Part 3 (1/2)

His study became the scene of much important plot and counter-plot. They found in his mind the quality which had led them to outwit many an enemy when he scouted ahead of their tattered regiment, still available when the enemy appeared under commercial or civic front. Also it naturally happened that his library gradually became the hunting-grounds for Mrs.

Matilda's young people, who were irresistibly drawn into the circle of his ever ready sympathy.

The whole tale and its telling was absorbingly interesting to Caroline Darrah Brown and she listened with enraptured attention to it all. She repeated carefully the names of her mother's friends as they came up in the conversation; and she was pathetically eager to know all about this world she had come back into, from, what already seemed to her, her birth in a strange land. Two days in this country of her mother, and the enchantment of traditions that had been given to her unborn was already at work with its spell!

And so they rambled around and talked, unheeding the time until the early twilight began to fall and Mrs. Buchanan was summoned by Jeff to a consultation in the domestic regions with the autocratic Tempie.

Left to herself, Caroline Darrah wandered back again through the rooms from one object to another that inspired the stories. It was like fairy-land to her and she was in a long dream of pleasure. Out of the shadows she seemed to be drawing her wistful young mother, and hand in hand they were going over the past together.

When it was quite deep into the twilight she sauntered back to the crackling comfort of the major's fragrant logs. A discussion with Jeff over his toilet had delayed the major in his bedroom and she found the library deserted, but hospitable with firelight.

How long she had been musing and castle-building in the coals she scarcely knew, when a step on the polished floor made her look up, and with a little exclamation she rose to her full, slim, young height and turned to face a man who had come in with the unannounced surety of a member of the household. He was tall, broad and dark, and his knickerbockers were splashed with mud and covered with clinging burrs and pine-needles. One arm was lashed to his side with a silk sling and he held a huge bunch of glowing red berries in his free hand. They were branches of the red, coral-strung buck bushes and Caroline had never seen them before. Their gorgeousness fairly took her breath and she exclaimed with the ingenuous delight of a child.

”How lovely, how lovely!” she cried as she stretched out her hands for them. ”I never saw any before. Do they grow here?”

”Yes,” answered the man with a gleam of amus.e.m.e.nt in his dark eyes, ”yes, they came from Seven Oaks. The fields are full of them now. Do you want them?” And as he spoke he laid the bunch in her arms.

”And they smell woodsy and piny and delicious. Thank you! I--they are lovely. I--” She paused in wild confusion, looked around the room as if in search of some one, and ended by burying her face in the berries. ”I don't know where Major Buchanan is,” she murmured helplessly.

”Well, it doesn't matter,” he said with a comforting smile as he came up beside her on the rug. ”They'll introduce us when they come. I'm Andrew Sevier and the berries are yours, so what matter?”

”Oh,” said Caroline Darrah in an awed voice, and as she spoke she raised her head from the wood flowers and her eyes to his face, ”oh, are you really Andrew Sevier?”

”Yes, _really_,” he answered with another smile and a slightly puzzled expression in his own dark eyes.

”But I read everything I can find about you, and the papers say you are ill in Panama. I've been so worried about you. I saw your play last week in New York and I couldn't enjoy it for wondering how you were. I wouldn't read your poem in this month's _Review_ because I was afraid you were dead--and I didn't know it. I'm so relieved.” With which astonis.h.i.+ng remark she drew a deep breath and laid her cheek against the field bouquet.

”I am--that is I was smashed up in Panama until David came down and brought me home. It was awfully good of you to--to know that I--that I--” Andrew Sevier paused as mirth, wonder and grat.i.tude spread in confusion over his suntanned face.

”How did it happen? Was it very dreadful?” And again those distractingly solicitous eyes, full of sympathetic anxiety, were raised to his. Andrew shook himself mentally to see if it could possibly be a dream he was having, and a little thrill shot through him at the reality of it all.

”Nothing interesting; end of a bridge collapsed and put a rib or two out of commission,” he managed to answer.

”I _knew_ it was something dreadful,” said Caroline Darrah Brown as she moved a step nearer him. ”I was really unhappy about it and I wondered if all the other people who read your poems and watch for them and--and love them like I do, were worried, too. But I concluded that they would know how to find out about you; only I didn't. I'm glad you are here safe and that I know it.”

The puzzled expression in Andrew Sevier's face deepened. Of course he had become more or less accustomed to the interest which his work had caused to be attached to his personality, and this was not the first time he had had a stranger read the poet into the man on first sight. They had even gone so far as to expect him to talk in blank verse he felt sure, especially when his admirer had been a member of the opposite and fair s.e.x, but a thing like this had never happened to him before. It was, at the least, disturbing to have a lovely woman rise out of the major's very hearthstone and claim him as a familiar spirit with the exquisite frankness of a child. It smacked of the wine of wizardry. He glanced at her a moment and was on the point of making a tentative inquiry when the major came into the room.

”Well, Andy boy, you're in from the fields, I see. How's the farm? Every thing s.h.i.+pshape?” As he spoke the major shot a keen glance from under his beetling old brows at the pair and wisely let the situation develop itself.

Andrew answered his salutation promptly, then turned an amused glance on the girl at his side.

”He isn't going to introduce us,” she laughed with a friendly little look up into his face. ”I ought to have done it myself when you did, but I was so astonished--and relieved to find you. I'm Caroline Darrah Brown.”

The words were low and laughing and warm with a sweet friendliness, but they crashed through the room like the breath of a swarm of furies.

Andrew Sevier's face went white and drawn on the instant, and every muscle in his body stiffened to a tense rigidity. His dark eyes narrowed themselves to slits and glowed like the coals.

The major's very blood stopped in his veins and his fine old face looked drawn and gray as he stretched out his hand and laid it on Caroline's young shoulder. Not a word came to his lips as he looked in Andrew's face and waited.

And as he waited a wondrous thing and piercing sweet unfolded itself under his keen old eyes and sank like a balm into his wise old heart.