“You will think so still.”
“Kid, you know nothing about love. A man truly in love may have been attracted by beauty, but it is not that which holds him. It is a unity of soul; he finds a complement of mind; he has a sense of sympathy and, through thick and thin, a partisan, constant faith in a reciprocal heart. He gets used to the prettiest face and it makes little impression on him,—just as he wouldn’t notice, after a time, a fine costume. She is nothing that I imagined. She is not now, and she never was the ideal I loved. I don’t regret her. Don’t grieve for me, little boy. And now will you be so kind as to take those paws off my neck,—you are half strangling me with your fraternal anxiety. Behold, I will smite you under the fifth rib.”
There was once more a brief, boyish scuffle. Then the two turned and came walking decorously back to the group on the portico. The exterior aspect of the old ruin had an added majesty by daylight, despite the more obvious injuries of wreckage. Its fine proportions, the blended elegance and stateliness of its design, the richness even in the restraint of its ornamentation, all showed with telling effect, apart from the wild work within of the marauders. These details the rude usage it had received could not affect. It might have stood as an imposing architectural example of a princely residence of the date of its erection, and it was impossible to gaze upon it with a sense of possessing it, and feel no glow of gratulation.
“Why, the item of glass alone would be a corker,” a practical man was saying, walking backward down the stone pavement and surveying the great black gaps of the shattered windows.
The two brothers cast a meaning glance at each other, the discussion, of which this was obviously a fragment, evidently looked to a rehabilitation of the mansion under a change of owners, for, certainly, it would seem that Floyd-Rosney had neither the interest nor the associations to induce him to set up his staff of rest here. It was only a straw, but it showed how the wind of opinion set, and the brothers were in the frame of mind to discern propitious omens. The sun was bright on the over-grown spaces of the lawn. The Cherokee rose hedge that divided it from the family graveyard, and continued much further, had spread with its myriad unpruned sprangles beyond the space designed for a boundary, growing many feet wide. Beneath the great arch it described stretched a long tunnel-like arbor, throughout its whole extent, dark, mystic, in the shadow of its evergreen leaves. By reason of some natural attraction which quaint nooks have for children, Marjorie and little Ned had discovered this strange passageway, and were running in and out of the darksome space, with their shrilly sweet cries of pretended fright and real excitement, each time venturing a little farther than before. The mists had lifted from the river, which spread a broad, rippling surface of burnished copper in the sunshine under an azure sky. There was no sign of approaching craft, no curl of smoke above the woods beyond the point to herald deliverance by a steamboat. One of the old ladies had established herself on her suitcase on the topmost step of the flight from the portico, and it would, indeed, have been a swift steamer that could have escaped her vigilance and passed without being signaled.
Adrian paused good-naturedly. “You need give yourself no uneasiness, madam,—it will require half an hour’s time at least for a steamboat to pass this place from the moment that she is sighted,” he said, in polite commiseration.
But the old lady sat tight. “They tell me there is a crazy man in there,” she declared lugubriously. She would leave by the first opportunity.
“He is going presently in a phaeton across the country,” Adrian explained. “There is no possible danger from him, however,—he has only occasional attacks. He is perfectly at himself to-day. But he will not be going on the boat.” This remark was unlucky, as it increased her anxiety to embark.
Randal had lifted his hat after a moment’s pause, and passed on without his brother. He hesitated, looked back, then entered the vestibule, and came suddenly face to face with Paula.
It had been five years since they had met and then it was as lovers. She had not dreamed of seeing him here. She thought him ten miles away at Caxton. She had never been more brilliantly, more delicately beautiful. Her burnished redundant hair that was wont to resemble gold, and to seem so elaborately tended, had now a luminous fibrous effect at the verges of the smooth pompadour roll that had been hastily tossed up from her forehead. She even appeared taller, more slender than usual, since she wore a clinging gown of princess effect, in one piece, and, obviously, of matutinal usage, in more conventional surroundings. The flowing sleeve showed her bare arm from the elbow, exquisitely white and soft. The V-shaped neck gave to view her delicate snowy throat rising from a mist of lace. The strange large flower-pattern cast over a ground of thick sheeny white was an orchid with a gilded verge, and in the mauve and pearl tones she, too, looked like some rare and radiant bloom. Her eyes were sweet and expectant—her step swift. She was on her way to call back the child. She paused suddenly, dumfounded, disconcerted, confronted with the past.