The Lighted Match Part 3

persisted O'Barreton.

"Some day I'll tell you all about it. Do you think the Elkridge hounds will run--"

"I addressed a question to you. That question is still before the house," interrupted O'Barreton, with dignity. "How did you acquire 'em?"

"Inherited 'em!" snapped Van, but O'Barreton was not to be turned aside.

"Quite true and quite epigrammatic," he persisted sweetly. "But how?"

Van turned to the rest of the table. "You don't have to listen to this,"

he said in despair. "I have to go through it with O'Barreton every time he comes here. It's a sort of ritual." Then, turning to the tormenting guest, he explained carefully: "Once upon a time the Earl of Dundredge had three daughters. The eldest--my mother--married an American husband.

The second married an Englishman--she is the mother of my fair cousin, Cara, there; the third and youngest married the third son of the Grand Duke of Maritzburg, at that time a quiet gentleman who loved the Champs Elysees and landscape-painting in Southern Spain."

Van traced a family-tree on the tablecloth with a salt-spoon, for his guest's better information.

"That doesn't enlighten me on the semi-royal status of your Aunt Maritzburg," objected O'Barreton. "How did she grow so great?"

"Vicissitudes, Barry," explained the host patiently. "Just vicissitudes.

The father and the two elder brothers died off and left the third son to a.s.sume the government of a grand duchy, which he did not want, and compelled him to relinquish the mahl-stick and brushes which he loved.

My aunt was his grand-d.u.c.h.ess-consort, and until her death occupied with him the ducal throne. If you'd look these things up for yourself, my son, in some European 'Who's Who,' you'd remember 'em--and save me much trouble."

After dinner Cara disappeared, and Benton wandered from room to room with a seemingly purposeless eye, keenly alert for a black gown, a red rose, and a girl whom he could not find. Von Ritz also was missing, and this fact added to his anxiety.

In the conservatory he came upon Pagratide, likewise stalking about with restlessly roving eyes, like a hunter searching a jungle. The foreigner paused with one foot tapping the marble rim of a small fountain, and Benton pa.s.sed with a nod.

The evening went by without her reappearance, and finally the house darkened, and settled into quiet. Benton sought the open, driven by a restlessness that obsessed and troubled him. A fitful breeze brought down the dead leaves in swirling eddies. The moon was under a cloud-bank when, a quarter of a mile from the house, he left the smooth lawns and plunged among the vine-clad trees and thickets that rimmed the creek. In the darkness, he could hear the low, wild plaint with which the stream tossed itself over the rocks that c.u.mbered its bed.

Beyond the thicket he came again to a more open s.p.a.ce among the trees, free from underbrush, but strewn at intervals with great bowlders. He picked his way cautiously, mindful of crevices where a broken leg or worse might be the penalty of a misstep in the darkness. The humor seized him to sit on a great rock which dropped down twenty feet to the creek bed, and listen to the quieting music of its night song. His eyes, grown somewhat accustomed to the darkness, had been blinded again by the match he had just struck to light a cigarette, and he walked, as it behooved him, carefully and gropingly.

"Please, sir, don't step on me."

Benton halted with a start and stared confusedly about him. A ripple of low laughter came to his ears as he widened his pupils in the effort to accommodate his eyes to the murk. Then the moon broke out once more and the place became one of silver light and dark, soft shadow-blots. She was sitting with her back against a tree, her knees gathered between her arms, fingers interlocked. She had thrown a long, rough cape about her, but it had fallen open, leaving visible the black gown and a spot he knew to be a red rose on her breast.

He stood looking down, and she smiled up.

"Cara!" he exclaimed. "What are you doing here--alone?"

"Seeking freedom," she responded calmly. "It's not so good as the hobo's fire beside the track, but it's better than four walls. The moon has been wonderful, Sir Gray Eyes--as bright and dark as life; radiant a little while and hidden behind clouds a great deal. And the wind has been whispering like a troubadour to the tree-tops."

"And you," he interrupted severely, dropping on the earth at her feet and propping himself on one elbow, "have been sitting in the chilling air, with your throat uncovered and probably catching cold."

"What a matter-of-fact person it is!" she laughed. "I didn't appoint you my physician, you know."

[Ill.u.s.tration: "PLEASE, SIR, DON'T STEP ON ME."]

"But your coming alone out here in these woods, and so late!" he expostulated.

"Why not?" She looked frankly up at him. "I am not afraid."

"I am afraid for you." He spoke seriously.

"Why?" she inquired again.

He knelt beside her, looking directly into her eyes. "For many reasons,"

he said. "But above all else, because I love you."

The fingers of her clasped hands tightened until they strained, and she looked straight away across the clearing. The moon was bright now, and the thought-furrow showed deep between her brows, but she said nothing.

The tree-tops whispered, and the girl s.h.i.+vered slightly. He bent forward and folded the cape across her throat. Still she did not move.

"Cara, I love you," he repeated insistently.

"Don't--I can't listen." Her voice was one of forced calm. Then, turning suddenly, she laid her hand on his arm. It trembled violently under her touch. "And, oh, boy," she broke out, with a voice of pent-up vibrance, "don't you see how I want to listen to you?"

He bent forward until he was very close, and his tone was almost fierce in its tense eagerness.

"You want to! Why?"

Again a tremor seized her, then with the sudden abandon of one who surrenders to an impulse stronger than one's self, she leaned forward and placed a hand on each of his shoulders, clutching him almost wildly.

Her eyes glowed close to his own.

"Because I love you, too," she said. Then, with a break in her voice: "Oh, you knew that! Why did you make me say it?"

While the stars seemed to break out in a chorus above him, he found his arms about her, and was vaguely conscious that his lips were smothering some words her lips were trying to shape. Words seemed to him just then so superfluous.

There was a tumult of pounding pulses in his veins, responsive to the fluttering heart which beat back of a crushed rose in the lithe being he held in his arms. Then he obeyed the pressure of the hands on his shoulders and released her.

"Why should you find it so hard to say?" He asked.

She sat for a moment with her hands covering her face.

"You must never do that again," she said faintly. "You have not the right. I have not the right."

"I have the only right," he announced triumphantly.

She shook her head. "Not when the girl is engaged."

She looked at him with a sad droop at the corners of her lips. He sat silent--waiting.

"Listen!" She spoke wearily, rising and leaning against the rough bole of the tree at her back, with both hands tightly clasped behind her.

"Listen and don't interrupt, because it's hard, and I want to finish it." Her words came slowly with labored calm, almost as if she were reciting memorized lines. "It sounds simple from your point of view. It is simple from mine, but desperately hard. Love is not the only thing.

To some of us there is something else that must come first. I am engaged, and I shall marry the man to whom I am engaged. Not because I want to, but because--" her chin went up with the determination that was in her--"because I must."

"What kind of man will ask you to keep a promise that your heart repudiates?" he hotly demanded.

"He knew that I loved you before you knew it," she answered; "that I would always love you--that I would never love him. Besides, he must do it. After all, it's fortunate that he wants to." She tried to laugh.

"Is his name Pagratide?" The man mechanically drew his handkerchief from his cuff, and wiped beads of cold moisture from his forehead.