Life at High Tide Part 5

Lizzie Graham took it, and stood stock-still for one hard moment....

Then she led him down-stairs, out upon the porch, past the loafers gaping and nudging each other.

"Goin' to be married, after all, Mis' Graham?" some one said.

And Lizzie Graham turned and faced them. "No," she said, calmly.

Then they went out into the sunshine together.

"AND ANGELS CAME--"

BY ANNE O'HAGAN

The full effulgence of cloudless midsummer enveloped the place. The lawns, bright and soft, sloped for half a mile to the sweetbrier hedge. Among them wound the drive, now and again crossing the stone bridges of the small, curving lake which gave the estate its affected name--Lakeholm. To the left of the house a coppice of bronze beeches shone with dark l.u.s.tre; clumps of rhododendrons enlivened the green with splashes of color. Lombardy poplars, with their gibbetlike erectness, bordered the roads and intersected them with mathematical shadows; here and there rose a feathery elm or a maple of wide-branched beauty. To the right, a shallow fall of terraces led to the Italian garden, Mrs. Dinsmore's chief pride, now a glory of matched and patterned color and a dazzle of spray from marble basins.

Beyond all the careful, exotic beauty of the place, the wide valley dipped away, alternate meadow and grove, until it met the silvery shiver of willows marking the course of the river. Beyond that again, the hills, solemn in unbroken green, rose to cloud-touched heights.

Before the house Brockton's new automobile waited. He himself leaned against a stone pillar of the piazza, facing his hostess, who sat on the edge of a chair in the tense att.i.tude of protest against delay.

She had scarcely recovered from her waking crossness yet, and found herself more irritated than amused at the eccentricities of her guest.

She was wondering with unusual asperity why a man with such lack-l.u.s.tre blue eyes dared to wear a tie of such brilliant contrast.

He interrupted her musings.

"Miss Harned seems mighty stand-offish these days."

"Millicent is a little difficult," admitted Millicent's cousin.

"What do you suppose it is? She seemed all smooth enough in New York last winter, and even in the spring after--But now--" He paused again without finishing his sentence. "And I had counted on your influence to make her more approachable."

"Oh, Millicent is having a struggle with her better nature, that is all," laughed Mrs. Dinsmore. "It's hard living with her during the process, but she's adorable once her n.o.ble impulses have been vanquished and she's comfortably like the rest of the world again."

"I don't know what you mean," said the downright Mr. Brockton.

"No?" Mrs. Dinsmore was sure that the impertinence of her monosyllable would be lost upon her elderly protege. "I'll make it clear to you, if I can. Millicent, you know, has nothing--"

"With that figure and that face?" interrupted Brockton, with gallant enthusiasm.

"I was speaking in your terms, Mr. Brockton," said the lady, with suave hauteur. "Of course all of us count my cousin's charm and accomplishments, though we do not inventory them as possessions far above rubies. But in the valuation of the 'change she has nothing. Oh, she may manage to extract five or six hundred a year from some investments of my uncle, and she has the old Harned place in New Hampshire. That might bring in as much as seven hundred dollars if the abandoned farm-fever were still on--"

"By ginger!" boasted Brockton, whose expletives lacked _ton_, "it's more than I had when I started."

"So I remember your saying before. But I fear that my cousin is not a financial genius. What I meant by her struggles with her better nature is that she sometimes tries to thwart us when we want to make things easy for her. Her better nature had a fearful tussle with her common sense about five years ago, when Aunt Jessie asked her to go abroad; and it nearly overcame her frivolity and her vanity last winter when I met her at the dock and insisted upon having her spend the winter with me, and our second cousin, Alicia Broome, offered to be responsible for her wardrobe. But, thanks be," she added, laughing, "the world, the flesh, and the devil won. So cheer up, Mr. Brockton. It may happen again."

"Oh, I'm not hopeless by any manner of means. I want her pretty badly, and I'm used to getting what I want. I told her, out and out, when she turned me down, back there in May, that if she were a young girl I wouldn't urge her any more, after what she said about her feelings.

But she wasn't, and I thought she could look at a proposition from a plain business point of view."

"You told her that? You mentioned to her that she was no longer a young girl?" Mrs. Dinsmore's laugh rippled delightedly on the air.

"I did. Oh, I'm used to bargaining," he rejoined, proudly. "I always could make the other fellow see what he'd lose by refusing my offers.

And I got her to take the matter under consideration. I heard somewhere that she was interested in some philanthropy. Well, money comes in handy in charity." He grinned broadly at Mrs. Dinsmore.

At that moment her protege was extremely distasteful to the lady. But she was a philosopher where marriage was concerned, and she whole-heartedly hoped that her cousin Millicent would not dally too long with her opportunity and allow the matrimonial prize to escape.

She was sincerely fond of Millicent, and desired for her the best things in the world. She sometimes said so with touching earnestness.

"She told me"--Mr. Brockton stumbled slightly--"that there wasn't any one else."

"There isn't. She has her train--she's enormously admired--but there is no one in whom she is sentimentally interested. And Aunt Jessie says it was so all the time they were in Europe."

"Wasn't there ever?" he demanded.

"My dear Mr. Brockton, Millicent is twenty-nine, as you reminded her, and she's a normal woman! Of course there have been some ones--her music-master at fourteen, I dare say, and an actor at sixteen, and a young curate at eighteen--oh, of course I'm jesting. But I suppose she was somewhat like other girls. She was engaged at nineteen--and he must have been quite twenty-three! No, I should dismiss all jealousy of her past if I were you."

"Engaged?"

Mrs. Dinsmore wondered suddenly if she had been wise, after all, to admit that widely known fact.

"Oh yes, a bread-and-b.u.t.ter engagement. My uncle was notoriously inadequate in all practical affairs; he was a scholar and something of a recluse and the most charming gentleman I ever saw, but a child in worldly matters,--a child! It ended, you see."

"How did it end?"

"Oh, poor Will Hayter died."

"Dead long?"

"Five or six years."

"Well, I'm not afraid of dead men." Brockton laughed in relief. Mrs.

Dinsmore did not point out to him from her more subtle knowledge that constancy to the unchanging dead is sometimes easier than constancy to the variable living. She was only too glad to have the inevitable disclosure made lightly and the truth dismissed without frightening off the desirable suitor. "And certainly Miss Harned don't look as if, as if--"

"Any irremediable grief were gnawing at her damask cheeks?--"

"What's this about damask cheeks?" The question came along with a swirl of skirts from the great hall. "Cousin Anna, don't hate me for keeping you so long. Mr. Brockton, I owe you a thousand apologies."

Some of those who admitted Millicent Harned's charm declared that it lay in her voice. Always there sounded through its music the note of eagerness, with eagerness's underlying hint of pathos. Her tones were like her face, her motions, herself. Impulse, merriment, yearning, and the shadow of melancholy dwelt in her eyes and shaped her lips to sensitive curves. She was tall, and her motions were of a spontaneous grace, swifter and more changeful than most women's.

"You have been a disgracefully long time, Millicent," her cousin answered her apology. "But"--she looked at the beautifully gowned figure, the lovely, imaginative face, thereby, like a good showman, calling Mr. Brockton's attention to them--"we'll forgive you."

"Oh, it wasn't primping that kept me. I stopped for a few minutes at the schoolroom door. Poor Lena! She seemed to be feeling the responsibilities of erudition terribly this morning. She showed me her botany slides with such an air! Do you know what genus has the _rostellum_, Anna?"

"No, I don't," said Anna, shortly. "And Lena's growing up a perfect young prig. I'll have to change governesses. Heaven knows what I'll draw next time! The last one had charm, but no learning, and mighty little intelligence. This one has no manner at all, and is of encyclopaedic information. A daughter's a terrible responsibility."

"Isn't she?" Millicent's tone was one of affectionate raillery as she gathered her draperies about her in the automobile. The notion of Anna's responsibilities amused her; Anna was so untouched by them--as smooth-skinned, as slim and vivacious, as the forty-year-old mother of two boys entering college, a girl in the schoolroom and another in the nursery, as she had been as a _debutante_.

"Oh, you may make fun," said Anna, snapping open the frothy thing she called a sunshade, "but you don't know how I lie awake nights, shuddering lest Lena grow up a near-sighted girl with no color and serious views."