Life at High Tide Part 6

Millicent only smiled as the great machine moved off. The suns.h.i.+ne, the rare and ordered beauty of the place, the fragrance of the soft winds, all lapped her in indolence. As they neared the gate that gave upon the open road, a turn brought them in sight of the front of the house. It was very beautiful. She breathed deeply in the content of the sight--the delicate lines, the soft color, the perfection of detail. In the gardens were stained, mellow columns and bal.u.s.trades which Anna had brought from the dismantled palace in the Italian hills where she had found them. Everywhere wealth made its subtlest, most delicate appeal to her eyes.

"My house," thought Millicent, as they shot out of the grounds, "shall be different, but as beautiful. The Tudor style, I think, and for my out-of-door glory a vast rose-garden,--acres, if I please!" Then she called sternly to her straying imagination. She was picturing what she might have as the wife of the man before her--the man whose first proposal she had unhesitatingly refused, whose appearance at Lakeholm she had regarded as proof of disloyalty on Anna's part--the man who at the best represented to her only the artistic possibilities of riches.

She dismissed her reverie with a frown and joined in the talk.

"Do you know," she confessed, "I forget where it is that we are going?"

"We're coming back to the Monroes' for luncheon," Mrs. Dinsmore reminded her. "But Mr. Brockton is going to skim over most of the Berks.h.i.+res first. I think you said you hadn't been in this part of the country before, Mr. Brockton?"

"No," said Brockton, "I haven't had much chance to get acquainted with the playgrounds of the country. I've been too busy earning a holiday.

But I've earned it all right." He turned to emphasize his boast with a nod toward Millicent. She blushed. His very chauffeur must redden at his braggart air, she thought. The Tudor castle grew dim in her vision.

"What do you think of the bubble, Miss Harned?" he went on. "Goes like a bird, don't she?"

"Indeed she does," answered Millicent, characteristically making immediate atonement in voice and look for the mental criticism of the moment before. "It's really going like a bird. I don't suppose we shall ever have a sensation more like flying."

"Not until our celestial pinions are adjusted," said Anna. Brockton laughed, but Millicent went on:

"Seriously, the loveliest belief I ever lost was the one in the wings with which my virtues should be at last rewarded. To breast the ether among the whirling stars,--didn't you ever lie awake and think of the possibility of that, Anna?"

"Never! I'm no poet in a state of suffocation, as I sometimes suspect you of being."

"As for heaven," declared Brockton, "I don't take much stock in all that. We're here--we know that--and we'd better make the most of it.

For all we know, it's our last chance to have a good time. Better take all that's coming to you here and now, Miss Harned, and not count much on those wings of yours."

Millicent smiled mechanically. Could any Elizabethan garden of delight compensate for the misery of having each b.u.t.terfly of fancy crushed between Lemuel Brockton's big hands in this fas.h.i.+on?

They were entering a village. Before them was the triangular green with the soldier's monument upon it. About it were the post-office, the stores, the small neat houses of the place. A white church, tall-steepled, green-shuttered, rose behind the monument, and with it dominated the square. A wagon or two toiled lazily along the road; before the stores a few dusty buggies were tied. The place seemed drowsy to stagnation in the summer heat. Why, Millicent wondered, were towns so crude and unlovely in the midst of a country so beautiful?

There was a sudden explosive sound, and, with a crunch and a jerk which almost threw them from their seats, the machine came to a standstill. Brockton and his chauffeur were out in an instant, the one peering beneath, the other examining more closely. He emerged in a moment, and there was a jargon of explanation, unintelligible to the two women. All that Anna and Millicent understood was that the accident was not serious; that they would be delayed only a few minutes, and that Brockton was very angry with some one for the mishap. The two men worked together. Anna looked at her cousin.

"I'm dead sleepy," she half whispered. "The wind in my face and the sun are too soporific for me. Let us not say a word to each other."

"You read last night," Millicent accused her. "But I don't feel particularly conversational myself."

She leaned back and surveyed the scene again. She could read the words graved on the granite block beneath the bronze soldier:

"To the men of Warren who fought that their country might be whole and their fellows free this tribute of love is erected."

And there followed the honor-roll of Warren's fallen.

Millicent's sensitive lips quivered a little. Her ready imagination pictured them coming to this very square, perhaps,--the men of Warren.

Boys from the hill farms, men from the village shops, the blacksmith who had worked in the light of yonder old forge, the carpenter who was father to the one now leisurely hammering a yellow L upon that weather-stained house,--she saw them all. What had led them? What call had sounded in their ears that they should leave their ploughshares in the furrows, their tills, their anvils, and their benches? What better thing had stirred with the primeval instinct for fight, with the unquenchable, restless longing for adventure, to send them forth? She read the words again--"that their country might be whole and their fellows free."

She moved impatiently. For now an old shadowy theory of hers--an inheritance from the theories of the recluse, her father--stirred from a long-drugged quiet: a theory that there was a disintegrating unpatriotism in the untouched, charmed life of riches she and her fellows sought. She felt the disturbing conviction that those common men--she could almost hear their blundering speech, see their uncouth yawns at the sights and sounds of beauty on which she fed her soul--that those men had wells of life within them purer, sweeter, than she. She averted her eyes from the monument.

"Honey!" called a voice, full-throated and loving--"honey, where are you?"

There was a play-tent on the little patch of yard before the brown cottage to the left. The voice had come from the narrow piazza.

Millicent s.h.i.+vered as she looked at it, with its gingerbread decorations already succ.u.mbing to the strain of the seasons. The answer came from the tent:

"Here I am, muvver. Did you want me?"

She came out--a child of five or six years. The round-eyed solemnity of babyhood had not left her yet. She brought her small doll family with her, and a benevolent collie ambled beside her. Her mother watched, tenderness beautifying her brown eyes: she was a young woman, no older than Millicent, but her face was more lined than Anna's; a strand of dark hair was blown across her cheek; there were fruit stains on her ap.r.o.n. All the marks of a busy household life were about her, all the bounteous restfulness of a woman well beloved, and the anxieties of a loving woman. She gave the automobile a pa.s.sing glance, but it had no interest for her. Her eyes came back to caress the young thing which toiled up the steps to her, babbling of a morning's events in the tent.

"Yes, sweetheart, that was very nice," she said, in answer to some breathless demand for sympathy. "And mother has brought you the bread and jam she promised you this morning. Will you eat it here, or in the tent?"

"Couldn't I come into the kitchen to eat it, where you are?"

"Why, yes, honey, if you want to."

The door closed upon the vision of intimate love. Millicent saw Lena walking sedately with the governess of no charm and encyclopaedic information.

"Now we're all right," called Brockton, loudly. "Upon my word, Mrs.

Dinsmore, I think you were asleep! Miss Harned, you can't be as entertaining as I thought if your cousin falls asleep with you."

"But think how soothing I must be; that's even better than to be entertaining."

"By ginger! I never found that out--that you were soothing, I mean."

It was evident that Mr. Brockton intended a compliment. Anna Dinsmore saw the annoyed red whip out upon Millicent's cheeks. She interposed a few ready, irrelevant questions before the tide of Brockton's flattery.

They made their swift way through the hills, sometimes overlooking the winding course of the river, sometimes skirting the great estates of the region, again whizzing noisily through an old village. Anna and Brockton sustained the weight of conversation. Millicent smiled in vague sympathy with their laughter and Joined at random in the talk.

Obstinately her mind had stayed behind her--with the men of Warren, with the round-faced child, and the woman to whose life love and not art gave all its beauty.

They approached one of the larger old towns of the country--a place with a bustling main street and elm-shaded thoroughfares branching from it. Here were ample, well-kept lawns and houses of prosperous dignity. It seemed charming to Millicent with its air of unhurried activity or undrowsy repose.

"What is this, Anna?" she asked.

Anna told her.

"Riverfield?" Millicent repeated the name, but in a strange voice.

Anna stared a little.

"Yes. Why? Do you know any one here?"

"No." The word trickled slowly, unwillingly, from Millicent.

"Lovely town, and there are some good places outside," said Anna. "The Ostranders have one, and Jimson, the artist. But the native city, or whatever you call it, is adorable. It has that air of rewarded virtue which makes one ashamed of one's life--"

"I wish"--Millicent still spoke remotely, as if out of a sleep--"I wish, Mr. Brockton, that we might find a little library and museum they have here."

"Why, of course!"

"Are you going to compare it with the Vatican, Millicent?" asked Anna, flippantly. Millicent turned a distant, starry gaze upon her cousin.

"No," she said; and then, in a flash of sympathy and fright, Anna remembered that it had been for some little Berks.h.i.+re town that Will Hayter had built a library and museum just before his death, six years before--the town from which his family had originally come. Her memory worked rapidly, constructing the story. The blood dyed her face at the thought of her obtuseness. Then she set her lips firmly. She had done her best; if a wanton fate chose to interfere now and make Millicent slave to the phantom of her early, radiant love, she, Anna, could do no more!

"Here we are, I guess," called Brockton. The machine shot into a broad street. A promenade between a double row of elms down its centre gave it a s.p.a.cious dignity. The modest courthouse stood on one side, as green-bowered as if Justice were a smiling G.o.ddess; a few churches broke the stretch of houses. And on the other side the library and museum stood.

"Pretty little building, but plain," commented Brockton, making disparaging note of its graceful severity.