“Never!”
“I see. Yes, that was a bad guess: I’m sure Lindley’s just the same steady-going, sober, plodding old horse he was as a boy. His picture doesn’t fit a romantic frame — singing under a lady’s window in a thunderstorm! Your serenader must have been very young.”
“He is,” said Cora. “I suppose he’s about twenty-three; just a boy — and a very annoying one, too!”
Her companion looked at her narrowly. “By any chance, is he the person your little brother seemed so fond of mentioning — Mr. Vilas?”
Cora gave a genuine start. “Good heavens! What makes you think that?” she cried, but she was sufficiently disconcerted to confirm his amused suspicion.
“So it was Mr. Vilas,” he said. “He’s one of the jilted, of course.”
“Oh, `jilted’!” she exclaimed. “All the wild boys that a girl can’t make herself like aren’t `jilted,’ are they?”
“I believe I should say — yes,” he returned. “Yes, in this instance, just about all of them.”
“Is every woman a target for you, Mr. Corliss? I suppose you know that you have a most uncomfortable way of shooting up the landscape.” She stirred uneasily, and moved away from him to the other end of the bench.
“I didn’t miss that time,” he laughed. “Don’t you ever miss?”
He leaned quickly toward her and answered in a low voice: “You can be sure I’m not going to miss anything about you.”
It was as if his bending near her had been to rouge her. But it cannot be said that she disliked his effect upon her; for the deep breath she drew in audibly, through her shut teeth, was a signal of delight; and then followed one of those fraught silences not uncharacteristic of dialogues with Cora.
Presently, she gracefully and uselessly smoothed her hair from the left temple with the backs of her fingers, of course finishing the gesture prettily by tucking in a hairpin tighter above the nape of her neck. Then, with recovered coolness, she asked:
“Did you come all the way from Italy just to sell our old house, Mr. Corliss?”
“Perhaps that was part of why I came,” he said, gayly. “I need a great deal of money, Miss Cora Madison.”
“For your villa and your yacht?”
“No; I’m a magician, dear lady — —”
“Yes,” she said, almost angrily. “Of course you know it!”
“You mock me! No; I’m going to make everybody rich who will trust me. I have a secret, and it’s worth a mountain of gold. I’ve put all I have into it, and will put in everything else I can get for myself, but it’s going to take a great deal more than that. And everybody who goes into it will come out on Monte Cristo’s island.”
“Then I’m sorry papa hasn’t anything to put in,” she said.
“But he has: his experience in business and his integrity. I want him to be secretary of my company. Will you help me to get him?” he laughed.
“Do you want me to?” she asked with a quick, serious glance straight in his eyes, one which he met admirably.
“I have an extremely definite impression,” he said lightly, “that you can make anybody you know do just what you want him to.”
“And I have another that you have still another `extremely definite impression’ that takes rank over that,” she said, but not with his lightness, for her tone was faintly rueful. “It is that you can make me do just what you want me to.”
Mr. Valentine Corliss threw himself back on the bench and laughed aloud. “What a girl!” he cried. Then for a fraction of a second he set his hand over hers, an evanescent touch at which her whole body started and visibly thrilled.
She lifted her gloved hand and looked at it with an odd wonder; her alert emotions, always too ready, flinging their banners to her cheeks again.
“Oh, I don’t think it’s soiled,” he said, a speech which she punished with a look of starry contempt. For an instant she made him afraid that something had gone wrong with his measuring tape; but with a slow movement she set her hand softly against her hot cheek; and he was reassured: it was not his touching her that had offended her, but the allusion to it.
“Thanks,” he said, very softly.
She dropped her hand to her parasol, and began, musingly, to dig little holes in the gravel of the path. “Richard Lindley is looking for investments,” she said.
“I’m glad to hear he’s been so successful,” returned Corliss.
“He might like a share in your gold-mine.”
“Thank heaven it isn’t literally a gold-mine,” he exclaimed. “There have been so many crooked ones exploited I don’t believe you could get anybody nowadays to come in on a real one. But I think you’d make an excellent partner for an adventurer who had discovered hidden treasure; and I’m that particular kind of adventurer. I think I’ll take you in.”
“Do you?”
“How would you like to save a man from being ruined?”
“Ruined? You don’t mean it literally?”
“Literally!” He laughed gayly. “If I don’t `land’ this I’m gone, smashed, finished — quite ended! Don’t bother, I’m going to `land’ it. And it’s rather a serious compliment I’m paying you, thinking you can help me. I’d like to see a woman — just once in the world — who could manage a thing like this.” He became suddenly very grave. “Good God! wouldn’t I be at her feet!”
Her eyes became even more eager. “You think I — I might be a woman who could?”
“Who knows, Miss Madison? I believe — —” He stopped abruptly, then in a lowered, graver voice asked: “Doesn’t it somehow seem a little queer to you when we call each other, `Miss Madison’ and `Mr. Corliss’?”
“Yes,” she answered slowly; “it does.”
“Doesn’t it seem to you,” he went on, in the same tone, “that we only `Miss’ and `Mister’ each other in fun? That though you never saw me until yesterday, we’ve gone pretty far beyond mere surfaces? That we did in our talk, last night?”
“Yes,” she repeated; “it does.”
He let a pause follow, and then said huskily:
“How far are we going?”
“I don’t know.” She was barely audible; but she turned deliberately, and there took place an eager exchange of looks which continued a long while. At last, and without ending this serious encounter, she whispered:
“How far do you think?”
Mr. Corliss did not answer, and a peculiar phenomenon became vaguely evident to the girl facing him: his eyes were still fixed full upon hers, but he was not actually looking at her; nevertheless, and with an extraordinarily acute attention, he was unquestionably looking at something. The direct front of pupil and iris did not waver from her; but for the time he was not aware of her; had not even heard her question. Something in the outer field of his vision had suddenly and completely engrossed him; something in that nebulous and hazy background which we see, as we say, with the white of the eye. Cora instinctively turned and looked behind her, down the path.
There was no one in sight except a little girl and the elderly burgess who had glanced over his shoulder at Cora as she entered the park; and he was, in face, mien, and attire, so thoroughly the unnoticeable, average man-on-the-street that she did not even recall him as the looker-round of a little while ago. He was strolling benevolently, the little girl clinging to one of his hands, the other holding an apple; and a composite photograph of a thousand grandfathers might have resulted in this man’s picture.
As the man and little girl came slowly up the walk toward the couple on the bench there was a faint tinkle at Cora’s feet: her companion’s scarfpin, which had fallen from his tie. He was maladroit about picking it up, trying with thumb and forefinger to seize the pin itself, instead of the more readily grasped design of small pearls at the top, so that he pushed it a little deeper into the gravel; and then occurred a tiny coincidence: the elderly man, passing, let fall the apple from his hand, and it rolled toward the pin just as Corliss managed to secure the latter. For an inst
ant, though the situation was so absolutely commonplace, so casual, Cora had a wandering consciousness of some mysterious tensity; a feeling like the premonition of a crisis very near at hand. This sensation was the more curious because nothing whatever happened. The man got his apple, joined in the child’s laughter, and went on.
“What was it you asked me?” said Corliss, lifting his head again and restoring the pin to his tie. He gazed carelessly at the back of the grandsire, disappearing beyond a bush at a bend in the path.
“Who was that man?” said Cora with some curiosity.
“That old fellow? I haven’t an idea. You see I’ve been away from here so many years I remember almost no one. Why?”
“I don’t know, unless it was because I had an idea you were thinking of him instead of me. You didn’t listen to what I said.”
“That was because I was thinking so intensely of you,” he began instantly. “A startlingly vivid thought of you came to me just then. Didn’t I look like a man in a trance?”
“What was the thought?”
“It was a picture: I saw you standing under a great bulging sail, and the water flying by in moonlight; oh, a moon and a night such as you have never seen! and a big blue headland looming up against the moon, and crowned with lemon groves and vineyards, all sparkling with fireflies — old watch-towers and the roofs of white villas gleaming among olive orchards on the slopes — the sound of mandolins — —”
“Ah!” she sighed, the elderly man, his grandchild, and his apple well-forgotten.
“Do you think it was a prophecy?” he asked.
“What do you think?” she breathed. “That was really what I asked you before.”
“I think,” he said slowly, “that I’m in danger of forgetting that my `hidden treasure’ is the most important thing in the world.”
“In great danger?” The words were not vocal.
He moved close to her; their eyes met again, with increased eagerness, and held fast; she was trembling, visibly; and her lips — parted with her tumultuous breathing — were not far from his.
“Isn’t any man in great danger,” he said, “if he falls in love with you?”
“Well?”
CHAPTER SEVEN
TOWARD FOUR O’CLOCK that afternoon, a very thin, fair young man shakily heaved himself into a hammock under the trees in that broad backyard wherein, as Valentine Corliss had yesterday noticed, the last iron monarch of the herd, with unabated arrogance, had entered domestic service as a clothes-prop. The young man, who was of delicate appearance and unhumanly pale, stretched himself at full length on his back, closed his eyes, moaned feebly, cursed the heat in a stricken whisper. Then, as a locust directly overhead violently shattered the silence, and seemed like to continue the outrage forever, the shaken lounger stopped his ears with his fingers and addressed the insect in old Saxon.
A white jacketed mulatto came from the house bearing something on a silver tray.
“Julip, Mist’ Vilas?” he said sympathetically.
Ray Vilas rustily manoeuvred into a sitting position; and, with eyes still closed, made shift to accept the julep in both hands, drained half of it, opened his eyes, and thanked the cup-bearer feebly, in a voice and accent reminiscent of the melodious South.
“And I wonder,” he added, “if you can tell me — —”
“I’m Miz William Lindley’s house-man, Joe Vaxdens,” said the mulatto, in the tone of an indulgent nurse. “You in Miz Lindley’s backyard right now, sittin’ in a hammick.”
“I seem to gather almost that much for myself,” returned the patient. “But I should like to know how I got here.”
“Jes’ come out the front door an’ walk’ aroun’ the house an’ set down. Mist’ Richard had to go downtown; tole me not to wake you; but I heerd you splashin’ in the bath an’ you tole me you din’ want no breakfuss — —”
“Yes, Joe, I’m aware of what’s occurred since I woke,” said Vilas, and, throwing away the straws, finished the julep at one draught. “What I want to know is how I happened to be here at Mr. Lindley’s.”
“Mist’ Richard brought you las’ night, suh. I don’ know where he got you, but I heered a considerable thrashum aroun’, up an’ down the house, an’ so I come help him git you to bed in one vem spare-rooms.” Joe chuckled ingratiatingly. “Lord name! You cert’n’y wasn’t askin’ fer no bed!”
He took the glass, and the young man reclined again in the hammock, a hot blush vanquishing his pallor. “Was I — was I very bad, Joe?”
“Oh, you was all right,” Joe hastened to reassure him. “You was jes’ on’y a little bit tight.”
“Did it really seem only a little?” the other asked hopefully.
“Yessuh,” said Joe promptly. “Nothin’ at all. You jes’ wanted to rare roun’ little bit. Mist’ Richard took gun away from you — —”
“What?”
“Oh, I tole him you wasn’ goin’ use it!” Joe laughed. “But you so wile be din’ know what you do. You cert’n’y was drunkes’ man I see in long while,” he said admiringly. “You pert near had us bofe wore out ‘fore you give up, an’ Mist’ Richard an’ me, we use’’ to han’lin’ drunkum man, too — use’ to have big times week-in, week-out ‘ith Mist’ Will — at’s Mist’ Richard’s brother, you know, suh, what died o’ whiskey.” He laughed again in high good-humour. “You cert’n’y laid it all over any vem ole times we had ‘ith Mist’ Will!”
Mr. Vilas shifted his position in the hammock uneasily; Joe’s honest intentions to be of cheer to the sufferer were not wholly successful.
“I tole Mist’ Richard,” the kindly servitor continued, “it was a mighty good thing his ma gone up Norf endurin’ the hot spell. Sence Mist’ Will die she can’t hardly bear to see drunkum man aroun’ the house. Mist’ Richard hardly ever tech nothin’ himself no more. You goin’ feel better, suh, out in the f’esh air,” he concluded, comfortingly as he moved away.
“Joe!”
“Yessuh.”
Mr. Vilas pulled himself upright for a moment. “What use in the world do you reckon one julep is to me?”
“Mist’ Richard say to give you one drink ef you ask’ for it, suh,” answered Joe, looking troubled.
“Well, you’ve told me enough now about last night to make any man hang himself, and I’m beginning to remember enough more — —”
“Pshaw, Mist’ Vilas,” the coloured man interrupted, deprecatingly, “you din’ broke nothin’! You on’y had couple glass’ wine too much. You din’ make no trouble at all; jes’ went right off to bed. You ought seen some vem ole times me an Mist’ Richard use to have ‘ith Mist’ Will — —”
“Joe!”
“Yessuh.”
“I want three more juleps and I want them right away.”
The troubled expression upon the coloured man’s face deepened. “Mist’ Richard say jes’ one, suh,” he said reluctantly. “I’m afraid — —”
“Joe.”
“Yessuh.”
“I don’t know,” said Ray Vilas slowly, “whether or not you ever heard that I was born and raised in Kentucky.”
“Yessuh,” returned Joe humbly. “I heerd so.”
“Well, then,” said the young man in a quiet voice, “you go and get me three juleps. I’ll settle it with Mr. Richard.”
“Yessuh.”
But it was with a fifth of these renovators that Lindley found his guest occupied, an hour later, while upon a small table nearby a sixth, untouched, awaited disposal beside an emptied coffee-cup. Also, Mr. Vilas was smoking a cigarette with unshadowed pleasure; his eye was bright, his expression care-free; and he was sitting up in the hammock, swinging cheerfully, and singing the “Marseillaise.” Richard approached through the yard, coming from the street without entering the house; and anxiety was manifest in the glance he threw at the green-topped glass upon the table, and in his greeting.
“Hail, gloom!” returned Mr. Vilas, cordially, and, observing the anxious glance, he swiftly removed th
e untouched goblet from the table to his own immediate possession. “Two simultaneous juleps will enhance the higher welfare,” he explained airily. “Sir, your Mr. Varden was induced to place a somewhat larger order with us than he protested to be your intention. Trusting you to exonerate him from all so-and-so and that these few words, etcetera!” He depleted the elder glass of its liquor, waved it in the air, cried, “Health, host!” and set it upon the table. “I believe I do not err in assuming my cup-bearer’s name to be Varden, although he himself, in his simple Americo-Africanism, is pleased to pluralize it. Do I fret you, host?”
“Not in the least,” said Richard, dropping upon a rustic bench, and beginning to fan himself with his straw hat. “What’s the use of fretting about a boy who hasn’t sense enough to fret about himself?”
“`Boy?’” Mr. Vilas affected puzzlement. “Do I hear aright? Sir, do you boy me? Bethink you, I am now the shell of five mint-juleps plus, and am pot-valiant. And is this mere capacity itself to be lightly boyed? Again, do I not wear a man’s garment, a man’s garnitures? Heed your answer; for this serge, these flannels, and these silks are yours, and though I may not fill them to the utmost, I do to the longmost, precisely. I am the stature of a man; had it not been for your razor I should wear the beard of a man; therefore I’ll not be boyed. What have you to say in defence?”
“Hadn’t you better let me get Joe to bring you something to eat?” asked Richard.
“Eat?” Mr. Vilas disposed of the suggestion with mournful hauteur. “There! For the once I forgive you. Let the subject never be mentioned between us again. We will tactfully turn to a topic of interest. My memories of last evening, at first hazy and somewhat disconcerting, now merely amuse me. Following the pleasant Spanish custom, I went a-serenading, but was kidnapped from beneath the precious casement by — by a zealous arrival. Host, `zealous arrival’ is not the julep in action: it is a triumph of paraphrase.”
“I wish you’d let Joe take you back to bed,” said Richard.
“Always bent on thoughts of the flesh,” observed the other sadly. “Beds are for bodies, and I am become a thing of spirit. My soul is grateful a little for your care of its casing. You behold, I am generous: I am able to thank my successor to Carmen!”
Collected Works of Booth Tarkington Page 122