Madcap Part 11

He shrugged his shoulders and followed.

The machine was already on the lawn surrounded by Hermia's guests and preliminary experiments had proven that all was ready. Hermia climbed into the seat unaided, while Markham stood at one side and watched the propellers started. Faster and faster they flew, the machine held by Armistead and the Frenchman, while Hermia sat looking straight before her down the lawn through the opening between the rocks which led to open water.

"_Au revoir_, my friends," she cried and gave the word, at which the men sprang clear, and amid cries of encouragement and congratulation the machine moved down the lawn, gathering momentum with every second, rising gracefully with its small burden just before it reached the water and soaring into the air. The people on the lawn watched for a moment and then with one accord rushed for the launch.

Olga Tcherny paused a moment, her hand on Markham's arm.

"You will come to 'Wake-Robin'?" she asked.

"I think not," he replied.

"Then I shall come to Thimble Island," she finished.

"I shall be charmed, of course."

She looked over her shoulder at him and laughed. He was watching the distant spot in the air.

"You're too polite to be quite natural."

"I didn't mean to be."

"Then don't let it happen again."

The voices of her companions were calling to her and she hastened her footsteps.

"_? bient?t_," she cried.

"_Au revoir_, Madame." He saw her hurried into the launch, which immediately got under way, its exhaust snorting furiously, and vanished around the point of rocks. In a moment there was nothing left of his visitors to Markham but the lapping of the waves from the launch upon the beach and the spot in the air which was not almost imperceptible.

He stood there until he could see it no more, when he turned and took his pipe thoughtfully from his trousers pocket and addressed it with conviction.

"Mad!" he muttered. "All--quite mad!"

CHAPTER VII

"WAKE ROBIN"

Markham climbed the hill slowly, pus.h.i.+ng tobacco into his pipe. Once or twice he stopped and turned, looking out over the bay toward the distant launch. The a?roplane had vanished. When he reached the bungalow he dropped into a chair, his gaze on s.p.a.ce, and smoked silently for many minutes.

Mad! Were they? Madness after all was merely a matter of relative mental att.i.tudes. Doubtless he was as mad in the eyes of his visitors as they were to him. In his present mood he was almost ready to admit that the sanest philosophy of life was that which brought the greatest happiness. And sanity such as his own was only a sober kind of madness after all, a quiet mania which sought out the soul of things and in the seeking fed itself upon the problems of the world, a diet which too much prolonged might lead to mental indigestion.

Morbid--was he? Introspective? A "grouch"? He was--he must be--all of these things.

His small inquisitor had neglected none of his failings, had practiced her glib tongue at his expense in the few hours in which she had taken possession of Thimble Island and of him. What a child she was, how spoiled and how utterly irresponsible! He identified her completely now, Hermia Challoner, the sole heiress of all Peter Challoner's hard-gotten millions, the heiress, too, it was evident, of his att.i.tude toward the world, the flesh and the devil; Peter Challoner, by profession banker and captain of industry, a man whose name was remembered the breadth of the land for his masterly manipulation of a continental railroad which eventually came under his control; an organizer of trusts, a patron saint of political lobbyists, a product of the worst and of the best of modern business! This girl who had fallen like a bright meteor across Markham's sober sky this morning was Peter Challoner's daughter. He remembered now the stories he had heard and read of her caprices, the races on the beach at Ormonde, her fearlessness in the hunting field and the woman's polo team she had organized at Cedarcroft which she had led against a team of men on a Southern field. It had all been in the newspapers and he had read of her with a growing distaste for the type of woman which American society made possible. Peter Challoner's daughter, the spoiled darling of money idolaters, scrubbing the floor of his kitchen!

As he sat looking out over the bay thinking of his visitor, a picture rose and wreathed itself amid the smoke of his tobacco--the vision of a little working girl in New York, a girl with tired eyes and a patient smile, with the faded hair and the faded skin which came from too few hours of recreation--from too many uninterrupted hours of plodding grind at the tasks her employers set for her, a girl who would have been as pretty as Hermia Challoner if her youth had only been given its chance. This was Dorothy Herick, whose father, a friend of Markham's father, had been swallowed up in one of the great industrial combinations which Peter Challoner had planned. Markham, who had been studying in Paris at the time, had forgotten the details of Oliver Herrick's downfall, but he remembered that the transaction which had brought it about had not even been broadly in accordance with the ethics of modern business, and that there had been something in the nature of sharp practice on Peter Challoner's part which had enabled him to obtain for his combination the mills in the Wyoming Valley which had been in the Herrick family for three generations.

Markham knew little of business and hated it cordially, but he had heard enough of this affair to be sure that, whatever the courts had decided, Oliver Herrick had been unfairly dealt with and that a part, at least, of Peter Challoner's fortune belonged morally, at least, to the inconsiderable mite of femininity who read proof in a publisher's office in New York. He knew something of the law of the survival of the fittest, for he himself had survived the long struggle for honors which had put him at last in a position where he felt secure at least from the pinch of poverty, and whatever Oliver Herrick's failings among the larger forces with which he had been brought into contact, Markham knew him to have been an honest man, a good father and a faithful gentleman. Something was wrong with a world which pinched the righteous between the grindstones of progress and let the evil prosper.

It was an unfairness which descended to the second generation and would descend through the years until the equalizing forces of character and will--or the lack of them--brought later generations to the same level of condition. Markham could not help comparing Hermia Challoner with her less fortunate sister--Hermia Challoner, the courted, the fted, who had but to wish for a thing to have it granted, with Dorothy Herrick, the neglected and forgotten, who was bartering her youth for twelve dollars a week and was glad to get the money; one, who boasted that the only value life had for her was what she could get out of it, with the other, who almost felt it a privilege to be permitted to live at all. The more he thought of these two girls, the more convincing was his belief that Miss Herrick did not suffer by the comparison. She was doing just what thousands of other girls were doing in New York, with no more patience and no more self-sacrifice than they, but the childish vagaries of his visitor, still fresh in his memory, seemed to endow Dorothy Herrick with a firmer contour, a stronger claim on his interest and sympathies.

And yet--this little madcap aviatrix disclosed a winning directness and simplicity which charmed and surprised him. She was a joyous soul. He could not remember a morning when he had been so completely abstracted from the usual current of thought and occupation as today, and whatever the faults bequeathed by her intrepid father, she was, as Markham had said to Olga, quite human. There were possibilities in the child-and it seemed a pity that no strong guiding hand led the way on a road like hers, which had so many turnings. She was only an overgrown child as yet, flat chested, slender, almost a boy, and yet redeemed to femininity by an unconscious coquetry which she could no more control than she could the warm flush of her blood; a child indeed, full of quick impulses for good or for evil.

Markham rose, knocked the ash out of his pipe, walked over to his canvas, set it up against the porch pillar and examined it leisurely.

But in a moment he took it indoors and added it to the pile in the living-room, fetching a fresh canvas and carrying his easel and paint-box over the hill to another spot, a shady one among the rocks where he had already painted many times.

He worked a while and then sat and smoked again, his thoughts afar.

What sort of an influence was Olga Tcherny for the mind of this impressionable child? The Countess was clever, generous and wonderfully attractive to men and to women but, as Markham knew, her views of life were liberal and she was not wise--at least, not with a wisdom which would help Hermia Challoner. One doesn't live for ten years in Paris in the set in which Markham had met her without absorbing something of its careless creed, its loose ethical and moral standards. New York society, he knew, reflected much that was bad, and much that was good of the gay worlds of Paris and London; for Americans are unexcelled in the talent of imitation, but from phrases that had pa.s.sed Olga's lips he knew that she had outgrown her own country.

Markham tried to paint but things went wrong and so he gave it up, swearing silently at the interruption which had spoiled his day. After lunch he tried it again with no better success, and finally gave it up and, taking a book, went out on a point of rocks where the tide swirled and cast in a fis.h.i.+ng line, not because he hoped to catch anything but because fis.h.i.+ng, of all the resources available, had most surely the ways of peace. The book was a French treatise on the Marxian philosophies--dull reading for a summer's day when the water lapped merrily at one's feet, the breeze sighed softly, laden with the odors of the mysterious deeps, and sea and sky beckoned him invitingly into the realms of adventure and delight, so dull that, the fish biting not, Markham dozed, and at last rolled over in the sunlight and slept.

How long he lay there he did not know. He was awakened by the exhaust of a launch close at hand and sat up so quickly that "Karl Marx,"

rudely jostled by his elbow, went sliding over the edge of the rock and into the sea. But there was no time at present to bewail this calamity for the man in the launch had brought her insh.o.r.e and hailed him politely.

"Mr. Markham?" he questioned.

Markham nodded. "That's my name," he said.

"A note for you." The launch moved slowly in toward the landing and Markham met his visitor, already aware that there was to be a further intrusion on his solitude. He broke the seal of the note and read.

It was from Hermia Challoner.

Dear Mr. Markham:

Life, as you see, has yielded me one more sensation without penalty. I am safe at home again, my philosophy triumphant over yours. There isn't a great deal of difference between them after all. You, too, take from life, Mr. Markham--you take what you need just as I do; but just because your needs differ from mine, manlike, you a.s.sume that I must be wrong. Perhaps I am. Then so must you, because you give less than I do.

There is but one way to justify yourself, and that is to give up what you are h.o.a.rding--what you prize most highly--your solitude. We want you at "Wake Robin," Mr. Markham. Will you come to dine and stay the night? By so doing you will at least show an amiable disposition, which is more to the point than all the philosophy in the world. We are very informal and dine at eight.

I am sure that if you disappoint us Madame Tcherny, who is already tired of us all, will perish of _ennui_.

Very cordially yours, Hermia Challoner

Markham read the note through and turned toward the cabin for pen and paper.

"Will you moor the launch and come ash.o.r.e?"

"Oh, no, sir," said the man, tinkering with the engine, "I'll wait for you here. Miss Challoner said that I was to wait."

When Markham reached the bungalow he remembered suddenly that he had no ink, pen--or indeed paper, and yet a verbal reply would hardly be courteous. He stood in the doorway puzzling a moment and then went over to a trunk in the corner, opened it and began pitching its contents about. He straightened at last, put some garments on the bed and looked at them with a ruminative eye.

"Oh, I had better go," he muttered, rubbing the roughness on his chin.

"I owe it to Olga. But why the devil they can't leave a fellow alone--" and, fuming silently, he shaved, made a toilet, and packing some things in a much battered suit case made his way to the launch.

At the Westport landing he found the Countess Olga, wonderfully attired in an afternoon costume of pale green, awaiting him in a motor.

"There's a chance for you still, my friend," she laughed. "You have won my fond regard--and, incidentally, the cost of a new frock."

"I?"

"Yes. We laid a bet as to whether you would come, Hermia and I. We've been watching the island through the telescope, and saw you embark--so to me--the victor, falls the honor of conducting you home in triumph."