CHAPTER XII
Gita was walking in her woods. She had had a canter on the beach and a swim and was full of exultant life. The mood of two mornings earlier was forgotten. It was glorious to be young and free from care and as healthy and lively as a puppy. In these days, thank heaven, the young were consciously young; no one could say they did not appreciate their youth till too late.
She had come into the wood because there was no one to see her if she looked as pagan as she felt, and she loved these beautiful silent pines more than any of her possessions. Occasionally she danced, and kicked the pine-needles and fallen cones about. Elsie had forbidden her to whistle and engrave lines about her mouth, but she answered the trills of the birds with sharp little cries almost as ecstatic. She wondered if she had been a dryad in a former incarnation, or (her self-analytical habit always kept pace with her imagination) if she were merely being young for the first time; she could not recall feeling young even in her childhood. She also wondered if she would ever have been unhappy, even under the shadow of Gerald Carteret, if they had lived in the country. “The Peninsula” below San Francisco had been far too decorated and populous to be real country and the desert was a region set aside for lost souls. But in these pine woods with their brooding but intimate silences, their pungent fragrance, and lovely solitudes, she had a sense of both space and friendliness, of stateliness and simplicity, vastly different, she imagined, from the mighty forests of California.
And they were hers! She had never taken even Elsie into them. She had a fancy that these straight slender trees had, perhaps a million years ago, lived as men and women, whose souls had passed finally into a form more beautiful than Nature had granted to mortals, and fortunately inarticulate; but that they recognized her as an old playmate and sheltered her jealously when she found her joy in their shade. She picked up a cone and flung it into the arbors above, resenting even the presence of a squirrel in her secret domain, and gave a whoop of delight as he scampered angrily across his branch into another tree.
And then she came face to face with Eustace Bylant.
“You look like a wood-nymph,” he said, lifting his hat and undisconcerted by the fierce blaze of her eyes. “For a moment I hesitated to break the spell.”
Gita was speechless with amazement and wrath. She felt an impulse to chase him out of her sacred wood as she would a stray cat from her bedroom. Then she remembered her manners and said with bitter politeness: “Good morning. You startled me, but this is the first time I have ever met anyone in my woods.”
“Are they yours? I beg your pardon. New Jersey is covered with woods and one gets into the habit of thinking of them—well, as just woods. And I happen to be very fond of woods. But I am really sorry,” he added contritely. “You looked so happy a moment ago—happier than any mere mortal has a right to look. . . . And I think I understand. I’ll go if you insist——” He broke off and looked about him at the sweet deep aisles of the wood with an expression of longing in his fine eyes that seemed to have eliminated herself.
The spell was broken and the creature was a friend of Elsie’s. “Oh, well, as you are here you may as well stay,” she said with no attempt at graciousness. “But I must go in presently. I have business letters to write.”
“Oh, please! Business letters! What a horrible thought. How could it enter your head in these woods? If they were mine I doubt if I should write a line except when they were dripping in winter: I have a holy horror of rheumatism.”