Fennel and Rue Part 7

"Oh, that excuses it, then," Miss Macroyd said. But she lost the laugh which was her due in the rush which some of the others made to open a window and see whether it could be made to snow in-doors there.

"Oh, it isn't crowded enough here," the young man explained who had alleged the scientific marvel.

"And it isn't Boston," Miss Macroyd tried again on the same string, and this time she got her laugh.

The girl who had first spoken remained, at the risk of pneumonia, with her arm prettily lifted against the open sash, for a moment peering out, and then reported, in dashing it down with a shiver, "It seems to be a very soft snow."

"Then it will be rain by morning," another predicted, and the girl tried hard to think of something to say in support of the hit she had made already. But she could not, and was silent almost through the whole first course at dinner.

In spite of its being a soft snow, it continued to fall as snow and not as rain. It lent the charm of stormy cold without to the brightness and warmth within. Much later, when between waltzes some of the dancers went out on the verandas for a breath of air, they came back reporting that the wind was rising and the snow was drifting.

Upon the whole, the snow was a great success, and her guests congratulated Mrs. Westangle on having thought to have it. The felicitations included recognition of the originality of her whole scheme. She had downed the h.o.a.ry superst.i.tion that people had too much of a good time on Christmas to want any good time at all in the week following; and in acting upon the well-known fact that you never wanted a holiday so much as the day after you had one, she had made a movement of the highest social importance. These were the ideas which Verrian and the young man of the in-doors snow-storm urged upon her; his name was Bushwick, and he and Verrian found that they were very good-fellows after they had rather supposed the contrary.

Mrs. Westangle received their ideas with the twittering reticence that deceived so many people when they supposed she knew what they were talking about.

XII.

At breakfast, where the guests were reasonably punctual, they were all able to observe, in the rapid succession in which they descended from their rooms, that it had stopped snowing and the sun was shining brilliantly.

"There isn't enough for sleighing," Mrs. Westangle proclaimed from the head of the table in her high twitter, "and there isn't any coasting here in this flat country for miles."

"Then what are we going to do with it?" one of the young ladies humorously pouted.

"That's what I was going to suggest," Mrs. Westangle replied. She p.r.o.nounced it 'sujjest', but no one felt that it mattered. "And, of course," she continued, "you needn't any of you do it if you don't like."

"We'll all do it, Mrs. Westangle," Bushwick said. "We are unanimous in that."

"Perhaps you'll think it rather funny--odd," she said.

"The odder the better, I think," Verrian ventured, and another man declared that nothing Mrs. Westangle would do was odd, though everything was original.

"Well, there is such a thing as being too original," she returned. Then she turned her head aside and looked down at something beside her plate and said, without lifting her eyes, "You know that in the Middle Ages there used to be flower-fights among the young n.o.bility in Italy. The women held a tower, and the men attacked it with roses and flowers generally."

"Why, is this a speech?" Miss Macroyd interrupted.

"A speech from the throne, yes," Bushwick solemnly corrected her. "And she's got it written down, like a queen--haven't you, Mrs. Westangle?"

"Yes, I thought it would be more respectful."

"She coming out," Bushwick said to Verrian across the table.

"And if I got mixed up I could go back and straighten it," the hostess declared, with a good--humored candor that took the general fancy, "and you could understand without so much explaining. We haven't got flowers enough at this season," she went on, looking down again at the paper beside her plate, "but we happen to have plenty of s...o...b..a.l.l.s, and the notion is to have the women occupy a snow tower and the men attack them with s...o...b..a.l.l.s."

"Why," Bushwick said, "this is the snow-fort business of our boyhood!

Let's go out and fortify the ladies at once." He appealed to Verrian and made a feint of pushing his chair back. "May we use water-soaked s...o...b..a.l.l.s, or must they all be soft and harmless?" he asked of Mrs.

Westangle, who was now the centre of a storm of applause and question from the whole table.

She kept her head and referred again to her paper. "The missiles of the a.s.sailants are to be very soft s...o...b..a.l.l.s, hardly more than mere clots, so that n.o.body can be hurt in the a.s.sault, but the defenders may repel the a.s.sailants with harder s...o...b..a.l.l.s."

"Oh," Miss Macroyd protested, "this is consulting the weakness of our s.e.x."

"In the fury of the onset we'll forget it," Verrian rea.s.sured her.

"Do you think you really will, Mr. Verrian?" she asked. "What is all our athletic training to go for if you do?"

Mrs. Westangle read on:

"The terms of capitulation can be arranged on the ground, whether the castle is carried or the a.s.sailing party are made prisoners by its defenders."

"Hopeless captivity in either case!" Bushwick lamented.

"Isn't it rather academic?" Miss Macroyd asked of Verrian, in a low voice.

"I'm afraid, rather," he owned.

"But why are you so serious?" she pursued.

"Am I serious?" he retorted, with a trace of exasperation; and she laughed.

Their parley was quite lost in the clamor which raged up and down the table till Mrs. Westangle ended it by saying, "There's no obligation on any one to take part in the hostilities. There won't be any conscription; it's a free fight that will be open to everybody." She folded the paper she had been reading from and put it in her lap, in default of a pocket. She went on impromptu:

"You needn't trouble about building the fort, Mr. Bushwick. I've had the farmer and his men working at the castle since daybreak, and the ladies will find it all ready for them, when they're ready to defend it, down in the meadow beyond the edge of the birch-lot. The battle won't begin till eleven o'clock."

She rose, and the clamor rose again with her, and her guests crushed about her, demanding to be allowed at least to go and look at the castle immediately.

One of the men's voices asked, "May I be one of the defenders, Mrs.

Westangle? I want to be on the winning side, sure."

"Oh, is this going to be a circus chariot-race?" another lamented.

"No, indeed," a girl cried, "it's to be the real thing."

It fell to Verrian, in the a.s.sortment of couples in which Mrs.

Westangle's guests sallied out to view the proposed scene of action, to find himself, not too willingly, at Miss Macroyd's side. In his heart and in his mind he was defending the amus.e.m.e.nt which he instantly divined as no invention of Mrs. Westangle's, and both his heart and his mind misgave him about this first essay of Miss Shirley in her new enterprise. It was, as Miss Macroyd had suggested, academic, and at the same time it had a danger in it of being tomboyish. Golf, tennis, riding, boating, swimming--all the vigorous sports in which women now excel--were boldly athletic, and yet you could not feel quite that they were tomboyish. Was it because the bent of Miss Shirley was so academic that she was periling upon tomboyishness without knowing it in this primal inspiration of hers? Inwardly he resented the word academic, although outwardly he had a.s.sented to it when Miss Macroyd proposed it.

To be academic would be even more fatal to Miss Shirley's ambition than to be tomboyish, and he thought with pathos of that touch about the Italian n.o.bility in the Middle Ages, and how little it could have moved the tough fancies of that crowd of well-groomed young people at the breakfast-table when Mrs. Westangle brought it out with her ignorant acceptance of it as a social force. After all, Miss Macroyd was about the only one who could have felt it in the way it was meant, and she had chosen to smile at it. He wondered if possibly she could feel the secondary pathos of it as he did. But to make talk with her he merely asked:

"Do you intend to take part in the fray?"

"Not unless I can be one of the reserve corps that won't need to be brought up till it's all over. I've no idea of getting my hair down."

"Ah," he sighed, "you think it's going to be rude:"

"That is one of the chances. But you seem to be suffering about it, Mr.

Verrian!" she said, and, of course, she laughed.

"Who? I?" he returned, in the temptation to deny it. But he resisted. "I always suffer when there's anything silly happening, as if I were doing it myself. Don't you?"