The Danger Mark Part 29

"_Could_ I?"

"No!" she exclaimed, appalled.

"Then why do you ask me not to try? I believe I could!"

"You cannot! You cannot, believe me. Won't you believe me? It must not happen; it is all wrong--in every way----"

He stood looking at her with a new expression on his face.

"If you are so alarmed," he said slowly, "you must have already thought about it. You'll think about it now, anyway."

"We are both going to forget it. Promise that you will!" She added hurriedly: "Drop my hand, please; there is Geraldine--and Mr.

Grandcourt, too!... Tell me--do my eyes look queer? Are they red and horrid?... Don't look at me that way. For goodness' sake, don't display any personal interest in me. Go and turn over some flat rocks and find some lizards!"

Geraldine, bare-armed and short-skirted, came swinging along the woodland path, Delancy Grandcourt d.o.g.g.i.ng her heels, as usual, carrying a pair of rods and catching the artificial flies in the bushes at every step.

"We're all out of trout at the house!" she called across to the stream to her brother. "Jack Dysart is fis.h.i.+ng down the creek with Nada and Sylvia. Where is Duane?"

"Somewhere around, I suppose," replied Scott sulkily. His sister took a running jump, cleared the bank, and alighted on a rock in the stream.

Poised there she looked back at Grandcourt, laughed, sprang forward from stone to stone, and leaped to the moss beside Kathleen.

"h.e.l.lo, dear!" she nodded. "Where did you cross? And where is Duane?"

"We crossed by the log bridge below," replied Kathleen. She added: "Duane left us half an hour ago. Wasn't it half an hour ago, Scott?"

with a rising inflection that conveyed something of warning, something of an appeal. But on Scott's face the sullen disconcerted expression had not entirely faded, and his sister inspected him curiously. Then without knowing why, exactly, she turned and looked at Kathleen.

There was a subdued and dewy brilliancy in Kathleen's eyes, a bright freshness to her cheeks, radiantly and absurdly youthful; and something else--something so indefinable, so subtle, that only another woman's instinct might divine it--something invisible and inward, which transfigured her with a youthful loveliness almost startling.

They looked at one another. Geraldine, conscious of something she could not understand, glanced again at her sulky brother.

"What's amiss, Scott?" she asked. "Has anything gone wrong anywhere?"

Scott, pretending to be very busy untangling Grandcourt's cast from the branches of a l.u.s.ty young birch, said, "No, of course not," and the girl, wondering, turned to Kathleen, who sustained her questioning eyes without a tremor.

"What's the matter with Scott?" asked his sister. "He's the guiltiest-looking man--why, it's absurd, Kathleen! Upon my word, the boy is blus.h.i.+ng!"

"What!" exclaimed Scott so furiously that everybody laughed. And presently Geraldine asked again where Duane was.

"Rosalie Dysart is canoeing on the Gray Water, and she hailed him and he left us and went down to the river," said Kathleen carelessly.

"Did Duane join her?"

"I think so--" She hesitated, watching Geraldine's sombre eyes. "I really don't know," she added. And, in a lower voice: "I wish either Duane or Rosalie would go. They certainly are behaving unwisely."

Geraldine turned and looked through the woods toward the Gray Water.

"It's their affair," she said curtly. "I've got to make Delancy fish or we won't have enough trout for luncheon. Scott!" calling to her brother, "your horrid trout won't rise this morning. For goodness' sake, try to catch something beside lizards and water-beetles!"

For a moment she stood looking around her, as though perplexed and preoccupied. There was sunlight on the glade and on the ripples, but the daylight seemed to have become duller to her.

She walked up-stream for a little distance before she noticed Grandcourt plodding faithfully at her heels.

"Oh!" she said impatiently, "I thought you were fis.h.i.+ng. You must catch something, you know, or we'll all go hungry."

"Nothing bites on these bally flies," he explained.

"Nothing bites because your flies are usually caught in a tree-top.

Trout are not arboreal. I'm ashamed of you, Delancy. If you can't keep your line free in the woods"--she hesitated, then reddening a little under her tan--"you had better go and get a canoe and find Duane Mallett and help him catch--something worth while."

"Don't you want me to stay with you?" asked the big, awkward fellow appealingly. "There's no fun in being with Rosalie and Duane."

"No, I don't. Look! Your flies are in that bus.h.!.+ Untangle them and go to the Gray Water."

"Won't you come, too, Miss Seagrave?"

"No; I'm going back to the house.... And don't you dare return without a decent brace of trout."

"All right," he said resignedly. The midges bothered him; he mopped his red face, tugged at the line, but the flies were fast in a hazel bush.

"d.a.m.n this sort of thing," he muttered, looking piteously after Geraldine. She was already far away among the trees, skirts wrapped close to avoid briers, big straw hat dangling in one hand.

As she walked toward the Sachem's Gate she was swinging her hat and singing, apparently as unconcernedly as though care rested lightly upon her young shoulders.

Out on the high-road a number of her guests whizzed past in one of Scott's motors; there came a swift hail, a gust of wind-blown laughter, and the car was gone in a whirl of dust. She stood in the road watching it recede, then walked forward again toward the house.

Her accustomed elasticity appeared to have left her; the sun was becoming oppressive; her white-shod feet dragged a little, which was so unusual that she straightened her head and shoulders with nervous abruptness.

"What on earth is the matter with me?" she said, half aloud, to herself.

During these last two months, and apparently apropos of nothing at all, an unaccustomed sense of depression sometimes crept upon her.

At first she disregarded it as the purely physical la.s.situde of spring, but now it was beginning to disquiet her. Once a hazy suspicion took shape--hastily dismissed--that some sense, some temporarily suppressed desire was troubling her. The same idea had awakened again that evening on the terrace when the faint odour from the decanter attracted her. And again she suspected, and shrank away into herself, shocked, frightened, surprised, yet still defiantly incredulous.

Yet her suspicions had been correct. It was habit, disturbed by the tardiness of accustomed tribute, that stirred at moments, demanding recognition.

Since that night in early spring when fear and horror of herself had suddenly checked a custom which she had hitherto supposed to be nothing worse than foolish, twice--at times inadvertently, at times deliberately--she had sought relief from sleepless nervousness and this new depression in the old and apparently harmless manner of her girlhood. For weeks now she had exercised little control of herself, feeling immune, yet it scared her a little to recognise again in herself the restless premonitions of desire. For here, in the suns.h.i.+ne of the forest-bordered highway, that same dull uneasiness was stirring once more.

It was true, other things had stirred her to uneasiness that morning--an indefinable impression concerning Kathleen--a definite one which concerned Rosalie Dysart and Duane, and which began to exasperate her.

All her elasticity was gone now; tired without reason, she plodded on along the road in her little white shoes, head bent, brown eyes brooding, striving to fix her wandering thoughts on Duane Mallett to fight down the threatening murmurs of a peril still scarcely comprehended.

"Anyway," she said half aloud, "even if I ever could care for him, I dare not let myself do it with this absurd inclination always threatening me."

She had said it! Scarcely yet understanding the purport of her own words, yet electrified, glaringly enlightened by them, she halted. A confused sense that something vital had occurred in her life stilled her heart and her breathing together.

After a moment she straightened up and walked forward, turned across the lawn and into the syringa-bordered drive.

There was n.o.body in the terrace except Bunbury Gray in a brilliant waistcoat, who sat smoking a very large faence pipe and reading a sporting magazine. He got up with alacrity when he saw her, fetched her a big wicker chair, evidently inclined to let her divert him.