Verrian thought he might ask the daughter of the house, "And if I don"t forget, am I engaged to spend Christmas week with her?"
The girl laughed. "If she doesn"t forget, you are. But you"ll have a good time. She"ll know how to manage that." Other guests kept coming up to take leave, and Verrian, who did not want to go just yet, was retired to the background, where the girl"s voice, thrown over her shoulder at him, reached him in the words, as gay as if they were the best of the joke, "It"s on the Sound."
The inference was that Mrs. Westangle"s place was on the Sound; and that was all Verrian knew about it till he got her little note. Mrs.
Westangle knew how to write in a formless hand, but she did not know how to spell, and she had thought it best to have a secretary who could write well and spell correctly. Though, as far as literacy was concerned, she was such an almost incomparably ignorant woman, she had all the knowledge the best society wants, or, if she found herself out of any, she went and bought some; she was able to buy almost anything.
Verrian thanked the secretary for remembering him, in the belief that he was directly thanking Mrs. Westangle, whose widespread consciousness his happiness in accepting did not immediately reach; and in the very large house party, which he duly joined under her roof, he was aware of losing distinctiveness almost to the point of losing ident.i.ty. This did not quite happen on the way to Belford, for, when he went to take his seat in the drawing-room car, a girl in the chair fronting him put out her hand with the laugh of Miss Macroyd.
"She did remember you!" she cried out. "How delightful! I don"t see how she ever got onto you"--she made the slang her own--"in the first place, and she must have worked hard to be sure of you since."
Verrian hung up his coat and put his suit-case behind his chair, the porter having put it where he could not wheel himself vis-a-vis with the girl. "She took all the time there was," he answered. "I got my invitation only the day before yesterday, and if I had been in more demand, or had a worse conscience--"
"Oh, do say worse conscience! It"s so much more interesting," the girl broke in.
"--I shouldn"t have the pleasure of going to Seasands with you now,"
he concluded, and she gave her laugh. "Do I understand that simply my growing fame wouldn"t have prevailed with her?"
Anything seemed to make Miss Macroyd laugh. "She couldn"t have cared about that, and she wouldn"t have known. You may be sure that it was a social question with her after the personal question was settled. She must have liked your looks!" Again Miss Macroyd laughed.
"On that side I"m invulnerable. It"s only a literary vanity to be soothed or to be wounded that I have," Verrian said.
"Oh, there wouldn"t be anything personal in her liking your looks. It would be merely deciding that personally you would do," Miss Macroyd laughed, as always, and Verrian put on a mock seriousness in asking:
"Then I needn"t be serious if there should happen to be anything so Westangular as a Mr. Westangle?"
"Not the least in the world."
"But there is something?"
"Oh, I believe so. But not probably at Seasands."
"Is that her house?"
"Yes. Every other name had been used, and she couldn"t say Soundsands."
"Then where would the Mr. Westangular part more probably be found?"
"Oh, in Montana or Mesopotamia, or any of those places. Don"t you know about him? How ignorant literary people can be! Why, he was the Amalgamated Clothespin. You haven"t heard of that?"
She went on to tell him, with gay digressions, about the invention which enabled Westangle to buy up the other clothes-pins and merge them in his own--to become a commercial octopus, clutching the throats of other clothespin inventors in the tentacles of the Westangle pin. "But he isn"t in clothespins now. He"s in mines, and banks, and steamboats, and railroads, and I don"t know what all; and Mrs. Westangle, the second of her name, never was in clothespins."
Miss Macroyd laughed all through her talk, and she was in a final burst of laughing when the train slowed into Stamford. There a girl came into the car trailing her skirts with a sort of vivid debility and overturning some minor pieces of hand-baggage which her draperies swept out of their shelter beside the chairs. She had to take one of the seats which back against the wall of the state-room, where she must face the whole length of the car. She sat weakly fallen back in the chair and motionless, as if almost unconscious; but after the train had begun to stir she started up, and with a quick flinging of her veil aside turned to look out of the window. In the flying instant Verrian saw a colorless face with pinched and sunken eyes under a worn-looking forehead, and a withered mouth whose lips parted feebly.
On her part, Miss Macroyd had doubtless already noted that the girl was, with no show of expensiveness, authoritatively well gowned and personally hatted. She stared at her, and said, "What a very hunted and escaping effect."
"She does look rather-fugitive," Verrian agreed, staring too.
"One might almost fancy--an asylum."
"Yes, or a hospital."
They continued both to stare at her, helpless for what ever different reasons to take their eyes away, and they were still interested in her when they heard her asking the conductor, "Must I change and take another train before we get to Belford? My friends thought--"
"No, this train stops at Southfield," the conductor answered, absently biting several holes into her drawing-room ticket.
"Can she be one of us?" Miss Macroyd demanded, in a dramatic whisper.
"She might be anything," Verrian returned, trying instantly, with a whir of his inventive machinery, to phrase her. He made a sort of luxurious failure of it, and rested content with her face, which showed itself now in profile and now fronted him in full, and now was restless and now subsided in a look of delicate exhaustion. He would have said, if he would have said anything absolute, that she was a person who had something on her mind; at instants she had that hunted air, pa.s.sing at other instants into that air of escape. He discussed these appearances with Miss Macroyd, but found her too frankly disputatious; and she laughed too much and too loud.
VIII.
At Southfield, where they all descended, Miss Macroyd promptly possessed herself of a groom, who came forward tentatively, touching his hat.
"Miss Macroyd?" she suggested.
"Yes, miss," the man said, and led the way round the station to the victoria which, when Miss Macroyd"s maid had mounted to the place beside her, had no room; for any one else.
Verrian accounted for her activity upon the theory of her quite justifiable wish not to arrive at Seasands with a young man whom she might then have the effect of having voluntarily come all the way with; and after one or two circuits of the station it was apparent to him that he was not to have been sent for from Mrs. Westangle"s, but to have been left to the chances of the local drivers and their vehicles. These were reduced to a single carryall and a frowsy horse whose rough winter coat recalled the aspect of his species in the period following the glacial epoch. The mud, as of a world-thaw, encrusted the wheels and curtains of the carryall.
Verrian seized upon it and then went into the waiting-room, where he had left his suit-case. He found the stranger there in parley with the young woman in the ticket-office about a conveyance to Mrs. Westangle"s. It proved that he had secured not only the only thing of the sort, but the only present hope of any other, and in the hard case he could not hesitate with distress so interesting. It would have been brutal to drive off and leave that girl there, and it would have been a vulgar flourish to put the entire vehicle at her service. Besides, and perhaps above all, Verrian had no idea of depriving himself of such a chance as heaven seemed to offer him.
He advanced with the delicacy of the highest-bred hero he could imagine, and said, "I am going to Mrs. Westangle"s, and I"m afraid I"ve got the only conveyance--such as it is. If you would let me offer you half of it? Mr. Verrian," he added, at the light of acceptance instantly kindling in her face, which flushed thinly, as with an afterglow of invalidism.
"Why, thank you; I"m afraid I must, Mr. Merriam," and Verrian was aware of being vexed at her failure to catch his name; the name of Verrian ought to have been unmistakable. "The young lady in the office says there won"t be another, and I"m expected promptly." She added, with a little tremor of the lip, "I don"t understand why Mrs. Westangle--" But then she stopped.
Verrian interpreted for her: "The sea-horses must have given out at Seasands. Or probably there"s some mistake," and he reflected bitterly upon the selfishness of Miss Macroyd in grabbing that victoria for herself and her maid, not considering that she could not know, and has no business to ask, whether this girl was going to Mrs. Westangle"s, too. "Have you a check?" he asked. "I think our driver could find room for something besides my valise. Or I could have it come--"
"Not at all," the girl said. "I sent my trunk ahead by express."
A frowsy man, to match the frowsy horse, looked in impatiently. "Any other baggage?"
"No," Verrian answered, and he led the way out after the vanishing driver. "Our chariot is back here in hiding, Miss--"
"Shirley," she said, and trailed before him through the door he opened.
He felt that he did not do it as a man of the world would have done it, and in putting her into the ramshackle carryall he knew that he had not the grace of the sort of man who does nothing else. But Miss Shirley seemed to have grace enough, of a feeble and broken sort, for both, and he resolved to supply his own lack with sincerity. He therefore set his jaw firmly and made its upper angles jut sharply through his clean-shaven cheeks. It was well that Miss Shirley had some beauty to spare, too, for Verrian had scarcely enough for himself. Such distinction as he had was from a sort of intellectual tenseness which showed rather in the gaunt forms of his face than in the gray eyes, heavily lashed above and below, and looking serious but dull with their rank, black brows. He was chewing a cud of bitterness in the accusal he made himself of having forced Miss Shirley to give her name; but with that interesting personality at his side, under the same tattered and ill-scented j.a.panese goat-skin, he could not refuse to be glad, with all his self-blame.
"I"m afraid it"s rather a long drive-for you, Miss Shirley," he ventured, with a glance at her face, which looked very little under her hat. "The driver says it"s five miles round through the marshes."
"Oh, I shall not mind," she said, courageously, if not cheerfully, and he did not feel authorized further to recognize the fact that she was an invalid, or at best a convalescent.
"These wintry tree-forms are fine, though," he found himself obliged to conclude his apology, rather irrelevantly, as the wheels of the rattling, and tilting carry all crunched the surface of the road in the succession of jerks responding to the alternate walk and gallop of the horse.
"Yes, they are," Miss Shirley answered, looking around with a certain surprise, as if seeing them now for the first time. "So much variety of color; and that burnished look that some of them have." The trees, far and near, were giving their tones and l.u.s.tres in the low December sun.
"Yes," he said, "it"s decidedly more refined than the autumnal coloring we brag of."