"I don"t know anything," said Susan, feeling it true. "Well," he said gaily, "we"ll read them all!"
Susan presently poured his tea; her guest wheeling his great leather chair so that its arm touched the arm of her own.
"You make me feel all thumbs, watching me so!" she protested.
"I like to watch you," he answered undisturbed. "Here, we"ll put this plate on the arm of my chair,--so. Then we can both use it. Your scones on that side, and mine on this, and my b.u.t.ter-knife between the two, like Prosper Le Gai"s sword, eh?"
Susan"s color heightened suddenly; she frowned. He was a man of the world, of course, and a married man, and much older than she, but somehow she didn"t like it. She didn"t like the laughter in his eyes.
There had been just a hint of this--this freedom, in his speech a few nights ago, but somehow in Billy"s presence it had seemed harmless--
"And why the blush?" he was askingly negligently, yet watching her closely, as if he rather enjoyed her confusion.
"You know why," Susan said, meeting his eyes with a little difficulty.
"I know why. But that"s nothing to blush at. a.n.a.lyze it. What is there in that to embarra.s.s you?"
"I don"t know," Susan said, awkwardly, feeling very young.
"Life is a very beautiful thing, my child," he said, almost as if he were rebuking her, "and the closer we come to the big heart of life the more wonderful things we find. No--no--don"t let the people about you make you afraid of life." He finished his cup of tea, and she poured him another. "I think it"s time to transplant you," he said then, pleasantly, "and since last night I"ve been thinking of a very delightful and practical way to do it. Lillian--Mrs. Bocqueraz has a very old friend in New York in Mrs. Gifford Curtis--no, you don"t know the name perhaps, but she"s a very remarkable woman--an invalid. All the world goes to her teas and dinners, all the world has been going there since Booth fell in love with her, and Patti--when she was in her prime!--spent whole Sunday afternoons singing to her! You"ll meet everyone who"s at all worth while there now, playwrights, and painters, and writers, and musicians. Her daughters are all married to prominent men; one lives in Paris, one in London, two near her; friends keep coming and going. It"s a wonderful family. Well, there"s a Miss Concannon who"s been with her as a sort of companion for twenty years, but Miss Concannon isn"t young, and she confided to me a few months ago that she needed an a.s.sistant,--someone to pour tea and write notes and play accompaniments---"
"A sort of Julie le Breton?" said Susan, with sparkling eyes. She resolved to begin piano practice for two hours a day to-morrow.
"I beg pardon? Yes--yes, exactly, so I"m going to write Lillian at once, and she"ll put the wheels in motion!"
"I don"t know what good angel ever made you think of ME," said Susan.
"Don"t you?" the man asked, in a low tone. There was a pause. Both stared at the fire. Suddenly Bocqueraz cleared his throat.
"Well!" he said, jumping up, "if this clock is right it"s after half-past six. Where are these good people?"
"Here they are--there"s the car coming in the gate now!" Susan said in relief. She ran out to the steps to meet them.
A day or two later, as she was pa.s.sing Ella"s half-open doorway, Ella"s voice floated out into the hall.
"That you, Susan? Come in. Will you do your fat friend a favor?" Ella, home again, had at once resumed her despotic control of the household.
She was lying on a couch at this moment, lazily waving a scribbled half sheet of paper over her head.
"Take this to Mrs. Pullet, Sue," said she, "and ask her to tell the cook, in some confidential moment, that there are several things written down here that he seems to have forgotten the existence of. I want to see them on the table, from time to time. While I was with the Crewes I was positively MORTIFIED at the memory of our meals! And from now on, while Mr. Bocqueraz"s here, we"ll be giving two dinners a week."
"While--?" Susan felt a delicious, a terrifying weakness run like a wave from head to feet.
"He"s going to be here for a month or two!" Ella announced complacently. "It was all arranged last night. I almost fell off my feet when he proposed it. He says he"s got some work to finish up, and he thinks the atmosphere here agrees with him. Kate Stanlaws turned a lovely pea-green, for they were trying to get him to go with them to Alaska. He"ll have the room next to Mamma"s, with the round porch, and the big room off the library for a study. I had them clear everything out of it, and Ken"s going to send over a desk, and chair, and so on.
And do try to do everything you can to make him comfortable, Sue.
Mamma"s terribly pleased that he wants to come," finished Ella, making a long arm for her novel, "But of course he and I made an instant hit with each other!"
"Oh, of course I will!" Susan promised. She went away with her list, pleasure and excitement and a sort of terror struggling together in her heart.
Pleasure prevailed, however, when Stephen Bocqueraz was really established at "High Gardens," and the first nervous meeting was safely over. Everybody in the house was the happier and brighter for his coming, and Susan felt it no sin to enjoy him with the rest. Meal times became very merry; the tea-hour, when he would come across the hall from his workroom, tired, relaxed, hungry, was often the time of prolonged and delightful talks, and on such evenings as Ella left her cousin free of dinner engagements, even Emily had to admit that his reading, under the drawing-room lamp, was a rare delight.
Sometimes he gave himself a half-holiday, and joined Emily and Susan in their driving or motoring. On almost every evening that he did not dine at home he was downstairs in time for a little chat with Susan over the library fire. They were never alone very long, but they had a dozen brief encounters every day, exchanged a dozen quick, significant glances across the breakfast table, or over the book that he was reading aloud.
Susan lived in a dazed, wide-eyed state of reasonless excitement and perilous delight. It was all so meaningless, she a.s.sured her pretty vision in the mirror, as she arranged her bright hair,--the man was married, and most happily married; he was older than she; he was a man of honor! And she, Susan Brown, was only playing this fascinating game exceptionally well. She had never flirted before and had been rather proud of it. Well, she was flirting now, and proud of that, too! She was quite the last girl in the world to fall SERIOUSLY in love, with her eyes wide open, in so extremely undesirable a direction! This was not falling in love at all. Stephen Bocqueraz spoke of his wife half a dozen times a day. Susan, on her part, found plenty of things about him to dislike! But he was clever, and--yes, and fascinating, and he admired her immensely, and there was no harm done so far, and none to be done. Why try to define the affair by cut-and-dried rules; it was quite different from anything that had ever happened before, it stood in a cla.s.s quite by itself.
The intangible bond between them strengthened every day. Susan, watching him when Ella"s friends gathered about him, watching the honest modesty with which he evaded their empty praises, their attempts at lionizing, could not but thrill to know that HER praise stirred him, that the deprecatory, indifferent air was dropped quickly enough for HER! It was intoxicating to know, as she did know, that he was thinking, as she was, of what they would say when they next had a moment together; that, whatever she wore, he found her worth watching; that, whatever her mood, she never failed to amuse and delight him! Her rather evasive beauty grew more definite under his eyes; she bubbled with fun and nonsense. "You little fool!" Ella would laugh, with an approving glance toward Susan at the tea-table, and "Honestly, Sue, you were killing tonight!" Emily, who loved to be amused, said more than once.
One day Miss Brown was delegated to carry a message to Mr. Bocqueraz in his study. Mrs. Saunders was sorry to interrupt his writing, but a very dear old friend was coming to dinner that evening, and would Cousin Stephen come into the drawing-room for a moment, before he and Ella went out?
Susan tripped demurely to the study door and rapped.
"Come in!" a voice shouted. Susan turned the k.n.o.b, and put her head into the room. Mr. Bocqueraz, writing at a large table by the window, and facing the door across its shining top, flung down his pen, and stretched back luxuriously in his chair.
"Well, well!" said he, smiling and blinking. "Come in, Susanna!"
"Mrs. Saunders wanted me to ask you---"
"But come in! I"ve reached a tight corner; couldn"t get any further anyway!" He pushed away his papers. "There are days, you know, when you"re not even on bowing acquaintance with your characters."
He looked so genial, so almost fatherly, so contentedly lazy, leaning back in his big chair, the winter sunshine streaming in the window behind him, and a dozen jars of fragrant winter flowers making the whole room sweet, that Susan came in, unhesitatingly. It was the mood of all his moods that she liked best; interested, interesting, impersonal.
"But I oughtn"t--you"re writing," said Susan, taking a chair across the table from him, and laying bold hands on his ma.n.u.script, nevertheless.
"What a darling hand you write!" she observed, "and what enormous margins. Oh, I see, you write notes in the margins--corrections?"
"Exactly!" He was watching her between half-closed lids, with lazy pleasure.
""The only," in a loop," said Susan, "that"s not much of a note! I could have written that myself," she added, eying him sideways through a film of drifting hair.
"Very well, write anything you like!" he offered amusedly.
"Oh, honestly?" asked Susan with dancing eyes. And, at his nod, she dipped a pen in the ink, and began to read the story with a serious scowl.
"Here!" she said suddenly, "this isn"t at all sensible!" And she read aloud:
"So crystal clear was the gaze with which he met her own, that she was aware of an immediate sense, a vaguely alarming sense, that her confidence must be made with concessions not only to what he had told her--and told her so exquisitely as to indicate his knowledge of other facts from which those he chose to reveal were deliberately selected--but also to what he had not--surely the most significant detail of the whole significant episode--so chosen to reveal!"
"Oh, I see what it means, when I read it aloud," said Susan, cheerfully honest. "But at first it didn"t seem to make sense!"
"Go ahead. Fix it anyway you like."
"Well---" Susan dimpled. "Then I"ll--let"s see--I"ll put "surely" after "also,"" she announced, "and end it up, "to what he had not so chosen to reveal!" Don"t you think that"s better?"
"Clearer, certainly.--On that margin, Baby."
"And will you really let it stay that way?" asked the baby, eying the altered page with great satisfaction.
"Oh, really. You will see it so in the book."
His quiet certainty that these scattered pages would surely be a book some day thrilled Susan, as power always thrilled her. Just as she had admired Th.o.r.n.y"s old scribbled prices, years before, so she admired this quiet mastery now. She asked Stephen Bocqueraz questions, and he told her of his boyhood dreams, of the early struggles in the big city, of the first success.