The Poet gazed with a new intentness at the dark-haired child of five who stood rigidly at the end of the pergola with her hands clasped behind her back. The Poet All the People Loved was a philosopher also, but his philosophy was not quite equal to forecasting the destiny of little Marjorie.
“Children,” he observed, “should not be left on the temple steps when the pillars of society crack and rock; the good fairies ought to carry them out of harm’s way. Little Marjorie looks as though she had never smiled.” And then he murmured with characteristic self-mockery,—
“Oh, little child that never smiled—
Somebody might build a poem around that line, but I hope nobody ever will! If that child doesn’t stop looking that way, I shall have to cry or crawl over there on my knees and ride her pickaback.”
Mrs. Waring’s two daughters had been leading the children in a march and dance that now broke up in a romp; and the garden echoed with gleeful laughter. The spell of restraint was broken, and the children began initiating games of their own choosing; but Marjorie stood stolidly gazing at them as though they were of another species. Her nurse, having failed to interest her sad-eyed charge in the games that were delighting the other children, had withdrawn, leaving Marjorie to her own devices.
“She’s always like that,” the girl explained with resignation, “and you can’t do anything with her.”
A tall, fair girl appeared suddenly at the garden entrance. The abrupt manner of her coming, the alert poise of her figure, as though she had been arrested in flight and had paused only for breath before winging farther, interested the Poet at once.
She stood there as unconscious as though she were the first woman, and against the white gate of the garden was imaginably of kin to the bright goddesses of legend. She was hatless, and the Poet was grateful for this, for a hat, he reflected, should never weigh upon a head so charming, so lifted as though with courage and hope, and faith in the promise of life. A tennis racket held in the hollow of her arm explained her glowing color. Essentially American, he reflected, this young woman, and worthy to stand as a type in his thronging gallery. She so satisfied the eye in that hesitating moment that the Poet shrugged his shoulders impatiently when she threw aside the racket and bounded across the lawn, darting in and out among the children, laughingly eluding small hands thrust out to catch her, and then dropped on her knees before Marjorie. She caught the child’s hands, laughed into the sad little face, holding herself away so that the homesick, bewildered heart might have time to adjust itself, and then Marjorie’s arms clasped her neck tightly, and the dark head lay close to the golden one.
There was a moment’s parley, begun in tears and ending in laughter; and then Marian tripped away with Marjorie, and joined with her in the mazes of a dance that enmeshed the whole company of children in bright ribbons and then freed them again. The Poet, beating time to the music with his hat, wished that Herrick might have been there; it was his habit to think, when something pleased him particularly, that “Keats would have liked that!”—“Shelley would have made a golden line of this!” He felt songs beating with eager wings at the door of his own heart as his glance followed the fair girl who had so easily turned a child’s tears to laughter. For Marjorie was laughing with the rest now; in ten minutes she was one of them—had found friends and seemed not to mind at all when her good angel dropped out to become a spectator of her happiness.
“I have saved my trousers,” remarked the Poet to Mrs. Waring, who had watched the transformation in silence; “but that girl has spoiled her frock kneeling to Marjorie. I suppose I couldn’t with delicacy offer to reimburse her for the damage. If there were any sort of gallantry in me I would have sacrificed myself, and probably have scared Marjorie to death. If a child should put its arms around me that way and cry on my shoulder and then run off and play, I should be glad to endow laundries to the limit of my bank account. If the Diana who rescued Marjorie has another name—”