Mistress Anne Part 39

The life that he lived with her, however, and with Pip and Winifred and Tony was a heady wine which swept away regrets. He had no time to think.

He worked by day and played by night, and often after their play there was work again. Now and then, as the Sunday night when he had first met Marie-Louise, he motored with Austin out to Westchester. Mrs. Austin spent her summers there. Long journeys tired her, and she would not leave her husband. Marie-Louise stayed at "Rose Acres" because she hated big hotels, and found cottage colonies stupid. The great gardens swept down to the river--the wide, blue river with the high bluffs on the sunset side.

The river at Bower's was not blue; it showed in the spring the red of the clay which was washed into it, and now and then a clear green when the rains held off, but it was rarely blue except on certain sapphire days in the fall, when a northwest wind swept all clouds from the sky.

And this was not a singing river. It was too near the sea, and too full of boats, and there was no reason why it should say, "_Come and see--come and see--the world_," when the world was at its feet!

And so the great Hudson had no song for Richard. Yet now and then, as he walked down to it in the warm darkness, his ears seemed to catch a faint echo of the harmonies which had filled his soul on the day that Anne Warfield had dried her hair on the bank of the old river at Bower's, and had walked with him in the wood.

Except at such moments, however, it must be confessed that he thought little of Anne Warfield. It hurt to think of her. And he was too much of a surgeon to want to turn the knife in the wound.

Marie-Louise, developing a keen interest in his affairs as they grew better acquainted, questioned him about Evelyn.

"Dad says you are going to marry her."

"Yes."

"Is she pretty?"

"Rather more than that."

"Why don't you bring her out?"

"n.o.body asked me, sir, she said."

She flashed a smile at him.

"I like your nursery-rhyme way of talking. You are the humanest thing that we have ever had in this house. Mother is a harp of a thousand strings, and Dad is a dynamo. But you are flesh and blood."

"Thank you."

"I wish you'd ask your Evelyn out here, and her friends. For tea and tennis some Sat.u.r.day afternoon. I want to see you together."

But after she had seen them together, she said, shrewdly, "You are not in love with her."

"I am going to marry her, child. Isn't that proof enough?"

"It isn't any proof at all. The big man is the one who really cares."

"The big man? Pip?"

"Is that what you call him? He looks at her like a dog waiting for a bone. And he brightens when she speaks to him. And her eyes are always on you and yours are never on her."

"Marie-Louise, you are an uncanny creature. Like your little silver cat.

She watches mice and you watch me. I have a feeling that you are going to pounce on me."

"Some day I shall pounce," she poked her finger at him, "and shake you as my little cat shakes a mouse, and you'll wake up."

"Am I asleep, Marie-Louise?"

"Yes. You haven't heard Pan pipe." She was leaning on the sun-dial and looking up at the grinning G.o.d. "Men who live in cities have no ears to hear."

"Are you a thousand years old, Marie-Louise?"

"I am as old as the centuries," she told him gravely. "I played with Pan when the world was young."

They smiled at each other, and then he said, "My mother wants me to live in the country. Do you think if I were there I should hear Pan pipe?"

"Not if you were there because your mother wished it. It is only when you love it yourself that the river calls and you hear the fluting of the wind in the rushes."

It was an August Sat.u.r.day, hot and humid. Marie-Louise was in thin white, but it was a white with a difference from the demure summer frocks of a former generation. The modern note was in the white fur which came high up about Marie-Louise's throat. Yet she did not look warm. Her skin was as pale as the pearls in her ears. Her red hair flamed, but without warmth; it rippled back from her forehead to a cool and cla.s.sic coil.

"If you marry your Eve," she told Richard, "and stay with father, you'll grow rich and fat, and forget the state of your soul."

"I thought you didn't believe in souls."

She flushed faintly. "I believe in yours. But your Eve doesn't. She likes you because you don't care, and everybody else does. And that isn't love."

"What is love?"

She pondered. "I don't know. I've never felt it. And I don't want to feel it. If I loved too much I should die--and if I didn't love enough I should be ashamed."

"You are a queer child, Marie-Louise."

"I am not a child. Dad thinks I am, and mother. But they don't know."

There were day lilies growing about the sun-dial. She gathered a handful of white blooms and laid them at the feet of the piping Pan. "I shall write a poem about it," she said, "of a girl who loved a marble G.o.d, and who found it--enough. Every day she laid a flower at his feet. And a human came to woo her, and she told him, 'If I loved you, you would ask more of me than my marble lover. He asks only that I lay flowers at his feet.'"

He could never be sure whether she was in jest or earnest. And now she narrowed her eyes in a quizzical smile and was gone.

He spoke of Marie-Louise to Eve. "She hasn't enough to do. She ought to be busy with her fancy work and her household matters."

"No woman is busy with household matters in this age, d.i.c.ky. Nor with fancy work. Is that what you expect of a wife?"

He didn't know what he expected, and he told her so. But he knew he was expecting more than she was prepared to give. Eve had an off-with-the-old-and-on-with-the-new theory of living which left him breathless. She expressed it one night when she said that she shouldn't have "obey" in her marriage service. "I never expect to mind you, d.i.c.ky, so what's the use?"

There was no use, of course. Yet he had a feeling that he was being robbed of something sweet and sacred. The quaint old service asked things of men as well as of women. Good and loving and fine things. He was old-fashioned enough to want to promise all that it asked, and to have his wife promise.

Eve laughed, too, at Richard's grace before meat. "You mustn't embarra.s.s me at formal dinners, d.i.c.ky. Somehow it won't seem quite in keeping with the c.o.c.ktails, will it?"

Thus the spirit of Eve, contending with all that made him the son of his mother, meeting his spiritual revolts with material arguments, banking the fires of his flaming aspirations!

Yet he rarely let himself dwell upon this aspect of it. He had set his feet in a certain path, and he was prepared to follow it.

On this path, at every turning, he met Philip. The big man had not been driven from the field by the fact of Eve's engagement. He still asked her to go with him, he still planned pleasures for her. His money made things easy, and while he included Richard in most of his plans, he looked upon him as a necessary evil. Eve refused to go without her young doctor.

Now and then, however, he had her alone. "d.i.c.ky's called to an appendicitis case," she informed him ruefully, one night over the telephone, "and I am dead lonesome. Come and cheer me up."

He went to her, and during the evening proposed a week-end yachting trip which should take them to the North Sh.o.r.e and Aunt Maude.