“Ah—don't go away!”
In truth, she could not go; she had been too vitally stirred; she began to tremble excessively, and sank back upon the bench, motioning him away with vague gestures of her shaking hands.
This was more than the Incroyable had counted upon, and far from his desires. He started forward with an exclamation.
“Don't come near me!” she gasped. “Who are you? Go away!”
“Give me one second to explain,” he began; but with the instant reassurance of this beginning she cut him off short, her fears dispelled by his commonplace. Nay, indignation displaced them so quickly that she fairly flashed up before him to her full height.
“You did not come in by the gate!” she cried. “What do you mean by coming here in that dress What right have you in my garden?”
“Just one word,” he begged quickly, but very gently. “You'd allow a street-beggar that much!”
She stood before him, panting, and, as he thought, glorious, in her flush of youth and anger. Tom Vanrevel had painted her incoherently, but richly, in spite of that, his whole heart being in the portrait; and—Crailey Gray had smiled at what he deemed the exaggeration of an ordinarily unimpressionable man who had fallen in love “at first sight;” yet, in the presence of the reality, the Incroyable decided that Tom's colors had been gray and humble. It was not that she was merely lovely, that her nose was straight, and her chin dexterously wrought between square and oval; that her dark hair lay soft as a shadow on her white brow; not that the trembling hand she held against her breast sprang from a taper wrist and tapered again to the tips of the long fingers; nor that she was of that slenderness as strong as it is delicate; not all the exquisite regularity of line and mould, nor simplicity of color, gave her that significance which made the Incroyable declare to himself that he stood for the first time in the presence of Beauty, and that now he knew the women he had been wont to call beautiful were but pretty. And yet her beauty, he told himself, was the least of her loveliness, for there was a glamour about her. It was not only the richness of her youth; but there was an ineffable exhalation which seemed to be made partly of light, partly of the very spirit of her, and, oddly enough, partly of the scent of the little fan that hung by a ribbon from her waist. This was a woman like a wine, he felt, there was a bouquet.
In regard to the bouquet of the young man himself, if he possessed one, it is pertinent to relate that at this very instant the thought skipped across his mind (like the hop of a flea in a rose-jar) that some day he might find the moment when he could tell her the truth about herself—with a half-laugh—and say: “The angels sent their haloes in a sandal-wood box to be made into a woman—and it was you!”
“If you have anything to say for yourself, say it quickly!” said Miss Betty.
“You were singing a while ago,” he answered, somewhat huskily, “and I stopped on the street to listen; then I came here to be nearer. The spell of your voice—” He broke off abruptly to change the word. “The spell of the song came over me—it is my dearest favorite—so that I stood afterward in a sort of trance, only hearing again, in the silence, 'The stolen heart, like the gathered rose, will bloom but for a day!' I did not see you until you came to the bench. You must believe me: I would not have frightened you for anything in the world.”
“Why are you wearing that dress?”
He laughed, and pointed to where, behind him on the ground, lay a long gray cloak, upon which had been tossed a white mask. “I'm on my way to the masquerade;” he answered, with an airy gesture in the direction of the violins. “I'm an Incroyable, you see; and I had the costume made from my recollection of a sketch of your great-uncle. I saw it a long time ago in your library.”
Miss Carewe's accustomed poise was quite recovered; indeed, she was astonished to discover a distinct trace of disappointment that the brilliant apparition must offer so tame an explanation. What he said was palpably the truth; there was a masquerade that night, she knew, at the Madrillon's, a little way up Carewe Street, and her father had gone, an hour earlier, a blue domino over his arm.
The Incroyable was a person of almost magical perceptiveness; he felt the let-down immediately and feared a failure. This would not do; the attitude of tension between them must be renewed at once. “You'll forgive me?” he began, in a quickly impassioned tone. “It was only after you sang, a dream possessed me, and—”
“I cannot stay to talk with you,” Miss Betty interrupted, and added, with a straightforwardness which made him afraid she would prove lamentably direct: “I do not know you.”
Perhaps she remembered that already one young man had been presented to her by no better sponsor than a white cat, and had no desire to carry her unconventionality farther than that. In the present instance there was not even a kitten.
She turned toward the house, whereupon he gave a little pathetic exclamation of pleading in a voice that was masterly, being as sincere as it was musical, and he took a few leaning steps toward her, both hands outstretched.
“One moment more!” he cried, as she turned again to him. “It may be the one chance of my life to speak with you; don't deny me this.—All the rest will meet you when the happy evening comes, will dance with you, talk with you, see you when they like, listen to you sing. I, alone, must hover about the gates, or steal like a thief into your garden to hear you from a distance. Listen to me—just this once—for a moment?”
“I cannot listen,” she said firmly; and stood quite still. She was now in deep shadow.
“I will not believe you merciless! You would not condemn the meanest criminal unheard!” Remembering that she was so lately from the convent, he ventured this speech in a deep, thrilling voice, only to receive a distinct shock for his pains, for she greeted it with an irrepressible, most unexpected peal of contralto laughter, and his lips parted slightly with the surprise of it.
They parted much farther in the next instant—in good truth, it may be stated of the gentleman that he was left with his mouth open—for, suddenly leaning toward him out of the shadow into the light, her face shining as a cast of tragedy, she cried in a hoarse whisper:
“Are you a murderer?”
And with that and a whisk of her skirts, and a footfall on the gravel path, she was gone. He stood dumbfounded, poor comedian, having come to play the chief role, but to find the scene taken out of his hands. Then catching the flutter of her wrap, as she disappeared into the darkness of the veranda, he cried in a loud, manly voice:
“You are a dear!”
As he came out into the street through a gap in the hedge, he paused, drawing his cloak about him, and lifted his face to the eastern moon. It was a strange face: the modelling most like what is called “Greek,” save for the nose, which was a trifle too short for that, and the features showed a happy purity of outline almost childlike; the blue eyes, clear, fleckless, serenely irresponsible, with more the look of refusing responsibility than being unconscious of it; eyes without care, without prudence, and without evil. A stranger might have said he was about twenty-five and had never a thought in his life. There were some blossoms on the hedge, and he touched one lightly, as though he chucked it under the chin; he smiled upon it then, but not as he had smiled upon Miss Betty, for this was his own, the smile that came when he was alone; and, when it came, the face was no longer joyous as it had been in repose; there was an infinite patience and worn tolerance-possibly for himself. This incongruous and melancholy smile was astonishing: one looked for the laughter of a boy and found, instead, a gentle, worldly, old prelate.
Standing there, all alone in the moonlight, by the hedge, he lifted both hands high and waved them toward the house, as children wave to each other across lawns at twilight. After that he made a fantastic bow to his corrugated shadow on the board sidewalk.
“Again, you rogue!” he exclaimed aloud. Then, as he faced about and began to walk in the direction of the beckoning violins: “I wonder if Tom's kitten was better, after all!”
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