Part 7

“Don’t you think young girls nearly all get like that sometimes?” Mildred suggested. “Perhaps somebody hurt her feelings at the last party she did go to.” She laughed reminiscently. “I remember when I was about her age I was terribly anxious to please that funny little Paul Thompson, who used to live next door. He danced with me twice at somebody’s birthday party, and I felt perfectly uplifted about it. Then I overheard him talking to another boy, not thinking I was near him. He said his mother had told him he must be polite to me or he wouldn’t have done it, and he certainly never would again, no matter what his mother said, because I’d walked all over his new pumps. It just crushed me, and I know I moped around the house for days afterward; but I wouldn’t tell you what was the matter. It’s the most terribly sensitive age we go through, Mamma, and I just _couldn’t_ have told you. Perhaps there’s been a Paul Thompson for Cornelia.”

“No,” Mrs. Cromwell returned. “I’m sure there isn’t, and that nobody’s hurt her feelings. She came home from the last party she went to, a couple of months ago, in a perfect gale of high spirits; she’d had a glorious time. Then, a week or two later, when I spoke of arranging for her birthday, she got very moody—wouldn’t hear of any such thing; and she’s been so ever since. Your father’s getting cross about it and thinks we ought to do something.”

“You don’t suppose—you don’t suppose she’s fallen in love? It does happen, you know, Mamma—even at fifteen and sixteen.”

“No,” Mrs. Cromwell returned decidedly. “I’m certain it isn’t that. She’s sensible about the boys she knows, and she’s never shown the slightest sentimentality. I’ve thought over all those things, and it isn’t any of them. Nothing’s the matter with her health either; so there just isn’t any reason at all for a change in her. Yet she _has_ changed—completely. In the space of a few weeks—you might almost say a few days—instead of being the bright, romping, responsive girl she’s always been, she’s become so silent and remote you’d think the rest of her family were mere distant and rather inferior acquaintances. It’s mysterious and extremely uncomfortable. Your father thinks we ought to send her away to school where she’d have a complete change, and I’ve had some correspondence about it with Miss Remy of your old school. I think perhaps——”

Mrs. Cromwell stopped speaking, her attention arrested by the sound of a door opening and closing. She listened for a moment, then whispered: “There! She’s just come in. See for yourself.”

The two ladies were sitting in a room that opened upon the broad central hallway of the house, and their view of that part of the black-and-white marble-floored hall just beyond the open double doors was unimpeded. Here appeared in profile the subject of their discussion, a plump brunette demoiselle, rosy-cheeked and far from uncomely, but weightily preoccupied with her own thoughts.

She did not even glance into the room where sat her mother and sister, though the doorway was so wide that she must have been conscious of them;—she was going toward the stairway at the other end of the hall, and would have passed without offering any greeting, if her mother’s voice, a little strained, had not checked her.

“Cornelia!”

The girl paused unwillingly. “Yes?”

“Don’t you see who’s here?”

“Yes.” Cornelia nodded vaguely in the direction of her sister. “How do you do,” she said, not smiling. “I’m glad to see you.”

“Is that all you have to say?” Mrs. Cromwell inquired.

“Yes, Mamma, if you please. May I go now? There’s something important I want to attend to.”

“What is it?”

“Something important.”

“You told us that,” her mother returned. “What is it?”

Cornelia’s voice expressed the strained tolerance of a person who has already reported, over and over, all the known facts in a case. “Mamma, I explained that it’s something important. Would you mind letting me go?”

“No! Do!” her mother replied crisply, and, when Cornelia had disappeared, turned again to her oldest daughter, and with widespread hands made the gesture of one displaying strange stuff for inspection.

“You see? That’s what she’s like all the time.”

“What do you suppose it is she says is so important?”

Mrs. Cromwell laughed ruefully. “That’s all you’d ever find out about it from her. If I ask her again at lunch what it was, she’ll do just what she did then. Her expression will show that she finds me a very trying person, and she’ll either say, ‘Nothing,’ or else, ‘It was something I wanted to attend to.’ And if we should follow her up to her room now, we shouldn’t learn any more about it. She’d probably be just pottering at her dressing-table or looking out of the window. That’s all we’d find her doing.”

In this surmise Mrs. Cromwell was correct;—if she and Mildred had ascended to Cornelia’s room, they would have found her either rearranging the silver and porcelain trifles on her dressing-table, or else standing at the window near her desk and looking down pensively upon the suburban boulevard below. That is to say, by the time they opened the door she would have been doing one of those two things: Cornelia was quick of hearing.

What they would have found her doing, if they could have entered her room without any forewarning sound of footsteps, however, was another matter. While her mother and sister continued to wonder about her downstairs, Cornelia went to her small desk of dull mahogany and seated herself before it, but, having done that, did nothing else for a minute or two;—instead, she sat listening, a precaution due to the possibility that her mother might indeed prove so curious as to follow up recent inquiries in person.

Then she opened the desk, and after a final glance at her closed door, took from about her neck, beneath the collar of her brown silk blouse, a tiny key upon a fragile gold chain of links as slim as thin wire. With the key she unlocked a drawer inside the desk, and as she did this her expression altered;—the guarded look vanished, and there came in its place a tenderness, wistful and yet so keen that the colour in her cheeks heightened and her softened eyes grew lustrous.

She took first from the drawer a little notebook bound in black leather, and opened it. All the pages were blank except the first one, upon which she had lately written the opening sentence of a novel that she intended to offer the world when the work had been secretly completed. She read the sentence over fondly and yet with some perplexity. It was this:

Gregory Harlford had just fallen out of his airplane at a height of 7000 feet and as he possessed no parachute he realized that only a miracle could save him from being dashed to pieces at the end of his descent.

That was the original form of the sentence, but Cornelia had made an alteration. She had scratched out “7000” and replaced it with “5000.” To-day she looked at the latter figure thoughtfully for some time, and, having drawn a line through it, wrote “1000” above it. Then, for a few moments, she had an encouraged look and seemed about to begin a second sentence, but did not do so. Instead, she rested her elbow upon the desk and her chin upon her hand; and as she continued her study of the opening of her novel, her air of being encouraged gave way to a renewed bafflement. It was not that the opening sentence displeased her;—on the contrary. Yet whenever she wished to add another and get on with the story, she came to one of those inexplicable blank gaps in the creative mind, one of those flat stops that so often set even the most willing novelists to walking the floor or the links.

She was sure that if she could once surmount the difficulty of the second sentence, the rest would flow easily from her. Gregory Harlford was to be the hero of her story, and she had in her mind’s eye a remarkably definite portrait of him, which she wished to include in the novel; but she felt that under the circumstances a description of his person and attributes would be out of place in the second sentence. There was a vague but persistent impediment somewhere;—inspiration failed to make an appearance, and, after waiting almost fifteen minutes for it, she sighed, pushed the little book away and turned to the other contents of the drawer.

There were several queer items: the stub of an almost entirely consumed lead pencil; an odd bit of broken amber, not quite cylindrical, and half of an old shoe-lace. There were also a dozen dried violets, a flattened rosebud, and a packet of small sheets of note paper whereon appeared cryptic designs—line drawings most curious. These enigmas were what now occupied Cornelia.

They were her own handiwork; nobody had even seen any of them, and they were of different ages. The oldest of the designs had been drawn long, long ago;—that is to say, long, long ago, according to Cornelia’s sense of the passage of time. For she was sixteen now, and she had made the first of the queer drawings four eternal years earlier, when she was only a child.

It appeared to be the representation in profile of a steep stairway, or perhaps a series of superimposed cliffs, each with a small shelf at its base. Beginning at the bottom of the sheet of paper, this stairway, or series of cliffs, rose to a small plateau or summit near the top; and upon each step, or shelf of cliff, there was drawn one of those little figures children call “men”;—the body is emaciated to the extent that it becomes a single straight line, the arms and legs being similar lines, and the head a round black dot.

In Cornelia’s drawing, each of these little figures was labelled, a name having been written beside it; and in some cases a descriptive word or two had been added beneath the name. Thus, under the name “Georgie P.”, which evidently belonged to the figure occupying the lowest step or shelf, there appeared in faded purple ink a phrase of qualified admiration, “Half Handsome.” Another expression of an enthusiasm limited by a defect in its subject seemed to refer to “Harold,” midway in the ascent—“Terribly Good Looking But Stingy.” However, the figure upon the summit, named in full, “William Peterson McAvoy,” was obviously the symbol of a being without flaw, for here Cornelia had carefully printed, all in capital letters: “ABSOLUTELY PERFECT.”

Yet, in the next drawing, which, like all the others, was of the same stairway, or series of cliffs, with little “men” upon the steps or ledges, a sharp disaster had befallen this figure adorning with its perfection the summit of the first design. Cornelia had drawn a straight line from the summit down to the bottom of the page; and evidently this straight line indicated a precipice of catastrophical dimension. At the foot of it lay the dot and five lines representing the head, body, and members of William Peterson McAvoy, again thus denominated, and near by was written the simple explanation, “Too Snooty.” The summit was bare.

In a subsequent design, done when Cornelia was thirteen, the half handsome Georgie P., who had sometimes occupied one step and sometimes another, finally made his appearance upon the summit, though without any other explanatory tribute than a date: “Sept. 16th.” But Georgie P. did not long remain in his high position. A drawing made only a week later depicted him miserably upon his back at the foot of the precipice, and beside him Cornelia had written: “Perfectly Odious. Well only another dream shattered.”

All of the drawings were dated and thus proved that they were made at irregular intervals;—sometimes two or three months had elapsed between them; sometimes three or four would be produced within a week; and the figures upon the steps or ledges varied in name and relative position as greatly, though one or two of the names appeared upon all of the designs except the last and most recent one. This had been drawn only a month ago, and was interestingly different from its predecessors.

One thing that made it different was the fact that it contained a Mister. In the others there were Georgies and Harolds and Williams and Toms and Johnnies; but now, for the first time, with unique dignity, appeared “Mr. Bromley,” neither a Mister nor a Bromley having been seen upon any previous step or ledge. Moreover, this début of his was unprecedented. Instead of occupying one ledge and then another, sometimes ascending, sometimes descending, before reaching the final elevation, Mr. Bromley made his first appearance strikingly upon the summit. More than this, the ledges below him were unoccupied;—the lofty plateau alone was inhabited. The Harolds and Johnnies and Georgies were gone utterly from the picture, as if unworthy to be seen at all upon a mountain crowned with this supreme Mister.

For the cliffs, or stairway, meant a mountain to Cornelia;—she thought of the drawings as a mountain; and she called the little packet, kept in the locked drawer, “My Mountain.” Her mountain was her own picture of her heart and of the impressions made upon it;—no wonder she kept it locked away! And now it was a deeper secret than ever, for in its present state it glorified the one name alone, and would have told her world everything. Mr. Bromley was the “English Professor,” aged forty-three, at the boarding-school where she was a day scholar; and not long ago he had told her she ought to think “less about candy and more about books and life.” That was what was the matter with Cornelia;—she had begun her novel immediately, and spent a great deal of time in her room, thinking about life and Mr. Bromley.

Mr. Bromley was the hero of the novel and Cornelia thought of him as Gregory Harlford. The general public would never have supposed Mr. Bromley to be an aviator, and he had no claim, in fact, to be thought anything so dashing, though he was fond of chess and still played tennis sometimes. Nevertheless, he seemed to be a quietly resourceful man, one who would find a way out of almost any difficulty, and it was strange that he remained so long suspended in mid-air, in Cornelia’s story, even after the vacancy beneath him had been reduced to a thousand feet. For, after looking over her mountain, Cornelia again took up the little leather-bound notebook and renewed the struggle for a second sentence.

Nothing resulted, and, sighing, she gave over the effort and performed a little daily ceremonial of hers, placing side by side in a row her mementoes of Mr. Bromley—the stub of the pencil he had used, the worn shoe-lace he had broken and carelessly tossed aside, the rosebud she had once asked him to smell, the violets that had dropped from his coat lapel, and the fragment of the amber mouthpiece of his pipe, broken when it fell from his pocket upon the stone steps of the school building. Dreamily, she put them all in a row, touching them gently, one after the other; then she leaned her elbows upon the desk and, with her chin in her hands, thought about life and books in a general way for several minutes.

After that, as the air was warm in the room, she went to the window and opened it. Looking down moodily, she saw her sister Mildred departing. “Going home to mess around with the baby,” Cornelia thought. “That’s her life. How strange she can be contented with it!”

A large red open car went by, sending forth upon the wintry air some cheerful cadences of song as it passed;—young gentlemen collegians merrymaking not indecorously in this holiday time. Cornelia looked down upon the manly young faces, rosy with the wind. “How terrible!” she murmured, dreamily. For they were no part of her mountain; her sister’s baby had nothing to do with Mr. Bromley; neither had the song from the big red car; both were dross.

A negro rattled by upon an ash cart drawn by a lively mule. The negro whistled piercingly to a friend in the distance, and the mule’s splendid ears stood high and eager; he was noble in action, worthy of all attention. Cornelia could not bear him. “Oh, dear!” she said, probably thinking of his master, who was proud of him. “What lives these people lead!”

She was in the act of turning away from this barren window when something far down the street caught her attention. It was the figure of a thin, somewhat middle-aged gentleman in gray clothes, approaching slowly upon the sidewalk. For a moment Cornelia was uncertain; then there appeared for an instant, beneath the rim of his soft hat, twin sparklings of reflected light. They vanished, but Cornelia needed no further proof that the gentleman in gray wore the eyeglasses that completed her identification of him.

She said, “_Oh!_” in a loud voice, and clapped her joined hands over her mouth to stifle this too-eloquent revelation. Then the bright eyes above the joined hands semicircled impulsively to the bed, where lay her hat and coat as she had tossed them when she came into the room. The impulse that made her look at them increased overwhelmingly; she seized them, put them on hurriedly; opened her door with elaborate caution, tiptoed to a back stairway, descended it noiselessly, and a moment later left the house by a rear door. No one had seen her except the cook’s cat.

XII HER HAPPIEST HOUR

THUS Cornelia saved herself from replying to intrusive questions about where she was going, and why; but in her impulsive haste she had forgotten something. Upon her desk, upstairs, lay her heart’s secret, her mountain, all in loose sheets of paper. Beside the desk was an open window;—she had left the door open, too, and this was a breezy day. Such was instantly her condition at sight of Mr. Bromley; and with no thought but to have more sight of him, she flitted across the back yard and through an alley gate, leaving calamity brooding behind her.

Mr. Bromley, returning homeward with a book under his arm, after his morning’s browsing in the suburban public library, was not surprised to see one of his pupils emerge from a cross-street before him, since this was the neighbourhood in which most of the school’s day scholars lived; but he wondered why Cornelia Cromwell was so deeply preoccupied. She seemed to look toward him, though vaguely, and he lifted his hand to his hat; but before he could complete his salutation she looked away, apparently unconscious of him. She was walking in a rather elderly manner, with her head inclined forward and her hands meditatively clasped behind her—the right posture for an engrossed statesman philosopher, but not frequently expected of sixteen. At the corner she turned northward upon the boulevard sidewalk, Mr. Bromley’s own direction, and went pensively on before him, some thirty yards or so in advance.

His gait was slow, for that was his thoughtful habit; and the distance between them, like Cornelia’s attitude, remained unvaried until the next cross-street was reached. Here, without altering that scholarly attitude of hers by a hair’s-breadth, she walked straight into what was the proper path and right-of-way demanded by an oncoming uproarious taxicab.

With his hoarse warning signal and with his own hoarse voice, the driver raved; she heeded him not. So, taking his life in his hands, he saved her by charging into the curbstone. The wheels providentially mounted and bore him fairly upon the sidewalk;—he crashed down again to the pavement of the boulevard and roared onward, biblically oratorical about women, let hear him who would.

Mr. Bromley rushed forward and seized Cornelia’s arm. “Miss Cromwell!”

She looked up, smiling absently. “Do you think there was any danger?” she asked. “I didn’t notice.”

“Good gracious!” he cried. “Don’t you know you can’t cross streets _any_where, these days, without looking to see what’s coming? What was the matter with you?”

“The matter?” she repeated, vaguely, as she began to walk onward with him. “Why, nothing.”

“I mean: What on earth were you thinking of to step right in front of a——”

“Oh, that? Yes,” she said, gently. “I see what you mean now, Mr. Bromley. I was thinking about life.”

“You were, indeed?”

“And books,” she added.

“Well, I wouldn’t!” he said, for he had long since forgotten his advice to her in the matter. “If I were you, I’d put my mind more upon street crossings, especially during pedestrian excursions.”

She accepted the reproof meekly, not replying, and for some moments walked beside him in silence. Then she said gravely: “I believe I haven’t thanked you for saving my life.”

“What?”

She repeated it: “I haven’t thanked you for saving my life.”

“Good gracious!” he exclaimed. “I didn’t do anything of the kind.”

“You did, Mr. Bromley.”

“I certainly did not,” he said, astonished that she seemed genuinely to believe such a thing. “The taxicab was banging around all over the sidewalk by the time I reached you.”

“No,” she insisted. “I heard you call my name, and then you took hold of me. If you hadn’t, I’d have gone straight on.”

“Well, you’d have been all right to go straight on, because by that time the taxicab was twenty or thirty feet away.”

“No, I’d have been killed,” she said. “If you hadn’t caught me, I’d have been killed absolutely.”

He stared at her, perplexed, though he knew that people often retain but a confused recollection of exciting moments, even immediately after those moments have passed. Then, with this thought in his mind, he was a little surprised to find that she simultaneously had it in her mind, too.

“Maybe you were a little excited to see a person in danger,” she said. “It might have got you mixed up or something. When things happen so quickly, it’s hard to remember exactly what _did_ happen. You may not know it, but you saved my life, Mr. Bromley.”

He laughed. “I didn’t; but if you insist on thinking so, I suppose there’s no harm.”

This seemed to content her; she nodded her head, smiled sunnily, then became grave again. “And to think you’d risk your own life to save—even mine!” she murmured.

“That’s merely absurd, Miss Cromwell. By not the remotest possibility could it be conceived that I placed myself in any jeopardy whatever.”

“Well”——she returned, indefinitely, but seemed to reserve the right to maintain her own conviction in the matter. “I think ‘jeopardy’ is a beautiful word, Mr. Bromley,” she added, after a moment’s silence. “I mean, whether you admit you were in jeopardy or not, it’s a word I think ought to be used oftener because it’s got such a distinguished kind of sound.” She repeated it softly, to herself. “Jeopardy.” Then, in a somewhat louder voice, but as if merely offering a sample sentence in which this excellent word appeared to literary advantage, she murmured: “He placed his life in jeopardy—for me.”

“I didn’t!” her companion said, sharply. “The word is extremely inappropriate in any such connection.”

“I just used it to see how it would sound,” Cornelia explained. “I mean, whether you did get in jeopardy or anything, or not, on my account, Mr. Bromley, I was just seeing how it would sound if I said it. I mean, like this.” And she began to repeat, “He placed his life in jeopardy——”

“Please oblige me,” Mr. Bromley interrupted. “Don’t say it again.”

His tone was brusque, and she looked up inquiringly to find him frowning with annoyance. She decided to change the subject.

“Do you care much for Christmas, Mr. Bromley?” she asked, in the key of polite small talk. “It strikes me as terribly tiresome, myself. I’m positively looking forward to the next school term.”

“Are you?”

“Yes—and oh! there was something I thought of the other day I wanted to ask you. Are you a Republican or a Democrat, Mr. Bromley?”

“Neither.”

“That’s so much more distinguished,” Cornelia said. “I mean it seems so much more distinguished not to be in politics. Do you believe in woman suffrage?”

“No.”