"I had no business being in the way," I laughed, noting first her glowing color, her violet eyes--amazingly fine eyes they were--her fair hair with its golden glint, her plain black gown with lawn collar and wristbands. It was her age, however, that roused me to instant speculation. Twenty-five, I decided, was a maximum; more likely she was not more than twenty-two, and if I had been told that eighteen was the total of her years I shouldn"t have had the heart to dispute it.
"Bob Singleton," I said and stupidly added, "and you are Mrs. Bashford?"
unable for the life of me to avoid turning the statement into an inquiry.
"I am your aunt Alice," she said with a smile, putting out her hand.
"Down, Rex!" she commanded the dancing terrier; "lie down; school"s over now"; whereupon Rex obediently sprawled in the sand and began trying to swallow the ball.
"Wasn"t that silly of me to try to kill you the first time we met!" Her eyes danced with merriment. "I didn"t know, of course, that any one was about. But you made a very nice catch of it! I had expected to receive you most formally in the drawing-room, but this really serves very well.
That tree down yonder is inviting; suppose we stay out here and talk a bit."
This struck me as the pleasantest thing imaginable, though I was still dazed and my tongue seemed to have died in my mouth. This girl, this wholly charming and delightful young woman, was the monstrous being I had conjectured as the globe-trotting widow who had kidnapped and married my uncle! Not only had she married my uncle Bash and in due course buried him; she had been a widow when she married him! I furtively studied her face--a face that invited scrutiny--and her candid eyes that met my gaze of wonder and frank admiration easily and without a trace of self-consciousness. On the third finger of her left hand was a slender band of gold. The thing was staggering, bewildering. She was clearly anxious to be friendly, but nothing that I had thought of saying to her fitted the situation.
"In the first place," I finally began, "I must apologize most humbly for the earnest efforts of the servants to murder you last night. Mr.
Torrence had promised to let me know when you would reach here, but he must have forgotten it. I had motored to a friend"s house to dine and didn"t get back until the mischief was done. I"m very sorry. You must have thought you had driven into a camp of savages!"
"Not for worlds would I have missed that," she exclaimed with a merry laugh. "It was perfectly delicious! And it was all my fault. I meant to remain a day at Hartford, you know, and send a message to Mr. Torrence from there, but I found that by pushing on I could reach here yesterday.
Then the machine I hired showed every weakness that motors are subject to and we were hours later than the Hartford garage man promised. And you know we English always expect strange things to happen in America. I don"t understand yet why those people at the gates were so jolly anxious to kill us; but it doesn"t matter; you would only spoil the joke by explaining it."
However, I did my best--it was a weak attempt--to explain the nervousness of the veteran servants and their display of violence. Her arrival made it likely that we should soon know more about the "parties"
whose visits and inquiries had so alarmed Antoine and his comrades. Now that I saw Mrs. Bashford the idea that any one could entertain malevolent designs upon her was more preposterous than ever, and I resolved that she must be shielded from annoyances of every kind. I told her with all the humor I could throw into the recital of the drilling of the bell-hops and of the uncomfortable relations between the Allied forces and the Teutonic minority on the estate.
"It was dear of Mr. Bashford to provide a home for these people; wasn"t he really the kindest soul that ever lived?" she said softly.
She gazed wistfully seaward, and I saw the gleam of tears on her long lashes. My uncle had, then, meant something to her! No one, in speech or manner, could have suggested the adventuress less; Uncle Bash was a gentleman, a man of aesthetic tastes, and the girl was adorable. More remarkable things had happened in the history of love and marriage than that two such persons, meeting in a far corner of the world, would honestly care for each other. My respect for Uncle Bash grew; he had married the most attractive girl in the world, and here she was with the bloom of her girlhood upon her, tripping alone through a world that might have been created merely that she might confer light and cheer upon it.
"You stopped at Hartford," I began, breaking a long silence. "You have friends there----?"
"Not one! I had made a pious pilgrimage to Mark Twain"s last home at Redding, and, hearing that he had lived at Hartford, I came through there to render my fullest homage. He has always been one of my heroes, you know." She laughingly lifted her hands and counted upon her fingers--""The Jumping Frog," Tom and Huck, and "Mulberry Sellers," "The Prince and the Pauper," and "Pudd"nhead Wilson"! I know them all by heart!"
"Our introduction is complete," I said reverently. "Let"s consider ourselves old friends."
"I rather thought we"d understand each other," she said in her even, mellow tones. "You know, we had your photograph out East--a very good one, it seems--so I had an idea of what you looked like."
"The photograph gave you an unfair advantage! And I didn"t know Uncle Bash carried one away with him."
"He was very fond of you," she said gravely. "He was very proud that you had gone into the war."
"I am glad to hear that; I thought he disapproved of me for refusing to go into business. He offered me a substantial interest before he sold out."
"I know that; but I think he liked you rather better for refusing it.
Business with him was merely a means to an end. And it was doubly sad that he should die just when he was free to enjoy the beautiful things he loved."
It was at the tip of my tongue to say that the loss of her companionship was even more grievous; but nothing in her manner invited such a comment. Her grave moods were to be respected, and she talked for some time of Uncle Bash"s life in the East, of his short illness and quite unexpected death.
"But I"m keeping you," she exclaimed suddenly, jumping down from the wall. "And I must finish my unpacking."
As we walked to the house I answered her questions about the neighborhood, and promised to telephone Torrence immediately of her arrival.
"You will have luncheon with us--or maybe dinner would be better--or both? Antoine told me of your bachelor establishment, but eating alone is bad for the digestion. I shall think you resent my coming if you don"t dine at the house every day. Mrs. Farnsworth--my friend and companion--is a very interesting woman. I am sure you will like her."
The information that she was protected in her youthful widowhood by a companion was imparted neatly.
"It was really much nicer, meeting this way," she said, giving me her hand. "We shall expect you at seven."
I found them on the veranda, which had been transformed since my last glimpse of it. Rugs, wicker furniture, wall-pockets of flowers, and paper lanterns dropped over the electric lights gave it the appearance of a prettily set scene. She came toward me, a slender figure in white.
She seemed taller in white; as she took a few steps toward me, I was aware of a stateliness I had missed at the sh.o.r.e. A queenly young person, but as unaffectedly cordial and friendly as in the bright morning sunlight.
"Mrs. Farnsworth, Mr. Singleton."
Mrs. Farnsworth was a pleasant-faced, white-haired woman with remarkably fine, dark eyes. If the positions had been changed--if Mrs. Farnsworth had been my uncle"s choice of a wife, the situation would have been much more real. I instantly liked Mrs. Farnsworth. She uttered a few commonplaces in an uncommonplace tone without pausing in her knitting.
Mrs. Bashford had been knitting too, and as she sat down she took up her yarn and needles. It was a sweater, I think; it doesn"t matter. What matters is that her hands moved swiftly and deftly. Her manner of knitting was charming. She knew that I was watching her hands and remarked with a graceful turn of the head:
"For an English boy somewhere! I began by knitting for my brother and cousins, but"--her head bent lower--"that isn"t for me to do any more."
Her eyes, turned upon me for a moment, were bright with tears.
I was speaking of the splendid valor of Englishmen I had known in France when Antoine announced dinner.
It had been years since the house had known a woman"s hand, and it was astonishing how humanized it had become in a few hours. The long dining-room, always a bare, forbidding place, had been reduced to cosey proportions by screens, and a small round table replaced the ma.s.sive, oblong affair that always looked as though it had been built into the house by the carpenters.
"I found those lovely screens in the garret and thought we might as well enjoy them, and that Lang Yao jar you see on the sideboard oughtn"t to be hidden in the vault."
"I am sure Uncle Bash would be happy to know you care for these things so much," I said, noting that the white roses she had chosen for the jar--I knew the choice was hers--served to emphasize the deep red of its exquisite glaze.
"I am among the unelect," remarked Mrs. Farnsworth. "When I am told that such things are beautiful I am immediately convinced. I say they are beautiful, and that is enough."
"That has always been enough for me," I replied. "My uncle used to try to interest me, and I wore out a good many pairs of shoes following him through museums and salesrooms, but he gave me up when he found that my pagan soul was aroused by nothing but pottery idols. It wasn"t the pottery that interested me even there, but only the ugliest designs. I am a heathen!"
"I am gratified that you make the admission so frankly," said Mrs.
Farnsworth. "I have always been a great admirer of the heathen."
"I like them when they are nice," said Mrs. Bashford.
"Yes; I have found you very discriminating in your choice of the species, Alice. But, you know, Mr. Singleton, Alice and I never can agree as to just what a heathen is. All our squabbles have been about that. The old hymn pictured the heathen in his blindness bowing down to wood and stone; but I"m disposed to broaden my definition to include all who believe in fairies good or bad, and persons who honestly believe in signs, omens, and lucky stones and all who have the receipt of fern-seed and walk invisible--there"s Shakespeare for that. Some very good Christians are also very nice heathens: we mustn"t be narrow and bigoted about such things."
"I think," said Mrs. Bashford soberly, "that I have always believed in witches; and if I keep on believing I shall see one some day. We shall find anything in this world that we believe in hard enough. Now a witch--the kind of witch I have always expected to wake up and find flourishing a broom at me from the foot of my bed----"
She was talking very gravely, as though witches were the commonest topic of conversation, but finding my eyes turned upon her in frank wonder, she laughed at my amazement.
"Let us be honest with you, Mr. Singleton," Mrs. Farnsworth explained, "and tell you that we are just testing you. It may be a breach of hospitality, and you are all but a stranger, but we are curious to know whether you are of that small company of the favored of heaven who can play at being foolish without becoming idiotic. Alice is sometimes very near idiocy. You admit that, Alice!"
"I not only admit it, but I might even boast of it!" my aunt replied.
At the mention of witches I had caught Antoine crossing himself as he turned to the sideboard. I confess that I myself had been startled by the drift of the talk. Mrs. Farnsworth was far from being the grim duenna I had feared might be my aunt"s chaperon, and there was certainly nothing in her appearance to suggest that she was a believer in witches.
She and my aunt treated each other as though they were contemporaries, and it was Alice and Constance between them. As the talk ran exhaustively through the lore of witches and goblins I had hoped that one or the other would drop some clew as to the previous history of my amazing aunt. It was as plain as day that she and Mrs. Farnsworth indulged in whims for the joy of it, and her zest in the discussion of witches, carried on while Antoine served the table, lips tightly compressed, and with an exaggeration of his stately tread, was the more startling from the fact that my aunt"s companion was a woman of years, a handsome woman with a high-bred air who did not look at all like a person who would discuss witches as though they had been made the topic of the day by the afternoon newspapers. And when the shape of a witch"s chin became the immediate point of discussion I knew it was in Antoine"s mind that such conversation was unbecoming, an offense to the memory of Raymond Bashford. Mrs. Farnsworth"s brown eyes sparkled, and the color deepened in my aunt"s cheeks as we discoursed upon witches and the chins thereof. I had a friend in college who used to indulge in the same sort of piffling, but that my uncle"s widow and her elderly companion should delight in such absurdities bewildered me. I had been addressing my aunt as Mrs. Bashford--it seemed ridiculous to call her Aunt Alice--and in the heat of our argument as to whether witches are necessarily naughty and malign beings I had just uttered the "Mrs." when she bent toward me and said gravely and with no hint of archness: "Can"t we make it Alice and Bob? I think that would be a lot friendlier."
I experienced a curious flutter of the heart the first time I tried it, but after that it came very easily. I found it impossible to think of her in terms of auntship, and it was a relief to have the relationship waived. She was simply the jolliest, prettiest girl that had ever crossed my horizon, and to be talking to her across the table gave me thrills compared with which sliding out of clouds in an airplane is only a rocking-chair pastime for old men.
The veteran chef of the Tyringham had produced an excellent dinner, though the witch talk made Antoine a trifle nervous in serving it.