Chapter XV: Underneath the Bough

The kind-hearted Miss Kent had decreed a holiday for Howard. With characteristic thoughtfulness she had volunteered to take Forbes off his hands, and suggested they fill in the time by a long walk with a picnic lunch in some shady place, dinner to be postponed until a convenient hour after their return. Howard showed hilarious approval of the plan, and Forbes aroused himself from his melancholy abstraction sufficiently to agree, whereupon Agatha fell to making sandwiches, giving directions to Phemie as she worked.

Nature in the raw did not appeal to Miss Finch. She hated long walks. She hated sitting on the grass; while sandwiches, without an accompanying cup of tea, were as ashes to her taste. The others accepted her excuses with fortitude, and left her at home to see that Phemie did not set the house afire, and to grope wearily toward a solution of her vexing problem. Howard, having stuffed his pockets with a generous proportion of the sandwiches, shouldered his fishing rod and departed to make the most of his holiday. And while the fragrant freshness of the night still lingered in the air, Forbes and Agatha set out in the direction of the woods.

The serene confidence of her morning vigil still enfolded Agatha. She walked as if keeping time to music, inaudible to all ears but her own. Forbes had insisted on carrying the basket of lunch which also contained a book or two, in case their mood should take a literary turn. Agatha kept fast hold of his arm, the better to steer his steps, and he thought there was a hint of friendliness in the firm clasp. The lonely and unhappy man felt a disproportionate sense of gratitude.

They walked and rested, strolled on and rested again. Neither was inclined to talk. Forbes had plenty to occupy his thoughts, and Agatha, too, was reflective. She realized that the time was at hand when she must confess to Forbes the deception she had practised on him, or else allow him to go out of her life altogether. Neither alternative was agreeable, but the latter was unthinkable.

A scheme occurred to her so in harmony with her native audacity that she dallied with it lovingly, before reluctantly renouncing it as impracticable. She could tell Forbes that she expected a visit from her grand-niece, Agatha Kent, and prejudice him in favor of the newcomer by assuring him of the extraordinary likeness existing between the twentieth-century Agatha and her girlhood self. After the new Agatha's arrival, she could leave him more and more to the society of the younger woman, withdrawing by degrees into the background until her sudden demise would hardly shock him, though he would naturally feel more or less responsible for consoling her namesake and heir. Agatha's final rejection of the plan was due less to doubt of her ability to act the dual rôle, or to manage the embarrassing details of her own interment, than to the realization that if her intimacy with Forbes was to continue, it must be established on a foundation of absolute truth. This deception on which she had entered so light-heartedly, had its sole excuse in the impermanence of their relationship. Before their friendship could become real there must be perfect understanding between them.

They ate their sandwiches shortly after noon, washing them down with deliciously cool water from a convenient spring. The day had grown warm and very still. "It feels as if a thunder-storm might be brewing," Forbes remarked, breaking one of the periods of friendly silence.

"I think not," Agatha answered in a dreamy voice. "Don't you love this stillness here in the shade? It's perfect, perfect!"

"'A book of verses underneath the bough, A loaf of bread, a jug of wine--and thou,'"

quoted Forbes inevitably. He was laughing but the lines stirred her, and to disguise the fact she spoke nonchalantly.

"There _is_ a book of poems in the basket, but I don't care for reading to-day, do you? It's one of the times when you feel everything that has ever been written and more too. You simply want to sit and think how wonderful it is to be alive."

"By jove, it's you that's wonderful," Forbes exclaimed. "That sensitiveness wears off with most people long before they're my age, to say nothing of yours. But you feel the thrill of life and the mystery and the adventure, as if you were a girl."

"Yes," Agatha acquiesced, "I do."

"I'd have known it without your telling me. It's been a continual marvel all through our acquaintance, that ardent freshness of yours. It's confirmed my faith in immortality."

Agatha had no answer ready. He groped for her hand and took possession of it with becoming masterfulness.

"I've got something to say to you, something very important. I've meant to say it for an age, but I've been too much of a coward to risk a no."

Agatha was obliged to remind herself that she was almost seventy years of age. Otherwise she might have suspected she was listening to a proposal.

"Before I can explain my plan, I want to ask you something. Aren't you ever lonely here in winter?"

The question was less formidable than she had anticipated. Her quick assent showed relief.

"And aren't you going to miss me a little when I go back to the city?"

"Of course I shall," she said faintly, and instinctively tried to withdraw her hand. He tightened his hold, laughing.

"Please don't take it away. It does me good, and I'm sure it can't do you any harm. Now you've given me just the encouragement I needed. If you're lonely here, and if you're going to miss me, why shouldn't you and I set up housekeeping together?"

"I--I don't understand." Again Agatha steadied herself with the recollection of her three-score years and seven.

"I'm afraid you've spoiled me," Forbes continued with sudden seriousness. "I've grown shamefully dependent on you. It isn't altogether or chiefly that you've looked after my physical comfort so wonderfully, though, of course, that counts. But you've been so interested in all that concerns me, so sympathetic, such a good pal--" He broke off, apparently at a loss for words. "You're as bracing as an October breeze," he said. "God knows what I should have done without you, this damnable summer."

The thought crossed her mind that this was her opportunity. Now that they were alone, now that he had acknowledged his indebtedness, she could safely throw herself upon his mercy. Her lips parted for her confession, and an overmastering cowardly fear paralyzed the organs of speech. Suppose he refused to forgive her. Then he would go away and she would never see him again. She must make herself still more indispensable. She must foster that feeling of dependence before she risked self-accusation.

"Of course I must be in town next winter," Forbes went on. "Why shouldn't I take a furnished apartment and have you as a sort of mother confessor? We can get some good servants so you will be relieved of all responsibility as far as the establishment is concerned, and your sole duty will be to keep me content with life. How does that appeal to you?"

Agatha heard herself faltering something about Miss Finch.

"Oh, we'll find a place for Miss Finch," Forbes said tolerantly. "I took it for granted Miss Finch would come along, just as I assumed that your shadow would accompany you."

"It may be that Zaida will be married by fall," exclaimed Agatha, seizing the opportunity to postpone the necessity of answering him. She would not have risked the story on Warren, but she trusted Forbes to understand that even while her voice broke with uncontrollable laughter, she was not holding her old friend up to ridicule. As she described Miss Finch's singular quandary, Forbes joined in her laughter, more spontaneously than for many weeks, though he made no effort to conceal his amazement.

"Miss Finch! I begin to feel that I haven't done justice to the lady's charms. She has impressed me as colorless, not faded, you know, but colorless from the start."

"It's well we don't all see alike," Agatha said demurely, though a little startled by his perspicacity.

His next remark took her by surprise. "It's a thousand pities you never married."

Her impertinent retort that there was still time for that, was checked before it left her lips, and replaced by the less hazardous rejoinder, "In that case, probably I shouldn't be sitting here with you."

"True. But my good luck has meant loss to so many. You would have been an incomparable mother. It's a shame you didn't have a dozen children. Do you know I've never in my life felt such a sense of being mothered as I have since I came to Oak Knoll. My own mother was an invalid when I first remember her."

A little confused, but gallantly striving to live up to her maternal rôle, Agatha patted his arm with her disengaged hand. He showed his filial appreciation by kissing the other.

"It wasn't my father's fault, anyway, that you didn't fulfil your destiny. He took me into his confidence the last few months of his life, not in any formal way, you understand, just a word dropped here and there. He was the tenderest of husbands to my mother, but at the last of his life, his thoughts were all with his first love." He turned toward her with a gesture plainly interrogative. "He must have been rather an attractive young fellow."

"He was." Agatha spoke with conviction.

"And still you turned him down. I suppose it would be presumptuous to hazard a guess that there was another man."

"Yes, I think it would be rather presumptuous," Agatha said breathlessly. "Anyway, it's foolish, dragging up old love-affairs. 'Let the dead past bury its dead,' you know, though you modern young folks don't hold Longfellow in such esteem as my generation did."

"I was only thinking that if there was a man who might have married you and didn't, he's probably putting in his time in the next world cursing his luck. But you're not going to be as hard on the son as you were on the father, are you?"

"I--I--do you mean--"

"You're not going to blast all my hopes by saying no. How am I going to get along without you; tell me that?"

"You must give me a little time to think," Agatha protested faintly. She had vowed that morning to avoid all references in the future to her advanced age, but the habit of acting a part was too strong to be overcome by a single resolution. She heard herself continuing mechanically, "Old people don't like to be hurried into important decisions. Leaving the home of so many years and going away with a young man may seem a very little thing to you, but to me it's a real adventure."

"Take all the time you want for reflection," he conceded generously. "Only understand, you must end by saying yes!"

"You might change your mind and not want me," Agatha said. The playfulness oozed out of her tone as she voiced her haunting dread. "You might find out something about me, some trait you had never suspected. I might be any number of awful things--deceitful, for instance." Again the impulse to confession took her by the throat. Again she fought it off almost with terror. It was too soon. She was not ready. She did not know what to say, and moreover the moment was too sweet to spoil.

Forbes laughed tolerantly. "Oh, I'll take the risk. Shall we shake hands on the bargain?"

He was amused by the fervor of her refusal, but his instinct warned him he was carrying his teasing too far. He had a strong conviction that she would end by accepting his proposition, but nothing would be gained by hurrying her to a decision. Though in most things she was strangely younger than her years, her age manifested itself in her reluctance to change the established order. He congratulated himself on broaching the subject early enough to give her time for accustoming herself to the idea.

A comfortable silence fell between them. Forbes stretched himself on the pine needles, and presently dropped off to sleep. He had held to her hand throughout their talk with seeming playfulness, though perhaps underneath was the instinct of the blind man to establish a link between himself and his kind, to touch what he can not see. In his sleep he moved nearer the imprisoned hand, and lay with his cheek touching it. And though her arm grew very tired from staying in one position so long, passing through the various stages from prickles to excruciating pain, and finally to a numbness which made her wonder if she could ever use it again, Agatha did not move. Indeed as she sat listening to his quiet breathing, feeling through the torture of her cramped muscles the touch of his cheek against her hand, her only quarrel with the hour was that it could not last.