The girl drew a long sigh. "I suppose not," she breathed, in dismal resignation.
"But I should like him to come here, to see me; and then, if I find him to be what your father would approve, you may see him here; and we shall all have to explain things together, I fancy, to your father."
The girl drew another, a very different, sigh, and impulsively kissed Miss Wing's hand. She tried to speak, and could only murmur, "Oh, I do love you!"
"And so, if you will tell Graf von Butler—what is his Christian name, Florence?"
"Max," said the girl, very low, for she felt the presence of the picture, on which she had not once turned her eyes. Before she spoke, under a pretense of a pull at her skirt, she slipped her hand out of the hand with the sapphire ring. Yet her excited young nerves vibrated at the slight cough which came as the principal changed her position, before she said, in her usual tone: "It is a fine name. Well, Florence, you will tell Count Max von Butler that I shall hope to see him. And—will you trust me?"
The girl told her that she would trust her utterly, and she knew that it would be right; and oh, she was so happy. And she came back to say, with the tears in her eyes, "I shall be grateful to you as long as I live."
Miss Wing stood in the center of the room, smiling, until the door closed. But then in a second she was at the door, almost fiercely, but noiselessly, twisting the key in the lock. From the door she passed to the windows and dropped the shades. At last, safe from every chance of espial, she sat down again in her chair before the desk, leaned her elbows on the desk, and looked desperately, miserably, into the joyous face of the picture. She did not speak, but her thoughts took on words and sank like hot lead into her heart. "Max Butler! Max Butler! The little nephew he told me about. And he has been alive all these years; and happy; with little sons, while I—I have lied to these trusting girls. It was wicked and shameless. I deceived myself; then I deceived them. I wonder why. I knew what they were thinking. How dare I look that honest child in the face! I suppose she wonders like the rest why I have not told any one of my romance. And it is simply that there was nothing to tell. Nothing." She looked into the soldier's happy eyes while her lips curled and she murmured, drearily and bitterly, "I haven't even the right to be angry with you, poor lad. What did you do? You are not my Max; I only made him up out of my heart—like children playing a game!" Her mind drifted dizzily through shapeless and inconsequent visions of the past. She was seeing again the grim pile of the ruined castle, the masses of broken shadow, the intricate carving on arch and architrave and plinth, the wavering mass of limbs and tree-trunks on the green sward; and she, with her twisted ankle, was kneeling, trying to peer through the shrubbery for her lost companions. Did he come by chance? She had seen the handsome young officer daily, for a week. His great-aunt was Margaret's right-hand neighbor at the pension table d'hôte, a withered relic of Polish nobility with fine, black eyes in a face like a hickory nut; who wore shabby gowns and magnificent jewels, frankly smoked cigarettes, and seemed to have a venomous tale ready to fit any name mentioned in conversation—with one exception, her nephew's. According to her, Max's father was a swine and his mother a fool and his brother a popinjay, and his sister had no respect for her betters; but Max had a heart. It was understood at the pension that she was arranging a great match for him. In spite of the general disapproval of his aunt, he was a favorite, he was so simple, amiable, and polite. Even the American professor admitted that for a man "who had won the iron cross in such a spectacular fashion, he was very modest and really more like an American than a German officer," thus paying the unconsciously arrogant compliment kept by every race for engaging aliens. Margaret's first sight of him was not under the shelter of conventionalities. It happened that the countess' ferocious pet (and the terror of the pension), a Great Dane, was trying to eat up a little girl, but fortunately had begun with her petticoats. The court of the house was the scene of the fray; a large, timid cook, the only witness, was waving a copper kettle full of the meringue that she was beating, in one hand, and the great wire whip in the other, while she shrieked impartially on Heaven and the police. Margaret heard the din. She ran to the spot. Being a New England woman, she didn't scream; one swift glance went from the child's writhing body and the dog's horrible head to the wailing cook. In two strides she caught the kettle out of a fat and agitated German hand and hurled the whole sticky, white mass full at the dog's eyes; then, as the blinded and astounded beast flung his head back to howl, and spattered the world with meringue, she snatched up the child and sent her flying into the door and the cook. The dog was smeared with meringue, she was smeared, the child was smeared, the cook was smeared; and now a beautiful white and gold officer, who bounded over the wall and fell upon the dog with his saber and two heels, was smeared the most lavishly of all! No wonder Frau Müller (visible aloft, in an artless German toilet of ease and without her teeth), the countess (who was a gazing stock, for the same reason), and Augustine, her maid, the three Russians on the second floor, and the three Americans on the third, filled the windows with polyglot consternation! The consequence of it all was that when the Count von Butler was formally presented to Miss Wing that evening, she blushed. She was too pale and listless to be pretty, but when she blushed she was enchanting. Remembering the meringue, she smiled and ventured an upward glance; and, for the first time in her life, met the admiration in the eyes of a man. At this time Margaret was thirty years old and had never been asked in marriage. She had spent most of the thirty years in a boarding-school, as pupil or as teacher; and she had brought from her cloistered life a single vivid feeling, a passionate friendship which death had ended. The sapphire ring was her poor friend's last token.
To be thirty and never to have been sought like other girls, leaves a chill in the heart. It may be lonely never to have loved, but it is bleak never to have been loved. Margaret remembered her delicate, girlish dreams with a recoil of humiliation; they seemed to her almost immodest. She thought she was too old to wear hats, and wondered whether she ought not to discard the pinks and light blues which poor Elly had liked on her, for more sedate colors. But she wore pink after she met Max Butler. Yet he never saw her save in the presence of others. He was full of little, graceful attentions, but he showed the same attentions to the portly clergyman's widow and the meritorious but cross-eyed teacher of fifty, who formed Miss Wing's "party"; it was only his eyes, his eyes always following her, approvingly, delighting, admiring, pleading, speaking to her as they spoke to no other woman. She told herself that it was just the pleasant, foreign way; and she wrote to her friends in America, "The German officers have very agreeable, deferential manners; I think they are much more gentle and polite and have a higher respect for women than the French or Italians." And he said no word, even of friendship, until that afternoon at the Heidelberger Schloss.
He came upon her almost immediately, scrambling up the bank at a rate which had worked woe to his uniform. He was torn, he was scratched, he was stained with mud and grass; and he was beaming with delight. "I have seen you from below," he exclaimed in his careful English, "so I came up. Will you excuse?" Then his mood changed, perceiving her plight, and he insisted on tearing his handkerchief into strips to bind her ankle. It seemed absurd to refuse his aid, which he offered quite simply; but his hands trembled a little over the knots. "It will be most easy, I think," said he, "that you should let me assist you a small way, to the restauracion; so I can get the carriage, and you can have some ice cream. Again, to-day, is it burned—"
She had laughed and said that she never had heard of burned ice cream. He laughed, too, and explained that it was burned as a custard, and somehow under cover of this she let him put her hand on his shoulder and his arm about her waist. She was grateful to him for the matter-of-fact manner in which he did it all, saying, "You will have to be my comrade that has been wounded, and I will help him off the field; so I did, once, with my colonel; it is better than to wait until I could bring help." In this fashion they walked for some twenty minutes. They were minutes not entirely disfigured by her physical pain, for it was a comfort to be helped by so strong and kind a friend. The comfort brightened almost into pleasure, as they drove homeward in a shabby droschky, with all the circuit of the horizon flooded with softest rose and gold, reflecting the cloudless glory of the west. Borne along through that unreal and lovely radiance, past the hills checkered with vineyards and ripening grain, which the sunlight blazoned in green and gold like the initials of an old missal; they talked as one friend would talk to another. At least that was her phrase, and she admitted to herself that she had not been so nearly happy since Elly died. "I didn't know a man could be so—so kind," she said.