Part 3 (2/2)
”I've joined Robin Hood's band,” he continued. ”At least I've been adopted by a new sort of Robin Hood who's travelling round robbing the rich to pay the poor, and otherwise meddling in people's affairs--the old original Robin Hood brought up to date. If it hadn't been for him I might be cooling my heels in jail right now. He's an expert on jails--been in nearly every calaboose in America. He's tucked me under his wing--persuaded me to take the highway, and not care a hang for anything.”
”How delightful!” she replied, but so slowly that he began to fear that his confidences had alarmed her. ”That's too good to be true; you're fooling, aren't you--really?”
His eyes had grown accustomed to the light, and her profile was now faintly limned in the dusk. Hers was the slender face of youth. The silhouette revealed the straightest of noses and the firmest of little chins. She was young, so young that he felt himself struggling in an immeasurable gulf of years as he watched her. Apparently such sophistication as she possessed was in the things of the world of wonder, the happy land of make-believe.
”Keats would have liked a night like this,” she said gently.
Deering was silent. Keats was a person whom he knew only as the subject of a tiresome lecture in his English course at college.
”Bill Blake would have adored it, but he would have had lambs in the pasture,” she added.
”Bill Blake?” he questioned. ”Do you mean Billy Blake who was half-back on the Harvard eleven last year?”
She tossed her head and laughed merrily.
”I love that!” she replied lingeringly, as though to prolong her joy in his ignorance. ”I was thinking of a poet of that name who wrote a nice verse something like this:
'I give you the end of a golden string; Only wind it into a ball, It will lead you in at Heaven's gate, Built in Jerusalem's wall.'”
No girl had ever quoted poetry to him before, and he was thinking more of her pretty way of repeating the stanza--keeping time with her hands--than of the verse itself.
”Well,” he said, ”what's the rest of it?”
”Oh, there isn't any rest of it! Don't you see that there couldn't be anything more--that it's finished--a perfect little poem all by itself!”
He played with a loosened bit of stone, meekly conscious of his stupidity. And he did not like to appear stupid before a girl who danced alone in the starlight and hung moons in trees.
”I'm afraid I don't get it. I'd a lot rather stay by this wall talking to you than go to Jerusalem.”
”You'd be foolish to do that if you really had the end of the golden string, and could follow it to Paradise. I think it means any nice place--just any place where happiness is.”
He was not getting on, and to gain time he bade her repeat the stanza.
”I think I understand now; I've never gone in much for poetry, you know,”
he explained humbly.
”Burglars are natural poets, I suppose,” she continued. ”A burglar just has to have imagination or he can't climb through the window of a house he has never seen before. He must imagine everything perfectly--the silver on the sideboard, the watch under the pillow, and the butler stealing down the back stairs with a large, s.h.i.+ny pistol in his hand.”
”Certainly,” Deering agreed readily. ”And if he runs into a policeman on the way out he's got to imagine that it's an old college friend and embrace him.”
”You mustn't spoil a pretty idea that way!” she admonished in a tone that greatly softened the rebuke. ”Come to think of it, you haven't told me your name yet; of course, if you become a burglar, you will have a great number of names, but I'd like awfully to know your true one.”
”Why?” he demanded.
”Because you seem nice and well brought up for a burglar, and I liked your going up to the moon and poking your finger into it. That makes me feel that I'd like to know you.”
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