Just as she had maneuvered her way across the wide, long room and was within reach of the door, it opened and her grandmother hobbled in, leaning on her stick. There was a chuckle from the other end of the room. The blood flew to the girl's face. She knew without turning to look that the old man had been watching her careful escape and was enjoying the sight of her, caught at the moment when freedom was at hand.
Mrs. Ludlow was one of those busy little women who are thorns in the flesh of servants. Her eyes had always been like those of an inspecting general. No detail, however small, went unnoticed and unrectified.
She had been called by an uncountable number of housemaids and footmen "the little Madam"--the most sarcastic term of opprobrium contained in their dictionary. A leader of New York society, she had run charitable institutions and new movements with the same precision and efficiency that she had used in her houses. Every hour of her day had been filled. Not one moment had been wasted or frittered away. Her dinner parties had been famous, and she had had a spoke in the wheels of politics. Her witty sayings had been passed from mouth to mouth. Her little flirtations with prominent men and the ambitious tyros who had been drawn to her salon had given rise to much gossip. Not by any means a beauty, her pretty face and tiptilted nose, her perennial cheerfulness, birdlike vivacity and gift of repartee had made her the center of attraction for years.
But she, like Cumberland Ludlow, had refused to grow old gracefully and with resignation. She had put up an equally determined fight against age, and it was only when the remorseless calendar proved her to be sixty-five that she resigned from the struggle, washed the dye out of her hair and the make-up from her face and retired to that old house. Not even then, however, did she resign from all activity and remain contented to sit with her hands in her lap and prepare herself for the next world. This one still held a certain amount of joy, and she concentrated all the vitality that remained with her to the perfect running of her house. At eleven o'clock every morning the tap of her stick on the polished floors was the signal of her arrival, and if every man and woman of the menage was not actively at work, she knew the reason why. Her tongue was still as sharp as the blade of a razor, and for sloppiness she had no mercy. Careless maids trembled before her tirades, and strong men shook in their shoes under her biting phrases. At seventy, with her snowy hair, little face that had gone into as many lines as a dried pippin, bent, fragile body and tiny hands twisted by rheumatism, she looked like one of the old women in a Grimm's fairy tale who frightened children and scared animals and turned giants into cowards.
She drew up in front of the frustrated girl, stretched out her white hand lined with blue veins and began to tap her on the shoulder-- announcing in that irritating manner that she had a complaint to make.
"My dear," she said, "when you write letters to your little friends or your sentimental mother, bear in mind that the place for ink is on the note paper and not on the carpet."
"Yes, Grandmother."
"Try to remember also that if you put your hand behind a candle you can blow it out without scattering hot grease on the wall paper."
"Yes, Grandmother"
"There is one other thing, if I may have your patience. You are not required to be a Columbus to discover that there is a basket for soiled linen in your bedroom. It is a large one and eager to fulfill its function. The floor of your clothes closet is intended for your shoes only. Will you be so good as to make a note of these things?"
"Yes, Grandmother."
Ink, candle grease, wash basket--what did they matter in the scheme of life, with spring tapping at the window? With a huge effort Joan forced back a wild burst of insurrection, and remained standing in what she hoped was the correct attitude of a properly repentant child. "How long can I stand it?" she cried inwardly. "How long before I smash things and make a dash for freedom?"
"Now go back and finish reading to your grand father."
And once more, trembling with anger and mortification, the girl picked her way over the limp and indifferent skins, took up the paper and sat down. Once more her clear, fresh voice, this time with a little quiver in it, fitted in to the regular tick of the querulous clock, the near-by chatter of birds' tongues and the hiss of burning logs.
The prim old lady, who had in her time borne a wonderful resemblance to the girl whom she watched so closely,--even to the chestnut-brown hair and the tip-tilted nose, the full lips, the round chin and the spirit that at any moment might urge her to break away from discipline,--retired to carry on her daily tour of inspection; and the old man stood again with his back to the fire to listen impatiently and with a futile jealousy to the deeds and misdeeds of an ever-young and ever-active world.
II
Joan was thankful when lunch was over, and murmured "Amen" to grace with a fervor that would have surprised an unimaginative and unobservant person. Like all the meals in that pompous dining-room, it was a form of torture to a young thing bubbling with health and high spirits, who was not supposed to speak unless directly addressed and was obliged to hold herself in check while her grandparents progressed slowly and deliberately through a menu of medically thought-out dishes. Both the old people were on a rigid diet, and mostly the conversation between them consisted of grumbles at having to dally with baby-food and reminiscences of the admirable dinners of the past. An aged butler and a footman in the sere and yellow only added to the general Rip van Winklism, and the presence of two very old dogs, one the grandfather's Airedale and the other Mrs. Ludlow's Irish terrier, with a white nose and rusty gray coat, did nothing to dispel the depression. The six full-length portraits in oils that hung on the walls represented men and women whose years, if added together, would have made a staggering grand total. Even the furniture was Colonial.
But when Joan had put on her hat, sweater and a pair of thick-soled country boots, and having taken care to see that no one was about, slid down the banisters into the hall on her way out for her usual lonely walk, she slipped into the garden with a queer sense of excitement, an odd and unaccountable premonition that something was going to happen. This queer thing had come to her in the middle of lunch and had made her heart suddenly begin to race. If she had been given to self analysis, which she was not, she might have told herself that she had received a wireless message from some one as lonely as herself, who had sent out the S.O.S. call in the hope of its being picked up and answered. As it was, it stirred her blood and made her restless and intensely eager to get into the open, to feel the sun and smell the sweetness in the air and listen to the cheery note of the birds.
It was with something of the excited interest which must have stirred Robinson Crusoe on seeing the foot-prints on the sand of what he had conceived to be a desert island that she ran up the hill, through the awakened woods whose thick carpet of brown leaves was alight with the green heads of young ferns, and out to the clearing from which she had so often gazed wist fully in the direction of the great city away in the distance.
She was surprised to find that she was alone as usual, bitterly disappointed to see no other sign of life than her friends the rabbits and the squirrels--the latter of which ambled toward her in the expectation of peanuts. She had no sort of concrete idea of what she had expected to find: nor had she any kind of explanation of the wave of sympathy that had come to her as clearly as though it had been sent over an electric wire. All she knew was that she was out of breath for no apparent reason, and on the verge of tears at seeing no one there to meet her. Once before, on her sixth birth day, the same call had been sent to her when she was playing alone with her dolls in the semitropical garden of a hired house in Florida, and she had started up and toddled round to the front and found a large-eyed little girl peering through the gate. It was the beginning of a close and blessed friendship.
This time, it seemed, the call had been meant for some other lonely soul, and so she stood and looked with blurred eyes over the wide valley that lay unrolled at her feet and, asked herself what she had ever done to deserve to be left out of all the joy of life. From somewhere near by the baying of hounds came, and from a farm to her left the crowing of a cock; and then a twig snapped behind her, and she turned eagerly.
"Oh, hello," said the boy.
"Oh, hello," she said.
He was not the hero of her dreams, by a long way. His hair didn't curl; his nose was not particularly straight; nor were his eyes large and magnetic. He was not something over six feet two; nor was he dressed in wonderful clothes into which he might have been poured in liquid form. He was a cheery, square-shouldered, good-natured looking fellow with laughter in his gray eyes and a little quizzical smile playing round a good firm mouth. He looked like a man who ought to have been in the navy and who, instead, gave the impression of having been born among horses. His small, dark head was bare; his skin had already caught the sun, and as he stood in his brown sweater with his hands thrust into the pockets of his riding breeches, he seemed to her to be just exactly like the brother that she ought to have had if she had had any luck at all, and she held out a friendly hand with a comfortable feeling of absolute security.
With some self-consciousness he took it and bowed with a nice touch of deference. He tried to hide the catch in his breath and the admiration in his eyes. "I'm glad it's spring," he said, not knowing quite what he was saying.
"So am I," said Joan. "Just look at those violets and the way the leaves are bursting."
"I know. Great, isn't it? Are you going anywhere?"
"No. I've nowhere to go."
"Same here. Let's go together."
And they both laughed, and the squirrel that had come to meet Joan darted off with a sour look. He had anticipated a fat meal of peanuts. He was out of it now, he saw, and muttered whatever was the squirrel equivalent for a swear-word.
The boy and girl took the path that ran round the outskirts of the wood, swung into step and chimed into the cantata of spring with talk and laughter.
There had been rather a long silence.
Joan was sitting with her back against the trunk of a fallen tree, with her hands clasped round her knees. She had tossed her hat aside, and the sunlight made her thick brown hair gleam like copper. They had come out at another aerie on the hill, from which a great stretch of open country could be seen. Her eyes were turned as usual in the direction of New York, but there was an expression of contentment in them that would have startled all the old people and things at home.
Martin Gray was lying full stretch on the turf with his elbows up and his chin on his left fist. He had eyes for nothing but the vivid girl whom he had found so unexpectedly and who was the most alive thing that he had ever seen.
During this walk their chatter had been of everything under the sun except themselves. Both were so frankly and unaffectedly glad to be able to talk at all that they broke into each other's laughing and childish comments on obvious things and forgot themselves in the pleasure of meeting. But now the time had come for mutual confidences, and both, in the inevitable young way, felt the desire to paint the picture of their own particular grievance against life which should make them out to be the two genuine martyrs of the century. It was now a question of which of them got the first look- in. The silence was deliberate and came out of the fine sense of sportsmanship that belonged to each. Although bursting to pour out her troubles, Joan wanted to be fair and give Martin the first turn, and Martin, equally keen to prove himself the champion of badly treated men, held himself in, in order that Joan, being a woman, should step into the limelight. It was, of course, the male member of the duet who began. A man's ego is naturally more aggressive than a woman's.
"Do you know," said Martin, arranging himself in a more comfortable attitude, "that it's over two months since I spoke to any one of about my own age?"
Joan settled herself to listen. With the uncanny intuition that makes women so disconcerting, she realized that she had missed her chance and must let the boy have his head.
Not until he had unburdened his soul would she be able, she knew, to focus his complete attention upon herself.
"Tell me about it," she said.
He gave her a grateful look. "You know the house with the kennels over there--the hounds don't let you miss it. I've been wandering about the place without seeing anybody since Father died."
"Oh, then, you're Martin Gray!"
"Yes."
"I was awfully sorry about your father."
"Thanks." The boy's mouth trembled a little, and he worked his thumb into the soft earth. "He was one of the very best, and it was not right. He was too young and too much missed. I don't understand it. He had twenty-five years to his credit, and I wanted to show him what I was going to do. It's all a puzzle to me. There's something frightfully wrong about it all, and it's been worrying me awfully."
Joan couldn't find anything to say. Years before, when she was four years old, Death had come to her house and taken her own father away, and she had a dim remembrance of dark rooms and of her mother crying as though she had been very badly hurt. It was a vague figure now, and the boy's queer way of talking about it so personally made the conventional expressions that she had heard seem out of place. It was the little shake in his voice that touched her.
"He had just bought a couple of new hunters and was going to run the hunt this fall. I wanted him to live forever. He died in New York, and I came here to try and get used to being without him. I thought I should stay all alone for the rest of my life, but--this morning when I was moping about, everything looked so young and busy that I got a sort of longing to be young and busy again myself. I don't know how to explain it, but everything shouted at me to get up and shake myself together, and on the almanac in Father's room I read a thing that seemed to be a sort of message from him."
"Did you? What was it?"
