Chapter IV: Front Matter (4)

Three more strokes like that would get her to the meadow--oh, wonderful to be alive, to be swift and light and sure, to feel the wind lifting your hair, and the sun warming your heart in a world that was once more safe and kind. Dear world--dear France, dear France, so kind to this small American--she absolved it lavishly from its sins of cold water and bitter coffee; where else in all the world could you find a game of the inspiring simplicity of croquo-golf--a game whose sole equipment was a ball and a mallet--whose sole object was to cover as much space in as few strokes as possible? Where else could you find such comrades to play it with, grave and eager as children, ardent-eyed and laughing-lipped? She smote the ball again, her voice flying with it.

“Oh, Laure, as I live and breathe, it’s cleared the ditch!

‘Monsieur Charette hath said to all his peers,
Monsieur Charette hath said to all his peers,
Come, good sirs!
Now let us sally forth and whip these curs!’”

The exultant chant wavered for a moment as the proud possessor of the ball cleared the ditch, too, and took up her triumphant lilt, crescendo:

“‘Take up thy gun, my good Gregory!
Take up thy virgin of ivory--
Fill up thy drinking gourd right cheerily--
Our comrades have gone down
To fight for Paris Town!’”

André de Chartreuil swung up beside her, breathless and laughing. Luck was with him; all the English that he had mastered as liaison officer raced to the tip of his tongue.

“But what a child! How old are you, Mlle. Fairfax Carter?”

“Too old,” mourned Fairfax, shaking her bright head till the curls danced in the sun. “Much, much too old--old enough to know better.” She pounced on the half-buried ball with a small shriek of excitement. “Ah ha, my little treasure, a mere turn of the wrist and--bet I make the gate in four strokes.”

“Bet you do not,” replied André obligingly.

“Done; all the mushrooms that you find in Daudin’s meadow to--to what?”

“To the very great privilege of kissing the tips of your fingers.” Young De Chartreuil’s voice was carefully light.

“Monsieur André!” Fair, her mallet poised for the blow, paused long enough to bestow a distracting glance through her lashes, oddly at variance with her maternal tone. “You aren’t going to begin that kind of thing, are you?” Her laughter rang out, gay and lovely and mocking.

Young De Chartreuil smiled back at her--a not very convincing smile. She was the most enchanting creature that he had ever met, but her lack of discretion froze the marrow in his bones.

“Mademoiselle, one so charming is privileged to forget that one may also be kind,” he remarked formally.

Fair stopped laughing. “Oh, nonsense!” she returned abruptly, forgetting that one may also be polite. She hit viciously at the ball, scowling after it more like a cross little boy than a lady of Romance. “There--see what you made me do!” The astonished André met her accusing gaze blankly.

“I, Mademoiselle?”

“Yes, sir, you.” The tone was unrelenting. “I’m a great deal kinder than I have any business being,” she added darkly. “I certainly am. Sooner or later every single one of you turn on me like--like--vipers, and tell me that it’s not possible that I could have been so everlastingly kind and patient and wonderful if I hadn’t meant something by it. Goodness knows what you’d all like me to do,” she murmured gloomily. “Make faces and bark like a dog every time one of you comes near me, I s’pose. Where’s that ball? I wish I were dead.”

This time André’s smile was clearly unforced.

“Oh, no one in the world is droll like you!” he stated with conviction. “But no one. No, do not bark like a little dog--I will be good, I swear.” He shrugged his shoulders philosophically. “After all, if God had made you tender hearted you would spend your days weeping for the ones you broke. So this way it is best, is it not so?”

Fair beamed on him graciously. “Well, of course!” she assented with conviction. “And I’m certainly thankful that you see it. If you’d had about seventy-eight thousand soldiers spending their every waking minute telling you that they’d fade away and die if you weren’t kind to them, you’d see that the novelty of it would wear off a little. Wear off a good deal.” She gave the ball a rather perfunctory hit. After all, Fairfax Carter on the subject of Fairfax Carter was more absorbing than any game ever invented. She drew a deep breath and started off headlong on her favourite topic. “It’s perfectly horrible being a girl--and it’s a million times worse if you’re a--well, if you aren’t exactly revolting looking and are what the dime novels call an heiress.”

“It must, indeed, be hard,” agreed young De Chartreuil consolingly.

Fair glanced at him suspiciously from the corner of her eye.

“You needn’t laugh, my dear boy--it most certainly is. I don’t believe men care one little snip for your soul or--or your intellect.”

“Oh, but surely!” protested De Chartreuil politely.

“No, sir,” maintained the complete cynic, giving another abstracted hit at the ball. “Not a single, solitary one. Oh, bother--look where it went then! How many strokes have you had? Four? _Four?_ I’ve had five, and look at the horrible thing now. What was I talking about? Oh, proposals! I don’t believe in international marriages, do you, Monsieur André?”

Monsieur André made a light and deprecating gesture. “I, Mademoiselle? But I have had so few!”

“I do think foreigners are horribly frivolous!” murmured Fair to the universe at large. “I’ve not had so many myself, but I can still think they’re a bad idea. You couldn’t possibly help thinking that they were pretty cold and calculating.”

“Could you not?” inquired one who had come very near being a cold calculator in a freezing voice. “I, for one, try to look more charitably on the pretty ladies who covet our poor coronets.”

Fair brushed this thrust aside with the obliviousness that made her strength and her weakness once the engine of her attention was racing along her one-track mind to the goal of her selection. Humour, satire, impertinence, or indignation were signals powerless to impede her progress when she was on her way; she rushed by them heedlessly, recklessly indifferent to anything short of a head-on collision.

“Oh, I wasn’t thinking of the girls--who in the world wants a little old coronet! Of course they’re nice if you’re _used_ to them,” she added hastily. “But it was the men that I was thinking of; you simply couldn’t be sure, not ever. You work, don’t you?”

“Alas, yes, Mademoiselle!” De Chartreuil abandoned resentment and stood leaning on his mallet, laughing down at this incorrigible and enchanting small barbarian.

“Monsieur André, why do you suppose that Monsieur de Lautrec doesn’t work?”

“Philippe?” His voice was strange.

“Yes, Philippe--you didn’t suppose that I meant the Vicomte, did you? This place keeps him busy from morning to night. Philippe, of course.” Her voice was impatient, but there was a desperate eagerness behind it that checked the quick words on De Chartreuil’s tongue.

“Mademoiselle, for four years he worked day and night; he gave the blood of his heart, the blood of his soul in work--would you grudge him a little rest?”

“But, good heavens, he’s had years to rest,” cried Fair despairingly. “He’s not going to rest until he dies, is he? You’re not resting--Monsieur Raoul’s not resting--no one in the world has a right to rest when there’s so much to do--no one!”

“For long, long after the war he did not leave the hospital, Mademoiselle.”

“Well, wasn’t he resting there?” demanded his inquisitor fiercely.

“No,” replied the boy gravely. “No, he was not resting there, I think.”

“What--what was the matter with him in the hospital?” asked Fair, making her lips into a very straight line so that they wouldn’t quiver.

“It was--what you call shell-shock.”

“Shell-shock? That’s horrible--oh, don’t I know! Those hospitals--like a nightmare--worse than a nightmare----” She swept it far from her with a resolute gesture. “It’s no good thinking about it; you have to forget! And Heaven knows that he’s over it now; Heaven knows that now he isn’t suffering from any breakdown. I’ve never seen him look even serious for two minutes at a time--I don’t believe that he has the faintest idea of what seriousness means. It’s all very well to have a sense of humour; I have a perfectly wonderful sense of humour myself when I’m not thinking of something more important--but it’s ridiculous to think that that’s all there is to it!” She hit the ball a reckless blow that sent it flying far across the tawny meadow, and turned to young De Chartreuil a lovely little countenance on fire with righteous indignation and angry distress. “A real man would know that life ought to be more than just laughing half the day--and singing half the night--and looking the way the heroes in the moving pictures ought to look--and chatter-boxing away in his room for hours and hours and hours!” Bitter resentment at this unpalatable memory sent the colour flying higher in her cheeks, and she swung off after the red ball at a furious scamper. “And by Glory, I’m going to tell him so!” she announced tempestuously over her shoulder to the astounded André. He sprang forward, galvanized into instant action.

“Mademoiselle--Mademoiselle, wait, I beg you. You jest, of course, but----”

“Indeed I do not jest, of course,” retorted Fair hotly. “I don’t jest one little bit. Why in the world shouldn’t I tell him?”

“There are, I should think, one thousand reasons why,” he replied sharply. “Must I give you the thousand and first, and assure you that always, always, all the days that you live, it would be to you a very deep regret?”

“It certainly would not,” replied his unimpressed audience flatly. Any one who attempted to frighten Fair out of any undertaking whatever was making a vital strategic error, but André de Chartreuil was too young and too thoroughly outraged to indulge in strategy.

“Mademoiselle, but this is madness----”

“Monsieur, but this is impertinence.” Fair’s chin was tilted at an angle that implied that battle, murder, and sudden death would be child’s play to her from then on. This--this little _whipper-snapper_ of a French infant who had basely pretended to be at her feet, suddenly rising up and dictating a course of conduct to her--to _her_! Well, it simply proved what she had always maintained. You couldn’t trust a foreigner--you couldn’t, not ever.

“For what you call impertinence, forgive me.” The tone was far from repentant, and Fair waited stiffly for further developments. “My poor English renders me clumsy--grant me, I pray, patience.”

Very poor English, thought Fair sternly; it might mean anything. Grant him patience indeed! She had precious little patience to spare for any one this morning, as he would discover to his cost.

“Philippe, he is like no one else!” Young De Chartreuil made a gesture of impotent despair, his careful English suddenly turned traitor. “You do not see it, but he is like no one else, I tell you. I who was his sous-officier--his how you call it, his under-officer--ah, no matter--he was my captain for three years, and I know, you hear me, I know.”

“Heaven knows I hear you,” Fair assured him with ominous calm. “I should think that they could hear you in Paris!”

“Well, then, I tell you that we, his men, we who followed him, we would have given the blood out of our hearts for him to shine his boots with--we knew him, we. You know why they call him Philippe le Gai?”

“I know that there’s some story about an old troubadour called Philippe le Gai----”

“About a very great soldier who was also a very great singer, Mademoiselle, long years ago in Provence. Philippe is of his race; one of those who meet Death itself with a song. That other Philippe died eight hundred years ago, and they say that he died singing. And we--we who followed this Philippe and gave to him our souls--we know that he could face worse than death--and still sing.”

“There isn’t the slightest necessity of making a curtain speech to me about courage,” replied the last of the fighting Carters, and the velvet voice rang as cold and hard as drawn steel. “I know quite a good deal about it, thank you. I may not have had any old ancestor that went rampaging around singing songs about how gay and brave and wonderful he was, but I had three great-uncles and a grandfather who were killed in the Civil War and a brother who was killed in the Spanish War, and--and a father----” Her voice failed her, but she swallowed hard and pushed on relentlessly: “And a father who died for his country just as much as any of them, because he went right on working for it when he _knew_ that it would kill him--and who didn’t even let me know that he was dying, because I couldn’t help him, and he thought that I might help America, and I was the only one of the Carters left to fight for America. And I kept on fighting, even though it just about killed me, too; I went into Germany with my men, because I knew that he wouldn’t think the war was over until we got what we fought for--until we _really_ got it--and I’d be there yet if it hadn’t been for those idiotic doctors. Nervous breakdown! For gracious sakes, I’d like to hear what they’d say if one of their old colonels started to have a nervous breakdown. This isn’t any kind of a world to sit and twirl your thumbs and pet your nerves in--and I can’t see that singing about it makes it much nobler--or laughing, either.”

“There are many things, perhaps, that you cannot see,” commented young De Chartreuil, and at the tone in his voice there was one thing that Fair did see, and that was red.

“Well, I can see this,” she cried in a voice shaken with sheer fury, “I can see that it’s possible to be just as much of a slacker after the war as during it.”

“Mademoiselle!”

“In America men _work_,” stormed Fair. “They----”

“In America you save your generosity for your own faults, it seems.” He raised a commanding hand, and Fair stood voiceless, literally transfixed with rage. “No, wait, I beg you; I have not yet finished. Perhaps in your great country you forget that work is the means--that it is not the end; no, no, believe me, it is not the end. It is also not very wise to condemn utterly that which may differ only in kind, not in degree. To you courage may be a dark and stern thing--a duty--but to some--to one at least, Mademoiselle--it is a shining and gay and splendid gift; it is a joy.”

“Are you through with your lessons for the day?” asked Fair icily. “Because if you are, I’m going!” She whirled the red mallet about her head like a battle-axe, and sent it spinning far from her after the neglected ball. “Good-bye--I’m off. Tell the others I twisted my ankle--got a headache--tell them any old lie you think of----”

“But, Mademoiselle, you cannot----”

Fairfax Carter halted for a moment in her tumultuous progress, the wind whipping her leaf-brown skirts about her and sending the bright curls flying about the reckless, stubborn little face.

“Can’t I?” she called back defiantly. “Can’t I? Well, wait and see! I’m going to tell your precious Philippe de Lautrec just exactly what I think of a hero who spends his life resting on his laurels while his sisters work their fingers to the bone--and you and Foch and the Archangel Gabriel can’t stop me, so I’d advise you to stick to croquo-golf. Good-bye!”

She was gone in a brilliant whirl of flying skirts and scarf and hair. Young De Chartreuil watched her disappearing down the long hill that led past Daudin’s farm to the far gate of the château with an expression in which dismay was tempered by a grim satisfaction. After a moment he shrugged his shoulders briefly, retrieved the scarlet ball and mallet, and set off slowly toward the sounds of distant laughter that marked the other players. Well, let her go; she was richly in need of a lesson, that lovely little demon! And to think that for a moment he had dreamed--ah, name of Heaven, what an escape!----

Fair, in the meantime, raced lightly on her chosen way. She was in a towering rage at De Chartreuil for his presumptuous insolence, and in an even more towering rage at herself for the effect that it had had on her. Even immature reflection revealed the unmistakable fact that she had behaved a good deal more like a fish-wife than the traditional great lady. About the only things that she had failed to do were boxing his ears and screaming at the top of her lungs. And she had felt terribly--oh, but terribly--like doing both of them. No, it was all very well to have a temper, but it was a bad strategic error to lose it. Possession is nine points of the law, especially with tempers. Fortunately, the hateful De Chartreuil child had been even worse than she. He had looked at one time as though it would have been pure ecstasy to throttle the life out of her--the time that she had got in that neat thrust about peace-time slackers. Well, she was on her way to tell one of them exactly what she thought of him as fast as her stubby brown boots would carry her. She wrenched impatiently at the iron latch on the great north gate--it yielded with an unexpectedness that nearly threw her off her feet, and she heard it clang to behind her as she raced up the long alley of lime trees that led to the stone terrace. If she were lucky, she might find the object of her righteous wrath basking there in the sunlight, without so much as a book in his graceless hands, dreaming away the hours, his dark face turned to the golden fields of his inheritance. She had found him there before--and, yes, fate was with her--there he was now in his great chair with his back to the lime trees, lounging deep. For a moment she hesitated, her heart thundering in her ears, and then she swung recklessly across the sun-warmed flags, hands deep in her pockets, her chin tilted at an outrageous angle.

“Oh, there you are!” she hailed in her magic voice, but there was something behind the words that turned them from a salutation to a challenge.

Philippe le Gai sat quite still for a moment, and then, without rising, he flung her a radiant smile over his shoulder.

“And there are you!” he said. “All finished, the croquo-golf?”

“No--just finished for me. It’s a stupid game, don’t you think?”

“Me? I think no game stupid that once I have started--no, not one. Then I must play it through to the end, or count myself defeated!”

Fair’s eyes darkened ominously.

“But you don’t start many games, do you?” she asked.

“No,” acquiesced the young man in the chair. “As you say, not many.”

Fair set her teeth. Did he think that if he continued to sprawl all his splendid length there, unmoving, that she would pass on? Was this his method of once more conveying to her the information that her presence was an intrusion? Oh, for a man--for some slim, freckled, young American--to take this insolent foreigner by his coat collar and jerk him to his unworthy feet! Perhaps it might be better to have two of them--he was disgustingly tall. She swung round the corner of the chair, flames dancing in her eyes.

“Are you--very busy?” she inquired in a dangerously polite little voice.

Philippe le Gai showed all of his white teeth in another flashing smile.

“But no!” he replied accurately, and made a swift motion as though to rise, only to check himself more swiftly. “Be seated, I pray you!”

The look of consuming rage that Fair flashed on him as she seated herself in the small iron chair opposite him would have shrivelled a normally sensitive soul to gray ashes. Her impervious host, however, merely leaned deeper into his bright cushions, the smile still edging his lips.

“Laure still plays?”

“Yes,” replied Fair. She spoke with considerable difficulty; the royal condescension of that “Be seated” had left her feeling slightly dizzy.

“I have here a paper which will need her sharp wits--she will not be long, perhaps?”

“I don’t know,” replied Fair sombrely. Just how, she wondered, did you lead up to telling a comparative stranger that you despised him? It was harder than she had thought it would be, out there in the meadow--it was the proud turn of the black head, and the sure strength of the long brown hands, and the sheer beauty of the flashing smile that made it hard. No one had a right to look like that--and to be despicable. It wasn’t fair.

“I think that those poor Gods in Heaven must envy us our earth to-day!” said the object of her scorn, turning his face to the deep blue of the autumn sky. “So warm, so cold, so sweet--like some mad Bacchante, bare of throat and arm for all her warm fur skins, with grapes of purple weighing down her curls, and wine of gold tripping up her light heels.... Once, you know, when I was the smallest of little boys, Monsieur my grandfather call me to come down from my sleep to drink the health of my very new sister--of young Laure. There was a great banquet, a table brave with fruit and flowers and lace and candles, and they put me onto that table, and give me a little burning golden brandy to drink in a great cool glass of crystal--and straight to my head it flew--ah, Dieu, the lucky, curly head! I remember still, you see--I remember how the world must feel to-day. The world and I, we have been fortunate.”

Fair’s mouth was a rose-red line of stern distaste. It might be all very French to take a perfectly good autumn day and turn it into an intoxicated heathen, but in her opinion, which was far from humble, it was simply outrageous. And those detestable people, giving brandy to that darling little boy--well, all little boys were more or less darling. It was their truly lamentable degeneration at about the age of twenty-nine that was occupying her at present. She leaned forward swiftly, her hands very cold and her eyes very hot.

“Monsieur Philippe, don’t you ever, ever get tired of just sitting around doing _nothing_?”

Perhaps the passion in the clear voice touched him--for a moment Philippe le Gai belied his name. Then he made a slight gesture with the hand that held the papers, a gesture of dismissal to such folly as sober thought.

“Tired, Mistress Fairy? How should I be tired, doing nothing? And how are you so sure that I do nothing while I sit around--how are you so sure of that, I wonder?”

“Because I can see you,” replied Fair with despairing emphasis.

“Can you then, Wise Eyes? Can you see so well? Then you must see that it is not nothing that I do.”

“Oh, isn’t it?” she whispered breathlessly, her heart in her voice. “Isn’t it?”

“But never! While I sit around, I am being very, very busy, me, being alive--and being amused--and being, believe me, most eternally and most exultantly grateful. You call that doing nothing?”

“Of course I call that doing nothing,” replied Fair fiercely.

“Now that is strange--because, you know, I am so busy doing it that I can find time to do nothing else. To sit with the sun and beauty and silence all about, that is better than heaven, I think. Always I have loved Beauty better than life and once I thought that I had lost her for ever--and, see, she is mine again! In other fields--fields churned to madness, horrors of white clay and red blood, with the proud trees stripped to dirty black stumps--in other fields I remembered these, and I swore to that god of battles that if he would send me back to this golden grace--to this greenness and kind quiet--I would ask nothing more. And where those stenches made the poor soul sicker than the body, I could sometimes hold my breath, and smell apple-blossoms in the spring moonlight, and yellow roses in the summer sunlight, and spiced wood burning in the great chimneys, and cider blowing across the autumn winds. Now--now I need not hold the breath to smell the good ripe fruit, now I need not close my eyes to see my fields of gold, with the little warm gray sheep against the hills. Now I have come home to my fields, and I keep faith with the god of battles--I ask for nothing more. Look before you, Wise Eyes; what do you see?”

“The alley of lime trees and the north gate and the meadow,” said Fair, fighting to harden the voice that wanted only to break.

“Look farther----”

“I can see the thatch on Daudin’s roof and the road to the village and the little steeple on the church.”

“Nothing more?”

“There’s nothing more to see.”

“You do not see a little boy climbing that iron gate and racing home up that long alley, singing--racing quick, quick because it begins to grow dark?”

“Of course I don’t see him,” replied Fair defiantly, but she leaned forward, straining her eyes.

“Look farther--look far away; you cannot see the other little boys, many, many, all hurrying while they sing to get home before it is dark? No? Ah, poor Wise Eyes! Perhaps it is because it is years that those little boys hurry down, instead of just an alley of lime trees--they are hurrying home clean across the centuries. Since that first Philippe came singing up from the south, they have loved these gray stones best of all the earth--best, I think, of heaven. And that last little boy, he did not love it least, believe me. Perhaps he is singing louder than them all, because though they have made it, those others, he has saved it.”

“He didn’t save it any more than a good many million other people,” commented Fair ruthlessly.

Philippe le Gai threw back his black head with a ringing peal of laughter. “Truly as you say, not more. But that is another reason why he sings, believe me.”

“But what did you do before you started in to save it?” pursued the remorseless inquisitor, and suddenly she sickened at her task. The radiance flagged in the dark face before her; for a moment Philippe le Gai looked mortally tired.

“Me? I was an artist--and an engineer.” He sat staring ahead of him, tense and straight; and then he relaxed easily, the smile playing again. “Not so good an artist, and not so bad an engineer. I was oh, most young, and oh, most vain, and gray-headed old gentlemen from far away came to beg a little advice as to what to do with their sick mines.”

“Mines?” Fair’s face was alight. “That was what Dad used to do before he went in for cotton. It was copper, you know. D’you know about copper?”

“Every kind of mine that ever was I knew about,” he assured her lightly. “But now I have forgotten.”

“How could you?” she cried. “How could you, when they need you so? Don’t you think that that little boy would be ashamed if he could see you sitting on this terrace--just sitting and sitting like a great enormous lazy black cat? Don’t you?”

“Why, no,” replied Philippe le Gai. “No, I do not think that he would be ashamed.”

Fair wrung her hands together; she felt defeat closing about her.

“Those fields that you talked about--don’t you want to make them green and golden again, too?”

“They are very tired, those fields,” said the man. “Shall we not let them rest?”

“Oh!” cried Fair, and the valiant voice struggled and broke. “Oh, how can you--oh, oh, how can you?”

“Fair----”

He was on his feet at last--the swift move sent the paper flying, and it came fluttering irresponsibly across the sunlit space between them, dancing to a halt almost at her feet. It had blown open, and her incredulous eyes were riveted on the letterhead--the little thick black letters spelling out the name of Dad’s attorney, Henry C. Forrester, Wall Street--she stared down blankly:

Dear Sir--

In further reply to your request for full details as to the
fortune left Miss Carter by her father----

A wave of scarlet swept over her from heel to brow; she felt as though she were drowning, she felt as though she were being buried alive, she felt as though a bolt of lightning had passed clean through her body, leaving her quite dead and still.

“So that’s what you are?” she said. “You--you! I might have known.”

“What I am?” His voice was touched with a little wonder. “No, but I do not understand; what is it that I am?”

“There’s no word for you,” she told him between her clicking teeth. She was shaking violently, uncontrollably, like someone in a chill. “Crawling to my lawyers--you--you--a common adventurer----”

“You are mad,” he said.

“It’s here,” cried Fair. “Look. It’s here in black and white--are you going to deny it?”

“Give me that letter,” said Philippe le Gai.

“I wouldn’t touch it in a thousand years,” she flung at him. “Not in a hundred hundred thousand. It’s filthy--it can lie there till it rots.”

“Pick it up,” he told her.

“How dare you?” she whispered. “How dare you?”

“It is not so very greatly daring,” he assured her. “Pick it up, I tell you.”

Fair stared at him voicelessly where he stood, tall and splendid and terrible in the sunlight. No, no, this was nightmare--this was not real. It was not she who bent to the bidding of this relentless monster--it was some other Fairfax caught in a hideous dream. The paper rattled in her fingers like goblin castanets.

“Now bring it to me.”

She crossed the little space of sun-warmed bricks, her eyes fixed and brilliant as a sleep-walker.

“Closer,” bade the still voice. “Closer yet. Yes. Now put it in my hand. That way--yes. It was not yours, you see; did you forget that?”

Fair made no answer. She stood frozen, watching the brown fingers folding the bit of white paper into a neat oblong.

“I would not, I think, say any word to Laure of this,” said the voice. “And I would not, I think, stay here longer. I would forget all this, and go.”

“I am going this afternoon,” she told him through her stiff lips. “And I am going to tell Laure--everything.”

“Do not,” he said. “Do not, believe me.” He stood staring down at the paper, and then he spoke again.

“I am, as you say, an adventurer,” said Philippe le Gai, in that terrible and gentle voice. “And adventure is, as you say, common. For which I thank my gods. You have nothing more to say to me?”

“Nothing.”

“Then that is all, I think, Miss Carter.”

Obviously, the audience was over, the courtier was dismissed. Oh, for one word--one little, little word--to blast him where he stood, gentle and insolent and relentless. She could not find that word, and she would die before she would give him any other. The brown boots stumbled in their haste on the terrace steps; at the foot she turned once more to face him, flinging him a last look of terror and defiance and despair--and deeper than all, wonder. But Philippe le Gai’s face was turned once more to his golden fields.

Far away, at the end of the long alley, she could see the players coming back; she could hear them, too, laughing and calling to each other--Bravo was barking frenziedly, heedless of Diane’s small, peremptory shouts--there, he was off, with Raoul and Diane in pursuit, headed straight for the distant stables. She clung to the stone railing for a moment, limp and sick, and then she flung back her head, spurred her flagging feet, and set off down the arching lime trees, running. Running because she was desperately tired and desperately frightened; because it was toward battle that she ran, and she must get there swiftly. Laure hailed from the far end.

“Ah, small deserter, you come to surrender? Come quick, then, and do penance.”

“I’ve not come to do penance,” said the deserter. She stood very straight with her hands clasped tightly behind her. “I’ve come to say good-bye.”

“Good-bye?” echoed Laure. “Here, André, take this mallet, this ball. What folly is this, Fair?”

“It’s not folly; the folly’s been in staying. I’ve learned quite a lot of things in the last few minutes, Laure. Monsieur de Lautrec has some papers that he wants to show you.”

“Papers? Well, but what is all this mystery? Come, now, Fair, you are not well, I know. The doctor he said you should not be excited.”

“I am not in the least excited,” replied Fair, her eyes two glittering danger signals. “Are you in this plot, too, Monsieur André?”

“_Plot?_ No, decidedly, this is fever! Let me feel your hands, _mon enfant_----”

“Don’t touch me, please,” said Fair, clearly and distinctly.

“Did I say fever? But it is delirium! I am not to touch you?”

“No.” She took a step farther away from Laure who stood looking down at her, clear and quiet, with that incredulous lift to her brows. “Don’t pretend any more, please; it makes me rather sick. I know about everything, you see.”

“That is very exactly what I do not do, _ma petite_. No, André, do not go--you, too, will wait and see. What is this nonsense, Fair?”

“You needn’t keep it up any longer, I tell you,” returned Fair fiercely. “I’ve found out what you and Monsieur de Lautrec have been doing. I thought that you loved me, Laure--you did it pretty well--and all the time you were nothing but fortune hunters, were you?”

“You told Philippe--that?” asked Laure. Every atom of colour had drained out of her face, but she did not lift her voice. “No, wait, André. I am not yet through. It would be a good hunter who could find your fortune, Fairfax. You have none to hunt for.”

“I have two million dollars,” said Fair.

“You have not half a million centimes. It was all in cotton, that great fortune; it is gone. Your lawyers had cabled to you while you were ill in Germany, but the doctors they said you must not hear that bad news then; they asked me to tell you, gently, when you were much better. So I have waited, and Philippe, he has cabled three--no, four times, to see whether skill and thought and work might not save that so mighty fortune. To-day he thought perhaps that we might have heard----”

“Oh,” said Fair in a small, childish voice. “Oh.” She put her hand to her head; it hurt dreadfully. “Well, then, I can go to work----” She made a vague gesture, as though if she stretched out her hand work would be there for her to cling to--and Laure smiled, a fine, cruel little smile. Something snapped in Fair’s head. “That sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it, Laure? But you see, I’m not over six feet tall, I’m not stronger than steel--I’m not busy twelve hours a day sitting around in the sun being an ex-hero--so I’m going to work.”

“Did you, perhaps, tell my brother that you thought that of him, too?” asked Laure.

“I told him that, and I told him more,” said Fair.

Laure came toward her, something so terrible in her white face that for a moment Fair thought that she was going to kill her.

“Little fool!” she said very softly. “Little, wicked, wicked fool, Philippe cannot work--Philippe is blind.”

“No!” cried Fair. She clapped her hands over her ears, to shut out those dreadful words, her face a twisted mask of terror. “No, no, no!”

“And I tell you yes, yes, yes,” repeated the tall girl before her, closing her long fingers over the small wrists, wrenching the clinging hands down relentlessly. “Blind like a stone, I tell you--blind.”

“He couldn’t be--he couldn’t be--I’d have seen----”

“What have you ever seen that did not touch yourself?” asked Philippe’s sister. “He is blind, but not so blind as you. When you came to us, never, never did we think that you would not see, though we could not talk of it--not yet. But Philippe--Philippe he said: ‘No, no--let her alone. She has need of peace and mirth and sunshine, those doctors said--darkness it must not touch her. We will be careful, and perhaps she will not know.’ You have well repaid that care, have you not, Fairfax?”

“But his eyes--his eyes----”

“His eyes--because they are still there, you think they see? They saw too much, those eyes; they see no more. What made the light behind them--that nerve behind them--it is paralyzed. You who know so much about the war, you do not know that shock could do that? That there are men blind because their eyes turned rebel, and they would see no more horror--deaf because they would not hear more horror--dumb because they could not tell their horror. Philippe--Philippe he loved beauty--and after a long while his eyes they went mad--and he is blind. Work--work, you little fool! All day, all night, he works, he works. To learn to read--to learn to write--to learn to live, to live, you hear----”

“Please let me go, Laure,” whispered Fair. “Please, Laure--please, Laure.”

“I will tell Marie Léontine to help you with your packing,” said Laure. “And I am glad indeed to let you go. Come, André.”

Fair watched them cutting across the garden to the east entrance--not the terrace, not the terrace. She couldn’t run any more--she felt as though she could never run again--but perhaps if she started now and went very carefully, holding to the lime trees, she could get there before he left. She must, she must get there before he left.... Not until she was at the steps did she dare to raise her eyes. He was still there.

“Laure?” he called. “Laure?”

“It’s Fair,” she said. “I came back.”

She saw him grind the paper between his hands--and then he turned toward her, smiling a little.

“You had forgotten something?”

“Yes.” She was quite near now, but her voice was so low that it barely reached him. “I came back to tell you--to tell you----”

The smile deepened on the dark young face. “Ah, _tiens_! There was something, then, that you forgot to tell me? Never should I have said it!”

“Please,” she entreated, in that shadow of a voice. “Please. I know now about--about--Laure told me!”

“About why I lie like that cat in the sun? Good! Now you tell Laure----” He broke off sharply. “She was not kind, our Laure? You are weeping? Do not weep; those little jewels of tears, so small, so shining, so empty, empty--you women love them best of all your jewels, I think. But me, I do not think that they become you best!”

“I don’t cry often,” Fair told him. “Not often, really. You can ask Dad--no, no--not Dad. It’s because I’m tired, probably. I came back because I wanted to tell you----” She swallowed despairingly, the tears salt on her lips.

“Why, because you were a good child,” he helped her gaily. “And wanted to tell me that you were sorry.”

“No--no. Because I wanted to tell you that I was glad.”

“_Glad?_” He was on his feet, with that cry.

“How could I be sorry for you, Philippe? Oh, I can’t be sorry for myself--not even now--not now, when I see myself. I wanted so to be proud of you--you don’t know--you don’t--you don’t----”

“And why did you so want to be proud of me, may I ask?”

“Because I love you,” said Fair clearly.

Philippe le Gai caught at the cushioned chair. “You are mad,” he said.

“Yes.” The voice tripped in its haste. “Yes, but you see I had to tell you. You mustn’t mind; I’m going this afternoon--Marie Léontine’s waiting now. Don’t mind, please, Philippe; I didn’t know, myself, truly--not till Laure told me about--about you, and I knew that I didn’t care at all how horrible and vile I had been, because I was so glad that you--that you----”

“Hush!” He stood quite still, and then he raised his hand to his eyes. “I should send you far from me, Fairfax.”

“Yes,” said Fair, “I’m not any good, you see. All I had to give you was my money and my--my prettiness. I can’t give you either of them, Philippe.”

“When I heard you laugh, that first night when you came,” he told her, “I remembered--I remembered that laughter was not just a sound to cover up despair--I remembered how to laugh that night.”

She stared at him, voiceless.

“When you spoke to me--when you spoke to me, my Music--I was glad then that I could not see, because I wished to listen only, always.”

“Philippe,” she prayed. “Don’t, don’t send me away, Philippe.”

“We are mad,” he said. “Come closer.”

And once more she went toward him across that sunlit space, to where he stood, tall and splendid and terrible. “Closer still,” he said. “Closer still--still closer. Why do you weep, my Laughter?”

“Hold me--hold me--don’t let me go.”

“Blindness,” he said. “It is just a little word, a little, dark, ugly word to frighten foolish children. Are you beautiful, my Loveliness? Never, never could you be beautiful as I dream you!” He touched her lips with his brown fingers.

“Smile!” he said. And she smiled.

“What is blindness to me who can touch your lips to laughter?” he asked her, bending his black head until his lips swept her lashes. “What is blindness to me, who can touch your eyes to tears?”

The sunlight fell across the bright hair of the last of the fighting Carters--he could feel it warm against his lips and suddenly he laughed aloud.

“What is blindness to me?” cried Philippe le Gai to the golden sun. “What is blindness to me, who hold my light against my heart?”

GREEN GARDENS

Daphne was singing to herself when she came through the painted gate in the back wall. She was singing partly because it was June, and Devon, and she was seventeen, and partly because she had caught a breath-taking glimpse of herself in the long mirror as she had flashed through the hall at home, and it seemed almost too good to be true that the radiant small person in the green muslin frock with the wreath of golden hair bound about her head and the sea-blue eyes laughing back at her was really Miss Daphne Chiltern. Incredible, incredible luck to look like that, half Dryad, half Kate Greenaway--she danced down the turf path to the herb garden, swinging her great wicker basket and singing like a mad thing.

“He promised to buy me a bonnie blue ribbon,” carolled Daphne, all her ribbons flying,

“He promised to buy me a bonnie blue ribbon,
He promised to buy me a bonnie blue ribbon
To tie up----”

The song stopped as abruptly as though someone had struck it from her lips. A strange man was kneeling by the beehive in the herb garden. He was looking at her over his shoulder, at once startled and amused, and she saw that he was wearing a rather shabby tweed suit and that his face was brown against his close-cropped tawny hair. He smiled, his teeth a strong flash of white.

“Hello!” he greeted her, in a tone at once casual and friendly.

Daphne returned the smile uncertainly. “Hello,” she replied gravely.

The strange man rose easily to his feet, and she saw that he was very tall and carried his head rather splendidly, like the young bronze Greek in Uncle Roland’s study at home. But his eyes--his eyes were strange--quite dark and burned out. The rest of him looked young and vivid and adventurous, but his eyes looked as though the adventure were over, though they were still questing.

“Were you looking for any one?” she asked, and the man shook his head, laughing.

“No one in particular, unless it was you.”

Daphne’s soft brow darkened. “It couldn’t possibly have been me,” she said in a stately small voice, “because, you see, I don’t know you. Perhaps you didn’t know that there is no one living in Green Gardens now?”

“Oh, yes, I knew. The Fanes have left for Ceylon, haven’t they?”

“Sir Harry left two weeks ago, because he had to see the old governor before he sailed, but Lady Audrey only left last week. She had to close the London house, too, so there was a great deal to do.”

“I see. And so Green Gardens is deserted?”

“It is sold,” said Daphne, with a small quaver in her voice, “just this afternoon. I came over to say good-bye to it, and to get some mint and lavender from the garden.”

“Sold?” repeated the man, and there was an agony of incredulity in the stunned whisper. He flung out his arm against the sun-warmed bricks of the high wall as though to hold off some invader. “No, no; they’d never dare to sell it.”

“I’m glad you mind so much,” said Daphne. “It’s strange that nobody minds but us, isn’t it? I cried at first--and then I thought that it would be happier if it wasn’t lonely and empty, poor dear--and then, it was such a beautiful day, that I forgot to be unhappy.”

The man bestowed a wrenched smile on her. “You hardly conveyed the impression of unrelieved gloom as you came around that corner,” he assured her.

“I--I haven’t a very good memory for being unhappy,” Daphne confessed remorsefully, a guilty rose staining her to her brow at the memory of that exultant chant.

He threw back his head with a sudden shout of laughter.

“These are glad tidings! I’d rather find a pagan than a Puritan at Green Gardens any day. Let’s both have a poor memory. Do you mind if I smoke?”

“No,” she replied, “but do you mind if I ask you what you are doing here?”

“Not a bit.” He lit the stubby brown pipe, curving his hand dexterously to shelter it from the little breeze. He had the most beautiful hands that she had ever seen, slim and brown and fine; they looked as though they would be miraculously strong--and miraculously gentle. “I came to see whether there was ‘honey still for tea,’ Mistress Dryad!”

“Honey--for tea?” she echoed wonderingly. “Was that why you were looking at the hive?”

He puffed meditatively. “Well--partly. It’s a quotation from a poem. Ever read Rupert Brooke?”

“Oh, yes, yes.” Her voice tripped in its eagerness. “I know one by heart--

“‘If I should die think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. That shall be----’”

He cut in on the magical little voice roughly.

“Ah, what damned nonsense! Do you suppose he’s happy, in his foreign field, that golden lover? Why shouldn’t even the dead be homesick? No, no--he was sick for home in Germany when he wrote that poem of mine--he’s sicker for it in Heaven, I’ll warrant.” He pulled himself up swiftly at the look of amazement in Daphne’s eyes. “I’ve clean forgotten my manners,” he confessed ruefully. “No, don’t get that flying look in your eyes; I swear that I’ll be good. It’s a long time--it’s a long time since I’ve talked to any one who needed gentleness. If you knew what need I had of it, you’d stay a little while, I think.”

“Of course I’ll stay,” she said. “I’d love to, if you want me to.”

“I want you to more than I’ve ever wanted anything that I can remember.” His tone was so matter-of-fact that Daphne thought that she must have imagined the words. “Now, can’t we make ourselves comfortable for a little while? I’d feel safer if you weren’t standing there ready for instant flight! Here’s a nice bit of grass--and the wall for a back----”

Daphne glanced anxiously at the green muslin frock. “It’s--it’s pretty hard to be comfortable without cushions,” she submitted diffidently.

The man yielded again to laughter. “Are even Dryads afraid to spoil their frocks? Cushions it shall be. There are some extra ones in the chest in the East Indian room, aren’t there?”

Daphne let the basket slip through her fingers, her eyes black through sheer surprise.

“But how did you know--how did you know about the lacquer chest?” she whispered breathlessly.

“Oh, devil take me for a blundering ass!” He stood considering her forlornly for a moment, and then shrugged his shoulders, with the brilliant and disarming smile. “The game’s up, thanks to my inspired lunacy! But I’m going to trust you not to say that you’ve seen me. I know about the lacquer chest because I always kept my marbles there.”

“Are you Stephen Fane?”

At the awed whisper the man bowed low, all mocking grace, his hand on his heart, the sun burnishing his tawny head.

“Oh-h!” breathed Daphne. She bent to pick up the wicker basket, her small face white and hard.

“Wait!” said Stephen Fane. His face was white and hard, too. “You are right to go--entirely, absolutely right--but I am going to beg you to stay. I don’t know what you’ve heard about me; however vile it is, it’s less than the truth----”

“I have heard nothing of you,” said Daphne, holding her gold-wreathed head high, “but five years ago I was not allowed to come to Green Gardens for weeks because I mentioned your name. I was told that it was not a name to pass decent lips.”

Something terrible leaped in those burned-out eyes, and died.

“I had not thought they would use their hate to lash a child,” he said. “They were quite right--and you, too. Good-night.”

“Good-night,” replied Daphne clearly. She started down the path, but at its bend she turned to look back--because she was seventeen, and it was June, and she remembered his laughter. He was standing quite still by the golden straw beehive, but he had thrown one arm across his eyes, as though to shut out some intolerable sight. And then, with a soft little rush, she was standing beside him.

“How--how do we get the cushions?” she demanded breathlessly.

Stephen Fane dropped his arm, and Daphne drew back a little at the sudden blaze of wonder in his face.

“Oh,” he whispered voicelessly. “Oh, you Loveliness!” He took a step toward her, and then stood still, clinching his brown hands. Then he thrust them deep in his pockets, standing very straight. “I do think,” he said carefully, “I do think you had better go. The fact that I have tried to make you stay simply proves the particular type of rotter that I am. Good-bye--I’ll never forget that you came back.”

“I am not going,” said Daphne sternly. “Not if you beg me. Because you need me. And no matter how many wicked things you have done, there can’t be anything as wicked as going away when someone needs you. How do we get the cushions?”

“Oh, my wise Dryad!” His voice broke on laughter, but Daphne saw that his lashes were suddenly bright with tears. “Stay, then--why, even I cannot harm you. God himself can’t grudge me this little space of wonder: He knows how far I’ve come for it--how I’ve fought and struggled and ached to win it--how in dirty lands and dirty places I’ve dreamed of summer twilight in a still garden--and England!”

“Didn’t you dream of me?” asked Daphne wistfully, with a little catch of reproach.

He laughed again unsteadily. “Why, who could ever dream of you, my Wonder? You are a thousand thousand dreams come true.”

Daphne bestowed on him a tremulous and radiant smile. “Please let us get the cushions. I think I am a little tired.”

“And I am a graceless fool! There used to be a pane of glass cut out in one of the south casement windows. Shall we try that?”

“Please, yes. How did you find it, Stephen?” She saw again that thrill of wonder on his face, but his voice was quite steady.

“I didn’t find it; I did it! It was uncommonly useful, getting in that way sometimes, I can tell you. And, by the Lord Harry, here it is. Wait a minute, Loveliness; I’ll get through and open the south door for you--no chance that way of spoiling the frock.” He swung himself up with the sure grace of a cat, smiled at her--vanished--it was hardly a minute later that she heard the bolts dragging back in the south door, and he flung it wide.