Dorothy installed herself on a bench, and young Nisbet perched upon the rim of the pool, and stared at vacancy.
"It"s corking, in here," he said, after a moment.
"Isn"t it, though?" agreed Dorothy, with a nod of approval. "It"s my favorite part of the house. You can"t imagine how many hours I spend here, sewing, or reading, or fiddling with the fish and all those funny little plants under the palms."
"You bet!" said young Nisbet, with enthusiasm, if not much relevancy.
"I"ve just got a picture of that, you know. Besides, we"ve spent a good many of those hours together in here, these past few months."
"Oh, not a tenth of them!" exclaimed Dorothy, "and then only the very shortest."
"Oh!" said young Nisbet gloomily. His fertile imagination was immediately peopled with the forms and faces of those who had shared the other hours, a score of eligible and attractive young men, his moral, mental, and physical superiors in every conceivable particular, faultlessly arrayed, scintillating with wit, and surpa.s.singly skilled in the way to win a woman. The conservatory was full of them. He saw them in every imaginable posture: feeding the gold-fish, watering the begonias, looking up into Dorothy"s eyes as they sat at her feet, looking down at her slender fingers, as she pinned gardenias to their lapels. And these had been granted the long hours, he only the short.
Inwardly, young Nisbet groaned; aloud, as was his wont, he said the wrong thing.
"They seemed long enough to me."
"_Well!_" said Dorothy.
"Oh, hang it all! I didn"t mean that. What an oaf I am!"
"Never mind," said Dorothy consolingly. "I know you well enough to understand you, by this time." She smoothed her skirt reflectively.
"Let me see," she added, "what were we talking about when we were swamped by the family?"
"I think," answered young Nisbet, with one of his illogical blushes, "that I had just asked you what sort of a man you thought you would like to marry. I remember I was on the point of saying that I thought perhaps you had ideas like--er--like your mother"s."
Dorothy raised her eyebrows.
"Like the Mater"s?"
"About a man being big and prominent, and all that, you know,"
floundered young Nisbet. "She always makes such a point of Barclay"s being Lieutenant-Governor--I thought you might be for the same kind of thing."
Dorothy looked him over, with a whimsical smile, as he was speaking.
There was a deep bronze light in his close-cropped, ruddy hair, and his skin was very smooth and clean. His eyes were appealing, with that unspeakable eloquence of simple honesty which is almost pathetic. Under his blue cloth coat, the great muscles of his shoulders and chest stood out magnificently, rippling the fabric as he stirred, as if eager to throw off their trammels, and be given free play. About him there was a distinct suggestion of sane living and regular exercise. For all his freckles, and his nose that was too little, and his mouth that was too large, "the ugliest of the Nisbet boys"--he had often been called that!--was very emphatically good to look upon.
"A big man?" answered Dorothy. "Yes, I think I should like to marry a big man. I want him very clean, too--_very_ clean!--morally, as well as otherwise. And honest as the day is long. And not _too_ bright! I don"t want to be continually trying to live up to his brain, and continually failing. It is fatal to one"s self-respect, that sort of thing. Then, he must be heels over head in love with me--for keeps! And then--oh, he must be a _man_, a man through and through, who wouldn"t think anything he didn"t dare to say, nor say anything he didn"t dare to do! That"s what I want, and if I can get it, all the prominence in the world may go hang!"
"That"s just about John Barclay, though," said young Nisbet, "with the prominence thrown in."
"Well, I"m not saying I wouldn"t have married John Barclay, if I"d had the chance. He comes pretty close to being all I would ask for, in the way of a man. But, unfortunately, there"s only one John Barclay, and, like the rest of the world, he looked directly over poor little Me"s shoulders, and saw only Natalie. Good gracious! Who could blame him?
She"s the loveliest little thing in the world! But, at all events, she nabbed him, so all that is left for me to do is to grin and bear the disappointment as best I may. He"s very much of a man, John Barclay is!"
"Yes," a.s.sented young Nisbet, somewhat mournfully. "I can see that would be the kind of a chap that the dames would stand for everlastingly."
"But, as I said before," continued Dorothy, "it"s not because he"s Lieutenant-Governor, whatever the Mater may think about it, that I admire him. It"s just because he"s so big, and earnest, and loyal, and--and"--
"White," said young Nisbet.
"Yes, _isn"t_ he? That"s it--white!"
"I can understand a man like that getting spliced," observed young Nisbet very earnestly. "He has so much to offer a girl. But as for the rest of us"--
"Oh, as to that," broke in Dorothy airily, "John Barclay isn"t the only man in the world, by any manner of means! Besides, Natalie having already bagged him, it is plain I shall have to look elsewhere."
There was a long pause, broken only by the plash of the water, which seemed, as the seconds slipped by, to grow amazingly loud. Then young Nisbet raised his eyes, and looked at her, blushing deplorably.
"I wish"--he said, "I wish"--
"Dorothy! _Do_ excuse me, Mr. Nisbet, but _really_--dinner at seven, you know, and this child _must_ be thinking about dressing. She takes _ages_!"
Mrs. Rathbawne folded her fat hands, and stood waiting, at the conservatory door. Young Nisbet rose.
"Of course!" he said. "I"m always so stupid about these things. Good-by, Miss Rathbawne. I"m off to New York to-morrow on some confounded business, so I probably won"t see you for a week or so. Good-by."
"_Would_ you mind going out by the hall, Mr. Nisbet?" suggested Mrs.
Rathbawne. "Mr. Barclay is in the drawing-room with my elder daughter, and he is so _greatly_ occupied with affairs of state that they have _very_ little time together. I _hate_ to have them interrupted. One can do _so_ much harm sometimes, you know, by thoughtlessly interrupting people who are in love with each other. Thank you _so_ much; good-by.
_Do_ try to stand a little straighter, Dorothy, my dear."
III
A FACE IN THE CROWD
At the sound of the Lieutenant-Governor"s voice at the front door, Mrs.
Rathbawne had beaten a hasty retreat, dragging her immensely edified half-sister in her wake, so that when he stepped through the curtained doorway Barclay found Natalie alone.
"I"m so glad you could come early," she said, from the corner of the divan. "Now we can have a talk before dinner. I seem to see so little of you. I suppose that"s the penalty attached to being engaged to the second biggest man in the state. I"m sometimes jealous, Johnny boy, of Alleghenia"s place in your affections."
"You"re the only person in the world who has no need to be," laughed Barclay. "What is the news?"
"Probably," said Natalie, "the only interesting items are that you are cold and a little cross, and that you want a big chair and a cup of tea and some hot toast."
"Your summary of the situation is so exhaustive," said Barclay, "that there seems to be nothing left for me to say, except that you are the most beautiful girl in the world, and that I think I must stand still a moment and just look at you, before I accept any of the luxuries you suggest."
"I can"t imagine how you know that I"m so beautiful. You can"t possibly see me in this dark corner. But I see I"ve made one mistake! You are distinctly _not_ cross."
"Why should I be?" asked the Lieutenant-Governor, standing before the table, with his long legs far apart, and rocking from his toes to his heels and back again. "When a man has been walking for half an hour through a gnawing February air, and suddenly, out of all proportion to his deserts, comes full upon a rose in bloom, is that a reason for being cross?"
She was very small, and deliciously delicate, was Natalie Rathbawne, like a little Dresden image, with an arbutus-pink complexion, brown hair, and deep-blue eyes, now clouded thoughtfully, but oftener alight with humor, or dilating and clearing under the impetus of conversation.
A doll-like daintiness of tiny pleats and ruffles, fresh bows, and fine st.i.tching pervaded everything she wore, and if her voice inspired the hackneyed comparison of running water, it was of water running under moss, the sound whereof is as different from that of an open brook as is music from discord. To John Barclay"s thinking the barely believable fact that this little miracle of beauty--this pocket-Venus, as he was wont to call her--actually belonged to him remained one of the insoluble mysteries of life. He could not, in the thraldom of his present Elysium, be expected to remember, even if he had ever fully realized, that he himself was tall, broad-shouldered, clean-cut, and clean-lived, with the unmistakable stamp of the American gentleman on his linen and his simple, well-fitting clothes, and the evidences of a sane, regular existence in his steady hands and his clear eyes and his firm mouth,--a man of whom any woman might be, and of whom this particular woman was, extravagantly proud. For the first tribute which a lover lays at the feet of his lady is, in ordinary, the stamped-upon and abused summary of his personal attributes, which, in his own mind, he has taken remarkable pains to render as despicable as possible, and which, in hers, her imagination contrives not only to rehabilitate, but to imbue with a preposterously exaggerated splendor.
"I wonder," added the Lieutenant-Governor presently, "whether when gentlemen are invited to tea they are supposed to kiss the hostess on entering."
"If you are in any doubt about it," observed Natalie, with an air of superb indifference, "I advise you to write for advice to the etiquette editor of the "Kenton City Record." She is probably sixty-two years old, looks like an English walnut, has never had a proposal in her life, and so knows all about"--
What the lady in question was supposed to know all about was for sufficient reasons never made clear. There are occasions, despite the manuals of polite behavior, when interruption cannot with any approach to justice be regarded as rudeness.