"Not particularly, since you ask me," replied Mrs. Falkener, not deigning even to look at the poet, but sweeping her head about slowly as if scanning vast horizons.
"The rational doesn"t attract you," Lefferts went on cheerfully. "Well, then we must try something else. How about the fantastic-sardonical, or the comic-fantastical, or even better, the--"
But Mrs. Falkener, uttering a slight exclamation of impatience, moved away.
Lefferts turned to Crane, with his unruffled smile.
"She doesn"t like me," he said.
"Cora," he added, very slightly raising his voice so as to attract the attention of Miss Falkener, who immediately approached them, "Cora, why is it your mother hates me so much?"
"She certainly does," returned Cora frankly. "You know, Leonard, you are really rather stupid with her. You always begin by saying things she doesn"t understand, and of course no one likes that."
Lefferts sighed.
"You see, she stimulates me so tremendously. One gets used to just merely boring or depressing one"s friends, but to be actively hated is exciting. People who have lived through blood feuds and tong wars tell you that there is no excitement comparable to it. I feel a little like the leader of a tong whenever I meet Mrs. Falkener. Cora, would you belong to my tong, or would you feel loyalty demanded your remaining in your mother"s?"
They went in to luncheon before Cora was obliged to answer, and here Lefferts contrived to sit next to her by the comparatively simple expedient of making the man who had already seated himself at her side get up and yield him the place.
Crane, sitting between his host and another man, enjoyed a period of quiet. Without his exactly arranging it, a definite plan for the afternoon was growing up in his mind--a plan which, it must be confessed, had been first suggested by Tucker"s idea of staying at home, a plan based on a vision of Jane-Ellen and Willoughby holding the kitchen in solitary state.
Crane knew that luncheons at Eliot"s were long ceremonies. Food was served and eaten slowly, you sat a long time over coffee and cigars, and at the smallest encouragement, Eliot would bring out his grandfather"s Madeira. And after that you were unusually lucky if you escaped a visit to the stables, and that meant the whole afternoon.
So he awaited a good opportunity after lunch was over, when Tucker, under pretense of reading a newspaper, had sunk into a comfortable doze, and Mrs. Falkener, while carrying on a fairly connected conversation with Eliot, was really concentrated on preventing Lefferts from taking Cora into another room. This was Crane"s chance. He slipped into the hall, found his coat and hat, unearthed his chauffeur and motor, and drove quickly home, sending back the car at once to wait for the others.
He did not, as his impulse was, go in the kitchen way. He did not want to do anything that might annoy Jane-Ellen. At the same time, he rebelled at the notion of having always to offer an excuse for seeing her, as if he were so superior a being that he had to explain how he could stoop to the level of her society. He wanted to say frankly that he had come home because he wanted more than anything in the world to see her again.
The first thing he noticed as he went up the steps of the piazza was Willoughby sleeping in the warm afternoon sun. Then he was aware of the sound of a victrola playing dance music. The hall-door stood wide open; he looked in. Smithfield and Jane-Ellen were dancing.
Though no dancer himself, Crane had never been aware of any prejudice on the subject; indeed, he had sometimes thought that those who protested were more dangerously suggestive than the dances themselves. But now he felt a wave of protest sweep over him; the closeness, the ident.i.ty of intention, seemed to him an intolerable form of intimacy.
The two were quite unconscious of his presence, and he stood there for several minutes, stood there, indeed, until Jane-Ellen"s hair fell down and she had to stop to rearrange it. She looked very pretty as she stood panting and putting it up again, but she exerted no attraction upon Crane. Disgust, he thought, was all he now felt. One did not, after all, as he told himself, enter into compet.i.tion with one"s own butler.
He went quietly away, ordered a horse and went for a long ride. A man not very easily moved emotionally, he had never experienced the sensation of jealousy, and he now supposed himself to have reached as calm a judgment as any in his life. Everything he had ever heard to Jane-Ellen"s discredit, every intimation of Tucker"s, every sneer of Mrs. Falkener"s, came back to him now. He would like to have sent for her and in the most scathing terms told her what he thought of her--an interview which he imagined as very different from his former reproof.
But he decided it would be simpler and more dignified never to notice her in any way again. On this decision he at last turned his horse"s head homeward.
Smithfield let him in, as calm and imperturbable as ever.
"Your afternoon been satisfactory, Smithfield?" inquired his employer.
Smithfield stared.
"I beg pardon, sir?"
"Have you succeeded in finding a boy to replace Brindlebury?"
The butler"s face cleared.
"Oh, yes, I believe I have--not a boy, exactly, quite an elderly man, but one who promises to do, sir."
"Good." Crane turned away, but the man followed him.
"Miss Falkener asked me to tell you when you came in, sir, that she would be glad of a word with you. She"s in your office."
Crane stood absolutely still for a second or two, and as he stood, his jaw slowly set, as he took a resolution. Then he opened the door of his office and went in.
Two personalities sometimes advance to a meeting with intentions as opposite as those of two trains on a single track. Crane and Cora were both too much absorbed in their own aims to observe the signals of the other.
"Cora," began Crane, with all the solemnity of which the two syllables were capable.
"Oh, Burton," cried the girl, "why did you leave Mr. Eliot"s like that?
It has worried me so much. Did anything happen to annoy you? What was it?"
"I sent the car right back for you."
"It wasn"t the car I wanted."
Crane began at once to feel guilty, the form of egotism hardest to eradicate from the human heart.
"I"m sorry if I seemed rude, my dear Cora. I thought you were settled and content with Lefferts. I did not suppose any one would notice--"
"Your absence? Oh, Burt!"
He became aware of a suppressed excitement, an imminent outburst of some sort. A sudden terror swept over him, terror of the future, of the deed he was about to do, terror even of this strange and utterly unknown woman whom he was about to make a part of his daily life, as long as days existed. For a second he had an illusion that he had never seen, never spoken to her before, and as he struggled against this queer abnormality, he heard that in set, clear and not ill-chosen terms he was asking her to marry him.
She clasped her hands together.
"Oh, it"s just what I was trying to prevent."
"To prevent?"
"Burt, I"ve treated you so badly."
He looked at her without expression.
"Well, let"s get the facts before we decide on that."
The facts, Cora intimated, were terrible. She was already engaged.
"To Lefferts?"
She nodded tragically.
Crane felt a strong inclination to laugh. The world took on a new aspect. Reality returned with a rush, and with it a strong, friendly affection for Cora. He hardly heard her long and pa.s.sionate self-justification. She knew, she said, that she had given him every encouragement. Well, the truth was she had simply made up her mind to marry him; nothing would have pleased her mother more, but she did not intend to shelter herself behind obedience to her mother; she had intended to do it for her own ends.
"That was what I tried to tell you last evening in the garden, Burt. I deliberately schemed to marry you, but you mustn"t think I did not like and admire you, in a way--"
"There"s only one way, Cora."