quiet after her friends
had gone, and she settled back into the very life she had chosen for
herself. The summer had been brimful of guests and gayeties, with
people coming and going all the time and always some new delightful
project or enthralling interest afoot, a true Forest of Arden atmosphere
of sunshine and happiness and blithe irresponsibility.
Even the sharp and sudden thunder crash, heard from overseas in that
fateful early August, the din of great nations rushing to arms, came
only vaguely to Sylvia's happy Hill as to most of America. Slow to
waken, the country had not at once sensed the significance of what was
happening. Humane and peaceful itself, it had not taken in the hideous
reality of a desolated and ravaged Belgium, the inspiriting vision of a
risen and consecrated France beating the enemy back from Paris, of the
fearful and relentless grip of the great dog of war upon the stricken
nations. To Sylvia, as to others, it all seemed impossible, incredible,
not to be apprehended in terms of actuality. These things just couldn't
be, that was all. There must be some mistake somewhere. But there was
no mistake. People kept coming in on every steamer with harrowing tales
of well-substantiated horror. The things they had seen made the heart
sick and the blood run cold. It was war indeed. However horrible,
these things were possible, had happened.
Perhaps the first vital realization came to Sylvia as it came to nearly
every one in this country through individual testimony of friends. Even
in September, rumor reached her that John Armstrong's money had helped
to establish and support a field hospital "somewhere in France," that
his wife and her sister Hilda were regular Red Cross nurses. And in
October had come a letter from Hilda herself, describing simply but with
the fearful graphicness of the bare truth, the horrors, the miracles,
the splendid thrills, the supreme satisfaction of the work she and
Constance had undertaken. John was driving a relief Ambulance near the
battle line. Bertram was at the front somewhere. Bertram, it appeared,
was the young Englishman to whom the writer had very recently become
engaged after a romantically brief acquaintance. Of course it was
horrible, Hilda admitted, having him there, but then she wouldn't want
him not to want to be there.
All this Sylvia read with absorbed interest and straightway dispatched a
generous check to John Armstrong. But giving money being altogether
insufficient to express her abounding sympathy she also learned to knit,
to Jack's huge delectation and much raillery, and resolutely set herself
to making sponges and rather eccentric looking hose, though this
process, too, scarcely satisfied her when she thought of what her friend
was doing over in France. In fact, it satisfied her so little that she
very speedily abandoned it entirely wherein she was rather like a good
many other American women. "A thousand shall fall at thy right hand but
it shall not come nigh thee" seemed to be America's motto in those days.
Perhaps the thing which came nearest, that autumn, to offering Sylvia an
outlet for her restless energy was her music. She was an excellent
accompanist and she and Gus Nichols spent much time together previous to
his departure for the concert tour which was to begin early in November.
And while Sylvia was intent on her own dreams and quandaries, weaving
much she scarcely understood herself into the music, she had not the
slightest perception that these hours she gave the young violinist meant
anything more to him than to herself, an agreeable mutual expression in
a loved art. "Music is Love in search of a word" and if the boy's violin
struggled more than once to tell her what his lips would never have
ventured on, Sylvia, with her mind on other things, did not hear.
Long enthusiastic letters came frequently from Suzanne, ensconced,
according to schedule, in a dingy studio in the Square where one is not
encumbered with needless luxuries like steam heat and bath tubs and
electricity, where one steeps in "Atmosphere," and pays far more than he
can afford for the privilege of living very uncomfortably but
artistically. Her letters reeked of Bohemia, of "Polly's" and "Bruno's
Garret," of the delicious glamour and picturesqueness of the inimitable
Village, of the thrill and stimulus of the whole marvelous city of which
the Village was a unique part.
Barb, too, wrote often, though with less abandon of rejoicement in her
new way of life. It was all "interesting." Aunt Jo was "wonderful."
The Metropolitan was "magnificent." People were "kind." But there was
a faint panic-stricken note beneath it all, at first, which made Sylvia
wonder if poor Barbara were a little submerged by the very seething
whirlpool which was such supreme delight to Suzanne. It was as if both
were on a "Merry-Go-Round," and Suzanne kept clapping her hands and
crying "Faster! Faster!" while Barb's timid "pansy" eyes begged in
silence for a safer, less mad rate of revolution.
Aside from her aunt, of whom Barb could never say enough, the person
most frequently mentioned in her letters was Philip Lorrimer. "Dr.
Lorrimer is so good to me." "Dr. Lorrimer took me to a roof garden last
night." "Phil and I rode over on the ferry to Staten Island to cool off
last evening." "Phil just came in and sends greetings. He is going to
take me to a Socialist meeting soon." "Aunt Jo likes Phil so much," and
so forth.
And though Sylvia made no comment on this new development it gave her
cause for reflection. Sylvia was more than ever "at sea" these days.
That sunset moment on Lover's Leap had been an illuminating moment for
her and she guessed it had been one for Phil also. Though she told
herself later she must have been mistaken, she knew in her heart she had
not been so. The look in Phil's eyes as they had met hers that moment
was unmistakable, more eloquent than volumes of speech. She had felt the
same thing vibrating in his voice when later he had bidden her "Good
night" and "Good-by" and stepped into Jack's car, something which met a
quick leap of response in herself. Sylvia was very woman and she knew
what had happened, though she did not know whether the thing was going
to be permanent or not.
All that next day and the next and for a week beyond she watched the
mails, pretending to herself, feminine wise, that she was doing nothing
of the sort. And, finally, when on the tenth day a brotherly, brief,
impersonal, not to say casual, note came from New York in Phil's big
sprawling hand, she felt as if a shower of icy water had been hurled at
her. Not that she wanted Phil to ask her to marry him, not that she was
at all sure she would have said yes if he had asked her. She was by no
means certain it would not be Jack to whom she would surrender when the
time came for surrender. At least so she told herself to save her pride.
Certainly she was far from ready to marry any man that Fall, sincerely
desirous as she was to belong to herself awhile as she had told Jack.
Nevertheless Phil's very discretion angered and hurt her. Every now and
then she was tortured by an agonizing fear that in the strange
exhilaration of that moment in the forest she might have betrayed to him
more than she had been in any degree willing to admit to herself.
Consequently, Philip Lorrimer, M.D., got very few and very brief letters
from Arden Hall those golden autumn days.
Neither is it strange that out of favor with his "Faraway Princess" Phil
turned to sympathetic little Barbara in his few idle hours. Not that he
took Barb into his confidence. Indeed there were no confidences to
make. To no one in the world would he have admitted that Sylvia's
apparent indifference hurt. Sylvia had the right to ignore him if she
chose. The Queen could do no wrong. Nor was there anything to say
about the rumors which reached him frequently that Sylvia and Jack were
often together, and that an engagement was obviously to be expected if
not already secretly in existence. That, too, he had counted on as a
possibility when he had told Jack there was no reason for him to "clear
out." Phil Lorrimer was man enough to want the lady of his heart to be
free in her choice. Had he been in Jack's position he would have entered
the race and run, neck and neck, beside his rival and abided the end
whatever it was. But he was handicapped, or so he believed, by his
poverty, so he set his teeth and stood out of the way leaving Jack a
clear road. If Jack could win--well, it meant Sylvia cared, that was
all. Phil's philosophy was a very simple one.
In the meantime there was work. And Phil was the kind to be able to
assuage nearly every mortal ill in work. In the strenuous demands of
the day-time hours at the hospital he had little chance to brood over
any personal woes and when night came on he took what consolation he
could, man fashion, from another woman's obvious pleasure in his
society, never once suspecting he was playing with edged tools any more
than Barb herself did. Of the physiological action of the heart Phil
Lorrimer knew a great deal but of the more subtle manifestations of that
organ he knew astonishingly little.
Only Miss Josephine Murray kept her keen eyes wide open. "Babes in the
wood!" she thought sometimes. "Heavens! What a fearful thing it is to
be young!" And then seeing the soft flush on Barb's cheeks when she
came in from an excursion with the young doctor, and the starry shine in
her eyes, Miss Murray would add grimly to herself, "Fearful but divine!
It's a million years since I had the gift of looking like that."
And sometimes she would ask her niece questions about young Dr.
Lorrimer, and Barb would chatter on innocently about him, how he was an
old, old friend of Sylvia's, so old, they were almost like brother and
sister, though she and Suzanne used sometimes to think maybe Sylvia
would marry him some time, but now everybody said it would be Jack
Amidon. And once Barb had told the story of how she had slipped over
the edge of the cliff and hung to the little ash-tree until Phil had
called to her to let go and she had obeyed and gone down, down into
space, not one tiny bit afraid for she had felt just as sure as sure
that Phil Lorrimer would catch her just as he promised.
"He's the kind of person you just have to have faith in. You know he
wouldn't fail you, no matter what happened," she had finished. And Aunt
Jo had "H-med" meditatively and risen to switch on the electric light
and sit down to her letters. But Barb had lingered before the gas log,
watching its scintillating colors and lights and dreaming little vague
pleasant dreams. Perhaps the Barb who didn't dare let herself look at
the real Barb took a shy peep that night.
As for Jack Amidon, he was extraordinarily on his good behavior that
autumn. His father was grimly pleased to find him prompt and assiduous
at his office desk, a rather unexpected departure from his career of the
past two years when he had fulfilled the obligations of his nominal post
chiefly by absent treatment. Possibly the sudden change of heart on the
part of his rather erratic son reminded the old man of a similar abrupt
right-about-face some six years ago when the same delinquent had
announced himself blandly as being "on the water wagon" after a rather
strenuous course of wild oat sowing. Perhaps, too, Jackson Amidon
shrewdly suspected that now as then the impetus to the reform could be
traced to a vigorous-willed, clear-eyed young lady who tolerated no
weaklings among her retinue.
"The boy's taken a new turn," he thought. "He'll come out all right in
the end. He's sound as a nut inside for all his vagaries. And if that
little girl on the Hill can make him come to, it will be one of the best
jobs she ever landed." And he added also to himself that if the day
ever came when he should welcome Sylvia Arden as his third daughter
there would be little left to wish for in the time he had left. And
then his eyes had grown sober, for his own daughters, those of his own
flesh and blood, had never been of much comfort to him, dearly as he
loved them. Over in Europe, Isabel was already threatening stormily to
get a divorce from the titled rascal she had insisted on marrying in
spite of her father's judgment and protestations. And there was
Jeanette, beautiful, willful Jeanette, whose frocks were the last cry
from Paris and whose cars and horses and houses and entertainments were
all the most daring and expensive America could produce! He, himself,
had given her all the money her little hands could hold or spend and
Francis Latham had gone on with the prodigious task but neither one of
them had been able to give her happiness. That was all too evident.
Perhaps if there had been children it would have been different. And at
this point in his reflections the old man always broke off with a sigh,
for he knew that the moment when Jack should bring Sylvia home for a
bride could only yield precedence in satisfaction to that other
hoped-for moment when he should see his grandson, Jackson Amidon, the
third. Then, indeed, the curtain might go down when it pleased.
These dreams of Jackson Amidon's did not look so all improbable that
October. Jack was distinctly "on the job" as he would have expressed
it, doing his level best to make a man of himself, since that was what
Sylvia demanded, and sunning himself happily in her favor during their
mutual leisure hours. Very good comrades the two were. Youth turns to
youth as a morning glory to the sun and the Goddess of Propinquity is a
lady of much influence. Certainly it was not strange that people
prophesied that an engagement would soon be announced. Possibly it was
not strange either, that Jack and Sylvia themselves believed such a
denouement entirely probable in course of time.
*CHAPTER VIII*
*FIRE AND FROST*
"Lois, aren't you ever going to write any more?" Sylvia on the rug
before the fire with wee Marjory in her arms looked up over that young
person's bobbing silver curls to ask the question.
Lois Daly sitting by the window to catch the last bit of daylight, ran
her hand into a small stocking to investigate the number of casualties
before she answered.
"Maybe. When the kiddies are grown up."
"But don't you mind not doing it now? Don't you want to do it
dreadfully sometimes?"
"Not especially. In fact I don't believe I could write now if I tried.
I've lost the knack as well as the impulse. You have no idea how much
such things are a matter of mere habit." Lois' voice had an even flow
suggesting cool, shady, translucent waters. Sometimes her friend's
serenity irritated Sylvia. It did now.
"Well, I think that is all wrong," she announced decidedly. "You
oughtn't to have let it go."
"Just how could I have helped it? You may recall I have been moderately
busy these last few years. I haven't had much time to entertain
literary angels."
"Oh, I know," acknowledged Sylvia penitently, curling one of Marjory's
ringlets around her finger as she spoke. "You couldn't, of course, with
the house and the babies and the little mother's death and everything.
But couldn't you begin again now?"
"Why should I? Tom doesn't need an author in his household. He needs a
housekeeper and a nurse and a seamstress and a wife." There was a
faintly satirical twist to Lois' lips as she made the statement. "Of
the four he needs the wife least, of course. He is too busy to enjoy my
society. This hospital project is the last straw."
Sylvia looked thoughtful. Somehow there did seem to be something wrong
somewhere. Doctor Tom too occupied to see anything of his beautiful,
brilliant wife; she, in turn, too much immersed in household and
maternal cares either to cultivate her own particular gift or pay much
attention to the things her husband was so vitally interested in! These
two had started out so well. They were both so fine, so thoroughly
devoted at heart to each other. What was the trouble? Was marriage
always a compromise like this? Sylvia did not like to think so.
Somewhere there must have been something which could have been done
differently. Woman-like she was a bit inclined to blame the other woman.
If only Lois had cared a little more for the things Doctor Tom cared
for, the things which to Sylvia seemed so splendid, his profession, his
tireless service to the community, his dreams for its progress and
betterment! Lois rolled up the stockings she had just finished mending
and rose.
"Do you mind staying a few minutes with Marjory, Sylvia? It is cook's
night out and I have to see about supper."
Sylvia assented willingly and Lois departed. Even as the door closed
behind her, Sylvia heard Doctor Tom's step in the hall and his cheerful
voice as he greeted his wife.
"Got in earlier than I expected. Come on back and enjoy the twilight
with me," she heard him inviting.
Lois' answer was inaudible but in a moment Doctor Tom entered the
living-room alone.
"Hello, here's my best daughter and my star neighbor! Come on, Cherub,
and let your old Dad toss you up to the moon."
Marjory leaped with a happy little crow out of Sylvia's arms and Sylvia
rose to the higher level of a chair while she smiled at the baby's
gurgling delight as her father tossed her "up to the moon." Presently
the doctor seated himself before the fire with his small daughter still
in his arms. As he settled back with a tired sigh Sylvia saw with
sudden quick compunction that Doctor Tom looked old--too old for his
years. Some of his characteristic buoyancy had gone out of him.
"How is the Curry baby?" she asked.
He shook his head sadly.
"Died early this morning," he said.
"Oh!" Sylvia's exclamation was pitiful. "Can I do anything?"
"Go down and see the mother. She is like a stone. Can't even cry.
Maybe the baby's better off. The father is drunk half the time and
there isn't any too much to eat. But if I could have had Jimmy in a
decent hospital I could have saved him. Everything was against him down
there, poor little chap!" And Tom Daly's big hand closed over little
Marjory's dimpled one as if somehow to keep her safe from the grim enemy
that had pursued Jimmy Curry, an enemy who had altogether too many
allies down in the unsanitary tenement district where the baby had
wearily breathed his little life in and out again in one short year.
Then the doctor's fist came down with a resounding thump on the arm of
the chair. "I tell you, Sylvia, we have got to get that hospital and
get it quick. We're wasting human life too fast at this rate."
"Will money help? You know I'm ready to give to the hospital any
time--any amount you want."
Doctor Tom smiled his old wide-mouthed friendly grin.
"Naturally you are, Miss Christmas. I can always count on you every
time. You would give your last red cent if anybody needed it. Thank
Heaven you don't come into the bulk of your property till you are
twenty-five. You would have made ducks and drakes of it before this if
you had it all. I shall tell Gordon to keep his eye on the purse strings
until you get a husband to do it for you. You have such dissipating
tendencies. Don't wrinkle your nose like that. You shall give when the
time is ripe. What I want just now is to wring some money out of the
hides of some of these tough old Greendale sinners who keep their
religion with their prayer books in the family pew and their brotherly
love reduced systematically to lowest terms. The apology for a hospital
we have is a disgrace and they know it or they will before I get through
with 'em. There isn't even a children's ward. Little Allie Wendell died
last week to the tune of Jake Casey's blasphemous D. T. music. Bah!
It's rotten."
"Tom, I do wish you wouldn't shout so. I could hear you clear out in
the kitchen." Thus Lois' silver cool voice from the doorway,
contrasting oddly with her husband's vehement ejaculatoriness which
still filled the little room. "Supper is ready. You'll stay, won't
you, Sylvia? I will be with you as soon as I can get Marjory into
Tessy's hands and see if Junior brushed his teeth. He is so bad these
days. I can't trust him at all."
Sylvia had been about to refuse but Doctor Tom cut her short.
"Of course you will stay. You haven't been here for a dog's age.
Besides, I want to talk to you about the hospital and ask what you think
about--"
"Don't start to talk shop now," ordered Lois from the doorway, with
small Marjory's head bobbing sleepily over her shoulder. "The omelet
will go down."
"It sure will," promised the doctor. "I feel as if almost anything
would go down in me this minute."
"That is the trouble with Tom," smiled Lois to Sylvia. "He doesn't know
the difference between a sublimated souffle and plain hash. It is all
food to him. It is very discouraging."
Doctor Tom shook his head as the door closed upon his wife and daughter.
"If only she wouldn't fuss," he groaned. "Sylvia, I feel like a beast
when I think what a lot this life we are leading takes out of her. If
only she would take it a bit easier. She's such a confounded
perfectionist every blessed thing she does has to be just right. That's
why it uses up so much of her."
It was certainly a "just right" meal to which they sat down a few
moments later. Everything was cold which should have been cold,
everything hot which should have been hot. The table linen was fine and
dazzling white, the silver and glass resplendently bright and clean.
The bowl of yellow chrysanthemums made a perfect centerpiece, under the
pleasantly shaded glow of the suspended lamp. Lois herself was exquisite
in a soft clinging gray gown which she had taken the time to slip into
while she had been upstairs with the children. Not a fold was awry, not
a hair out of place. Serene and low-voiced and deft-motioned, she
served perfect tea in quaint gold-banded cups from a green-dragoned
teapot.
But somehow Sylvia was critical in her judgment to-night. The very
perfectness of it all jarred upon her. She couldn't help wondering if
Lois were after all the consummate artist her husband acclaimed her.
Life was made for happiness and was Lois Daly happy or was she making
her big-hearted, splendid-souled husband happy? Had she even noticed
the tired look in his eyes to-night, the droop to his shoulders? In her
conscientious supervision of Junior's teeth and Marjory's bedtime did
she think or care at all about the Tommy Currys and Allie Wendells of
the world who mattered so gravely to her husband? The two loved each
other devotedly, Sylvia knew, yet she could not help seeing how far
apart they were after five years of wedded life. It gave one food for
thought.
After supper Lois excused herself to do some household auditing.
"You and Tom are going to talk hospital anyway," she added to Sylvia,
"and there is no use of my listening while it is all just an air-castle.
If I had that on my mind on top of the price of potatoes and bacon I
don't know what would happen."
"Stay and rest and we'll call hospital taboo," promised Doctor Tom.
"Never mind the old accounts to-night."
But Lois shook her head, protesting if he ran his business the way he
wanted her to run hers they would soon end in the poorhouse.
"Not that you run your business any too well, Tommy dear," she had
added. "You are a scandalously poor bill collector. Aren't the
Williamsons ever going to pay?"
"Steve Williamson's down with pneumonia. I can't press them now."
"Pneumonia on top of twins! They _are_ unfortunate." And Lois left the
room.
Sylvia dropped her eyes quickly. Intuitively she knew she didn't want
to look at Doctor Tom just then. He made no comment upon his wife's
parting speech but settled down in the big armchair with a tired grunt.
"Mind if I smoke?"
"Of course not."
"All right, here goes." He took one or two long comforting puffs at his
pipe. "Let's side-track the hospital for the present. Might as well
since it's only an air-castle, as Lois says. I'm a bit frazzled
to-night. Can't seem to get the Curry baby off my chest. Suppose you
play something instead. Nothing too classic--just agreeable and
anaesthetic."
Sylvia went to the piano and sat down. Her fingers drifted into a
nocturne. Save for the soft music and the crackling of the logs on the
hearth there was no sound in the room. Tom Daly sat staring into the
leaping flames and smoked stolidly. It would have made an appropriate
picture for a woman's magazine cover. The gracious, comfortable room,
the tired man, basking in home peace and contentment after the labor and
stress of the day; the young girl at the piano, with healing and
sympathy, wordless but no less apparent in her finger tips. Only in a
woman's magazine the musician would no doubt have been the man's wife.
Life is sometimes oddly different from magazine covers.
It was nearly an hour before Lois returned to the living-room. She
paused a moment on the threshold.
"Oh, so you aren't building hospitals after all? Forgive me for being
such a bad hostess, Sylvia. Was that Brahms?"
Sylvia shook her head with a smile.
"I don't know what it was," she admitted. "Something I heard in my
dreams maybe. Did I put you to sleep Doctor Tom?"
"No, just soothed the savage in me. I feel fairly pacific at the
moment. Don't stop."
"Ah, but I must. Felicia will think I am lost." She rose as she spoke
and Doctor Tom rose too. "Don't come," she protested. "It is too absurd
when it's only such a step."
"It's a step I intend to take," he grinned. "If you must go, I'm at
your service."
"I wish you wouldn't," objected Sylvia, but she let him wrap her long
moss green cloak about her and in a moment they were out in the keen
November air under the stars. Neither said anything until they were at
the steps of the Hall. Then suddenly Doctor Tom spoke.
"Sylvia, how did you know I had the blue devils to-night?" he demanded.
"Did you?" parried Sylvia. There was something different about Doctor
Tom to-night; a queer, tense something in his voice she wasn't used to.
"You know I did. You played to 'em--charmed 'em, as I said."
"I'm glad," said Sylvia. "Glad I charmed them, I mean. You need a
rest, Doctor Tom. You are going a pace that would kill any man who
wasn't as strong as an ox."
He laughed a little grimly.
"Well, Miss Nestor, any more sage advice to offer your grandfather?
Just how am I going to shunt the world I happen to have on my shoulders
at present?"
"Just drop it off. You could if you had to. Why don't you and Lois go
on a vacation? Felicia and I will look after the babies."
"Thanks, Miss Christmas. That is like you and mighty kind, but do you
see Lois letting anybody--the angel Gabriel himself--look after the
babies for her?"
"She might," dubiously.
"And again she mightn't. But, aside from Lois, I have too many life and
death jobs on hand at present to quit. A doctor's no business to get
nerves. He ought to leave that to his patients. Anyway, it isn't the
work that is getting me just now, it is the damnable futility of it all.
The Curry baby is a symbol. I'm pouring water in a sieve, Sylvia, and
that's the devil's truth."
"It isn't. You aren't," denied Sylvia quickly. "You are doing miracles
every day of your life and everybody knows it. Doctor Tom, I never
heard you talk like that before. Don't. It makes me feel as if
everything were tottering on its foundations."
"Sometimes I think they are with that infernal senseless war going on
over there after all our peace prating. Sylvia, what's it all for?
Where are we going? What's the use?"
"Everything's the use. Maybe we can't see behind all the agony and
blundering but there must be something there even if we can't see it.
Why, Doctor Tom, there must be." Sylvia's eyes were earnest, her face
uplifted to the stars lit with the fine fires of youth's faith. Tom
Daly shook himself like one coming out of a trance. He was suddenly
ashamed that he, the strong man, had been outdistanced in courage by the
slim girl before him.
"Right you are," he said heartily. "There _must_ be. It's the only way
to look at it. Thank you, Sylvia. I won't bleat again. If only--"
But what was to have followed that sharp wrung "if only" Sylvia never
knew for suddenly Tom Daly crushed both her hands in a vicelike grip and
then turned and fled with a gruff "good night" down the path.
In his own yard close by he met his wife placidly draping a blanket over
a rhododendron bush.
"I thought there might be a frost to-night," she observed, and her tone
had all the clear crispness of frost in it as she spoke. Tom Daly was
only human. It was scarcely strange that he could not help contrasting
his wife's voice with that other eager, vibrant, younger, warmer voice
he had just heard, passionately asserting faith in that something behind
all the miseries and misunderstandings of things without which life were
indeed scarcely to be endured.
There was a world war on. Little Jimmy Curry lay dead unnecessarily.
Tom Daly's nerves and courage and endurance were strained all but to the
breaking point. And his wife Lois thought there might be a frost. But
long after Tom Daly had fallen into the heavy sleep of complete physical
exhaustion Lois lay wide-eyed and sleepless, staring into the darkness.
*CHAPTER IX*
*THE MOTH AND THE STAR*
The audience settled itself into place, rattling its programs, prepared
idly to be either amused or bored as the opportunity presented itself,
mildly curious as to the personality and talent of the young violinist
"heard for the first time in this country."
"They say he used to be old man McIntosh's office boy. He certainly
struck it soft. Old man's worth near a million they say and this darned
Dago'll get it all I suppose. Some folks just naturally nab the luck."
Thus a young reporter to his neighbor.
"I don't know about that. I can't imagine old McIntosh standing for
this fiddling business. He's a husky old Puritan."
"Well, he did stand for it to the tune of quite a pretty price, I
understand. The chap's had four years of Berlin and Dresden and the
rest of it. Some mixture! Italian birth, American start, Scotch
bringing up, German polish. Whew! Wonder what he's like with all that
in him. Talk about your melting pots!"
"There's old McIntosh in the box now. No, the left. Ugly old snoozer,
ain't he? But brains. Gee! He's shrewd as they make 'em. Hello! Who's
the dame? Pretty easy to look at it, ain't she?"
"That's Miss Arden--lives on a high mucky muck hill out in Greendale.
She's something to old McIntosh. Niece maybe. I forget."
"No, she isn't. Old man used to be bookkeeper for her father's firm. I
remember. My dad knew 'em. Arden and Daly--big cotton concern. Arden
died young. Daly lost his money in some railroad slump and croaked too.
Son's a doctor--making the wires hum out in Greendale about a hospital
or something. So that's Miss Arden. Engaged to young Amidon, isn't
she?"
"I reckon. Shut up. There he comes. Gee! He's nothing but a kid."
It must be admitted that Gus, appearing on the program as Gustavus
Niccolini, did look very much indeed like a "kid" as he came across the
stage and made a shy, stiff little bow to the audience. Angus McIntosh
fidgeted in his chair and cleared his throat irritably. "Fool to let
him try," he thought. "How do I know whether he can play or not? What
if he can't?" A cold perspiration stood out on the old man's forehead.
What if the boy made a failure of the thing? What if the audience
smiled, hissed? Audiences did behave like that sometimes. Why hadn't
he told the boy, short-off, long ago, he shouldn't try it? Thus he
worked himself into a perfect passion of apprehension. But in the midst
of his perturbation Sylvia's hand rested on his knee and Sylvia's eyes
smiled reassurance.
"It's all right, Daddy McIntosh," she whispered. "Just you wait till
they hear him."
In a moment they did hear him and the great hall was hushed to
respectful silence. The audience had the grace to recognize a master
touch when they heard it. Angus McIntosh was justified. The boy whom
he had plucked out of a den of squalor and vice was an artist, and the
grim old man who had had a hand in the creation had been something of an
artist at the job himself. As for Sylvia, who was behind it all, she
hardly breathed until the music ceased. She listened rapt while the
voice of the violin sang and soared, now rapturous, now tender, now
triumphant, now dying away like the note of a wild bird in the night.
She had known before that Gus could play, but this--why this was a thing
born of Heaven to which she listened reverently. Finally the last note
came and quivered into silence. There was an instant's hush then the
applause thundered. The boy lifted his head quietly, but with a certain
grave pride, and his eyes sought the box where Angus McIntosh and Sylvia
sat. Then suddenly his face was lit with a light which was not a smile
but an enveloping radiance which seemed to say, "This is yours. I give
it to you. I am glad it is worth giving." Then he bowed to the
audience and the applause redoubled.
Angus McIntosh never knew much about the rest of that program. He knew
it went on and the applause went on, that the boy went through the
varied and difficult performance with ease and serenity and simplicity,
but what he was playing the old man never knew. It might have been
"Yankee Doodle" or the "Cam'el's are Coming" for all he heard. He only
knew the thing was beautiful. All the remnants of still lingering
prejudices floated off into some dim cavern where such limbo is stored
or annihilated. There was a place in the world it seemed for sheer
beauty. Maybe it had a spiritual essence all its own. Anyway, this
music of the boy's seemed oddly connected in his mind with the psalms
and other fine old religious poetry with which his mother had filled his
mind long ago. He was humbly glad that he had had a share in letting
loose this thing upon the world. He remembered always that it was
Sylvia who had really opened the door.
Beauty--Kindness--Happiness--Love--all these things had been slipping
almost beyond his grasp that December nearly six years ago when Sylvia
and her Christmas family had brought them back. It was Sylvia who had
given the boy to him, Sylvia, who had given his music to the world by
making himself who had been blind see.
The concert was over and Herr Bernsdorf, Gus' old music teacher, had
rushed up to the box and was pumping Mr. McIntosh's hand up and down
violently with inarticulate croonings and mutterings of delight and
congratulation. "Haf I not told you that the boy was a genius? Haf I
not said it hundertmal? I knew. I, who was his master, I knew. They
haf done well by him over there, they haf done well. But somebody else,
she haf done more? Is it you, mein Fraulein?" He turned his flashing
little black eyes on Sylvia as he asked the question.
"I! Oh, no. I have done nothing," disclaimed Sylvia.
"No? Maybe it is another, in Berlin or Dresden or elsewhere. I know
not. I only know the boy haf learned to play like that from luf. Luf
haf taught him. Only luf learns to play like that. Ach! Do I not
know?"
And then Gus himself stepped into the box, having gently but firmly
slipped away from the crowd which would have waylaid him.
"Did you like it, Daddy McIntosh?" he asked playfully, and the old man
coughed and sputtered and could not speak. But Gus was satisfied. Even
as he grasped his sponsor's hand the boy's eyes went beyond to Sylvia,
who had purposely stepped back. Though his lips said nothing, his eyes
asked her too, "Did you like it, Sylvia?" and said again what they had
proclaimed from the stage. "It is yours. I give it to you."
And a little shiver went over Sylvia as she read the boy's eyes, and
suddenly she felt very sad and humble and a little ashamed because she
had been so blind. She knew he was asking nothing, probably never would
ask anything, but she also knew he was giving something very precious,
something for which she had nothing to give in exchange. Mr. McIntosh,
absorbed in his emotions, did not understand, but the old music teacher
did.
"I haf said it," he thought triumphantly. "I haf had right. It was
luf--luf and no other who have learned the boy to play like that. I haf
heard it from his fingers and now I haf seen it in his eyes. And by and
by he will play efen better, for luf will also learn him pain, and pain
he is the great master. He it is who learn the masters themselves. Haf
I not seen it?"
Only for a moment Gus had let his eyes betray him, so brief an interval
indeed that Sylvia thought afterward she must have imagined it so
naturally did she and the young man find themselves chatting over the
details of the concert.
But later, after she was home in Greendale and curled comfortably in
bed, that eloquent look from those dark eyes came back and would not let
her sleep.
"Oh, dear," she thought. "Who would ever have thought it of Gus, of all
people? I thought he was just wrapped up in his music. Why won't they
stay friends? It is so discouraging and uncomfortable. There is no end
to the trouble it makes when they begin to want to be lovers. Jack is
likely to come any minute and tell me what a good boy he is and demand
the plums out of the Christmas pie. I don't want to marry any of them.
I don't. I don't. So there."
But even as she snuggled down among the pillows she heard a wee distinct
little voice inside her somewhere say something quite different.
"Oh, yes, you do," it said. "You want to marry Phil, by and by, way off
in the future, a thousand years from now. Only he doesn't want to marry
you, and that is what makes you so restless and discontented and horrid.
That's why you've been flirting with Jack and--yes, Gus, too, in a
demure, artistic sort of way, not thinking it would do any harm to
anybody. And even Doctor Tom looked funny at you the other night.
And--but then it is all Phil's fault--so you needn't worry."
And then Sylvia put her hands over her ears, for she didn't want to hear
any more of that kind of talk.
"You are quite mistaken," she retorted to the disagreeable little voice.
"I haven't been flirting with anybody. Jack and Gus are both good
friends and I can't help being nice to them. And Doctor Tom is safe and
married, so he doesn't count. But, anyway, I'll be careful after this
and I don't want to marry anybody--not anybody."
And down in the near-by city the young violinist who had scored such a
success that the papers were already writing up flattering notices about
him sat in his room, furiously scribbling poetry, at least that is what
he would probably have called it, poetry whose theme was mostly borrowed
from another young lover, and had in it a lot about the "desire of the
moth for the star" or some such rubbish. Gus was very young yet if he
was a master violinist and Love was beginning to teach him other things
than how to make his violin sing. But the poetry was not so good as his
music and presently he pushed aside his scribblings in disgust and went
and stood by the window looking out into the night.
It had been raining and the pavements glistened in the light reflected
from the arc-lamps. And suddenly the twinkling lights called up to the
boy the memory of a Christmas eve when he had followed Angus McIntosh
into a brilliantly lighted room with a wonderful Christmas tree in the
center, such a Christmas tree as he had never dreamed of in his wildest
dreams. And then he forgot the tree and remembered Sylvia smiling
kindly at him, saying, "Christmas Family, here are Mr. McIntosh and Gus
Nichols. Isn't it nice they could get here to-night?"
He knew now that the desire of the moth for the star had been born then
and there, only it wasn't even a desire, it was just a worship.
And in the Oriole Inn, at the foot of Sylvia's Hill, Hope Williams lay
asleep with Stephen Kinnard's four weeks' old letter under her pillow,
and a smile on her lips, for she was dreaming she was back in the garden
with Stephen sketching her among the wistaria vines. But Stephen
Kinnard was having a very amusing and profitable time sketching a wild,
little beauty of a half breed on an Arizona desert these days and had
all but forgotten such a person as Hope existed. But never once in all
his wanderings did he forget to mail a weekly letter to Felicia Emory,
who had rejected him "with reasons."
So things go in this piquant world of ours. And there is much truth
hidden for the wise in the depths of the "Grecian Urn."
*CHAPTER X*
*THE CITY*
By November Barbara had become so accustomed to the city that she no
longer jumped at its noises or shrank physically from its crowds. She
learned to ignore the thunder of the El and to regard the Subway as a
necessary evil, the traffic policeman a very present help in time of
trouble. She even learned to zigzag deftly, alone and unprotected, in
and out among the automobiles, and to calculate on the chance that a
Fifth Avenue Bus driver would probably prefer not to run her down, other
things being equal.
But she never quite made friends with the big, strange city--the
Step-Mother city--as some one has called it. Always it seemed to hold
her at a distance, perfectly amicable and perfectly impersonal. It
seemed to say to her "What are you to me? There are hundreds---yes,
thousands, like you in my gigantic household. Can I be expected to care
for you each as individuals? Watch the motes dancing in the sunshine.
As the motes to you so you to me. Go look at the sands shining on the
beach at Coney. As the grains to you so you to me. Let your eyes
follow the ripples of my big river. As the ripples to you so you and
all the rest of the human eddies which make up my great tide to me."
Yet there were moments when Barb felt as if she had almost surprised the
city's secret, caught it unaware, as it were, and half ashamed, slipping
into its holy of holies. Once coming over on the ferry from Jersey City
she had scanned the great towers and buildings, set with twinkling
lights as with many jewels, and beheld the huge bridges, across which an
endless stream of traffic passed and repassed, like human life itself in
its unending succession. And then she had seemed to see for a moment
what the city really meant. Sordid, material, menacing, heartless as it
was in many of its aspects did it not after all cherish a big vision?
Were not those very towers and bridges the symbol of its restless
aspiration?
Suddenly above it all had risen a pale lackadaisical looking moon,
slipping quietly from behind a smoke bank to look down at the seething
tumultuous life of the great city. To Barb the moon had seemed almost
to smile, a world-weary, somewhat cynical smile as one who should say
"Go on. Keep it up. Burrow and build, crush and create, scream and
scuffle. What will it matter a million years hence? You will have
learned by then to be cold and calm like me."
But the bridges and towers had mocked the moon and defied it. "We are
wood and stone and steel," they said. "We may crumble and fall but what
we stand for will neither crumble nor fall. For we are the symbol of
man, aspirant, conquering--a spirit which shall not grow cold or calm
while there is anything in life to which to aspire, anything left to
conquer. We are nothing. That we grant you, Moon. But the spirit of
man is everything, yes, even God himself, God passioning, agonizing,
ultimately victorious."
So the vision came to little Barb, and after that she was not afraid of
the city. She had the clew as to what it was all about. It whirred and
rumbled and rushed and screeched like its own busses but it had a method
in its madness. Like the busses, it had a destination. It was going
somewhere whether it knew it or not.
As for Barb's own little life, caught in the whirl of the city's, it was
full and breathless and on the whole incredibly agreeable. She typed
her Aunt's eloquent pro-suffrage pamphlets and articles and listened
with rapt eyes and eager ears to her Aunt's glowing speeches and all the
while in her busy brain the meaning of this, too, was gradually dawning.
At first it had been like a confused, jumbled picture puzzle, but little
by little she was able to put the pieces together into their proper
places. She was beginning to see that though one talked a great deal
about the woman question and listened to a great deal about the woman
question, there was really, after all, no woman question, just the human
question--the human questions.
How could every man and woman and child in America--in the world--be
assured enough to eat and to wear, enough and not too much? How could
each have leisure to play, also just enough, neither too much, nor too
little? How was each to find his own work, neither too much nor too
little, but the right work, the work he could do with all his heart, not
for the payment, though that must be adequate, but for the zest of the
doing itself, that special, personal service which every human being
should be God endowed and man fitted to perform? Above all, how could
every man, woman and child be sure of happiness? Since she had come to
the city happiness had come to seem a very fundamental thing, perhaps
because she herself was so happy, partly also because she was so sorry
for the rest who were not happy. And so few of them seemed to be happy.
They looked complacent, or smug, or well-fed, or blatantly successful,
some of them, but almost none looked happy, and most of them, it seemed
to Barb, looked downright miserable, haunted and hunted, which was very
sad.
Barb herself was happy, as has been said. In her ignorance and
innocence she supposed her happiness had its roots in the fact that she
was young and healthy and busy and useful and interested in her work.
She had no idea that her happiness was at all bound up in the other fact
that few days passed that she did not either see or talk over the
telephone with a certain rather grave but very friendly young doctor
from the near-by clinic, who was also interested in getting at the
secret of the city, especially in trying to pluck out the heart of its
physical miseries, fighting the seemingly futile battle with filth and
disease and ignorance and vice and their sad consequences, attacking the
Augean stables of the city with the energy of a Hercules, though there
was no magic stream to turn to his aid except the magic stream of youth
and courage and determination and faith, which was, after all, a fairly
efficient substitute.
And if sometimes when there was a silence between the two young people
and Barb's heart was almost overbrimming with a wistful, half-conscious
joy in things as they were, she did not know that the grim set to Phil's
mouth and the tired look in his eyes was due to the fact that his
Faraway Princess was looking particularly far off just then and that he
was all but oblivious of the presence of the contented little
Beggar-Maid quite within hailing distance. So much for Fools' Paradises
where Youth lives from preference and for Nature going quietly about her
business in the background!
The city had its way with Suzanne, too, and though she loved it better
than Barb, it treated her less genially. Suzanne worked hard and
hopefully. The click of her typewriter resounded faithfully by night and
day. But, somehow, her plays and stories did not sell. The arrival of
the mails with the persistently returning long envelopes was a daily
agony. She got to know all the hateful platitudinous variations of the
printed slip "Does not necessarily imply lack of merit," "Not exactly
suited to the needs of the magazine," and so on. How she detested the
smug, smooth, complacency of those printed formulae! How she hugged to
her heart the occasional kindly, personal notes of the compassionate
editors who salved the pain of rejection by a brief word or two of
encouragement or advice. But, alas, these favors were as few as they
were precious!
The plays fared no better. The managers smiled unctuously upon her
prettiness when Suzanne bearded them in their dens. Some of them even
patted her on the shoulder and told her her work was "promising," and
advised her by all means to keep at it. But there was always some
thoroughly excellent reason why they could not take the particular play
or sketch she had to offer and she had eventually to retreat from the
dens, one after the other, sore, indignant, but more doggedly determined
than ever to storm the citadel.
In the meanwhile Aunt Sarah's little legacy dwindled until it became a
mere shadow of itself. It had never been very portly at the best of
times, and living in the Village is deceptively expensive. By the first
of December Suzanne moved, taking with her her "Factory re-built," which
skipped a few letters for variety's sake now and then, but was, on the
whole, very dependable. Certainly it could be depended upon to turn out
manuscript which would return with automatic precision after the
briefest allotment of days. Suzanne informed Barb about this time over
the telephone that it was incomparably more picturesque to be living
over a fruit vender's shop in the Alley than it was to inhabit a mere
studio. It gave you loads of "copy." Miss Murray looked meditative
when her niece reported this new viewpoint on Suzanne's part and
suggested that that young lady be invited to take supper with them at an
early date, to which Barbara joyfully acquiesced. She felt that she had
seen too little of Suzanne of late. Suzanne accepted and Barb looked at
her very critically and accused her of working herself to death and
getting great dark circles under her eyes.
But Suzanne only shrugged and asserted that work agreed with her and
sent up her plate for more salad, apologizing for her appetite on the
score of having been so busy at lunch time she had forgotten to eat any.
"Oh, you genii!" laughed Barb reproachfully, but Miss Josephine Murray
vouchsafed her guest a keen scrutiny which Suzanne perceiving,
straightway rattled off a lot of voluble enthusiasm about the delights
of the "Dutch Oven" and other Bohemian eating-places.
Later, Phil Lorrimer dropped in and took the girls to a show. He, too,
looked rather hard at Suzanne later when they were having innocuous
sandwiches and beer at a little German restaurant. Phil and Barb
escorted Suzanne home to her alley but she would not let them come in,
protesting that it was too late and she didn't want to ruin her
reputation with Giovanni and Pepita downstairs, who were very proper
people.
On the Bus Phil turned to Barb to ask a rather odd question.
"Roger Minot been in town lately?"
"I don't think so. Suzanne wouldn't let him see her if he did come.
Why?"
"I just wondered. Suzanne is looking a little peaked, don't you think?"
"Dreadful," sighed Barb. "Suzanne is such a fiend for work. She owned
up to forgetting to eat any luncheon to-day she was so interested in
what she was doing. I'm afraid she forgets rather often."
"Shouldn't wonder," agreed Phil. He had seen more than one young man
and young woman, too, for that matter, who had developed that convenient
kind of memory about food in the city when pockets were empty. He
shrewdly suspected that Suzanne was "up against it" in his own parlance.
He had made a fair diagnosis of her case in the garish lights of the
German restaurant. "Overwork, underfeeding, devilish desperation.
Something sure to snap soon." Thus he summed the matter up mentally,
for he had not thought it necessary to alarm Barb about her friend's
situation, since she was so obviously unsuspecting. He knew Suzanne
would brook no help nor pity. "Proud as Lucifer, of course," he
thought. But he made up his mind to keep his eye on Suzanne, as he put
it.
To that end he made his way to the Village a few evenings later, found
from Giovanni that Suzanne was out and discovered her, for himself
shortly, sitting in a bench on the Square, looking pinched and blue
about the lips. Phil Lorrimer was a very direct person and usually went
straight for any goal he had in sight. He finally succeeded in wringing
the truth out of Suzanne. She had not sold a story since she came to
New York or "landed" a play. Her money was all but gone and she had
been living on one meal a day for a week past.
"And the worst of it is, I'm a rotten failure. That's what I can't
stand." And Suzanne had clenched her fist in her shabby little glove
and set her white teeth together sharply. "I won't give up. I tell you
I won't. I won't go home and I won't ask 'em for a cent. I won't let
'em say, 'I told you so.' I won't. I won't. Phil Lorrimer, if you
dare to hint one word of what I've told you to-night to Rog--er--to my
people, I'll borrow a stiletto of Giovanni and ram it clean through you.
What did you ever make me tell you for, anyway? You hadn't any business
to. I hate you!" And with an ejaculation somewhere between a snarl and
a sob, Suzanne had turned and fled away from him into the night.
But it had not taken Phil's long legs many seconds to be up with her
again.
"See here, Suzanne," he urged. "Don't take it like that. My knowing
doesn't count. Doctors and priests are dumb as the grave. I won't
peach, but do let me help you over the bad spot. I haven't much myself,
as you know, but I'd be glad to ease you along a bit if you'll let me,
man to man."
Suzanne smiled an April smile at him.
"Man to man, you are a darling, Phil Lorrimer. I'd let you help me if
I'd let any one but I won't. My pride's all I have left, and I'm going
to hang on to that like grim death. Don't you worry. I know what I can
do and I'm going to do it."
"What?" Phil was somewhat dubious about the sudden flush on Suzanne's
cheeks, the sparkle in her eyes.
She shook her head, mischief written in every line of her thin, pretty,
piquant face.
"'Be innocent of the knowledge, dearest chuck,
Till you applaud the deed,'"
she quoted gayly. "It is much better you shouldn't know. I'm not even
going to tell Barb. She will only be informed that I am out of town
with friends. My esteemed parents and dear Roger will hear the same.
Your job is to sit tight and know nothing. You won't be responsible.
Your skirts--I mean your coat-tails---will be entirely clear."
"Suzanne, I've half a mind to telegraph your father this minute--or
Roger. Maybe it would be better to summon Roger." He eyed her sternly.
Suzanne giggled wickedly.
"You will do nothing of the sort, dear Dumb as the Grave. I have your
sacred oath not to peach."
"Let me off, Suzanne," he begged. "Honest, I'm worried about you. You
look wild."
But Suzanne only laughed again, and assured him she was saner than the
statue of Liberty.
"Let you off nothing, dear sir," she added for good measure. "But
please don't fret. I assure you I am not going to do a thing either
desperate or immoral. I'm going on a lark, that is all. You can't down
Suzanne. Like Ivory Soap--it floats. Here we are at my alley. My fruit
stand's just beyond. Shake hands like a good boy and wish me luck.
Don't frown like that. It spoils your leonine beauty. Good night--and
good-by." And, before he could speak, Suzanne had darted into her own
doorway leaving Phil staring rather ruefully after her.
"Now what in time or eternity is she up to?" he pondered. "She isn't
the kind to play the fool to any great extent. Got too much head and
too little heart. I may as well let her gang her own gait. She's bound
to anyway. Poor old Roger! She is certainly leading him a trail.
Wouldn't he curse me for letting her make a getaway like this if he
knew? Out of town with friends!" he muttered as he descended into the
depths of the subway. "I'd like to see the friends. And if I were Rod
Minot, I would too, or know the reason why."
Thus satisfactorily can one young man sum up the whole duty of another
in a recreant courtship though remaining as helpless and inefficient as
a new-born infant in the management of his own.
*CHAPTER XI*
*MARGINS*
"Hello, Jack! I had no idea you were home." Sylvia, rosy and blown
from a spin behind Doctor Tom's frolicsome black mare, entered the
living-room at Arden Hall, bringing with her a whiff of fresh outdoor
air. She threw down her muff and held out a welcoming hand to her guest
who had been waiting her return.
"Bad penny, you know." Jack captured both hands instead of the one
vouchsafed as he spoke. "Can't leave business very long, you see." His
eyes twinkled mischievously as he looked down at Sylvia, making
shameless bid for her favor. Sylvia laughed, but she withdrew her hands
and shook her head at him.
"You are a dreadful fraud, Jack. You don't really care such a lot about
the business all at once. You know you don't."
"Not a tinker's dam," he shrugged. "Whatever that may be."
"Then why--" began Sylvia and stopped.
"There is only one why, young lady, and you know it."
Sylvia frowned and jabbing out her hatpins a little irritably, tossed
her black velvet toque on the table. She had already removed her coat
and furs and stood, trim and tailored, in her simple blue serge dress; a
simplicity which was exceedingly becoming and likewise extremely
expensive as Jack's approving gaze, sweeping the lithe young curves of
her figure, knew very well.
"I wish you wouldn't, Jack."
"Wouldn't what?" blandly.
"Wouldn't work--just because I want you to. It is so horribly like a
bribe."
"It is a bribe."
"Then I don't like it. I told you I didn't promise anything."
"And I told you I didn't expect anything. You can't blame a fellow for
putting all the eggs he can find into his basket."
"Put all the eggs you like into the basket, only don't blame me if they
get smashed. Sometimes, Jack, I think you don't really want to marry me
at all--you just want the fun of pursuing me."
"Maybe so," agreed Jack so amicably that Sylvia lifted her eyebrows at
him. "I was brought up never to contradict a lady."
Sylvia laughed at that and sat down, running her hand over her hair, to
brush back its turbulent ripple, a gesture Jack loved because it was so
interwoven with his mental pictures of her.
"Let's not discuss ourselves," she added. "Tell me the news. Did you
see Barb and Suzanne?"
"I saw Barb. Suzanne has fled the coop."
"What?"
"The report is she is out of town, traveling with friends. Barb looks
worried and Phil looks wise but neither has much to say."
"Does Phil know where she is?"
"He says not, but he knows something, or I miss my guess. Not that the
old oyster would open up his shell a fraction of an inch even to oblige
yours truly. I pried like a good one but to no purpose. Talk about
your professional secrecy! Phil's got it down to the finish. The old
chap is different somehow, older and solemn as a fish. Horrible example
of what work will do to a fellow!" he grinned.
Sylvia stooped to pick up the tongs and stir the fire, which was
smoldering a little sulkily on the hearth. Out of the tail of his eye
Jack watched her.
"He and Barb seem to be remarkably good pals," he continued. "The Aunt
orders him about like a member of the family. Don't wonder he obeys.
That woman is a general. I wouldn't be surprised if she took the vote
away from the men and gave it to the women any day, if she took the
notion. Lucky she and Napoleon didn't hitch their wagons to the same
star in the same generation. The star would have dragged Aunt Josephine
and ditched the emperor, that's certain."
"Do stop talking nonsense, Jack, and tell me more about Suzanne."
Sylvia's voice had a faint edge of sharpness to it as if a little of the
grim December wind outside had gotten into it.
"I don't know any more. I've told you all that is generally published.
Even Norton, Pa., gropes in middle darkness. She didn't even write to
Roger it seems. He is in bad. Had the temerity to propose to her again
just after she had emerged with a bundle of manuscripts from a manager's
office, which wasn't a tactful moment, I gather. She consigned him to
the devil or some feminine equivalent thereof, apparently. Pa and Ma
knows she's traveling. Had cards from Buffalo and Cleveland, I
understand. Pa's excited and Ma's took to her bed. Looks as if they
feared the worst."
"Jack!"
"Sorry. I was only joking, of course. Trust Suzanne to take care of
herself. She is all right. Roger is having a fit or two though, and no
wonder."
"Serves him right. Why didn't he go and marry her and not let her go
off on a tangent like that?"
"Why, indeed?" murmured Jack. "It is so hanged easy to marry a girl
when she won't have you! Give me the good old cave days. You could
knock your bride down with a club if she objected. Then, when she came
to, she would get up and grin at her noble master and string some red
berries round her neck, or stick a ring in her nose, to enhance her
charms, and everything would be entirely agreeable."
"Jack, you are perfectly horrid to-day. I wish you had stayed in New
York. How is Jeanette?" Sylvia changed the subject severely.
"Going the pace, as usual. Good Lord, Sylvia, what do you suppose a
woman wants to live the kind of life she's elected for? I like a good
time myself. It's a family trait. But she goes as if all the devils of
Hell were loose and after her. Maybe they are, after a fashion. See
here, Sylvia, aren't you going up to see her soon?"
"After Christmas. Why?"
"Nothing especial. I thought a dose of you might be good for her, that
is all."
And that was all the explanation that Sylvia extracted on that subject,
though she guessed that there was more than Jack admitted behind his
rather enigmatic remarks. Jack was incredibly clear-sighted about some
things, and it was evident he saw cause to worry about his sister
Jeanette, even to the extent of hurrying Sylvia to New York where he
himself could not follow unless he turned back the page of the virtuous
new leaf of his devotion to business. There was a puzzle behind it
somewhere, Sylvia knew. She also knew she was going to be left to
discover the exact nature of the puzzle for herself.
So December went its way. Suzanne continued mysteriously "traveling
with friends." Barb and Phil kept hard at work in the city and managed
to see a good deal of each other in their off hours. Sylvia and Phil
had almost ceased to write to each other, though there was no open break
in their friendship. It was rather that a wall, intangible but
unsurmountable, had risen between them, as perhaps it had, for pride is
a mightier barrier than a mountain peak sometimes. Gus went his quiet,
successful way on his concert tour, refusing politely but conclusively
to be made a lion of, keeping rather to himself in his leisure hours,
living on his unspoken dreams and managing to get a great deal of pure
happiness out of his star worship. To Sylvia's delight, and almost to
Felicia's consternation, the latter's designs for a mural relief, which
Stephen Kinnard had fairly bullied her into submitting in a competition,
had been accepted and she was hard at work on the actual modeling these
brief winter days, though she found time, Felicia fashion, to be an
excellent "Home-keeper" and Mother along with the other task.
Early in November Lois Daly had rather astonishingly announced her
intention of "doing some writing" as she put it rather vaguely. Lois
was always reticent, especially about her literary work, and even her
husband asked no questions, realizing it suited her better to be let
alone to work out her purpose for herself. She was far too
conscientious about her other duties to neglect any of them and it was
consequently the long evenings when the children were in bed and the
household affairs quiescent that she found most profitable for her new
work. This arrangement was admirable in all but two respects. It made
Lois' working day an almost impossibly long one and left her a little
too weary for restful sleep when she did finally creep into bed. It
also curtailed almost to a minimum the moments which she had to spare
for her husband's society, which had been all too few even before the
advent of this new era. Doctor Tom made no protest as to this. He was
always over-sensitive to the sacrifice of her work which Lois had made
for him and his, but he did beg her at times not to "bother" so much
about the house and the children and himself.
But Lois always shook her head at his pleas and explained quietly that
he and the house and the children were her real job and she could not
neglect them for the other. And if Tom Daly found it in his heart to
wonder sometimes if his wife's "real job" did not include a little
closer companionship with himself he never voiced his wondering. He was
no "martyr," as he had once long ago protested to Sylvia.
But human relations are never static and while Lois shut herself in her
den and wrote feverishly, night after night, her husband, being only
human, easily drifted into the habit of finding elsewhere than at his
own home the companionship and sympathy which even the strongest and
most independent of men half-consciously crave. Arden Hall and Sylvia
were close at hand and it was almost inevitable that he should find his
way to the two rather often. Sylvia was intensely interested in all his
schemes for the hospital and other altruistic visions which made up a
very large part of his wide, busy career. Often they talked eagerly for
hours, either with or without Felicia's presence. Oftener still Tom
Daly would sit and smoke in contented silence while Sylvia played soft
music or read aloud out of some magazine stories which let his mind rest
instead of wrestle.
It was all the most natural, even inevitable development. The two were
old friends. Tom Daly was thirty-eight and happily married. Sylvia
Arden was twenty-two questing for experience innocently enough. There
was no one to question or warn, or indeed, anything to question or warn
against. Yet there sat Nature spinning away at her web all the time and
Tom Daly and Sylvia were near to being caught in the mesh, without even
knowing there was any mesh. And the danger for Tom Daly as it happened
was considerably greater than for Sylvia just because he was a man. Man
is the so-called reasoning sex, but, as has been more than once noted,
sex is the one subject upon which he will not reason. And so things
slipped easily and pleasantly along up to Christmas time.
It was Jack Amidon who involuntarily opened Sylvia's eyes by uttering an
unusually sharp protest that she went nowhere any more, either with him
or any one else, but just sat in the chimney corner and played Joan to
Tom Daly's Darby. "And soon there'll be the deuce to pay whether you
know it or not," he had added darkly.
Of course Sylvia had flared out in quick anger at his implications.
"What do you mean, Jack Amidon, by saying such horrid things?" she had
stormed. "It is perfectly ridiculous. Doctor Tom is years and years
older than I am. He is just like a brother."
Jack had seen the brother dodge worked before and said so somewhat
caustically, whereupon Sylvia lost what little temper she had left, and
having delivered a volley of violent wrath upon her guest's imprudent
head, shot out of the room, leaving him to enjoy the hospitality of the
Hall in solitude or beat a retreat as pleased him best.
Meanwhile, upstairs in her own room, Sylvia threw herself on the bed,
and, first of all, woman fashion, relieved her feelings by indulging in
a good old-fashioned "weep," her anger dissipating with her tears.
Presently she sat up and began to take stock of the situation and
herself, and found to her consternation that things as they actually
were, were about as safe as a child with a box of matches in a haymow.
She was a perfectly clear-eyed and sophisticated young woman and when
her attention was called, however brutally, to the fact that you cannot
see a man, night after night, week after week, as she had been seeing
Tom Daly, without there being at least the possibility of the "deuce to
pay," as Jack had bluntly expressed it, she was willing to acknowledge
the fact to herself at least. She carefully analyzed her own mental
processes for the past few weeks and discovered to her surprise and some
chagrin that she had been ruthlessly cutting out engagements in which
Tom Daly did not figure, and eagerly making those in which he did
figure, that she had deliberately plunged into everything that
interested him, Red Cross work, the new hospital, the needs of some of
his poorer patients; everything, in short, that he cared about heartily.
She even had to admit to herself that she had been a little complacent
and self righteous in her genuine interest and sympathy with these
things because she resented Lois Daly's apathy in the matter and felt
profoundly sorry for Doctor Tom. She discovered that it is not prudent
in the world as it is lived to be too sorry for another woman's husband.
That way danger lies, and a signboard to that effect is in order.
Beyond this, however, Sylvia knew she had little for which to blame
herself. She was not a deliberate coquette. She had acted in all
simplicity and naturalness, but there had been a risk to the experiment
for all that and she was a bit ashamed of her hitherto state of
blindness.
Being a very honest young person, Sylvia sat down, as soon as she had
threshed the whole matter out to the satisfaction of her clear, fair
mind, and wrote a very artistically penitent note to Jack, retracting
some of the unwarrantable things she had said in her wrath and admitting
rather hazily that there was a faint possibility that he might have been
in the right about certain matters, implying that she was magnanimously
willing even to ignore his objectionable rightness if he so desired.
And her note crossed one from Jack, begging her to forgive his "darned
impertinence" and adding that he had behaved like a jackass and a dog in
the manger and Heaven knows how many other kinds of animals, but if she
would be good enough to overlook his misdemeanors he would be eternally
grateful.
And the next evening Sylvia appeared under Jack's escort at the
Honeycutt ball, wearing a marvelous new gown and looking extraordinarily
pretty after her temporary estrangement from Vanity Fair. And from that
time on during all the mad gayeties of Christmas week Jack was
constantly in attendance, obviously the favored knight. Life is mostly
made up of reactions. The pendulum having swung so far to the left,
swings back an equal distance to the right. Sylvia was the kinder to
Jack because of her deflection away from him in an entirely opposite
direction. And he, with the wisdom born of considerable experience of
the feminine sex in general, and Sylvia Arden in particular, made no
comment though he perfectly understood what had happened, but sunned
himself agreeably in his lady's rather uncertain grace and bided his
time.
And the night of the Honeycutt ball for the first time in several weeks
Tom Daly sat and smoked before his own fireside and not once did he
think of the new hospital.
*CHAPTER XII*
*"SUCH STUFF AS DREAMS"*
"Phil? That you, my boy? Come up and take dinner with us to-night,
won't you? I have a proposition to make to you."
Thus the smooth voice of Justin Huntley over the telephone. Justin
Huntley was a famous nerve specialist, a classmate and lifelong friend
of Phil Lorrimer's father, who had kept a friendly eye on the young man
ever since he had come to the city.
Phil accepted the invitation, and later, as he left the Subway and
strolled down Seventy-second Street toward the river, he speculated
vaguely as to what the proposition might be likely to be. Doctor
Huntley was quite capable of initiating any kind of a suggestion, from
proposing a marriage to an heiress to the use of a new serum.
Consequently Phil had little to go upon in his speculations.
It was an agreeable dinner. Dinner at the Huntleys' always was
agreeable, moving by pleasant stages to a perfect end, gastronomically
speaking. There were no other guests to-night and presently, Mrs.
Huntley, a frail tired looking little lady who always seemed to be
deprecating the weight of her silks and the brilliancy of her jewels,
rose and left the two men together.
"Any curiosity about the proposition I baited my hook with to get you
here to-night?" Dr. Huntley surveyed his guest a little quizzically as
he launched the question.
"I didn't need any bait," said Phil. "But I admit the curiosity."
The older man leaned forward and deliberately lit his cigarette from a
candle that stood close at hand.
"You don't smoke?" he remarked irrelevantly.
"No," admitted Phil. "At least, not often. Bad for the operating
table."
"Bad! It's the devil. You have a deal of sense, young man. How would
you like to be my partner?" The question was put as casually as if he
were offering a fellow traveler, caught in the rain, a share of his
umbrella, but his shrewd eyes took full account of the face of the young
man. Phil flushed and his mouth opened slightly. It was a proposition
to make any ambitious young man drop his jaw. Justin Huntley had one of
the largest and most remunerative practices in the city. It was a
dazzling prospect to open suddenly before the eyes of a small-salaried
worker in a free clinic. It meant success, money--Sylvia, something to
offer her, at last.
"Well?"
"It is a wonderful chance," said Phil steadily, "but I should like to
think it over, if you don't mind."
"Eh?" It was Dr. Huntley's jaw that dropped this time. He had scarcely
expected a young man in Phil Lorrimer's position to need to think over
an offer such as he had just made. Most young men would have jumped at
it quickly as a trout leaps at a shining fly lest the fascinating thing
disappear from view before it could be apprehended. "What did you say?"
"I said I should have to think it over," repeated Phil. "Your kind of
practice isn't the kind I am interested in, to speak frankly."
"Interested! Good Lord! Who expects to be interested in anything
nowadays? A lot of damn women with nothing on earth the matter with
them except fool notions, and having nothing on earth or in Heaven to
occupy themselves with, dyspeptics, neurasthenics, hypochondriacs, dope
fiends, gentlemen drunkards and worse! That is my kind of practice,
boy. Pah! Interesting! Of course, they aren't interesting. They are
fools. But they pay. Lord, how they pay! They wouldn't be sick if they
didn't have so much money. You would open your eyes if you saw my
books. But I've had 'most enough of 'em. I want somebody to take the
brunt of their damn foolnesses off of me. That is what I want a partner
for. Some day I'll be telling 'em what I really think of 'em and it
wouldn't do--it wouldn't do. I've got to have an understudy. You've a
close mouth and a good head and you'd like the money. Don't tell me you
wouldn't like it," querulously. "Everybody wants money these days. The
whole world's after it."
"Oh, I want it all right," said Phil Lorrimer honestly. "I happen to
want it like the devil just at present. But I am not sure I want
it--that bad. That is what I have to think over."
He took a hasty swallow of water from the glass beside his plate, then
rose and made a few quick, nervous turns, up and down the room. Finally
he came to a halt opposite his host.
"I don't know whether I can make you understand, Dr. Huntley, but it is
like this," he said. "I have a drop or so of missionary blood in me.
My father is in China now. My mother would be, if she could stand the
climate. My sister is teaching in a missionary school in Turkey. I
chose the kind of work I am doing here in New York partly because it
interested me, but I believe it was a little bit too because of the
missionary strain. Anyway, it seems to me a worth-while job. But this
thing you are offering me-- Pardon me if I sound rude. I don't mean to
disparage your work. It is fine--some of it, but well, the truth of it
is, it doesn't look to me to measure up to what we are doing in the
clinic and what some other doctors and surgeons are doing in other
places. The finest man I know--doing the finest work I know--is in
Greendale, a little place just outside Baltimore. He has always been a
sort of standard for me--he and my father. If I went in with you, it
would be not because my heart was in it, but because the money was in
it, and wanted the money worse than I wanted to hang onto my dreams.
That is about the whole story."
Justin Huntley smoked in silence during this, for Phil, rather long
speech. Phil was not much given to eloquence.
"Well," he said. "Even so. Put it as baldly as that, if you like. It
is up to you. A man can't afford to sentimentalize much in this day and
generation. Let me remind you, the money is not to be despised. It
buys a good deal."
Phil's eyes were lowered. Well he knew, or thought he knew, what it
could buy for him. Not Sylvia, of course, Sylvia could not be bought,
but the right to go in and try to win her against Jack, against the
world, yes, against even his own ideals. The last thought crowded in, an
unbidden guest. Suddenly he loathed his father's friend, loathed his
smug success, his cynical sureness that he himself could be bought. For
it was buying, and Phil knew it. If he took this offer, he sold out, to
the highest bidder, his own high ideals. Was it worth it? Was even
Sylvia worth it? Had he the right to win her that way? Could he do it?
"Don't give your final answer to-night." Justin Huntley's bland voice
interrupted the boy's reflections. "There is no hurry. Take a week.
Two--three--if you like."
Phil pulled himself together.
"Thank you. I will, if you don't object--a few days, anyway. Please
don't think I am ungrateful, or don't appreciate the compliment you have
paid me--or rather the kindness, for, of course, I know I'm not
experienced enough to be much of a partner at present. I--"
But Huntley waved the words aside.
"It's not kindness--nothing but selfishness. I happen to want you.
Come on in if you will. Anyway think it over. The madame is alone.
Shall we go to her?"
Phil fancied there was an odd, wistful inquiry in Mrs. Huntley's pale
eyes as she turned to meet the men as they entered the room. It was
almost as if she were making some kind of plea. Whether she wanted him
to accept or refuse her husband's offer was not at all clear to Phil.
He made his adieus as early as he politely could on the score of a
previous engagement and passed out into the night trying to adjust as
best he could the confused bundle of thoughts and emotions he carried.
"Wonder if old Mephisto had any qualms," muttered Justin Huntley as the
door had closed upon the tall young doctor.
"Did you speak, dear?" inquired his wife. "I didn't understand."
"No, I didn't say anything--worth repeating."
"How like Philip is to his father, isn't he?"
"Very like," somewhat dryly. "Did you say there was a girl?"
"A girl?" Mrs. Huntley always dealt in mild interrogatives as if to
disclaim the responsibility of assertion. "Oh, yes. His mother told us
he was devoted to Sylvia Arden--wasn't it? That lovely young girl we
met once--in Baltimore, I think? She is a great heiress, isn't she?"
"H-mm. Maybe he will be back, after all," remarked her husband
irrelevantly.
Phil's restlessness gave him no peace, and though the engagement had
been fiction he decided to run around and see Barb a few moments before
he turned in for the night. He had gotten in the habit of using Barb as
an anaesthetic of late, though he had no idea he was doing it. To-night
he found her alone, curled up like a sleepy kitten before the fire. She
rose with a happy little exclamation of surprise as Phil came in.
For once the flood gates of his reserve were down for Phil. In five
minutes he had poured out the whole story of his evening's experience,
omitting nothing except the mention of Sylvia. In fact, he, hardly
thought it necessary to mention Sylvia. She so fully possessed his own
mind he had no conception that Barbara did not fully understand how
inextricably Sylvia was woven in with the whole matter.
"But Phil," wondered Barb, "it isn't the kind of work you like, is it?
I can't imagine you dealing with that kind of patients exclusively."
Barb's eyes blinked and crinkled, Barb-like, as she made the statement.
"Nor I. I should be all too likely to tell 'em to go plum to thunder."
He grinned a little as he made the admission.
"Then why? Phil, it can't be the money that appeals to you?" Barb's
voice was startled, incredulous.
Phil had been on his feet, marching to and fro in the little room, as
was his custom when excited. But suddenly he dropped into a chair before
the hearth.
"Listen, Barbie. Listen hard," he said. "Suppose a chap wanted to
marry a girl and he didn't have any money, at least not as much as he
thought he ought to have, not to look like a fool and a knave, asking
for her, and then suppose that, right out of a clear sky, the chap saw a
chance to make a big income, perfectly respectably, if not, well, we'll
say exhilaratingly, wouldn't he just naturally grab at the chance?"
Phil was not looking at Barb. He was staring into the gas log with all
his might, but in any case it didn't matter much. Wherever he looked
Phil saw only Sylvia that night. Barb's cheeks were pink and her breath
came a little more quickly than usual. She couldn't help wondering if
Phil could hear the "Blop! Blop! Blop!" her heart was making. It
seemed as if he must hear, it was such a queer, loud sound, but he did
not appear to notice. He did not even turn toward her.
"He might grab, but I think he would put his hand down quick again as
soon as he realized the girl wouldn't want him--that way. She wouldn't
want to be bought at a price--like that." Barb managed to keep her
voice steady in spite of the queer thing her heart was doing.
"Maybe not," said Phil. "Somehow I thought that is what you would say,
Barbie. Thank you." And suddenly Phil was on his feet. "'Night, Barb.
I've got to telephone a man before it gets any later."
And before Barb caught her breath he was gone. It did not matter any
more now how her heart behaved, but somehow, oddly enough it stopped
"blopping" and seemed suddenly to be very, very tired and heavy, as if
it were going to sink straight down into her stomach which, of course,
was no place for a heart to be located.
Yet it was all perfectly natural and like Phil not to have said anything
more at the moment. He had to get the taint of barter off his hands
before he came to her. "Suppose a chap wanted to marry a girl."
"Suppose a chap wanted to marry a girl." The clock on the mantel seemed
to be ticking out the words very distinctly. And suddenly Barb felt
very happy and contented and curled up in her chair again like a kitten.
Here her aunt found her a half hour later.
"Asleep, Kiddie?" she asked, and Barbara looked up with a shy, radiant
little smile.
"No, just dreaming," she said.
*CHAPTER XIII*
*INTO HAVEN*
Christmas was over, and Sylvia had hardly breathed for a week so
engrossed had she been in all kinds of festivities. Even now she was
preparing to depart on the morrow for an even gayer round, on the long
promised visit to Jeanette Latham, Jack's sister. Perhaps it was to
keep the "Booing" questions at a distance that Sylvia chose to fly from
one mad whirl to another that winter.
"I almost wish you weren't going to New York, just now, Sylvia. You
look tired to death and your nerves are 'jumpy,' as Doctor Tom says."
Thus Felicia addressed Sylvia at breakfast the morning of the
twenty-sixth, after the children had scampered off to the delights of
yesterday's new harvest of toys.
"It is nothing but the day-after feeling," said Sylvia. "I've danced
until morning for four nights running. I'll be all right as soon as I
can get some sleep."
"I don't know," Felicia looked dubious. "If you were seventeen instead
of twenty-two, I believe I should order you to stay at home."
"Isn't it lucky, I'm not?" smiled Sylvia. "Felicia, dear, you never did
really boss me in all the years you might have done it. Are you going
to begin now?"
"I am afraid it wouldn't be much use at this late date," sighed Felicia.
"Sometimes I wonder why you aren't more spoiled than you are.
Seriously, child, you have gotten a little of your shining splendor
rubbed off. Anything the matter?"
"Nothing in the world, except maybe I wish I knew whether I were going
to marry Jack or not. It is a little distracting not to know. You don't
happen to possess any inside information on the subject, do you?"
Sylvia's smile was whimsical but her eyes were tired. It was true. She
had lost a little of her "shining splendor," as Felicia described it, in
the past few weeks.
"I do not. But I should on the whole say you were not going to marry
him. You have seen too much of him lately. You need to get away and
get a perspective."
"Well, who wanted to order me to stay away from New York, just now?"
"I retract. Go ahead with my blessing. I hope you will meet a hundred
young men and let Jack Amidon get put in his place."
"That is just it. What _is_ his place?"
"Sylvia!" Felicia's tone was faintly exasperated. "You are no more in
love with Jack Amidon than I am. Some day you will wake up and find it
out."
"Will I? Sometimes, Felicia, I have a horrible suspicion I am just a
taster--like tea tasters, you know. Only I like to go round tasting
experience. I never thought I was a bit of a flirt until lately. But
I'm just finding out there are ways and ways of flirting, having
'adventures in personality' as Suzanne calls it. Jack says my 'Damnable
sympathetic ways' are vicious. Maybe they are. I think I must be a
sort of chameleon--all things to all men, you know. I shouldn't wonder
if I couldn't really love anybody--_grand style_."
"You goose! When the right man comes along you will know the
difference."
"I wonder." And suddenly Sylvia remembered how she had felt that night
on Lover's Leap, when she and Philip Lorrimer had been the only two
individuals in a whole spacious, shining universe. It seemed now as if
she had heard a kind of Hallelujah chorus, or was it that the silence
had been a strange kind of music itself?
And then on the heels of this blinding sweet memory had come another,
bringing with it a bitter taste, a memory of those long days after Phil
had gone back to the city and she had watched the mails and pretended to
ignore them.
And then she remembered Gus and Jack and Doctor Tom. Had they all been
just understudies for somebody else she really wanted in her heart of
hearts? How many other understudies would there be? And would she
marry one of them sooner or later?
"Women are rather like cats, after all, aren't they, Felicia? They will
pat their mice and keep putting their paws on them, even if they don't
want to eat them."
Felicia laughed.
"What a traveler you are! Have you been half round the world since you
spoke last? Shall we ask Tom and Lois over to dinner to-night? We
haven't seen either of them for an age."
"Yes," said Sylvia. "You telephone, Felicia. I have to pack."
Sylvia had seen practically nothing of Doctor Tom for the past few
weeks. Never once in that time had she been alone with him. Twice
Doctor Tom had been over when she was in, which was not often during
those full holiday evenings, and she had taken pains to be sure Felicia
was present on those two occasions. Once he had called to her to come
for a drive but she had had a genuine engagement with Jack to plead.
She felt silly enough placing any sort of a barrier between herself and
Doctor Tom but she was afraid for her own part it would be some time
before she could meet him quite naturally again. Sometimes she wished
Jack had kept his "darned impertinence" to himself and other times she
owned it was safer this way. Better that children should not play with
matches at all, since matches did sometimes ignite. At any rate, she
did not mean to see her neighbor alone again until after she got back
from New York.
But Fate ruled otherwise. That very afternoon, after her breakfast
table philosophizing, she had gone downtown to attend to a few last
errands and the delicious, crisp frostiness of the day tempted her to
walk instead of having the car out. She had hardly finished her tasks
and started homeward when she heard Doctor Tom's familiar whistle, and,
turning, saw him reigning in black Bess by the curb.
"Game for a spin?" he asked. "I have to go a few miles out in the
country and was looking for company."
His tone was so natural that Sylvia herself lost her self-consciousness
and was so thankful for the loss that she was very gay and talkative.
If only he needn't find out that it had not been accidental that he had
seen so little of herself of late all would be well.
"Seems to me you are turning into a regular society Miss after all," he
teased. "Bet you've been cutting Red Cross and everything else since
this dance mania set in."
"I am afraid I have. I've been an awful backslider in pretty much
everything lately," she told him soberly.
He flashed one of his quick, shrewd glances at her.
"What's this, Miss Christmas? Your own special season here and you in
the dumps without even a solitary star sparkle?"
"You are as bad as Felicia," said Sylvia a little crossly. "Do you all
expect me to grin like a Cheshire cat every minute?"
He chuckled.
"Sylvia touchy! What next? Indigestion or bad conscience?"
"Neither--well, maybe a bit of the latter," admitted Sylvia. "Anyway, I
am not at all pleased with myself lately. I'm getting to be a selfish
pig, and that's the ungarnished truth."
"Indeed! I hadn't noticed it. The McGuires had a powerful good dinner
yesterday and--"
"Do hush. It is nothing to send dinners to McGuire's. It doesn't cost
me anything--not even much thought. You needn't try to smooth it over.
I know. I haven't been thinking about a single soul in the world lately
except Sylvia Arden. I set Jack to work and I've just diddled round
myself doing next to nothing. I haven't even learned to cook as I said
I was going to, and since Gus went I haven't practiced and--"
"And since three weeks ago Thursday you haven't even played me a psalm
tune," he jested.
Then suddenly he stared. For out of the corner of his eye he perceived
that Sylvia was unmistakably blushing, blushing, of course, the more
hotly because she was so furiously angry at herself for so doing.
"So it isn't my imagination. There has been some kind of fool talk
somewhere. Confound me for an idiot! Poor kid! We'll settle that."
So thought Tom Daly. Then aloud, "See here, Sylvia, may I say a little
speech? You needn't look at me. I was a manger dog all right, a few
weeks ago, without meaning to be. I had no business to be keeping the
young chaps away from you. I didn't even see I was doing it. I was
down and out for a while, and you, bless your kind heart, saw it and
came to the rescue, like the Christmas girl you are. I shan't forget
what you did for me. If you pulled me out of a rut--and you did--maybe
we both came somewhere near being pulled into a bigger one. So far as I
know, no man is ever old enough to be sure he's passed the fool limit,
and maybe I was nearer the edge than I knew. Anyway, you were a trump
as usual. The blame, if there is any, is mine. All right, little
sister?" Then, at last, he turned to face Sylvia.
And suddenly and disconcertingly her eyes filled with tears. She was
very tired and her nerves were unstrung by too much gayety and mental
uneasiness.
"Of course it is all right. There never was anything much wrong,
only--well, I thought I was beginning to plume myself and get complacent
because I was the only one who patted you and smoothed your fur the
right way and maybe I'd better stop before--Doctor Tom, I hate things to
be as they are."
"Meaning?"
"Lots of things, but mostly why can't people--men and women--just be
friends and not have anything else snarled up with it?"
"They can." Tom Daly's steady voice was like oil to the troubled waters
of Sylvia's soul.
Nor did she guess that it cost him something of an effort to throw
precisely the right amount of big-brotherness into his words. As he
admitted, no man could safely boast that he had passed the fool limit,
but he could and would be man enough himself to be sure no girl like
Sylvia was going to be bothered by the folly.
"_We_ can anyway," he smiled down at Sylvia to add in the old friendly
way, a friendliness whose very familiarity was steadying.
She smiled back mistily.
"Of course we can. I'm a silly idiot to-day. Ghosts seem to walk even
in the sunniest, most everyday
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