Chapter 8

With a slight indrawing breath that was half sigh, half shiver, she left the window and drew her chair close to the fire. For a long time she looked into its dancing depths, and gradually her eyes so narrowed that their long lashes touched her flame-flushed cheeks. After a while she got up, went over to her desk, took from it several letters locked in a small drawer, came back to the fire, and again looked into it.

The girlish grace of her figure in its simple dress of soft blue, open at the neck and showing the curves of the beautiful throat, was emphasized by the unconscious relaxation of her body as she leaned for a moment against the mantel; and the Claudia to whom all looked for direction, the Claudia who had small patience with hesitating indecisions, and none for morbid self-questionings, searched the leaping flames with eyes uncertain and afraid.

A slight noise in the hall made her start uneasily. She did not want to be disturbed to-night. Turning her head, she listened. The corners of the large, high-ceilinged room, with its old-fashioned mahogany furniture, its shelves of books, its carved desk of quaint pattern, and its many touches of feminine occupancy, were lost in shadow, and only here and there on chair or table or bit of wall the firelight darted, but to dance off again, and the stillness was unbroken save by the crackling logs upon the hearth.

Drawing the lamp on the table closer, she sat down and took out of their opened envelopes two letters, one addressed to her mother and one to her Uncle Bushrod Ball; and as she read them the flush in her face deepened, then paled, and she bit her lip to hide its quivering. Putting them aside, she held for a moment, in hands that trembled slightly, another letter, and presently she began to read it:

"_December 30th_.

"I can wait no longer, Claudia. Words are not for love like mine; but you, who gave it life, will understand it without words. I believed I had put it from me--the thought of marriage--for almost I had lost my faith in the love for which I looked, and with compromise I could not be content. Perhaps I had no right to ask for what few find in life, but I did ask it, and when you came I knew my dreaming had come true. Will you marry me, Claudia? So infinitely I love you, want you, need you, that the days ahead until I win you--for I shall win you--are dark and dreaded. All of your love, its supremest best, I want; but if for mine, which is beyond all measure, you can give me now but little, give it and let me come to you. I must come. I am coming. And believe me always Yours,

"WINTHROP LAINE."

The pages dropped slowly in her lap, and, leaning back in her chair, Claudia closed her eyes and pressed her hands against them tightly. For some time she sat thus, then took up the last letter and read that also.

"_December 31st_.

"It is within an hour of midnight, Claudia. Soon the new year will be with us and the old one gone--the one that brought you to me. Almost the year had gone before I met you, but time is more than days and weeks, and that of ours together has been the real living of my life. In the stillness of my room I drop my book and dream that you are with me. On the street I hurry home to you; and once I stopped and bought you flowers--and in the darkness threw them away. To have you really here, to know that you are waiting--

"The new year has come, Claudia. The bells are striking the hour. It must, it shall bring you to me. I am asking much when I ask you to marry me, to leave your home to make a home for me. Your infinite love for Elmwood is understood well. Its old-world air of dignity and charm, of gracious courtesy and fine friendships, of proud memories and gentle peace, could scarce find counterpart elsewhere on earth, and yet in the days to come would it content alone, Claudia? For my great need of you might there not be some little need of me? Tell me I may come; but, whether you tell me or not, I am coming.

"WINTHROP LAINE."

Claudia put the pages back in their envelope. On the hearth the fire burned low, and, slipping out of her chair, she sat upon the rug and held her hands out shiveringly to the red ashes slowly turning gray. The habit of childhood was upon her, and quiveringly she talked to herself:

"You shouldn't have asked him to come Christmas! But how could I have known? I only thought he would be lonely. He cares for so few people and with all his wisdom has so little understanding of many things in life. He is so intolerant of weakness and meanness, of sham and show and pretence and make-believe that--that that's why you like him, and you know it, Claudia Keith! You shouldn't have asked him. You didn't know--but you knew before he went away. And he is coming back." Slowly she got up. "No. He is not coming back. That is, not yet, he isn't. You are not sure. Are you glad?" In the mirror over the mantel she met her eyes unshrinkingly. "Yes, I am glad," she said, and her lips whitened. "I am glad, but I am not sure." In her eyes was strange appeal. "Vermont and Virginia! Could we be happy? We are so different--and yet-- Perhaps in the spring. . . . The winter months are very long. Oh, Winthrop Laine!" She pressed her hands to her heart as if to still its sudden throbbing, then reached for his letter and kissed it. "I wonder if I am going to know what Lonely Land can mean!"

XXI

A VISIT FROM DOROTHEA

Dorothea settled herself more comfortably in her uncle's lap. "You certainly ought to be thankful you've never had it," she said. "It's worse than being a leper. I've never been a leper, but when you're that you can go out, the Bible says so, and people just pass you by on the other side and let you alone. With diphtheria they don't let you alone. Lepers are just outcasts, but diphtherias--what are people who have diphtheria?--well, whatever they are, they're cast in and nobody can see them except the nurses and the doctor and your mother and father. The doctor said father mustn't come in my room, as he had to go to his business, and father told him to go to the devil--I heard him. I just love the way father talks when he's mad. I couldn't have stood the long days if it hadn't been for you and father coming in every evening. They certainly do a lot of things when you're sick with contagiousness. Everything you eat out of and drink out of has to be boiled and stewed, and the things you spit in burned up, and the walls washed, and more foolishness!" Dorothea's eyes rolled and her voice was emphatic. "I don't believe in a lot of things, Uncle Winthrop. I wasn't really sick, and just had a teensy, weensy bit of pain in my throat; and if I'd known what they were going to do to me I'd have been one of those Science Christians and kept it to myself."

"But suppose you had given it to Channing?" Dorothea's uncle settled Dorothea more steadily on his lap. "The foolishness of wisdom is all some see of it, but if Channing had taken diphtheria from you--"

"I don't believe there was any diphtheria for him to take. If I'd been a poor person it would have been plain sore throat, and I'd had some peace. Timkins says his little girl was a heap sicker than I was, and her mother nursed her all the time, and she got well long before I did. Are we very rich, Uncle Winthrop?"

"You are not billionaires. Your father has been fortunate and made some money--"

"Is making money fortunate? Of course, I like nice things; but a whole lot of us children feel like"--Dorothea's arms waved as if to free herself from unseen strappings--"feel like Chinese children. Our feet aren't really bound, sure enough, but we can't do like we like. Sometimes I just want to run as fast as a racehorse, and holler as loud as the poor children do in the park. I hate regulations and proper things. If father were to lose his money, do you suppose we would have to have a special time for everything we do? Go to bed, and get up, and eat, and say lessons, and study lessons, and take lessons, and go out, and come in, and lie down in a dark room, and go again to drive or walk, and in between everything you do dress over again, and never, _never_ run or climb trees or tear your clothes and have just plain fun? I love dirt. I do! I have to be so careful with my finger nails and my clothes that if ever I have children I am going to let them get right down in the dirt and roll in it and make all the noise they want. Mother says a loud voice is so inelegant. So is affectatiousness, I think, and I wasn't born with a soft voice. I just bawl at Channing sometimes. I do it on purpose. I'm like father. I get tired of being elegant. Haven't you any kind of candy anywhere, Uncle Winthrop? Mother said I could have a few pieces if it didn't have nuts in it."

Laine reached for a drawer in the book-piled table near which he sat. "If I had known I was to have the honor of a visit from you this afternoon I would have been better prepared for entertainment. I'm afraid this candy isn't very good. It's been here since your last visit, and--"

"That's been two months ago. We didn't get back from Florida until February, and in March I was taken sick, and then we went to Lakewood, and now it's May. Mother can't understand how I got sick. She says she tries so hard to keep us from diseases and they come anyhow. I wish I didn't have to be educated and find out things--mother knows a lot; but it makes her so nervous. I'd rather be sick sometimes than afraid of being all the time. This certainly is poor candy. I promised mother I wouldn't eat a thing Caddie gave me if she'd let me come to see you; but I don't think she'd mind if I took home some of those little cakes Caddie makes with almonds in them. Do you suppose she has any?"

"I couldn't guess. I'll ring and find out."

"I'll ask her." Dorothea slipped from her uncle's lap. "I'll be back in a minute," and before Laine could press the button which would bring Moses she had disappeared. Five minutes later she was back, in her hands a good-sized paper box, tied clumsily with red string, and as she put it on the table she patted it with satisfaction.

"That's for Channing," she said, half leaning against the table and drumming on it with the tips of her fingers. "Caddie didn't have any cakes. She says you used to like sweet things, and it was once a pleasure to cook for you; but if you enjoy anything you eat now you never confess it to her. She says you eat, but you don't know the name of what you're eating, and one thing is the same as another. I think her feelings are getting hurt, Uncle Winthrop."

"Are they? I'm sorry. Caddie is a spoiled creature. I long ago exhausted the English language in commendation of her efforts. Nothing is so wearing on one as continual demand for praise, and Caddie's capacity is exhaustless. I'm sorry she didn't have the little cakes."

"She's going to make some to-morrow and send them to me. It's pop-corn in this box." Dorothea held up the latter and shook it. "Moses brought it from Virginia. They are the cunningest little ears you've ever saw. Wasn't it nice of Moses to think about us and bring it? Of course, he didn't know we would be away so long and that I was going to be sick and he wouldn't see me until spring; but it's a thing that keeps, and the drier it is the prettier it pops, he says. What is that picture over there, Uncle Winthrop? It is very ugly."

Laine glanced at the picture to which Dorothea pointed. "That is a Jan Steen--'The Village Fair.' Sorry you don't like it. You think that Botticelli is ugly also. A little later in life it may meet with your approval. The original is priceless."

"A lot of priceless things aren't pretty. I don't ever expect to be a culturated person. Mother makes me go to all those old galleries and museums, when we're in Europe, and look at a lot of cracked pictures and broken statues and carved things, and wants me to think they're beautiful, but I don't. Some of them are hideous, and I get so tired of being told I must admire them that I make a face inside at most of them as I walk along, though, of course, outside, for mother's sake, I don't make any signs. I'm a great disappointment to mother. We had a lady artist guide the last time we were in Italy. She used to get so mad with me that once she shook me. Father would have killed her if she hadn't been a lady, and after that he and I used to go out by ourselves and have the grandest times. He'd show me just a few pictures at the time, and tell me all about them, and some of them I just loved. Mother says you have so many beautiful things, Uncle Winthrop, and that it's a shame for a man to have them all by himself." She looked around the large room, and again took her seat in her uncle's lap. "Some things I like in here, and some I don't. You've got an awful lot of books, haven't you?"

"Too many, I'm afraid. Would you mind if I smoked?" Laine reached for a cigar from the box on the table and held it between his fingers.

"May I?"

"Of course. I hope I won't forget, though, and kiss you. I'm so apt to when I'm talking, if I like a person. Tobacco is so bitter. I'll tell you what I think is the matter with this room. It's--it's--" She looked around carefully. "It's something that isn't in it. I don't know what it is. Why don't you get married, Uncle Winthrop? Maybe your wife would know."

Laine put the unlighted cigar back on the table, and Dorothea's hands, which were stroking one of his, were gripped by it and held tightly.

"I do not doubt it. The trouble is in getting the wife."

Dorothea sat upright. "The idea! I heard Miss Robin French say the other day the way unmarried men were run after was outrageous, and all they had to do was to stand still and crow a little, and up would come a-clucking all kinds of hens, little ones and big ones, and young ones and old ones, and-- Don't you tell anybody, but I think she'd come, too!" Dorothea's hands came together, and she laughed gleefully. "Father says if Miss Robin would give up hoping she'd be happier." Suddenly her face sobered. "Do all ladies try to marry a man, Uncle Winthrop?"

"They most certainly do not." Laine smiled in Dorothea's face, and before the child's clear eyes his own, full of weary pain, turned away. "Many of them take very long to make up their minds to marry at all."

"Have you ever asked one to marry you?"

Laine did not answer. Dorothea's question was unheard. His thoughts were elsewhere.

"Have you?"

"Have I what?"

"Ever asked a lady to many you?"

"I have."

The hand which Dorothea had been stroking was dropped. She sprang to her feet and stood in front of him, her hands clasped in rigid excitement on her breast.

"When"--her voice curled upward in quivering delight--"when is she going to do it, Uncle Winthrop?"

"I do not know. She has not said she would do it at all."

"Not said--she would--marry--you!" Delight had changed to indignation high and shrill, and Dorothea's eyes blazed brilliantly. "Is she a crazy lady?"

"She is not."

"Then why?"

"She is not quite sure she-- It is not a thing to talk about, Dorothea." He drew her again on his lap and unclasped the clenched fingers. "We are good friends, you and I, and I have told you what I have told no one else. So far as I am concerned, it does not matter who knows, but until she decides we will not talk of this again. You understand, don't you, Dorothea?"

"I understand she must have very little sense. I don't see how you could want to marry a lady who didn't know right off, the very first minute, that she wanted to marry you. Do--do I know her, Uncle Winthrop?"

"You do."

For a moment there was silence, broken only by the ticking of the clock on the mantel; and slowly Dorothea turned to her uncle, her big brown eyes troubled and uncertain. For half a moment she looked at him, then, without warning, threw her arms around his neck and hid her face against his.

"Is--is--it Claudia, Uncle Winthrop?" she whispered. "Is--it--my cousin Claudia?"

"It is--your cousin Claudia."

The quiver in Laine's voice was beyond control, and, lifting the child's face, he kissed it. "I have asked her to marry me, Dorothea, but not yet has she promised to do so."

In Dorothea's cheeks two burning spots of red glowed brilliantly. Slipping down from her uncle's lap, she drew a long breath. "I knew she must be queer about something," she said, and her fingers interlocked in trembling excitement. "She was too nice not to be, but I didn't think she'd be this kind of queer. The idea of not promising right away! I know what's the matter. It's her home and her mother, and all the things she is doing in the country that she don't want to give up. Why don't you go down there and make her, Uncle Winthrop?"

"She asks me not to come--yet. There is no hotel, and--"

"Does she write to you?"

Laine smiled in the eager eyes. "Yes, she writes to me."

Again there was silence, and presently a queer sound from Dorothea. "I can't help it, Uncle Winthrop! They're coming! Won't it be grand, because she will, I know she will, and I'm so glad I can't--can't help--" And big, happy tears rolled down Dorothea's face, which was pressed close to Laine's as he held her close to his heart.

That night, when all the house was still and every one asleep, Dorothea slipped out of bed and, kneeling down beside it, folded her hands and began to pray.

"O Lord"--her voice was a high whisper--"please make my cousin Claudia come to her senses and promise my uncle Winthrop that she will marry him right away. She lives in Virginia. Her post-office is Brooke Bank, and she's an awfully nice person, but father says even You don't know why women do like they do sometimes, and of course a man don't. Please make her love him so hard she'd just die without him, and make her write him to come quick. Give her plenteous sense from on high, and fill her with heavenly thankfulness and make her my aunt for ever and ever. Amen."

She got up and scrambled into bed and closed her eyes tightly. "French prayers aren't worth a cent when you want something and want it quick," she said, half aloud. "And when you're in dead earnest you have to get right down on your knees. I don't know what I'd do if I couldn't talk in plain English to the Lord. I hope He will answer, for if He don't I certainly couldn't say right off, 'Thy will be done.' I'd say I thought my cousin Claudia had mighty little sense."

XXII

SPRINGTIME

Winthrop Laine lifted the tangled vines which overhung the shrub-bordered path leading down the sloping lawn at the back of the house to the rose-garden at its foot, and held them so that Claudia could pass under.

"They ought to be cut." She stopped and unfastened a long tendril of intertwined honeysuckle and bridal-wreath which had caught her hair. "Everything ought to be cut and fixed, only--"

"It would be beyond pardon. If any one should attempt to change this garden, death should be the penalty. One rarely sees such old-fashioned flowers as are here, never in modern places."

"No one knows when many of them were planted, and nothing hurts them." Stooping, Claudia picked from the ground a few violets and lilies-of-the-valley growing around the trunk of an immense elm-tree at the end of the path, then looked up.

"Don't let's go to the roses yet. I want to see what the sun-dial says. This is the way my great-grandmother used to come to meet my great-grandfather when she was a girl. Her parents wanted her to marry some one else. She would slip out of the house and down this path to that big magnolia-tree, from where she could see and not be seen, and it was there they made their plans to run away."

"We will go there. It looks like a very nice place at which to make plans."

Into Claudia's face color sprang quickly, and for a moment she drew back. "Oh no! It is too beautiful to-day to make plans of any kind. It is enough to just--live. You haven't seen half of Elmwood yet, and you want to talk of--other things."

"I certainly do." Laine stepped back that Claudia might lead the way down the path, box-bordered so high that those within could not be seen outside, and smiled in the protesting face. A few moments more and they had come out to the front lawn on the left of the house and some distance below the terrace on which it overlooked the river, and as they reached a group of spreading magnolias he drew in his breath.

"I do not wonder that you love it. And I am asking you to leave it!"

She looked up. "Come, I want to show you some of the old things, the dear things, and then--"

"We will come back, and you will tell me what I must know, Claudia?"

She nodded and pulled the bells from the lily-of-the-valley she held in her hands. "We will come back and--I will tell you."

For an hour, in the soft glow of the sun now, sinking in the heavens, they wandered through the grounds and separate gardens of the old estate, now walking the length of the long avenue, shaded by great elms of more than century age, now around the lawn with its beds of bleeding-hearts and snowdrops, of wall-flowers and sweet-William, of hyacinths and tulips, with their borders of violets and cowslips, of candytuft and verbenas, and at the old sun-dial they stopped and read the hour. Picking an armful of lilacs and calicanthus and snowballs and blue flags, planted in the days when the great trees were tiny saplings, they sent them in by Gabriel, who was following at a distance, blowing softly on his trumpet, and for some minutes stood in front of the house and watched the sun touch, here and there, the old brick laid in Flemish bond; then went back and sat down on the low seat under the big magnolia, from which the river could be glimpsed, and over which every now and then a white sail could be seen.

Behind them the sun sank. The mass of shifting gold and blue and crimson and pale purple lost little by little its brilliant splendor, and slowly over land and sky soft twilight fell, and only here and there was heard the song and twitter of birds as they made ready for the night.

For a few moments there was silence, and then in his Laine held the hands of Claudia.

"It is a wonder world, this old, old world of yours with its many things we have forgotten. And yet--you will come to me? You are sure at last, Claudia?"

"I am sure--at last." She raised her eyes to his. "I could not let you come until I knew that--all the homes in all the world would not be home without--"

"Without what, Claudia?"

"Without-- Why do you make me tell you when you know? You make me tell too much."

"You cannot tell too much. Claudia! Claudia!"

Overhead the birds chirped sleepily and one by one the stars came out. Presently Claudia drew herself away and smoothed her kissed and wind-blown hair. "I am such a queer person. I think you ought to know," she said, and again her shining eyes were raised to his. "There are a great many things I don't care for, and I don't think the way some people do about a good many other things. I had to take long to be sure."

"It was very cruel, Claudia." He lifted her face to his and smiled in the confessing eyes. "My forgiveness proves the measure of my love. As proof of penitence, will you marry me in June?"

"I certainly--will--not!" Again she drew away. "Jacqueline will not get here until July. I told you she was coming home to live. You don't suppose I'd leave my mother before Jacqueline comes home?"

"Then when?"