Wild Wings Part 3

"Huh!" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed Phil inelegantly, utterly taken by surprise by Carlotta's announcement. "Do you mind repeating that? The alt.i.tude seems to have affected my hearing."

"You heard correctly. I said I brought you up here to propose to me."

Phil shrugged.

"Too much 'As You Like It,'" he observed. "These Shakespearean heroines are a bad lot. May I ask just why you want me to propose to you, my dear?

Do you have to collect a certain number of scalps by this particular rare day in June? Or is it that you think you would enjoy the exquisite pleasure of seeing me writhe and wriggle when you refuse me?"

Phil's tone was carefully light, and he smiled as he asked the questions, but there was a tight drawn line about his mouth even as he smiled.

"Through bush, through briar, Through flood, through fire"

he had followed the will o' the wisp, Carlotta, for two years now, against his better judgment and to the undoing of his peace of mind and heart. And play days were over for Phil Lambert. The work-a-day world awaited him, a world where there would be neither s.p.a.ce nor time for chasing phantoms, however lovely and alluring.

"Don't be horrid, Phil. I'm not like that. You know I'm not," denied Carlotta reproachfully. "I have a surprise for you, Philip, my dear. I am going to accept you."

"No!" exclaimed Phil in unfeigned amazement.

"Yes," declared Carlotta firmly. "I decided it in church this morning when the man was telling us how fearfully real and earnest life is. Not that I believe in the real-earnestness. I don't. It's bosh. Life was made to be happy in and that is why I made up my mind to marry you. You might manage to look a little bit pleased. Anybody would think you were about to keep an appointment with a dentist, instead of having the inestimable privilege of proposing to me with the inside information that I am going to accept you."

Phil drew away his hand from hers. His blue eyes were grave.

"Don't, Carlotta! I am afraid the chap was right about the real-earnestness. It may be a fine jest to you. It isn't to me. You see I happen to be in love with you."

"Of course," murmured Carlotta. "That is quite understood. Did you think I would have bothered to drag you clear up on a mountain top to propose to me if I hadn't known you were in love with me and--I with you?" she added softly.

"Carlotta! Do you mean it?" Phil's whole heart was in his honest blue eyes.

"Of course, I mean it. Foolis.h.!.+ Didn't you know? Would I have tormented you so all these months if I hadn't cared?"

"But, Carlotta, sweetheart, I can't believe you are in earnest even now.

Would you marry me really?"

"_Would_ I? _Will_ I is the verb I brought you up here to use. Mind your grammar."

Phil clasped his hands behind him for safe keeping.

"But I can't ask you to marry me--at least not to-day."

Carlotta made a dainty little face at him.

"And why not? Have you any religious scruples about proposing on Sunday?"

He grinned absent-mindedly and involuntarily at that. But he shook his head and his hands stayed behind his back.

"I can't propose to you because I haven't a red cent in the world--at least not more than three red cents. I couldn't support an everyday wife on 'em, not to mention a fairy princess."

"As if that mattered," dismissed Carlotta airily. "You are in love with me, aren't you?"

"Lord help me!" groaned Phil. "You know I am."

"And I am in love with you--for the present. You had better ask me while the asking is good. The wind may veer by next week, or even by tomorrow.

There are other young men who do not require to be commanded to propose.

They spurt, automatically and often, like Old Faithful."

Phil's ingenuous face clouded over. The other young men were no fabrication, as he knew to his sorrow. He was forever stumbling over them at Carlotta's careless feet.

"Don't, Carlotta," he begged again. "You don't have to scare me into subjection, you know. If I had anything to justify me for asking you to marry me I'd do it this minute without prompting. You ought to know that.

And you know I'm jealous enough already of the rest of 'em, without your rubbing it in now."

"Don't worry, old dear," smiled Carlotta. "I don't care a snap of my fingers for any of the poor worms, though I wouldn't needlessly set foot on 'em. As for justifications I have a whole bag of them up my sleeve ready to spill out like a pack of cards when the time comes. You don't have to concern yourself in the least about them. Your business is to propose. 'Come, woo me, woo, me, for now I am in a holiday humor and like enough to consent'"--she quoted Tony's lines and, leaning toward him, lifted her flower face close to his. "Shall I count ten?"

she teased.

"Carlotta, have mercy. You are driving me crazy. Pretty thing it would be for me to propose to you before I even got my sheepskin. Jolly pleased your father would be, wouldn't he, to be presented with a jobless, penniless son-in-law?"

"Nonsense!" said Carlotta crisply. "It wouldn't matter if you didn't even have a fig leaf. You wouldn't be either jobless or penniless if you were his son-in-law. He has pennies enough for all of us and enough jobs for you, which is quite sufficient unto the day. Don't be stiff and silly, Phil. And don't set your jaw like that. I hate men who set their jaws. It isn't at all becoming. I don't say my dear misguided Daddy wouldn't raise a merry little row just at first. He often raises merry little rows over things I want to do, but in the end he always comes round to my way of thinking and wants precisely what I want. Everything will be smooth as silk, I promise you. I know what I am talking about. I've thought it out very carefully. I don't make up my mind in a hurry, but when I do decide what I want I take it."

"You can't take this," said Philip Lambert.

Carlotta drew back and stared, her violet eyes very wide open. Never in all her twenty two years had any man said "can't" to her in that tone.

It was a totally new experience. For a moment she was too astounded even to be angry.

"What do you mean?" she asked a little limply.

"I mean I won't take your father's pennies nor hold down a pseudo-job I'm not fitted for, even for the sake of being his son-in-law. And I won't marry you until I am able to support you on the kind of job I am fitted for."

"And may I inquire what that is?" demanded Carlotta sharply, recovering sufficiently to let the thorns she usually kept gracefully concealed p.r.i.c.k out from among the roses.

Phil laughed shortly.

"Don't faint, Carlotta. I am eminently fitted to be a village store-keeper. In fact that is what I shall be in less than two weeks. I am going into partners.h.i.+p with my father. The new sign _Stuart Lambert and Son_ is being painted now."

Carlotta gasped.

"Phil! You wouldn't. You can't."

"Oh yes, Carlotta. I not only could and would but I am going to. It has been understood ever since I first went to college that when I was out I'd put my shoulder to the wheel beside Dad's. He has been pus.h.i.+ng alone too long as it is. He needs me. You don't know how happy he and Mums are about it. It is what they have dreamed about and planned, for years. I'm the only son, you know. It's up to me."

"But, Phil! It is an awful sacrifice for you." For once Carlotta forgot herself completely.

"Not a bit of it. It is a flouris.h.i.+ng concern--not just a two-by-four village shop--a real department store, doing real business and making real money. Dad built it all up himself, too. He has a right to be proud of it and I am lucky to be able to step in and enjoy the results of all his years of hard work. I'm not fooling myself about that. Don't get the impression I am being a martyr or anything of the sort. I most distinctly am not."

Carlotta made a little inarticulate exclamation. Mechanically she counted the cars of the train which was winding its black, snake-like trail far down below them in the valley. It hadn't occurred to her that the moon would be difficult to dislodge. Perhaps Carlotta didn't know much about moons, after all.

Phil went on talking earnestly, putting his case before her as best he might. He owed it to Carlotta to try to make her understand if he could.

He thought that, under all the whimsicalities, it was rather fine of her to lay down her princess pride and let him see she cared, that she really wanted him. It made her dearer, harder to resist than ever. If only he could make her understand!

"You see I'm not fitted for city life," he explained. "I hate it. I like to live where everybody has a plot of green gra.s.s in front of his house to set his rocking chair in Sunday afternoons; where people can have trees that they know as well as they know their own family and don't have to go to a park to look at 'em; where they can grow tulips and green peas--and babies, too, if the lord is good to 'em. I want to plant my roots where people are neighborly and interested in each other as human beings, not shut away like cave dwellers in apartment houses, not knowing or caring who is on the other side of the wall. I should get to hating people if I had to be crowded into a subway with them, day after day, treading on their toes, and they on mine. Altogether I am afraid I have a small town mind, sweetheart."