The Bent Twig Part 40

He received this into one of his thoughtful silences, but presently it brought him to a standstill. They were within sight of the Grand Ca.n.a.l again, looking down from the terrace of the Trianon. He leaned against the marble bal.u.s.trade and thrust his hands deep into his pockets. His clear eyes were clouded. He looked profoundly grave. "I am thirty-two years old," he said, "and never for a moment of that time have I made any sense out of my position in life. If you call that 'having everything'--"

It occurred to Sylvia fleetingly that she had never made any sense out of her position in life either, and had been obliged to do a great many disagreeable things into the bargain, but she kept this thought to herself, and looked conspicuously what she genuinely felt, a sympathetic interest. The note of plain direct sincerity which was Page's hallmark never failed to arrest her attention, a little to arouse her wonder, and occasionally, for a reason that she did not like to dwell upon, somewhat to abash her. The reason was that he never spoke for effect, and she often did. He was not speaking for effect now: he seemed scarcely even to be speaking to her, rather to be musingly formulating something for his own enlightenment. He went on. "The fact is that there _is_ no sense to be made out of my situation in life. I am like a man with a fine voice, who has no ear."

He showed surprise that Sylvia failed to follow this, and explained.

"I mean the voice is no good to that kind of a man, it's no good to anybody. It's the craziest, accidental affair anyhow, haven't you ever noticed it?--who draws the fine voices. Half the time--more than half the time, _most_ of the time it seems to me when I've been recently to a lot of concerts, the people who have the voices haven't any other qualifications for being singers. And it's so with coal-mines, with everything else that's inherited. For five years now I've given up what I'd like to do, and I've tried, under the best _maestri_ I could find, to make something out of my voice, so to speak. And it's no go. It's in the nature of things that I can't make a go of it.

Over everything I do lies the taint that I'm the 'owner'! They are suspicious of me, always will be--and rightly so. Anybody else not connected with the mediaeval idea of 'possession' could do better than I. The whole relation's artificial. I'm in it for the preposterous reason that my father, operating on Wall Street, made a lucky guess,--as though I should be called upon to run a locomotive because my middle initial is L!"

Sylvia still felt the same slight sense of flatness when this recurring topic thrust itself into a personal talk; but during the last month she had adjusted herself to Page so that this no longer showed on the surface. She was indeed quite capable of taking an interest in the subject, as soon as she could modulate herself into the new key. "Yes, of course," she agreed, "it's like so many other things that are perfectly necessary to go on with, perfectly absurd when you look closely at them. My father nearly lost his position once for saying that all inheritance was wrong. But even he never had the slightest suggestion as to what to do about it, how to get an inheritance into the hands of the people who might make the best use of it." She was used from her childhood to this sort of academic doubt of everything, conducted side by side with a practical acceptance of everything. Professor and Madame La Rue, in actual life devotedly faithful married lovers, staid, stout, habit-ridden elderly people, professed a theoretical belief in the flexibility of relations.h.i.+ps sanctioned by the practice of free love. It was perhaps with this recollection in her mind that she suggested, "Don't you suppose it will be like the inst.i.tution of marriage, very, very gradually altered till it fits conditions better?"

"In the meantime, how about the cases of those who are unhappily married?"

"I don't see anything for them but just to get along the best they can," she told him.

"You think I'd better give up trying to do anything with my Colorado--?" he asked her, as though genuinely seeking advice.

"I should certainly think that five years was plenty long enough for a fair trial! You'd make a better amba.s.sador than an active captain of industry, anyhow," she said with conviction. Whereupon he bestowed on her a long, thoughtful stare, as though he were profoundly pondering her suggestion.

They moved forward towards the Grand Ca.n.a.l in silence. Privately she was considering his case hardly one of extreme hards.h.i.+p. Privately also, as they advanced nearer and nearer the spot where they had left Mrs. Marshall-Smith, she was a little dreading the return to the perfect breeding with which Aunt Victoria did not ask, or intimate, or look, the question which was in her mind after each of these strolling tete-a-tetes which consistently led nowhere. There were instants when Sylvia would positively have preferred the vulgar openness of a direct question to which she might have answered, with the refres.h.i.+ng effect to her of a little honest blood-letting: "Dear Aunt Victoria, I haven't the least idea myself what's happening! I'm simply letting myself go because I don't see anything else to do. I have even no very clear idea as to what is going on inside my own head. I only know that I like Austin Page so much (in spite of a certain quite unforgotten episode) there would be nothing at all unpleasant about marrying him; but I also know that I didn't feel the least interest in him until Helene told me about his barrels of money: I also know that I feel the strongest aversion to returning to the Spartan life of La Chance; and it occurs to me that these two things may throw considerable light on my 'liking' for Austin. As for what's in _his_ mind, there is no subject on which I'm in blacker ignorance. And after being so tremendously fooled, in the case of Felix, about the degree of interest a man was feeling, I do not propose to take anything for granted which is not on the surface. It is quite possible that this singularly sincere and simple-mannered man may not have the slightest intention of doing anything more than enjoy a pleasant vacation from certain rather hair-splitting cares which seem to trouble him from time to time." As they walked side by side along the stagnant waters, she was sending inaudible messages of this sort towards her aunt; she had even selected the particular mauve speck at the top of the steps which might be Mrs. Marshall-Smith.

In the glowing yellow gold of the sky, a faintly whirring dark-gray spot appeared: an airman made his way above the Grand Ca.n.a.l, pa.s.sed above the Chateau, and disappeared. They had sat down on a bench, the better to crane their heads to watch him out of sight. Sylvia was penetrated with the strangeness of that apparition in that spot and thrilled out: "Isn't it wonderful! Isn't it wonderful! _Here!_"

"There's something _more_ wonderful!" he said, indicating with his cane the ca.n.a.l before them, where a group of neat, poorly dressed, lower middle-cla.s.s people looked proudly out from their triumphal progress in the ugly, gasping little motor-boat which operates at twenty-five centimes a trip.

She had not walked and talked a month with him for nothing. She knew that he did not refer to motor-boats as against aeroplanes. "You mean," she said appreciatively, "you mean those common people going freely around the royal ca.n.a.l where two hundred years ago--"

He nodded, pleased by her quickness. "Two hundred years from now,"

he conjectured, "the stubs of my checkbook will be exhibited in an historical museum along with the regalia of the last hereditary monarch."

Here she did not follow, and she was too intelligent to pretend she did.

He lifted his eyebrows. "Relic of a quaint old social structure inexplicably tolerated so late as the beginning of the twentieth century,"

"Oh, coal-mines forever!" she said, smiling, her eyes brilliant with friendly mockery.

"Aye! _Toujours perdrix!_" he admitted. He continued to look steadily and seriously into her smiling, sparkling face, until, with a sudden pulse of premonition, she was stricken into a frightened gravity. And then, with no prelude, no approach, quite simply and directly, he spoke. "I wonder how much you care for me?" he said musingly, as he had said everything else that afternoon: and as she positively paled at the eeriness of this echo from her own thought, he went on, his voice vibrating in the deep organ note of a great moment, "You must know, of course, by this time that I care everything possible for you."

Compressed into an instant of acute feeling Sylvia felt the pangs which had racked her as a little girl when she had stood in the schoolyard with Camilla Fingal before her, and the terrifying hostile eyes about her. Her two selves rose up against each other fiercely, murderously, as they had then. The little girl sprang forward to help the woman who for an instant hesitated. The fever and the struggle vanished as instantly as they had come. Sylvia felt very still, very hushed. Page had told her that she always rose to crucial moments. She rose to this one. "I don't know," she said as quietly as he, with as utter a bravery of bare sincerity, "I don't know how much I care for you--but I think it is a great deal." She rose upon a solemn wing of courage to a greater height of honesty. Her eyes were on his, as clear as his. The mere beauty of her face had gone like a lifted veil. For a instant he saw her as Sylvia herself did not dream she could be. "It is very hard," said Sylvia Marshall, with clear eyes and trembling lips of honest humility, "for a girl with no money to know how much she cares for a very rich man."

She had never been able to imagine what she would say if the moment should come. She had certainly not intended to say this. But an unsuspected vein of granite in her rang an instant echo to his truth. She was bewildered to see his ardent gaze upon her deepen to reverence. He took her hand in his and kissed it. He tried to speak, but his voice broke.

She was immensely moved to see him so moved. She was also entirely at a loss. How strangely different things always were from forecasts of them! They had suddenly taken the long-expected stride away from their former relation, but she did not know where they had arrived. What was the new status between them? What did Austin think she meant? It came to her with a shock that the new status between them was, on the surface, exactly what it was in reality; that the avowed relation between them was, as far as it went, precisely in accord with the facts of the case. The utter strangeness of this in any human relations.h.i.+p filled her with astonishment, with awe, almost with uneasiness. It seemed unnatural not to have to pretend anything!

Apparently it did not seem unnatural to the man beside her. "You are a very wonderful woman," he now said, his voice still but partly under his control. "I had not thought that you could exist." He took her hand again and continued more steadily: "Will you let me, for a little while longer, go on living near you? Perhaps things may seem clearer to us both, later--"

Sylvia was swept by a wave of grat.i.tude as for some act of magnanimity. "_You_ are the wonderful one!" she cried. Not since the day Helene had told her who he was, had she felt so whole, so sound, so clean, as now. The word came rus.h.i.+ng on the heels of the thought: "You make one feel so _clean_!" she said, unaware that he could scarcely understand her, and then she smiled, pa.s.sing with her free, natural grace from the memorable pause, and the concentration of a great moment forward into the even-stepping advance of life. "That first day--even then you made me feel clean--that soap! that cold, clean water--it is your aroma!"

Their walk along the silent water, over the great lawn, and up the steps was golden with the level rays of the sun setting back of them, at the end of the ca.n.a.l, between the distant, sentinel poplars. Their mood was as golden as the light. Sometimes they spoke, sometimes they were silent. Truth walked between them.

Sylvia's mind, released from the tension of that great moment, began making its usual, sweeping, circling explorations of its own depths.

Not all that it found was of an equal good report. Once she thought fleetingly: "This is only a very, very pretty way of saying that it is all really settled. With his great wealth, he is like a reigning monarch--let him be as delicate-minded as he pleases, when he indicates a wish--" More than once--many, many times--Felix Morrison's compelling dark eyes looked at her penetratingly, but she resolutely turned away her head from them, and from the impulse to answer their reproach even with an indignant, well-founded reproach of her own.

Again and again she felt a sweet strangeness in her new position. The aroma of utter sincerity was like the scent of a wildflower growing in the sun, spicy, free. She wondered at a heart like his that could be at once ardent and subtle, that could desire so profoundly (the deep vibrations of that voice of yearning were in her ears still) and yet pause, and stand back, and wait, rather than force a hair's breadth of pretense. How he had liberated her! And once she found herself thinking, "I shall have sables myself, and diamonds, and a house as great as Molly's, and I shall learn how to entertain amba.s.sadors, as she will never know." She was ashamed of this, she knew it to be shockingly out of key with the grand pa.s.sage behind them. But she had thought it.

And, as these thoughts, and many more, pa.s.sed through her mind, as she spoke with a quiet peace, or was silent, she was transfigured into a beauty almost startling, by the accident of the level golden beams of light back of her. Her aureole of bright hair glowed like a saint's halo. The curiously placed lights and unexpected shadows brought out new subtleties in the modeling of her face. Her lightened heart gleamed through her eyes, like a lighted lamp. After a time, the man fell into a complete silence, glancing at her frequently as though storing away a priceless memory....

CHAPTER x.x.xV

"A MILESTONE Pa.s.sED, THE ROAD SEEMS CLEAR"

As the "season" heightened, the beautiful paneled walls of Mrs.

Marshall-Smith's salon were frequently the background for chance gatherings of extremely appropriate callers. They seemed a visible emanation of the room, so entirely did they represent what that sort of a room was meant to contain. They were not only beautifully but severely dressed, with few ornaments, and those few a result of the same concentrated search for the rare which had brought together the few bibelots in the room, which had laid the single great dull Persian rug on the un.o.btrusively polished oaken floor, which had set in the high, south windows the boxes of feathery green plants with delicate star-like flowers.

And it was not only in externals that these carefully brushed and combed people harmonized with the mellow beauty of their background.

They sat, or stood, moved about, took their tea, and talked with an extraordinary perfection of manner. There was not a voice there, save perhaps Austin Page's unstudied tones, which was not carefully modulated in a variety of rhythm and pitch which made each sentence a work of art. They used, for the most part, low tones and few gestures, but those well chosen. There was an earnest effort apparent to achieve true conversational give-and-take, and if one of the older men found himself yielding to the national pa.s.sion for lengthy monologues on a favorite theme, or to the mediocre habit of anecdote, there was an instant closing in on him of carefully casual team-work on the part of the others which soon reduced him to the tasteful short comment and answer which formed the framework of the afternoon's social activities.

The topics of the conversation were as explicitly in harmony with the group-ideal as the perfectly fitting gloves of the men, or the smooth, burnished waves of the women's hair. They talked of the last play at the Francais, of the exhibitions then on view at the Pet.i.t Palais, of a new tenor in the choir of the Madeleine, of the condition of the automobile roads in the Loire country, of the restoration of the stained gla.s.s at Bourges.

On such occasions, a good deal of Sylvia's attention being given to modulating her voice and holding her hands and managing her skirts as did the guests of the hour, she usually had an impression that the conversation was clever. Once or twice, looking back, she had been somewhat surprised to find that she could remember nothing of what had been said. It occurred to her, fleetingly, that of so much talk, some word ought to stick in her usually retentive memory; but she gave the matter no more thought. She had also been aware, somewhat dimly, that Austin Page was more or less out of drawing in the carefully composed picture presented on those social afternoons. He had the inveterate habit of being at his ease under all circ.u.mstances, but she had felt that he took these great people with a really exaggerated lack of seriousness, answering their chat at random, and showing no chagrin when he was detected in the grossest ignorance about the latest move of the French Royalist party, or the probabilities as to the winner of the Grand Prix. She had seen in the corners of his mouth an inexplicable hidden imp of laughter as he gravely listened, cup in hand, to the remarks of the beautiful Mrs. William Winterton Perth about the inevitable promiscuity of democracy, and he continually displayed a tendency to gravitate into the background, away from the center of the stage where their deference for his name, fortune, and personality would have placed him. Sylvia's impression of him was far from being one of social brilliance, but rather of an almost wilful negligence. She quite grew used to seeing him, a tall, distinguished figure, sitting at ease in a far corner, and giving to the scene a pleasant though not remarkably respectful attention.

On such an afternoon in January, the usual routine had been preserved.

The last of the callers, carrying off Mrs. Marshall-Smith with her, had taken an urbane, fair-spoken departure. Sylvia turned back from the door of the salon, feeling a fine glow of conscious amenity, and found that Austin Page's mood differed notably from her own. He had lingered for a tete-a-tete, as was so frequently his habit, and now stood before the fire, his face all one sparkle of fun. "Don't they do it with true American fervor!" he remarked. "It would take a microscope to tell the difference between them and a well-rehea.r.s.ed society scene on the stage of the Francais! That's their model, of course. It is positively touching to see old Colonel Patterson subduing his tw.a.n.g and shutting the lid down on his box of comic stories. I should think Mrs. Patterson might allow him at least that one about the cowboy and the tenderfoot who wanted to take a bath!"

The impression made on Sylvia had not in the least corresponded to this one; but with a cat-like twist of her flexible mind, she fell on her feet, took up his lead, and deftly produced the only suitable material she had at command. "They _seem_ to talk well, about such interesting things, and yet I can never remember anything they say.

It's odd," she sat down near the fireplace with a great air of pondering the strange phenomenon.

"No, it isn't odd," he explained, dropping into the chair opposite her and stretching out his long legs to the blaze. "It's only people who do something, who have anything to say. These folks don't do anything except get up and sit down the right way, and run their voices up and down the scale so that their great-aunts would faint away to hear them! They haven't any energy left over. If some one would only write out suitable parts for them to memorize, the performance would be perfect!" He threw back his head and laughed aloud, the sound ringing through the room. Sylvia had seldom seen him so light-heartedly amused. He explained: "I haven't seen this sort of solemn, genteel posturing for several years now, and I find it too delicious! To see the sweet, invincible American navete welling up in their intense satisfaction in being so sophisticated,--oh, the harmless dears!" He cried out upon them gaily, with the indulgence of an adult who looks on at children's play.

Sylvia was a trifle breathless, seeing him disappear so rapidly down this unexpected path, but she was for the moment spared the effort to overtake him by the arrival of Tojiko with a tray of fresh mail. "Oh, letters from home!" Sylvia rejoiced, taking a bulky one and a thin one from the pile. "The fat one is from Father," she said, holding it up.

"He is like me, terribly given to loquaciousness. We always write each other reams when we're apart. The little flat one is from Judith. She never can think of anything to say except that she is still alive and hopes I am, and that her esteem for me is undiminished. Dear Spartan Judy!"

"Do you know," said the man opposite her, "if I hadn't met you, I should have been tempted to believe that the inst.i.tution of the family had disappeared. I never saw anything like you Marshalls! You positively seem to have a real regard for each other in spite of what Bernard Shaw says about the relations of blood-kin. You even, incredible as it seems, appear to feel a mutual respect!"

"That's a very pretty compliment indeed," said Sylvia, smiling at him flas.h.i.+ngly, "and I'm going to reward you by reading some of Judith's letter aloud. Letters do paint personalities so, don't they?"

He settled himself to listen.

"Oh, it won't take long!" she rea.s.sured him laughingly. She read:

"'DEAR SYLVIE: Your last letter about the palaces at Versailles was very interesting. Mother looked you up on the plan of the grounds in Father's old Baedeker. I'm glad to know you like Paris so much. Our chief operating surgeon says he thinks the opportunities at the School of Medicine in Paris are fully as good as in Vienna, and chances for individual diagnoses greater. Have you visited that yet?'" Over the letter Sylvia raised a humorous eyebrow at Page, who smiled, appreciative of the point.

She went on: "'Lawrence is making me a visit of a few days. Isn't he a queer boy! I got Dr. Wilkinson to agree, as a great favor, to let Lawrence see a very interesting operation. Right in the middle of it, Lawrence fainted dead away and had to be carried out. But when he came to, he said he wouldn't have missed it for anything, and before he could really sit up he was beginning a poem about the "cruel mercy of the s.h.i.+ning knives."'" Sylvia shook her head. "Isn't that Lawrence!

Isn't that Judith!"

Page agreed thoughtfully, their eyes meeting in a trustful intimacy.

They themselves might have been bound together by a family tie, so wholly natural seemed their sociable sitting together over the fire.

Sylvia thought with an instant's surprise, "Isn't it odd how close he has come to seem--as though I'd always, always known him; as though I could speak to him of anything--n.o.body else ever seemed that way to me, n.o.body!"