Jerry waved them aside as phenomena of no importance. "All of 'em tributes from Dad's loving const.i.tuents," he said, repeating what was evidently an old joke in the family. "You'd better believe Dad doesn't vote to get the tariff raised on anything unless he sees to it that the manufacturers know who they have to thank. It works something fine! Talk about the presents a doctor gets from his grateful patients! Nothing to it!"

This picturesque statement of practical politics meant so little to Sylvia's mind that she dismissed it unheard, admiring, in spite of her effort to take things for granted, the fabulous fineness of the little fringed napkin set under the bouillon cup. Jerry followed the direction of her eyes. "Yep--tariff on linen," he commented pregnantly.

The young man called Stub now sped up to them, skating very fast, and swept Sylvia off. "_Here's_ where we show 'em how to do it!" he cried cheerfully, skating backward with crazy rapidity, and pulling Sylvia after him. There was a clang of swift steel on ice, and Jerry bore down upon them, the muscles of his jaw showing prominently. Without a word he thrust his friend aside, caught at Sylvia's hands, and bore her in a swooping flight to the other end of the pond, now deserted by the other skaters.

As they sped along he bent over Sylvia fiercely and said in a low, angry tone, "You don't like that bounder, do you? You _don't_!"

Sylvia was astonished at the heat of his suspicion. She had known that Jerry was not notably acute, but it had seemed to her that her dislike for his friend must be more than apparent to any one. They had reached the edge of the ice now, and Sylvia's hands were still in Jerry's, although they were not skating, but stood facing each other. A bush of osier, frozen into the ice, lifted its red twigs near them. Sylvia looked down at it, hesitating how to express her utter denial of any liking for the hilarious young man. Jerry misunderstood her pause and cried out: "Good G.o.d! Sylvia! Don't say you _do._"

Sylvia's heart gave a frightened leap. "Oh no--no--not a bit!" she said hastily, looking longingly across the pond at the group around the fire. Jerry caught his breath with a gasp and gripped her hands hard. "It makes me crazy to see you look at another fellow," he said.

He forced her eyes to meet his. "Sylvia--you know--you know what I mean."

Yes, Sylvia knew what he meant. Her very white face showed that. The young man went on, pressing, masterful, confident, towering over her: "It's idiotic to speak of it now, out here--with all these people around--but it just _got_ me to see you with that--I wasn't sure how I felt about you till I saw how I felt when you seemed so friendly with him, when you got off the car together. Then I knew. It made me crazy--I _wanted_ you!"

Sylvia had not been able once to look away from him since he began to speak. Her mouth was a little open in her white face, her eyes fixed with a painful intensity on his. He moistened his lips with his tongue. "Sylvia--_it's all right_--isn't it?"

With no change of expression in her strained face, Sylvia nodded. As suddenly and apparently as automatically she took a backward step.

The young man made a great stride towards her--there was a sound of quick strokes on the ice and--"BOO!" shouted the hilarious young man, bursting between them at railroad speed. He executed a marvelous pirouette and returned instantly, calling out, "Less spooning in the corners if you please--or if it's got to be, let me in!" He was followed closely by a string of young men and girls, playing snap-the-whip. They "snapped" just as they reached Jerry. The end girl flew off and b.u.mped, screaming with joy, into Jerry's arms. He looked furiously over her head towards Sylvia, but she had been enveloped in a ring and was being conveyed away to the accompaniment of the usual squeals and shouts. The Colonel had come down to take them all back, she was informed, and was waiting for them with the sleigh.

CHAPTER XIX

AS A BIRD OUT OF A SNARE

Sylvia dressed for dinner literally like one in a dream. Outwardly she was so calm that she thought she was so inwardly. It was nothing like so exciting as people said, to get engaged, she thought as she brushed out her hair and put it up in a big, gleaming knot. Here she had been engaged for a whole hour and a half, and was getting calmer every minute, instead of the reverse. She astonished herself by the lucidity of her brain, although it only worked by s.n.a.t.c.hes--there being lacunae when she could not have told what she was doing. And yet, as she had approached the house, sitting again beside the Colonel, she had looked with a new thrill of interest at its imposing battlemented facade. The great hall had seemed familiar to her already as she stepped across it on her way to the stairs, her feet had pressed the rugs with a.s.surance, she had been able to be quite nonchalant about refusing the services of the maid who offered to help her dress.

It was true that from time to time she suddenly flushed or paled; it was true that her mind seemed incapable of the slightest consecutive thought; it was true that she seemed to be in a dream, peopled by crazily inconsequent images--she had again and again a vision, startlingly vivid, of the red-twigged osier beside which she had stood; it was true that she had a slight feeling of vertigo when she tried to think ahead of the next moment--but still she was going ahead with her unpacking and dressing so steadily that she marveled. She decided again from the depth of her experience that getting engaged was nothing like so upsetting an event as people made out. She thrust the last pin into her hair and tipped her head preeningly before the big triplicate mirror--the first time she had ever encountered this luxury outside of a ready-made clothes shop. The yellow chiffon came out from the trunk in perfect condition, looking like a big, silk-petaled flower as she slipped it on over her bare shoulders, and emerged above, triumphant and yet half afraid to look at herself in the mirror lest she should see that her home-made toilet had not "the right look." One glance satisfied even her jealous eagerness. It had exactly the right look--that is, it looked precisely like the picture from which she had copied it. She gazed with nave satisfaction at the faithfulness with which her reflected appearance resembled that of the Parisian demi-mondaine whose photograph she had seen, and settled on her slim, delicately modeled shoulders the straps of shirred and beaded chiffon which apparently performed the office of keeping her dress from sliding to the floor. In reality, under its fluid, gauzy draperies, it was constructed on a firm, well-fitting, well-fastened foundation of opaque cloth which quite adequately clothed the young body, but its appearance was of a transparent cloud, only kept from floating entirely away by those gleaming straps on the shoulders, an effect carefully calculated in the original model, and inimitably caught by Sylvia's innocent fingers.

She turned herself about, artlessly surprised to see that her neck and shoulders looked quite like those of the women in the fashion-plates and the magazine ill.u.s.trations. She looked at the clock. It was early yet. She reflected that she never _could_ take the time other girls did in dressing. She wondered what they did. What could one do, after one's bath was taken, one's hair done, and one's gown donned--oh, of course, powder! She applied it liberally, and then wiped away every grain, that being what she had seen older girls do in the Gymnasium dressing-room. Then with a last survey of her face, unaltered by the ceremonial with the powder-puff, she stepped to the door.

But there, with her hand on the k.n.o.b, she was halted by an inexplicable hesitation about opening the door and showing herself.

She looked down at her bare shoulders and bosom, and faintly blushed.

It was really very, very low, far lower than any dress she had ever worn! And the fact that Eleanor Hubert, that all the "swell" girls wore theirs low, did not for the moment suffice her--it was somehow different--their showing their shoulders and her showing her own.

She could not turn the k.n.o.b and stood, irresolute, frowning vaguely, though not very deeply disquieted. Finally she compromised by taking up a pretty spangled scarf Aunt Victoria had sent her, wrapping it about her like a shawl, in which quaint garb she went out in more confidence, and walked down the hall to the stairway. Half-way down she met Colonel Fiske just coming up to dress. Seeing one of his young guests arrayed for the evening he made her his compliments, the first words rather absent and perfunctory. But when he was aware which guest she was, he warmed into a pressing and personal note, as his practised eyes took in the beauty, tonight startlingly enhanced by excitement, of the girl's dark, shining eyes, flushed cheeks, and white neck and arms. He ended by lifting her hand, in his florid way, and pressing it to his white mustache for a very fervent kiss. Sylvia blushed prettily, meeting his hot old eyes with a dewy unconsciousness, and smiling frankly up into the deeply lined carnal face with the simple-hearted pleasure she would have felt at the kind word of any elderly man. The Colonel seemed quite old to her--much older than her father--like Professor Kennedy.

"Jerry's in the library, waiting," his father announced with a sly laugh. "I wondered at the young rascal's being dressed so far ahead of time." He turned reluctantly and went on up the stairs, leaving Sylvia to go forward to her first meeting alone with the man she had promised to marry. As she descended the long flight of stairs, her scarf, loosened by her movement, slipped un.o.bserved in her excitement and hung lightly about her shoulders.

The door to the library was shut. She opened it with a rapidly beating heart and stood on the threshold, shyly hesitating to advance further, looking with agitation at the stalwart, handsome, well-groomed figure which stood in an att.i.tude of impatient expectation by the window.

Except for the light which came in from the electric bulb on the porch outside, the big room was in twilight. In the brilliantly lighted door-opening, she stood revealed as by a searchlight.

At the sound of the opening door, and his name spoken in a quavering voice, the young man turned, paused an instant as if blinded by the vision, and sprang forward. The door behind Sylvia swung shut, and her eyes, widening in the dusk, saw only the headlong, overwhelming rush upon her of her lover. She was enfolded strongly in muscular arms, she was pressed closer and yet closer to a powerful body, whose heat burned through the thin broadcloth, she was breathless, stunned, choked. As the man bent forward over her, clasping her to him, her flexible spine bent and her head drooped backward, her face with its flush all gone, gleaming white in the dusk. At this he rained kisses on it, on her eyes, hair, cheeks, mouth, the burning softness of his full lips seeming to leave a smear on her skin where they pressed it.

Still holding her with one arm, pressed to him as though the two young bodies were gripped together by a vice, he loosened the other arm and thrust it at the back of her dress, through the flimsy gauze of her scarf, down next her body. His stiff cuff caught on the edge of her dress, and his sleeve slid up--it was his bare arm against her naked flesh. He gave a savage, smothered, gasping exclamation, pressed his fingers deeply into her side, still kissing her pa.s.sionately, her neck, her shoulders, burying his hot face in her bosom.

It was the girl's body which acted, since at the first instant of the whirlwind which had broken over her, her mind had been shocked into a swooning paralysis. Only her strong, sound body, hardened by work, fortified by outdoor exercise, was ready in its every fiber for this moment. Her body bent suddenly like a spring of fine steel, its strength momentarily more than a match for his, and thrust the man from her with staggering violence. Her reaction from him was as physical a sensation as though she had bitten into a tempting fruit and found it not sweet--not even bitter--but nasty. She sickened at the sight of him.

As he caught his balance, laughing a little but not at all good-naturedly, and started back towards her with a dangerous dark face of excited anger and desire, his headlong rush was checked an instant by the fierce eyes which flamed at him from her crimson face.

Even her neck and shoulders were now scarlet. She held him off for the s.p.a.ce of a breath, giving one deep exclamation, "_Oh_!" short, sharply exhaled, almost like a blow in his face.

But his blood was up as well as hers, and after his momentary pause, he rushed forward again, his handsome, blond face black with pa.s.sion.

Sylvia stooped, gathered up her skirts, turned, burst open the door, and fled out of the room, running in her high-heeled satin slippers as she did on the track in the Gymnasium, with long, deer-like bounds. In a flash she had crossed the wide hall--which was as it happened empty, although she would not have slackened her pace for all the a.s.sembled company--and was darting arrow-like up the stairs, her torn scarf flying behind her like a banner. Her flight had been so unexpected and so swift that young Fiske did not attempt to follow her; but she reached her room, flung the door shut, and locked it with as much precipitancy as though he were on her heels, instead of standing quite still, open-mouthed, where she had left him.

The sharp crack of her slamming door, loud in the quiet house, broke the spell which held him. His mouth shut, and his clenched hands loosened from their fierce tension. He took an aimless step and drew a long breath. A moment later, quite automatically, he fumbled for his cigarette-case, and finding it, took out a cigarette and lighted it with fingers that were not steady. The familiar action and the first puff of smoke affected him like emerging from a turmoil of darkness into the quiet and order of a well-lighted room. "Well, may I be d.a.m.ned!" he said to himself with the beginning of a return of his usual a.s.surance--"the d.a.m.n little spitfire!"

He walked about the room, puffing vigorously, feeling with relief his blood resume its usual rate of circulation. His head seemed to clear of a thick vapor. The startling recollection of the anger in his fiancee's eyes was fading rapidly from his mind. Now he only saw her, blushing, recoiling, fleeing--he laughed out a little, this time not angrily, but with relish. "Ain't she the firebrand!" he said aloud. He found his desire for her a hundredfold enhanced and stood still, his eyes very l.u.s.trous, feeling again in imagination the warm softness of her bosom under his lips. "Gee!" he exclaimed, turning restlessly in his pacing walk.

He was aware that some one in the room moved. "Jermain," said his stepmother's faint voice. He looked at her smiling. "h.e.l.lo, Momma," he said good-naturedly, "when did _you_ gum-shoe in?"

"Oh, just now," she told him, giving him an a.s.surance which he doubted, and which he would not have valued had he known it to be true. He was perfectly indifferent as to the chance that this negligible person might have been a spectator to the scene between the son of the house and a guest. If she said anything about it, he meant to give the all-sufficing explanation that he and Miss Marshall had just become engaged. This would of course, it seemed self-evident to him, make it all right.

But Mrs. Fiske did not make any remark calling forth that information.

She only said, in her usual listless manner, "Your sleeve is shoved up."

He glanced down in surprise, realizing how excited he must be not to have noticed that before, and remained for a moment silent, looking at the splendidly muscular white arm, and the large well-manicured hand. He was feeling in every nerve the reminiscence of the yielding firmness of Sylvia's flesh, bare against his own. The color came up flamingly into his face again. He moistened his lips with his tongue.

"Jesus _Christ_!" he exclaimed, contemptuously careless of his listener, "I'm wild in love with that girl!" He pulled his sleeve down with a quick, vigorous gesture, deftly shot the cuff out beyond the black broadcloth, and, the picture of handsome, well-groomed youth in easy circ.u.mstances, turned again to his father's wife. "What you in here _for_, anyhow?" he asked still with his light absence of concern about anything she did or did not do.

She hesitated, looking about the room. "I thought Miss Marshall would be here. She promised to come down early to write the names on the place-cards. I thought I heard her voice."

"You did," he told her. "She came down early all right--but she went back again." He laughed, tossed his cigarette-end in the fireplace, and vouchsafing no more explanation, strolled into the billiard-room, and began to knock the b.a.l.l.s about, whistling a recent dance tune with great precision and vivacity. He was antic.i.p.ating with quickened blood the next meeting with Sylvia. As he thrust at the gleaming b.a.l.l.s, his mouth smiled and his eyes burned.

Mrs. Fiske went upstairs and knocked at Sylvia's door. There was a rush of quick footsteps and the girl asked from the other side in a m.u.f.fled voice, "Who is it?" Mrs. Fiske gave her name, and added, in answer to another question, that she was alone. The door opened enough for her to enter, and closed quickly after her. She looked about the disordered room, saw the open trunk, the filmy cascade of yellow chiffon half on and half off the bed, the torn and crumpled spangled scarf, and Sylvia herself, her hastily donned kimono clutched about her with tense hands.

The mistress of the house made no comment on this scene, looking at Sylvia with dull, faded eyes in which there was no life, not even the flicker of an inquiry. But Sylvia began in a nervous voice to attempt an explanation: "Oh, Mrs. Fiske--I--you'll have to excuse me--I must go home at once--I--I was just packing. I thought--if I hurried I could make the eight-o'clock trolley back to La Chance, and you could send my trunk after me." Her every faculty was so concentrated on the single idea of flight--flight back to the safety of home, that she did not think of the necessity of making an excuse, giving a reason for her action. It seemed that it must be self-evident to the universe that she could not stay another hour in that house.

Mrs. Fiske nodded. "Yes, I'll send your trunk after you," she said.

She drew a long breath, almost audible, and looked down at the fire on the hearth. Sylvia came up close to her, looking into her l.u.s.terless eyes with deep entreaty. "And, Mrs. Fiske, _would_ you mind not telling any one I'm going, until I'm gone--_n.o.body_ at all! It's because--I--you could say I didn't feel well enough to come down to dinner. I--if you--and say I don't want any dinner up here either!"

"Won't you be afraid to go down through the grounds to the trolley alone, at night?" asked Mrs. Fiske, without looking at her.

"Everybody will be at dinner, won't they?" asked Sylvia.

Mrs. Fiske nodded, her eyes on the floor.

Upon which, "Oh no, I won't be afraid!" cried Sylvia.

Her hostess turned to the door. "Well, I won't tell them if you don't want me to," she said. She went out, without another word, closing the door behind her. Sylvia locked it, and went on with her wild packing.

When she came to the yellow chiffon she rolled it up tightly and jammed it into a corner of her trunk; but the instant afterward she s.n.a.t.c.hed it out and thrust it fiercely into the fire. The light fabric caught at once, the flames leaped up, filling the room with a roaring heat and flare, which almost as quickly died down to blackened silence.

Sylvia faced that instant of red glare with a grimly set jaw and a deeply flushed face. It did not look at all like her own face.

At a quarter of eight the room was cleared, the trunk strapped and locked, and Sylvia stood dressed for the street, gloved, veiled, and furred. Under her veil her face showed still very flushed. She took up her small handbag and her umbrella and opened the door with caution.

A faint clatter of dishes and a hum of laughing talk came up to her ears. Dinner was evidently in full swing. She stepped out and went noiselessly down the stairs. On the bottom step, close to the dining-room door, her umbrella-tip caught in the bal.u.s.trade and fell with a loud clatter on the bare polished floor of the hall. Sylvia shrank into herself and waited an instant with suspended breath for the pause in the chatter and laughter which it seemed must follow. The moment was forever connected in her mind with the smell of delicate food, and fading flowers, and human beings well-washed and perfumed, which floated out to her from the dining-room. She looked about her at the luxuriously furnished great hall, and hated every inch of it.

If the noise was heard, it evidently pa.s.sed for something dropped by a servant, for Colonel Fiske, who was telling a humorous story, went on, his recital punctuated by ba.s.s and treble antic.i.p.atory laughter from his auditors: "--and when he called her upon the 'phone the next day to ask her about it, she said _she_ didn't know he'd been there at all!" A roar of appreciation greeted this recondite climax, under cover of which Sylvia opened the front door and shut it behind her.