"Decidedly not, Miss Hollister. On the other hand I should nurse the job for all it was worth, plunder the public treasury, explore the dungeons, make love to the princesses, and free the rightful heir to the throne from his cell beneath the bosom of the lake."
My friends at the Hare and Tortoise would have heard this avowal with some surprise, for no man"s life had ever been tamer than mine. I am by nature timid, and fall but a little short of being afraid of the dark. Prayers for deliverance from battle, murder, and sudden death cannot be too strongly expressed for me. My answer had, however, pleased Miss Octavia, and she clapped her hands with pleasure.
"Cecilia," she cried, "something told me, that afternoon at the Asolando, that my belief in the potential seven was not ill-placed, and now you see that in introducing myself to Mr. Ames at the seventh table from the door, in the seventh shop from Fifth Avenue, I was led to a meeting with a gentleman I had been predestined to know."
As we talked further, a servant appeared and laid fresh logs across the still-smouldering fire. This I thought would suggest to Miss Hollister the professional character of my visit; but the fire kindled readily, the smoke rose freely in the flue; and Miss Hollister paid no attention to it other than to ask the man whether the fuel he had taken from a carved box at the right of the hearth was apple-wood from the upper orchard or cherry from a tree which, it appeared, she had felled herself. It was apple-wood, the man informed her, and she continued talking. The merits of chain-armor, I think it was, that held us for half an hour, Cecilia and I listening with respect to what, in my ignorance, seemed a remarkable fund of knowledge on this recondite subject.
"We dine at seven, Mr. Ames, and you may amuse yourself as you like until that hour. Cecilia, you may order dinner in the gun-room to-night."
"Certainly, Aunt Octavia."
Once more I glanced at the girl, hoping that some glimmer in her eyes would set me right and establish a common understanding and sympathy between us; but she was moving out of the room at her aunt"s side. The man who had tended the fire met me in the hall and, conducting me to my room, suggested various offices that he was ready to perform for my comfort. The house faced south, and my windows, midway of the east wing, afforded a fine view of the hills. The room was large enough for a chamber of state, and its furniture was ma.s.sive. A four-poster invited to luxurious repose; half a dozen etchings by famous artists--Parrish and Van Elten among them--hung upon the walls; and on a table beside the bed stood a handsome decanter and gla.s.ses, reinforced by the quart of Scotch which Miss Hollister had recommended for my refreshment.
My bag had been opened and my things put out, so that, there being more than an hour to pa.s.s before I need dress for dinner, I went below and explored the garden and wandered off along a winding path that stole with charming furtiveness toward a venerable orchard of gnarled apple trees. From the height thus gained I looked down upon the house, and caught a glimpse beyond it of one of the chain of lakes, on which the westering sun glinted goldenly. Thus seeing the house from a new angle, I was impressed as I had not been at first by its size: it was a huge establishment, and I thought with envy of Pepperton, to whom such ample commissions were not rare. Pepperton, I recalled a little bitterly, had arrived; whereas I, who had enjoyed exactly his own training for the architect"s profession, had failed at it and been obliged to turn my hand to the doctoring of chimneys. But I am not a morbid person, and it is my way to pluck such joy as I may from the fleeting moment; and as I reflected upon the odd circ.u.mstance of my being there, my spirits rose. Miss Hollister was beyond question a singular person, but her whims were amusing. I felt that she was less cryptic than her niece, and the thought of Cecilia drove me back upon Jewett"s story of Wiggins"s interest in that quarter. I resolved to write to Wiggins when I got back to town the next day and abuse him roundly for running off without so much as good-bye. That, most emphatically, was not like dear old Wiggins!
I had been sitting on a stone wall watching the shadows lengthen. I rose now and followed the wall toward a highway along which wagons and an occasional motor-car had pa.s.sed during my revery. The sloping pasture was rough and frequently sent me along at a trot. The wall that marked the boundary at the roadside was hidden by a tangle of raspberry bushes, and my foot turning on a stone concealed in the wild gra.s.ses, I fell clumsily and rolled a dozen yards into a tangle of the berry bushes. As I picked myself up I heard voices in the road, but should have thought nothing of it, had I not seen through a break in the vines, and almost within reach of my hand, Cecilia Hollister talking earnestly to some one not yet disclosed. She was hatless, but had flung a golf-cape over her shoulders. The red scarlet lining of the hood turned up about her neck made an effective setting for her n.o.ble head.
"Oh, I can"t tell you! I can"t help you! I must n"t even appear to give you any advantage. I went into it with my eyes open, and I "m in honor bound not to tell you anything. You have said nothing--nothing,--remember that. There is absolutely nothing between us."
"But I must say everything! I refuse to be blinded by these absurd restrictions, whatever they are. It"s not fair,--it"s inviting me into a game where the cards are not all on the table. I "ve come to make an end of it!"
My hands had suffered by contact with the briars, and I had been ministering to them with my handkerchief; but I fell back upon the slope in my astonishment at this colloquy. Cecilia Hollister I had seen plainly enough, though the man"s back had been toward me; but anywhere on earth I should have known Wiggins"s voice. I protest that it is not my way to become an eavesdropper voluntarily, but to disclose myself now was impossible. If it had not been Wiggins--but Wiggins would never have understood or forgiven; nor could I have explained plausibly to Cecilia Hollister that I had not followed her from the house to spy upon her. I should have made the noise of an invading army if I had attempted to effect an exit by creeping out through the windrow of crisp leaves in which I lay; and to turn back and ascend the slope the way I had come would have been to advertise my presence to the figures in the road. There seemed nothing for me but to keep still and hope that this discussion between Cecilia Hollister and Hartley Wiggins would not be continued within earshot. To my relief they moved a trifle farther on; but I still heard their voices.
[Ill.u.s.tration: This discussion between Cecilia Hollister and Hartley Wiggins.]
"I cannot listen to you. Now that I "m committed I cannot honorably countenance you at all; and I can explain nothing. I came here to meet you only to tell you this. You must go--please! And do not attempt to see me in this way again."
I was grateful that Wiggins"s voice sank so low in his reply that I did not hear it; but I knew that he was pleading hard. Then a motor flashed by, and when the whir of its pa.s.sing had ceased, the voices were inaudible; but a moment later I heard a light quick step beyond the wall, and Cecilia pa.s.sed hurriedly, her face turned toward the house. The cape was drawn tightly about her shoulders, and she walked with her head bowed.
I breathed a sigh of relief, and when I felt safe from detection climbed the slope.
Pausing on the crest to survey the landscape, I saw a man, wearing a derby hat and a light top-coat, leaning against a fence that inclosed a pasture. As I glanced in his direction he moved away hastily toward the road below. The feeling of being watched is not agreeable, and I could not account for him. As he pa.s.sed out of sight, still another man appeared, emerging from a strip of woodland farther on. Even through the evening haze I should have said that he was a gentleman.
The two men apparently bore no relation to each other, though they were walking in the same direction, bound, I judged, for the highway below.
I had an uncomfortable feeling that they had both been observing me, though for what purpose I could not imagine. Then once more, just as I was about to enter the Italian garden from a fallow field that hung slightly above it, a third man appeared as mysteriously as though he had sprung from the ground, and ran at a sharp dog-trot along the fence, headed, like the others, for the road. In the third instance the stranger undoubtedly took pains to hide his face, but he, too, was well dressed and wore a top-coat and a fedora hat of current style.
I did not know why these gentlemen were ranging the neighborhood or what object they had in view; but their several appearances had interested me, and I went on into the house well satisfied that events of an unusual character were likely to mark my visit to the home of Miss Octavia Hollister.
IV
WE DINE IN THE GUN-ROOM
Cecilia sat reading alone when I entered the library shortly before the dinner-hour. She put down her book and we fell into fitful talk.
"I took a walk after tea. I always feel that sunsets are best seen from the fields; you can"t quite do them justice from windows," she began.
She seemed preoccupied, but this may have been the interpretation of my conscience, whose twinges reminded me unpleasantly of my precipitation into the briar bushes at the foot of the pasture, where I had witnessed her meeting with Wiggins. My admiration gained new levels. Her black evening gown became her; a band of velvet circled her throat, emphasizing its firm whiteness. It seemed incredible that I had seen her so recently, in the filmy dusk, talking with so much earnestness to Hartley Wiggins. It was my impression, gained from the few sentences I had overheard by the road, that she did not repulse him, but that some mysterious, difficult barrier kept them apart. Where, I wondered, was Wiggins now, and what were to be the further incidents of this singular affair?
While we waited for Miss Hollister to appear, she continued to speak of her joy in the hills. It is not every one who can admire a sunset with sincerity, but she conveyed the spirit of the phenomena that had attended the lowering of the bright targe of day in terms and tones that were delightfully natural and convincing. And yet the far-away look in her eyes suggested inevitably the scene I had witnessed and the phrases I had caught by the roadside. Wiggins was in her recollection of the glowing landscape,--I was confident of this; and poor Wiggins was even now wandering these hills, no doubt, brooding upon his troubles under the clear October stars.
Dinner was announced the moment Miss Hollister entered, and I walked out between them. Miss Octavia Hollister was a surprising person, but in nothing was she so delightfully wayward as in the gowns she wore.
My ignorance of such matters is immeasurable, but I fancy that she designed her own raiment and that her ideas were thereupon carried out by a tailor of skill. At the Asolando and when we had met at tea in her own house, she had worn the severest of tailored gowns, with short skirt and a coat into whose pockets she was fond of thrusting her hands. To-night the material was lavender silk trimmed in white, but the skirt had not lengthened, and over a white silk waist she wore a kind of cut-away coat that matched the skirt. An aigrette in her lovely white hair contributed a piquant note to the whole impression.
As we pa.s.sed down the hall she talked with great animation of the Hague Tribunal, just then holding a prominent place in the newspapers for some reason that has escaped me.
"The whole thing is absurd; perfectly absurd! I know of nothing that would contribute more to human enjoyment than a real war between Germany and England. The Hague idea is pure sentimentalism,--if sentimentalism can ever be said to be pure. I will go further and say that I consider it positively immoral."
This new view of the matter left me stammering. Cecilia, I saw, had no intention of helping me over these difficult hurdles that were constantly popping up in my conversations with her aunt. This delightful old lady in lavender, the mistress of a house whose luxury and peace were antipodal to any hint of war, continued to baffle me.
She had ordered dinner in the gun-room, but I thought this merely a turn of her humor; and I was taken aback when she led the way into a low, heavily raftered room, where electric sconces of an odd type were thrust at irregular intervals along the walls, which were otherwise hung with arms of many sorts in orderly combinations. They were not the litter of antique shops, I saw in a hasty glance, but rifles and guns of the latest patterns, and beside the sideboard stood a gun-rack and a cabinet which I a.s.sumed contained still other and perhaps deadlier weapons. At one end of the room, and just behind Miss Hollister, was a sunburst of swords, which gleamed with a kind of mockery behind her white head.
The small round table was conventionally set, but this only added to the grimness of the encompa.s.sing a.r.s.enal. A bowl of crimson roses in the centre of the snowy cloth would ordinarily have mitigated the effect of the grim walls; but I confess that the color reminded me a little too sombrely of the ugly business for which this steel had been designed. But for the presence of Miss Cecilia, who was essentially typical of our twentieth-century American woman, I think I might readily have yielded to the illusion that I was the guest of some eccentric chatelaine who had invited me to dine with her in a bastion of her fortress before ordering me to some chamber of horrors for execution.
There seemed to be no reason why one of those keen blades on the wall might not find its way through my ribs between a highly satisfactory plate of _potage a la tortue_ and a bit of sea-ba.s.s that would have honored any kitchen in the land. No reference was made to the character of the room; I felt, in fact, that Cecilia rather pleaded with her eyes that I should make no reference to it. And Miss Hollister remarked quite casually as though in comment upon my thoughts:--
"Consistency has buried its thousands and habit its tens of thousands.
We should live, Mr. Ames, for the changes and chances of this troubled life. Between an opera-box and a villa at Newport many of my best friends have perished."
"I have thought myself that Th.o.r.eau had the right idea,"--I began hopefully; but she raised her finger warningly.
"Mr. Ames, the mention of Henry David Th.o.r.eau is wholly distasteful to me. A man who will deliberately choose to whittle lead-pencils for chipmunks and write a book about a moist sand-pile like Cape Cod arouses no sympathy in me. And these well-meaning women who are forever gathering autumn leaves, or who tire you in spring by telling you they have found the first p.u.s.s.y-willow feathering, and who make all Nature odious by their general goo-gooings, bore me to death. There is no such thing possible as the simple life. I give you my word for it that it is only in the most complex existence that the spirit of man can thrive."
I am only a chimney-doctor; I have never been able to make any headway in discussing things aesthetic, sentimental or spiritual with persons of sound conviction in such matters. A bishop with whom I once roamed the English cathedrals confessed to me his sincere belief that in the days of the inquisition the gridiron would have been my rightful portion. I was fearful lest my hostess should suggest the mediaeval church as a topic, and this I knew would be disastrous. As an abbess she would, I fancied, have ruled with an iron hand. But with startling abruptness she put down her fork, and bending her wonderfully direct gaze upon me, asked a question that caused me to strangle on a bit of asparagus.
"I imagine, Mr. Ames, that you are a member of some of the better clubs in town. If by any chance you belong to the Hare and Tortoise,--the name of which has always pleased me,--do you by any chance happen to enjoy the acquaintance of Mr. Hartley Wiggins?"
Cecilia lifted her head. I saw that she had been as startled as I. It crossed my mind that a denial of any acquaintance with Wiggins might best serve him in the circ.u.mstances; but I am not, I hope, without a sense of shame, and I responded promptly:--
"Yes, I know him well. We are old friends. I always see a good deal of him during the winter. His summers are spent usually on his ranch in the west. We dined together two days ago at the Hare and Tortoise, just before he left for the west."
"You will pardon me if I say that it is wholly to his credit that he has forsworn the professions and identified himself with the honorable calling of the husbandman."
"We met Mr. Wiggins while traveling abroad last summer," interposed Cecilia, meeting my eyes quite frankly.
"Met him! Did you say met him, Cecilia? On the contrary we found him waiting for us at the dock the morning we sailed," corrected Miss Hollister, "and we never lost him a day in three months of rapid travel. I had never met him before, but I cannot deny that he made himself exceedingly agreeable. If, as I suspected, he had deliberately planned to travel on the same steamer with my two nieces, I have only praise for his conduct, for in these days, Mr. Ames, it warms my heart to find young men showing something of the old chivalric ardor in their affairs of the heart."
"I "m sure Mr. Wiggins made himself very agreeable," remarked Cecilia colorlessly.
"For myself," retorted Miss Hollister, "I should speak even more strongly. He repeatedly served us with tact and delicacy; and I recall with the greatest satisfaction his vigorous chastis.e.m.e.nt of our courier in Cologne, where that person was found to have treated us in the most treacherous manner. He had, in fact, in collusion with an inn-keeper, connived at the loss of our baggage to delay our departure, even after I had p.r.o.nounced the cathedral the greatest architectural monstrosity in Europe."
"Oh, Aunt Octavia, you didn"t really mean that!" And Cecilia laughed for the first time. Her color had risen, and her dark eyes lit with pleasure.
"I had formed so high an opinion of Mr. Wiggins," Miss Octavia continued, "that I learned with sincerest regret that his ancestors were Tories and took no part in the struggle for American independence.
There are times when I seriously question the wisdom of the colonists in breaking with the mother country; but certainly no man of character in that day could have hesitated as to his proper course."
Then, as though by intention, Miss Hollister dropped upon the smooth current of our talk a sentence that drove the color from Cecilia"s face. At once the girl was cold again, and I felt embarra.s.sed and uncomfortable that a friend of mine had been brought into the conversation to my befuddlement. The situation was trying, but in spite of this it grew steadily more interesting.
"Hezekiah and Mr. Wiggins were the best of friends," was Miss Hollister"s remark.