Ailsa Paige Part 10

"I know you didn't. My answer was not frank. The reason I never came to you before was that-I did not know I would be welcomed."

Their voices dropped. Ailsa standing by the window, watching the orioles in the maple, could no longer distinguish what they were saying.

He said: "You were bridesmaid to my mother. You are the Celia Paige of her letters."

"She is always Connie Berkley to me. I loved no woman better. I love her still."

"I found that out yesterday. That is why I dared come. I found, among the English letters, one from you to her, written-after."

"I wrote her again and again. She never replied. Thank G.o.d, she knew I loved her to the last."

He rested on the tabletop and stood leaning over and looking down.

"Dear Mr. Berkley," she murmured gently.

He straightened himself, pa.s.sed a hesitating hand across his forehead, ruffling the short curly hair. Then his preoccupied gaze wandered. Ailsa turned toward him at the same moment, and instantly a flicker of malice transformed the n.o.bility of his set features:

"It seems," he said, "that you and I are irrevocably related in all kinds of delightful ways, Mrs. Paige. Your sister-in-law very charmingly admits it, graciously overlooks and pardons my many delinquencies, and has asked me to come again. Will you ask me, too?"

Ailsa merely looked at him.

Mrs. Craig said, laughing: "I knew you were all Ormond and entirely Irish as soon as I came in the do'-befo' I became aware of your racial fluency. I speak fo' my husband and myse'f when I say, please remember that our do' is ve'y wide open to our own kin-and that you are of them--"

"Oh, I'm all sorts of things beside-" He paused for a second-"Cousin Celia," he added so lightly that the grace with which he said it covered the impudence, and she laughed in semi-critical approval and turned to Ailsa, whose smile in response was chilly-chillier still when Berkley did what few men have done convincingly since powdered hair and knee-breeches became unfashionable-bent to salute Celia Craig's fingertips. Then he turned to her and took his leave of her in a conventional manner entirely worthy of the name his mother bore,-and her mother before her, and many a handsome man and many a beautiful woman back to times when a great duke stood unjustly attainted, and the Ormonds served their king with steel sword and golden ewer; and served him faithfully and well.

Camilla Lent called a little later. Ailsa was in the backyard garden, a trowel in her hand, industriously loosening the earth around the prairie roses.

"Camilla," she said, looking up from where she was kneeling among the shrubs, "what was it you said this morning about Mr. Berkley being some unpleasant kind of man?"

"How funny," laughed Camilla. "You asked me that twice before."

"Did I? I forgot," said Mrs. Paige with a shrug; and, bending over again, became exceedingly busy with her trowel until the fire in her cheeks had cooled.

"Every woman that ever saw him becomes infatuated with Phil Berkley," said Camilla cheerfully. "I was. You will be. And the worst of it is he's simply not worth it."

"I-thought not."

"Why did you think not?"

"I don't know why."

"He can be fascinating," said Camilla reflectively, "but he doesn't always trouble himself to be."

"Doesn't he?" said Ailsa with a strange sense of relief.

Camilla hesitated, lowered her voice.

"They say he is fast," she whispered. Ailsa, on her knees, turned and looked up.

"Whatever that means," added Camilla, shuddering. "But all the same, every girl who sees him begins to adore him immediately until her parents make her stop."

"How silly," said Ailsa in a leisurely level voice. But her heart was beating furiously, and she turned to her roses with a blind energy that threatened them root and runner.

"How did you happen to think of him at all?" continued Camilla mischievously.

"He called on-Mrs. Craig this afternoon."

"I didn't know she knew him."

"They are related-distantly-I believe--"

"Oh," exclaimed Camilla. "I'm terribly sorry I spoke that way about him, dear--"

"I don't care what you say about him," returned Ailsa Paige fiercely, emptying some grains of sand out of one of her gloves; resolutely emptying her mind, too, of Philip Berkley.

"Dear," she added gaily to Camilla, "come in and we'll have tea and gossip, English fashion. And I'll tell you about my new duties at the Home for Dest.i.tute Children-every morning from ten to twelve, my dear, in their horrid old infirmary-the poor little darlings!-and I would be there all day if I wasn't a selfish, indolent, pleasure-loving creature without an ounce of womanly feeling-Yes I am! I must be, to go about to galleries and dances and Philharmonics when there are motherless children in that infirmary, as sick for lack of love as for the hundred and one ailments distressing their tender little bodies."

But over their tea and marmalade and toast she became less communicative; and once or twice the conversation betrayed an unexpected tendency to drift toward Berkley.

"I haven't the slightest curiosity concerning him, dear," said Ailsa, attempting corroboration in a yawn-which indiscretion she was unable to accomplish.

"Well," remarked Camilla, "the chances are that you've seen the last of him if you showed it too plainly. Men don't come back when a girl doesn't wish them to. Do they?"

After Camilla had gone, Ailsa roamed about the parlours, apparently renewing her acquaintance with the familiar decorations. Sometimes she stood at windows, looking thoughtfully into the empty street; sometimes she sat in corners, critically surveying empty s.p.a.ce.

Yes, the chances were that he would scarcely care to come back. A man of that kind did not belong in her sister-in-law's house, anyway, nor in her own-a man who could appeal to a woman for a favourable opinion of himself, asking her to suspend her reason, stifle logic, stultify her own intelligence, and trust to a sentimental impulse that he deserved the toleration and consideration which he asked for... . It was certainly well for her that he should not return... . It would be better for her to lay the entire matter before her sister-in-law-that was what she would do immediately!

She sprang to her feet and ran lightly up-stairs; but, fast as she fled, thought outran her slender flying feet, and she came at last very leisurely into Celia's room, a subdued, demure opportunist, apparently with nothing on her mind and conscience,

"If I may have the carriage at ten, Celia, I'll begin on the Dest.i.tute Children to-morrow... . Poor babies! ... If they only had once a week as wholesome food as is wasted in this city every day by Irish servants ... which reminds me-I suppose you will have to invite your new kinsman to dine with you."

"There is loads of time for that, Honey-bud," said her sister-in-law, glancing up absently from the note she was writing.

"I was merely wondering whether it was necessary at all," observed Ailsa Paige, without interest.

But Celia had begun to write again. "I'll ask him," she said in her softly preoccupied voice, "Sat.u.r.day, I think."

"Oh, but I'm invited to the Cortlandt's," began Ailsa, and caught her under lip in her teeth. Then she turned and walked noiselessly into her bedroom, and sat down on the bed and looked at the wall.

CHAPTER IV

It was almost mid-April; and still the silvery-green ta.s.sels on the wistaria showed no hint of the blue petals folded within; but the maples' leafless symmetry was already veined with fire. Faint perfume from Long Island woodlands, wandering puffs of wind from salt meadows freshened the city streets; St. Felix Street boasted a lilac bush in leaf; Oxford Street was gay with hyacinths and a winter-battered b.u.t.terfly; and in Fort Greene Place the gra.s.sy door-yards were exquisite with crocus bloom. Peace, good-will, and spring on earth; but in men's souls a silence as of winter.

To Northland folk the unclosing buds of April brought no awakening; lethargy fettered all, arresting vigour, sapping desire. An immense inertia chained progress in its tracks, while overhead the gray storm-wrack fled away,-misty, monstrous, gale-driven before the coming hurricane.

Still, for the Northland, there remained now little of the keener suspense since those first fiery outbursts in the South; but all through the winter the dull pain throbbed in silence as star after star dropped from the old galaxy and fell flashing into the new.

And it was a time of apathy, acquiescence, stupefied incredulity; a time of dull faith in destiny, duller resignation.