The Twenty-Fourth of June Part 24

So presently the two young men were rus.h.i.+ng down the winding, snowy road which led through pasture and meadow for a quarter of a mile toward a beckoning bonfire.

"I don't know when I've gone skating," said Hugh Benson.

"The last time I skated was two years ago on the Neva at St. Petersburg.

Jove! but it was a carnival!" And Richard's thoughts went back for a minute to the face of the girl he had skated with. He had not cared much for skating since that night. All other opportunities had seemed tame after that.

"You've travelled a great deal--had a lot of experiences," Benson said, with a suppressed sigh.

"A few. But they don't prevent my looking forward to a new one to-night.

I never went skating on a river in the country before. How far can you go?"

"Ten miles, if you like, down. Two miles up. There they are, coming round the bend four abreast. Westcott has more than his share of girls."

"More than he wants, probably. He'll cling to one and joyfully hand over the others."

"You'll like Anna Drummond; we're old school friends. Forbes and Miss Roberta naturally seem to get together wherever they are. And Miss Ruth is a mighty nice little girl."

Across the blazing bonfire two men scrutinized each other: Forbes Westcott, one of the cleverest attorneys of a large city, a man with a rising reputation, who held himself as a man does who knows that every day advances his success; Richard Kendrick, well-known young millionaire, hitherto a travelled idler and spender of his income, now a newly fledged business man with all his honours yet to be won. They looked each other steadily in the eye as they grasped hands by the bonfire, and in his inmost heart each man recognized in the other an antagonist.

Richard skated away with Miss Drummond, a wholesomely gay and attractive girl who could skate as well as she could talk and laugh. He devoted himself to her for half an hour; then, with a skill of which he was master from long exercise, he brought about a change of partners. The next time he rounded the bend into a path which led straight down the moonlight it was in the company he longed for.

Richard's heart leaped exultantly as he skated around the river bend in the moonlight with Roberta. And when his hands gathered hers into his close grasp it was somehow as if he had taken hold of an electric battery. He distinctly felt the difference between her hands and those of the other girl. It was very curious and he could not wholly understand it.

"What kind of gloves do you wear?" was his first inquiry. He held up the hand which was not in Roberta's m.u.f.f and tried to see it in the dim light.

"You _are_ deep in the new business, aren't you?" she mocked. "Whatever they are, will you put them into your stock?"

"Don't you dare make fun of my new business. I'm in it for scalps and have no time for joking. Of course I want to put this make in stock. I never took hold of so warm a hand on so cold a night. The warmth comes right through your glove and mine to my hand, runs up my arm, and stirs up my circulation generally. It was running a little cold with some of the things Miss Drummond was telling me."

"What could they be?"

"About how all the rest of you know each other so well. She described all sorts of good times you have all had together on this river in the summer. It seems odd that Benson never told me about any of them while we were together at college."

"They have happened mostly in the last two summers, since Mr. Benson left college. We always spend at least part of our summers here, and we have had worlds of fun on the river and beside it--and in it."

"I'm glad I'm a business man in Eastman. I can imagine what this river is like in summer. It's wonderful to-night, isn't it? Let's skate on down to the mouth and out to sea. What do you say?"

"A beautiful plan. We have a good start; we must make time or it will be moonset before we come to the sea."

"This is a glorious stroke; let's. .h.i.t it up a little, swing a little farther--and make for the mouth of the river. No talking till we come in sight. We're off!"

It was ten miles to the mouth of the river, as they both understood, so this was nonsense of the most obvious sort. But the imagination took hold of them and they swung away on over the smooth, s.h.i.+ning floor with the long vigorous strokes which are so exhilarating to the accomplished skater. In silence they flew, only the warm, clasped hands making a link between them, their faces turned straight toward the great golden disk in the eastern heavens. Richard was feeling that he could go on indefinitely, and was exulting in his companion's untiring progress, when he felt her slowing pull upon his hands.

"Tired?" he asked, looking down at her.

"Not much, but we've all the way back to go--and we ought not to be away so long."

"Oughtn't we? I'd like to be away forever--with you!"

She looked straight up at him. His eyes were like black coals in the dim light. His hands would have tightened on hers, but she drew them away.

"Oh, no, you wouldn't, Mr. Richard Kendrick," said she, as quietly as one can whose breath comes with some difficulty after long-sustained exertion. "By the time we reached--even the mouth of the river, you'd be tired of my company."

"Should I? I think not. I've thought of nothing but you since the day I saw you first."

"Really? That's--how long? Was it November when you came to help Uncle Calvin? This is February. And you've never spent so much as a whole hour alone with me. You see, you don't even know me. What a foolish thing to say to a girl you barely know!"

"Foolish, is it?" He felt his heart racing now. What other girl he knew would have answered him like that? "Then you shall hear something that backs it up. I've loved you since that day I saw you first. What will you do with that?"

She was silent for a moment. Then she turned, striking out toward home.

He was instantly after her, reached for her hands, and took her along with him. But he forced her to skate slowly.

"You'll trample on that, too, will you?" said he, growing wrathful under her silence.

But she answered, quite gently, now: "No, Mr. Kendrick, I don't trample on that. No girl would. I simply--know you are mistaken."

"In what? My own feeling? Do you think I don't know--"

"I _know_ you don't know. I'm not your kind of a girl, Mr. Kendrick. You think I am, because--well, perhaps because my eyes are blue and my eyelashes black; just such things as that do mislead people. I can dance fairly well--"

He smothered an angry exclamation.

"And skate well--and play the 'cello a little--and--that's nearly all you know about me. You don't even know whether I can teach well--or talk well--or what is stored away in my mind. And I know just as little about you."

"I've learned one thing about you in this last minute," he muttered.

"You can keep your head."

"Why not?" There was a note of laughter in her voice. "There needs to be one who keeps her head when the other loses his--all because of a little winter moonlight. What would the summer moonlight do to you, I wonder?"

"Roberta Gray"--his voice was rough--"the moonlight does it no more than the sunlight. Whatever you think, I'm not that kind of fellow. The day I saw you first you had just come in out of the rain. You went back into it and I saw you go--and wanted to go with you. I've been wanting it ever since."

They moved on in silence which lasted until they were within a quarter-mile of the bonfire, whose flas.h.i.+ng light they could see above the banks which intervened. Then Roberta spoke:

"Mr. Kendrick"--and her voice was low and rich with its kindest inflections--"I don't want you to think me careless or hard because I have treated what you have said to-night in a way that you don't like.

I'm only trying to be honest with you. I'm quite sure you didn't mean to say it to me when you came to-night, and--we all do and say things on a night like this that we should like to take back next day. It's quite true--what I said--that you hardly know me, and whatever it is that takes your fancy it can't be the real Roberta Gray, because you don't know her!"

"What you say is," he returned, staring straight ahead of him, "that I can't possibly know what you really are, at all; but you know so well what I am that you can tell me exactly what my own thoughts and feelings are."

"Oh, no, I didn't mean--"

"That's precisely what you do mean. I'm so plainly labelled 'worthless'

that you don't have to stop to examine me. You--"

"I didn't--"

"I beg your pardon. I can tell you exactly what you think of me: A young fool who runs after the latest sensation, to drop it when he finds a newer one. His head turned by every pretty girl--to whom he says just the sort of thing he has said to you to-night. Superficial and ordinary, incapable of serious thought on any of the subjects that interest you.

As for this business affair in Eastman--that's just a caprice, a game to be dropped when he tires of it. Everything in life will be like that to him, including his very friends. Come, now--isn't that what you've been thinking? There's no use denying it. Nearly every time I've seen you you've said some little thing that has shown me your opinion of me. I won't say there haven't been times in my life when I may have deserved it, but on my honour I don't think I deserve it now."

"Then I won't think it," said Roberta promptly, looking up. "I truly don't want to do you an injustice. But you are so different from the other men I have known--my brothers, my friends--that I can hardly imagine your seeing things from my point of view--"