Part 47 (1/2)

”Do you feel that way?” he asked, hungrily.

”Terribly. I love you--I love you hideously much. Watch out! Will you never learn that somebody's always looking?--a whole picnic this time.”

They were nearing Pocantico Lake. In a thicket on its sh.o.r.es a wagon-load of villagers had finished its basket-lunch and scattered in a rather dreary effort at inexpensive happiness.

Among the trees the wagon waited pitifully to take them back from their dingy cheer to their dull homes. It was rendered only the more pitiful by a strip of red-white-and-blue bunting. A coat of paint would have become it better.

While the horses cropped the gra.s.s soberly a pack of substantial wives cleared away such part of the debris of the banquet as was not scattered about the ground.

As Forbes and Persis rounded the turn that disclosed the revelers a homely couple evidently in search of a less populous nook severed a highly unromantic-looking clasp. It was hard to see how either took much pleasure from the other. The man was in his s.h.i.+rt-sleeves, with his hat askew; the girl, shapeless and freckled, in a shapeless freckled dress.

They squinted their eyes against the sun, gaped at the tailor-made couple on the varnished horses, and stumbled in the roadside gully to let them pa.s.s.

”Isn't it ghastly?” Persis whispered. ”They were trying to spoon--just as we were. And we both broke up both of us. It makes love rather a silly, shabby spectacle, doesn't it?”

”I don't think so,” Forbes said. ”I should say that instead of their making love shabby, love covered them with a little glory.”

”That's a much prettier way to put it. But shabby people--oh Lord! Look at that family, dear! If that's wedded bliss, give me chloroform.”

It was a doleful exhibit on the edge of the woods: a fat, paunchy, sweaty man was taking his picnic in carrying a squally, messy baby.

Alongside him a bunchy woman with stringy hair waddled in answering stupidity, hanging to her husband's suspenders.

”You can't tell which of them's going to have the next one,” Persis commented, before she caught herself. ”Forgive me, I didn't realize how it would sound.”

Forbes laughed sheepishly. ”It was what I was thinking, too.”

As they rode on she shuddered. ”What an odious thing to be like that!

Suppose you lost your job in the army and we got very poor, and I had to take in was.h.i.+ng, and we had a lot of children; should we be like that, do you think?--should we?”

”You could never be anything that was not beautiful!” Forbes exclaimed, partly because he believed it to be unquestionable truth and partly to quell her ferocious repugnance for anything that was ugly and tawdry.

”Perhaps that awful man told that awful woman the same thing,” she groaned, ”and believed it! Come on; let's run away from it.” She lifted her horse to a gallop and fled so fast that Forbes, for all the authority and help he gave his horse, could not overtake her, since hers was the better mount. As he followed, lumbering and scolding his black beast, he felt that she was indeed too fleet, too elusive for him ever to capture and keep.

But at length she relented, and reined in till he came abeam. Then she urged her horse on again, and they galloped in the mad swoop of a cavalry charge with boots griding together. She forgot her wounded knee, and he forgot his doubts of her.

There were narrow escapes, unexpected swerves round loitering wagons or deliberate wayfarers. Once she rode up a shelving bank to give him room to avoid a mangy canine landlord so earnestly attempting to evict a family of tenants from his left ear that he paid no heed to the risk of his own life or hers.

”If we ride fast on levels, we can take more time later,” she said; ”then they won't wonder at our being so late.”

She was always thinking of what other people would think. He wished that she would forget the eternal audience, the unbroken spectators, now and then. And yet it was intelligent. It was wise. Only he loved her more when she was uttering those childish plans of hers for a life in which the funds were to be taken from a fairy purse automatically replenished as fast as it was depleted.

Yet he feared both of the women she was: the cautious and forethoughtful who might in all wisdom refuse his penury, and the spoiled demander who might resent it.

They trotted now into a park-like domain with roads branching out on either side. At the edge of each of them stood a sign-board warning against trespa.s.s and signed with the resounding name of the richest man on earth.

”They say he's worth a hundred or two hundred million dollars,” Persis called across to Forbes.

”That ought to be enough,” said Forbes. ”It's more than we shall have.”

And he smiled at the comparison. Persis sighed: