Wild Wings.

by Margaret Rebecca Piper.

CHAPTER I

MOSTLY TONY

Among the voluble, excited, commencement-bound crowd that boarded the Northampton train at Springfield two male pa.s.sengers were conspicuous for their silence as they sat absorbed in their respective newspapers which each had hurriedly purchased in transit from train to train.

A striking enough contrast otherwise, however, the two presented. The man next the aisle was well past sixty, rotund of abdomen, rubicund of countenance, beetle-browed. He was elaborately well-groomed, almost foppish in attire, and wore the obvious stamp of worldly success, the air of one accustomed to giving orders and seeing them obeyed before his eyes.

His companion and chance seat-mate was young, probably a scant five and twenty, tall, lean, close-knit of frame with finely chiseled, almost ascetic features, though the vigorous chin and generous sized mouth forbade any hint of weakness or effeminacy. His deep-set, clear gray-blue eyes were the eyes of youth; but they would have set a keen observer to wondering what they had seen to leave that shadow of unyouthful gravity upon them.

It happened that both men--the elderly and the young--had their papers folded at identically the same page, and both were studying intently the face of the lovely, dark-eyed young girl who smiled out of the duplicate printed sheets impartially at both.

The legend beneath the cut explained that the dark-eyed young beauty was Miss Antoinette Holiday, who would play Rosalind that night in the Smith College annual senior dramatics. The interested reader was further enlightened to the fact that Miss Holiday was the daughter of the late Colonel Holiday and Laura LaRue, a well known actress of a generation ago, and that the daughter inherited the gifts as well as the beauty of her famous mother, and was said to be planning to follow the stage herself, having made her debut as the charming heroine of "As You Like It."

The man next the aisle frowned a little as he came to this last sentence and went back to the perusal of the girl's face. So this was Laura's daughter. Well, they had not lied in one respect at least. She was a winner for looks. That was plain to be seen even from the crude newspaper reproduction. The girl was pretty. But what else did she have beside prettiness? That was the question. Did she have any of the rest of it--Laura's wit, her inimitable charm, her fire, her genius? Pshaw! No, of course she hadn't. Nature did not make two Laura LaRue's in one century. It was too much to expect.

Lord, what a woman! And what a future she had had and thrown away for love! Love! That wasn't it. She could have had love and still kept on with her career. It was marriage that had been the catastrophe--the fatal blunder. Marriage and domesticity for a woman like that! It was asinine--worse--criminal! It ought to have been forbidden by law. And the stubbornness of her! After all these years, remembering, Max Hempel could have groaned aloud. Every stage manager in New York, including himself, had been ready to bankrupt himself offering her what in those days were almost incredible contracts to prevent her from the suicidal folly on which she was bent. But to no avail. She had laughed at them all, laughed and quit the stage at six and twenty, and a few years later her beauty and genius were still--in death. What a waste! What a d.a.m.nation waste!

At this point in his animadversions Max Hempel again looked at the girl in the newspaper, the girl who was the product of the very marriage he had been cursing, LaRue's only daughter. If there had been no marriage, neither would there have been this glorious, radiant, vividly alive young creature. Men called Laura LaRue dead. But was she? Was she not tremendously alive in the life of her lovely young daughter? Was it not he, and the other childless ones who had treated matrimony as the one supreme mistake, that would soon be very much dead, dead past any resurrection?

Pshaw! He was getting sentimental. He wasn't here for sentiment. He was here for cold, hard business. He was taking this confounded journey to witness an amateur performance of a Shakespeare play, when he loathed traveling in hot weather, detested amateur performances of anything, particularly of Shakespeare, on the millionth of a chance that Antoinette Holiday might be possessed of a t.i.the of her mother's talent and might eventually be starred as the new ingenue he was in need of, afar off, so to speak. It was Carol Clay herself who had warned him.

Carol was wonderful--would always be wonderful. But time pa.s.ses. There would come a season when the public would begin to count back and remember that Carol had been playing ingenue parts already for over a decade. There must always be youth--fresh, flaming youth in the offing. That was the stage and life.

As for this Antoinette Holiday girl, he had none too much hope. Max Hempel never hoped much on general principles, so far as potential stars were concerned. He had seen too many of them go off fizz bang into nothingness, like rockets. It was more than likely he was on a false trail, that people who had seen the girl act in amateur things had exaggerated her ability. He trusted no judgment but his own, which was perhaps one of the reasons why he was one of the greatest living stage managers. It was more than likely she had nothing but a pretty, shallow little talent for play acting and no notion under the sun of giving up society or matrimony or what-not for the devilish hard work of a stage career. Very likely there was some young galoot waiting even now, to whisk Laura LaRue's daughter off the stage before she ever got on.

Moreover there was always her family to cope with, dyed in the wool New Englanders at that, no doubt with the heavy Puritan mortmain upon them, narrow as a shoe string, circ.u.mscribed as a duck pond, walled in by ghastly respectability. Ten to one, if the girl had talent and ambition, they would smother these things in her, balk her at every turn. They had regarded Ned Holiday's marriage to Laura a misalliance, he recalled.

There had been quite a to-do about it at the time. Good G.o.d! It had been a misalliance all right, but not as they reckoned it. It had not been considered suitable for a Holiday to marry an actress. Probably it would be considered more unsuitable for a Holiday to _be_ an actress. Suitable!

Bah! The question was not whether the career was fit for the girl, but whether the girl could measure up to the career. And irascibly, unreasonably indignant as if he had already been contending in argument with legions of mythical, over-respectable Holidays, Max Hempel whipped his paper open to another page, a page that told of a drive somewhere on the western front that had failed miserably, for this was the year nineteen hundred and sixteen and there was a war going on, "on the other side." Oh, typically American phrase!

Meanwhile the young man, too, had stopped staring at Antoinette Holiday's pictured face and was staring out of the window instead at the fast flying landscape. He had really no need anyway to look at a picture of Tony. His head and heart were full of them. He had been storing them up for over eight years and it was a considerable collection by now and one in which he took great joy in lonely hours in his dingy little lodging room, or in odd moments as he went his way at his task as a reporter for a great New York daily. The perspicuous reader will not need to be told that the young man was in love with Tony Holiday--desperately in love.

Desperately was the word. Slight as Max Hempel's hope may have been that Laura LaRue's daughter was to prove the ingenue he sought, infinitely slighter was d.i.c.k Carson's hope of ever making Tony his wife. How could it be otherwise? Tony Holiday was as far above him in his own eyes as the top of Mount Tom was high above the onion beds of the valley. The very name he used was his only because she had given it to him. d.i.c.k n.o.body he had been. Richard Carson he had become through grace of Tony.

Like his companion the young man went back into the past, though not so far a journey. As vividly as if it were but yesterday he remembered the misery of flesh and spirit which had been his as he stowed himself away in the hay loft in the Holiday's barn, that long ago summer dawn, too sick to take another step and caring little whether he lived or died, conscious vaguely, however, that death would be infinitely preferable to going back to the life of the circus and the man Jim's coa.r.s.e brutality from which he had made his escape at last.

And then he had opened his eyes, hours later, and there had been Tony--and there had been chiefly Tony ever since, for him.

If ever he amounted to anything, and he meant to amount to something, it would be all due to Tony and her Uncle Phil. The two of them had saved him in more ways than one, had faith in him when he wasn't much but a scarecrow, ignorant, profane, unmoral, miserable, a "gutter brat" as some one had once called him, a phrase he had never forgotten. It had seemed to brand him, set him apart from people like the Holidays forever. But Tony and Doctor Phil had shown him a different way of looking at it, proved to him that nothing could really disgrace him but himself. They had given him his chance and he had taken it. Please G.o.d he would make himself yet into something they could be proud of, and it would all be their doing. He would never forget that, whatever happened.

A half hour later the train puffed and wheezed into the station at Northampton. d.i.c.k Carson and Max Hempel, still close together, descended into the swarming, chattering crowd which was delightfully if confusingly congested with pretty girls, more pretty girls and still more pretty girls. But d.i.c.k was not confused. Even before the train had come to a full stop he had caught sight of Tony. He had a single track mind so far as girls were concerned. From the moment his eyes discovered Tony Holiday the rest simply did not exist for him. It is to be doubted whether he knew they were there at all, in spite of their manifest ubiquity and equally manifest pulchritude.

Tony saw him, too, as he loomed up, taller than the others, bearing resistlessly down upon her. She waved a gay greeting and smiled her welcome to him through the throng. Max Hempel, close behind, caught the message, too, and recognized the face of the girl who smiled as the original of the newspaper cut he had just been studying so a.s.siduously.

Deliberately he dogged the young man's heels. He wanted to get a close-up view of Laura LaRue's daughter. She was much prettier than the picture.

Even from a distance he had made that out, as she stood there among the crowd, vivacious, vivid, clad all in white except for the loose coral-hued sweater which set off her warm brunette beauty and the slim but charmingly rounded curves of her supple young body. Yes, she was like Laura, like her and yet different, with a quality which he fancied belonged to herself and none other.

Almost jealously Hempel watched the meeting between the girl and the youth who up to now had been negligible enough, but suddenly emerged into significance as the possible young galoot already mentally warned off the premises by the stage manager.

"d.i.c.k! O d.i.c.k! I'm _so_ glad to see you," cried the girl, holding out both hands to the new arrival. Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes shining.

She looked quite as glad as she proclaimed.

As for the young man who had set down his suitcase and taken possession of both the proffered hands, there wasn't the slightest doubt that he was in the seventh heaven of bliss wherever that may be. Next door to Fool's Paradise, Max Hempel hoped somewhat vindictively.

"Just you wait, young man," he muttered to himself. "Bet you'll have to, anyway. That glorious young thing isn't going to settle down to the shallows of matrimony without trying the deep waters first, unless I'm mightily mistaken. In the meantime we shall see what we shall see to-night." And the man of power trudged away in the direction of a taxicab, leaving youth alone with itself.

"Everybody is here," bubbled Tony. "At least, nearly everybody. Larry went to a horrid old medical convention at Chicago, and can't be here for the play; but he's coming to commencement. Of course, Granny isn't able to travel and Aunt Margery couldn't come because the kiddies have been measling, but Ted is here, and Uncle Phil--bless him! He brought the twins over from Dunbury in the car. Phil Lambert and everybody are waiting down the street. Carlotta too! To think you haven't ever met her, when she's been my roommate and best friend for two years! And, oh!

d.i.c.ky! I haven't seen you myself for most a year and I'm so glad." She beamed up at him as she made this rather ambiguous statement. "And you haven't said a word but just 'h.e.l.lo!' Aren't you glad to see me, d.i.c.ky?"

she reproached.

He grunted at that.

"About a thousand times gladder than if I were in Heaven, unless you happened to be sitting beside me on the golden stairs. And if you think I don't know how long it is since I've seen you, you are mightily mistaken.

It is precisely one million years in round numbers."

"Oh, it is?" Tony smiled, appeased. "Why didn't you say so before, and not leave me to squeeze it out of you like tooth-paste?"

d.i.c.k grinned back happily.

"Because you brought me up not to interrupt a lady. You seemed to have the floor, so to speak."

"So to speak, indeed," laughed Tony. "Carlotta says I exist for that sole purpose. But come on. Everybody's crazy to see you and I've a million things to do." And tucking her arm in his, Tony marshaled the procession of two down the stairs to the street where the car and the old Holiday Hill crowd waited to greet the newest comer to the ranks of the commencement celebrants.

With the exception of Carlotta Cressy, Tony's roommate, the occupants of the car are known already to those who followed the earlier tale of Holiday Hill.[1]

[Footnote 1: The earlier experiences of the Holidays and their friends are related in "The House on the Hill."]

First of all there was the owner of the car, Dr. Philip Holiday himself, a married man now, with a small son and daughter of his own, "Miss Margery's" children. A little thicker of build and thinner of hair was the doctor, but possessed of the same genial friendliness of manner and whimsical humor, the same steady hand held out to help wherever and whenever help was needed. He was head of the House of Holiday now for his father, the saintly old pastor, had gone on to other fields and his soldier brother Ned, Tony's father, had also gone, in the prime of life, two years before, victim of typhus, leaving his beloved little daughter, and his two sons just verging into manhood, in the care of the younger Holiday.

As d.i.c.k and the doctor exchanged cordial greetings, the latter's friendly eyes challenged the young man's and were answered. Plainly as if words had been spoken the doctor knew that d.i.c.k was keeping faith with the old pact, living up to the name the little girl Tony had given him in her impulsive generosity.

"Something not quite right, though," he thought. "The boy isn't all happy. Wonder what the trouble is. Probably a girl. Usually is at that age."

At the wheel beside the doctor was his namesake and neighbor, Philip Lambert. Phil was graduating, himself, this year from the college across the river, a st.u.r.dy athlete of some note and a Phi Beta Kappa man as well. Out of a harum-scarum, willful boyhood he had emerged into a finely tempered, steady young manhood. The Dunbury wiseacres who had been wont to shake their heads over Phil's youthful escapades and prophesy a bad end for such a devil-may-care youngster now patted themselves complacently on the back, as wiseacres will, and declared they had always known the boy would turn out a credit to his family and the town.

On the back seat were Phil's sisters, the pretty twins, Charley and Clare, still astonishingly alike at twenty, as they had been at twelve, and still full of the high spirits and ready laughter and wit that had made them the life of the Hill in the old days. Neither looked a day over sixteen, but Clare had already been teaching two years in a Dunbury public school and Charley was to go into nurse's training in the fall.

Larry, the young doctor, as Dunbury had taken to calling him in distinction from his uncle, was not yet arrived, as Tony had explained; but Ted, her younger brother, was very much on the scene, arrayed in all the extravagant niceties of modish attire affected by university undergraduates. At twenty, Ted Holiday was as handsome as the traditional young Greek G.o.d and possessed of a G.o.dlike propensity to do as he liked and the devil take the consequences. Already Ned Holiday's younger son had acquired something of a reputation as a high flier among his own s.e.x, and a heart breaker among the fairer one. Reckless, debonair, utterly irresponsible, he was still "terrible Teddy" as his father had jocosely dubbed him long ago. Yet he was quite as lovable as he was irrepressible, and had a manifest grace to counterbalance every one of his many faults.

His soberer brother Larry worried uselessly over Ted's misdeeds, and took him sharply to task for them; but even Larry admitted that there was something rather magnificent about Ted and that possibly in the end he would come out the soundest Holiday of them all.

There remains only Carlotta to be introduced. Carlotta was lovely to look upon. A poet speaks somewhere of a face "made out of a rose." Carlotta had that kind of a face and her eyes were of that deep, violet shade which works mischief and magic in the hearts of men. As for her hair, it might well have been the envy of any princess, in or out of the covers of a book, so fine spun was it in texture, so pure gold in color, like the warm, vivid shimmer of tropical sunshine. She lifted an inquiring gaze now to d.i.c.k, as she held out her hand in acknowledgment of the introduction, and d.i.c.k murmured something plat.i.tudinous, bowed politely over the hand and never noticed what color her eyes were. A single track mind is both a curse and a protection to a man.

"Carlotta _would_ come," Tony was explaining gaily, "though I told her there wasn't room. Let me inform you all that Carlotta is the most completely, magnificently, delightfully spoiled young person in these United States of America."

"Barring you?" teased her uncle.