IV.
The laughter and nonsense grew louder, and I descried, standing upright in the cart, a vision, spirit or woman I couldn’t tell.
My companion stared a moment and then remarked:
“Mrs. Massingbyrd’s hair has come down!” Into these simple words was packed all the quintessence of disapproval that Cecilia had learned from her various advisers. There were echoes of her mother’s shocked tones, haunting accents of her offended teacher, all welded together by the cool disapproval that was Cecilia’s own.
I am sure that if my delightful little guest could have heard the awful, the chilling, contempt of “Mrs. Massingbyrd’s hair has come down,” she would have veiled her face with it in abject shame.
I gathered by her attitude and that of Felicia and Almington that these silly creatures were playing at tableaux, the cart serving as a Mi-carême char.
Mrs. Massingbyrd’s hair, more miraculous than ever in the moonlight, fell down to her knees. Her eyes looked seraphically heavenward. Almington held her hand, kneeling before her, while Felicia, a little shawl disposed as drapery about her, was pointing dramatically out into the night, giving an admirable impersonation of those statuesque young ladies who, in tableaux, have no raison d’être save to round out the composition and look pretty.
Later I learned that the name of this impressive tableau was: “The Triumph of Virtue.”
At that moment I was too occupied with the attitude of my little companion to pay attention to Mrs. Massingbyrd’s foolery.
Cecilia had just caught sight of Almington as he knelt, holding the hand of Virtue, his lean legs bent like the blade of a knife. Almington generally cuts a fine figure, through a certain sense of the fitness of things. His air of secret melancholy wins half his battles for him, and he is one of those men who must at any cost hang on to the last shred of dignity, as they are nothing without it. In his present situation I have no hesitation in saying he looked fatuous and grotesque.
How he came to lend himself to the crazy whim of the two girls I can’t tell. I suppose he was carried away by the flood of their high spirits, as many a wiser man has been before him and will be after him.
But if I had excuses for him, Cecilia had none.
It may be heartbreaking to have your first “serious young man” leave you at the smiles of a pretty widow with blond hair; but, after all, by showing how truly noble you are, you may some day crush your rival and bring your suitor to your knees, crying, “Peccavi!” It’s bad to learn he’s a heartbreaker, but, after all, then there’s all the more incentive to break his heart. You can, whatever happens, bear your suffering nobly, and at the worst you have lots of things, heaps simply, to tell the girls.
But to have your first hero of romance make himself ridiculous—that is the end of all things. Sorrow has then no dignity. A broken heart for a man like that is out of the question. Oh, it’s a bitter thing to think the drama of one’s life a tragedy and have it turn out a low comedy!
Cecilia saw her hero exactly as he was, at that moment, stripped of all adornment.
Glamour died, romance withered away; in the clear fire of her uncompromising young scorn.
She was proving again that man’s only unpardonable crime toward the woman who loves him is to make himself ridiculous.
It was really quite a dramatic little moment. The late hero, now turned mountebank, descended and helped out Felicia and Lydia, radiant in her white and gold attire—and it was only then I saw Drake, who had been sitting stiffly in the back of the cart.
He had taken no part in the pageant. If his temper was impaired, his dignity wasn’t. Sliding downhill was all right, his rigidity seemed to say, but no play acting in his. His mood and Cecilia’s jumped together. Her eyes met his. “I know you now,” her grateful glance seemed to say.
Meantime Mrs. Massingbyrd, lovely as an angel, drifted along the white road.
“It’s breaking the rules of the game,” Felicia said to her, “for you to have taken down your hair.”
“It fell down itself,” answered Lydia the unashamed.
“But you looked so entirely lovely,” my wife went on, “that I forgive you. It’s worth the price.”
And I guiltily hoped that Mrs. Massingbyrd would refrain from saying, “That’s exactly what Bobby said.”
She stood pensive a moment in the moonlight. Drake and Cecilia, drawn together by the feeling of superiority they shared in common—and which I had helped to point out—wandered off together. Almington was absorbed in an open and impertinent admiration of Mrs. Massingbyrd’s beauty, and Felicia and I gazed at her, and again Felicia said, approvingly: “It’s an unfair advantage to take—but it’s really worth it!”
Then the dreamy look in lovely Mrs. Massingbyrd’s eyes deepened, and she opened her lovely lips and said:
“Felicia, I’m so desperately hungry that I wouldn’t coast down that hill again—not for anything! Did you say you had something good for supper?”
“And at supper I shall ask my boon,” Almington answered.
“Boon?” said Mrs. Massingbyrd, as she watched Cecilia and Drake vanish together in the moonlight among the flowers. “Boon? You greedy person! Isn’t it boon enough to have seen me with my hair down by moonlight! I wonder at your graspingness, Jack Almington!”
* * * * *
After we had said good-night to our guests, after Cecilia and Drake had at last come in from an interminable talk on the piazza, after Mrs. Massingbyrd had stuffed herself—in the face of her ethereal loveliness I hate to use such a word, but I know no other; indeed, she applied herself to supper with such a fair, frank and honest appetite that she had neither eyes nor ears for Almington’s compliments—after all this was over, Felicia turned to me with a look of satisfaction.
“You played up nobly that time, Robert,” she said. “I’ve never known you to catch on so quickly and without a word from anyone.”
I gained time with remarking, pathetically, “You’ve always underrated my intelligence.”
“I call it a thoroughly artistic performance,” my wife said; “and the beauty of it is that there was no talk, no nothing, but each one doing his work.”
I looked at Felicia, to see if by any chance she was making a pitfall for me, but there was no danger signal. I thought it safe to give out, “I’m glad you liked my little share in it.”
“You were splendid,” she cried, cordially. “And if Miss Bennett only knew it, we deserve a vote of thanks from her.”
“Yes, don’t we?” I took care not to commit myself.
“It isn’t as if we hadn’t provided Cecilia with another suitor, and I’m sure Ellery Drake, from any point of view, is far more desirable than Almington.”
“I should say he was,” I cordially assented.
“And then, who can tell if Almington was really serious? And for a young girl to be affichée with Almington her first season is nothing short of tarnishing,” Felicia went on, virtuously.
“That’s what I’ve said from the beginning,” I put in.
“And you certainly played up nobly. We couldn’t have put it through so quickly without you,” my wife was generous enough to confess. “But did you ever see anything as splendid and self-sacrificing as Lydia?”
“Self-sacrificing?” I wondered, feeling my way.
“Why, she made herself odious—simply odious—in Cecilia’s eyes, so Cecilia would feel furious at having Almington like her.” Sometimes Felicia is anything but lucid.
“Like whom?” I naturally wanted to know.
“Like Lydia,” replied my wife, impatiently. “A girl can stand anything but having a man she likes fall in love with a woman she doesn’t. It’s queer,” she said, suspiciously, “clever as you are sometimes, how dense you are others. Did you understand——”
But at this late date I wasn’t going to have my laurels snatched from me. So I hastened to assure her. “Of course,” I said, loftily, “I understood Mrs. Massingbyrd intended to interfere!”
AUTUMN
SCARLET her cloak, her lips all scarlet too,
Her cloudy hair as golden as the leaves
Of the sun-mellowed hickories, her voice
The rich, low whispers of the brooks that please
By hinting Autumn mysteries, her eyes
Witch-lights of laughter and of mad surprise.
Oh, gypsy prodigal, who gives and gives,
Till penury in winter strips you bare,
Cover me with the splendor of your locks,
Let your eyes challenge me from dull despair—
Wake me and sting me till I, too, shall sweep
Round in the revels that your whirlwinds keep.
Clinton Dangerfield.
THE WARRENERS
By MARIE VAN VORST
