She was a trifle pale as she sank back on her knees in the sand. Smith was paler.
After both her gloved hands had rested across his palm for five full minutes, his fingers closed over them, tightly, and he leaned forward a little. She, too, swayed forward a trifle. Her eyes were closed when he kissed her.
Now, whatever misgivings and afterthoughts the Lady Alene Innesly may have had, she was nevertheless certain that to resist Smith was to fight against the stars in their courses. For not only was she in the toils of an American, but more hopeless still, an American who chronicled the most daring and headlong idiosyncrasies of the sort of young men of whom he was very certainly an irresistible example.
To her there was something Shakespearean about the relentless sequence of events since the moment when she had first succ.u.mbed to the small, oblong pink package, and her first American novel.
And, thinking Shakespeareanly as she stood in the purple evening light, with his arm clasping her waist, she looked up at him from her charming abstraction:
""If "twere done,"" she murmured, ""when "tis done, then "twere well it were done quickly."" And then, gazing deep into his eyes, a n.o.ble idiom of her adopted country fell from her lips:
"Dearest," she said, "my father won"t do a thing to you."
And so she ran away with him to Miami where the authorities, civil and religious, are accustomed to quick action.
It was only fifty miles by train, and preliminary telephoning did the rest.
The big chartered launch that left for Verbena Inlet next morning poked its nose out of the rainbow mist into the full glory of the rising sun.
Her golden head lay on his shoulder.
Sideways, with delicious indolence, she glanced at a small boat which they were pa.s.sing close aboard. A fat gentleman, a fat lady, and a boatman occupied the boat. The fat gentleman was fast to a tarpon.
Up out of the dazzling Atlantic shot three hundred pounds of quivering silver. Splash!
"Why, Dad!" exclaimed the girl.
Her father and mother looked over their shoulders at her in wooden amazement.
"We are married----" called out their pretty daughter across the sunlit water. "I will tell you all about it when you land your fish. Look sharp, Dad! Mind your reel!"
"Who is that d.a.m.ned rascal?" demanded the Duke.
"My husband, Dad! Don"t let him get away!--the fish, I mean. Put the drag on! Check!"
Said his Grace of Pillchester in a voice of mellow thunder:
"If I were not fast to my first tarpon----"
"Reel in!" cried Smith sharply, "reel or you lose him!"
The Duke reeled with all the abandon of a squirrel in a wheel.
"Dearest," said Mrs. John Smith to her petrified mother, "we will see you soon at Verbena. And _don"t_ let Dad over-play that fish. He always over-plays a salmon, you know."
The d.u.c.h.ess folded her fat hands and watched her departing offspring until the chartered launch was a speck on the horizon. Then she looked at her husband.
"Fancy!" she said.
"Nevertheless," remarked the youthful novelist, coldly, "there is nothing on earth as ign.o.ble as a best-seller."
"I wonder," ventured Duane, "whether you know which books actually do sell the best."
"Or which books of bygone days were the best-sellers?"
"Some among them are still best-sellers," added Athalie.
"A truly important book----" began the novelist, but Athalie interrupted him:
"O solemn child," she said, "write on!--and thank the G.o.ds for their important gifts to you of hand and mind! So that you keep tired eyes awake that otherwise would droop to brood on pain or sorrow you have done well; and what you have written to this end will come nearer being important than anything you ever write."
"True, by the nine muses!" exclaimed Stafford with emphasis. Athalie glanced at him out of sweetly humourous eyes.
"There is a tenth muse," she said. "Did you never hear of her?"
"Never! Where did you discover her, Athalie?"
"Where I discover many, many things, my friend."
"In your crystal?" I said. She nodded slowly while the sweetmeat was dissolving in her mouth.
Through the summer silence a bell here and there in the dusky city sounded the hour.
"The tenth muse," she repeated, "and I believe there are other sisters, also. Many a star is suspected before its unseen existence is proven....
Please--a gla.s.s of water?"
XII
She sipped the water pensively as we all returned to our places. Then, placing the partly empty gla.s.s beside her jar of sweetmeats, she opened her incomparable lips.
It is a fine thing when a young man, born to travel the speedway of luxury, voluntarily leaves it to hew out a pathway for himself through life. Brown thought so, too. And at twenty-four he resolutely graduated from Harvard, stepped out into the world, and looked about him very sternly.
All was not well with the world. Brown knew it. He was there to correct whatever was wrong. And he had chosen Good Literature as the vehicle for self expression.
Now, the nine sister G.o.ddesses are born flirts; and every one of them immediately glanced sideways at Brown, who was a nice young man with modesty, principles, and a deep and reverent belief in Good Literature.
The nine daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne seemed very attractive to him until the tenth and most recent addition to the Olympian family sauntered by with a flirt of her narrow skirt--the jade!
One glance into the starry blue wells of her baby eyes bowled him over.
Henceforth she was to be his steady--Thalomene, a casual daughter of Zeus, and muse of all that is sacredly obvious in the literature of modern realism.
From early infancy Brown"s had been a career of richest promise. His mother"s desk was full of his earlier impressions of life. He had, in course of time, edited his school paper, his college paper; and, as an undergraduate, he had appeared in the contributor"s columns of various periodicals.
His was not only a wealthy but a cultivated lineage as well. The love of literature was born in him.