The Flirt Part 18

"All the time. There's no stopping him. I suppose he can't help it, because he thinks of nothing else."

"Isn't that rather--rather queer for you?"

"'Queer'?" he repeated.

"No, I suppose not!" She laughed impatiently. "And probably you don't think it's 'queer' of you to sit here helplessly, and let another man take your place----"

"But I don't 'let' him, Laura," he protested.

"No, he just does it!"

"Well," he smiled, "you must admit my efforts to supplant him haven't----"

"It won't take any effort now," she said, rising quickly.

Valentine Corliss came into their view upon the sidewalk in front, taking his departure. Seeing that they observed him, he lifted his hat to Laura and nodded a cordial good-day to Lindley. Then he went on.

Just before he reached the corner of the lot, he encountered upon the pavement a citizen of elderly and plain appearance, strolling with a grandchild. The two men met and pa.s.sed, each upon his opposite way, without pausing and without salutation, and neither Richard nor Laura, whose eyes were upon the meeting, perceived that they had taken cognizance of each other. But one had asked a question and the other had answered.

Mr. Pryor spoke in a low monotone, with a rapidity as singular as the restrained but perceptible emphasis he put upon one word of his question.

"I got you in the park," he said; and it is to be deduced that "got" was argot. "You're not _doing_ anything here, are you?"

"No!" answered Corliss with condensed venom, his back already to the other. He fanned himself with his hat as he went on. Mr. Pryor strolled up the street with imperturbable benevolence.

"Your coast is cleared," said Laura, "since you wouldn't clear it yourself."

"Wish me luck," said Richard as he left her.

She nodded brightly.

Before he disappeared, he looked back to her again (which profoundly surprised her) and smiled rather disconsolately, shaking his head as in prophecy of no very encouraging reception indoors. The manner of this glance recalled to Laura what his mother had once said of him. "Richard is one of those sweet, helpless men that some women adore and others despise. They fall in love with the ones that despise them."

An ostentatious cough made her face about, being obviously designed to that effect; and she beheld her brother in the act of walking slowly across the yard with his back to her. He halted upon the border of her small garden of asters, regarded it anxiously, then spread his handkerchief upon the ground, knelt upon it, and with thoughtful care uprooted a few weeds which were beginning to sprout, and also such vagrant blades of gra.s.s as encroached upon the floral territory. He had the air of a virtuous man performing a good action which would never become known.

Plainly, he thought himself in solitude and all un.o.bserved.

It was a touching picture, pious and humble. Done into coloured gla.s.s, the kneeling boy and the asters--submerged in ardent suns.h.i.+ne--would have appropriately enriched a cathedral: Boyhood of Saint Florus the Gardener.

Laura heartlessly turned her back, and, affecting an interest in her sleeve, very soon experienced the sensation of being stared at with some poignancy from behind. Unchanged in att.i.tude, she unravelled an imaginary thread, whereupon the cough reached her again, shrill and loud, its insistence not lacking in pathos.

She approached him, driftingly. No sign that he was aware came from the busied boy, though he coughed again, hollowly now--a proof that he was an artist. "All right, Hedrick," she said kindly. "I heard you the first time."

He looked up with utter incomprehension. "I'm afraid I've caught cold," he said, simply. "I got a good many weeds out before breakfast, and the ground was damp."

Hedrick was of the New School: everything direct, real, no striving for effect, no pressure on the stroke. He did his work: you could take it or leave it.

"You mustn't strain so, dear," returned his sister, shaking her head. "It won't last if you do. You see this is only the first day."

Struck to the heart by so brutal a misconception, he put all his wrongs into one look, rose in manly dignity, picked up his handkerchief, and left her.

Her eyes followed him, not without remorse: it was an exit which would have moved the ba.s.s-violist of a theatre orchestra. Sighing, she went to her own room by way of the kitchen and the back-stairs, and, having locked her door, brought the padlocked book from its hiding-place.

"I think I should not have played as I did, an hour ago," she wrote. "It stirs me too greatly and I am afraid it makes me inclined to self-pity afterward, and I must never let myself feel _that_! If I once begin to feel sorry for myself. . . . But I _will_ not! No. You are here in the world. You exist. You _are_!

That is the great thing to know and it must be enough for me. It is. I played to You. I played _just love_ to you--all the yearning tenderness--all the supreme kindness I want to give you. Isn't love really just glorified kindness? No, there is something more.

. . . I feel it, though I do not know how to say it. But it was in my playing--I played it and played it. Suddenly I felt that in my playing I had shouted it from the housetops, that I had told the secret to all the world and _everybody_ knew. I stopped, and for a moment it seemed to me that I was dying of shame. But no one understood. No one had even listened. . . . Sometimes it seems to me that I am like Cora, that I am very deeply her sister in some things. My heart goes all to You--my revelation of it, my release of it, my outlet of it is all here in these pages (except when I play as I did to-day and as I shall not play again) and perhaps the writing keeps me quiet. Cora scatters her own releasings: she is looking for the You she may never find; and perhaps the penalty for scattering is never finding. Sometimes I think the seeking has reacted and that now she seeks only what will make her feel. I hope she has not found it: I am afraid of this new man--not only for your sake, dear. I felt repelled by his glance at me the first time I saw him. I did not like it--I cannot say just why, unless that it seemed too intimate. I am afraid of him for her, which is a queer sort of feeling because she has alw----"

Laura's writing stopped there, for that day, interrupted by a hurried rapping upon the door and her mother's voice calling her with stress and urgency.

The opening of the door revealed Mrs. Madison in a state of anxious perturbation, and admitted the sound of loud weeping and agitated voices from below.

"Please go down," implored the mother. "You can do more with her than I can. She and your father have been having a terrible scene since Richard went home."

Laura hurried down to the library.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

"Oh, _come_ in, Laura!" cried her sister, as Laura appeared in the doorway. "Don't _stand_ there! Come in if you want to take part in a grand old family row!" With a furious and tear-stained face, she was confronting her father who stood before her in a resolute att.i.tude and a profuse perspiration. "Shut the door!" shouted Cora violently, adding, as Laura obeyed, "Do you want that little Pest in here? Probably he's eavesdropping anyway. But what difference does it make? I don't care. Let him hear! Let anybody hear that wants to! They can hear how I'm tortured if they like. I didn't close my eyes last night, and now I'm being tortured. Papa!" She stamped her foot. "Are you going to take back that insult to me?"

"'Insult'?" repeated her father, in angry astonishment.

"Pshaw," said Laura, laughing soothingly and coming to her. "You know that's nonsense, Cora. Kind old papa couldn't do that if he tried. Dear, you know he never insulted anybody in his----"

"Don't touch me!" screamed Cora, repulsing her. "Listen, if you've got to, but let me alone. He did too! He did! He _knows_ what he said!"

"I do not!"

"He does! He does!" cried Cora. "He said that I was--I was too much 'interested' in Mr. Corliss."

"Is that an 'insult'?" the father demanded sharply.

"It was the way he said it," Cora protested, sobbing. "He meant something he didn't _say_. He did! He did! He _meant_ to insult me!"

"I did nothing of the kind," shouted the old man.

"I don't know what you're talking about. I said I couldn't understand your getting so excited about the fellow's affairs and that you seemed to take a mighty sudden interest in him."

"Well, what if I _do_?" she screamed. "Haven't I a right to be interested in what I choose? I've got to be interested in _something_, haven't I? _You_ don't make life very interesting, do you? Do you think it's interesting to spend the summer in this horrible old house with the paper falling off the walls and our rotten old furniture that I work my hands off trying to make look decent and can't, and every other girl I know at the seash.o.r.e with motor-cars and motor-boats, or getting a trip abroad and buying her clothes in Paris? What do _you_ offer to interest me?"

The unfortunate man hung his head. "I don't see what all that has to do with it----"

She seemed to leap at him. "You _don't_? You _don't_?"

"No, I don't. And I don't see why you're so crazy to please young Corliss about this business unless you're infatuated with him. I had an idea--and I was pleased with it, too, because Richard's a steady fellow--that you were just about engaged to Richard Lindley, and----"

"Engaged!" she cried, repeating the word with bitter contempt.

"Engaged! You don't suppose I'll marry him unless I want to, do you? I will if it suits me. I won't if it suits me not to; understand that! I don't consider myself engaged to anybody, and you needn't either. What on earth has that got to do with your keeping Richard Lindley from doing what Mr. Corliss wants him to?"

"I'm not keeping him from anything. He didn't say----"