She regarded his face with a keen, almost anxious glance, before she let the softer look dominate her own. “I am going to hurry to tell you where I got them,” she said. “They are the gift of my uncle—my father’s brother. This was what I was beginning to explain when—when you got so unhappy.”
“Yes—that is the merciful word—unhappy,” he assented, with gratitude. “I have been deeply out of sorts—mentally—since I lost you that night. There is a special devil inside of me, Vestalia, who sometimes lies low for long periods, and hardly reminds me of his existence, but since last Thursday he has been out on the war-path, night and day. My nerves are stretched like fiddle-strings, just with the effort of holding him. The sight of you is death to him, dear. He is gone now—clean out of existence. And while you stay, he won’t return. But the wretch has left me tired and a little tremulous. I want to rest myself by just looking at you.”
She, smiling with demure pleasure at his speech and his look, related to him briefly the story of the Skinner pedigree. “It occurred to me the minute I woke up in the early morning,” she declared. “I shall always believe that I really dreamed it first. Are you interested in dreams?”
“Oh immensely—at the time.”
“No; but there is something in them. I assure you, the idea never entered my head the day we met them. But before I was fairly awake next morning, lo, there it was, all worked out. The old gentleman was politeness itself. He came down immediately, when I sent my note upstairs. When I told him about wanting to make a pedigree of the Skinners, the notion appealed to him at once. Then I told him about something else, and that appealed to him a good deal more.”
Vestalia paused here, and began to regard her companion with signs of diminishing confidence. “I can’t go any farther without making a most humiliating confession to you,” she faltered.
“Then don’t go any farther, I beseech you,” he answered. “Truly, I do not find myself stirred very much by this entire demonstration of your ability to do things off your own bat. It is independent and praiseworthy and all that, no doubt, but I still have a lingering feeling that you ought to have stayed to breakfast, you know, and left mere commercial details to me. And I certainly shrink from humiliating confessions. Skip the unpleasant parts. We will have no skeletons at our feast to-day.”
“Ah, but they can’t be skipped,” sighed Vestalia. She drew nearer to him, across the table, and lowered her voice. “I foolishly told you some things that were not so—that first morning,” she confided in doleful tones. “It was a kind of romance about myself that I had built up in my own mind, and without much thought I gave it to you as truth. So long as I kept it to myself it did no harm; it even made life easier and more endurable for me, like a poor child making-believe that she and her rag doll are princesses. But it was different to tell you. My father was not a French gentleman. He was not an officer, and he wasn’t killed in a duel. He was never in France any more than I was. My mother was Scotch, but she did not belong to any noble or wealthy family. She did not leave any family jewels with a crest on them, and no one cheated her out of a private fortune, because she never had such a thing. It was just my individual fairyland that I described to you as real. I didn’t even tell you my true name.” David smiled solace upon her distressed aspect “You speak as if it were of importance. Dear child, do we value a rare and beautiful lily the less, because the gardener has put the wrong label on it by mistake? Tut—tut! Names and lineage and all that—it is the idlest stuff on earth to me. The story that you told me was pleasant in my ears only because it came from your lips. The discovery now that it was all yours—that it was not the mere recital of dull facts, but was the child of your own inner imaginings—why that only makes it the more delightful to me. I simply gave it store-room in my memory before; I love it now—and at the same time I find I have quite forgotten it. There is a paradox for you!”
Vestalia essayed a smile through her tears. “You are always kinder than even I expect you to be,” she faltered; “but I did tell you a—a story, and by rights you should be very angry with me.”
David laughed. “Hans Christian Andersen told me many stories, but I worshipped him increasingly to the end. Dear lady, the stories are the only veritable things in life. The alleged realities of existence pass by us, or roll over us, and leave us colourless and empty. The genuine possessions of our souls—the things that shape and decorate and furnish our spiritual habitations—are the things that never happened. I note a twinkle in your eye. You fancy that I have said an inept thing. You think that I shall have to go back and explain that at least what has happened to us forms an exception to the rule. Ah, sweet little Vestalia, have you forgotten your own remark, here in this very room? ‘It isn’t like real life at all,’ you said; ‘it is the way things happen in fairy tales.’ I take my stand upon that definition. We have deliberately repudiated what are described as the realities of life. We discard them, cut them dead, decline to have anything whatever to do with them. We declare that it is fairyland that we are living in, and that we refuse to come out of it to the end of our days.”