The Highgrader Part 51

Later they came to earth and babbled the nonsense that is the highest wisdom of lovers. They built air castles and lived in them, seeing life through a poetic ambient as a long summer day in which they should ride and work and play together.

At last she remembered Lady Farquhar and began to laugh.

"We must go down and tell her at once, Jack."

He agreed. "Yes, let's go back and have it out. If you like you may go to your room and I'll tackle her alone."

"I'd rather go with you."

He delighted in her answer.

Farquhar was taking an early morning stroll, arm in arm with Lady Jim, when he caught sight of them.

"Look, Di!"

Both of the lovers knew how to walk. Lady Farquhar, watching them, thought she had never seen as fine a pair of untamed human beings. In his step was the fine free swing of the hillman, and the young woman breasted the slope lightly as a faun.

The Englishman chuckled. "You're beaten, Di. The highwayman wins."

"Nonsense," she retorted sharply, but with anxiety manifest in her frown.

"Fact, just the same. He's coming to tell us he means to take our little girl to his robber den."

"I believe you'd actually let him," she said scornfully.

"Even you can't stop him. It's written in the books. Not sure I'd interfere if I could. For a middle-aged Pharisee with the gout I'm incurably romantic. It's the child's one great chance for happiness. But I wish to the deuce he wasn't a highgrader."

"She shan't sacrifice herself if I can prevent it," Lady Farquhar insisted stanchly.

"I 'member a girl who sacrificed herself for a line lieutenant without a s.h.i.+lling to call his own," he soliloquized aloud. "Would have him, and did, by Jove! Three deaths made him Lord Farquhar later, but she married the penniless subaltern."

"I've always been glad I did." She squeezed his arm fondly. "But this is different, James."

Kilmeny and Moya stopped. The young man doffed his gray felt hat and bowed.

"Mornin', Lady Farquhar--Lord Farquhar. We've come to ask your permission for our marriage."

"Mornin', rebels. Fancy I'll have to refuse it," cut back Farquhar, eyes twinkling. For this bold directness pleased and amused him.

"That would distress us extremely," answered Kilmeny with a genial smile.

"But would not affect your plans, I understand you to mean."

"You catch the idea exactly, sir."

Lady Farquhar entered the conversation. "Are you planning to go to prison with him, Moya, when he is convicted of highgrading?" she asked pleasantly.

Moya told in three sentences of what her lover had done. The Englishman wrung Kilmeny's hand cordially.

"By Jove, you reform thoroughly when you go about it. Don't think I'd have enjoyed writing that check for Miss Joyce. Leaves you strapped, does it?"

"Dead broke," came the very cheerful reply.

"But of course Moya has some money," said Lady Farquhar quietly.

The Westerner winced. "Wish she hadn't. It's the only thing I have to forgive her."

Farquhar lifted his eyebrows. "Di," he remonstrated.

His wife came to time with a frank apology. "That was downright nasty of me, Mr. Kilmeny. I withdraw it. None the less, I think Moya would be throwing herself away. Do you realize what you are proposing? She's been used to the best ever since she was born. Have you the means to supply her needs? Or are you considering a Phyllida and Corydon idyll in a cottage?"

"It will have to be something of that sort at first. I've told her all this too, Lady Farquhar."

"What does that matter if we love each other?" Moya asked.

"You'll find it matters a good deal," said Lady Jim dryly. "When poverty comes in love is likely to wink out any day. Of course I realize that yours is of a quality quite unusual. It always is, my dear. Every lover has thought that since time began."

"We'll have to take our fighting chance of that," Jack replied.

Moya, her eyes s.h.i.+ning, nodded agreement. No great gain can be won without risk. She knew there was a chance that she might not find happiness in her love. But where it called her she must follow--to a larger life certainly, to joy and to sorrow, to the fuller experiences that must come to every woman who fulfills her destiny.

A voice hailed Jack. Colter was hurrying up the street, plainly excited.

Kilmeny moved a few steps toward him.

Lady Jim took advantage of his absence to attack Moya from another angle. "My dear, I wish I could show you how much depends on a similarity of tastes, of habits, of standards. Matrimony means more than love. It means adjustment."

"I've thought of that too. But ... when you love enough that doesn't help the adjustment?" asked the girl navely.

She had appealed to Farquhar. That gentleman came to her a.s.sistance. "It does."

"This isn't a matter to be decided merely by personal preference," urged the older woman. "There may be--consequences."

The color beat into the face of the young woman in a wave, but her eyes held steadily to those of Lady Farquhar.

"I ... hope so."

"Bravo, Moya!" applauded her guardian, clapping his hands softly.

"Don't you think they--the consequences--deserve a better chance than you will give them?"

"I'll answer that, Di," spoke up Farquhar. "When a girl chooses for the father of her children a man who is clean and strong and virile, and on top of that her lover, she is giving them the best possible chance in life."

Moya's grat.i.tude shone through the eyes that met those of her guardian.

Kilmeny swung back to the group he had left. "I've good news, friends.

This is my lucky day. You remember that when I was rescued from the Golden Nugget my pockets were full of ore samples I had picked up as I was tunneling."

"Yes ... picked them up while you were delirious, didn't you?" Farquhar replied.