"And you do not mind the heat?" he asked. "Those who go East to live return to find our summers oppressive."
"Oh, I"m a salamander, I think," Alison laughed.
Thus they sat chatting, interrupted once or twice by urchins too small to join in the game, who came running to Mr. Bentley and stood staring at Alison as at a being beyond the borders of experience: and she would smile at them quite as shyly,--children being beyond her own. Her imagination was as keen, as unspoiled as a child"s, and was stimulated by a sense of adventure, of the mystery which hung about this fine old gentleman who betrayed such sentiment for a mother whom she had loved and admired and still secretly mourned. Here, if there had been no other, was a compelling bond of sympathy....
The shadows grew longer, the game broke up. And Hodder, surrounded by an argumentative group keeping pace with him, came toward them from the field; Alison watched him curiously as he turned this way and that to answer the insistent questions with which he was pelted, and once she saw him stride rapidly after a dodging delinquent and seize him by the collar amidst piercing yells of approval, and derision for the rebel.
"It"s remarkable how he gets along with them," said Mr. Bentley, smiling at the scene. "Most of them have never known what discipline is."
The chorus approached. And Hodder, recognizing her, dropped the collar he held: A young woman conversing with Mr. Bentley--was no unusual sight,--he had made no speculations as to this one"s ident.i.ty. He left the boys, and drew near.
"You know Miss Parr, I believe," the old gentleman said.
Hodder took her hand. He had often tried to imagine his feelings if he should meet her again: what he should do and say,--what would be their footing. And now he had no time to prepare....
"It is so strange," she said, with that note of wonder at life in her voice which he recalled so well, "that I should have come across Mr.
Bentley here after so many years. How many years, Mr. Bentley?"
"Ah, my dear," he protested, "my measurements would not be yours."
"It is better for both of us not to say, Alison declared, laughingly.
"You knew Mr. Bentley?" asked Hodder, astonished.
"He was a very dear friend of my mother"s, although I used to appropriate him when he came to our house. It was when we lived in Ransome Street, ages ago. But I don"t think Mr. Bentley has grown a bit older."
"He is one of the few who have found the secret of youth," said the rector.
But the old gentleman had moved off into the path, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that he was carried off by the swarm which cl.u.s.tered around him, two smaller ones tugging at his hand, and all intent upon arriving at the soda-water pavilion near the entrance. They had followed him with their eyes, and they saw him turn around and smile at them, helplessly. Alison presented a perplexed face to Hodder.
"Does he bring them here,--or you?" she asked.
"I--" he hesitated. "Mr. Bentley has done this every Sat.u.r.day afternoon for years," he said, "I am merely one of them."
She looked at him quickly. They had started to follow, in the cool path beneath the forest trees. Restraint fell upon them, brought about by the memory of the intimacy of their former meeting, further complicated on Hodder"s part by his new att.i.tude toward her father, and his finding her in the company, of all persons, of Mr. Bentley. Unuttered queries pressed on the minds of both.
"Tell me about Mr. Bentley," she said.
Hodder hesitated.
"I scarcely know where to begin," he replied, yet smiling at the characteristic abruptness of her question. The modulations of her voice revealed again the searching, inquisitive spirit within her, and his responded to the intensity of the interest in Mr. Bentley.
"Begin anywhere."
"Anywhere?" he repeated, seeking to gain time.
"Yes--anywhere," she said impatiently.
"Well, he lives in Dalton Street, if you recall what kind of a place that is" (she nodded), "and he is known from one end of it to the other."
"I see what he is--he is the most extraordinary person I have ever known. Just to talk to him gives one such a queer feeling of--of dissatisfaction with one"s self, and seeing him once more seems to have half revived in me a whole series of dead memories. And I have been trying to think, but it is all so tantalizing. There is some mystery about him," she insisted. "He disappeared suddenly, and my mother never mentioned him but once afterward, but other persons have spoken of him since--I forget who. He was so well known, and he used to go to St.
John"s."
"Yes, he used to go to St. John"s."
"What happened to him--do you know? The reason he stopped coming to our house was some misunderstanding with my father, of course. I am positive my mother never changed her feelings toward him."
"I can only tell you what he has told me, which is all I know--authoritatively," Hodder replied. How could he say to her that her father had ruined Mr. Bentley? Indeed, with a woman of her fearlessness and honesty--and above all, her intuition,--he felt the cruelty of his position keenly. Hodder did not relish half truths; and he felt that, however scant his intercourse in the future might be with Alison Parr, he would have liked to have kept it on that basis of frankness in which it had begun. But the exact stage of disillusionment she had reached in regard to Eldon Parr was unknown to him, and he feared that a further revelation might possibly sever the already precarious tie between father and daughter.
He recounted, therefore, that Mr. Bentley had failed; and how he had before that given much of his estate away in charity, how he had been unable to keep his pew in St. John"s, and had retired to the house in Dalton Street.
For some moments after he had finished Alison did not reply.
"What is his number in Dalton Street?" she asked.
Hodder informed her.
He could not read in her face whether she suspected that he could have told her more. And in spite of an inordinate, human joy in being again in her presence, his desire to hide from her that which had taken place within him, and the inability he felt to read his future, were instinctive: the more so because of the very spontaneity they had achieved at their first meeting. As a man, he shrank from confessing to her, however indirectly, the fact that she herself was so vital an element in his disillusionment. For the conversation in the garden had been the immediate cause of the inner ferment ending in his resolution to go away, and had directed him, by logical steps, to the encounter in the church with Mrs. Garvin.
"You have not yet finished the garden?" he asked. "I imagined you back in the East by this time."
"Oh, I am procrastinating," she replied. "It is a fit of sheer laziness.
I ought to be elsewhere, but I was born without a conscience. If I had one I should try to quiet it by reminding it that I am fulfilling a long-delayed promise--I am making a garden for Mrs. Larrabbee. You know her, of course, since she is a member of your congregation."
"Yes, I know her," he a.s.sented. And his mind was suddenly filled with vivid colour,--cobalt seas, and a.r.s.enic-green spruces with purple cones, cardinal-striped awnings that rattled in the salt breeze, and he saw once more the panorama of the life which had pa.s.sed from him and the woman in the midst of it. And his overwhelming thought was of relief that he had somehow escaped. In spite of his unhappiness now, he would not have gone back. He realized for the first time that he had been nearer annihilation then than to-day.
"Grace isn"t here to bother me with the ideas she has picked up in Europe and catalogued," Alison continued.
"Catalogued!" Hodder exclaimed, struck by the pertinency of the word.
"Yes. Did you ever know anybody who had succeeded half so well in piecing together and absorbing into a harmonized whole all the divergent, artificial elements that enter into the conventional world to-day? Her character might be called a triumph of synthesis. For she has actually achieved an individuality--that is what always surprises me when I think of her. She has put the puzzle picture together, she has become a person."
He remembered, with a start, that this was the exact word Mrs. Larrabbee had used about Alison Parr. If he had searched the world, he could not have found a greater contrast than that between these two women. And when she spoke again, he was to be further struck by her power of logical insight.
"Grace wants me because she thinks I have become the fashion--for the same reason that Charlotte Plimpton wants me. Only there is this difference--Grace will know the exact value of what I shall have done.
Not that she thinks me a Le Notre"--Alison laughed--"What I mean is, she sees behind, she sees why it is fashionable to have a garden, since she has worked out the values of that existence. But there!" Alison added, with a provocative touch that did not escape him, "I am picking your parishioners to pieces again."
"You have more right than I," he replied, "they have been your friends since childhood."
"I thought you had gone away," she said.
"Why?" he demanded. Had she been to church again?
"My father told me before he left that you were to take a cruise with him on the yacht he has chartered."
"He wrote me from New York--I was unable to go," Hodder said slowly.
He felt her gaze upon him, but resolutely refused to meet it.... They walked on in silence until they came to the more open s.p.a.ces near the edge of the Park, thronged that Sat.u.r.day evening by crowds which had sought the city"s breathing s.p.a.ce. Perfect trees cast long, fantastic shadows across the lawns, fountains flung up rainbows from the midst of lakes; children of the tenements darted hither and thither, rolled and romped on the gra.s.s; family parties picnicked everywhere, and a very babel of tongues greeted the ear--the languages of Europe from Sweden to Italy.