"Oh, I suppose so! Everybody was lovely to me, and I could have divided my dances. These Southerners are easy to love, aren"t they?
I find it very easy for me! And oh, Sophy, there"s to be a picnic day after to-morrow, at the Meade plantation, in my honor, if you please! We go by automobile.--I never thought I could get tired dancing, Sophy. But I am. Tired!"
"Go to bed and sleep it off."
"Did you have time to make out that grocery list? They"ve been overcharging us on b.u.t.ter."
"Yes: I finished it after Doctor Geddes left"
"Oh! He was here, then?" She yawned again.
"Yes. But somebody sent for him, and he had to cut his visit short."
Alicia frowned.
"I wonder he keeps so healthy, running out at all hours of the night; and heaven knows how he manages about meals! His cook told me that sometimes he has to rush away in the middle of a meal, and sometimes he misses one altogether."
"I remembered that, so I made him wait for a cup of coffee and an omelet."
She reached over and squeezed my hand. "You"re always thinking about other people"s comfort, Sophy." She paused, and looked at me half-questioningly:
"I wish he had somebody to look after him," she said in a low voice, "somebody like you." She added, as if to herself: "He takes two lumps of sugar in his coffee, one in his tea, wants dry toast, and likes his omelet _b.u.t.tered_."
And when I stared at her, she slipped nearer, and laid her cheek against mine.
"Sophy," in a soft whisper, "you"ve made up to me for my father and my mother, and for the sisters and brothers I never had. We"re all sorts and conditions of folks, aren"t we, Sophy?--but none like you, Sophy; not any one of them all like you!"
At that moment, through the open window, there stole in on the night air the faintest whisper of music. It wasn"t mournful, it wasn"t joyful, but both together; a singing voice, a crying voice, wild and sweet, part of the night and the trees and the wind, and part, I think, of the secretest something in the human heart. We had no idea where it came from; out of the sky, perhaps!
Somebody ran down-stairs, and a moment later the front door opened softly. The Author had heard, and was afoot. But even as he stepped outside, Ariel"s ghostly music ceased. There was nothing; n.o.body; only the night.
CHAPTER X
THE FOREST OF ARDEN
I had seen Alicia whirl away in the Meades" big car. I had seen the Westmacotes and Miss Emmeline off on what they termed a nature-hunt.
The Author and his secretary were up to the eyes in a new chapter; The Suffragist was spreading the glad tidings; and Riedriech and Schmetz had Luis Morenas in hand for the afternoon, visioning the United States of the World, while he s.n.a.t.c.hed sketches of the visionaries.
The Author, Mr. Johnson, and I, lunched together.
"Miss Smith," began The Author abruptly, "did you know this house was built by British and French master masons? No? Well, it was.
Judge Gatch.e.l.l"s father, grandfather, and great-grandfather were solicitors for this estate, and the judge at last very kindly allowed me to look through a great batch of papers in his possession. From these I discovered that one of the Hyndses visited England in 1727, joined the new lodge lately established there, and brought one of the brethren, an architect, back to America with him. Another came from France. These three planned and built this house, and did it pretty well, too.
"This house-builder, Walsingham Hynds, made his house a sort of lodge for the brethren, just as in later times his grandsons sheltered the brethren of those societies that fathered the American Revolution. Gatch.e.l.l tells me there is a legend of the master of Hynds House entertaining British officers and at the same time hiding the forfeited rebels they were hunting. I"d like to know,"
The Author added, reflectively, "where he hid them."
"An old house like this has dozens of places where one could be hidden without much danger of detection," remarked Mr. Johnson.
"I"m pretty sure of that," agreed The Author, emphatically.
"You should be, since you did a neat little bit of hiding on your own account," Mr. Johnson reminded him.
The Author was nettled. He had never found the paper lost out of the closet in his own room, though he had never given up a tentative search for it.
"Well, it"s confoundedly odd I never did such a thing before," he grumbled.
"What is odd is that I myself was waked out of my sleep that night by the most oppressive sense of misery and hopelessness I have ever experienced," Mr. Johnson said seriously. "It was so overpowering that it made me think of Saint Theresa"s description of her torment in that oven in the wall of h.e.l.l which had by kindly forethought on the part of the devil been arranged for her permanent tenancy. Of course, it was just a nightmare," he added, doubtfully; "or perhaps a fit of indigestion."
"Indigestion takes many forms," I remarked, as lightly as I could.
"And you must remember you"ve been warned that Hynds House is haunted. Why, the servants insist they"ve seen ol" Mis" Scarlett"s h"ant!"
"Ah!" nodded The Author. "And I smell a mysterious perfume, I walk in my sleep for the first and only time in my life, and I hide where it can"t be found a paper with an uncouth jingle and some dots on it, Johnson and I have the same nightmare. And I have heard footsteps. All hallucinations, of course! I will say this much for Hynds House: I never had a hallucination until I came here. By the way, did I merely imagine I heard a violin last night?"
"Oh, no: I heard it, too." Mr. Johnson looked at The Author with a concerned face. "You"re getting a bit off your nerves, Chief.
Anybody might play a violin."
"Anybody might, but few do play it as I thought I heard it played last night. Who"s the player, Miss Smith?"
"I haven"t the slightest idea. Alicia thinks it"s a spirit that lives in the c.r.a.pe-myrtle trees."
I was beginning to be aweary of The Author"s shrewd eyes and persistent questioning, and I was heartily glad when he had to go back to his work.
That was a gray and windless afternoon, and the house was full of those bluish shadows that belong to gray days; it was charged, even more than usual, with mystery: the whole atmosphere tingled with it as with electricity. I couldn"t read. I have never been able to play upon any musical instrument, much as I love music. I do not sing, either, except in a small-beer voice; and when I tried to sew I p.r.i.c.ked my fingers with the needle. I went into the kitchen, consulted with Mary Magdalen as to the evening"s dinner, weighed and measured such ingredients as she needed, saw that the two maids were following instructions, tried to make friends with Beautiful Dog, until he howled with anguish and affliction and fled as from pestilence; and, unable to endure the house any longer, put on my hat and set out upon one of those aimless walks one takes in a land where all walks are lovely.
Automobiles came and went upon the public road, and to escape them I crossed a wooden foot-bridge spanning a weedy ditch, struck into a path bordering a wide field followed it aimlessly for a while, and before I knew it was in the Enchanted Wood.
The Enchanted Wood was carpeted with brown and sweet-smelling pine-needles, with green clumps of honeysuckle breaking out here and there in moist spots. There were ca.s.sena bushes, full of vivid scarlet berries; and crooked, gray-green cedars; and brown boles of pine-trees; and the shallowest, gayest, absurdest little thread of a brook giggling as it went about its important business of keeping a lip of woodland green.
It was very, very still there, somewhat as Gethsemane might have been, I fancy. I had wanted to be alone, that I might wrestle with my trouble. Yet now that I was facing it, my spirit quailed. Never had I felt so desolate, or dreamed that the human heart could bear such anguish.
If I had had the faintest warning, that I might have saved myself!
If I had never come to Hynds House at all, but had lived my busy, matter-of-fact, quiet life! Yet the idea of never having seen him, never having loved him, was more cruel than the cruellest suffering that loving entailed. It was harder even than the thought that Alicia and I cared for the same man, who perhaps cared for neither of us. At that I fell into an agony of weeping.
That pa.s.sed. I was spent and empty. But the calm of acceptance had come. I wasn"t to lose my grip, nor wear the willow. The idea of me, Sophy Smith, wearing the willow, aroused my English common-sense. I refused to be ridiculous.
And then I looked up and saw him coming toward me, his great dog trotting at his side. I pulled myself together, and smiled; for Boris was thrusting his friendly nose into my palm, and rubbing his fine head against my shoulder, and his master had dropped lightly down beside me.
I had not seen Mr. Jelnik for several days, and it struck me painfully that the man was pale, that his step dragged, and the brightness of his beauty was dimmed. He looked older, more careworn.
If he was glad to see me, it was at first a troubled gladness, for he started, and bit his lip. I wondered, not with jealousy, but with pain, if there was somebody, some beautiful and high-born lady, at sight of whom his heart might have leaped as mine did now. Was it, perhaps, to forget such a one that he had exiled himself?
"You are such a serene, restful little person!" he said presently, and a change came over his tired face; "and I am such a restless one! You soothe me like a cool hand on a hot forehead."
"Restless?--you? Why, I thought you the serenest person I had ever known."
His mocking, gentle smile curved his lips. But his eyes were not laughing. For a fleeting, flashing second the whirlpools and the depths were bared in them. Then the veil fell, the surface lights came out and danced.