The Essential Booth Tarkington Collection. Booth Tarkington
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in his voice. "I have a villa there."
"Do you know what that seems to me?" Cora asked gravely, after a pause; then answered herself, after another: "Like magic. Like a strange, beautiful dream."
"Yes, it is beautiful," he said.
"Then tell me: What do you do there?"
"I spend a lot of time on the water in a boat."
"Sailing?"
"On sapphires and emeralds and turquoises and rubies, melted and blown into waves."
"And you go yachting over that glory?"
"Fishing with my crew--and loafing."
"But your boat is really a yacht, isn't it?"
"Oh, it might be called anything," he laughed.
"And your sailors are Italian fishermen?"
Hedrick slew a mosquito upon his temple, smiting himself hard. "No, they're Chinese!" he muttered hoarsely.
"They're Neapolitans," said Corliss.
"Do they wear red sashes and earrings?" asked Cora.
"One of them wears earrings and a derby hat!"
"Ah!" she protested, turning to him again. "You don't tell me. You let me cross-question you, but you don't tell me things! Don't you see? I want to know what _life_ is! I want to know of strange seas, of strange people, of pain and of danger, of great music, of curious thoughts! What are the Neapolitan women like?"
"They fade early."
She leaned closer to him. "Before the fading have you--have you loved--many?"
"All the pretty ones I ever saw," he answered gayly, but with something in his tone (as there was in hers) which implied that all the time they were really talking of things other than those spoken. Yet here this secret subject seemed to come near the surface.
She let him hear a genuine little snap of her teeth. "I _thought_ you were like that!"
He laughed. "Ah, but you were sure to see it!"
"You could 'a' seen a Neapolitan woman yesterday, Cora," said Hedrick, obligingly, "if you'd looked out the front window. She was working a hurdy-gurdy up and down this neighbourhood all afternoon." He turned genially to face his sister, and added: "Ray Vilas used to say there were lots of pretty girls in Lexington."
Cora sprang to her feet. "You're not smoking," she said to Corliss hurriedly, as upon a sudden discovery. "Let me get you some matches."
She had entered the house before he could protest, and Hedrick, looking down the hall, was acutely aware that she dived desperately into the library. But, however tragic the cry for justice she uttered there, it certainly was not prolonged; and the almost instantaneous quickness of her reappearance upon the porch, with matches in her hand, made this one of the occasions when her brother had to admit that in her own line Cora was a miracle.
"So thoughtless of me," she said cheerfully, resuming her seat. She dropped the matches into Mr. Corliss's hand with a fleeting touch of her finger-tips upon his palm. "Of course you wanted to smoke. I can't think why I didn't realize it before. I must have----"
A voice called from within, commanding in no, uncertain tones.
"Hedrick! I should like to see you!" Hedrick rose, and, looking neither to the right nor, to the left, went stonily into the house, and appeared before the powers.
"Call me?" he inquired with the air of cheerful readiness to proceed upon any errand, no matter how difficult.
Mr. Madison countered diplomacy with gloom.
"I don't know what to do with you. Why can't you let your sister alone?"
"Has Laura been complaining of me?"
"Oh, Hedrick!" said Mrs. Madison.
Hedrick himself felt the justice of her reproof: his reference to Laura was poor work, he knew. He hung his head and began to scrape the carpet with the side of his shoe.
"Well, what'd Cora say I been doing to her?"
"You know perfectly well what you've been doing," said Mr. Madison sharply.
"Nothing at all; just sitting on the steps. What'd she _say_?"
His father evidently considered it wiser not to repeat the text of accusation. "You know what you did," he said heavily.
"Oho!" Hedrick's eyes became severe, and his sire's evasively shifted from them.
"You keep away from the porch," said the father, uneasily.
"You mean what I said about Ray Vilas?" asked the boy.
Both parents looked uncomfortable, and Mr. Madison, turning a leaf in his book, gave a mediocre imitation of an austere person resuming his reading after an impertinent interruption.
"That's what you mean," said the boy accusingly. "Ray Vilas!"
"Just you keep away from that porch."
"Because I happened to mention Ray Vilas?" demanded Hedrick.
"You let your sister alone."
"I got a right to know what she said, haven't I?"
There was no response, which appeared to satisfy Hedrick perfectly. Neither parent met his glance; the mother troubled and the father dogged, while the boy rejoiced sternly in some occult triumph. He inflated his scant chest in pomp and hurled at the defeated pair the well-known words:
"I wish she was _my_ daughter--about five minutes!"
New sounds from without--men's voices in greeting, and a ripple of response from Cora somewhat lacking in enthusiasm--afforded Mr. Madison unmistakable relief, and an errand upon which to send his deadly offspring.
Hedrick, after a reconnaissance in the hall, obeyed at leisure. Closing the library door nonchalantly behind him, he found himself at the foot of a flight of unillumined back stairs, where his manner underwent a swift alteration, for here was an adventure to be gone about with ceremony. "Ventre St. Gris!" he muttered hoarsely, and loosened the long rapier in the shabby sheath at his side. For, with the closing of the door, he had become a Huguenot gentleman, over forty and a little grizzled perhaps, but modest and unassuming; wiry, alert, lightning-quick, with a wrist of steel and a heart of gold; and he was about to ascend the stairs of an unknown house at Blois in total darkness. He went up, crouching, ready for anything, without a footfall, not even causing a hideous creak; and gained the top in safety. Here he turned into an obscure passage, and at the end of it beheld, through an open door, a little room in which a dark-eyed lady sat writing in a book by the light of an oil lamp.
The wary Huguenot remained in the shadow and observed her.
Laura was writing in an old ledger she had found in the attic, blank and unused. She had rebound it herself in heavy gray leather; and fitted it with a tiny padlock and key. She wore the key under her dress upon a very thin silver chain round her neck. Upon the first page of the book was written a date, now more than a year past, the month was June--and beneath it:
"Love came to me to-day."
Nothing more was written upon that page.
CHAPTER FOUR
Laura, at this writing, looked piquantly unfamiliar to her brother: her eyes were moist and bright; her cheeks were flushed and as she bent low, intently close to the book, a loosened wavy strand of her dark hair almost touched the page. Hedrick had never before seen her wearing an expression so "becoming" as the eager and tremulous warmth of