Part 6 (1/2)
Millicent only smiled as the great machine moved off. The suns.h.i.+ne, the rare and ordered beauty of the place, the fragrance of the soft winds, all lapped her in indolence. As they neared the gate that gave upon the open road, a turn brought them in sight of the front of the house. It was very beautiful. She breathed deeply in the content of the sight--the delicate lines, the soft color, the perfection of detail. In the gardens were stained, mellow columns and bal.u.s.trades which Anna had brought from the dismantled palace in the Italian hills where she had found them. Everywhere wealth made its subtlest, most delicate appeal to her eyes.
”My house,” thought Millicent, as they shot out of the grounds, ”shall be different, but as beautiful. The Tudor style, I think, and for my out-of-door glory a vast rose-garden,--acres, if I please!” Then she called sternly to her straying imagination. She was picturing what she might have as the wife of the man before her--the man whose first proposal she had unhesitatingly refused, whose appearance at Lakeholm she had regarded as proof of disloyalty on Anna's part--the man who at the best represented to her only the artistic possibilities of riches.
She dismissed her reverie with a frown and joined in the talk.
”Do you know,” she confessed, ”I forget where it is that we are going?”
”We're coming back to the Monroes' for luncheon,” Mrs. Dinsmore reminded her. ”But Mr. Brockton is going to skim over most of the Berks.h.i.+res first. I think you said you hadn't been in this part of the country before, Mr. Brockton?”
”No,” said Brockton, ”I haven't had much chance to get acquainted with the playgrounds of the country. I've been too busy earning a holiday.
But I've earned it all right.” He turned to emphasize his boast with a nod toward Millicent. She blushed. His very chauffeur must redden at his braggart air, she thought. The Tudor castle grew dim in her vision.
”What do you think of the bubble, Miss Harned?” he went on. ”Goes like a bird, don't she?”
”Indeed she does,” answered Millicent, characteristically making immediate atonement in voice and look for the mental criticism of the moment before. ”It's really going like a bird. I don't suppose we shall ever have a sensation more like flying.”
”Not until our celestial pinions are adjusted,” said Anna. Brockton laughed, but Millicent went on:
”Seriously, the loveliest belief I ever lost was the one in the wings with which my virtues should be at last rewarded. To breast the ether among the whirling stars,--didn't you ever lie awake and think of the possibility of that, Anna?”
”Never! I'm no poet in a state of suffocation, as I sometimes suspect you of being.”
”As for heaven,” declared Brockton, ”I don't take much stock in all that. We're here--we know that--and we'd better make the most of it.
For all we know, it's our last chance to have a good time. Better take all that's coming to you here and now, Miss Harned, and not count much on those wings of yours.”
Millicent smiled mechanically. Could any Elizabethan garden of delight compensate for the misery of having each b.u.t.terfly of fancy crushed between Lemuel Brockton's big hands in this fas.h.i.+on?
They were entering a village. Before them was the triangular green with the soldier's monument upon it. About it were the post-office, the stores, the small neat houses of the place. A white church, tall-steepled, green-shuttered, rose behind the monument, and with it dominated the square. A wagon or two toiled lazily along the road; before the stores a few dusty buggies were tied. The place seemed drowsy to stagnation in the summer heat. Why, Millicent wondered, were towns so crude and unlovely in the midst of a country so beautiful?
There was a sudden explosive sound, and, with a crunch and a jerk which almost threw them from their seats, the machine came to a standstill. Brockton and his chauffeur were out in an instant, the one peering beneath, the other examining more closely. He emerged in a moment, and there was a jargon of explanation, unintelligible to the two women. All that Anna and Millicent understood was that the accident was not serious; that they would be delayed only a few minutes, and that Brockton was very angry with some one for the mishap. The two men worked together. Anna looked at her cousin.
”I'm dead sleepy,” she half whispered. ”The wind in my face and the sun are too soporific for me. Let us not say a word to each other.”
”You read last night,” Millicent accused her. ”But I don't feel particularly conversational myself.”
She leaned back and surveyed the scene again. She could read the words graved on the granite block beneath the bronze soldier:
”To the men of Warren who fought that their country might be whole and their fellows free this tribute of love is erected.”
And there followed the honor-roll of Warren's fallen.
Millicent's sensitive lips quivered a little. Her ready imagination pictured them coming to this very square, perhaps,--the men of Warren.
Boys from the hill farms, men from the village shops, the blacksmith who had worked in the light of yonder old forge, the carpenter who was father to the one now leisurely hammering a yellow L upon that weather-stained house,--she saw them all. What had led them? What call had sounded in their ears that they should leave their ploughshares in the furrows, their tills, their anvils, and their benches? What better thing had stirred with the primeval instinct for fight, with the unquenchable, restless longing for adventure, to send them forth? She read the words again--”that their country might be whole and their fellows free.”
She moved impatiently. For now an old shadowy theory of hers--an inheritance from the theories of the recluse, her father--stirred from a long-drugged quiet: a theory that there was a disintegrating unpatriotism in the untouched, charmed life of riches she and her fellows sought. She felt the disturbing conviction that those common men--she could almost hear their blundering speech, see their uncouth yawns at the sights and sounds of beauty on which she fed her soul--that those men had wells of life within them purer, sweeter, than she. She averted her eyes from the monument.
”Honey!” called a voice, full-throated and loving--”honey, where are you?”
There was a play-tent on the little patch of yard before the brown cottage to the left. The voice had come from the narrow piazza.
Millicent s.h.i.+vered as she looked at it, with its gingerbread decorations already succ.u.mbing to the strain of the seasons. The answer came from the tent: