III.
“For a spotless child of heaven, Cecilia’s playing the game pretty well,” I mused, as I watched her at dinner. During the hour of dressing she had pulled herself wonderfully together. She held her little round chin high in the air and devoted herself to Drake with all the aplomb of a Felicia.
The cup of bitterness held its touch of sweet to her. Even if one must suffer, one was out in the world, one was living, was what I read in her attitude. But as I have said, I don’t pretend to understand women; still, I’m much mistaken if, during dinner, at least, she didn’t have a good time.
She ignored Almington as much as she could in a general conversation.
“Mrs. Massingbyrd can have you,” her attitude seemed to say. “I fight for no man.”
I looked at Drake. If he wanted to keep his rose in the bud, he had better carry her away quickly to a fresher atmosphere.
At the end of dinner the ladies exchanged nods and smiles. I saw that an explanation was forthcoming for the mysterious visit to the stable.
They had been preparing what to me seemed not unlike a little amateur Walpurgisnacht.
It was, of course, Lydia Massingbyrd’s idea. Nobody else, not even Felicia, could have been wrong-minded enough to want to slide downhill in summer. My coachman’s children have a species of roller sled on which they daily endanger their lives by coasting down the steep macadamized road which leads from my house.
“I saw them on my way from the station,” proclaimed Mrs. Massingbyrd, triumphantly; “and saw at once their possibilities.”
“Will you steer me, Mr. Curtis?” asked Cecilia, turning her back on Almington, and giving poor Drake a killing glance; and I thought I surprised a glance of malicious intelligence pass between Mrs. Massingbyrd and my wife.
Now, I know that, told in plain words the morning after, most of our maddest fun seems flat and puerile enough. I know that a decent married man of my age and a lady killer of Almington’s ought to have poohpoohed this childish sport, and sat with our cigars and our whiskies and sodas on the piazza.
I suppose you think that’s what you would have done. But I can tell you, if you had dined with Felicia and Mrs. Massingbyrd, you’d have been caught up in the fire of their folly. It’s contagious, more than anything I know. In the glamour of their lovely nonsense sliding downhill on the coachman’s children’s roller sled would have seemed an appropriate and delightful thing—or sliding down the banister or the cellar door, if it had been their mad whim to do that.
Haven’t you ever been a kid since you were grown up? Did all your fooling stop before you were out of college? I’m sorry for you if it’s so. I hope, for my part, that Felicia and Mrs. Massingbyrd and their like will make me forget my years for a long time to come. And I hope often to wake up in the sober light of the next day wondering just what magic it was that had turned back the hand of time for me, that I could find merriment in sliding down a macadamized hill on a roller sled.
The night was cold, with a bit of a breeze; there was a moon, and the glow from Felicia’s gayety and Lydia Massingbyrd lasted my little companion on our first swift, delirious slides.
It wasn’t coasting, but it was exciting enough, as one went very fast. And coming up we piled into a cart to be drawn up the hill. But after a few slides the flame of my little friend’s gayety flickered out, and as the others were piling into the cart, “Let’s walk,” Cecilia suggested. Youth is ever selfish in its distress, and what did Cecilia care whether my legs were tired or not climbing that hill? Her little flock of conventions had come fluttering back to her. Her doll was sawdust, and there was a bad taste in her mouth.
Now, of course, you know that there’s nothing more revolting than the folly of others when you yourself are serious. Haven’t you been annoyed time and again by the senseless and meaningless good spirits of the people next door? I’m sure you have. And just as often you’ve felt a certain compassion for the people who give you sour looks and grim glances when you’re having the time of your life.
So it was with ever-increasing disapproval of my wife’s merriment and Mrs. Massingbyrd’s abandon that Cecilia walked up the hill with me.
“I think,” she confided to me, sadly, “I was born old!”
“There are some people who stay babies forever,” I encouraged her.
“They are the fortunate ones,” Cecilia said, gloomily. “I never have been able to enjoy things long at a time. Even our good times at school used to seem childish to me. And I thought when I came out and was among grown people——”
“That things would be different,” I supplemented. “And you find it’s just the same.”
“Just the same,” she agreed, in a gratified tone. “I feel as old as I did at school!”
“Some people are born with a realization of the futility of pleasure,” I went on, trying to voice Cecilia’s mood.
“I suppose it’s that,” she sighed. “When I was at school I thought of the world as a playground where I could amuse myself with the others.”
“And instead, you find that you’re only learning a different kind of lesson, and play is as uninteresting as ever?”
“Yes, it’s just like another kind of school, and the lessons harder to learn—and of less use when you’ve learned them!” There was a pathetic note in her voice.
“You’re very different from other girls, Miss Bennett,” I felt was an appropriate and comforting thing to say.
“I know I am, and it’s a great misfortune to be so,” she acknowledged, with becoming modesty.
“But it has its compensations.”
“It’s very lonely,” she said. “No one has ever understood all I think and feel. Mamma never has, nor the girls.”
“And since you’ve been out?”
“Since I’ve been out I met some one—once”—the once threw the time of meeting in the remote past—“some one I thought understood me—but I was disappointed.”
I murmured something sympathetic.
“Because I’m young in years people think I can’t see things,” she cried, with a little rising temper.
“You have the best possible vantage, then, to observe the world as it really is.”
“And I do see things as they really are, and many things!” and she clinched her little fists under cover of the darkness. Things were getting somewhat strenuous for me, so I brought our conversational boat to smoother waters.
“You make me think a little of Ellery Drake,” I said. (Machiavelli to the front!) “Because he seems so simple and direct; shallow people don’t take the trouble to understand him. But you’ve seen, of course——”
“Yes,” she assented; and I saw she was interested.
“What a lonely time he has of it, and under his apparent simplicity how much depth there is.”
“I’ve known him all my life—but I’ve never really known him—that is, what I call knowing a person.” There was a great deal of intensity in Cecilia’s voice. “Ah, how hard it is to really know any—and so few realize it.” The atmosphere was getting a little rarefied, so I was glad of the diversion caused by the two roller sleds whiffling by us.
“We’re racing,” called Mrs. Massingbyrd. “If we win, I’m to grant a boon to Jack Almington.”
“He’ll probably ask her to take down her hair,” said Machiavelli. “Men always do.”
“Oh, if that sort of thing amuses him”—contempt spoke in Cecilia’s tone—“let him have—his hank of hair!”
“There’s a remarkably happy man,” I said. “No still waters in his; a perfectly delightful fellow, only spoiled by women!”
“Is he?” asked Cecilia, indifferently.
“He’s been so immensely liked, you know, that what he really needs is a snub. He thinks he’s only to look at a woman for him to like her.”
“Wouldn’t one call that just a trifle conceited?” Cecilia’s voice dripped sarcasm.
“Not in his case,” I returned, cruelly. “For, you see, it’s generally so. I’ve never known a more fatal man than Almington.”
“He’s not always fatal,” Cecilia gave out, dryly; and she shut her little mouth with a firmness that even in the dim moonlight made itself visible.
We stood at the top of the hill in silence for a moment, waiting for the cart with the others in it. They came up laughing. How vain and empty their laughter was, I was sure Cecilia was thinking. Her deep knowledge of the world and its iniquity were fairly bowing down her young shoulders.