Part 5

I had become tired of following Smith about and of trying to keep an eye on Clelia. The little minx was so demure that it seemed difficult to believe she deliberately offered Smith opportunities for philandering. Otherwise my household caused me no anxiety; everything went smoothly. Thusis waited on table and ran the place, Josephine Vannis cooked to perfection, Raoul had started a garden and the bottling works; and no tourists had bothered us by interrupting the regime and demanding food and shelter.

Outwardly ours was a serene and emotionless life, undisturbed by that bloody frenzy which agitated the greater surface of the globe.

Here in the sunny silence of our little valley ringed by snow peaks, the soft thunder of some far avalanche or the distant tinkle of cow-bells were the loudest interruptions that startled us from the peaceful inertia consequent upon good food and idle hours.

Outwardly as I say, calm brooded all about us. True the Zurich and Berne newspapers stirred me up, and the weekly packages of New York papers which Smith and I received caused a tense silence in our rooms whither we always retired to read them.

Smith once remarked that it was odd I never received any Chilean papers. To which I replied that it seemed queer no Norwegian newspapers came to him.

We let it rest there. As for my household I never saw Josephine Vannis at all except by accident in the early evening when I sometimes noticed her in the distance strolling with Raoul.

On Clelia, I kept an unquiet eye as I have said. Thusis I saw only on strictly business interviews. And Smith thought it strange that there was so much business to be discussed between us. But every day I felt it my duty to go over my household accounts with Thusis, checking up every item. In these daily conferences there were, of course, all sorts of matters to consider, such as the farm and dairy reports from Raoul, the bottling reports, daily sales of eggs, butter, and bottled spring-water--a cart arriving from Zurich every morning to take away these surplus items to the Grand Hotel, Baur-au-Lac, with which Thusis had made a thrifty contract.

This was a very delightful part of the day to me,--the hour devoted to business with Thusis, while Smith fumed in his room. Possibly Clelia fumed with him--I was afraid of that--and it was the only rift in the lute.

Every morning I tried to prolong that business interview with Thusis,--she looked so distractingly pretty in her peasant garb. But though her gray eyes were ever on duty and her winning smile flashed now and then across the frontier of laughter, always and almost with malice, she held me to the matter of business under discussion, discouraging all diversions I made toward other topics, refusing to accompany me on gay excursions into personalities, resisting any approach toward that little spot of unconventional ground upon which we had once stood face to face.

For since that time when, for hours afterward, my hand remained conscious of her soft, cool hand's light contact--since that curious compact between us which had settled her status, and my own, here under this common roof above us, she had permitted no lighter conversation to interrupt our business conferences, no other subject to intrude. Only now and then I caught a glimpse of tiny devils dancing in her gray eyes; only at long intervals was the promise of the upcurled corners of her mouth made good by the swift, sweet laughter always hidden there.

There was no use attempting any less impersonal footing any more; Thusis simply evaded it, remaining either purposely dull and irresponsive or, gathering up her accounts, she would rise, curtsey, and back out with a gravity of features and demeanor that her mocking eyes denied.

Once, as I have said, I discovered a fishing rod in the attic, dug some worms, and started out upon conservation bent. And encountering Thusis digging dandelions for salad behind the garden, explained to her my attire and implements. As it was strictly a matter of business she consented to go with me as far as the brook. There, by the bridge in the first pool, she caught the first trout. And, having showed me how, retreated, resolutely repelling all suggestions that she take a morning off, and defying me with a gaiety that made her eyes brilliant with delighted malice.

"It was my duty to show you how Swiss trout are caught," she called back to me, always retreating down the leafy path--"but when you propose a pleasure party to your housekeeper--oh, Don Michael, you betray low tastes and I am amazed at you and I beg you most earnestly to remember the Admiral."

Whereupon I was stung into action and foolish enough to suppose I could overtake her. Where she vanished I don't know. There was not a sound in the wood. I was ass enough to call--even to appeal in a voice so sentimental that I blush to remember it now.

And at last, discomfited and sulky, I went back to my fishing. But hers remained the only trout in my basket. Smith and I ate it, baked with parsley, for luncheon, between intermittent inquiries from Smith regarding the fewness of the catch.

And now, it appeared, somebody had already told him that Thusis and I had gone fishing together that day. Who the devil had revealed that fact? Clelia, no doubt,--having been informed by Thusis. And no doubt Thusis had held me up to ridicule.

So now, at the hour when our daily business conference approached, instead of seating myself as usual at the table in my sitting-room, I took my fishing-rod, creel, a musty and water-warped leather fly-book, and went into Smith's room.

"Suppose we go fishing," I suggested, knowing he'd refuse on the chance of a tete-a-tete with Clelia the minute I was out of sight.

He began to explain that he had letters to write, and I laughed in derision and sent my regards to all the folks in dear old Norway.

"Go to the deuce," said I. "Flirt with my chamber-maid if you want to, but Thusis will take your head off--"

"Isn't she going with _you_?"

"--When she returns," I continued, vexed and red at his impudent conclusion. It was perfectly true that I meant to take Thusis fishing, but it was not Smith's business to guess my intentions.

"You annoy me," I added, passing him with a scowl. At which he merely grinned.

In the hallway I encountered Clelia in cap and apron, very diligent with her duster.

"Clelia," said I pleasantly, "has Raoul brought the mail?"

"Yes, Monsieur."

"Where is it?"

"There was only a bill from the Grand Hotel for cartage."

"What!" said I in pretense of dismay, "no letter yet from Mr. Smith's wife? And seven of his children down with whooping-cough!"

"W-wife!" stammered Clelia, her blue eyes becoming enormous. "S-seven children!"

"Seven in Christiania," I explained sadly, "the other eleven at school near Bergen. Poor fellow. His suspense must be dreadful."

I'm no actor; I saw immediately in Clelia's face that I had overplayed my part as well as the total of Smith's progeny, for the color came swiftly back and she shot at me a glance anything but demure.

"The other eleven," I explained, "were by his first three wives."

Clelia, dusting furiously, looked around at me over her shoulder.

"At least," she said, "he's done his duty by his country."

"W-what!" I stammered.

"The population of Norway is so very small," she added gaily. And went on with her dusting.

"Minx," thought I to myself as I marched down stairs and out toward the fountain where, from the servants' wing of the chalet Thusis could not fail to observe me. And she did. She appeared, presently, account books under one arm. Out of the subtle corner of my subtlest eye--the left one--I observed her. And with surpassing cunning I selected a yellow fly from the battered book and tied it on my leader.

"Monsieur!"

"Good-morning, Thusis. We're going fishing. So if you'll ask Josephine to put up some war lunch for us--"

"Has Monsieur forgotten his daily business interview?" she inquired smilingly.

"Not at all. But we're going to conserve time as well as food, Thusis. We can fish and consult at the same time."

"But--"

"All waste must cease," I said firmly. "We mustn't waste even a minute in the day. And if we can do two things at the same time it is our economic duty to do them." I smiled at her. "I shall dig worms," said I, "for two, while you prepare lunch for two. That is a wonderful way of economizing time and labor, isn't it, Thusis?"

She smiled, bit her lip, as though regretting an indiscretion, looked up at the cloudless sky, let her gray eyes wander from one snowy peak to the next, glanced almost insolently at me, then smiled with that delicious impulse characteristic of her.

"You know you have no business to take me fishing," she said. "Your cleverness is not Machiavellian; it is Michael-valian. It doesn't deceive me for one moment, Senor Michael!"

I laughed, picked up a stable-fork that stood against the cow-barn:

"Worms for two; luncheon for two," said I.

"I don't _like_ that juxtaposition!" she protested. "Do you really wish me to go with you? Why won't you sit here on the edge of the pool and go over these accounts?"

"Conservation of time and energy forbid doing one thing when two things can be accomplished at the----"

"You are absurd!"

I went over to the barnyard and began to dig.

"Hasten, Thusis," I called to her. "I'll be ready in ten minutes."

"I've a good mind not to go," she said.

"You've a _good_ mind," said I, disinterring a fine fat worm.

"I have a mind, anyway, and it counsels me not to go fishing with you, Don Michael."

"Argue with it," said I. "It's a reasonable mind, Thusis, and is open to conviction. Prove to it that you ought to go fishing."

"Don Michael, you are ridiculous."

"Let it be a modest lunch," said I, "nourishing and sufficient. But not a feast, Thusis. Don't put in any wreaths of roses, or any tambourines. But you can stick a fry-pan into the basket, with a little lard on the side, and I'll show you how we cook trout in the woods at home."

"In Chile?"

"In the Adirondacks," said I, smiling.

I went on digging and accumulating that popular lure for trout not carried in the fly-books of expert anglers, but known to the neophyte as the "Barn-yard Hackle."

Once I glanced over my shoulder. Thusis was not there. Presently, and adroitly dissembling my anxiety by a carefully camouflaged series of sidelong squints I discovered her near the kitchen-wing of the chalet talking earnestly to Josephine.

And so it happened that, having garnered a sufficiency of Barn-yard hackles, I went to the fountain pool to wash my hands.

And when, with playful abandon, I stood drying them upon my knickerbockers, I saw Thusis emerge from the house carrying my pack-basket.

She came up rather slowly.

"Here is your lunch," she said, looking at me with an inscrutable expression suggesting amusement and annoyance in an illogical combination.

"You mean _our_ lunch," said I.

"I mean _your_ lunch."

"Aren't you coming, Thusis?"

I looked into the pack-basket and discovered her account books in it.

"An oversight," she said, calmly. "Give them to me."

I started to fish them out and caught sight of the package of lunch.

"Good heavens!" said I, "there is twice too much for one!"

She appeared to be greatly disturbed by the discovery.

"Josephine has made a dreadful mistake," she said. "She has put up lunch enough for two!"

"It mustn't be wasted," said I, gravely. "I'm afraid you'll have to come fishing with me after all, Thusis."

There appeared to be no other way out of it. At least neither of us suggested any other way.

"Oh, dear," she said, looking up at me, and the very devil was in her gray eyes.

Which discovery preoccupied me when she went back to the house for her hat and for another rod which she had, it seemed, discovered in the laundry, all equipped for business.

The agreeable tingle of subdued excitement permeated me as she returned with the rod but without any hat.

"I don't need one," she said, calmly, pulling out several hair pins.

And then I saw a thick mass of molten gold tumble down; and the swift white fingers of Thusis dividing it into two heavy braids--a thrilling sight--and once, in the thrall of that enchantment where I stood motionless to watch her at this lovely office, I became aware of her lifted eyes--two celestial assassins intent on doing me deep harm.

Then, still busy with her hair, she moved slowly forward across the grass beside me, silently, almost stealthily--for, in the slow and supple grace of her I seemed to divine something almost menacing to me.

Her account books and rod were in my pack-basket. She sauntered along the shadow-flecked path beside me, at first paying me scant attention, but singing carelessly to herself in a demi-voix snatches of any vagrant melody that floated through her mind.

I recognized none of them. One strange little refrain seemed to keep on recurring to her at intervals:

--"And Aphrodite's throat was white As lilies opening at night In Naxos, In Naxos. And red were Aphrodite's lips-- And blue her eyes and white her hips As roses, sky, and surf that clips The golden shore of Tenedos.

O Tenedos, my Tenedos, Set in the purple sea! O Naxos, my Naxos, I hear you calling me! The old gods have gone away; I follow them with feet astray, But in my heart I'll faithful be To Tenedos and Naxos!"

She strolled on, singing to herself, an absent look in her starry eyes, switching idly at the leaves with some dead stalk she had picked up. And no matter what other fragments of melody occurred to her she was ever coming back to her odd little song of Naxos and of Tenedos, where flowers and sky and sea matched Aphrodite's charms.

Now and again I was conscious of a leisurely sideways glance from her as though indifferently marking my continued but quite uninteresting existence in the landscape.

When we came to the wooden bridge she rested both hands on the rail and looked down at the limpid greenish pool. But her gaze seemed serious and remote, and I became quite sure she was not thinking about trout.

However, I rigged up her rod for her and was preparing to impale a worm upon her hook when she noticed what I was about and remarked that she preferred an artificial fly.

"_That_ one," she added, coming up beside me and looking over my shoulder at the open fly-book in my hand.

So, that matter settled, we took the leafy path which ran through ferns along the northern bank of the stream.

*VII*

*CONSERVATION AND CONVERSATION*

Thusis hooked the first trout. It made a prodigious swirl in the pool and rushed to and fro in the shadowy depths--a slim, frantic phantom lacing the crystalline water with flashes of pallid fire.

She drew in the trout splashing and spattering in all its rainbow glory, and I thankfully thumped it into Nirvana and placed it upon a catafalque of wet green moss in my basket. Thusis looked on calmly while I performed the drudgery of the episode, and I heard her singing carelessly to herself:

"The old gods have gone away; I follow them with feet astray, But in my heart I'll faithful be To Tenedos and Naxos!"

"There seems to be a dryad or two left," said I, looking up over my shoulder where I squatted by the brookside, scrubbing my hands in the under-water gravel.

"You mean me," she nodded absently, loosening and freeing her leader and line.

"I sure do, Thusis."

"You're so funny," she said in the same tranquil, detached voice, as though she were some young chatelaine and I her gillie.

We went on to the next pool where the green crystal water gushed in and spread out calmly through the woodland, reflecting every fern and tree.

The silken whistle of her cast made a pretty whispering sound in the mossy silence, and I watched her where she stood slim and straight as a silvery sapling searching the far still reaches of the water with the tiny tuft of tinseled feathers until the surface of the placid pool was shattered into liquid splinters by the splash of a trout, and her line vibrated and hummed like a taut violin string.

Like lightning the convulsive battle was joined there in the woodland depths and the girl, all fire and grace, swayed like a willow under the furious rhythmic rushes of the unseen fish.

Click-click went her reel, and the feathery whirr of the line accented the silence. Then that living opalescent thing sprang quivering out of its element, and fell back, conquered, in a shower of opal rain.

Toward noon we came to a pool into which poured the stream with a golden sound between two boulders mantled thick with moss. And here Thusis seated herself and laid aside her rod.

"I am hungry," she said, looking over her shoulder at me with the same aloof composure that all the morning had reversed our roles as master and maid.

But even as she spoke she seemed to realize the actual situation: a delicate color came into her cheeks and then she laughed.

"Isn't it funny?" she said, springing to her feet. "Such presumption! Pray condescend to unsling the basket and I shall give Don Michael his lunch."

"Don Michael," said I, "will continue to do the dirty work on this expedition. Sit down, Thusis."

"Oh, I couldn't permit----"

"Oh, yes, you could. You've been behaving like a sporting duchess all this morning. Continue in that congenial role."

"What did you say?" she demanded, her gray eyes frosty and intent on me.

"I said you've been behaving like a duchess."

"Why do you say that?"

"Because it's so."

She sat on her mossy throne, regarding me intently and unsmilingly.

"Don't say that again,--please," she said, coldly.

"I was merely jesting."

"I know. But please don't say it in that way. Don't use that expression."

"Very well," said I, not relishing the snub. And I laid out the lunch in silence, during which operation I could feel Thusis was watching my sulky features with amusement.

To make sure I looked up at her when I had finished, and caught the little devils laughing at me out of both her eyes.

"Luncheon's ready," said I, infuriated by her mockery.

"Monsieur is served," said Thusis, in a voice so diabolically meek that I burst out laughing; and the girl, as though flinging discretion to the summer breezes, leaped to her feet with a gay little echo of my laughter and dropped down on the moss beside the woodland banquet.

"What do I care after all!" she said. "From the beginning I've been at no pains to deceive you. So in the name of the old gods let us break bread together."

She picked up a bit of bread, sprinkled a pinch of salt on it, broke it, and offered me half with a most adorable air. And we ate together under the inviolate roof of the high blue sky.

"Now," she said, "you'll never betray me."

"You knew that in the beginning."

"Did I? I don't know. I've been perfectly careless concerning you, Don Michael."

"Was it from instinctive confidence, Thusis, or out of disdain?"

The girl laughed, not looking up but continuing to poke for olives with a fork too large for the neck of the flask:

"Disdain you, Don Michael? How could I?"

"I sometimes believe you do. You behave very often as though I were a detail of the surrounding landscape and quite as negligible."

"But it's an attractive landscape and not negligible," she insisted, still poking for elusive olives. "Your simile is at fault, Monsieur O'Ryan."

"Thusis," said I, gravely consuming a sandwich, "you have made fun of me ever since I laid eyes on you."

"You began it."

"How?"

"You made fun of my red hair."

"It is beautiful hair."

"Indeed?"

"You know it. You know perfectly well how pretty you are."

"Senor!"

"In fact," said I, offering myself another sandwich, "you are unusually ornamental. I concede it. I even admit that you resemble _The Laughing Girl_."

"The cherished photograph on Monsieur's dresser! Oh, that is too much flattery. What would the Admiral think to hear you say such things to your housekeeper! Don Michael, you are young and you are headed for trouble. I beg of you to remember your ancestors."

"How about yours, Thusis?"

"Mine? Oh, they were poor Venetians. Probably they ran gondolas for the public--the taxis of those days, Don Michael--and lived on the tips they received."

"Thusis?"

"Monsieur?"

"I'd be grateful for a tip--if you don't mind."

"A tip?"

"Yes. Just a little one."

The girl held out her glass and I filled it with cool Moselle.

"You're such a nice boy," she said, and sipped her wine, looking at me all the while. She was so pretty that it hurt.

"A tip," she repeated musingly. "That is the Anglo-Saxon slang for information. Is it then that you request information?"

"If you are willing."

"About what, pray?"

"About yourself, Thusis."

"That is unworthy curiosity."

"No, it isn't curiosity."

She elevated her delicate nose, very slightly. "What, then, do you term it, Don Michael?"

"Sympathy."

"Oh la! Sympathy? Oh, I know _that_ kind. It is born out of the idleness of speculation and developed with an admixture of sentimental curiosity always latent in men."

She laughed: "It's nothing but emotion, Monsieur. Men call it budding friendship. But men really care for no women."

"Why do you say that?"

"It's true. Men seek friendship among men. Men like few or no women, but almost any female. That is the real truth. Why dodge it?"

"How old are you, Thusis?"

"Not old--as you mean it."

She had finished her luncheon, and now she leaned over and bathed her lips and fingers in the icy stream. There, like some young woodland thing out of the golden age of vanished gods she hovered, playing at the glimmering water's edge, scooping up handfuls of golden gravel from the bottom and letting them slide back through her dripping fingers.

"I'll tell you this," she said, looking at the water: "I don't like men. I never did. Any I might have been inclined to like I had already been born to hate.... You don't understand, do you?"

"No."

She smiled, sat erect, and dried her fingers on her handkerchief.

"Be flattered," she said. "No other man before you has had even a glimpse of my real self. And I really don't know why I've given you that much. I ask myself. I don't know.... But,"--and her sweet, reckless laughter flashed--"the very devil seemed to possess me when I first saw you, Don Michael. I was amazingly careless. But you were so funny! I was indiscreet. But you were so solemn and so typically and guilelessly masculine."

"Was I?" said I, getting redder and redder.

"Oh, yes!" she cried, "and you are still! You are all man--the most comprehensive type of your sex--the most logical, and the most delightfully transparent! Oh, you are funny, Don Michael. You don't know it; you don't suspect it; but you are! And that is why I read you to the depths of your nice boyish mind and heart, and felt that I need be at no pains to play my little role with you."

"Then," said I, "if you consider me harmless, why not trust me further?"

"I do trust you. You know I'm not born a servant. You know, also, that nevertheless I'm in service. So is my sister. So is my friend, Josephine Vannis. So is my friend, Raoul Despres. Well, then! It seems to me that I have trusted you, and that you know a great deal about us all."

"That is not very much to know," said I, so naively that Thusis showered the woods with her delicious laughter.

"Of course it isn't much, Don Michael. But just think how you can amuse yourself in dull moments by trying to guess the rest!"

"I can't imagine," said I, "what your object may be in taking service here in this little lonely valley in the Swiss Alps. If, as seems probable, you all are agents of some power now at war--what on earth is the use of coming here?"