Part 12

She went from the room as quickly as a shadow flits before sunlight. The two young men were so taken by surprise that by the time Dick reached the door to open it for his departing caller, it had already closed behind her. The friends stared a moment. Then Jack made a swift stride to the door; but when he flung it open the hall without was empty.

"Damn it, Dick," he ejaculated, coming back with a face of anger, "what did you let her go off like that for?"

"How in the world could I help it?" was all that his friend could answer.

Jack regarded Dick blackly for the fraction of a second; then he burst into a laugh, and clapped him on the shoulder.

"I beg your pardon, old man," he said, as cheerily as ever. "I'm going off my nerve with all these carryings on. If you hadn't written that rotten old novel of yours, we shouldn't have had these continual circuses."

He went for his hat as he spoke, and without farther adieu took his way down town. Men in this peculiar world are to be envied or pitied not so much for their fortunes as for their dispositions; and if outward indications were to be trusted, Jack Neligage was one of those enviable creatures who will be cheerful despite the blackest frowns of fate. From indifference or from pluck, from caring little for the favors of fortune or from despising her spite, Jack took his way through life merrily, smiling and sunny; up hill or down dale as it chanced he followed the path, with a laugh on his lip and always a kindly greeting for his fellow travelers. This morning, as he walked out into the sunlight, handsome, well-groomed, debonaire, and jocund, certainly no one who saw him was likely to suspect that the world did not go smoothly with him. Least of all could one suppose that his heart or his thought was troubled concerning the favor or disfavor of any woman whatsoever.

Jack in the afternoon took May for a drive. The engagement had thus far been a somewhat singular one. Jack had been to see May nearly every day, it is true, but either by the whimsical contrivance of fate or by his own cunning he had seldom seen her alone. She either had callers or was out herself; and as no one but Mrs. Neligage and Alice knew of the engagement there was no chance for that sentiment which makes callers upon a lady feel it necessary to retreat as speedily as possible upon the appearance of her acknowledged lover. So well settled in the public mind was the conviction that Jack was in love with Alice Endicott, that nobody took the trouble to notice that he was calling on May Calthorpe or to get out of his way that he might be alone with her. This afternoon, in the face of all the world, in a stylish trap, on the open highway, they were at last together without other company.

Had not the mind of May been provided with an object of regret and longing in the person of Fairfield, there might have been danger that Jack would engage her fancy by sheer indifference. Any girl must be puzzled, interested, piqued, and either exasperated or hurt according to her nature, when the man to whom she is newly betrothed treats her as the most casual of acquaintances. If nothing else moved her there would be the bite of unsatisfied curiosity. To be engaged without even being able to learn by experience what being engaged consists in may well wear on the least inquisitive feminine disposition. The _fiancé_ who does not even make pretense of playing the lover is an object so curious that he cannot fail to attract attention, to awake interest, and the chances are largely in favor of his developing in the breast of his fair the determination to see him really aroused and enslaved. Many a woman has succumbed to indifference who would have been proof against the most ardent wooing.

"Well, May," Jack said, smiling upon her as they drove over the Mill Dam, "how do you like being engaged?"

She looked at him with a sparkle in her eyes which made her bewitching.

"I don't see that it's very different from not being engaged," she said.

"It will be if you keep on looking so pretty," he declared. "I shall kiss you right here in the street, and that would make folks talk."

The color came into her cheeks in a way that made her more charming still.

"Now you color," Jack went on, regarding her with a teasing coolness, "you are prettier yet. Gad! I shall have to kiss you!"

His horses shied at something at that instant, and he was forced to attend to them, so that May had a moment's respite in which to gather up her wits. When he looked back, she took the aggressive.

"It is horrid in you to talk that way," she remarked. "Besides, you said that I needn't kiss you until I wanted to."

"Well, I didn't promise not to kiss you, did I?"

"How silly you are to-day!" she exclaimed. "Isn't there anything better to talk about than kissing?"

Jack regarded her with a grin; a grin in which, it must be confessed, there was something of the look with which a boy watches a kitten he is teasing.

"Anything better?" repeated he. "When you've had more experience, May, perhaps you won't think there is anything better."

May began to look sober, and even to have the appearance of feeling that the conversation was becoming positively improper.

"I think you are just horrid!" she declared. "I do wish you'd behave."

He gave her a respite for some moments, and they drove along through the sunlight of the April afternoon. The trees as they came into the country were beautiful with the buds and promise of nearing summer; the air soft with that cool smoothness which is a reminder that afar the breeze has swept fragments of old snowdrifts yet unmelted; the sky moist with the mists of snow-fields that have wasted away. All the landscape was exquisite with delicate hues.

The supreme color-season of New England begins about the middle of March, and lasts--at the very latest--until the middle of May. Its climax comes in late April, when pearly mists hover among the branches that are soon to be hidden by foliage. Glowing tints of amethyst, luminous gray, tender green, coral, and yellow white, make the woods a dream of poetic loveliness beside which the gorgeous and less varied hues of autumn are crude. Something dreamlike, veiled, mysterious, is felt in these tints, this iridesence of the woods in spring; as if one were looking at the luminous, rosy mists within which, as Venus amid the rainbow-dyed foam of the sea, is being shaped to immortal youth and divine comeliness the very goddess of spring. The red of the maple-buds shows from afar; the russet leaflets of the ash, the vivid green, the amber, the pearl, and the tawny of the clustering hardwood trees, set against the heavy masses of the evergreens, are far more lovely than all the broad coloring of summer or the hot tints of autumn.

Under the afternoon sun the woods that day were at their best, and presently May spoke of the colors which spread down the gentle slopes of the low hills not far away.

"Isn't it just too lovely for anything!" she said. "Just look at that hill over there. It is perfectly lovely."

Jack glanced at the hill, and then looked at her teasingly.

"That's right," he remarked. "Of course spoony people ought to talk about spring, and how perfectly lovely everything is."

"I didn't say that because we're engaged," returned May, rather explosively. "I really meant it."

"Of course you did. That shows that you are in the proper frame of mind. Now I'm not. I don't care a rap to talk about the whole holy show. It's pretty, of course; but I'm not going in for doing the sentimental that way."

She looked up with mingled indignation and entreaty.

"Now you are going to be horrid again," she protested. "Why can't you stop talking about our being engaged?"

"Stop talking about it? Why, good heavens, we're expected to talk about it. I never was engaged before, but I hope I know my business."

"But I don't want to talk about it!"

"Oh, you really do, only you are shy about owning it."

"But I won't talk about it!"

"Oh, yes, you will, my dear; for if I say things you can't help answering 'em."

"I won't say another word!"

"I'll bet you a pair of gloves that the next thing I say about our being engaged you'll not only answer, but you'll answer in a hurry."

"I'll take your bet!" cried May with animation. "I won't answer a word."

Jack gave a wicked chuckle, and flicked his horses into a brisk run. In a moment or two he drew them down to an easy trot, and turned to May with a matter-of-fact air.

"Of course now we have been engaged a week," he said, "I am at liberty to read that letter you wrote to Christopher Calumus?"

"Read it!" she cried. "Oh, I had forgotten that you kept it! Oh, you mustn't read it! I wouldn't have you read it for the world."

"Would you have me read it for a pair of gloves?" inquired Jack wickedly. "You've lost your bet."

"I don't care anything about my bet," she retorted, with an earnestness so great as to suggest that tears were not so far behind. "I want that letter."

"I'm sorry you can't have it," was his reply; "but the truth is, I haven't got it."

"Haven't got it? What have you done with it?"

"Delivered it to the one it was addressed to,--Christopher Calumus."

"Delivered it? Do you mean you gave it to Mr. Fairfield?"

"Just that. You wrote it to him, didn't you?"

Poor May was now so pale and miserable that a woman would have taken her in her arms to be kissed and comforted, but Jack, the unfeeling wretch, continued his teasing.

"I didn't want you to think I was a tyrant," he went on. "Of course I'm willing you should write to anybody that you think best."

"But--but I wrote that letter to Mr. Fairfield before I knew who he was!" gasped May.

"Well, what of it? Anything that you could say to a stranger, of course you could say to a man you knew."

For reply May put up one hand to her eyes, and with the other began a distressing and complicated search for a handkerchief. Jack bent forward to peer into her face and instantly assumed a look of deep contrition.

"Oh, I say," he remonstrated, "it's no fair to cry. Besides, you'll spoil your gloves, and now you've got to pay me a pair you can't afford to be so extravagant."

The effect of this appeal was to draw from May a sort of hysterical gurgle, a sound indescribably funny, and which might pass for either a cry of joy or of woe.

"I think you are too bad," she protested chokingly. "You know I didn't want Mr. Fairfield to have that letter when I was engaged to you!"

"Oh, is that all?" he returned lightly. "Then that's easily fixed. Let's not be engaged any more, and then there'll be no harm in his having it."

Apparently astonishment dried her tears. She looked at him in a sort of petrified wonder.

"I really mean it, my dear," he went on with a paternal air which was exceedingly droll in Jack Neligage. "I'll say more. I never meant for a minute to marry you. I knew you didn't want to have me, and I'd no notion of being tied to a dragooned wife."

"A dragooned wife?" May repeated.

She was evidently so stupefied by the turn things had taken that she could not follow him.

"A woman dragooned into marrying me," Jack explained, with a jovial grin; "one that was thinking all the time how much happier she would be with somebody else."

"And you never meant to marry me? Then what did you get engaged to me for?"

"I didn't. You wrote me that you were engaged to me, and of course as a gentleman I couldn't contradict a lady, especially on a point so delicate as that."

May flushed as red as the fingers of dawn.

"Your mother--" she began; but he interrupted her.

"Isn't it best that we don't go into that?" he said in a graver voice. "I confess that I amused myself a little, and I thought that you needed a lesson. There were other things, but no matter. I never was the whelp you and Alice thought me."

"Oh, Alice!" cried May, with an air of sudden enlightenment.

"Well, what about her?" Jack demanded.

"Nothing," replied May, smiling demurely to herself, "only she will be glad that the engagement is broken. She said awfully hard things about you."

"I am obliged to her," he answered grimly.

"Oh, not really awful," May corrected herself quickly, "and anyway it was only because she was so fond of you."

To this he made no reply, and for some time they drove on in silence. Then Jack shook off his brief depression, and apparently set himself to be as amusing as he could. He aroused May to a condition of mirth almost wildly joyous. They laughed and jested, told each other stories, and the girl's eyes shone, her dimples danced in and out like sun-flecks flashing on the water, the color in her cheeks was warm and delightful. Not a word more was said on personal matters until Jack deposited her at her own door once more.

"I never had such a perfectly lovely ride in my life!" she exclaimed, looking at him with eyes full of animation and gratitude.

"Then you see what you are losing in throwing me over," he returned. "Oh, you've had your chance and lost it!"

She laughed brightly, and held out her hand.

"But you see," she said mischievously, "the trouble is that the best thing about the ride was just that loss!"

"I like your impudence!" he chuckled. "Well, you're welcome. Good-by. I'll send Fairfield round to talk with you about the letter."

And before she could reply he was away.

XXII

THE COOING OF TURTLE-DOVES

There is nothing like the possibility of loss to bring a man to his bearings in regard to a woman. Dick Fairfield had told Jack that of course he was not a marrying man, that he could not afford to marry a poor woman, and that nothing would induce him to marry a rich one; he had even set down in his diary on the announcement of Jack's engagement that he could never have offered his hand to a girl with so much money; what his secret thought may have been no sage may say, but he had all the outward signs of a man who has convinced himself that he has no idea of trying to secure the girl he loves. Now that the affair had shaped itself so that May was again free, he hurried to her with a precipitation which had in it a choice flavor of comedy.

May always told him afterward that he did not even do her the honor to ask her for her hand, but that he coolly walked in and took up the engagement of Jack Neligage where it had been dropped. It was at least true that by nine o'clock that very evening they were sitting side by side as cosy and as idiotically blissful as a young couple newly betrothed should be. However informally the preliminaries had been conducted, the conclusion seemed to be eminently satisfactory.

"To think that this is the result of that little letter that I found on my table one rainy night last February," Dick observed rapturously. "I remember just how it looked."

"It was horrid of me to write it," May returned, with a demure look which almost as plainly as words added: "Contradict me!"

"It was heavenly of you," Dick declared, rising to the occasion most nobly. "It was the nicest valentine that ever was."

Some moments of endearments interesting to the participants but not edifying in narration followed upon this assertion, and then the little stream of lover-talk purled on again.

"Oh, Mr. Fairfield," May began with utter irrelevancy, "I--"

"You promised not to call me that," he interrupted.

"But it's so strange to say Dick. Well, Dick, then--"

The slight interruption of a caress having been got over, she went on with her shattered observation.

"What was I going to say? You put me all out, with your 'Dick'--I do think it's the dearest name!--Stop! I know what I was going to say. I was frightened almost to death when Mrs. Neligage said the Count wrote 'Love in a Cloud.' Oh, I wanted to get under the tea-table!"

"But you didn't really think he wrote my letters?"

"I couldn't believe it; but I didn't know what to think. Then when he wore a red carnation the next day, I thought I should die. I thought anyway he'd read the letter; and that's what made me so meek when Mrs. Neligage took hold of me."

"But you never suspected that I wrote the book?" Fairfield asked.

"Oh, I don't know. Sometimes it seems to me as if I really did know all the time. Don't you remember how we talked about the book at Mrs. Harbinger's tea?"

"That's just your intuition," Dick returned. "I know I didn't suspect you, for it troubled me tremendously that I cared so much for you when I thought I was in love with my unknown correspondent. It didn't seem loyal."

"But of course it was, you know, because there was only one of us."

Dick laughed, and bestowed upon her an ecstatic little hug.

"You dear little Paddy! That's a perfect bull!"

She drew herself away, and pretended to frown with great dignity.

"I don't care if it is a bull!" protested she. "I won't be called a Paddy!"

Dick's face expressed a consternation and a penitence so marked that she burst into a trill of laughter and flung herself back into his arms.

"I was just teasing," she said. "The truth is that Jack Neligage has teased me so awfully that I've caught it like the measles."

The tender follies which make up the talk of lovers are not very edifying reading when set down in the unsympathetic blackness of print. They are to be interpreted, moreover, with the help of many signs, trifling in themselves but essential to a correct understanding. Looks, caresses, sighs, chuckles, giggles, pressures and claspings, intonations which alter or deny the word spoken, a thousand silly becks, and nods, and wreathèd smiles, all go to make up the conversation between the pair, so that what may be put into print is but a small portion of the ecstatic whole. May Calthorpe and Dick Fairfield were not behind in all the enchanting idiocy which belongs to a wooing, where each lover, secure in being regarded as perfection, ventures for once in a lifetime to be frankly childish, to show self without any mask of convention.

"Oh, I knew you were a man of genius the very first time I saw you," May cried, in an entirely honest defiance of all facts and all evidence.

"I wish I were for your sake," Dick replied, with an adoring glance, and a kiss on the hand which he held. "And to think that this absurdly small hand wrote those beautiful letters."

"You didn't suppose I had an amanuensis, did you?" laughed May.

Then Dick laughed, and together they both laughed, overpowered by the exquisite wit of this fine jest.

"Really, though," Dick said, "they came to me like a revelation. I never had such letters before!"

May drew away her hand, and sat upright with an air of offended surprise.

"Well, I should hope you never did!" she cried. "The idea of any other woman's daring to write to you!"

"But you were writing to a stranger; some other woman--"

"Now, Richard," declared May resolutely, "this has got to be settled right here. If you are going to twit me all my life with having written to you--"

He effectually stopped her speech.

"I'll never speak of it again," he said; "or at least only just often enough so that it shan't be entirely forgotten."

"You are horrid!" declared she with a pout. "You mean to tease me with--"

"Tease you, May? Heavens, how you mistake! I only want all my life to be kept your slave by remembering--"

The reader is at liberty from experience to supply as many hours of this sort of talk as his taste calls for. There were, however, some points of real interest touched upon in the course of the evening. Dick confided to May the fact that Jack Neligage had sold his ponies, was paying his debts, and had accepted a place in a bank. Mr. Frostwinch, a college friend of Jack's father, had offered the situation, and although the salary was of course not large it gave Neligage something to live on.

"Oh, I'll tell that to Alice to-morrow," May said. "She will be delighted to know that Jack is going to do something. Alice is awfully fond of him."

The conversation had to be interrupted by speculations upon the relative force of the attachment between Alice and Jack and the love which May and Dick were at that moment confirming; and from this the talk drifted away to considerations of the proper manner of disclosing the engagement. May's guardian, Mr. Frostwinch, Dick knew well, and there was no reason to expect opposition from him unless on the possible ground of a difference of fortune. It was decided that Dick should see him on the morrow, and that there should be no delay in announcing the important news.

"It will take us two or three days to write our notes, of course," May said, with a pretty air of being very practical in the midst of her sentiment. "We'll say next Wednesday."

Dick professed great ignorance of the social demands of the situation, and of course the explanation had to be given with many ornamental flourishes in the way of oscular demonstrations. May insisted that everything should be done duly and in order; told him upon whom of her relatives he would have to call, to whom write, and so many other details that Dick accused her of having been engaged before.

"You horrid thing!" she pouted. "I've a great mind to break the engagement now. I have been engaged, though," she added, bursting into a laugh of pure glee. "You forget that I woke up this morning engaged to one man and shall go to sleep engaged to another."

"Dear old Jack!" Fairfield said fervently. "Well, I must go home and find him. I want to tell him the news. Heavens! I had no idea it was so late!"

"It isn't late," May protested, after the fashion of all girls in her situation, both before and since; but when Dick would go, she laughingly said: "You tell Jack if he were here I'd kiss him. He said I'd want to some time."

And after half an hour of adieus and a brisk walk home, Dick delivered the message.

XXIII

THE BUSINESS OF A MUSE

The decadence of literature began insensibly with the invention of printing, and has been proceeding ever since. How far it has proceeded and whether literature yet exists at all are questions difficult if not impossible to answer at the present time, because of the multitude of books. No living man can have more than a most superficial knowledge of what is being done in what was formerly the royalty and is now the communism of letters. A symphony played in the midst of a battle would stand much the same chance of being properly appreciated as would to-day a work of fine literary worth sent forth in the midst of the innumerous publications of the age.

Men write, however, more than ever. There is perhaps a difference, in that where men of the elder day deluded themselves or hoped to delude others with impressive talk about art and fame and other now obsolete antiquities, the modern author sets before him definite and desirable prizes in the shape of money and of notoriety which has money's worth. The muse of these days is confronted on the door of the author with a stern "No admittance except on business," and she is not allowed to enter unless she bring her check-book with her. The ideal of art is to-day set down in figures and posted by bankers' clerks. Men once foolishly tried to live to write; now they write to live. If men seek for Pegasus it is with a view to getting a patent on him as a flying-machine; and the really progressive modern author has much the same view of life as the rag-picker, that of collecting any sort of scraps that may be sold in the market.