Chapter 14. The Dancer On The Moor

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_ CHAPTER XIV. THE DANCER ON THE MOOR

I

Randy's letter had set Becky adrift. She was not in love with him. She was sure of that. And he had said he would not marry her without love. He had said that if she owned her soul she would think of Dalton as a cad and as a coward.

It seemed queer that Randy should be demanding things of her. He had always been so glad to take anything she would give, and now she had offered him herself, and he wouldn't have her. Not till she owned her soul.

She knew what he meant. The thought of George was always with her. She kept seeing him as she had first seen him at the station; as he had been that wonderful day when they had had tea in the Pavilion; the night in the music room when he had kissed her; the old garden with its pale statues and box hedges; and always there was his sparkling glance, his quick voice.

She would never own her soul until she forgot George. Until she put him out of her life; until the thought of him would not make her burn hot with humiliation; until the thought of him would not thrill to her finger-tips.

She found Cope's easy and humorous companionship a balance for her hidden emotions. And when Louise Cope came, she proved to be a rather highly emphasized counterpart of her brother. Her red-gold hair was thick and she wore it bobbed. Her skin was white but lacked the look of delicacy which seemed to contradict constantly Cope's vivid personality. She seemed to laugh at the world as he did. She called Becky "quaint," but took to her at once.

"Archie has been writing to me of you," she told Becky; "he says you came up like a bird from the south."

"Birds don't fly north in the fall----"

"Well, you were the--miracle," Cope asserted.

Louise Cope's shrewd glance studied him. "He has fallen in love with you, Becky Bannister," was her blunt assurance, "but you needn't let it worry you. As yet it is only an aesthetic passion. But there is no telling what may come of it----"

"Does he fall in love--like that?" Becky demanded.

"He has never been in love," Louise declared, "not really. Except with me."

Becky felt that the Copes were a charming pair. When she answered Randy's letter she spoke of them.

"Louise adores her brother, and she thinks he would be a great artist if he would take himself seriously. But neither of them seems to take anything seriously. They always seem to be laughing at the world in a quiet way. Louise is not pretty, but she gives an effect of beauty---- She wears a big gray cape and a black velvet tam, and I am not sure that the color in her cheeks is real. She is different from other people, but it doesn't seem to be a pose. It is just because she has lived in so many places and has seen so many people and has thought for herself. I have always let other people think for me, haven't I, Randy?

"And now that I have done with the Copes, I am going to talk about the things that you said to me in your letter, and which are really the important things.

"I hated to think that you dropped Mr. Dalton in the fountain. I hated to think that you wanted to burn him at the stake--there was something--cruel--and--dreadful in it all. I have kept thinking of that struggle between you--in the dark---- I have hated to think that a few years ago if you had felt as you do about him--that you might have--killed him. But perhaps men are like that. They care more for justice than for--mercy.

"I am trying to take your advice and tell myself the truth about Mr. Dalton. That he isn't worth a thought of mine. Yet I think of him a great deal. I am being very frank with you, Randy, because we have always talked things out. I think of him, and wonder which is the real man--the one I thought he was--and I thought him very fine and splendid. Or is he just trifling and commonplace? Perhaps he is just between, not as wonderful as I thought him, nor as contemptible as I seem forced to believe.

"Yet I gave him something that it is hard to take back. I gave a great deal. You see I had always been shut up in a glass case like the bob-whites and the sandpipers in the Bird Room, and I knew nothing of the world. And the first time I tried my wings, I thought I was flying towards the sun, and it was just a blaze that--burned me.

"Of course you are right when you say that you won't marry me unless I love you. I had a queer feeling at first about it--as if you were very far away and I couldn't reach you. But I know that you are right, and that you are thinking of the thing that is best for me. But I know I shall always have you as a friend. I don't think that I shall ever love anybody. And after this we won't talk about it. There are so many other things that we have to say to each other that don't hurt----"

Becky could not, of course, know the effect of her letter on Randy. The night after its receipt, he roamed the woods. She had thought him cruel--and dreadful. Well, let her think it. He was glad that he had dropped George in the fountain. He should always be glad. But women were not like that--they were tender--and hated--hardness. Perhaps that was because they were--mothers----

And men were--hard. He had been hard, perhaps, in the things he had said in his letter. Her words rang in his ears. "I had a queer feeling at first that you were very far away, and that I could not reach you." And she had said that, when his soul ached to have her near.

Yet he had tried to do the best that he could for Becky. He had felt that she must not be bound by a tie that was no longer needed to protect her from Dalton. She was safe at 'Sconset, with the Admiral and her new friends the Copes. He envied them, their hours with her. He was desperately lonely, with a loneliness which had no hope.

He worked intensively. The boarders had gone from King's Crest, and he and the Major had moved into the big house. Randy spent a good deal of time in the Judge's library at Huntersfield. He and Truxton had great plans for their future. They read law, sold cars, and talked of their partnership. The firm was to be "Bannister, Paine and Beaufort"; it was to have brains, conscience, and business acumen.

"In the order named," Truxton told the Major. "The Judge has brains, Randy has a conscience. There's nothing left for me but to put pep into the business end of it."

Randy worked, too, on his little story. He did not know in the least what he was going to do with it, but it was an outlet for the questions which he kept asking himself. The war was over and the men who had fought had ceased to be important. He and the Major and Truxton talked a great deal about it. The Major took the high stand of each man's satisfaction in the thing he had done. Truxton was light-heartedly indifferent. He had his Mary, and his future was before him. But Randy argued that the world ought not to forget. "It was a rather wonderful thing for America. I want her to keep on being wonderful."

The Major in his heart knew that the boy was right. America must keep on being wonderful. Her young men must go high-hearted to the tasks of peace. It was the high-heartedness of people which had won the war. It would be the high-heartedness of men and women which would bring sanity and serenity to a troubled world.

"The difficulty lies in the fact that we are always trying to make laws to right the world, when what we need is to form individual ideals. The boy who says in his heart, 'I want to be like Lincoln,' and who stands in front of a statue of Lincoln, and learns from that rugged countenance the lesson of simple courage and honesty, has a better chance of a future than the boy who is told, 'There is evil in the world, and the law punishes those who transgress.' Half of our Bolsheviks would be tamed if they had the knowledge and love of some simple hero in their hearts, and felt that there was a chance for them to be heroic. The war gave them a chance. We have now to show them that there is beauty and heroism in orderly living----"

He was talking to Madge. She was still with the Flippins. The injury to her foot had been more serious than it had seemed. She might have gone with Oscar and Flora when they left Hamilton Hill. But she preferred to stay. Flora was to go to a hospital; Madge would not be needed.

"I am going to stay here as long as you will let me," she said to Mrs. Flippin; "you will tell me if I am in the way----"

Mrs. Flippin adored Madge. "It is like having a Princess in the house," she said, "only she don't act like a Princess."

The Major came over every afternoon. Kemp drove him, as a rule, in the King's Crest surrey. If the little man missed Dalton's cars, he said no word. He made the Major very comfortable. He lived a life of ease if not of elegance, and he loved the wooded hills, the golden air, the fine old houses, the serene autumn glory of this southern world.

On the afternoon when the Major talked to Madge of the world at peace, they were together under the apple tree which Madge had first seen from the window of the east room. There were other apple trees in the old orchard, but it was this tree that Madge liked because of its golden globes. "The red ones are wonderful," she said, "but red isn't my color. With my gold skin, they make me look like a gypsy. If I am to be a golden girl, I must stay away from red----"

"Is that what you are--a golden girl?"

"That was always George Dalton's name for me."

"I am sorry."

"Why?"

"Because I should like it to be mine for you. I should like to link my golden West with the thought of you."

"And you won't now, because it was somebody else's name for me?"

Kemp, before he went away, had made her comfortable with cushions in a chair-like crotch of the old tree. The Major was at her feet. He meditated a moment. "I shall make it my name for you. What do I care what other men have called you."

"Do you know what you called me--once?" she was smiling down at him.

"No."

"A little lame duck. It was when I first tried to use my foot. And you laughed, and said that it--linked us--together. And now you are trying to link me with your West----"

"You know why, of course."

"Yes, I do."

He drew a long breath. "Most women would have said, 'No, I don't know.' But you told the truth. I want to link you with my life in every way I can because I love you. And you know that I care--very much--that I want you for my wife--my golden girl in my golden West----?"

"You have never told me before that--you cared."

"There was no need to tell it. You knew."

"Yes. I was afraid it was true----"

He was startled. "Afraid? Why?"

"Oh, I oughtn't to let you care," she said. "You don't know what a slacker I've been. And I don't want you to find out----"

"The only thing that I want to find out is whether you care for me."

She flushed a little under his steady gaze, then quite unexpectedly she reached her hand down to him. He took it in his firm clasp. "I do care--an awful lot," she said, "but I've tried not to. And I shouldn't let you care for me."

"Why--shouldn't?"

"I'm not--half good enough. My life has always been lived at loose ends. Nothing bad, but a thousand things that you wouldn't--like to hear--I'm not a golden girl--I'm a gilded one----"

"Why should you tell me things like that? I don't believe it."

"Please believe it," she said earnestly, "don't whitewash things. Just let me begin again--loving you----"

Her voice broke. He drew himself up, and took her in his arms. "My dear girl," he said, "my dear girl----"

"I never met a man like you, I never believed there were--such men----" He felt her tears against his hand.

"Listen," he said quietly; "let me tell you something of my life." He told her the things he had told Randy. Of the little wife he had not loved. "Perhaps if it had not been for her, I should not have had the courage to offer to you my--maimed--self. When I married her I was strong and young and had wealth to give her. Yet I did not give her love. And love is more than all the rest. I have that to give you--you know it."

"Yes."

"I have some money. I don't think it is going to count much with either of us. What will count is the way we plan our future. I have a big old ranch, and we'll live in it--with the dairy and the wide kitchen that you've talked about--and you won't have to wait for another world, dearest, to get your heart's desire----"

"I have my heart's desire," she whispered; "you are--my world."

II

Madge wrote to George Dalton that she was going to marry Major Prime.

"There is no reason why we should put it off, Georgie. The clergyman who prayed for Flora will perform the ceremony, and the wedding will be at the Flippins' farm.

"It seems, of course, too good to be true. Not many women have such luck. Not my kind of women anyway. We meet men as a rule who want us to be gilded girls, and not golden ones. But Mark wants me to be gold all through. And I shall try to be---- We are to live on his ranch, a place that passes in California for a farm--a sort of glorified country place. Mrs. Flippin is teaching me to make butter, so that I can superintend my own dairy, and I have learned a great deal about chickens and eggs.

"I am going to be a housewife in what I call a reincarnated sense--loving my house and the things which belong to it, and living as a part of it, not above it, and looking down upon it. Perhaps all American women will come to that some day and I shall simply be blazing the way for them. I shall probably grow rosy and round, and if you ever ride up to my door-step, you will find me a buxom and blooming matron instead of a golden girl. And you won't like it in the least. But my husband will like it, because he thinks a bit as I do about it, and he doesn't care for the woman who lives for her looks.

"I shall come and see Flora before I go West. But I am going to be married first. We both have a feeling that it must be now--that something might happen if we put it off, and nothing must happen. I love him too much. Of course you won't believe that. I can hardly believe it myself. But I have someone to climb the heights with me, Georgie, and we shall ascend to the peak--together."

For a wedding present George sent Madge the pendant he had bought for Becky. To connect it up with Madge's favorite color scheme, he had an amethyst put in place of the sapphire. He was glad to give it away. Every time he had come upon it, it had reminded him of things that he wished to forget.

Yet he could not forget. Even as Becky had thought of him, he had thought of her; of her radiant youth on the morning that Randy had arrived; at the Horse Show in her shabby shoes and sailor hat; in the Bird Room in pale blue under the swinging lamp; in the music room between tall candles; in the garden, with a star shining into the still pool; that last night, on the balcony, leaning over, with a yellow lantern like a halo behind her.

There were other things that he thought of--of Randy, in khaki on the station platform; Randy, lean and tall among the boarders; Randy, left behind with Kemp in the rain; Randy, debonair and insolent, announcing his engagement on the terrace at Hamilton Hill; Randy, a shadow against a silver sky, answering Becky's call; Randy, in the dark by the fountain, with muscles like iron, forcing him inevitably back, lifting him above the basin, letting him drop----; Randy, the Conqueror, marching away with Becky's fan as his trophy----!

New York was, of course, at this season of the year, a pageant of sparkling crowds, and of brilliant window displays, of new productions at the theaters. People were coming back to town. Even the fashionable folk were running down to taste the elixir of the early days in the metropolis.

But George found everything flat and stale. He did the things he had always done, hunted up the friends he had always known. He spent week-ends at various country places, and came always back to town with an undiminished sense of his need of Becky, and his need of revenge on Randy.

He had heard before he left Virginia that Becky was at Nantucket. He had found some consolation in the fact that she was not at Huntersfield. To have thought of her with Randy in the old garden, on Pavilion Hill, in the Bird Room, would have been unbearable.

He had a feeling that, in a sense, Madge's marriage was a desertion. He did not in the least want to marry her, but there were moments when he needed her friendship very much. He needed it now. And she was going to marry Major Prime, and go out to some God-forsaken place, and get fat and lose her beauty. He wished that she would not talk about such things--it made him feel old, and worried about his waist-line.

Even Oscar was failing him. "When Flora gets well," the little man kept telling him, "we are going to do some good with our money. We have done nothing but think of ourselves----"

"Oh, for Heaven's sake, don't preach," George exploded. It seemed to him that the world had gone mad on the subject of reforms. Man was no longer master of his fate. The time would come when the world would be a dry desert, without a cocktail or a highball for a thirsty soul, and all because a lot of people had been feeling for some time as Flora and Oscar felt at this moment.

"I shall take Flora up to the Crossing in a few days," Oscar was saying; "the doctor thinks the sea air will do her good. I wish you would come with us."

George had no idea of going with Oscar and Flora. He had been marooned long enough with a sick woman and her depressed spouse. When Flora was better and she and Oscar got over their mood of piety and repentance, he would be glad to join them. In the meantime he searched his mind for some reasonable excuse.

"Look here," he said, "I'll join you later, Oscar. I've promised some friends at Nantucket that I'll come down for the hunting."

"I didn't know that you had friends in Nantucket," Oscar told him moodily.

"The Merediths," George remembered in the nick of time the name of Becky's grandfather. Oscar would not know the difference.

Having committed himself, his spirits soared. It had, he felt, been an inspiration to put it over on Oscar like that. Subconsciously he had known that some day he would follow Becky, and when the moment came, he had spoken out of his thoughts.

In the two or three days that elapsed between his decision and the date that he had set for his departure, he found himself enjoying the city--its clear skies, its hurrying crowds, its color and glow, the tingle of its rush and hurry, its light-hearted acceptance of the pleasure of the moment.

He telegraphed for a room at a hotel in Nantucket. Once there, he was confident that he could find Becky. Everybody would know Admiral Meredith.

He went by boat from New York to New Bedford, and enjoyed the trip. Later on the little steamer, _Sankaty_, plying between New Bedford and Nantucket, he was so shining and splendid that he was much observed by the other passengers. His Jap servant, trotting after him, was perhaps less martial in bearing than the ubiquitous Kemp, but he was none the less an ornament.

Thus George came, at last, to Nantucket, and to his hotel. Having dined, he asked the way to the Admiral's house. He did not of course plan to storm the citadel after dark, but a walk would not hurt him, and he could view from the outside the cage which held his white dove. For he had come to that, sentimentally, that Becky was the white dove that he would shelter against his heart.

The clerk at the hotel desk, directing him, thought that the Admiral was not in his house on Main Street. He was apt at this season to spend his time in Siasconset.

"'Sconset? Where's 'Sconset?"

"Across the island."

"How can I get there?"

"You can motor over. There's a 'bus, or you can get a car."

So the next morning, George took the 'bus. He saw little beauty in the moor. He thought it low and flat. His heart leaped with the thought that every mile brought him nearer Becky--his white dove--whom he had--hurt!

He was set down by the 'bus at the post-office. He asked his way, and was directed to a low huddle of gray houses on a grassy street. "It is the 'Whistling Sally,'" the driver of the 'bus had told him.

When George reached "The Whistling Sally," he felt that there must be some mistake. Here was no proper home for an Admiral or an heiress. His eyes were blind to the charms of the wooden young woman with the puffed-out cheeks, to the beauty of silver-gray shingles, of late flowers blooming bravely in the little garden.

He kept well on the other side of the street. It might perhaps be embarrassing if he met Becky while she was with her grandfather. He wanted to see her alone. With no one to interfere, he would be, he was sure, master of the situation.

He passed the house. The windows were open, and the white curtains blew out. But there was no one in sight. At the next corner, he accosted a tall man in work clothes, with bronzed skin and fair hair.

"Can you tell me," George asked, "whether Admiral Meredith lives in that cottage--'The Whistling Sally'?"

"Yes. But he isn't there. He's gone to Boston."

George was conscious of a sense of shock.

"Boston?"

"Yes. He wasn't very well and he wanted to see his doctor."

"Has his--granddaughter gone with him?"

"Miss Becky? Yes."

"But--the windows of the house are open----"

"I open them every morning. The housekeeper is in Nantucket. But they are all coming back at the end of the week."

"Coming back?" eagerly; "the Admiral, and Miss Bannister?"

"Yes."

George drew a long breath. He walked back with Tristram to the low gray house. "Queer little place," he said.

Tristram eyed him with easy tolerance. "Of course it seems queer if you aren't used to it----"

"I thought the Admiral had money."

"Well, he has. But he forgets it out here----"

"Is there a good hotel?"

"Yes. It is usually closed by now. But they are keeping it open for some guests who are up for the hunting."

The hotel was a pleasant rambling structure, and overlooked the sea. George engaged a room for Saturday--and said that his man would bring his bags. He would have his lunch and take the afternoon 'bus back to Nantucket.

As he waited for the dining-room doors to open, a girl wrapped in a yellow cape crossed the porch and descended the steps which led to the beach. She wore a yellow bathing cap and yellow shoes. George walked to the top of the bluff and watched her. She threw off the cape, and stood slim and striking for a moment before she dived into the sea. She swam splendidly. It was very cold, and George wondered how she endured it. When she came running back up the steps and across the porch, she was wrapped in the cape. She was rather handsome in a queer dark way. "It was cold," she said, as she passed George.

He took a step forward. "You were brave----"

She stopped and shrugged her shoulders. "One gets warm," she said, "in a moment."

She left him, and he went in to lunch. He stopped at the desk on the way out. "I have changed my mind. My man will bring my bags to-morrow."

It was still too early for the 'bus, so George walked back up the bluff, turning at last towards the left. Crossing a grassy space, there was ahead of him a ridge which marked the edge of the moor. A little fog was blowing in, and mistily through the fog he saw a figure which moved as light as smoke above the eminence. It was a woman dancing.

As he came nearer, he saw that she wore gray with a yellow sash. Her yellow cape lay on the ground. "I am not sure," George said, as he stopped beside her, "whether you are a pixie or a mermaid."

"Look," she said, smiling, "I'll show you what I am----"

She began with a light swaying motion, like a leaf stirred by a breeze. Then, whipped into action, she ran before the pursuing elements. She cowered, and registered defiance. Her loosened hair hung heavy about her shoulders, then wound itself about her, as she whirled in a cyclone of movement. Beaten to the ground, she rose languidly, swayed again to that light step and stopped.

Then she came close to George. "You see," she said, "I am not a pixie or a mermaid. I am the spirit of the storm." _

Read next: Chapter 15. The Trumpeter Swan

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