CHAPTER IX

MAITLAND TAIT

The only difference between the houses in West Clydemont Place and museums was that there was no admission fee at the front door. Otherwise they were identical, for the "auld lang syne" flavor greeted you the moment you put foot into that corner of the town. You knew instinctively that every family there owned its own lawn-mower and received crested invitations in the morning mail.

Yet it was certainly not fashionable! Indeed, from a butler-and-porte-cochère standpoint it was shabby. The business of owning your own lawn-mower arises from a state of mind, rather than from a condition of finances, anyway. We were poor, but aloof--and strung high with the past-tension. The admiral, the ambassador and the artist rubbed our aristocracy in on any stray caller who lingered in the hall, if they had failed to be pricked by it on the point of grandfather's jeweled sword in the library.

I saw 1919 through a new vista as I came up to it in the late dusk, following the Flag Day reception, and I wondered what the effect of all this antiquity would be on the mind of a man who so clearly disregarded the grandfather clause in one's book of life. I hoped that he would be amused by it, as he had been by the long-tailed D. A. R. badge on my coat.

"You'd better have a little fire kindled up in the library, Grace," mother observed chillingly just after lunch that next afternoon. "It's true it's June, but--"

"But the day _is_ bleak and raw," I answered, with a sudden cordial sense of relief that she was on speaking terms with me again. "Certainly I'll tell Cicely to make a fire."

"The dampness of the day has nothing at all to do with it," she kept on with frozen evenness. "I suggested it because a fire is a safe place for a girl to look into while her profile is being studied."

"Mother!"

Her sense of outraged propriety suddenly slipped its leash.

"It keeps her eyes looking earnest, instead of _eager_," she burst out. "And any girl who'd let a man--allow a man--to run away from a party whose very magnificence was induced on his account, and take her off to tea in a public place, and come to see her the very next afternoon--a stranger, and a foreigner at that--is--is playing with fire!"

"You mean she'd better be playing with fire while he's calling?" I asked quietly. "We must remember to have the old andirons polished, then."

She stopped in her task of dusting the parlor--whose recesses without the shining new player-piano suddenly looked as bare and empty as a shop-window just after the holidays.

"You wilfully ignore my warning," she declared. "If this man left that party yesterday and comes calling to-day, of course he's impressed! And if you let him, of course _you're_ impressed. This much goes without saying; but I beg you to be careful, Grace! You happen to have those very serious, _betraying_ eyes, and I want you to guard them while he's here!"

"By keeping my hands busy, eh?" I laughed. "Well, I'll promise, mother, if that'll be any relief to you."

So the fire was kindled, as a preventative measure; and at four o'clock he came--not on the stroke, but ten minutes after. I was glad that he had patronized the street railway service for this call, and left the limousine in its own boudoir--you couldn't imagine anything so exquisite being kept in a lesser place--or I'm afraid that our little white-capped maid would have mistaken it for an ambulance and assured him that nobody was sick. Gleaming blue limousines were scarce in that section.

"Am I early?" he asked, after we had shaken hands and he had glanced toward the fire with a little surprised, gratified expression. "I wasted a quarter of an hour waiting for this car."

Now, a woman can always forgive a man for being late, if she knows he started on time, so with this reassurance I began to feel at home with him. I leaned over and stirred the fire hospitably--to keep my eyes from showing just how thoroughly at home I felt.

"No--you are not early. I was expecting you at four, and--and mother will be down presently."

He studied my profile.

"I was out at the golf club dance last night," he said, after a pause, with a certain abruptness which I had found characterized his more important parts of speech. I stood the tongs against the marble mantlepiece and drew back from the flame.

"Was it--enjoyable?" I asked politely.

"Extremely. Mrs. Walker was there, and she had very kindly forgiven me for my defection of the afternoon. In fact, she was distinctly cordial. She talked to me a great deal of you and your mother."

My heart sank. It always does when I find that my women friends have been talking a great deal about me.

"Oh, did she?"

"She is very fond of you, it seems--and very puzzled by you."

"Puzzled because I work for the _Herald_?"

I spoke breathlessly, for I wondered if Mrs. Walker had told of the Guilford Blake puzzle, as well; but after one look into the candid half-amused eyes I knew that this information had been withheld.

"Well, yes. She touched upon that, among other things."

"But what things?" I asked impatiently. At the door I heard the maid with the tea tray. "I suppose, however, just the usual things that people tell about us. That we have been homeless and penniless--except for this old barn--since I was a baby, and that, one by one, the pomps of power have been stripped from us?"

He looked at me soberly for a moment.

"Yes, she told me all this," he said.

"And that our historic rosewood furniture was sold, years ago, to Mrs. Hartwell Gill, the grocer's wife who used the chair-legs as battering-rams?"

He smiled.

"Against Oldburgh's unwelcoming doors? Yes."

"And that--"

"That you belonged to the most aristocratic family in the whole state," he interrupted softly. "So aristocratic that even the possession of the rosewood furniture is an open sesame! And of course this state is noted for its blooded beings, even in my own country."

"Really?" I asked, with a little gratified surprise.

"Indeed, yes!" he replied earnestly. "And Mrs. Walker told me something that I had not in the least thought to surmise--that you are a descendant of the famous artist, Christie. I don't know why I happened not to think about it, for the name is one which an Englishman instantly connects with portrait galleries. He was very favorably known on our side."

"Yes. He had a very remarkable--a very pathetic history," I said.

Turning around, he glanced at a small portrait across the room.

"Is--is this James Christie?" he asked.

"Yes. There is a larger one in the hall."

He walked across the room and examined the portrait. After a perfunctory survey, which did not include any very close examination of the strong features--rugged and a little harsh, and by no means the glorious young face which had been a lodestar to Lady Frances Webb--he turned back to me. For a moment I fancied that he was going to say something bitter and impulsive--something that held a tinge of mass-hatred for class, but his expression changed suddenly. I saw that his impulse had passed, and that what he would say next would be an afterthought.

"Do you care for him--for this sort of thing?" he asked, waving his hand carelessly toward the other portraits in the room and toward the sword, lying there in an absurd sort of harmlessness beneath its glass case. "I imagined that you didn't."

He spoke with a tinge of disappointment. Evidently he was sorry to find me so pedigreed a person.

"I do--and I don't," I answered, coming across the room to his side and drawing back a curtain to admit a better light. "I certainly care for--him."

"The artist?"

"Yes."

"But why?" he demanded, with a sudden twist of perversity to his big well-shaped mouth. "To me it seems such a waste of time--this sentiment for romantic antiquity. But I am not an unprejudiced judge, I admit. I have spent all the days of my life hating aristocracy."

"Oh, my feeling for him is not caused by his aristocracy," I made haste to explain. "And indeed, the Christies were very commonplace people until he elevated them into the ranks of fame. He was not only an artist of note, but he was a very strong man. It is this part of his history that I revere, and when I was a very young girl I 'adopted' him--from all the rest of my ancestors--to be the one I'd care for and feel a pride in."

He smiled.

"Of course you don't understand," I attempted to explain with a little flurry. "No _man_ would ever think of adopting an ancestor, but--"

He interrupted me, his smile growing gentler.

"I think I understand," he said. "I did the selfsame thing, years ago when I was a boy. But my circumstances were rather different from yours. I selected my grandfather--my mother's father, because he was clean and fine and strong! He was--he was a collier in Wales."

"A collier?" I repeated, wondering for the moment over the unaccustomed word.

"A coal-miner," he explained briefly. "He was honest and kind-hearted--and I took him for my example. He left me no heirlooms that--"

I turned away, looking at the room's furnishings with a feeling of reckless contempt.

"Heirlooms are--are a nuisance to keep dusted!" I declared quickly.

"Yet you evidently like them," he said, as we took our places again before the fire, and the little maid, in her nervous haste, made an unnecessary number of trips in and out. The firelight was glowing ruddily over the silver things on the tea-table, and looking up, I caught his eyes resting upon the ring I wore--Guilford's scarab. "That ring is likely an heirloom?"

"Yes--the story goes that Mariette himself found it," I elucidated, slipping the priceless old bit of stone off my hand and handing it to him to examine.

But as I talked my head was buzzing, for grandfather was at one ear and Uncle Lancelot was at the other.

"Grace, you ought to tell him!" grandfather commanded sharply. "Tell him this minute! Say to him: 'This ring is an heirloom in the family of my betrothed.'"

"_Rot_, parson!" came in Uncle Lancelot's dear comforting tones. "Shall a young woman take it for granted that every man who admires the color of her eyes is interested in her entire history?--Why, it would be absolutely indelicate of Grace to tell this man that she's engaged. It's simply none of his business."

"You'll see! You'll see!" grandfather warned--and my heart sank, for when a member of your family warns you that you'll see, the sad part of it is that you _will_ see.

"It's a royal scarab, isn't it?" Maitland Tait asked, turning the ancient beetle over and viewing the inscription on the flat side.

"Yes--perhaps--oh, I don't know, I'm sure," I answered in a bewildered fashion. Then suddenly I demanded: "But what else did Mrs. Walker tell you? Surely she didn't leave off with the mention of one illustrious member of my family."

"She told me about your great-aunt--the queer old lady who left James Christie's relics to you because you were the only member of the family who didn't keep a black bonnet in readiness for her funeral," he laughed, as he handed me back the ring.

"They were just a batch of letters," I corrected, "not any other relics."

"Yes--the letters written by Lady Frances Webb," he said.

It was my turn to laugh.

"I knew that Mrs. Walker must have been talkative," I declared. "She didn't tell you the latest touch of romance in connection with those letters, did she?"

He was looking into the fire, with an expression of deep thoughtfulness; and I studied his profile for a moment.

"Late romance?" he asked in a puzzled fashion, as he turned to me.

"A publishing company has made me an offer to publish those letters! To make them into a stunning 'best-seller,' with a miniature portrait of Lady Frances Webb, as frontispiece, I dare say, and the oftenest-divorced illustrator in America to furnish pictures of Colmere Abbey, with the lovers mooning 'by Norman stone!'"

He was silent for a little while.

"No, she didn't tell me this," he finally answered.

"Then it is because she doesn't know it!" I explained. "You see, mother is still too grieved to mention the matter to any one by telephone--and it happens that she hasn't met Mrs. Walker face to face since the offer was made."

"And--rejected?" he asked, with a little smile.

"Yes, but how did you know?"

The smile sobered.

"There are some things one _knows_," he answered. "Yet, after all, what are you going to do with the letters? If you don't publish them now how are you going to be sure that some other--some future possessor will not?"

"I can't be sure--that's the reason I'm not going to run any risks," I told him. "I'm going to burn them."

He started.

"But that would be rather a pity, wouldn't it?" he asked. "She was such a noted writer that I imagine her letters are full of literary value."

"It would be a cold-blooded thing for _me_ to do," I said thoughtfully. "I've an idea that some day I'll take them back to England and--and burn them there."

"A sort of feeling that they'd enjoy being buried on their native soil?" he asked.

"I'll take them to Colmere Abbey--her old home," I explained. "To me the place has always been a house of dreams! She describes portions of the gardens in her letters--tells him of new flower-beds made, of new walls built--of the sun-dial. I have always wanted to go there, and some day I shall bundle all these letters up and pack them in the bottom of a steamer trunk--to have a big bonfire with them on the very same hearth where she burned his."