Jewel Weed Part 7

"Poor things!" said d.i.c.k again.

"I think they are out on the terrace now. Would you like to go over and see them?" Madeline asked.

"No, thank you," said d.i.c.k politely. "We won't make their life any more complicated. Besides, I prefer the society of you and the stars to that of the miserable too-rich. And they are not alone."

"Of course not. They never are. But Mrs. Lenox said yesterday that late this fall, when every one else has gone into winter quarters, she is going to ask you and me and perhaps one or two others to visit her; and we'll have a serene and lovely time."

"Do you think that there is any hope that they will have lost part of their money by that time?" asked d.i.c.k.

"Father says Mr. Windsor has forgotten how to lose money, and of course Mr. Windsor and Mr. Lenox are all one."

"I must see to it that I don't marry a millionaire's daughter," said d.i.c.k.

CHAPTER V

SALAD DAYS

The most desirable thing in life is to have the sense of doing your duty without the trouble of doing it. Therefore days of preparation are always delicious days. There is the mingling of repose with all the joys of activity. To be planning to do things has in it more of triumph than the actual doing. It carries the irradiating light of hope and purpose, without the petty pin-p.r.i.c.k of detail which comes when reality parodies ideals.

d.i.c.k's first summer at home was a period of delight. He absorbed ideas and so felt that he was doing something in this city of his birth which now, in his manhood, came back to him as something new and strange. The weeks drifted by and he seemed to drift with them, though both mind and body were alert. All the things he learned and all the things he meant to do were tripled and quadrupled in interest when he pa.s.sed them on to his two counselors-in-chief, Norris, solid and appreciative, Madeline, even more believing and more sympathizing, but glorified by that charm of s.e.x which gilds even trifling contact of man and maid, making her friendship not only gilt but gold.

So he spent his days in prowling about and meeting all sorts and conditions of men, while Ellery slaved in a dirty and noisy office; but when Sat.u.r.day came and the _Star_ went to press at three, Norris, with the blissful knowledge that there was no Sunday edition, would meet Percival, stocked with a week's acc.u.mulation of experiences. In the hearts of both would be deep rejoicing as, at week-end after week-end, they stowed themselves in d.i.c.k's motor and betook themselves lakeward, nominally to go to the Country Club and play golf, but with the subconsciousness for both that the lake meant Madeline.

There were, to be sure, other people, girls agreeable, pretty and edifying, men of their own type and age, older men who did less sport and more business, but all of these were neither more nor less than a many-colored background to the little three-cornered intimacy which, as d.i.c.k said, "was the real thing."

It came to be understood that the three should spend their Sunday afternoons together, not on the cool piazza, where intrusion in its myriad forms might come upon them, but off somewhere, either on the bosom of the waters or on the bosom of the good green earth, who whispers her secret of eternal vitality to every one that lays an ear close to her heart.

The season was like the placid hour before the world wakes to its daily comedy and tragedy; and yet, with all its superficial serenity, this summer carried certain undercurrents of emotion that hardly rose to the dignity of discontent, but which, nevertheless, troubled the still waters of the soul. At first Madeline half resented the continual presence of Norris at these sacred conclaves. He seemed so much an outsider. d.i.c.k she had known all her life and she could talk to him with perfect freedom, but his friend often sat silent during their chatter, as though he were an onlooker before whom spontaneity was impossible.

Yet as Sunday after Sunday the two young men strode up together, she grew to accept Ellery. First he became inoffensive; then she became aware that his eyes spoke when his lips were dumb; and finally, when words did come, they were the words of a friend who understood moods and tenses. In some ways it was a comfort to have this buffer between her and d.i.c.k. It helped to prolong the period of uncertain certainty.

d.i.c.k never spoke of love, but the way was pointed not only by the easy restfulness of their comradeship, but in the very atmosphere that surrounded them. She read it half-consciously in the looks of father and mother as they met and accepted d.i.c.k's intimacy in the house, in the warmth of Mrs. Percival's motherly affection when Madeline ran in for one of her frequent calls. Life was full of it, like the gentle half-warmth that comes before the sun has quite peeped over the horizon on a summer morning; and it was well that this dawn to their day should be a long one. Madeline had been away the greater part of four years, and she was now in no hurry to cut short her reunion with the old home life. d.i.c.k, too, had his beginnings to make, man-fashion, and they ought to be made before he took on himself the full life of a man. So she was happily content to drift, conscious in a vague dreamy way that the drift was in the right direction, feeling the situation without a.n.a.lyzing it.

It was a condition of affairs like Madeline herself, gently affectionate, but not pa.s.sionate or deeply emotional. She was not of the type of women who rise up and control destiny.

Norris, for all his pa.s.sive exterior, had undercurrents that were fervid and powerful, and this first summer in the West, unruffled on its surface, stirred them and sent his life whirling along their irresistible streams. He never lost the sense that he was an outsider, admitted on sufferance to see the happiness of others and allowed to pick up their crumbs. If hard work, oblivion and lovelessness were to be his lot, the hardest of these was lovelessness. Much as he loved d.i.c.k he continually resented that young man's careless acceptance of the good things of life, and most of all did his irritation grow at Percival's way of taking Madeline for granted, enjoying her beauty, her sympathy, the grace that she threw over everything, and yet, thought Ellery, never half appreciating them. He himself bowed before them with an adoration that was framed in anguish because these things were, and were not for him. More and more cruel grew the knowledge that the currents of his life were gall and wormwood, flowing through wastes of bitterness.

Yet, along with the new grief came a new awakening, at first dimly felt by Madeline alone, then read with greater and greater clearness.

But of all undercurrents, d.i.c.k, prime mover and chief talker, remained unconscious, absorbed in his own dawning career, delighting in his two friends chiefly as hearers and sympathizers with his mult.i.tudinous ideas.

So it happened that one August afternoon, when it was late enough for the sun to have lost its fury, a not too strenuous breeze drove their tiny yacht through a channel which stretched enticingly between a wooded island and the jutting mainland.

"Let's land there," Madeline exclaimed suddenly. "It looks like a jolly place."

She pointed toward a stretch of beach caught between the arms of trees that came to the very water's edge, and enshrined in a great wild grape-vine that had climbed from branch to branch until it made a tangled canopy.

d.i.c.k turned sharply inward and ran their prow into the twittering sand.

"Thou speakest and it is thy servant's place to obey," he said.

"How does it feel to keep slaves? I've often wondered," Ellery said as he jumped ash.o.r.e and d.i.c.k began tossing him rugs and cushions.

"Very comfy, thank you, and not at all un-Christian," she answered saucily. "d.i.c.k, don't throw the supper basket, under penalty of liquidating the sandwiches. I think there's a freezer of ice-cream under the deck, if you'll pull it out. Now, are you ready for me?"

She stepped lightly forward under d.i.c.k's guidance, took Ellery's outstretched hands and sprang to the sh.o.r.e, where a kind of throne was built for her against a prostrate log,--all this help not because it was necessary, but as the appropriate pomp of royalty.

"I suspect," said d.i.c.k, looking about him with great satisfaction, "that this was a favorite picnic place for Gitche Manito and Hiawatha, in the morning of days."

"That shows how nature can forget," Madeline retorted. "Surely you know the real story, d.i.c.k."

"I don't," said Ellery. "Tell it to me."

She snuggled comfortably down into her rugs.

"In early days, which is the western equivalent for 'once upon a time,'

a furious storm raged down the lake and tore the water into long ribbons of purple and green. A beautiful girl stood, perhaps on this very spot, with a savage who had rescued her from a sinking canoe and brought her here, dripping but safe. Over there on the mainland her father came running out of the woods in an agony of fear. He saw her here, saw her signals, but the shriek of the storm and the roar of the waters drowned out the words that she frantically screamed toward him.

He saw her point to the Indian, who was always feared, always counted treacherous, and his dread of the hurricane changed to terror of the savage. He raised his rifle and the girl's deliverer dropped dead at her feet."

"Then fifty years went by, and this became a bower for the eating of sandwiches," added d.i.c.k.

Norris was lying on his back and staring through the tangle of grape and maple leaves at the flecks of blue beyond.

"That's a n.o.ble story," he said. "I didn't suppose this new land had any legends. It all gives me the impression of being just old enough to be big."

"Isn't that the conceit of the Anglo-Saxon? He calls this a new land because he's lived here only about a half-century. Things did happen before you were born, my dear boy," said d.i.c.k.

"Indeed! What things?" Norris asked placidly.

"Suppose you enlarge your mind by looking up the stories of the old _coureurs du bois_ who used to stumble through these woods when they were the border-land between Chippewa and Sioux." d.i.c.k threw a pebble at Norris' face. "Suppose you go up to that inky stream in the north, which twists mysteriously through the forests, black with the bodies of dead men rotting in its mire. I don't wonder they thought the rough life more fascinating than kings and courts. I'd like to have seen sun-dances and maiden-tests; I'd like to have eaten food strange enough to be picturesque, and to have found new streams and traced them to their sources, and to have come unexpectedly on new lakes, like amethysts.

It's as much fun to discover as to invent. And then the Jesuit fathers, half-tramp, half-martyr,--they were great old fellows."

"And the Frenchman--where is he?" said Madeline. "Gone, and left a few names for the Swede and the American to misp.r.o.nounce; but you may come down later, Mr. Norris, and find how law and order, in our own people, fought with savagery out here on the frontier. It's a thrilling story."

"You love it all and its legends, don't you?" Ellery looked from one to the other.

"Don't you?" Madeline asked.

"By Jove, I do!" he cried, sitting suddenly upright as though stirred with genuine feeling. "I love it without its legends. It does not seem to me to have any past. It is all future. It makes me feel all future, too."

"Do you know what's happened to you?" d.i.c.k laughed exultantly. "Gitche Manito the Mighty has got you--the spirit of the West--which, being interpreted, is Ozone."

"Something has got me, I admit," Norris cried. "What is it? What is it that makes the sky so dazzling? What is it that makes the leaves fairly radiate light? What is it that, every time you take a breath, makes the air freshen you down to your toes? I feel younger than I ever did before in all my life."

The other two were looking at him.