All her outraged soul leaped to arms, quivering now under the reaction; the man's mere presence was becoming unendurable; the room stifled her. She turned, scarce knowing what she was doing; and at the same moment her sister-in-law entered.
Berkley, already on his feet, turned short: and when she offered him a hand as slim and white as Ailsa's, he glanced inquiringly at the latter, not at all certain who this charming woman might be.
"Mrs. Craig," said Ailsa.
"I don't believe it," he said. "You haven't grown-up children!"
"Don't you really believe it, Mr. Berkley? Or is it just the flattering Irish in you that natters us poor women to our destruction?"
He had sense and wit enough to pay her a quick and really graceful compliment; to which she responded, still laughing:
"Oh, it is the Ormond in you! I am truly ve'y glad you came. You are Constance Berkley's sonConnie Berkley! The sweetest girl that ever lived."
There was a silence. Then Mrs. Craig said gently:
"I was her maid of honour, Mr. Berkley."
Ailsa raised her eyes to his altered face, startled at the change in it. He looked at her absently, then his gaze reverted to Ailsa Paige.
"I loved her dearly," said Mrs. Craig, dropping a light, impulsive hand on his. "I want her son to know it."
Her eyes were soft and compassionate; her hand still lingered lightly on his, and she let it rest so.
"Mrs. Craig," he said, "you are the most real person I have known in many years among the phantoms. I thought your sister-in-law was. But you are still more real."
"Am I?" she laid her other hand over his, considering him earnestly. Ailsa looking on, astonished, noticed a singular radiance on his facethe pale transfiguration from some quick inward illumination.
Then Celia Craig's voice sounded almost caressingly:
"I think you should have come to see us long ago." A pause. "You are as welcome in this house as your mother would be if she were living. I love and honour her memory."
"I have honoured little else in the world," he said. They looked at one another for a moment; then her quick smile broke out. "I have an album. There are some Paiges, Ormonds, and Berkleys in it"
Ailsa came forward slowly.
"Shall I look for it, Celia?"
"No, Honey-bell." She turned lightly and went into the back parlour, smiling mysteriously to herself, her vast, pale-blue crinoline rustling against the furniture.
"My sister-in-law," said Ailsa, after an interval of silent constraint, "is very Southern. Any sort of kinship means a great deal to her. I, of course, am Northern, and regard such matters as unimportant."
"It is very gracious of Mrs. Craig to remember it," he said. "I know nothing finer than confidence in one's own kin."
She flushed angrily. "I have not that confidencein kinsman."
For a moment their eyes met. Hers were hard as purple steel.
"Is that final?"
"Yes."
The muscles in his cheeks grew tense, then into his eyes came that reckless glimmer which in the beginning she had distrusteda gay, irresponsible radiance which seemed to mock at all things worthy.
He said: "No, it is not final. I shall come back to you."
She answered him in an even, passionless voice:
"A moment ago I was uncertain; now I know you. You are what they say you are. I never wish to see you again."
Celia Craig came back with the album. Berkley sprang to relieve her of the big book and a box full of silhouettes, miniatures, and daguerreotypes. They placed the family depository upon the table and then bent over it together.
Ailsa remained standing by the window, looking steadily at nothing, a burning sensation in both cheeks.
At intervals, through the intensity of her silence, she heard Celia's fresh, sweet laughter, and Berkley's humorous and engaging voice. She glanced sideways at the back of his dark curly head where it bent beside Celia's over the album. What an insolently reckless head it was! She thought that she had never before seen the back of any man's head so significant of characteror the want of it. And the same qualityor the lack of itnow seemed to her to pervade his supple body, his well-set shoulders, his voice, every movement, every featuresomething everywhere about him that warned and troubled.
Suddenly the blood burnt her cheeks with a perfectly incomprehensible desire to see his face again. She heard her sister-in-law saying:
"We Paiges and Berkleys are kin to the Ormonds and the Earls of Ossory. The Estcourts, the Paiges, the Craigs, the Lents, the Berkleys, intermarried a hundred years ago. . . . My grandmother knew yours, but the North is very strange in such matters. . . . Why did you never before come?"
He said: "It's one of those things a man is always expecting to do, and is always astonished that he hasn't done. Am I unpardonable?"
"I did not mean it in that way."
He turned his dark, comely head and looked at her as they bent together above the album.
"I know you didn't. My answer was not frank. The reason I never came to you before was thatI did not know I would be welcomed."
Their voices dropped. Ailsa standing by the window, watching the orioles in the maple, could no longer distinguish what they were saying.
He said: "You were bridesmaid to my mother. You are the Celia Paige of her letters."
"She is always Connie Berkley to me. I loved no woman better. I love her still."
"I found that out yesterday. That is why I dared come. I found, among the English letters, one from you to her, writtenafter."
"I wrote her again and again. She never replied. Thank God, she knew I loved her to the last."
He rested on the tabletop and stood leaning over and looking down.
"Dear Mr. Berkley," she murmured gently.
He straightened himself, passed a hesitating hand across his forehead, ruffling the short curly hair. Then his preoccupied gaze wandered. Ailsa turned toward him at the same moment, and instantly a flicker of malice transformed the nobility of his set features:
"It seems," he said, "that you and I are irrevocably related in all kinds of delightful ways, Mrs. Paige. Your sister-in-law very charmingly admits it, graciously overlooks and pardons my many delinquencies, and has asked me to come again. Will you ask me, too?"
Ailsa merely looked at him.
Mrs. Craig said, laughing: "I knew you were all Ormond and entirely Irish as soon as I came in the do'befo' I became aware of your racial fluency. I speak fo' my husband and myse'f when I say, please remember that our do' is ve'y wide open to our own kinand that you are of them"
"Oh, I'm all sorts of things beside" He paused for a second"Cousin Celia," he added so lightly that the grace with which he said it covered the impudence, and she laughed in semi-critical approval and turned to Ailsa, whose smile in response was chillychillier still when Berkley did what few men have done convincingly since powdered hair and knee-breeches became unfashionablebent to salute Celia Craig's fingertips. Then he turned to her and took his leave of her in a conventional manner entirely worthy of the name his mother bore,and her mother before her, and many a handsome man and many a beautiful woman back to times when a great duke stood unjustly attainted, and the Ormonds served their king with steel sword and golden ewer; and served him faithfully and well.
Camilla Lent called a little later. Ailsa was in the backyard garden, a trowel in her hand, industriously loosening the earth around the prairie roses.
"Camilla," she said, looking up from where she was kneeling among the shrubs, "what was it you said this morning about Mr. Berkley being some unpleasant kind of man?"
"Camilla," she said, looking up from where she was kneeling among the shrubs, "what was it you said this morning about Mr. Berkley being some unpleasant kind of man?"
"How funny," laughed Camilla. "You asked me that twice before."
"Did I? I forgot," said Mrs. Paige with a shrug; and, bending over again, became exceedingly busy with her trowel until the fire in her cheeks had cooled.
"Every woman that ever saw him becomes infatuated with Phil Berkley," said Camilla cheerfully. "I was. You will be. And the worst of it is he's simply not worth it."
"Ithought not."
"Why did you think not?"
"I don't know why."
"He can be fascinating," said Camilla reflectively, "but he doesn't always trouble himself to be."
"Doesn't he?" said Ailsa with a strange sense of relief.
Camilla hesitated, lowered her voice.
"They say he is fast," she whispered. Ailsa, on her knees, turned and looked up.
"Whatever that means," added Camilla, shuddering. "But all the same, every girl who sees him begins to adore him immediately until her parents make her stop."
"How silly," said Ailsa in a leisurely level voice. But her heart was beating furiously, and she turned to her roses with a blind energy that threatened them root and runner.
"How did you happen to think of him at all?" continued Camilla mischievously.
"He called onMrs. Craig this afternoon."
"I didn't know she knew him."
"They are relateddistantlyI believe"
"Oh," exclaimed Camilla. "I'm terribly sorry I spoke that way about him, dear"
"I don't care what you say about him," returned Ailsa Paige fiercely, emptying some grains of sand out of one of her gloves; resolutely emptying her mind, too, of Philip Berkley.
"Dear," she added gaily to Camilla, "come in and we'll have tea and gossip, English fashion. And I'll tell you about my new duties at the Home for Destitute Childrenevery morning from ten to twelve, my dear, in their horrid old infirmarythe poor little darlings!and I would be there all day if I wasn't a selfish, indolent, pleasure-loving creature without an ounce of womanly feelingYes I am! I must be, to go about to galleries and dances and Philharmonics when there are motherless children in that infirmary, as sick for lack of love as for the hundred and one ailments distressing their tender little bodies."
But over their tea and marmalade and toast she became less communicative; and once or twice the conversation betrayed an unexpected tendency to drift toward Berkley.
"I haven't the slightest curiosity concerning him, dear," said Ailsa, attempting corroboration in a yawnwhich indiscretion she was unable to accomplish.
"Well," remarked Camilla, "the chances are that you've seen the last of him if you showed it too plainly. Men don't come back when a girl doesn't wish them to. Do they?"
After Camilla had gone, Ailsa roamed about the parlours, apparently renewing her acquaintance with the familiar decorations. Sometimes she stood at windows, looking thoughtfully into the empty street; sometimes she sat in corners, critically surveying empty space.
Yes, the chances were that he would scarcely care to come back. A man of that kind did not belong in her sister-in-law's house, anyway, nor in her owna man who could appeal to a woman for a favourable opinion of himself, asking her to suspend her reason, stifle logic, stultify her own intelligence, and trust to a sentimental impulse that he deserved the toleration and consideration which he asked for. . . . It was certainly well for her that he should not return. . . . It would be better for her to lay the entire matter before her sister-in-lawthat was what she would do immediately!
She sprang to her feet and ran lightly up-stairs; but, fast as she fled, thought outran her slender flying feet, and she came at last very leisurely into Celia's room, a subdued, demure opportunist, apparently with nothing on her mind and conscience,
"If I may have the carriage at ten, Celia, I'll begin on the Destitute Children to-morrow. . . . Poor babies! . . . If they only had once a week as wholesome food as is wasted in this city every day by Irish servants . . . which reminds meI suppose you will have to invite your new kinsman to dine with you."
"There is loads of time for that, Honey-bud," said her sister-in-law, glancing up absently from the note she was writing.
"I was merely wondering whether it was necessary at all," observed Ailsa Paige, without interest.
But Celia had begun to write again. "I'll ask him," she said in her softly preoccupied voice, "Saturday, I think."
"Oh, but I'm invited to the Cortlandt's," began Ailsa, and caught her under lip in her teeth. Then she turned and walked noiselessly into her bedroom, and sat down on the bed and looked at the wall.
CHAPTER IV
It was almost mid-April; and still the silvery-green tassels on the wistaria showed no hint of the blue petals folded within; but the maples' leafless symmetry was already veined with fire. Faint perfume from Long Island woodlands, wandering puffs of wind from salt meadows freshened the city streets; St. Felix Street boasted a lilac bush in leaf; Oxford Street was gay with hyacinths and a winter-battered butterfly; and in Fort Greene Place the grassy door-yards were exquisite with crocus bloom. Peace, good-will, and spring on earth; but in men's souls a silence as of winter.
To Northland folk the unclosing buds of April brought no awakening; lethargy fettered all, arresting vigour, sapping desire. An immense inertia chained progress in its tracks, while overhead the gray storm-wrack fled away,misty, monstrous, gale-driven before the coming hurricane.
Still, for the Northland, there remained now little of the keener suspense since those first fiery outbursts in the South; but all through the winter the dull pain throbbed in silence as star after star dropped from the old galaxy and fell flashing into the new.
And it was a time of apathy, acquiescence, stupefied incredulity; a time of dull faith in destiny, duller resignation.
The printed news was read day after day by a people who understood nothing, neither the cautious arming nor the bold disarming, nor the silent fall of fortified places, nor the swift dismantling of tall shipsnor did they comprehend the ceaseless tremors of a land slowly crumbling under the subtle pressurenor that at last the vast disintegration of the matrix would disclose the forming crystal of another nation cradled there, glittering, naming under the splendour of the Southern skies.
A palsied Old Year had gone out. The mindless old manhe who had been Presidentwent with it. A New Year had come in, and on its infant heels shambled a tall, gaunt shape that seated itself by the White House windows and looked out into the murk of things with eyes that no man understood.
And now the soft sun of April spun a spell upon the Northland folk; for they had eyes but they saw not; ears had they, but they heard not; neither spoke they through the mouth.
To them only one figure seemed real, looming above the vast and motionless mirage where a continent stood watching the parapets of a sea-girt fort off Charleston.
But the nation looked too long; the mirage closed in; fort, sea, the flag itself, became unreal; the lone figure on the parapet turned to a phantom. God's will was doing. Who dared doubt?
"There seems to be no doubt in the South," observed Ailsa Paige to her brother-in-law one fragrant evening after dinner where, in the dusk, the family had gathered on the stoop after the custom of a simpler era.
Along the dim street long lines of front stoops blossomed with the light spring gowns of women and young girls, pale, dainty clusters in the dusk set with darker figures, where sparks from cigars glowed and waned in the darkness.