Play the Game! Part 10

But Honor had words. She gave back the grip of his hands and beamed on him. "Carter! Carter, _dear_! Oh, but it's wonderful to see you! It's _next_ best to having Jimsy himself!"

Marcia Van Meter winced with sympathy, but her son managed himself very commendably. They went to Sorrento first, and stayed a week in a mellow old hotel above the pink cliffs, and the boy and girl sat in the garden which looked like a Maxfield Parrish drawing and drove up to the old monastery at Deserto and wandered through the silk and coral shops and took the little steamer across to Capri for the day while Mrs. Van Meter rested from the crossing. She was happier that summer than she had been since Carter's little-boy days, for she was giving him, in so far as she might, what he wanted most in all the world, and she saw his courage and confidence growing daily. She was a little nervous about Roman fever, so they left Italy for Paris, and then went on to Switzerland, and for the first few days she was supremely content with her choice,--Carter gained color and vigor in the sun and snow, and Honor glowed and bloomed, but she presently saw her mistake. Switzerland was not the place to throw Honor and Carter together,--Switzerland filled to overflowing with knickerbockered, hard muscled, mountain climbing men and women; Honor who should have been climbing with the best of them; who would be, if Jimsy King were with them; and her son, in the smart incongruities of his sport clothes ... limping, his proud young head held high.

They found Miss Bruce-Drummond at Zermatt, brown as a berry and hard as nails with her season's work, and she was heartily glad to see Honor.

"Well, my dear,--fancy finding you here! Your stepfather wrote me you were studying in Florence and I've been meaning to write you. What luck, your turning up now! The friend who came on with me has been called home, and you shall do some climbs with me!"

"Shall I?" Honor wanted to know of her hostess, but it was Carter who answered.

"Of course! Don't bother about us,--we'll amuse ourselves well enough while you're hiking,--won't we, Mater?" He was charming about it and yet Honor felt his keen displeasure.

"Yes, do go, dear," said Mrs. Van Meter, quickly. "Make the most of it, for I think we'll be moving on in a very few days. I--I haven't said anything about it because you and Carter have been so happy here, but the alt.i.tude troubles me.... I've been really very wretched."

"Oh," said Honor penitently, "we'll go down right away, Mrs. Van Meter,--_to-day_! Why didn't you tell us?"

"It hasn't been serious," said Carter's mother, conscientiously, "it's just that I know I will be more comfortable at sea level." It was entirely true; she would be more comfortable at sea level or anywhere else, so long as she took Carter out of that picture and framed him suitably again. "But we needn't hurry so madly, dear. Suppose we go on Friday? That will give you a day with your friend." She sent Carter for her cloak and Honor and the Englishwoman strolled to the end of the veranda.

"I don't believe we ought to wait even a day, if she feels the alt.i.tude so," said Honor, troubled. "She's really very frail."

"I expect she can stick it a day," said Miss Bruce-Drummond, calmly.

"She looks fit enough. But--I say--where's the other one? Where's your boy?"

The warm and happy color flooded the girl's face. "Jimsy is in Mexico with his father, visiting their relatives there on a big ranch."

"You haven't thrown him over, have you?"

"Thrown Jimsy over? Thrown--" she stopped and drew a long breath. "I could just as easily throw _myself_ over. Why, we--_belong_! We're part of each other. I just--can't think of myself without thinking of Jimsy--or of Jimsy without thinking of me." She said it quite simply and steadily and smiled when she finished.

"I see," said the novelist. "Yes. I see. But you're both frightfully young, aren't you? I expect your people will make you wait a long time, won't they?"

"Well," said Honor, earnestly, "we're going to try our very best to wait three years,--three from the time when we found out we were in love with each other, you know,--two years longer now. Then we'll be twenty-one." She spoke as if every one should be satisfied then, if they dragged out separate existences until they had attained that h.o.a.ry age, and Miss Bruce-Drummond, hard on forty-one, grinned with entire good nature.

"And I daresay they'll keep you over here all the while,--not let you go home for holidays, for fear you might lose your heads and bolt for Gretna Green?"

"Mercy, no!" Her eyes widened, startled. "I shall go home for all summer next year! I meant to go this year, but Muzzie thought I ought to stay, to be with Carter and Mrs. Van Meter, when they'd made such lovely plans for me,--and it was really all right, this time, because Jimsy ought to be with his father on the Mexican trip." Her smooth brow registered a fleeting worry over James King the elder. "But next summer it'll be home, and Catalina Island, and Jimsy!"

But it wasn't home for her next summer, after all. Mildred Lorimer decided that she wanted three months on the Continent with her husband and her daughter.

"Right," said Stephen Lorimer, amiably, "so long as we take the boy along."

"You mean Rodney?" she wanted to know, not looking at him. (Rodney was the youngest Lorimer.)

"I mean Jimsy King, naturally, as you quite well know, Sapphira," he answered, pulling her down beside him on the couch and making her face him.

"Stephen, I don't think Mr. King can afford to send him."

"Then we'll take him."

"Jimsy wouldn't let us. He is very proud,--I admire it in him."

"Do you, my dear? Then, can't you manage to admire some of his other nice young virtues and graces?"

"I do, Stephen. I give the boy credit for all he is, but----"

"But you don't intend to let him marry your daughter if by the hookiest hook and crookedest crook you can prevent it. I observed your Star Chamber sessions with Mrs. Van Meter last year; I saw you wave her and her son hopefully away; I observed, smiling with intense internal glee, that you welcomed them back with deep if skillfully dissembled disappointment. Top Step, G.o.d love her, sat tight. Don't you know your own child yet, Mildred? Don't you know the well and favorably known chemical action of absence on young and juicy hearts? Don't you know"--he broke off to stare at her, flushed and a little breathless as she always was in discussions and unbelievably youthful and beautiful still, and finished in quite another key--"that you're getting positively lovelier with each ridiculous birthday--and your aged and infirm spouse more and more besottedly in love with you?"

She did not melt because she was tremendously in earnest. She was pledged in her deepest heart to break up what she felt was Honor's silly sentimentality--sentimentality with a dark and sinister background of mortgages and young widows and Wild Kings and shabby, down-at-the-heel houses and lawns.

"Woman," said Stephen Lorimer, "did you hear what I said? It was a rather neat speech, I thought. However, as you did not give it the rapt attention it merited I will now repeat it, with appropriate gestures."

He caught her in his arms as youthfully as Jimsy might have done with Honor, and told her again, between kisses. "You lovely, silly, stubborn thing, kiss your wise husband once more in a manner expressive of your admiration for his unfailing sapience, and he will then, with surprising agility for one of his years, lope across the intervening lawn and tell James King that his son goes to Europe with us in June." He grinned back at her from the door. "You'll do your little worst to prevent it, my dear, that I know, but Jimsy King goes with us!"

Honor and Jimsy wrote each other rapturously on receipt of the news, but they were not fluent or expressive, either of them, and they could only underline and put in a reckless number of exclamation points. "_Gee_,"

wrote Jimsy King, "isn't it immense? Skipper, I can't tell you how I feel--but, by golly, I can _show_ you when I get there!"

And Honor, reading that line, grew rosily pink to the roots of her honey-colored hair and flung herself into an hour of practice with such fire and fervor that the _Signorina_ came and beamed in the doorway.

"So," she nodded. "News? Good or bad?"

"Good," said Honor, swinging round on the piano stool. "The best in the world!"

"So? Well, it does not greatly matter which, my small one. It does not signify so much whether one feels joy or grief, so long as one feels. To feel ... that is to live, and to live is to sing!"

Honor sprang up and ran to her and put her arm as far around her as it would go. She was a delicious person to hug, the _Signorina_, warm and soft and smelling faintly of rare and costly scents.

"_So?_" said the great singer again. "It is of some comfort, then, to embrace so much of fatness, when your arms ache to feel muscles and hard flesh? There, there, my good small one," she patted her with a puffy and jeweled hand, "I jest, but I rejoice. It is all good for the voice, this."

"_Signorina_," said Honor, honestly, "I've told you and told you, but you don't seem to believe me, that I'm only studying to fill up the time until they'll let me marry Jimsy. I love it, of course, and I'll always keep it up, as much as I can without neglecting more important things, but----"

"Mother of our Lord," said the Italian, lifting her hands to heaven, "'more important things' says this babe with the voice of gold, who, by the grace of G.o.d and my training might one day wake the world!"

"More important to _me_," said Honor, firmly. "I know it must seem silly to you, _Signorina_, dear, but if you were in love----"

"Mothers of all the holy saints," said the fat woman, lifting her hands again, "when have I not been in love? Have I not had three husbands already, and another even now dawning on the horizon, not to mention--but there, that is not for pink young ears. I will say this to you, small one. Every woman should marry. Every artist _must_ marry. Run home, then, in another year, and wed the young savage, and have done with it. Stay a year with him--two if you like--until there is an infant savage. Then you shall come back and give yourself in earnest to the business of singing."

But Honor, scarlet-cheeked, shook her head. "I can't imagine coming back from--from _that_, _Signorina_!" Her eyes envisaged it and the happy color rose and rose in her face. "But I've got a good lesson for you to-day! Shall I begin?"

"Begin, then, my good small one," said her teacher indulgently, "and for the rest, we shall see what we shall see!"

Honor flung herself into her work as never before, and counted the weeks and days and hours until the time when Jimsy should come to her, and Jimsy, finis.h.i.+ng up a sound, triumphant Soph.o.m.ore year, saw everything through a hazy front drop of his Skipper on the pier at Naples.

But Jimsy King did not go abroad with Mr. and Mrs. Lorimer, after all, and Honor did not see him through the whole dragging summer. Stephen Lorimer, sick with disappointment for his stepdaughter, would have found relief in fixing the blame on his wife, for her lovely and complacent face mirrored her satisfaction at the turn of events, but he could hardly hold her responsible. James King was taken suddenly, alarmingly ill with pneumonia two days before they left Los Angeles to catch their steamer at New York, and it was manifestly impossible for his son to leave him. The doctors gave scant hope of his recovery.

Therefore, it was Carter Van Meter who took Jimsy's ticket off his hands and Jimsy's place in the party and the summer plans, leaving his happy mother to spend three flutteringly hopeful months alone.

CHAPTER VIII