Mrs. Mar’s satisfaction in her sons was checkered by the fact that each of these otherwise reasonable and enterprising young men clung to his boyish infatuation for Bella Wayne, long after their boyhood had gone the way of the years. It certainly did seem as though not till one or both were cut out by her marrying some one else, would either Trenn or Harry look at any of the girls Mrs. Mar considered more desirable. Not that the boys’ mother had been able wholly to escape the general Mar devotion to the disturber of their peace, but as the seasons passed, and Bella rejected one swain after another, it became increasingly vexatious to Mrs. Mar that her sons should not realize and amend the stupidity of caring about a girl who was more and more under suspicion of being handicapped by a silly passion for a mad fool who had given up the substance for the shadow, and had met his due reward—being now these many months lost in the arctic ice.
Hildegarde’s theory that since the unhappy issue of the love affair, Bella had greater need of her friend than ever before, and Hildegarde’s own consequent inaccessibility to others was the cause of some restiveness on Cheviot’s part. His old friendliness for Bella had vanished. He spoke of her with a humorous disparagement that did him ill-service with Hildegarde. But he was grave enough sometimes.
“I never get a word alone with you, nowadays,” he said one night, as he sat smoking on the steps of the porch at Hildegarde’s feet, while Bella walked about the garden with Trenn. Hildegarde made some perfunctory answer, and they sat silent for a time.
The light wind brought up waves of fragrance from the tangle of roses under Hildegarde’s window, and the little path stretched away to indefiniteness in the starlight, till it was lost long before it reached the garden’s end. The limits of the narrow inclosure, so sharply drawn by day, were nobly enlarged, lost even, at this hour, in the dim reaches of green turned silver and black, as the moon came over the tops of the conifers.
Down by the arbor vitæ hedge growing things that Hildegarde had planted sent their souls to her across the lawn, piercing the heavier air of roses with arrowy shafts of spicy sweetness.
On such a night no one is alone. Where two go down a darkling walk, or sit on the steps in the dusk, others gather round them. Invisible presences—the singers, the beautiful ones, the stern doers of great deeds—join us common folk, and give us a share in their glory or their steadfast pain. Hopes of our own, that look too large by day—too dim and inaccessible, they come walking in our garden at such an hour, beckoning us or looking, smiling, on. Living men, rumored to be far away, suddenly stand before us. Women who have been long aloof draw near. All the barriers go down. Even the dead come home.
John Galbraith was down there, where Bella’s white gown shone among the trees, and John Galbraith was sitting between those other two on the steps.
And Cheviot knew it.
Hildegarde was reminded of the visible presence by his saying, in a low voice, that he understood the reason of his ill-success with her.
“What do you mean?”