Quick Action Part 2

"Mother," she said calmly, on her eighteenth birthday, "do you know that I am known among my a.s.sociates as a dead one?" At which that fat and hard-eyed matron laughed, surveying her symmetrical daughter with grim content.

"Let me tell you something," she said. "America, socially, is only one vast cabaret, mostly consisting of performers. The spectators are few.

You're one. Conditions are reversed across the water; the audience is in the majority.... How do you like young Willowmere?"

The girl replied that she liked Lord Willowmere. She might have added that she was prepared to like anything in trousers that would give her a few hours off.

"Do you think," said her mother, "you can be trusted to play in the social cabaret all next winter, and then marry Willowmere?"

Said Cecil: "I am perfectly ready to marry anybody before luncheon, if you will let me."

"I do not wish you to feel _that_ way."

"Mother, I _do_! All I want is to be let alone long enough to learn something for myself."

"What do you not know? What have you _not_ learned? What accomplishment do you lack, little daughter? What is it you wish?"

The girl glanced out of the window. A young and extremely well-built man went striding down the avenue about his business. He looked a little like a man she had seen playing ball on the Harvard team a year ago. She sighed unconsciously.

"I've learned about everything there is to learn, I suppose....

Except--where do men go when they walk so busily about their business?"

"Down town," said her mother, laughing.

"What do they do there?"

"A million things concerning millions."

"But I don't see how there's anything left for them to do after their education is completed. What is there left for me to do, except to marry and have a few children?"

"What do you want to do?"

"Nothing.... I'd like to have something to do which would make me look busy and make me walk rather fast--like that young man who was hurrying down town all by himself. Then I'd like to be let alone while I'm busy with my own affairs."

"When you marry Willowmere you'll be busy enough." She might have added: "And lonely enough."

"I'll be occupied in telling others how to busy themselves with my affairs. But there won't be anything for _me_ to do, will there?"

"Yes, dear child; it will be one steady fight to better a good position.

It will afford you constant exercise."

The tall young girl bit her lip and shook her pretty head in silence.

She felt instinctively that she knew how to do that. But that was not the exercise she wanted. She looked out into the February suns.h.i.+ne and saw the blue shadows on the snow and the sidewalks dark and wet, and the little gutter arabs throwing snow-b.a.l.l.s, and a yellow pup barking blissfully. And, apropos of nothing at all, she suddenly remembered how she had run away when she was nine; and a rush of blind desire surged within her. What it meant she did not know, did not trouble to consider, but it stirred her until the soft fire burned in her cheeks, and left her twisting her white fingers, lips parted, staring across the wintry park into the blue tracery of trees. To Miss Ca.s.sillis adolescence came late.

They sang _Le Donne Curiose_ at the opera that evening; she sat in her father's box; numbers of youthful, sleek-headed, white-s.h.i.+rted young men came between the acts. She talked to all with the ardor of the young and unsatisfied; and, mentally and spiritually still unsatisfied, buried in fur, she was whirled back through snowy streets to the great grey mansion of her nativity, and the silence of her white-hung chamber.

All through February the preparatory regime continued, with preliminary canters at theatre and opera, informal party practice, and trial dinners. Always she gave herself completely to every moment with a wistful and unquenched faith, eager novice in her quest of what was lacking in her life; ardent enthusiast in her restless searching for the remedy. And, unsatisfied, lingering mentally by the door of Chance, lest she miss somewhere the magic that satisfies and quiets--lest the gates of Opportunity swing open after she had turned away--reluctantly she returned to the companions.h.i.+p of her own solitary mind and undeveloped soul, and sat down to starve with them in spirit, wondering wherein might lie the reason for this new hunger that a.s.sailed her, mind and body.

She ran up her private flag the next winter, amid a thousand other gay and flaunting colours breaking out all over town. The newspapers roared a salute to the wealthiest debutante; and an enthusiastic press, not yet housebroken but agile with much exercise in leaping and fawning, leaped now about the debutante's slippers, grinning, slavering and panting.

Later, led by instinct and its Celebrated Nose, it bounded toward young Lord Willowmere, jumped and fawned about him, slightly soiling him, until in midwinter the engagement it had announced was corroborated, and a million shop-girls and old women were in a furor.

He was a ruddy-faced young man who wore his bowler hat toward the back of his head, a small, pointed moustache, and who walked always as though he were shod in riding boots.

He would have made a healthy studgroom for any gentleman's stable.

Person and intellect were always thoroughly scrubbed as with saddle-soap. Had he been able to afford it, his stables would have been second to none in England.

Soon he would be able to afford it.

To his intimates, including his fiancee, he was known as "Stirrups." All day long he was in the saddle or on the box, every evening at the Cataract Club or at a cabaret. Between times he called upon Miss Ca.s.sillis--usually finding her out. When he found her not at home, he called elsewhere, very casually.

Two continents were deeply stirred over the impending alliance.

III

Young Jones, in wildest Florida, had never heard of it or of her, or of her income. His own fortune amounted to six hundred dollars, and he had been born in Brooklyn, and what his salary might be only he and the Smithsonian Inst.i.tution knew.

He was an industrious young man, no better than you or I, accepting thankfully every opportunity for mischief which the Dead Lake region afforded. No opportunities of that kind ever presenting themselves in that region, he went once a month to Miami in the _Orange Puppy_, and drank too many swizzles and so forth, et cetera.

Having accomplished this, he returned to the wharf, put the _Orange Puppy_ into commission, hoisted sail, and squared away for Matanzas Inlet, finding himself too weak-minded to go home by a more direct route.

He had been on his monthly pilgrimage to Miami, and was homeward bound noisily, using his auxiliary power so that silence should not descend upon him too abruptly. He had been, for half an hour now, immersed in a species of solitaire known as The Idiot's Delight, when he caught himself cheating himself, and indignantly scattered the pack to the four winds--three of which, however, were not blowing. One card, the deuce of hearts, fluttered seaward like a white b.u.t.terfly. Beyond it he caught sight of another white speck, s.h.i.+ning like a gull's breast.

It was a big yacht steaming in from the open sea; and her bill of lading included Miss Ca.s.sillis and Willowmere. But Jones could not know that.

So he merely blinked at the distant _Chihuahua_, yawned, flipped the last card overboard, and swung the _Orange Puppy_ into the inlet, which brimmed rather peacefully, the tide being nearly at flood.

Far away on the deck of the _Chihuahua_ the quick-fire racket of Jones's auxiliary was amazingly audible. Miss Ca.s.sillis, from her deck-chair, could see the _Orange Puppy_, a fleck of glimmering white across a sapphire sea. How was she to divine that one Delancy Jones was aboard of her? All she saw when the two boats came near each other was a noisy little craft progressing toward the lagoon, emitting an earsplitting racket; and a tall, lank young man clad in flannels lounging at the tiller and smoking a cigarette.

Around her on the snowy deck were disposed the guests of her parents, mostly corpulent, swizzles at every elbow, gracefully relaxing after a morning devoted to arduous idleness. The Victor on deck, which had furnished the incentive to her turkey-trotting with Lord Willowmere, was still exuding a syncopated melody. Across the water, Jones heard it and stood looking at the great yacht as the _Orange Puppy_ kicked her way through the intensely blue water under an azure sky.

Willowmere lounged over to the rail and gazed wearily at the sand dunes and palmettos. Presently Miss Ca.s.sillis slipped from her deck-chair to her white-shod feet, and walked over to where he stood. He said something about the possibilities of "havin' a bit of shootin'," with a vague wave of his highly-coloured hand toward the palmetto forests beyond the lagoon.

If the girl heard him she made no comment. After a while, as the distance between the _Chihuahua_ and the _Orange Puppy_ lengthened, she levelled her sea gla.s.ses at the latter craft, and found that the young man at the helm was also examining her through his binoculars.

While she inspected him, several unrelated ideas pa.s.sed through her head; she thought he was very much sunburned and that his hatless head was attractive, with its short yellow hair crisped by the sun. Without any particular reason, apparently, she recollected a young man she had seen the winter before, striding down the wintry avenue about his business. He might have been this young man for all she knew. Like the other, this one wore yellow hair. Then, with no logic in the sequence of her thoughts, suddenly the memory of how she had run away when she was nine years old set her pulses beating, filling her heart with the strange, wistful, thrilling, overwhelming longing which she had supposed would never again a.s.sail her, now that she was engaged to be married.

And once more the soft fire burned in her cheeks.

"Stirrups," she said, scarcely knowing what she was saying, "I don't think I'll marry you after all. It's just occurred to me."

"Oh, I say!" protested Willowmere languidly, never for a moment mistrusting that the point of her remark was buried in some species of American humour. He always submitted to American humour. There was nothing else to do, except to understand it.

"Stirrups, dear?"

"What?"

"You're very pink and healthy, aren't you?"