A Rebellious Heroine Part 8

"Oh!" she replied, arching her eyebrows; "that was it, was it? And do you waste your valuable time reading the vulgar effusions of the society reporter?"

Wasn't I glad that I had not come as a man with a nose to project into the affairs of others--as a newspaper reporter!

"No, indeed," I rejoined, "not generally; but I happened to see this particular item, and read it and remembered it. After all," I added, as we came to the sylvan path that leads to the Lake--"after all, one might as well read that sort of stuff as most of the novels of the present day. The vulgar reporter may be ignorant or a boor, and all that is reprehensible in his methods, but he writes about real flesh and blood people; and, what is worse, he generally approximates the truth concerning them in his writing, which is more than can be said of the so-called realistic novel writers of the day. I haven't read a novel in three years in which it has seemed to me that the heroine, for instance, was anything more than a marionette, with no will of her own, and ready to do at any time any foolish thing the author wanted her to do."

Again those eyes of Miss Andrews rested on me in a manner which gave me considerable apprehension. Then she laughed, and I was at ease again.

"You are very amusing," she said, quietly. "The most amusing of them all."

The remark nettled me, and I quickly retorted:

"Then I have not lived in vain."

"You do really live, then, eh?" she asked, half chaffingly, gazing at me out of the corners of her eyes in a fas.h.i.+on which utterly disarmed me.

"Excuse me, Miss Andrews," I answered, "but I am afraid I don't understand you."

"I am afraid you don't," she said, the smile leaving her lips. "The fact that you are here on the errand you have charged yourself with proves that."

"I am not aware," I said, "that I have come on any particularly ridiculous errand. May I ask you what you mean by the expression 'most amusing of them all'? Am I one among many, and, if so, one what among many what?"

"Your errand is a good one," she said, gravely, "and not at all ridiculous; let me a.s.sure you that I appreciate that fact. Your question I will answer by asking another: Are you here of your own volition, or has Stuart Harley created you, as he did Messrs.

Osborne, Parker, and the Professor? Are you my new hero, or what?"

The question irritated me. This woman was not content with interfering seriously with my friend's happiness: she was actually attributing me to him, casting doubts upon my existence, and placing me in the same category with herself--a mere book creature. To a man who regards himself as being the real thing, flesh and blood, and, well, eighteen-carat flesh and blood at that, to be accused of living only a figmentary existence is too much. I retorted angrily.

"If you consider me nothing more than an idea, you do not manifest your usual astuteness," I said.

Her reply laid me flat.

"I do not consider you anything of the sort. I never so much as a.s.sociated you with anything resembling an idea. I merely asked a question," she said. "I repeat it. Do you or do you not exist? Are you a bit of the really real or a bit of Mr. Harley's realism? In short, are you here at Profile Lake, walking and talking with me, or are you not?"

A realizing sense of my true position crept over me. In reality I was not there talking to her, but in my den in New York writing about her. I may not be a realist, but I am truthful. I could not deceive her, so I replied, hesitatingly:

"Well, Miss Andrews, I am--no, I am not here, except in spirit."

"That's what I thought," she said, demurely. "And do you exist somewhere, or is this a 'situation' calculated to delight the American girl--with pin-money to spend on Messrs. Herring, Beemer, & Chadwick's publications?"

"I do exist," I replied, meekly; for, I must confess it, I realized more than ever that Miss Andrews was too much for me, and I heartily wished I was well out of it. "And I alone am responsible for this.

Harley is off fis.h.i.+ng at Barnegat--and do you know why?"

"I presume he has gone there to recuperate," she said.

"Precisely," said I.

"After his ungentlemanly, discourteous, and wholly uncalled-for interference with my comfort at Newport," she said, her face flus.h.i.+ng and tears coming into her eyes, "I don't wonder he's prostrated."

"I do not know to what you refer," said I.

"I refer to the episode of the runaway horse," she said, in wrathful remembrance of the incident. "Because I refuse to follow blindly his will, he abuses his power, places me in a false and perilous situation, from which I, a defenceless woman, must rescue myself alone and unaided. It was unmanly of him--and I will pay him the compliment of saying wholly unlike him."

I stood aghast. Poor Stuart was being blamed for my act. He must be set right at once, however unpleasant it might be for me.

"He--he didn't do that," I said, slowly; "it was I. I wrote that bit of nonsense; and he--well, he was mad because I did it, and said he'd like to kill any man who ill-treated you; and he made me promise never to touch upon your life again."

"May I ask why you did that?" she asked, and I was glad to note that there was no displeasure in her voice--in fact, she seemed to cheer up wonderfully when I told her that it was I, and not Stuart, who had subjected her to the misadventure.

"Because I was angry with you," I answered. "You were ruining my friend with your continued acts of rebellion: he was successful; now he is ruined. He thinks of you day and night--he wants you for his heroine; he wants to make you happy, but he wants you to be happy in your own way; and when he thinks he has discovered your way, he works along that line, and all of a sudden, by some act wholly unforeseen, and, if I may say so, unforeseeable, you treat him and his work with contempt, draw yourself out of it--and he has to begin again."

"And why have you ventured to break your word to your friend?" she asked, calmly. "Surely you are touching upon my life now, in spite of your promise."

"Because I am willing to sacrifice my word to his welfare," I retorted; "to try to make you understand how you are blocking the path of a mighty fine-minded man by your devotion to what you call your independence. He will never ask you to do anything that he knows will be revolting to you, and until he has succeeded in pleasing you to the last page of his book he will never write again.

I have done this in the hope of persuading you, at the cost even of some personal discomfort, not to rebel against his gentle leaders.h.i.+p- -to fall in with his ideas until he can fulfil this task of his, whether it be realism or pure speculation on his part. If you do this, Stuart is saved. If you do not, literature will be called upon to mourn one who promises to be one of its brightest ornaments."

I stopped short. Miss Andrews was gazing pensively out over the mirror-like surface of the Lake. Finally she spoke.

"You may tell Mr. Harley," she said, with a sigh, "that I will trouble him no more. He can do with me as he pleases in all save one particular. He shall not marry me to a man I do not love. If he takes the man I love for my hero, then will I follow him to the death."

"And may I ask who that man is?"

"You may ask if you please," she replied, with a little smile. "But I won't answer you, except to say that it isn't you."

"And am I forgiven for my runaway story?" I asked.

"Yes," she said. "You wouldn't expect me to condemn a man for loyalty to his friend, would you?"

With which understanding Miss Andrews and I continued our walk, and when we parted I found that the little interview I had started to write had turned into the suggestion of a romance, which I was in duty bound to destroy--but I began to have a glimmering of an idea as to who the man was that Marguerite Andrews wished for a hero, and I regretted also to find myself convinced of the truth of her statement that that man did not bear my name.

CHAPTER VIII: HARLEY RETURNS TO THE FRAY

"I will be master of what is mine own: She is my goods, my chattels."

- "Taming of the Shrew."

At the end of ten days Harley returned from Barnegat, brown as a berry and ready for war, if war it was still to be. The outing had done him a world of good, and the fish stories he told as we sat at dinner showed that, realist though he might be, he had yet not failed to cultivate his imagination in certain directions. I may observe in pa.s.sing, and in this connection, that if I had a son whom it was my ambition to see making his mark in the world as a writer of romance, as distinguished from the real, I should, as the first step in his development, take care that he became a fisherman. The telling of tales of the fish he caught when no one else was near to see would give him, as it has given many another, a good schooling in the realms of the imagination.

I was glad to note that Harley's wonted cheerfulness had returned, and that he had become more like himself than he had been at any time since his first failure with Miss Andrews.

"Your advice was excellent," he said, as we sipped our coffee at the club the night of his return. "I have a clear two weeks in which to tackle that story, and I feel confident now that I shall get it done.

Furthermore, I shall send the chapters to Herring, Beemer, & Chadwick as I write them, so that there must be no failure. I shall be compelled to finish the tale, whatever may happen, and Miss Andrews shall go through to the bitter end, w.i.l.l.y-nilly."

"Don't be rash, Harley," I said; for it seemed to me that Miss Andrews, having consented at my solicitation to be a docile heroine for just so long as Harley did not insist upon her marrying the man she did not love, it was no time for him to break away from the principles he had so steadfastly adhered to hitherto and become a martinet. He struck me as being more than likely to crack the whip like a ring-master in his present mood than to play the indulgent author, and I felt pretty confident that the instant the snap of the lash reached the ears of Marguerite Andrews his troubles would begin again tenfold, both in quality and in quant.i.ty, with no possible hope for a future reconciliation between them.

"I'm not going to be rash," said Harley. "I never was rash, and I'm not going to begin now, but I shall use my nerve. That has been the trouble with me in the past. I haven't been firm. I have let that girl have her own way in everything, and I'm very much afraid I have spoiled her. She behaves like a child with indulgent parents. In the last instance, the Parker proposal, she simply ran her independence into the ground. She was not only rebellious to me, but she was impertinent to him. Her att.i.tude toward him was not nature at all; it was not realism, because she is a woman of good breeding, and would naturally be the last to treat any man, distasteful or not, with such excessive rudeness. I compelled him to go on and propose to her, though after he had been at it for five minutes I could see that he wished he was well out of it. I should have taken her in hand and controlled her with equal firmness, declining to permit her to speak so openly. Frankness is good enough, especially in women, among whom you rarely find it; but frankness of the sort she indulged in has no place in the polite circle in which she moves."