“And therefore,” continued Miss Edgelow, “I am going to break his heart; or if that is impossible by reason of his having none to break, I shall hurt his pride so dreadfully that he will suffer still more. I should like, Uncle, to humiliate that young man to the very dust.”
“So he has snubbed you, has he? Serves you right for throwing yourself at his head.”
“I only threw a rose,” said Miss Edgelow plaintively.
“Don’t make a fool of yourself,” said her uncle comfortingly. “I haven’t any authority over you, of course. I invited you here for the summer because your father told me plainly that he wanted to feel you were in some safe place while he had to be in Mexico. I did not know then that Elizabeth Cooper was going to have a young jackanapes next door. Likely she brought him there on purpose. I don’t believe a word of his being ill. He looks fit as a fiddle. But remember this, Miss. If you throw yourself away on that penniless fortune hunter not a cent of my money will you ever see.”
“Throw myself away on him! Uncle, do you realize that I’ve just told you I hate the creature?”
“See that you keep on hating him then, miss. There’s a proverb, if I remember aright, to the effect that hate is only love that has missed its way.”
Old James looked very fierce and relentless. Miss Edgelow sighed and went away. It was frightfully dull at Hill o’ the Winds. It was a detestable old place. It was out of the world. No decent people abode there. She would rather be in Mexico.
O, why had she been so silly as to throw him that rose? Why did night and faint starlight and scented winds make people do such absurd tings? She had been warned, hadn’t she? Samuel had warned her. Well, then, why had she done it?
“I suppose,” she thought resentfully, “that he doesn’t even find me interesting enough to study for material. Detestable creature! I am not going to think about him again.”
Romney, meanwhile, was talking to Samuel. He was resolved that he would not mention Miss Edgelow to Samuel. It will never be known whether he would have kept this resolution or not, because Samuel mentioned her at once.
“Her name is Dorcas,” he announced triumphantly. “She told me herself.”
“Dorcas it is,” said Romney airily. “Not that it matters. Dorcas or Titania or Melisande—all is one. Her last name is Edgelow.”
“Her father had to go to Mexico for the summer—he’s a civil engineer—so she came to stay with her uncle, and she’s twenty-three years old,” said Samuel.
“Did she tell you her age, too?”
“Nope. I found that out down at Clifton last night. ‘Pink’ Raymer told me. Pink is old Mary Edgelow’s chore boy. He heard her telling old Mrs. Franklin all about her. She’s an awful flirt, old Mary says, and her father sent her to Hill o’ the Winds ’cause he had to go to Mexico and dasn’t trust her home alone. She can’t help making eyes at any man who happens to be ’round, old Mary says. She’s even been engaged a lot o’ times, old Mary says, but always broke it off. She means to marry rich when she does marry, old Mary says. She’s so extravagant, nobody but a rich man could keep her, old Mary says. Her dress bill every year is awful!”
“Samuel, do you realize what an abominable thing gossip is?” demanded Romney sternly. “I’m sorry to find you so addicted to it.”
“You told me to find out all I could about her,” protested the aggrieved Samuel.
“Did you then find out whether her eyes are blue or gray?”
Samuel stared a second.
“No,” scornfully.
“You see the only important thing, the only thing I really wanted to know about her, you have failed to find out. And yet you were sitting beside her on a log in the Whispering Lane for some time last night. Unobservant Samuel! But never mind. Her name is Dorcas and there is no reasonable doubt in my mind that her eyes are fishy blue. Let’s go a-fishing.”
“Let’s,” said Samuel, brightening up. “Say, I’ve called my pig after old Jim Edgelow.”
So Dorcas Edgelow was a heartless coquette who broke hearts and ruined lives for her amusement, a cold-blooded schemer who meant to ensnare a rich husband! Romney did not know that Samuel had made up all these accusations out of whole cloth, that he had never been at or near Clifton the preceding evening, that Pink Raymer was only the name of the hero in a lurid dime novel Samuel was secretly devouring. Nobody could have suspected such a thing of Samuel, the frank-eyed, open-faced, red-lipped child.
He seemed too frank and honest.
Doubtless old Miss Mary Edgelow exaggerated somewhat, thought Romney; ancient maiden ladies of seventy-odd seldom erred on the side of charity in their judgment of their young relatives. But the fact remained. Dorcas Edgelow was a calculating coquette. Dorcas Edgelow was mercenary. Dorcas Edgelow must be avoided.
Therefore Romney went fishing.
Chapter V
He fished all day and wrote in the tower room all the evening. He would not let himself look down into the Edgelow garden. Dorcas Edgelow was sitting there reading a book; at least she had a book on her lap. At intervals she religiously turned a page. She sat facing the tower room and the hedge, but she never looked at them—noticeably.
She was bareheaded and she had thought a great deal about her dress before she put on her primrose silk. She wore a starlike cluster of pink and white daisies in her hair. She knew she looked very well. But what difference did that make when there was nobody to look at her?
She read until eight o’clock and then got up and went indoors in a huff. I am afraid she banged the door. She would die in this stupid place—yes, die! Then perhaps people might be sorry for their behavior. Her cruel father, for instance, who had doomed her to this solitude and exposed her to unparalleled impudence from the cub editors that infested it. There was no doubt that Miss Edgelow was very much annoyed.
Five minutes after she had gone in Romney went to the window and looked down into the Edgelow garden. Nobody was there. What an intolerable, prim, antiquated, formal, unattractive place it was! How could anybody endure year after year those endless stiff walks and clipped hedges and old-fashioned roses. How could anybody live at Hill o’ the Winds anyhow? How thankful he would be when his doctor would let him get away from it!
Romney stared at the Edgelow garden for ten minutes longer; then he tried to write again, failed, threw down his pen, looked at the Edgelow garden, still deserted, and betook himself to the hollow to seek Samuel.
Samuel he could not find. Samuel was at that moment talking to Miss Edgelow in the Whispering Lane, imparting to her a few facts and considerable fiction. So he went for a walk to the shore instead. It was dark when he got back and there was still no one in the Edgelow garden. Romney was sure of that because he went to the hedge and looked it over thoroughly.
He did not sleep a great deal that night. Neither did Miss Edgelow. It was a warm night and the mosquitoes were troublesome. Samuel slept dreamlessly. He had told Miss Edgelow that Romney thought she was quite stuck on him, and he had told Romney that Pink Raymer had heard old Mary say that there was a certain millionaire in Montreal to whom Miss Edgelow would be engaged in the fall. It was an understood thing, according to the mythical Pink.
Therefore for two days Romney wished and wrote and ignored Miss Edgelow and thought continually about her. And for two days Miss Edgelow read novels and avoided the garden and sang so loudly and cheerfully that old Jim told her to shut up. He had no particular ear for music. So Miss Edgelow went to the Whispering Lane. She knew there was no danger of meeting that detestable young man there because she had seen him striding down the hill half an hour before.
Of course Romney was there; he had only been down as far as the hollow and when he came back he saw a white figure, which was really that of old Jim’s housekeeper, disappearing in the distance along the valley road to the shore. He was sure it was Sylvia—pshaw, Dorcas!—so the lane would be safe.
They met face to face. They smiled at each other as if they had expected to meet. Romney said it was a lovely evening and Miss Edgelow said it looked like rain—it didn’t—and then they walked on together because there was nothing else to do.
Each of them thoroughly distrusted the other but neither wanted to be anywhere else. Miss Edgelow told herself again that it would be a pleasant and righteous thing to teach this young man a lesson. Romney told himself that if Miss Edgelow wanted to flirt, well and good; he would play the game with zest and get as much amusement out of it as she did. So they were both ready to be surprisingly agreeable to each other and both of them felt suddenly that Hill o’ the Winds was a dear, old, quaint, romantic spot, full of poetry and steeped in romance. Romney as he walked beside her felt perfectly happy and satisfied.
“Now why?” one part of him asked the other. “I’ve often walked in lanes before. It can’t be the lane. Dorcas Edgelow is a beauty, but I’ve walked with women just as beautiful. Why?”
There was no answer so he gave up asking the question and enjoyed his satisfaction. The Whispering Lane was a delightful spot. The warm air was full of elusive wood fragrances that mingled distractingly with the faint perfume that exhaled from Sylvia’s—no, confound it, Dorcas’—dress. Shafts of sunlight fell through it; now and then one struck athwart Sylvia’s hair and intensified its blue-black sheen.
Robins whistled here and there. Little ferns brushed Sylvia’s silken ankles. There were openings in the trees like green, arched windows, and one saw enchanting little landscapes through them.
There was a gate at the end of the lane and when they came to it they leaned against it and looked down into the valley. The gate was narrow and crowded with dogwood bushes, so that they had to stand close together. Occasionally Romney’s shoulder touched Sylvia’s or a frill of her lacy sleeve brushed his hand.
They watched the valley in a long, delicious silence. It was luminous in hazes of purple and pearl. Great clouds piled themselves up in dazzling masses over the iridescent sea, thunderclouds with white crests and gorges of purple shadow.
Miss Edgelow did not try to talk much. She knew exactly the value of significant silences when you were teaching a certain kind of lesson. She knew that foolish women chattered too much, that wise ones let nature talk for them.
When she did talk she talked of Samuel, his engaging deviltry, his amusing precocity. She said she was very fond of Samuel; Romney said he was, too, and felt that it was a link between them. He told her how he had loved Hill o’ the Winds in childhood and how glad he was to find it unchanged, a place unspoiled by the haste and rush of modernity, a place where one might dream dreams and cherish feuds and other impossible things.
Then they were silent again in as many languages as Aunt Elizabeth herself could have been. In fact, when Romney lay awake half the night to think over that half hour in the Whispering Lane he was surprised to find how little they had talked and yet how much more he seemed to know of her. At first he struggled against thinking of her; then philosophically decided that the more he struggled the more fictitious importance the thought of her would assume. Better think her out and have done with it.
So he gave himself over to his memories of her and gloated over them, the delicate, half-mocking, half-alluring undertones in her voice, the delicious golden spots on her face, the charming gestures of her wonderful hands. O, she was quite perfect, just as he had always known she would be.
There was no danger of his falling in love with her. There were a score of indisputable reasons for safeguard. So there was no danger in dwelling on her perfection, no danger in recalling her ways and words and glances—but he had forgotten after all to find out the real colour of her eyes!—no danger in dreaming of what might have been when one knew it couldn’t possibly be. In short, there was no danger in a skillful flirtation when both parties knew exactly what they were about.
“I have been walking in the Whispering Lane with Romney Cooper,” said Miss Edgelow to her uncle.
“Humph!”
“He is a very nice young man.”
“Humph!”
“He is, I think, the nicest young man I ever met.”
“Humph! I thought you said you hated him.”
“So I did. So I do. I hate him all the more for being so nice. What business has he to be so nice when he is poor and designing and a Cooper and utterly out of the question?”
“Out of the question for what?” grunted old Jim.
“I’m glad you didn’t say ‘humph’ that time,” said Dorcas reflectively. “It was getting monotonous.”
It was a week later that Romney went to see Cousin Clorinda again, through a weird, uncanny twilight following a rainy day. The sea was like gray satin before Cousin Clorinda’s old house. The sky was curdled all over with pale gray clouds. Cousin Clorinda wore flowered organdie and kissed him.
“Cousin Clorinda, she is divine.”
“Who?” said Cousin Clorinda indifferently.
“Why, Sylvia—Dorcas—if you must have it.”
“O, yes, the niece of old Jim’s,” said Cousin Clorinda as if she just now heard of her for the first time. “Try some of my shortcake, Romney. You used to be very fond of it.”
“She’s the most charming thing in the world, Cousin Clorinda. I am not in love with her. Please don’t imagine I’m in love with her.”
“O, I wouldn’t imagine it,” Cousin Clorinda seemed a trifle absent.
“But I could be in love with her overwhelmingly if she weren’t as rich as wedding cake, and a man-eater. I could adore her. She is adorable. The only thing I’m really sorry for is that I didn’t kiss her that day I carried her over the run. The gods will never send me such a chance again.”
“My white hen stole her nest and brought out ten of the dearest yellow chicks to-day.”
“Chickens! Cousin Clorinda, I’m talking of Sylvia—Sylvia! It’s such a luxury to call her Sylvia when I speak to you instead of Miss Edgelow or that abominable Dorcas! This morning when I woke up she was helping Mrs. Gould weed the kitchen garden and singing like a seraph. I love to hear a woman singing at her work. Everybody should sing at his work.”
“Nonsense,” said Cousin Clorinda. “Fancy a butcher singing at his work! Or an undertaker!”
Romney ignored the interruption.
“You can’t believe how deliciously her hair kinks at the nape of her neck on a rainy day. You can’t believe how golden her freckles are on her creamy skin. She isn’t like any other woman in the world.”
“Nobody is,” said Cousin Clorinda. “Is Elizabeth troubled with rheumatism this wet day?”
“Cousin Clorinda, I didn’t expect to find you so unsympathetic,” reproached Romney.
“Is it unsympathetic to ask about Elizabeth’s rheumatism? I would have thought it quite the reverse.”
“Darling, I came over here to-night to talk about Sylvia to you. I wanted to tell you that, lovely as she looks in flower-hued robes, she is still lovelier in a gray Mackintosh and a rubber cap; that, exquisite as she is when she’s talking, she’s ten times more exquisite when she’s silent; that I’ll go mad if I can’t solve the mystery of her smile—and you’re not a bit interested!”
“No, I don’t think I am. In fact, you bore me when you rave about Dorcas Edgelow. Don’t be so emotional.”
Romney stared incredulously, reproachfully.
“And the last time I was down here you were urging me to marry her!”
“I was not,” said Cousin Clorinda brazenly. “I was only teasing you. I regarded the whole matter as a joke. The idea of your marrying Dorcas Edgelow is quite absurd. She wouldn’t look at you.”
“Why wouldn’t she? I am kind and amiable when I feel like it. I never lose my temper, though I may mislay it occasionally. I go to bed early at least once a week. I bear other people’s misfortunes with equanimity
. And I never tell anyone that he has a cold. I’d really make an admirable husband.”
“And your salary wouldn’t keep her in boots for a month.”
“Cousin Clorinda, you’ve been lying awake at three o’clock too often and too long. That is what is the matter with you.”
“Anyhow, I’m not going to talk or be talked to about that Edgelow puss,” said Cousin Clorinda decidedly. “The world is full of other subjects.”
“Don’t you believe it,” said Romney.
But Cousin Clorinda was pink and white and blue-draped adamant. She fed him royally, but not a word would she hear of or say of Sylvia. He went away disgruntled.
“You’ll be sorry when I’m dead,” he warned her.
But Cousin Clorinda sat back in her rocking-chair and laughed.
“The less we talk of her the more he’ll think of her,” she reflected. “If I had let him pour out all he wanted to tell me he’d have gone home empty, resolving to be sensible and eschew her and all her beguilements. Now he’s gone home determined to show me he can’t be shooed away. Besides,” added Cousin Clorinda, “he took a whole week before he came down to tell me about her. I am not going to put up with being ignored in that fashion by a young snip I pampered with cream while he was a baby!”
Chapter VI
There were some transactions between Miss Edgelow and Samuel whereby the former became possessed of two adored orange-hued kittens, fluffy morsels of fur and mischief that gambolled about her feet as she walked in the Edgelow garden and frisked after her in the Whispering Lane.
She did distracting things with them—at least Romney found them distracting. She cuddled them under her lovely chin and kissed the sun-warm tops of their round, velvety heads. Romney knew she was doing it deliberately, on purpose, out of malice aforethought to drive him crazy, and she very nearly succeeded in spite of his knowledge of her arts. Sometimes he gloomily wished he could wring the necks of those little beasts. Only a conviction that Samuel would get her more prevented him from putting them out of the way in some underhanded fashion.
After Many Years Page 17
