THE FOREST OF ARDEN

I had seen Alicia whirl away in the Meades' big car. I had seen the Westmacotes and Miss Emmeline off on what they termed a nature-hunt. The Author and his secretary were up to the eyes in a new chapter; The Suffragist was spreading the glad tidings; and Riedriech and Schmetz had Luis Morenas in hand for the afternoon, visioning the United States of the World, while he snatched sketches of the visionaries.

The Author, Mr. Johnson, and I, lunched together.

"Miss Smith," began The Author abruptly, "did you know this house was built by British and French master masons? No? Well, it was. Judge Gatchell's father, grandfather, and great-grandfather were solicitors for this estate, and the judge at last very kindly allowed me to look through a great batch of papers in his possession. From these I discovered that one of the Hyndses visited England in 1727, joined the new lodge lately established there, and brought one of the brethren, an architect, back to America with him. Another came from France. These three planned and built this house, and did it pretty well, too.

"This house-builder, Walsingham Hynds, made his house a sort of lodge for the brethren, just as in later times his grandsons sheltered the brethren of those societies that fathered the American Revolution. Gatchell tells me there is a legend of the master of Hynds House entertaining British officers and at the same time hiding the forfeited rebels they were hunting. I'd like to know," The Author added, reflectively, "where he hid them."

"An old house like this has dozens of places where one could be hidden without much danger of detection," remarked Mr. Johnson.

"I'm pretty sure of that," agreed The Author, emphatically.

"You should be, since you did a neat little bit of hiding on your own account," Mr. Johnson reminded him.

The Author was nettled. He had never found the paper lost out of the closet in his own room, though he had never given up a tentative search for it.

"Well, it's confoundedly odd I never did such a thing before," he grumbled.

"What is odd is that I myself was waked out of my sleep that night by the most oppressive sense of misery and hopelessness I have ever experienced," Mr. Johnson said seriously. "It was so overpowering that it made me think of Saint Theresa's description of her torment in that oven in the wall of hell which had by kindly forethought on the part of the devil been arranged for her permanent tenancy. Of course, it was just a nightmare," he added, doubtfully; "or perhaps a fit of indigestion."

"Indigestion takes many forms," I remarked, as lightly as I could. "And you must remember you've been warned that Hynds House is haunted. Why, the servants insist they've seen ol' Mis' Scarlett's h'ant!"

"Ah!" nodded The Author. "And I smell a mysterious perfume, I walk in my sleep for the first and only time in my life, and I hide where it can't be found a paper with an uncouth jingle and some dots on it, Johnson and I have the same nightmare. And I have heard footsteps. All hallucinations, of course! I will say this much for Hynds House: I never had a hallucination until I came here. By the way, did I merely imagine I heard a violin last night?"

"Oh, no: I heard it, too." Mr. Johnson looked at The Author with a concerned face. "You're getting a bit off your nerves, Chief. Anybody might play a violin."

"Anybody might, but few do play it as I thought I heard it played last night. Who's the player, Miss Smith?"

"I haven't the slightest idea. Alicia thinks it's a spirit that lives in the crape-myrtle trees."

I was beginning to be aweary of The Author's shrewd eyes and persistent questioning, and I was heartily glad when he had to go back to his work.

That was a gray and windless afternoon, and the house was full of those bluish shadows that belong to gray days; it was charged, even more than usual, with mystery: the whole atmosphere tingled with it as with electricity. I couldn't read. I have never been able to play upon any musical instrument, much as I love music. I do not sing, either, except in a small-beer voice; and when I tried to sew I pricked my fingers with the needle. I went into the kitchen, consulted with Mary Magdalen as to the evening's dinner, weighed and measured such ingredients as she needed, saw that the two maids were following instructions, tried to make friends with Beautiful Dog, until he howled with anguish and affliction and fled as from pestilence; and, unable to endure the house any longer, put on my hat and set out upon one of those aimless walks one takes in a land where all walks are lovely.

Automobiles came and went upon the public road, and to escape them I crossed a wooden foot-bridge spanning a weedy ditch, struck into a path bordering a wide field followed it aimlessly for a while, and before I knew it was in the Enchanted Wood.

The Enchanted Wood was carpeted with brown and sweet-smelling pine-needles, with green clumps of honeysuckle breaking out here and there in moist spots. There were cassena bushes, full of vivid scarlet berries; and crooked, gray-green cedars; and brown boles of pine-trees; and the shallowest, gayest, absurdest little thread of a brook giggling as it went about its important business of keeping a lip of woodland green.

It was very, very still there, somewhat as Gethsemane might have been, I fancy. I had wanted to be alone, that I might wrestle with my trouble. Yet now that I was facing it, my spirit quailed. Never had I felt so desolate, or dreamed that the human heart could bear such anguish.

If I had had the faintest warning, that I might have saved myself! If I had never come to Hynds House at all, but had lived my busy, matter-of-fact, quiet life! Yet the idea of never having seen him, never having loved him, was more cruel than the cruellest suffering that loving entailed. It was harder even than the thought that Alicia and I cared for the same man, who perhaps cared for neither of us. At that I fell into an agony of weeping.

That passed. I was spent and empty. But the calm of acceptance had come. I wasn't to lose my grip, nor wear the willow. The idea of me, Sophy Smith, wearing the willow, aroused my English common-sense. I refused to be ridiculous.

And then I looked up and saw him coming toward me, his great dog trotting at his side. I pulled myself together, and smiled; for Boris was thrusting his friendly nose into my palm, and rubbing his fine head against my shoulder, and his master had dropped lightly down beside me.

I had not seen Mr. Jelnik for several days, and it struck me painfully that the man was pale, that his step dragged, and the brightness of his beauty was dimmed. He looked older, more careworn. If he was glad to see me, it was at first a troubled gladness, for he started, and bit his lip. I wondered, not with jealousy, but with pain, if there was somebody, some beautiful and high-born lady, at sight of whom his heart might have leaped as mine did now. Was it, perhaps, to forget such a one that he had exiled himself?

"You are such a serene, restful little person!" he said presently, and a change came over his tired face; "and I am such a restless one! You soothe me like a cool hand on a hot forehead."

"Restless?—you? Why, I thought you the serenest person I had ever known."

His mocking, gentle smile curved his lips. But his eyes were not laughing. For a fleeting, flashing second the whirlpools and the depths were bared in them. Then the veil fell, the surface lights came out and danced.

"My father was an excellent teacher," he said, indifferently. "The whole object of his training was self-control. He was really a very wonderful man, my father. But he overlooked one highly important factor in my make-up, my Hynds blood."

I made no reply. I was wondering, perplexedly, how I, I of all people, should have been picked up and enmeshed in the web of these Hyndses and their fate.

"Thank you," said he, gratefully, "for your silence. Most women would have talked, for the good of my soul. Why don't you talk?"

"Because I have nothing to say."

"You evidently inherited a God-sent reticence from your British forebears. The British have 'illuminating flashes of silence.' It is one of their saving graces."

I proved it.

Mr. Jelnik, with a whimsical, sidewise glance, drew nearer.

"Why, instead of sitting at the foot of a pine-tree, which is also a reticent creature, are you not sitting at the feet of our friend The Author, who is perfectly willing to illumine the universe? Very bright man, The Author. How do you like his secretary?"

"Mr. Johnson? Oh, very much indeed! He is charming!"

"I find him so myself. But he is melting wax before the fire of feminine eyes. A man in love is a sorry spectacle!"

"Is he?"

" Ach , yes! Consider my cousin Richard Geddes, for instance."

At that I winced, remembering the doctor's eyes when he had spoken of Alicia and of this man. I looked at Mr. Jelnik now, wonderingly. If he knew that much, hadn't he any heart? He stopped short. A wrinkle came between his black brows.

"I am not to speak lightly of my Cousin Richard, I perceive."

"No. Please, please, no!"

"I hadn't meant to. Richard," said Mr. Jelnik, gravely, "is a good man."

"Oh, yes! Indeed, yes! And—and he has a deep affection for you , Mr. Jelnik."

"We Hyndses are the deuce and all for affection. We take it in such deadly earnest that we store up a fine lot of trouble for ourselves." His face darkened.

I had been right, then, in supposing that there was somebody, perhaps half the world away, for whom he cared. And he didn't care for Alicia. I was sure of that.

"Don't go!" he begged, as I stirred. "Stay with me for a little while: I need you. I am tired, I am bored, I am disgusted with things as they are. There is nothing new under the sun, and all is vanity and vexation of spirit. Also, I am fronting the forks of a dilemma: Shall I shake the dust of Hyndsville from my foot, yield to the Wanderlust and go what our worthy friend Judge Gatchell calls 'tramping,' or shall I stay here yet awhile? I can't make up my mind!"

"Do you want to go?"

"Yes and no. Hold: let's toss for it and let the fall of the coin decide." He took from his pocket a thin silver foreign coin, and showed it me.

"Heads, I go. Tails, I stay," he said, and tossed it into the air. It fell beside me, out of his reach. With a swift hand I picked it up.

"Well?" he asked, indifferently.

My hand shut down upon it. There was the sound of wind in my ears, and my heart pounded, and my sight blurred. Then somebody—oh, surely not I!—in a low, clear, modulated voice spoke:

" You will have to stay, Mr. Jelnik ," said the voice, pleasantly. " It is tails. "

And all the while the inside Me, the real Me, was crying accusingly: "Oh, liar! liar! It is heads! "

Did he smile? I do not know. He did not look at me for the minute, but stared instead at the gray-blue, shadowed woods, the brown boles of the pines, the bright trickle of water playing it was a real brook.

"Tails it is. I stay," he said presently. And with a swift movement he reached out and lightly patted my hand with the coin in it.

"Well, it's decided. You have got me for a next-door neighbor for a while longer, Miss Smith. No, don't go yet."

So I stayed, who would have stayed in the Pit to be near him, or walked out of heaven to follow him, had he called me.

"Do you know," he spoke in a plaintive voice—"that I haven't had any lunch? I forgot to go home for lunch! Boris, go get me something to eat, old chap!"

Boris hung out a tongue like a flag, looked in his man's eyes, and vanished, running as only the thoroughbred wolf-hound can run.

"I am so tired! Should you mind if I kept my dog's place warm at your feet, Miss Smith?" And he stretched his long length on the pine-needles, his hands under his head, his face upturned.

"I wish I had a pillow!" he complained.

I scooped up an armful of the pine-needles, while he watched me lazily, and packed it over and between the roots of the pine-tree.

"You're a Sister of Charity," said he, gratefully. "But I can't afford to scratch my neck." And coolly he took a fold of my brown silk skirt, patted it over the straw, and with a sigh of satisfaction rested his head upon it.

"This is very pleasant!" he sighed. Presently: "Your hair looks just as a woman's hair ought to look, under that brown hat," he said drowsily, "soft and fair. And after this, I shall order some brown-silk cushion-covers. I never knew anything could feel so comfortable and restful!" He closed his eyes.

I sat there, hands locked tightly together, and looked down at his beautiful head, his slim and boyish body; and I felt an aching sense of resentment. No man has any business to be like that, and then come into the life of a woman named Smith.

He did not move, nor did I. We might have been creatures motionless under a spell, in that Enchanted Wood; until from the outside world came Boris, carrying a wicker basket, in which sandwiches, fruit, a small bottle of wine, and a silver drinking-cup had been carefully packed.

"Boris is used to playing courier." His master patted him affectionately. "Come, Miss Smith. By the way, that isn't your real name, though. Your name is Woman-in-the-Woods. Mine is—"

"Fortunatus."

He raised his brows. "I was about to say 'Man-who-is-Hungry,'" he finished, pleasantly. "I once knew an Indian named Tail-feathers-going-over-the-Hill. It taught me the value of being explicit as to one's name. Here, you shall have the cup, and I'll drink out of the bottle. Some of these fine days, Woman-in-the-Woods, I shall take you on a jaunt with me and Boris."

"It sounds promising," I admitted, cautiously.

"It is more. You shall learn all the fine points of out-of-door housekeeping.—Drink your wine, Woman-in-the-Woods. You were pale, very pale, when I came upon you. I was afraid something had been troubling you."

"Something troubles everybody."

"Oh, bromidic Miss Smith!—Drink your wine, please. And do not look doubtfully upon that sandwich. My man knows how to build them."

His man did. The sandwich was manna. The wine evidently came from heaven.

"Now you have a color. I say, is Morenas going to do you, too?"

"Good gracious, no! But he has sketched Alicia a dozen times at least."

"And me," said Mr. Jelnik, gloomily. "There's no evading the brute. I turn like a weathercock; and there he is, with corrugated brow and slitted eyes, studying me! And the baleful eye of The Author also pursues me. Between them, I feel skinned."

"Mr. Morenas says you are a rare but quite perfect type," I told him, mischievously.

The young man shrugged his shoulders disdainfully. "Am I a type, Woman-in-the-Woods?" he asked.

"Indeed, you are absolutely different from anybody else." And then, terrified, I turned red.

"Oh, I know! You didn't mean it either as a brick-bat or a bouquet, merely the truth as you see it. You are transparently truthful, fundamentally truthful, and at the same time the American business woman! You can't understand how that intrigues me!"

And then, quite simply and boyishly, he began to talk about himself. I got glimpses of a boyhood spent partly in a stately home in Vienna, and partly roaming about the great Hungarian estate which his mother loved, and to which the two returned summer after summer, until her death. Then student days, and after that, foot-loose wanderings up and down the earth and across the seven seas.

His grandmother had dropped courtesies to kings; and mine had dropped "aitches." His father had been a European celebrity, mine a ship-chandler in Boston, U.S.A. Yet here we two were; and he might have been a high-spirited and most beautiful little boy picnicking with a sedate and old-maidish little girl.

"How old should you imagine me?" he flung the question like a challenge, as if he had divined my thoughts.

"Oh, say, thirteen, going on fourteen."

"Dear Woman-in-the-Woods, I am thirty-three."

"You are older than I thought."

"You are younger than you think. And you betray the fact," he smiled.

"I have never been very young; probably I shall never be very old."

"You will always be exactly the right age," said Nicholas Jelnik. "For you will always be a little girl, and a young maiden, and a grown woman, and a bit of an old maid, and something of a grandmother. That is a wonderful, a very, very wonderful combination!"

I looked at him with more than doubt. But no, he was not poking fun, though the rich color had come into his cheek, and the golden lights flickered mischievously in his eyes.

"And I forgot to add, also a business woman!" he finished gaily. " Herr Gott , but it took a business woman to tackle old Hynds House and gather together such folks as you have there now!"

"Alicia was the head and front of that . I merely helped."

"Alicia," said Mr. Jelnik, "is a darling girl. Alicia is everything a girl ought to be." But there was not in eyes or voice that light and tone that crept into Doctor Richard's when he named her. My dear girl's tender face—so true and beautiful and loving—rose before me, and all she had meant to me, been to me, crowded upon my heart. I said what I had never intended to say to any one:

"Why, Alicia's my—my child , to me! Don't you understand?"

"Dear Woman, yes!" His voice was melted gold.

The ridiculous little brook went whish-whis-sssh; and the bluish shadows melted into gray; and a chill came creeping, creeping, into the air.

"Before you go," said Nicholas Jelnik, "I should like to give you a talisman, to turn Miss Smith into Woman-in-the-Woods every now and then." And with his pocket-knife he cut a sharp line down the thin old coin he had tossed, worked at it for a few minutes with a pocket file and a stone, and then with his fingers that looked so slim but were strong as steel nippers. The coin broke in halves.

"Half for you," said Mr. Jelnik, "and half for me, to commemorate a comradely afternoon, and to mark a decision. We'll consider it a token, a charm, a talisman—what you will. And if ever I really and truly need a Woman-in-the-Woods to help me, why, I'll send my half to her; and she'll obey the summons instantly and without question. And if ever she needs a man—like me, say—why, she'll send her half, and he'll come, instantly and without question." He was smiling as he spoke. Now he paused to look at me earnestly. "Because we are going to be real friends, you and I; are we not?"

I hesitated. How could we two be real friends, when the balance between us was so uneven, so unequal? He saw the hesitation, momentary as it was, and looked at me with something of astonishment and a hint of hurt.

"I have never," he said, proudly, "had to ask for friendship. Yet I do desire yours, who are such a grave, brave, true little thing, such a valiant-for-truth, stand-fast little thing! You have the one quality that I, born wanderer, foot-loose rolling-stone, need most in this world, unchanging, loyal, unquestioning steadfastness."

I considered this. It is true that I hold fast, for that is the English way.

"But outside of that one thing," I told him, "I have nothing else."

"No?—She hasn't," said he, in a teasing tone, "anything to give, except unbuyable truth. She has nothing to offer except Friendship's very self!—this poor, poor Miss Smith!"

Now, heaven alone knows why, but at that my eyes filled with foolish tears. If he saw them—and they ran down my cheek in spite of me—he mercifully gave no sign. Instead he held out his fine brown hand, and when I placed mine in it, he lifted it to his lips with foreign grace.

"We two are friends, then—through thick and thin, above doubting, and without fear or reproach. That is so, hein ?"

"Yes!" I promised.

So, walking slowly, as if loath to go, we two went out of the Enchanted Wood and left the Forest of Arden behind us.

When I was again in my own room, and had taken off the brown frock, I held against my cheek, for a long, long minute, that fold against which his head had rested; I fingered the broken coin; I looked long and long at the hand his lips had touched; and though I had told a shameless lie, I was not at all ashamed.

I have often read that women do not and cannot love men, but only love to be loved by them. Only a man could have been stupid enough to say that; and, then he didn't know. The woman hadn't told him.

"I say! Haven't you got on a new frock to-night? My word, it's scrumptious!" remarked The Author, after dinner. I was wearing a black-and-blue frock, and he had seen it before, as I explained with some surprise.

He adjusted his glasses, frowned, and shook his head.

"I am becoming unobservant," he said crossly. "This place is playing the very deuce with my mental processes! But stay: surely your hair is arranged differently? It wasn't brought over your ears like that, the first time I saw you, I know it wasn't!"

"It is curled a little and fluffed a little; that's what makes it look different," I told him patiently.

"Then that frock is curled a little and fluffed a little, and that's what makes it look different, too," The Author decided, and stared at me critically. "You are improving," he told me, with condescension.

"You are not !" I was goaded to reply.

The Author merely grinned.

"Do you know," he asked, "if that man Jelnik is coming to-night? I hope so. Unusual man. Can't think why he buries himself here! Our old friend Gatchell doesn't seem to admire him. I wonder why?"

"I can't possibly imagine," I replied equably, "unless it is that the judge grows old."

"Hah!" The Author's eyebrows went up truculently. "And is it a sign of advancing age and mental decrepitude not to admire this fellow?"

But I laughed at him.

"You're all alike, you women." A wicked light snapped into his eyes. "Hear, dear lady, the Bard of the Congaree, the Poet Laureate of South Carolina, Coogle for your benefit," hissed The Author, and repeated, balefully:

Alas, poor woman, with eyes of sparkling fire,
Thy heart is often won by mankind's gay attire!
So weak thou art, so very weak at best,
Thou canst not look beyond a satin-lined vest!

I've seen thee ofttimes cast a-winning glance,
And be carried away, as it were within a trance,
By the gay apparel of some dishonest youth
Whose bosom heaved with not a single truth!

He was so outrageously funny that I forgave his impertinence. His face relaxed, and his eyes twinkled. He was in high feather the remainder of the evening. He was, in fact, so good-humoredly witty that the boys and girls Alicia had brought home clustered about him like golden bees.

"Miss Smith," whispered Miss Emmeline, under cover of their laughter, "may I have a word with you?"

We drifted into the library; and she seated herself, folded her hands, and said tremulously:

"My dear, my wish has been granted. I have really come in contact with the Unknown! I have seen something, Miss Smith!" I looked at her steadily. "Just before dawn," Miss Emmeline continued, "I woke up, with a curious, indefinable, uneasy sense of trouble, as if something had happened and I was remembering it, say. I saw how foolish it was to allow a mere nightmare to worry me, though I am not subject to nightmares, my conscience and my digestion being quite all right, thank heaven! Gradually the impression faded. I was just dropping to sleep again, when I heard the faintest imaginable footfall, almost as if somebody were walking upon the air itself. And then, Miss Smith, there stole across my room a figure. There was nothing terrifying about it: it was merely a figure, that was all, and so I was not frightened. It came from my clothes-closet, went into the next room, and vanished. For when I arose and followed, there was no trace of it. And the doors were locked. Now, was not that remarkable?"

"Very," said I, with dry lips.

"I should have thought I was dreaming," went on Miss Emmeline, "save that there lingered in the air, for some time, a faint and very delicate—"

"Perfume," I finished.

Miss Emmeline started, and seized my hand.

"Then you have experienced it, too?"

"I have detected the perfume," I admitted, "but I have never seen anything. Dear Miss Emmeline, would it be too much to ask you to keep this to yourself, for a while at least? People are so easily frightened; and wild stories spread and grow."

Miss Emmeline nodded. "Of course I'll keep it quiet," she promised kindly. "I shall, however, write down the occurrence for the Society for Psychical Research, without giving actual names and place." To this I raised no objection. But it was with a troubled mind that I left Miss Emmeline.

I was destined to hear one more confidence that night, unwittingly this time. I had gone down-stairs to place, ready to Mary Magdalen's hand in the morning, the materials for the breakfast. This entails work, but it insures successful handling of household economics. Having weighed and measured what was necessary, and seen that the inquisitive Black family occupied their proper quarters on the lower veranda, I went back up-stairs. The Author's door was slightly ajar, and I could hear him walking up and down, as he does when he dictates; for he is a restless man.

"Johnson," The Author was saying as I passed, my slippered feet making no sound, "Johnson, that Sophy woman intrigues me. Hanged if she doesn't, Johnson!"

"I like Miss Smith, myself. She reminds me very much of my mother," said Johnson's cordial voice in reply.

"But I don't like the way things look here, at all, Johnson!" fumed The Author. "What's his game, anyhow? What's he after? What's he here for? Does she know, or suspect? Or doesn't she, Johnson?" The Author asked, earnestly. "Look here: somebody's got to protect that Sophy woman against Nicholas Jelnik!"

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