"Don"t! Please don"t! That"s brutal of you! But then, you are brutal, aren"t you? I suppose, if you weren"t, I shouldn"t-"
A little nondescript gesture expressed her thought better than she could have put it into words; and with this tribute to the caveman she slipped away again amid the brocades, pedestals, and old furniture.
CHAPTER III
Marillo Park, N. Y., is more than a park; it is a life. When a social correspondent registers the fact that Mr. and Mrs. Robert Bradley Collingham, Miss Edith Collingham, and Mr. Robert Bradley Collingham, Junior, have arrived at Collingham Lodge, Marillo Park, from their camp in the Adirondacks, their farm in Dutchess County, or their apartment in Fifth Avenue, the implications are beyond any that can be set forth in cold print. Cold print will tell you that a man has died, but it can convey no adequate notion of the haven of peace into which presumably he has entered.
Cold print might describe Marillo Park as it might describe Warwick Castle or the Chateau of Chenonceau, with a catalogue of landscapes and architectural minutiae. It could tell you of charming houses set in artfully laid-out grounds, of gardens, shrubberies, and tennis courts, of the club, the swimming pool, the riding school, the golf links; but only experience could give you that sense of being beyond contact with outside vulgarity which is Marillo"s specialty. Against its high stone wall outside vulgarity breaks as the sea against a cliff; before its beautiful grille gate it swirls like a river at the foot of a lawn with no possibility of overflow. As nearly as may be on earth, the resident of Marillo Park can be barricaded against the sordid, and withdrawn from all things inharmonious with his own high thought.
But every Eden has its serpent, and at Collingham Lodge on that October afternoon this Satan had taken the form of a not very good-looking young man who was pacing the flagged terrace side by side with Miss Edith Collingham. I emphasize the fact that he was not good-looking for the reason that, in his role of Satan, it was an added touch of the diabolic. Tall, thin, and stormy eyed, his knifelike features were streaked with dark shadows which seemed to fall in the wrong places in his face. When it is further said that he was a young professor of political economy in a near-by university, without a penny or much prospect in the world, it will easily be seen how devilish a creature he was to have crept into such a paradise.
He had crept in by means of being occasionally invited by young Sidebottom, whose family had the next estate to Collingham Lodge. Walls and hedges being unknown at Marillo, the lawns melted into one another with no other hint of demarcation than could be sketched by clumps of shrubs or skillfully scattered trees. You could be off the Collingham grounds and on to those of the Sidebottoms without knowing you had crossed a boundary. Between trees and shrubs you could slip from the one place to the other and not be seen from either.
"She might meet him a thousand times and you or I wouldn"t know it,"
Mrs. Collingham had pointed out to her husband when her suspicions were first roused. "All she"s got to do is to go round that lilac bush and she might do anything."
True; besides which, the mere chances of that hospitality without which Marillo could not be Marillo would throw together any two young people minded so to come. In such s.p.a.cious freedom, an ineligible young professor could touch the hem of the garment of a banker"s daughter without forcing the issue in any way.
With the conversation between Miss Edith Collingham and Professor Ernest Ayling we have almost nothing to do. It is enough to say that, from the rapidity of the young pair"s movements and the animation of their gestures, Mrs. Collingham judged that they were very much in earnest.
Looking out from what was known as the terrace drawing-room, she was convinced that no two young people could talk like that without an understanding between them.
She had been led to the terrace drawing-room by the sound of voices and the fact that it was the end of the house toward the Sidebottoms"
premises. Against a background of cannas, dahlias, and gladioli, with maples flinging their flame and crimson up into a golden sky, the two figures pa.s.sing and repa.s.sing the long French windows were little more than silhouettes. Such sc.r.a.ps of their phrases as drifted her way told her that they were up to nothing more criminal than settling the affairs of a distracted universe, but she had no intention that they should settle anything. At the appropriate moment she decided to make her presence felt.
In doing this she was supported by the knowledge that her presence was a presence to be felt impressively. Of her profile, it was mere economy of effort to say that it was like a cameo, aristocratically regular and clear-cut. Her hair, prematurely white, lent itself to the simplest dressing, too cla.s.sic to be a mode. A figure, of which it would have been vulgar to use the word "plump," carried the most sumptuous costumes with regal suitability. Studied, polished, and perfected, she wore her finish as a mask that concealed the lioness mother which she was.
It was the lioness mother who confronted the young couple as they turned in their promenade. Edith alone came forward. Her professor being given a bow so cold that it was tantamount to a dismissal, as a dismissal was obliged to take it. Within a minute, he was down both the flowered terraces and out of sight behind the lilac bush.
Mrs. Collingham"s enunciation had the exquisite precision of the rest of her personality.
"I thought I asked you, dear, not to encourage that impossible young man to come here."
"But I can"t stop his coming without encouragement, can I, mother darling?"
Mother darling moved to the edge of the flagged pavement, looking down on the blaze of summer"s final fireworks. On each of the two lower terraces fountains played, their back drops falling on the water lillies in the basins. It being the moment for a strong appeal, she sounded the first note without turning round.
"Edith, I wonder if you have the faintest idea of a mother"s ambitions for her children?"
Instinct had taken her to the root of the whole difference between the two generations in the family. Instinct took Edith to the same spot in her reply.
"I think I have. But, on the other hand, I wonder if a mother has the faintest idea of her children"s ambitions for themselves."
Following an outflanking movement, Mrs. Collingham threw her line a little farther.
"It"s curious how, as your father and I approach middle age, we feel that you and Bob are going to disappoint us."
"I"m sure I speak for Bob as well as for myself when I say that we wouldn"t disappoint you willingly. It"s only that the things we want are so different."
"Ours-your father"s and mine-are simple and natural."
"That"s the way Bob"s and mine seem to us."
She was in a tennis costume carelessly worn and not very fresh. A weatherbeaten Panama pulled down to shade her eyes gave a touch of cowboy picturesqueness to an _ensemble_ already picturesque rather than pretty or beautiful. Leaning nonchalantly against the high, carved back of a teakwood chair, the figure had a leopard grace to which the owner seemed indifferent. Indifference, boredom, dissatisfaction focused the expression of the delicate, irregular features to a wistful longing as far as possible from the mother"s brisk self-approval. All this was emphasized by a pair of restless, intelligent eyes, of which one was blue and the other brown.
The mother turned round with an air of expostulation.
"I"m sure I can"t see what you want to make of your life. You seem to have no ideals, not any more than Bob. You"re not pretty, but you"re not ugly; and you"ve a kind of witchiness most pretty girls have to do without. If you"d only dress with some decency and make the best of yourself, you could take as well as any other girl."
"Yes; if the game was worth the candle."
"But surely _some_ game is worth the candle."
"Oh, certainly; only, not this one, of taking-in the way you seem to think girls want to take."
"Some girls do."
"Oh, some girls, of course-only, not-not my kind."
"But what _is_ your kind? That"s what I can"t understand."
The girl smiled-a dim, distant, rather wistful smile that merely fluttered on the lips and died like a feeble light.
"And that"s what I can"t explain to you, mother darling."
"Are we so far apart as that?"
"We"re not far apart at all. It"s only that I"m myself, while you want me to be a continuation of you."
"I don"t want anything but what will make for your happiness."
"My happiness as you see it for me-not as I see it for myself."
"But you"re my child, Edith. I can"t be without hopes for you."
Another dim, quickly dying smile was the only answer to this as Edith picked up her racket from the teakwood chair and moved toward the house.
On a note that would have been plaintive had it not been so restrained, Mrs. Collingham continued:
"Edith darling, I don"t think there"s been a moment since you were born when I haven"t dreamed of a brilliant future for you, and now-"
"But, oh, mother dear, what"s the use of a brilliant future, as you call it, when your whole soul is set on something else?"
The lioness mother was roused.
"But it shouldn"t be set on something else. That"s what I resent. Don"t think for a minute that your father and I mean to stand by and see you throw yourself away."