The Trumpeter Swan Part 8

"No," Madge's eyes went out over the hills to where Monticello brooded over great memories, "he was not a b.o.o.b. He was so big that little people like us can't focus him, Flora."

She came down from her perch. "I adore great men," she said; "when I go back, I shall make a pilgrimage to Oyster Bay. I wonder how many of us who weep over Greatheart's grave would have voted for him if he had lived. In a sense we crucified him."

"Madge is serious," said Flora Waterman, "now what do you think of that?"

"I have to be serious sometimes, Flora, to balance the rest of you.

You can be as gay as you please when I am gone, and if you perish, you perish."

George walked beside her as the party moved towards the grandstand.

"I've half a mind to go to New York with you, Madge. I came down on your account."

"It's because you followed me that I'm tired of you, Georgie. If you go, I'll stay."

She was smiling as she said it. But he did not smile. "Just as you wish, of course. But you mustn't expect me to come running when you crook your finger."

"I never expect things, but you'll come."

Perhaps she would not have been so sure if she could have looked into his mind. The day that Becky had ridden away, hidden by the flaps of the old surrey, the spark of his somewhat fickle interest had been lighted, and the glimpse that he had had of her this morning had fanned the spark into a flame.

"Did you say the old man's name is Bannister?" he asked Oscar as the Judge's party pa.s.sed them later on their way to their seats.

"Yes. Judge Bannister. I tried to buy his place before I decided on Hamilton Hill. But he wouldn't sell. He said he wouldn't have any place for his stuffed birds."

"Stuffed birds?"

"His hobby is the game birds of Virginia. He has a whole room of them.

I offered him a good price, but I suppose he'd rather starve than take it."

The Judge's box was just above Oscar Waterman's. Becky, looking up, saw Dalton's eyes upon her.

"It's the man who came with you on the train," she told Randy.

"What's he wearing a pink coat for?" Randy demanded. "He isn't riding."

"He probably knows that he looks well in it."

"That isn't a reason."

Becky took another look. "He has a head like the bust of Apollo in our study hall."

"I'd hate to have a head like that."

"Well, you haven't," she told him; "you may hug that thought to yourself if it is any consolation, Randy."

V

Caroline Paine's boarders sat high up on the grandstand. If the boarders seem in this book to be spoken of collectively, like the Chorus in a Greek play, or the sisters and aunts and cousins in "Pinafore," it is not because they are not individually interesting.

It is because, en ma.s.se only, have they any meaning in this history.

Now as they sat on the grandstand, they discerned Mrs. Paine in the Judge's box. They waved at her, and they waved at Randy, they waved also at Major Prime. They demanded recognition--some of the more enthusiastic detached themselves finally from the main group and came down to visit Caroline. The overflow straggled along the steps to the edge of the Waterman box. One genial gentleman was forced finally to sit on the rail, so that his elbow stuck straight into the middle of the back of George's huntsman's pink.

George moved impatiently. "Can't you find any other place to sit?"

The genial gentleman beamed on him. "I have a seat over there. But we came down to see Mrs. Paine. She is in Judge Bannister's box and we board with her--at King's Crest. And say, she's a corker!"

George, surveying Becky with increasing interest, decided that she was a bit above her surroundings. She sat as it were with--Publicans.

George may not have used the Scriptural phrase, but he had the feeling.

He was Pharisaically thankful that he was not as that conglomerate group in the Bannister box. A cheap crowd was his estimate. It would be rather nice to give the little girl a good time!

Filled, therefore, with a high sense of his philanthropic purpose, he planned a meeting. With his blue eyes on the flying horses, with his staccato voice making quick comments, he had Becky in the back of his mind. He found a moment, when the crowd went mad as the county favorite came in, to write a line on the back of an envelope, and hand it to Kemp, who hovered in the background, giving him quiet instructions.

"Yes, sir," said Kemp guardedly and stood at attention until the races were over, and the crowd began to move, and then he handed the note to Judge Bannister.

The Judge put on his gla.s.ses and read it. "Where is he?" he asked Kemp.

"In the other box, sir. The one above."

"Tell him to come down."

"Yes, sir, thank you, sir."

The Judge was as pleased as Punch. "That man up there in Waterman's box has heard of my collection," he explained to his party. "He wants me to settle a point about the Virginia partridge."

"Which man?" Randy's tone was ominous.

Dalton's arrival saved the Judge an answer. In his hunting pink, with his Apollo head, Dalton was upon them. The Judge, pa.s.sing him around to the members of his party, came at last to Becky.

"My granddaughter, Becky Bannister."

With George's sparkling gaze bent full upon her, Becky blushed.

Randy saw the blush. "Oh, Lord," he said, under his breath, and stuck his hands in his pockets.

"I've always called it a quail," Dalton was saying.

"You would if you come from the North. To be exact, it isn't either, it's an American Bob-white. I'd be glad to have you come up and look at my collection. There is every kind of bird that has been shot in Virginia fields or Virginia waters. I've got a Trumpeter Swan. The last one was seen in the Chesapeake in sixty-nine. Mine was killed and stuffed in the forties. He is in a perfect state of preservation, and in the original gla.s.s case."

"I'd like to come," George told him. "Could I--to-night? I don't know just how long I shall be staying down."

"Any time--any time. To-night, of course. There's nothing I like better than to talk about my birds, unless it is to eat them. Isn't that so, Claudia?"

"Yes, Father." Mrs. Beaufort was studying Dalton closely. His manner was perfect. It was, indeed, she decided, too perfect. "He is thinking too much of the way he does it." The one sin in Aunt Claudia's mind was social self-consciousness. People who thought all of the time about manners hadn't been brought up to them. They must have them without thinking. George was not, she decided, a gentleman in the Old Dominion sense. Dalton would have been amazed could he have looked into Aunt Claudia's mind and have seen himself a--Publican.

"Father," she said, after Dalton had left them, "did I hear you invite him to dinner?"

"Yes, my dear, but he could not come----"