"Tell us!"
"I"d like to find Somebody--man or woman--who cared for the things I care for--sky and clouds and mountains,--and go away with him anywhere for--a little while, just a little while," she drawled dreamily, resting her elbows on the table.
"Elope! Fie, fie!" Conny laughed.
"My mother"s father had a plantation in one of the Windward Islands,"
Margaret continued. "It must be nice down there--warm and sunny. I"d like to lie out on the beach and forget children and servants and husbands, and stop wondering what life is. Yes, I"d like a vacation--in the Windward Islands, with somebody who understood."
"To wit, a man!" added Conny.
"Yes, a man! But only for the trip."
They laughed a good deal about Margaret"s vacation, called her the "Windward Islands," and asked her to make reservations for them in her Paradise when they had found desirable partners.
"Only, I should have to bring John, and he wouldn"t know what to do with himself on a beach," Isabelle remarked. "I don"t know any one else to take."
"You mustn"t go Windwarding until you have to," Margaret explained....
At the dessert, the children came in,--two boys and a girl. The elder boy was eight, with his mother"s fair hair, blue eyes, and fine features, and the same suggestion of race in the narrow high brow, the upward poise of the head. His younger brother was nondescript, with dark hair and full lips. Margaret observed her children with a curiously detached air, Isabelle thought. Was she looking for signs of Larry in that second son?
Alas, she might see Larry always, with the cold apprehension of a woman too wise to deceive herself! The little girl, fresh from her nap, was round and undefined, and the mother took her into her arms, cuddling her close to her breast, as if nothing, not even the seed of Larry, could separate her from this one; as if she felt in her heart all the ills and sorrows, the woman"s pains to be,--the eternal feminine defeat,--in this tiny ball of freshness.
And the ironical smile subtly softened to a glow of affection. Here, at least, was an illusion!
Isabelle, watching these two, understood--all the lines, the smile, the light cynicism--the Windward Islands! She put her arms impulsively about the mother and the child, hugging them closely. Margaret looked up into her shining eyes and pressed her hand....
"There are some cigarettes in the other room," Margaret suggested; "we"ll build up the fire and continue the argument in favor of the Windward Islands."
"It is a long way to New York over that road," Conny observed. "I have an engagement."
Now that she had satisfied her curiosity about "how the Poles lived," she began to think of her dinner with Cairy, and was fearful lest she might be delayed.
"Spend the night," suggested Margaret; but Isabelle, who understood Conny, telephoned at once for the motor.
"You aren"t going back to the West, Isabelle?" Margaret asked, while they waited for the motor. "Won"t you miss it?"
"Miss the West? Did you ever know a woman that had escaped from the Mississippi Valley who would go back there?" Conny drawled. "Why, Belle is like a girl just out of school, looking at the shop windows!"
Cornelia Woodyard, who had lived a number of years in a corner of that same vast valley, looked from metropolitan heights on the monotony of the "middle West." She had the New Yorker"s amusing incapacity to comprehend existence outside the neighborhood of Fifth Avenue and Central Park.
"One lives out there," Margaret protested with sudden fire, "in those great s.p.a.ces. Men grow there. They _do_ things. When my boys are educated I shall take them away from New York, to the Virginia mountains, perhaps, and have them grow up there, doing things, real things, working with their hands, becoming men! Perhaps not there," she mused, recollecting that the acres of timber and coal in the mountains, her sons" inheritance from her vigorous ancestors, had been lost to them in a vulgar stock dealer"s gamble by their father,--"perhaps out to Oregon, where I have an uncle. His father rode his horse all the way from Louisiana across the continent, after the War! He had nothing but his horse--and before he died he built a city in his new country. That is where men do things!"
Margaret had flashed into life again. As Tom Cairy would have said, "_Vraiment, ma pet.i.te cousine a une grande ame--etouffee_" (For Cairy always made his acute observations in the French tongue).
"There"s something of the Amazon in you, Margaret," Conny remarked, "in spite of your desire to seclude yourself in the Windward Islands with a suitable mate."
The motor finally came puffing up the drive, and the women stood on the veranda, prolonging their farewells. A round, red, important sun peeped from under the gray cloud bank that had lowered all the afternoon, flooding the thin branches of the budding trees, falling warm and gold across the dead fields.
"See!" Margaret cried, raising her thin arms to the sun. "The Promise!"
"I hope it will hold until we reach Jerome Avenue," Conny replied practically, preparing to enter the car.
"The promise of another life!"
Margaret was standing in the sun, her nostrils dilated, absorbing the light, the source of joy and life.
"Windward Islands, eh?" Conny coughed, settling herself comfortably in her corner.
"The real land," Margaret murmured to herself.
The chauffeur had reached for the lever when there appeared on the drive two men bearing something between them, a human something, carefully.
"What"s that!" exclaimed Conny in a frightened voice. "What is it?" she repeated to the chauffeur,--demanding of a man something in his province to know.
"Looks though they had a child--hurt," the chauffeur replied.
Margaret, shading her eyes with a thin hand, looked down the avenue. She made no movement to go towards the men,--merely waited motionless for the thing to come. And the men came slowly forward, past the car, up the steps.
It was the older boy. The man who held the head and shoulders of the child said, "An accident--not serious, I believe."
Margaret opened the door and pointed to the lounge before the fire. The man who had spoken laid the boy down very gently with his head on a cushion, and smoothed back the rumpled hair.
"I will go for the doctor," the other man said, and presently there was the sound of the motor leaping down the hill.
Margaret had dropped on her knees beside the unconscious boy, and placed one hand on his brow. "Bring some water," she said to Isabelle, and began to unb.u.t.ton the torn sweater.
Conny, with one look at the white face and closed eyes, went softly out into the hall and sat down.
"Will you telephone to Dr. W. S. Rogers in New York, and ask him to send some one if he can"t come himself?" Margaret asked the stranger, who was helping her with the boy"s clothes.
"Can I telephone any one else--his father?" the man suggested, as he turned to the door.
"No--it would be no use--it"s too late to reach him."
Then she turned again to the boy, who was still unconscious....
When the man had finished telephoning, he came back through the hall, where Conny was sitting.
"How did it happen?" she asked.
"He fell over the culvert,--the high one just as you leave the station, you know. He was riding his bicycle,--I saw the little chap pushing it up the hill as I got out of the train. Then a big touring car pa.s.sed me, and met another one coming down at full speed. I suppose the boy was frightened and tried to get too far out on the culvert and fell over. The motors didn"t notice him; but when I reached the spot, I saw his bicycle hanging on the edge and looked over for him,--could just see his head in the bushes and leaves. Poor little fellow! It was a nasty fall. But the leaves and the rubbish must have broken it somewhat."
"Rob! Rob Falkner!" Isabelle exclaimed, as the man turned and met her at the door. "I didn"t recognize you--with your beard! How is Bessie?"
"Very well, I believe. She is in Denver, you know."
When he had gone back to the boy, Isabelle said to Conny:--
"We used to know the Falkners very well. There is a story! ... Strange he should be _here_. But I heard he was in the East somewhere."