The Silver Poppy Part 3

"This is what I want to knock out of him," he said, tapping the little book, "for a while, at least. And I think, Miss Vaughan, you are the happy possessor of a lot I'd like to pound into him."

"And that is----"

"Oh, I mean poise and balance--good, practical judgment."

"Thank you." She caught up her skirts and courtesied.

Repellier raised a deprecating hand, and laughed.

"Well, you know what I mean. And that's why I'm glad you like him."

"I hardly said that."

"I mean all he wants is ballasting with a little of that business spirit which we call American push."

"Thanks," she murmured. "But tell me about him."

"Well, there isn't much to tell--at least not much that I know."

"But you knew him abroad?"

"Yes, I met him two years ago at Lady Meredith's--those were the Woodstock Merediths of Meredith Hall. I was doing a portrait of Connie Meredith--that's the 'C. M.' of the book--and he used to tramp over from Oxford now and then. His father was Sir Harry Hartley, who was killed in the Dunstable Hunt four or five years ago. Hartley himself was wasting his time about Oxford, unsettled, unsatisfied, impecunious, and unrecognized. As I said, I saw a good deal of him at the Merediths'. He was to have married the girl--it was she who gave me that volume--but she was always delicate. In fact, they had to pack her off to the south of England, and then to Italy. She died at Fiesole. On my way back from the Continent I ran across Hartley again, and asked him why he didn't try America."

"And will he ever do anything--anything worth while, I mean?"

She still held the thin, green volume of verse in her hand, almost contemptuously--suddenly depressed in spirits, she could not fathom why.

"He has already done something worth while."

"What is it?"

"Small things, I mean, but of the right sort."

"I never heard of him before," murmured the woman, closing the volume with a gentle little snap of finality.

"But you will," said Repellier as his guest slowly drew on her white gloves and arranged her hair before his mirror as she pa.s.sed.

"You will," he repeated as he swung his easel around to the light, and opening a door on his left called his model in for what was to be a morning of work for both of them.

CHAPTER IV

THE WORLD AND THE WOMAN

Leave not thy slumbering melodies To dream too long within thine eyes; Let not all time thy bosom hold Song in that overfragrant fold, Lest thou a tardy gleaner prove And thy reluctant hand but move The overgoldened sheaf, to find Thy tenderest touch can never bind These thoughts too long unharvested-- Lest on some byway stern be shed That golden, sad, ungarnered grain, When thou canst sow nor reap again.

JOHN HARTLEY, "The Lost Voice."

These souls of ours are like railway bridges--they can be reconstructed even when the trains of temptation and trial are creeping over them.--"The Silver Poppy."

Hartley's first impression of Cordelia Vaughan was a happy confusion of yellows. Her hair, luxuriant and heavily ma.s.sed on the small head, was a sort of tawny gold. Her skin, which more than once had been described as like old ivory, was in truth neither ivory nor olive, but almost a pale, rose-like yellow with a transfusing warmth to its pallor, as though the lights of an open fire were playing upon it. The eyes themselves seemed, at times, a soft, jade-like yellowish green, m.u.f.fled, unsatisfied, often mournful, with a latent hint of tragedy, shading off in strong lights to a sea gray; by lamplight showing a deep violet. In moments of excitement or exaltation they were slightly phosph.o.r.escent, glowing with an almost animal-like luminosity that temporarily relieved and illumined the ascetically cold chiseling of the face itself, suggesting a possible emotional power that might be stronger at times than the sh.e.l.l which housed it. Yet they were eyes that looked out on the world with quiet, brooding melancholy, wistful in repose, with some fugitive sadness--eyes that suggested, to the young poet at least, some wayward note of autumn, of twilight, of woodland loneliness. They seemed to betoken the dreamer in life more than the pioneer and the actor, in periods of weariness taking on a heavy, languorous, indolent look of half-careless defiance, like a tired and wilful child's.

At one moment, indeed, Cordelia Vaughan reminded Hartley of an old-fashioned tea-rose, quaintly anachronistic in her modish twentieth-century gown; at another moment she brought insistently to his mind the thought of a piece of fragile chinaware with which the slag of every-day life had not yet been infused, sadly to convert it into the ironstone of ordinary mortality.

"I find I am not very strong," she had confessed to him. "My work seems to take a great deal out of me." And the thought that some great internal fire was burning away both the youth and beauty of a pale priestess of Mnemosyne seemed to give to her pallor a new and redeeming touch of poignancy. For in Cordelia's days of weariness envious women, lacking her own strange resiliency of vigor, now and then maliciously declared that on such occasions she "looked her age."

"I am sure I can help you a little," she was saying now, looking up at Hartley. "But first you must tell me something about yourself and your work."

He was but four-and-twenty, and accustomed to the coldness and the reserve of his own older-fashioned countrywomen. So the open warmth and directness of his companion's manner at first embarra.s.sed him a little.

"That's jolly good of you; but really, you know, I haven't done anything worth talking about."

"But you've got it in you; I can see you have," said the other, on her cushion of Princeton orange, looking back unhesitatingly into his searching eyes. "And then Repellier says so, too," she added encouragingly.

For a releasing moment or two the young man basked in the sunlight of the tawny gold hair and the half-pleading eyes, wondering the while why her face should be so wistfully melancholy. It had its allurements, this finding in a great city a strange girl ready to take an interest in one's secret aspirations, a being willing to repose in one such immediate woman's faith. Hartley's four months of loneliness and solitude had been weighing heavily on his exuberant young soul. His first impulse was to pour out his heart to her, little as she might understand, and drain the momentary cup of new-found comradeship to its last dregs. He fumbled irresolutely with his note-book, then finally decided that the doctrine of silence was best. He preferred men, he told himself, who could consume their own smoke.

"You're very kind, and all that," he said almost stiffly, smiling an embarra.s.sed smile, "but we have this promised interview of ours to finish, you know."

He took up his note-book again--which he was still reportorial amateur enough to lean on in such cases.

"I have your first book, and its t.i.tle, and that you are a Southerner.

Your girlhood was spent in Kentucky, but you say your family is really a Virginia one. I have you here as pa.s.sionately fond of horses and hunting, and all that. Am I right in saying that it was your mother who rode through the Northern lines on a Kentucky thoroughbred to save that Confederate captive's life you spoke of? Good; I'll jot down a note of his name here. I think that will make an excellent little story. Then I have the anecdote about Judge Wilder and The Silver Poppy; and I can make a paragraph of your New York success, and about the novel being dramatized. Oh, yes, you would like the social element brought out, of course. There's just one other thing our editor usually asks for--if you don't mind--the age, you know," he added tentatively.

"I am almost twenty-three," answered the woman.

The young Oxonian buried himself in his note-book.

"Yes, twenty-three," he repeated, as he penciled a note of it. He felt, as he wrote, that for some unknown reason she was laughing at him.

"Why have you never written a second book?" he asked her.

"I _am_ writing one," she answered quietly, he thought rather wearily, as the smile faded from her face.

"Then I'd better put that in."

"If you like," she added, as if uninterested. He liked her better for that second touch of diffidence.

"Now there is just one point I'm not clear about. You mentioned the fact that you and Mrs. Spaulding were about to give a series of receptions--er--literary receptions, I think you called them--during the coming season. Pardon my asking, but is Mrs. Spaulding also devoted to the writing of books?"

"Oh, dear me, no!" she answered. "She's only devoted to the people who happen to be doing the writing."

"Then you are her guest at present?"

"Mrs. Spaulding has asked me to live with her, for the winter, at any rate. She was more than kind, when I came, about fixing up this little den for me to work in. You can see, she has made me only too comfortable."