Ashe, as he stood beside Mr. Peters' baggage and raked the unsympathetic darkness with a dreary eye, gave himself up to melancholy. Above him an oil lamp shed a meager light. Along the platform a small but st.u.r.dy porter was juggling with a milk can.

The east wind explored Ashe's system with chilly fingers.

Somewhere out in the darkness into which Mr. Peters and Aline had already vanished in a large automobile, lay the castle, with its butler and its fearful code of etiquette. Soon the cart that was to convey him and the trunks thither would be arriving. He shivered.

Out of the gloom and into the feeble rays of the oil lamp came Joan Valentine. She had been away, tucking Aline into the car.

She looked warm and cheerful. She was smiling in the old friendly way.

If girls realized their responsibilities they would be so careful when they smiled that they would probably abandon the practice altogether. There are moments in a man's life when a girl's smile can have as important results as an explosion of dynamite.

In the course of their brief acquaintance Joan had smiled at Ashe many times, but the conditions governing those occasions had not been such as to permit him to be seriously affected. He had been pleased on such occasions; he had admired her smile in a detached and critical spirit; but he had not been overwhelmed by it. The frame of mind necessary for that result had been lacking.

Now, however, after five minutes of solitude on the depressing platform of Market Blandings Station, he was what the spiritualists call a sensitive subject. He had reached that depth of gloom and bodily discomfort when a sudden smile has all the effect of strong liquor and good news administered simultaneously, warming the blood and comforting the soul, and generally turning the world from a bleak desert into a land flowing with milk and honey.

It is not too much to say that he reeled before Joan's smile. It was so entirely unexpected. He clutched Mr. Peters' steamer trunk in his emotion. All his resolutions to be cold and distant were swept away. He had the feeling that in a friendless universe here was somebody who was fond of him and glad to see him.

A smile of such importance demands a.n.a.lysis, and in this case repays it; for many things lay behind this smile of Joan Valentine's on the platform of Market Blandings Station.

In the first place, she had had another of her swift changes of mood, and had once again tucked away hostility into its corner.

She had thought it over and had come to the conclusion that as she had no logical grievance against Ashe for anything he had done to be distant to him was the behavior of a cat. Consequently she resolved, when they should meet again, to resume her att.i.tude of good-fellowship. That in itself would have been enough to make her smile.

There was another reason, however, which had nothing to do with Ashe. While she had been tucking Aline into the automobile she met the eye of the driver of that vehicle and had perceived a curious look in it--a look of amazement and sheer terror. A moment, later, when Aline called the driver Freddie, she had understood. No wonder the Honorable Freddie had looked as though he had seen a ghost.

It would be a relief to the poor fellow when, as he undoubtedly would do in the course of the drive, he inquired of Aline the name of her maid and was told that it was Simpson. He would mutter something about "Reminds me of a girl I used to know," and would brood on the remarkable way in which Nature produces doubles. But he had a bad moment, and it was partly at the recollection of his face that Joan smiled.

A third reason was because the sight of the Honorable Freddie had reminded her that R. Jones had said he had written her poetry.

That thought, too, had contributed toward the smile which so dazzled Ashe.

Ashe, not being miraculously intuitive, accepted the easier explanation that she smiled because she was glad to be in his company; and this thought, coming on top of his mood of despair and general dissatisfaction with everything mundane, acted on him like some powerful chemical.

In every man's life there is generally one moment to which in later years he can look back and say: "In this moment I fell in love!" Such a moment came to Ashe now.

Betwixt the stirrup and the ground, Mercy I asked; mercy I found.

So sings the poet and so it was with Ashe.

In the almost incredibly brief time it took the small but st.u.r.dy porter to roll a milk can across the platform and hump it, with a clang, against other milk cans similarly treated a moment before, Ashe fell in love.

The word is so loosely used, to cover a thousand varying shades of emotion--from the volcanic pa.s.sion of an Antony for a Cleopatra to the tepid preference of a grocer's a.s.sistant for the Irish maid at the second house on Main Street, as opposed to the Norwegian maid at the first house past the post office--the mere statement that Ashe fell in love is not a sufficient description of his feelings as he stood grasping Mr. Peters' steamer trunk.

a.n.a.lysis is required.

From his fourteenth year onward Ashe had been in love many times.

His sensations in the case of Joan were neither the terrific upheaval that had caused him, in his fifteenth year, to collect twenty-eight photographs of the heroine of the road company of a musical comedy which had visited the Hayling Opera House, nor the milder flame that had caused him, when at college, to give up smoking for a week and try to read the complete works of Ella Wheeler Wilc.o.x.

His love was something that lay between these two poles.

He did not wish the station platform of Market Blandings to become suddenly congested with red Indians so that he might save Joan's life; and he did not wish to give up anything at all. But he was conscious--to the very depths of his being--that a future in which Joan did not figure would be so insupportable as not to bear considering; and in the immediate present he very strongly favored the idea of clasping Joan in his arms and kissing her until further notice.

Mingled with these feelings was an excited grat.i.tude to her for coming to him like this, with that electric smile on her face; a stunned realization that she was a thousand times prettier than he had ever imagined; and a humility that threatened to make him loose his clutch on the steamer trunk and roll about at her feet, yapping like a dog.

Grat.i.tude, so far as he could dissect his tangled emotion was the predominating ingredient of his mood. Only once in his life had he felt so pa.s.sionately grateful to any human being. On that occasion, too, the object of his grat.i.tude had been feminine.

Years before, when a boy in his father's home in distant Hayling, Ma.s.sachusetts, those in authority had commanded that he--in his eleventh year and as shy as one can be only at that interesting age--should rise in the presence of a roomful of strangers, adult guests, and recite "The Wreck of the Hesperus."

He had risen. He had blushed. He had stammered. He had contrived to whisper: "It was the Schooner Hesperus." And then, in a corner of the room, a little girl, for no properly explained reason, had burst out crying. She had yelled, she had bellowed, and would not be comforted; and in the ensuing confusion Ashe had escaped to the woodpile at the bottom of the garden, saved by a miracle.

All his life he had remembered the grat.i.tude he had felt for that little timely girl, and never until now had he experienced any other similar spasm. But as he looked at Joan he found himself renewing that emotion of fifteen years ago.

She was about to speak. In a sort of trance he watched her lips part. He waited almost reverently for the first words she should speak to him in her new role of the only authentic G.o.ddess.

"Isn't it a shame?" she said. "I've just put a penny in the chocolate slot machine--and it's empty! I've a good mind to write to the company."

Ashe felt as though he were listening to the strains of some grand sweet anthem.

The small but st.u.r.dy porter, weary of his work among the milk cans, or perhaps--let us not do him an injustice even in thought--having finished it, approached them.

"The cart from the castle's here."

In the gloom beyond him there gleamed a light which had not been there before. The meditative snort of a horse supported his statement. He began to deal as authoritatively with Mr. Peters'

steamer trunk as he had dealt with the milk cans.

"At last!" said Joan. "I hope it's a covered cart. I'm frozen.

Let's go and see."

Ashe followed her with the gait of an automaton.

Cold is the ogre that drives all beautiful things into hiding.

Below the surface of a frost-bound garden there lurk hidden bulbs, which are only biding their time to burst forth in a riot of laughing color; but shivering Nature dare not put forth her flowers until the ogre has gone. Not otherwise does cold suppress love. A man in an open cart on an English Spring night may continue to be in love; but love is not the emotion uppermost in his bosom. It shrinks within him and waits for better times.

The cart was not a covered cart. It was open to the four winds of heaven, of which the one at present active proceeded from the bleak east. To this fact may be attributed Ashe's swift recovery from the exalted mood into which Joan's smile had thrown him, his almost instant emergence from the trance. Deep down in him he was aware that his att.i.tude toward Joan had not changed, but his conscious self was too fully occupied with the almost hopeless task of keeping his blood circulating, to permit of thoughts of love. Before the cart had traveled twenty yards he was a mere chunk of frozen misery.

After an eternity of winding roads, darkened cottages, and black fields and hedges, the cart turned in at a ma.s.sive iron gate, which stood open giving entrance to a smooth gravel drive. Here the way ran for nearly a mile through an open park of great trees and was then swallowed in the darkness of dense shrubberies.

Presently to the left appeared lights, at first in ones and twos, shining out and vanishing again; then, as the shrubberies ended and the smooth lawns and terraces began, blazing down on the travelers from a score of windows, with the heartening effect of fires on a winter night.

Against the pale gray sky Blandings Castle stood out like a mountain. It was a n.o.ble pile, of Early Tudor building. Its history is recorded in England's history books and Viollet-le-Duc has written of its architecture. It dominated the surrounding country.

The feature of it which impressed Ashe most at this moment, however, was the fact that it looked warm; and for the first time since the drive began he found himself in a mood that approximated cheerfulness. It was a little early to begin feeling cheerful, he discovered, for the journey was by no means over.

Arrived within sight of the castle, the cart began a detour, which, ten minutes later, brought it under an arch and over cobblestones to the rear of the building, where it eventually pulled up in front of a great door.

Ashe descended painfully and beat his feet against the cobbles.

He helped Joan to climb down. Joan was apparently in a gentle glow. Women seem impervious to cold.

The door opened. Warm, kitcheny scents came through it. Strong men hurried out to take down the trunks, while fair women, in the shape of two nervous scullery maids, approached Joan and Ashe, and bobbed curtsies. This under more normal conditions would have been enough to unman Ashe; but in his frozen state a mere curtsying scullery maid expended herself harmlessly on him. He even acknowledged the greeting with a kindly nod.

The scullery maids, it seemed, were acting in much the same capacity as the attaches of royalty. One was there to conduct Joan to the presence of Mrs. Twemlow, the housekeeper; the other to lead Ashe to where Beach, the butler, waited to do honor to the valet of the castle's most important guest.

After a short walk down a stone-flagged pa.s.sage Joan and her escort turned to the right. Ashe's objective appeared to be located to the left. He parted from Joan with regret. Her moral support would have been welcome.