CHAPTER XI

TWO MEN AND A MAID

Have you ever thought that the reason we can so fully sympathize with certain great people of history, and not with others, is because we are occasionally granted a glimpse of the emotion our favorites enjoyed--or endured?

For instance, no man who has ever knocked the "t" out of "can't" stands beside Napoleon's tomb without a sensation which takes the form of: "_We_ understand each other--don't we, old top?"

And every year at spring-time, Romeo is patted on the back condescendingly by thousands of youths--so susceptible that they'd fall in love with anything whose skirt and waist met in the back.

The night of the Kendalls' dance _I_ knew what Cleopatra's cosmic consciousness resembled--exactly. I knew it from the moment she glanced away from the glint of her silver oars of the wonderful Nile barge (because the glint of Antony's dark eyes was so much more compelling) to the hour she recklessly unwrapped the basket of figs in her death chamber! I ran the whole gamut of her emotions--'twixt love and duty--and I came out of it feeling that--well, certainly I felt that a conservatory is a room where eavesdroppers hear no good of themselves!

"Is everybody crazy to-night?" I whispered to Guilford, as we paused for a moment before the dancing commenced just outside one of the downy, silky reception rooms--quite apart from the noisy ballroom farther back--and I saw two people inside. The girl was seated before the piano, and was singing softly, while the man stood at her side, listening with a rapt expression.

"Who would ever have thought that _that_ girl would be singing _that_ song to _that_ man?" I asked, with a quivery little feeling that the world was going topsyturvy with other people besides me. The singer was the careless, rowdy golf champion of the state, and the man listening was Oldburgh's astonishing young surgeon--the kind who never went anywhere because it was said he laid aside his scalpel only when he was obliged to pick up his fork.

"What is the song?" Guilford inquired, looking in, then drawing back softly and dropping the curtain that screened the doorway.

"_Caro Mio Ben!_"

"A love song?"

I smiled.

"Well, rather!"

Then somebody crowded up and separated Guilford and me. I stood there listening to the lovely Italian words, and wondering if the night were in truth bewitched. Guilford, under the impulse induced by a white tissue gown and big red roses, had suffered an unusual heart-action already and had spent half an hour whispering things in my ear which made me feel embarrassed and ashamed. The only thing which can possibly make a lifelong engagement endurable is the brotherly attitude assumed by the lover in his late teens.

"Come in," he said, elbowing his way back to me through the chattering throng of the autumn's débutantes, after a few minutes. "I hear the violins beginning to groan--and say--_haven't_ they got everybody worth having here to-night?"

"I don't--know," I replied vaguely, looking up and down the length of the room that we were entering.

"But--there's Mrs. Walker, and there are the Chester girls, and Dan Hunter, just back from Africa--and--"

"Certainly they've got a fine selection of Oldburgh's solid, rolled-gold ornaments," I commented dryly, as my eyes searched the other side of the room.

"Oh, besides local talent in plenty to create some excitement, there's an assortment of imported artists," he went on. "That French fellow, d'Osmond, has been teaching some of the kids a new figure and they're going to try it to-night. Have you met him?"

"Yes, indeed--oh, no, of course I haven't met him, Guilford!" I answered impatiently. "How could I meet a stray French nobleman? The society editor is _his_ Boswell."

He turned away, hurt at my show of irritation, but I didn't care. I was in that reckless mood that comes during a great fire, or a storm at sea, or any other catastrophe when the trivialities of living fade into pygmy proportions before the vast desire for mere life.

"And there's that Consolidated Traction Company fellow," he said humbly, calling my attention to a bunch of new arrivals at the doors of the ballroom. "What's his name?"

"Maitland Tait."

"Have you met him?" he inquired.

Now usually Guilford is not humble, nor even very forgiving, so that when he turned to me again and showed that he was determined to be entertaining, I glanced at a mirror we happened to be passing. How easy it would be to keep men right where we wanted them if life could be carried on under frosted lights, in white tissue gowns, holding big red roses!

"Yes, I've met him," I answered giddily. "He was at Mrs. Walker's Flag Day reception Tuesday--and he brought me to town in his car, then came calling Wednesday afternoon, and--"

Guilford had stopped still and was looking at me as if anxious to know when I'd felt the first symptoms.

"Oh, it's true," I laughed desperately.

"Then why----"

"Didn't I tell you?"

"Yes--that is, you might have mentioned it. Of course, it really makes no difference--" He smiled, dismissing it as a triviality.

Gentle reader, I don't know whether your sympathies have secretly been with Guilford all the time or not--but I know that mine were distinctly with him at that moment. If there is ever a season when a woman's system is predisposed toward the malady known as sex love, it is when some man is magnanimous about another man. And Guilford's manner at that instant was magnanimous--and I already had fifty-seven other varieties of affection for him! I decided then, in the twinkling of my fan chain, which I was agitating rather mercilessly, that if Guilford were the kind of a man I _could_ love, he'd be the very man I should adore.

--But he wasn't. And the kind I could love was disentangling himself from the group around the door and coming toward me at that very moment.

"Have you met him?" I asked of my companion, trying to pretend that the noise was my fan chain and not my heart.

"No."

In another instant they were shaking hands cordially.

"You'll excuse me a moment?" Guilford asked, turning to me--after he and Maitland Tait had propounded and answered perfunctory questions about Oldburgh. "I wanted to speak to--Delia Ramage."

I had never before in my life heard of his wishing to speak to Delia Ramage, but she was the nearest one to him, so he veered across to her side, while I was left alone with the new arrival. This is called heaping coals of fire.

"I was glad to see you--a moment ago," Maitland Tait said in that low intimate tone which is usually begotten only by daily or hourly thought. Take two people who have not seen each other for a week, nor thought of each other, and when they meet they will shrill out spontaneous, falsetto tones--but not so with two people whose spirits have communed five minutes before. They lower their voices when they come face to face, for they realize that they are before the sanctum. "You're looking most--unusually well."

He was not, but I refrained from telling him so. Most thoughtful men assume a look of constraint when they are forced to mingle with a shallow-pated, boisterous throng, and he was strictly of this type--I observed it with a thrill of triumph.

Yet the festive appearance of evening dress was not unbecoming to him. His was that kind of magnificent plainness which showed to advantage in gala attire, and I knew that even if I could get him off to live the life of a cave-man, occasionally a processional of the tribe would cause him to thrust brilliant feathers into his goatskin cap and bind his sandals with gleaming new thongs. But then the martial excitement of a processional would cause his eyes to light up with a brilliancy to match the feathers in his cap, and a dance could not do this.

"Of course you're engaged for the first dance?" he asked, as the music began and a general commotion ensued. "I knew that I'd have to miss that--when I was late. But"--he came a step closer and spoke as if acting under some hasty impulse--"I want to tell you how very lovely I think you are to-night! I hope you do not mind my saying this? I didn't know it before--I thought it was due to other influences--but you are beautiful."

It was at this moment that the silver oars of the Nile barge were dimmed under the greater resplendence of dark eyes--and the purple silk sails closed out the sky, but closed in heaven. Cleopatra and I might have cut our teeth on the same coral ring, for all the inferiority _I_ felt to her in that instant.

"I--I'm afraid--" I began palpitatingly, for you must know that palpitations are part of the Egyptian rôle--the sense of danger and wrong were what raised--or lowered--the flitting space of time out of the ordinary lover thrills. "I am afraid----"

"But you must not say that!" he commanded, his deep voice muffled. "This is just the beginning of what I wish to say to you."

I wrenched my eyes away from his--then looked quickly for Guilford. Grandfather Moore's warnings in my ear were choking the violin music into demoniac howls. I don't believe that any woman ever really enjoys having two men love her at the same time--and this is not contradicting what I've said in the above paragraph about Cleopatra. I never once said that I had _enjoyed_ feeling like her--you simply took it for granted that I had!

"Aren't you going to dance--with some one?" I asked, turning back quickly, as Guilford's arm slipped about me and we started away into a heartless, senseless motion. Maitland Tait stood looking at me for an instant without answering, then swept his eyes down the room to where Mrs. Charles Sefton--a sister-in-law of the house of Kendall--and her daughter Anabel were standing. Mrs. Sefton was a pillar of society, and, if one _must_ use architectural similes, Anabel was a block. They caught him and made a sandwich of him on the spot. I whirled away with Guilford.

At the end of the dance I found myself at the far end of the ballroom, close to a door that opened into a small conservatory. The dim green within looked so calm and uncomplicated beside the glare of light which surrounded me that I turned toward it--thirstily.

"I'm going in here to rest a minute, Guilford," I explained, setting him free with a little push toward a group of girls he knew. "You run along and dance with some of them. Men aren't any too plentiful to-night."

"No-o--I'll go with you," he objected lazily, slipping his cigarette case from his pocket. "You're too darned pretty to-night to stay long in a conservatory alone."

"But I'll not be alone," I replied, with a return of that frightful recklessness which tempted me to throw myself on his mercy and say: "I'm in love with this Englishman--madly in love! I have never been in love before--and I hope I shall never be again if it always feels like this!" Instead of saying this, however, I said, with a smile: "Don't think for a moment that I shall be alone. Grandfather and Uncle Lancelot will be with me."

He looked disgusted.

"What's going on in your conscience now?" he asked, with slightly primped lips.

"Something--that I'll tell you about later."

"But has it got to be threshed out to-night?" he demanded irritably. "I had hoped that we might spend this one evening acting like human beings."

"Still, it seems that we can't," I answered, with a foolish attempt to sound inconsequential. "Please let me sit down in here by myself for a little while, Guilford."

He turned on his heel, with an unflattering abruptness, and left me. I entered the damp, earthy-smelling room, where wicker tables held giant ferns, and a fountain drizzling sleepily in the center of the apartment, broke off the view of a green cane bench just beyond; I made for this settee and sank down dejectedly.

How long I sat there I could not tell--one never can, if you've noticed--but after a little while I heard the next dance start, and then three people, still in the position of a sandwich, entered.

"How warm it is to-night!" I heard Maitland Tait's voice suddenly proclaim, in a fretful tone, as if the women with him were responsible for the disagreeable fact. But he drew up a chair, rather meekly, and subsided into it. "This is the first really warm night we've had this summer."

"It seems like the irony of fate, doesn't it?" Anabel Sefton asked with a nervous little giggle. There are some girls who can never talk to a man five minutes without bringing fate's name into the conversation.

"We had almost no dances during April and May, when one really needed violence of some sort to keep warm," her mother hastened to explain. "And now, at this last dance of the season, it is actually hot."

"The last big dance, mother."

"Of course!" Mrs. Sefton leaned toward the other two chairs confidentially. "A crush like this is too big," she declared.

"Oh, but I like the big affairs," Anabel pouted. "You never know then who you're going to run across! Just think of the unfamiliar faces here to-night! I happened up on Gayle Cargill and Doctor Macdonald down in the drawing-room a while ago--where they'd hidden to sing Italian, sotto voce!"

"Then Dan Hunter is here--for a wonder," her mother agreed, as if a recital of Oldburgh's submerged tenth were quite the most interesting thing she could think up for a foreigner's delectation, "and Grace Christie! Have you met Miss Christie, Mr. Tait?"

"Yes," he replied.

"She's gone in for newspaper work," Anabel elucidated.

"Just a pose," her mother hastily added. "She really belongs to one of our best families, and is engaged to Guilford Blake."

"But she won't marry him," Anabel said virtuously. "I'm sure _I_ can't understand such a nature. They've been engaged all their lives and----"

"She doesn't deserve anything better than to lose him," her mother broke in. "If he should chance to look in some other direction for a while she'd change her tactics, no doubt."

"Oh--no doubt," echoed a deep male voice, the tones as cool as the water-drops plashing into the fountain beside him.

"Anyway, it's her kind--those women who would be sirens if the mythological age hadn't passed--who cause so much trouble in the world," Mrs. Sefton wound up. At fifty-two women can look upon sirens dispassionately.

After a while the music began throbbing again, and a college boy came up to claim Anabel. The trio melted quietly away. I rose from my chair and started toward the door when I saw that Maitland Tait had not left with the others. He was standing motionless beside the fountain.

I came up with him and he did not start. Evidently he had known all the while that I was in the room.

"Well?" he said, with a certain aloofness that strangely enough gave him the appearance of intense aristocracy. "Well?"

"Well--" I echoed, feebly, but before I could go away farther he had drawn himself up sharply.

"I was coming to look for you--to say good-by," he said.

"Good-by?" I repeated blankly. "You mean good night, don't you?"

"No."

Our eyes met squarely then, and mine dropped. They had hit against steel.

"And this is--good-by?" I plead, while I felt that wild wind and waves were beating against my body and that the skies were falling.

"Of course!" he answered harshly. "What else could it be?"

I think that we must have stood there in silence for a minute or more, then, without speaking another word, or even looking at me squarely in the face again, he moved deliberately away and I lost all trace of him in the crowd.