Part 4

Suddenly he remembered the withered spray of roses that she had dropped to the path, and a desire to repossess it took hold of him. His cane was in his hand and he knew just where they had fallen. He leaned over the tops of the pickets and reached forward. Then he stopped.

The roses were gone.

VIII

Burton returned to Belle Harbour and King’s Street just two weeks later to a day. It was dusk when he stepped on the station platform, and starlit darkness when, followed by a tattered and grinning little darky bearing his luggage, he reached his lodgings. His first act was to throw open the bowed shutters and look out upon the Enchanted Garden. It was a dark expanse of bush and hedge, with here and there an uncertain fleck of gray where the wan light from the sky caught a white blossom. Beyond, the house was empty of light. Something--what he scarcely knew--in the aspect of house and garden oppressed him; had he believed in premonitions he would have accepted that as one of ill augury. He turned away with a shrug of impatience and lighted his lamp.

In the morning he leaped out of bed and again thrust aside the blinds. His heart sank. The Enchanted Garden was still below him; but it looked unmistakably neglected and uninhabited. Most of the roses were through blooming for the while and what blossoms there were seemed faded and imperfect. The blinds in the rear of the Castle were all tightly closed; the hammock was gone from the porch; the vines looked dusty. In a sudden panic of alarm Burton strode to the hall and called loudly for Bob.

“Have those people in that house over there gone away?” he demanded when the darky appeared.

“Which house is dat, sah?”

“There, idiot--beyond the rose-garden! Have they gone?”

“Oh, yessah; they gone; been gone a week, I reckon.”

Burton sat down on the edge of the bed and groaned. Then,--

“Where?” he demanded. Bob shook his head:

“I dunno, sah; somewhars up No’th. The Colonel he al’ays goes No’th in summer.”

“The Colonel?”

“Yessah, Colonel Barrett. Wasn’t you askin’ about----”

“_Barrett!_” Burton seized Bob by the arm and dragged him to the casement. “Look here,” he said desperately, “do you mean to tell me that Colonel Barrett lives in that house, the one with the rose-garden behind it?”

“Y-yessah, I surely does, sah.”

“You’re not mistaken?”

“No, sah; why, I knows the Colonel well!”

“Then why didn’t you tell me this before, you fool nigger? Why didn’t you tell me Colonel Barrett lived there?”

“Yo’ didn’t ask me!”

“Oh, get out of here!” groaned Burton. “Hold on, though. Has the Colonel a daughter?”

“No, sah, he ain’ never got mahied.”

“Then----” cried Burton in sudden hope.

“He got a niece, though.”

“Oh! So she’s his niece? What’s her name?”

“Name’s Miss Kitty.”

“I know that,” said the other impatiently. “What’s the rest of it?”

“Ah ain’ never heard no mo’.”

“Do you mean to tell me that she has no last name?”

“Oh, _las’_ name! I didn’t know you meant _las’_ name, sah. Las’ name’s Fletcher, o’ co’se!”

“That’s all. Get out!”

Bob departed to tell the cook that “Mister Burton he done wen’ crazy,” and the subject of the announcement remained for many minutes sitting on the bed in his pajamas gazing out into the Enchanted Garden and mentally heaping maledictions upon himself. The thought of the letter of introduction in his trunk was maddening. It was all very plain now; no wonder she had smiled when he had asked about the Colonel!

“Oh Kitty, Kitty!” he muttered, “you’re the cruel one!”

After breakfast he packed his trunk hurriedly and then, armed with the letter, sallied forth. Down King’s Street he went to the first corner; here a half-obliterated sign, nailed against the trunk of a giant oak, bore the legend “Mary Street;” he counted the houses and chose the third one. Emptiness was written all over its sleepy, red-brick front. Nevertheless he knocked, and waited. After many minutes the door was opened cautiously and an aged negress--he was certain it was Aunt Amanda--stuck her head through the narrow aperture.

“Is Colonel Barrett at home?” asked Burton.

“No, sah, he gone up No’th.”

“Impossible!” exclaimed Burton, simulating intense surprise and dismay. “I have a letter of introduction to him. Can you tell me where he has gone?”

“New Yo’k.”

“And the address there?”

“Can’ tell yo’ that, sah; reckon, though, jes’ ‘New Yo’k’ will fin’ him.”

“But isn’t there anyone here in town that can give me his address?”

“Don’ reckon so.”

“But his mail, where does that go?”

“Folkses at the pos’-office lookin’ arter that, sah.”

“Oh! And is Miss Fletcher with him?”

“Yessah.”

“Thank you. I think I will leave my card. Will you kindly see that he gets it when he returns?”

Burton tried the post-office without, however, much hope of success. And, as he had expected, the post-mistress, an elderly lady with an extremely suspicious expression about her thin lips, refused to divulge any information.

“It’s a rule of the Department,” she explained severely.

That evening Burton returned to New York without having obtained any more explicit directions than those given by Aunt Amanda. But he was not hopeless. Surely, he assured himself, it would not be difficult to discover the whereabouts of the Colonel and his niece so long as hotel registers were open to public inspection.

But at the end of two days he had changed his mind. At the end of the third he gave up the search. New York had swallowed the Princess and the Ogre! Burton returned to his affairs, which had begun to suffer, and strove, for their good, to banish thoughts of Belle Harbour and the Enchanted Garden and Kitty of the Roses from his mind. But the task he had set himself was a difficult one; and just when it seemed that he was arriving at some degree of success, lo! a prankish Fate interposed.

It was well into July. New York had been sweltering all day under hot, cloudless skies, and even the darkness brought no relief. To stay indoors was out of the question, and so Burton dragged himself from an already deserted club after a late dinner and hailed a hansom.

“Drive around,” he directed,--“any old place so long as it’s cool.”

Cabby turned the horse’s head up-town and it trotted listlessly along over the still heated asphalt. Burton leaned forward to catch what air there was and smoked and meditated. For some reason--perhaps it was a glimpse of a florist’s window that did it--his thoughts flew southward to a garden of roses and to a small, graceful figure that walked therein. Fagged by the heat of the long day, he had no strength left with which to combat temptation, and he yielded. It came back to him very vividly; closing his eyes he saw the garden and the blank, drowsy old house; he saw the door beside the rose-vines open and a white-gowned figure trip down the steps. She came nearer and nearer, smiling, happy-eyed, the broad brim of her hat lifting in the breeze and chasing the edge of the mellow shadow over her cheek. Never before had her face come back to him so clearly. In the length of eight blocks he lived over those precious mornings minute by minute. In the middle of the ninth he was suffering all the torments of a despairing lover of twenty. He hurled the dead cigar from his lips to the pavement and thrust up the trap with his cane.

“This won’t do,” he muttered savagely; and aloud, “Stop here; I’ve had enough.”

On the curb he found himself bathed in the bright glare of many lights; he had landed at the entrance of an uptown theatre. With a shrug of his shoulders he went in. “As well here as anywhere,” he thought. Of the entertainment he recalled but little the next day. But the theatre was fairly cool and the music bright and eminently cheerful. When the final curtain had descended he joined the pushing throng at the right of the house. Half-way towards the entrance his eyes, ranging carelessly over the scene, were suddenly arrested and his heart leaped. Across the rows of empty seats, at the far side of the theatre, a man and a girl were slowly making their way towards the door. The man was tall, thin, with grizzled hair and moustache, Southern-looking from head to heel, and about fifty years of age. The girl was slight and rather small, with brown hair and warm skin hued like the inner petals of a rose. She was plainly dressed in a street skirt of gray and a white shirt-waist against which three or four pink roses drooped. In short, it was Kitty--and the Ogre!

Burton looked about him desperately. The only course open was to remain in the aisle where he was and trust to reaching the lobby in time to intercept them. He took advantage of every cranny and crevice in the throng and pushed his way through with slight regard for toes or skirts. It seemed hours before he reached the entrance. Now and then he was able to catch sight of his quarry over the shoulders of the throng. It was while so engaged that he heard an eloquent sound of rending silk and felt himself seized roughly by the arm. He turned to face an indignant cavalier.

“Sir, you are very awkward! You should look where you are going! You have torn this lady’s dress!”

“I am very sorry,” replied Burton, striving to wrest himself from the other’s clutch. “Believe me, Madam, I am deeply grieved and--er---- I beg of you, sir, don’t detain me; I am trying to reach some friends who----”

“Deuce take your friends, sir! Your clumsiness----”

But Burton wrenched himself free and plunged into the lobby, followed by muttered execrations from those whom he unceremoniously thrust from his path. But the delay had cost him dear. The Princess and the Ogre were not to be seen. He rushed to the street door just in time to catch a fleeting glimpse of a gray skirt disappearing into a brougham.

“Kitty!” he called, and struggled across the sidewalk.

The door closed, the driver snapped his lash, and the carriage rolled away. And yet for an instant he was certain a face had looked from the window and a hand had rested upon the sill. He hailed a hansom.

“Keep that brougham in sight,” he said hurriedly. “There’s a five-dollar bill in it if you do!” With one foot on the step he paused, stooped, and lifted something from the asphalt.

It was a pink rose.

The driver’s task was not a hard one. The brougham went northward slowly for a few blocks and then turned to the west down a quiet side street. Presently Burton’s conveyance stopped.

“All right, sir,” said the driver.

The brougham had paused some dozen doors beyond and its passengers were alighting. Burton descended, dismissed his cab, and keeping the house into which the Princess and the Ogre had disappeared in sight, walked leisurely towards it. It proved to be a small, unpretentious, but attractive hotel. When he entered the hall was empty save for a clerk, behind the tiny desk, and a negro elevator boy.

“Is Colonel Barrett, of Virginia, staying here?” Burton asked.

“Yes, sir. Will you send up your card?”

Burton hesitated; then shook his head.

“No, I think I’ll wait until morning; I presume they have retired?”

“Did Colonel Barrett and the young lady go to their room, Billy?” the clerk inquired. The elevator boy nodded sleepily. Burton turned away and walked homeward through the breathless streets with a triumphant joy and a fragrant pink rose for companions. To-morrow he would see Kitty, his Kitty, Kitty of the Roses!

He went to his office early the following morning, and at ten o’clock, summoning a hansom, had himself driven to a florist’s. There he purchased two dozen and one roses and personally superintended the packing and dispatching of them. His selection may have struck the attendant as somewhat unique, consisting, as it did, of a dozen white blossoms, a dozen pink ones, and a single half-blown bud of deep crimson; but Burton, remembering Kitty’s wont, thought she would understand. After the flowers had been sent he hesitated a moment on the curb. In the end he sent the cab away. He did not want to present himself at the hotel before eleven; the thought of sitting inactive in a club window was distasteful; he would walk slowly uptown. So he crossed to the Avenue and, lighting a fresh cigarette, idled from window to window in a desperate attempt to kill time. He allowed no display on the shady side of the street to pass unexamined, and by the time he had reached his northerly goal his brain was a kaleidoscope of sporting prints, French landscapes, jewelry, silk stockings, bric-à-brac, lingerie, and smokers’ articles. But it was eleven o’clock!

This time there was no premonition of disappointment. He sought the desk and produced his card.

“Sorry, but Colonel Barrett and his niece left ten minutes ago for the steamer,” said the clerk.

“Steamer!” gasped Burton. “What steamer?”

“I’ll find out for you in a minute from the porter.” He disappeared, leaving Burton leaning against the desk staring blankly out onto the sun-smitten pavement. In a moment he returned.

“Trunks went to the American Line pier, sir.”

“Thank you,” Burton muttered. Then, turning suddenly at the doorway, “What time is the sailing?”

“Half after twelve, sir, I believe.”

Burton glanced at his watch, compared it with the smug-faced clock over the desk, and strode to the steps. But again he turned:

“I sent a box of flowers here for the young lady this morning; did she get them?”

“No, sir, they came just after she’d left. They’re here; I was going to send them back to the florist’s.”

That was a wild race against time! With the long box of roses between his knees, one hand on his watch, and a cigarette hanging unlighted from his lips, Burton sat like a stern-faced Fate and was whirled from the hotel to the wharf in what was practically one long bump. When the horse was pulled back on his haunches before the pier entrance there was no need to ask questions: a stream of persons whose handkerchiefs still hung from their hands was emerging into the hot sunlight.

With a groan Burton threw himself back against the cushions.

“Never before in the history of ocean travel has a steamship left on time,” he muttered.

“But to-day--oh, damn!”

“Where to, sir?” asked the driver, his red, perspiring face glowing above the opened trap. Burton gulped, and then gave his office address. The wearied horse and creaking hansom crept dejectedly uptown again through close, furnace-like streets and over pavements that threw the heat upward with intolerable intensity. Burton thought of the open, wind-swept ocean and cursed weakly. When the hansom came to a stop in front of the narrow, white-marble monstrosity on the tenth floor of which was his office, he paid three prices to the driver and strode towards the entrance. The cabman called after him,--

“Hi, sir, you’ve forgotten your flowers!”

Burton turned and scowled ferociously.

“I don’t want them,” he said. “Throw them away--take them home--eat them--_anything_!”

But cabby, being a person of business principles, did none of these things: he sold them at the next corner to a sidewalk vender for fifty cents.

IX

It was June once more.

Burton had been in Washington for two days; it was Tuesday evening now and his business was at last completed. He had earned a vacation, he told himself, and he meant to take it. Washington was maintaining its reputation for torridness, and when at the lunch-table an acquaintance had pictured a mile of cool green waves breaking on the shingle at Virginia Beach and had likened the sea-breezes there to a million electric fans, Burton had made up his mind on the instant. He would take the night boat for Hampton and spend the morrow by salt water; the thought of cleaving his way through gurgling, hissing combers was so enticing that the rest of the hot, humid afternoon was almost endurable.

He took the little steamer after dinner, just as the weary sun was sinking back of the miles of parched brick and fetid asphalt. He was tired, and he meant to go to bed early, but the deck was comparatively cool and the little box-like state-room was incomparably hot, and so darkness found him still smoking with his feet on the rail. Near at hand two men were talking lazily, but he gave them no heed until one said:

“Belle Harbour? Yes, over there where you see the lights. We stop there. Say, have you ever been there? Well, of all----”

Burton listened no longer. Belle Harbour--the Enchanted Garden--and Kitty! How long ago it all seemed, to be sure! And yet the mere mention of the sleepy old town set his heart a-racing and the memory of the girl amidst the roses still never failed to bring a frown to his brow and a queer little ache to his breast. It was June once more, he thought, and the garden would be gay and fragrant with the waving blooms, but Kitty----

He dropped his feet from the rail and sat up suddenly in his deck chair. But _would_ Kitty be absent? Wasn’t it far more probable that she would be at home, there in the garden, now that rose-time had come? It was a long cry from Algiers to Virginia, and yet, as he gazed across the dark water to the few scattered lights, he felt certain that the girl he loved was there.

Only twice since she had gone abroad had he had tidings of her, though he had searched the foreign pages diligently. Once her name was among a list of persons who had registered at the _Herald_ Bureau in Paris: that was in September. In January the paper had mentioned Colonel Simpson Barrett as having been a guest at a Government function given in Algiers to a visiting potentate. That was all. He had instructed Mrs. Phillips to advise him the instant the Colonel and his niece returned to Mary Street, but such advice had never come. And yet--and yet something seemed to tell him that Kitty was back among the roses, that the Castle once more held the Princess!

The steamer sidled across the black waste of water with a warning screech and much tinkling of bells. The lights on the wharves grew brighter and brighter. Burton tossed his cigarette into the wake and sought his state-room. Virginia Beach and rolling waves and sea-breezes were forgotten. The steamer bumped against the spiling and a voice droned:

“Belle Harbour! All off for Belle Harbour!”

A solitary figure, laden with suit-case and umbrella, strode down the gang-plank.

As Burton turned into King’s Street and walked along under the motionless branches of the arching oaks he caught dim glimpses of white-gowned figures on doorsteps and heard young voices. Once the tinkling of a mandolin floated across the street, and with it the sound of a girl singing softly in the darkness. It was June once more, the month of roses and of love! Burton went on with a new lightness in his heart.

“How things do happen!” exclaimed Mrs. Phillips, leading the way upstairs. “The Colonel got back yesterday, and I was just this minute hunting for pen and paper to write to you! Mr. Burton, that is surely a coincidence!”

“It is indeed, Mrs. Phillips. Er--I presume the Colonel brought his family back with him?”

“Well, now, sir, he hasn’t got much family to bring, but he brought what he had--his niece, Miss Fletcher, you know.”

“Ah, his niece? Indeed! There’s nothing I shall want, thank you. I think I will go out again for a stroll. If you will ask the worthy Robert to remember my existence in the morning----”

Out under the oaks again, Burton lighted a pipe and set off in an aimless manner down King’s Street. But at the first corner he turned to the right without hesitation. The third house held a solitary light. He stood for several moments across the way watching it, and then, humming a tune from sheer gladness, strolled on. At the next corner he again took the right-hand turning, and presently the tower of the old church arose, murky-white, against the starlit sky. The green, dotted with its crumbling tombstones, invited him in through the open gate. As he passed the church door he saw that the building was lighted, and simultaneously the sound of voices reached him. Wondering, he stepped noiselessly to a window and looked in.

A little group of men and girls were congregated near the farthest door and a second group stood beside the chancel. There was much talking, and what was said he could not hear. But as he looked the group at the door ranged itself in couples, from the organ loft came the first notes of the wedding-march, and the procession started up the aisle. At the same moment Burton’s heart stood still. Back of the first three couples--apparently the ushers--a middle-aged gentleman and a girl came. For the man Burton had no eyes, but at the girl he gazed fixedly, hungrily. It was Kitty of the Roses!

Up the nearer aisle marched the bridegroom and the best man. The organ’s notes rose and sank. Burton, with a vague disquiet at his heart, watched frowningly. “A rehearsal,” he told himself. The ushers turned at the end of the aisle and took up their stations. Bride and bridesmaids went slowly onward to the chancel; groom and best man advanced to meet them. Then the organ’s notes died away and with them went Burton’s happiness.

Side by side before the empty altar stood the bridegroom and Kitty!

Burton turned away from the window and stumbled blindly down the gravel driveway that led through the darkness to King’s Street. His hands clinched themselves fiercely and his heart was like lead. At the gate he paused and relighted his pipe with fingers that trembled. Then he laughed softly and walked homeward.

“You’re too late, old man,” he muttered, “too late!”

When he was ready for bed he blew out the lamp and drawing a chair to the open window sat and smoked many pipes and looked miserably down onto the darkened rose-garden. In the Castle all lights were gone. The town was silent save for a distant whistle from the direction of the railroad or the occasional _cheep_ of a circling bat.

“Kitty!” he murmured once, “Kitty!” Then he closed his lips resolutely, grimly, over the stem of his pipe.

God! how he hated the fragrance of roses!

X

The north-bound train left at eleven; his bag stood in the hallway; his watch said ten minutes of nine. Two dreary hours remained before he could shake the dust of Belle Harbour from his shoes for the last time.

There is a strain of morbidness in the most healthy of us and Burton was no exception. That, perhaps, is why, after vainly striving to find interest in the Washington morning paper, he lighted the inevitable cigarette and went out into the yard.

It might well have been a morning of a year ago; everything was unchanged. The Daphne-tree threw its grotesque shadows on the turf; the iris bloomed along the old wall; the birds sang and called from the boughs; and beyond the iron fence the roses were courtesying and swaying--flares of pink and yellow, white and red--on their slender stalks; the Enchanted Garden was as beautiful as ever. Burton, his hands behind his back, a little stream of smoke curling up from under his moustache, stood in the shade of the tree in the corner and viewed the scene with unresponsive eyes. It was all over, he told himself for the fiftieth time--over and done with, dead and buried. In an hour or two he would put the memory of it out of his heart; until then, though, what harm in----