Part 5

There were more motor drives, with the aunt now playing chaperon: a chaperon that conscientiously chaperoned as little as possible. There were small theatre parties, small suppers, small dinners. One or two mothers of daughters, who dared to be civil to Stainton, were shooed away, attacked by Ethel with all the brazen loyalty of a ponderous hen defending her chicks from the assault of a terrier. The Newberrys, as in duty bound, retaliated upon Stainton's theatres, dinners, and suppers with two teas and a luncheon. Stainton "came back at them," as George Holt phrased it, with more suppers, theatres, and dinners, the dramas always carefully selected to suit the immature condition of Muriel's soul; and so the whole courtship progressed along those conventional lines which lay the road to the altar over a plain of rich foods irrigated by vintage wines.

"Do you like this sort of thing?" Stainton heard himself asking the girl during one of the morning walks that he was permitted to take with her, unescorted, through Central Park.

"What sort of thing?" asked Muriel. "A day like this? I love it!"

It was a day worthy of being loved: one of those crisp autumnal days when New York is at its best and when the air, from the earth to the clear blue zenith, has a crystal clarity and a bracing tang that none other of the world's great cities possesses. Stainton felt as he used on some Rocky Mountain peak with the crests of lower eminences rolling away to the horizon like the waves of an inland sea below him; and Muriel, her cheeks glowing, walked by his side more like some firm-breasted nymph of those forests than a child of modern days and metropolitan civilisation.

"Yes," said Stainton, "this is splendid. But I meant the whole thing: New York, the life here, the city."

"I love that, too," said Muriel.

To Stainton's ear the use of one's first Latin verb translated was not merely schoolgirl carelessness and want of variety of phrase; it was an accurate expression of her abounding capacity for intense affection, her splendid fortune of emotion and her equally splendid generosity in its disposal.

"So do I," he said. "You can't begin to know how much it means to me to get back here."

"From the West?" Her eyes were soft at this. "But the West must be so romantic."

"Scarcely that. It has its points, but romance is not one of them."

"Oh, but your life there was romantic." She nodded wisely. "I know," she said.

Stainton's smile was tenderly indulgent.

"How did you get that idea?" he asked.

"Auntie Ethel has told me some of the brave things you did, and so has Uncle Preston."

"They have been reading some of the silly stories that the papers published when I made my big find. You mustn't believe all that the newspapers say."

"I believe these things," affirmed Muriel. "Wasn't that true about the time you rescued the man from the lynchers at Grand Junction?"

"Grand Joining. I didn't read it," said Stainton.

"But did you do it?"

"Oh, there was something of the sort." He honestly disliked to have his supposedly heroic exploits praised, only from modesty perhaps, perhaps from a super-sensitive consciousness that they were the results rather of fear than of bravery. "Look at that sky. Isn't it glorious?"

"Then about the express robbery on the Rio Grande," said Muriel; "they said you went after the robbers when the sheriff and his men were afraid to go, and you captured them by yourself--three of them."

Stainton laughed, his broad, white teeth showing.

"The sheriff and his men," he said, "were along with me. It was not half so exciting as that play last night. Didn't you like the play?"

"I loved it. But, Mr. Stainton----"

"Yes?"

"Won't you tell me about some of these things?"

"I am sure they are much more interesting in the form in which the newspapers presented them."

"I always wanted to see a mine. Surely a mine must be lovely. Please tell me about a mine."

He tried to tell her, but mining had been to him only a means to an end and, the end now being attained, mining struck him as a dull subject. He abruptly concluded by telling her so.

"Besides," he said, "it is merely a business: a mere business, like any other. What can girls and women care for business?"

So he brought back the conversation to the play that they had seen the night before. He discussed the plot with her, the plot having no relation to business, or to anything else approaching actuality for that matter, his iron-grey eyes all the while eagerly feeding on her beauty and her youth.

"You think," he asked, "that the Duchess should not have tried to break off the match?"

"Just because Arthur was young and poor?" inquired Muriel. "Of course I think she shouldn't. He was far too nice for her daughter anyway."

"But there was the suspicion that he had cheated at cards. Lord Eustace had told her so."

"She didn't really believe that; she only wanted to believe it. I think she was horrid."

"And her daughter, Lady--Lady----" He hesitated for the name.

"Lady Gladys," supplied Muriel. "I think she was horrid, too. To give up Arthur like that!"

Stainton smiled gravely.

"You would not have done it, Miss Stannard?"

"Indeed I would not!"

"What _would_ you have done?"

Muriel's chin became resolute.

"I should have gone right up to him before them all there in the drawing-room, and I should have put my----" She broke off, rosy with embarrassment. "You will think I am awfully silly," she said.

But Stainton did not think so. He urged her on.

"No, you will laugh," said Muriel.

"I should not," he answered her. "I really want to know."

Nevertheless, the illusion of the theatre, which her memory had partially renewed, her self-consciousness finally dispelled, and her conclusion was in lame contrast to her beginning:

"I should just have married him in spite of them all."

Of such material was Stainton's wooing made. Though it may seem but poor stuff to you, it did not seem so to those who wove it, and it was, if you will but reflect upon your own, the material generally in vogue.

Our modern method of courting is, of course, the most artificial phase of modern artificial life. The period of courtship is, for most lovers, what Sunday used to be for the small boy in the orthodox family of the early 'seventies. As he then put on his best clothes for the Sabbath, our men and women now put on their best manners for the courting. As he then put off his real self at church-time, they now lay aside, for this supposedly romantic interlude in an existence presently to return to the acknowledged prosaic, all their crudities. It was thus with Muriel and Stainton.

Not that the latter meant to appear other than he was. His great Plan presumed, indeed, quite the reverse. He was intent that Muriel should admire not his wealth or his reputation, but his inherent worth and the genuine basis for his reputation. He was resolved that she should love not any or all of the things that he might be, but the one thing, the real self, that he had himself made. His fault, according to the prevailing standards, if any fault resulted, consisted only in his insistence upon a too introspectively observed ideal of just what that thing happened to be.

Nor yet, and this is likewise intrinsic, would the severest scrutiny have revealed in Muriel any realisation of a pose upon her own part. Her aunt, trusting as do most guardians of youth to a natural intuition in the ward, which has no standing in fact, refrained from informing the girl in plain language what it was that Stainton wanted. Mrs. Newberry's fears were ungrounded: the conventional calm had not been disturbed, and Muriel, save for timid smiles at the butcher's boy when he called at the school and furtive glances at the acolytes in church, had never yet known love. Not guessing the truth, Muriel was merely, for the first time, being accorded a glimpse of those kingdoms of this world of which all schoolgirls have had their stolen dreams. With what she saw she was frankly delighted, and when a pretty young girl is frankly delighted, a pretty young girl is obviously not at her worst.

"You look very happy nowadays," said Mrs. Newberry at the luncheon-table, looking, however, not at the subject of her remarks but at the master of her affections, who, chancing to be lunching at home, sat opposite her.

"I am, Aunt Ethel," said Muriel. "I always have been happy, but I am happier than ever now."

Mrs. Newberry smiled meaningly at Preston, but Muriel could not see the smile, and Preston would not.

"Why is that?" asked Ethel.

"Oh, because."

"Because why?"

"Because I am seeing so much. The city, you know, and these suppers and things. Sitting up until to-morrow. And I do so love the theatres!"

Ethel's smile faded.

"Yes," she said, "Mr. Stainton is very kind."

"And generous," put in Preston so unexpectedly that his wife jumped. "Thompson; the salmon."

"I think he's lovely," said Muriel.

"Do you?" Mrs. Newberry was bovine even in her playful moods. "He does really run about like a boy, doesn't he?"

"Well," said Muriel, "I wouldn't say _just_ like a boy."

"He seems quite young--he actually seems very young indeed," mused Ethel.

"Seems?" said Preston. "He is."

His positive tone startled Mrs. Newberry into indiscretion.

"He is fif----" she began, then, catching her husband's eye, she corrected herself: "He must be nearly----"

"He is forty," said Newberry, scowling.

"Oh, Uncle Preston," protested Muriel, "Mr. Holt said----"

"George Holt is a fool," said Newberry, "and always was."

"Your uncle is quite right, Muriel," said Ethel. "Mr. Holt does gossip. Besides, he is not the sort of person a young girl should quote."

"You quote him, Aunt Ethel--often."

"Your aunt," said Preston, "is not a young girl. Mr. Stainton is younger than Holt, I dare say, for he has evidently taken good care of himself, and Holt never takes care of anything, least of all his health."

The air of importance that her uncle and aunt seemed to attach to so trivial a matter as a few years more or less in the age of any man past thirty puzzled Muriel, and she betrayed her bewilderment.

"I don't see how it much matters," she said, "whether he's forty or fifty."

"It doesn't matter in the least," said Newberry. "But you had better make the most of him while you can."

"I don't see why," said Muriel.

"Because he is popular," Preston explained. "There are several women--women and _girls_--anxious to marry him, and one or other of them is sure to succeed."

Muriel winced. She did not relish the thought of losing her new friend, and she wondered why, if he were really sought after in marriage, he had so much time to devote to her and her aunt and uncle, and why he spoke so little of women to her.

Stainton, indeed, held his tongue about his intentions for just the length of time that, as he had previously concluded, a man must hold his tongue in such matters. If, in the meantime, Muriel heard from both of the Newberrys more interesting stories of his career in the West, and was impressed thereby, if she got from the same reliable source equally romantic accounts of his wealth and was, as the best of us could not in like circumstances help being, a little impressed by these as well, she was, nevertheless, honestly unprepared for his final declaration. She regarded Stainton as a storybook hero, the more so since his conversation never approached the sentimental, and she delighted in his company for the "good time"--it was thus that she described it--which he was "showing her."

In brief, she was at last ready to fall in love with Stainton. Stainton was in love.

VI

A MAID PERPLEXED

So far as Stainton was privileged to know, the end of this first act in their comedy came about in much the manner designed by him. He moved quietly, as he moved in all the details of his life; he had the gift of precision, and when he arrived at what Sarcey called the _scène à faire_, though he was perhaps more in love, as that term is generally understood, than most lovers, he arrived not at all breathless, and found nothing to complain of in what awaited him.

Mrs. Newberry had ostentatiously deserted him and Muriel in the white-and-gold Newberry drawing-room splendid with spindle-legged mahogany and appropriately uncomfortable. It was evening, an evening that Stainton had taken care should be unoccupied by any disturbing theatre party or other frivolous forerunner to a declaration.

That Ethel and her husband had tacitly agreed to this arrangement, Stainton did not notice as significant. Mrs. Newberry, after the spasm of chaperonage that followed his first unwatched motor drive with Muriel, had tactfully begun to withdraw from the rôle of duenna, and the suitor had consoled himself in the ocular demonstration of the proverb that two are company and three none. Hitherto he had enjoyed his privilege like the temperate man that he was, which is to say that he enjoyed it without abusing it. He belonged by birth to that class of society which, though strong enough in the so-called natural affections, seems to think it indecent to display emotion in public, and he was unwilling, for both his own sake and that of the girl he loved, to hurry an affair that might lose much by speed and gain much by circumspection. Now, however, the time came to test the virtues of his plan of campaign, and Stainton was glad that the combination of the time and the place and the loved one was not marred by any extraneous interference.

The wooer was at his best. The clothes that are designed for those short hours of the twenty-four when one is at rest without being asleep, became him; they gave full value to his erect figure, his shapely hips, and his robust shoulders; and, since he was about to win or lose that which he now most prized in life, and since he had always felt sure that the only courage he lacked was physical, his strong face looked far younger than its years and his iron-grey eyes shone not with fear, but with excitement.

While he leaned against a corner of the white mantelpiece above the glowing fireplace, so much as it was possible for his upright figure to lean, he was thinking that Muriel, opposite him, was more beautiful than he had ever yet seen her--thinking, but without terror, how dreadful it would be should he lose her and how wonderful should he win. Young enough for her in that kindly light he almost looked and was sure he was; worthy of her, though he felt more worthy than most, he was certain that no man could be. He saw her as he had seen her that first night at the opera, but more desirable.

Seated in the farther corner of a long, low couch drawn close to the chimney-place and at right-angles to it, three or four rose-red pillows piled behind the suggestion of bare shoulders only just escaping from her gown of grey ninon draped over delicate pink, Muriel's slim body fronted the dancing fire and warmed in the light that played from the flames. Her blue-black hair waved about her white temples and the narrow lines of her brows; her lips, the lower slightly indrawn, were like young red roses after the last shower of Spring.

He felt again, as he had felt when he saw her in the Newberrys' box, that she was lovely not only with the hesitant possibilities of girlhood at pause before the door of maturity, but because she gleamed with the gleam of an approaching summer night scented and starred. He noted how the yellow rays from a high candelabrum standing near the couch cast what might be an aureole about her head and set it in relief against the distant, drawn curtains, the curtains of ivory plush, which shut the heaven of this drawing-room from the earth of everywhere else. In his every early adventure among the dreams of love, this lonely man of the desert, reacting on his environment, had been less annoyed by the demands of a body that clamoured in vain than by the dictates of a soul that insisted upon the perfection of beauty among beautiful surroundings beautifully encountered. Now he was to put into action forces that would either realise or break those dreams, and, knowing that, he imprinted on his memory this picture of her and always after remembered it: her white hands clasped about the great bunch of violets he had brought to her, the glory of her wayward hair, the curve of her throat, her dark eyes with their curving lashes, her parted lips.

She had again been asking him of his life in the mining-camps of Alaska and the West and about his solitary journeys prospecting for the gold that it had often seemed was never to be found, and Stainton, wishing not to capitalise his achievements and unable to understand why a girl should interest herself in what was simply a business history, had again evaded her.

"But you must have suffered a good deal," she said.

"Oh, yes," he said; "that is part of the price of Life."

"You did it all," she asked, "to win a fortune?"

"No," he answered, his glance as steady upon hers as it had been that night at the opera. "I did it all to win Life. That has always been what I wanted; that has always been what I never had: Life. I wanted--I scarcely know how to say it: the full, sharp, clean joys of being. You understand?"

"I think I understand," she said.

"I wanted them. I saw that no man could have them in these days, living as we live, unless he was economically independent and morally straight. I made up my mind to win economic independence and to keep morally straight at any sacrifice."

She drew her fingers a little tighter about the tinfoil wrapping of the violets. Over the purple tops of the flowers, as she raised them toward her face, her intent, innocent face returned his steady scrutiny.

"And you've won?" she asked.

He wished to cross to her, to come to the couch and lean over its back, and, with his lips close to her cheek, whisper his answer. But he would not do that; he had decided that to do that at this point would be to bring about for his benefit an unfair propinquity. Instead, he moved only a step from the mantelpiece and stood upright, his arms folded.

Only a step, but to the girl he seemed somehow to draw much closer. The atmosphere of the room was somehow strained to tension. She saw that his eyes, although they did not waver, softened, and, to fill a pause of which she began to be afraid, she heard herself repeating:

"And you've won?"

"That," said Stainton, "is for you to say--Muriel."

It was the first time he had called her by her given name. Her eyes fell. She lowered the violets and, looking only at them, raised a hand to finger them. The hand shook.

"For me?" she asked.

If there is one thing in which men are more alike than another, it is the manner of their asking women to marry them. Generally it adds to many pretences the cruelty of suspense. Stainton was not unusual.

"I have won my fight--yes," he said. "I have got the means. Can I gain the end? It's you who must tell me that."

She saw now.

"How can I help?" she faltered.

"I wanted Life," he repeated, and wished that he could see her face. "Life means more than money. Money will protect it, secure it; but Life means Love. Long ago I knew your mother."

Very simply, but directly, he told her how he had loved that other Muriel. His morbid fears he did not describe, but his first romance he sketched with a gentleness that, while she, her heart steadied, looked up at his reposed strength and remembered all the stories that she had heard of his adventurous career, brought a quick mist of tears to her eyes.

"Do you remember," he asked, when his story was finished, "how rudely I looked at you when I first saw you in the Metropolitan Opera House?"

"It wasn't rude," she said.

"You must have thought it so then."

"I--I didn't know what to think--exactly."

"Well, now you know. It was an astonishing resemblance that made me stare at you."

Her nether lip trembled.

"I didn't know my mother," she said.

"No," said Stainton, "but you are very like her." He waited a moment and then, as her eyes were lowered, went on: "That was a boyish love of mine for her. It was really not love at all--only the rough sketch for what might have been, but never was, a finished picture. But I went away, when your mother repulsed me, with the likeness of her in my heart. I wanted love; I worked to be fit to win love and to keep it once I had won it. Then I came back and saw in that box at the opera the living original of the dream-woman that had all those years been with me."

He came another step nearer.

"I arranged to meet you," he said, "and I knew at last I was really in love. I want to be to you what your mother would not let me be to her. It is you whom I love, not a memory. I love you. I was young then and didn't know. Now I am still young--I have kept myself young--but I _know_." He bent forward and paused. Then, "Muriel," he said.

The girl drew back. She put her hand before her eyes. The violets rolled to the floor.

"I--I can't tell," she stammered. "I didn't expect--I never thought----"

Even this Stainton had foreseen.

"Then don't hurry now," he said. He drew a chair beside her and quietly took her free hand. "Take your time. Take a week, two weeks, a month, if you choose."

"But it's so new; it's all so new," said Muriel. "I never suspected----Oh, I know girls are always supposed to guess; but really, really, I never, _never_----"

There was genuine pain in her voice.

"I don't know what is expected of most girls," said Stainton; "but of you I shall never expect anything but the truth."

She looked up at him with eyes perplexed.

"Yes--yes, that is just what I want to be: honest. And--don't you see?--that is just why--I am so uncertain--that is just why I can't, right away, tell you----"

He pressed her hand and rose. He did not like to hurt her.

"I ask only that you will think it over," he said. "Will you think it over, Muriel?"

She bowed her head.

"Yes," said she.

"And I may come back in----"

"Yes."

"In two weeks?"

"In two weeks." Her voice was low and shaken. "Oh, you don't mind if I ask you to go now?" she pleaded.

"I understand," said Stainton. "I'll be back two weeks from this evening. Good-night."

"Good-night, Mr. Stainton," said Muriel.

She waited for him to go. She waited until she heard the street door close behind him. Then she hurried in retreat toward her own room.

But Mrs. Newberry was lying in ambush on the landing when the girl came upstairs--Mrs. Newberry, broad in white satin, with diamonds at her neck and in her hair.

"Well?" asked the aunt.

"Oh!" cried Muriel. She started. "Aunt Ethel!"

"Well?"

"You frightened me," Muriel explained. "I didn't see you until you spoke."

"Well?" persisted Mrs. Newberry.

"Nothing. That's all," said Muriel. "Nothing--only that----"

Ethel became diplomatic:

"Mr. Stainton didn't stay very long?"

"Not very long, Aunty."

Ethel heard something ominous in her niece's tone.

"You didn't--you don't mean to say you sent him _away_?"

"No, Aunty. Good-night."

"It's early. You're going to bed so early?"

"Yes, I think I'll go to bed. I'm--I'm tired."

"But it's early," repeated Mrs. Newberry, who was accustomed to order her life according to hours and not to reason.

"Is it?" said Muriel.

"It's scarcely ten. The library clock just struck."

"I think it struck some time ago."

"Did it?"

"I think I shall go to bed, Aunty."

Mrs. Newberry sought to bar the way, but she could not succeed in that when she could think of no pretext for detaining the girl, so Muriel brushed past her and went to her own room.

Ethel returned to the library--so called because it contained a few hundred unread books, the newspapers, and all the current magazines. She said to herself that she wanted to think it over, "it" being the opportunity that she had so ceremoniously afforded Stainton and Muriel, together with Muriel's sudden desire for privacy.