CHAPTER I.

"I can't reach it," declared Georgy. "You boys are all growing so tall that a girl has to mount on stilts in order to go about with you."

"I will find a log," said I, looking about us.

"Come!" struck in Jack Holt, laughing, "make a footstool of me, Georgy;" and without another word he flung himself flat on his face. She was never loath to put her foot upon any of our necks, figuratively speaking, and now, with a burst of laughter, she took Jack at his word, and planting herself on his shoulders peered down through the coils of Virginia creeper into the cunningly devised bird's nest in the hollow of an oak tree. There were five delicately tinted eggs, and she tried in vain to squeeze her slim hand through the aperture and possess herself of them.

"Getting tired, Jack?" she asked presently.

"No," he answered, his face still kissing the moss: "I don't tire so easily in your service, Georgy."

I felt rather bitter against them both. I would have died to serve this girl, I told myself, yet such an opportunity left me dull and cold. I was always dreaming of doughty deeds to please her, yet if she dropped her handkerchief I could hardly stoop to pick it up.

"Oh, get up, Jack!" cried Harry Dart, whose lip had been curling in angry scorn as he watched the performance: "you are by far too good to be trodden under foot by any girl, let alone Georgy Lenox."

Georgy tripped down from her temporary throne and made Harry a little courtesy. "Do you mean to say that you would not be glad to be trodden under foot by Georgy Lenox?" she asked, laughing and tossing her curls.

He gave a contemptuous shrug: "Wait until I give you an opportunity. Floyd and I don't make fools of ourselves for any girls."

"Come, come, Harry!" said Jack, who had risen from the ground and was now wiping off the earth-stains from his clothes, "don't spoil our day by being disagreeable.--Shall we go on, Georgy?" He gave her a peculiar glance in which there was less of humility than gentle command, and she sprang after him and put her hand within his arm. He did not serve her for rewards as yet, and was used to as many blows as smiles, and this was a rare condescension on her part.

Georgy was fifteen--of the same age as Harry, but considerably younger than Jack, who was two years older than his cousin, while I was the youngest of the three. We had been playmates all our lives, and had each of us found in Georgy Lenox the only girl-friend of our boyhood. She had been a beauty from her infancy, and her wiles had grown with her growth and strengthened with her strength; and now her myriad tricks of mischief, caprice and cruelty were too closely identified with what was most bewitching in her not to have become additional charms for us. In those days, while we were still hobbledehoys, she pleased us the more that she had, with the precocity of her sex, quite outstripped us where all subtle social forces are concerned. Although she could be a hoyden still, it was quite as easy for her to assume the part of an elegant young lady, equipped for society with charming manners, a fastidious taste and indifferent ease. We occasionally laughed at her airs, but inwardly admired her superb assumptions of careless superiority: had she become timid, docile, admiring toward us, I dare say her reign would not have lasted the day out.

Harry flung his arm about me, and we followed Jack and Georgy deeper and deeper into the wood. It was the last Saturday in May, and the fairest day of the year. The thickets were full of mysterious sounds, and one could almost feel the beating of the delicate pulses of the springing, expanding life about us. I knew all the secrets of this forest, and loved no place half so well in Belfield outside of my own home. Nature, too, seemed tenderer of it than of other wildnesses, and had set the seal of her choice upon it with every gift of fern and vine and moss and lichen. No axe had invaded these solitudes for years except to prune away a too riotous undergrowth along the cart-path: the trees grew in grand natural aisles, and to look through the noble colonnade into mysterious vistas of copsewood gloom and stillness was for me to thrill with that blissful agony of youthful emotion which is our first premonition of the unreachable secret that underlies the universe.

"Did you ever think," said Harry to me earnestly, "that you would like to leave the world behind you for ever and live altogether in the woods, with only the trees and birds for company?"

But, dearly although I loved the woods, I could not answer him that I should be willing to resign my home, my mother, my friends and social joys for the life of a hermit.

"It's pleasant to see people," I suggested.

"I'm not sure of that," Harry rejoined with sudden misanthropy. "See what a hard world it is! I feel to-day like Achilles in his tent."

"But I don't like Achilles: he was only sullen because he had lost Briseis. Surely, Harry, you don't mind it that Georgy has gone on with Jack?"

Harry laughed loud and long: "That would be a good joke! As if I cared for Georgy Lenox! But it does make me angry to see Jack so taken up with her. Did you see her new shoes?"

There could be no question of that.

"Jack bought them for her," said Harry with angry emphasis. "He spends all his money on her, and I think it is a shame. She told him at first she could not come to-day, because she had nothing to wear on her feet except thin slippers. What does Jack do but post off to John Edwards and buy her a pair of boots at once!" He paused a moment, then burst out: "Just look at them!"

Georgy had flung her flowers at Jack, and having jumped across the little brook which meandered through the wood, now nodded at him defiantly, tossing her long curls, while her eyes sparkled and her color rose. He too sprang over the stream, with pretended anger, and she gave a little shriek and flew down the path, with him in pursuit. Jack was clumsy and not built for speed, while Georgy had the spring of a fawn; but I suspect she was willing to be caught, for when we next gained a glimpse of them she was sitting on a stump fanning herself with her broad-brimmed hat, which had fallen off, while he was leaning against a tree looking at her.

"He has kissed her--I know he has," Harry whispered to me with a bitter look. "I would die before I would kiss her when she behaved like that!"

I was in a sort of tremor. I was too young to be in love in the ordinary sense of the phrase, but I was aghast at the thought of the bloom of her cheeks and lips being plucked like roses in a hedgerow. She was precious to my imagination, yet, for all her every-day reality, scarcely nearer to my aspirations than Lady Edith Plantagenet or Ellen, Lady of the Lake.

"I don't care," muttered Harry doggedly--"I don't care. I dare say he means to marry her when he grows up, but I don't care."

"Floyd," called out Georgy, "can't you show me another bird's nest?"

Now I knew at least a hundred birds' nests in these woods. All Wednesday afternoon I had nestled here in the thickets and watched the little builders hopping from moss to bough and twig, and had learned all their secrets. I knew that by the great rock just behind where she was sitting was a ledge with shelving sides overhung with moss, and that there, so cunningly wrought and hidden that none but a trained eye could ever have discovered it, was an exquisite nest formed of lichens. Half ashamed of disclosing such a sacred confidence, I led Georgy up to it. Last Wednesday it was barely finished: now there were three eggs in it. It was a wood-pewee's nest, and while I let her peep the mother-bird flew toward us with a shrill pathetic cry.

"Hush, you horrid thing!" cried Georgy to the alarmed bird, that circled about us with cries growing every moment more piercing.--"Is not that perfectly sweet? I never saw anything prettier."

I had only consented that she should give one glance, and I now tried to coax her away; but nothing would content her but to hold two of the eggs in her hand, and while she held them her foot slipped and they fell to the ground, and she trod upon them.

"Oh, Georgy!" I cried angrily, "that is too horribly careless of you: I cannot forgive you."

"The idea!" she returned, laughing. "Do look at him, boys!--as white as a ghost just because I broke those wretched eggs! Look at that furious little bird! I declare it is ready to peck my eyes out! There, madam! now you may go to work and lay some more eggs;" and she took the sole remaining egg from the nest and flung it with wanton cruelty into the thicket.

I was cut to the heart. Both Jack and Harry came up to me, but I shook them off and sat down upon a fallen trunk, and would not say a word in answer to their inquiries or consolations. Presently they wandered down the woods together, and left me there alone. The owners of the despoiled nest kept up a loud, emphatic chirping for a time, which drew all the other birds to discover its cause. I felt as if they looked at me with wonder and resentment in their innocent eyes. But after a time the tumult of sorrow passed and the usual forest sounds returned: the whir of partridge-wings smote the air, and I heard the tender coo of the mother-hen; then the wind rose and blew through the tree-tops, and the blossoming boughs moved restlessly, no longer filtering green sunshine through their transparent leaves, but disclosing a gathering storm in the glimpses I gained of the sky above. I knew a short cut through the wood which led to the hill at the back of my mother's house, and when I heard Harry's voice calling me I sprang like a deer into the covert, and before the rain came had reached home.

Georgy's wanton cruelty had wounded me deeply, but my allegiance to our girl-queen was not easily thrown off; and seizing an umbrella I flew back to the woods to offer it to Georgy, who received it kindly, glad of shelter from the sudden shower. I was as proud of her smile and good-natured thanks as a dog is proud of his master's scant caress after a sound beating.

The fair May day ended in rain, and, as usual on Saturdays, my three mates finished the afternoon with me. Jack took his books and went sturdily at his Greek; Harry drew pictures by the dozen; Georgy was reading _Queechy,_ nestled in my mother's chair by the bay-window; and I was deep in one of the _Waverley_ novels. Banners streamed, bugles blew, spears gleamed, knights jostled in my world. Oh for a wet afternoon again like that twenty-five years ago, with the monotonous patter of rain in my ears, to go back to Coeur de Lion and Edith and Saladin! And not alone the time and the books, and the old high heart with the old longings and resolves, and the old fearless eyes to look out upon the world, but the old companions as well, with their glorious boy-faces, untouched then by any imprint of the base emotions and aims sure almost, a little later, to enter in and defile! The rain pattered ceaselessly; the heavy scent of the lilacs came in through the open windows; the martins screamed about their boxes under the eaves of the stable, and I could hear the twitter of innumerable birds; but with the consciousness of all this I had no thought except of my rapture for Kenneth when the dog sprang at the throat of Conrad.

"Floyd," said Georgy, putting her hand on my arm, "don't you hear the door-bell? Ann went out an hour ago."

Our service was not numerous, and if Ann had gone out, as was her wont when she found a moment's leisure, there was no one to answer the bell but myself. I rose heavily and unwillingly, and walked along the little hall, my eyes still glued upon the page, hardly raising them when I opened, the door until I saw, instead of some indifferent neighbor, a tall gentleman, quite strange to Belfield, who was shutting his dripping umbrella. He was very tall, stately, broad-shouldered, with an impassive but handsome face, and a glance at once quiet and commanding. He regarded me with an amused smile, as if he knew me very well, and something about him gradually renewed a sort of recollection in me.

"How do you do?" he asked as I stood squarely in the doorway staring at him.

"I am quite well, sir," I returned gravely.

"What is your name?" he inquired, laughing.

"James Floyd Randolph," I answered.

"I am James Floyd," said he. "Suppose you invite me in?"

I led the way silently back to the dull, chilly sitting-room, where Jack and Harry still sat at the table, while Georgy was peeping out to catch a glimpse of the new arrival. Mr. Floyd, having put his umbrella in the rack and taken off his hat and overcoat, followed me, casting a look about the room as he entered, as if he missed somebody he expected to see.

"My mother is not at home, sir," I observed, sitting down stiffly on the edge of a chair: "she has gone to spend the afternoon with a sick lady."

"She will return presently?"

"Oh, she will certainly be at home to tea, sir," I answered; and then, remarking that he gave a shrug as he glanced at the wide-open casements, I closed both windows, went to the closet, brought wood and kindlings and built a fire on the hearth.

"You are a boy of much nice discrimination," remarked Mr. Floyd. "Now that you have a temperature not altogether conducive to lumbago, I will venture to sit down. Do you know who I am?"

"Oh yes, sir: you are Mr. James Floyd, the gentleman I was named after."

"Has your mother often spoken of me?"

"Oh yes, sir," I said again, and at once observed that his face brightened up.

"And who are these young people?" he inquired, apparently noticing the group by the table for the first time.

I introduced them, and Mr. Floyd shook hands with Jack, put his hand under Harry's chin and looked keenly into his chiselled, beautiful face; then gave another glance at Georgy, to whom he had first bowed.

"Miss Lenox?" he repeated. "Any relation of George Lenox?"

"Oh yes, sir: I am his daughter," cried Georgy, blushing and dimpling. "I am third cousin to your little girl: Mr. Raymond at The Headlands is my great-uncle."

"Yes, of course. How is your father?"

"Papa is pretty well."

"He was first cousin of my wife," said Mr. Floyd, "and I have met him, I believe."

The door-bell rang again.

"That is Antonio Thorpe," observed Mr. Floyd--"a young friend of mine for whom I want to get board and lodging in Belfield. Can any of you recommend a place? He is a lad of eighteen or nineteen, and will probably study under your own masters."

"Mamma would be very glad to have a boarder," struck in Georgy earnestly. "There is a nice large room for him."

I ushered in the new-comer, a slim fellow of my own height, but looking immeasurably older, with a delicate black moustache and a coat which fitted in a way to shame anything in Belfield.

"Well, well, Tony!" said Mr. Floyd: "you followed quickly upon my footsteps; but all the better, perhaps, as I have already heard of a suitable place for you to settle. This young lady, Miss Lenox, thinks her mother may be able to accommodate you: perhaps she will be good enough to take you home now and introduce you, referring her family to me."

Thorpe bowed with a very finished air, and presently was walking off in the rain with Georgy, holding his umbrella over her in a manner truly Grandisonian. Harry and Jack also went away, and I was left alone with my guardian; for, although I had never seen him since my father's funeral eight years before, my guardian I knew him to be. He called me up to him, flung his arm over my shoulder and looked into my eyes. "My dear boy!" said he in a kind voice, and kissed me on the forehead. "You remember me a little, don't you?" he asked.

"I remember you now very well: at first it seemed all gone from me."

"No wonder. I have been in Europe eight years. My little girl is ten years old, and had never seen me since she was the merest baby. She was afraid of me at first."

But not for long, I was sure of that: nobody, man, woman or child, could look into his face and not love and trust him.

"I want to see your mother," he exclaimed with a sudden flash of expression over his tranquil face. "Your mother is all that is left to me of my youth: I have come back an old man."

I laughed at this, and then we fell to talking of our life in Belfield. I was not a loquacious fellow, but something about Mr. Floyd unloosed my tongue, and after describing our quiet household ways I spoke freely of the Lenoxes and of Jack and Harry. The two boys were cousins, and Harry, having neither father nor mother, lived with the Holts, who were the rich people of our village. My two friends loved me dearly, but still they were more to each other than I could be to either, for they shared the same room, ate at the same table, and had grown into an intimacy wonderful and rare even among brothers. They were Damon and Pythias, Orestes and Pylades; but indeed I doubted if anything in poetry, history or tradition had ever equalled this beautiful and complete friendship. I could not be jealous of it, because each gave me all I needed; and even if, at times, I felt the pang of being a little outside their world, my isolation was made sacred to me by the recollection of the brother I had lost, in whom some time, somewhere, I should regain everything.

Mr. Floyd had a way of listening which made me yearn to tell him every insignificant detail of my life. I knew that he was a man of national reputation, but I hardly cared for that, since he was the pleasantest companion I had ever met. I found myself gossiping to him about our village worthies, making him laugh heartily at their sayings passed into tradition and fable among us boys; for our one-eyed shoemaker and our corpulent grocer, like many other country wits to fortune and to fame unknown, surpassed either Douglas Jerrold or Sydney Smith in quip and drollery. And I did not omit George Lenox, for all Belfield except his wife was in the secret of his affairs, and they were our crowning joke, in which poor George himself joined merrily, although the story was so against himself.

"That girl of his is remarkably pretty," said Mr. Floyd. "Is he, then, so poor? He was well born, liberally educated, and married in a family of high pretensions."

There could be no doubt but what George Lenox had begun better than other men, with enough to live on comfortably in city or country, provided he did not think too much of the necessity for showing his wife that she had not lessened her consequence in marrying him. Nobody could accuse poor Mr. Lenox now-a-days of ambition, or blame him if, in those early days as now, that terrible woman had frankly regarded him as an utter nonentity save in his association with her own destiny. She was a handsome woman, with aquiline nose, a thin, firmly-set mouth, piercing eyes and a magnificent carriage. She was no longer young when she had accepted Mr. Lenox, and by what means she had encompassed his subjugation we were never told: he always shook his head when he alluded to his courtship. "A fellow is wax in a woman's hands," he had sometimes remarked darkly. But after his marriage he had seemed to acquiesce in his wife's belief in her high individual value to the world in general and himself in particular, and had given her the best of everything. Mrs. Lenox knew how to spend money, she had a house in New York and a villa in Belfield; she had running accounts with tradesmen; and not only gave dinner-parties, balls and receptions, but out-dressed her circle with a sort of gorgeous superfluity which made her intimates experience the ignominy of their inferiority. Mr. Lenox resigned himself to the irresistible current of his wife's will, and if he felt inward doubts silenced them as suggestions of morbid distrust in the discretion of a woman whom he knew to be virtuous, and whose price was so much above rubies that sordid calculations ought not to be mentioned in the same breath with her. After a time, however, not even his high faith in the necessity of agreeable issues where she was concerned could blind him to the fact that he had many debts and but a few thousand dollars. He at once invested these thousands in an enterprise which was shortly to make all those interested in it millionaires. But if any one made money out of it, it was not George Lenox, who suddenly found himself reduced to be a pensioner upon his wife, who had twelve thousand dollars invested in railway stock. They removed to their little Gothic cottage in Belfield, and Mrs. Lenox lost what remained of her beauty, her spirits, her temper, but never her ineradicable pride. Within a year her husband had taken her railway stock, sold it and invested it in some speculation which failed ignominiously, as any schemes of his were sure to do. Nothing attracted him which was regulated by average laws of supply answering a demand: all his undertakings required a miracle, an upheaval of popular ideas, to ensure success. He never told his wife of this embezzlement of his: when he lost her property he meditated suicide, and merely staved off the evil day by pretending to pay her dividends regularly; and for this he twice a year implored the assistance of his uncle, Mr. Raymond. The railroad in which Mrs. Lenox had invested was a prosperous one, and occasionally declared an additional stock dividend: it was on these occasions that the reduced lady lost in a degree her usual air of picturesque gloom--that she roused herself to talk about her family and the glories of her youth, the éclat and brilliance of her position, which she had never lost until after marrying her unfortunate husband; and at such times she even regained her courage and made a round of visits, dropping glazed and ancient cards, and retaining in her feebleness all the traditions of her majesty. But this epoch of her revived grandeur was set in painful contrast to poor Lenox's misery. He was commissioned to sell the scrip, which, for him, had no existence, and thus raise money to deck the family in transient brightness. I fancy that at such times, without any waste of rhetoric or balancing of expediencies, he was more in love with suicide than Hamlet or Cato, and that if it had not been for the sympathy and aid of a golden-haired little girl he would have swallowed his death-potion quietly. Georgy was his firm ally against her mother, and helped him shrewdly in many a close pinch; and his rich uncle, Mr. Raymond (Mr. Floyd's father-in-law), rarely refused him provisional aid upon his application, although he was wise enough to decline helping him in any of his fantastic kite speculations.

"And what sort of a girl is this Miss Georgy?" inquired Mr. Floyd. "Has she been injured at all by the somewhat exceptional circumstances of her family?"

"Oh no, sir."

"Is she gentle, generous and open in her ways?"

"Gentle, sir--generous?"

"She is remarkably pretty."

I assented eagerly to this observation, and he laughed: "There is no doubt in your mind upon that point. If she were in all respects a suitable companion for Helen, I would request that she should be invited to The Headlands. But Tony will find out what she is made of. He will be a new friend for you."

And he told me about this Antonio Thorpe, who had been under his guardianship for six years. He was the son of an Englishman who had married a Spanish girl in the West Indies: the lad was but twelve years old when he was thrown upon the world without parents or near relatives or suitable provision for his maintenance. The elder Thorpe had been a careless, good-natured person, without any distrust of his fellows, and not knowing what to do with his son had thrust him upon Mr. Floyd, who had at some trouble and expense looked after his education. He had entered college the year before, but his conduct had been a little unsatisfactory to the authorities, and his guardian had withdrawn him, and now, in some doubt as to the best course to pursue in regard to his future, wished him to study for a few months quietly at Belfield.

"Your mother will let him visit here, I trust," he went on. "I think he is half a good fellow, and we must forgive the other half, because his mother was the proudest, vainest, silliest little Castilian that ever lived. Tony has got a good deal to contend against."

But the drawbacks to Thorpe's advancement were not so patent to my mind on first acquaintance as his advantages. He had a slight, graceful figure, a little under height, but carried himself with the dignity of a grandee; his eyes were large, dark and languishing; his complexion was a pale olive; while his moustache, black and exquisitely pencilled, was a sign of itself of towering superiority above the rest of us callow youths. That alone would have filled me with envy.