Munsey's Magazine/Volume 86/Issue 4/The Unwritten Story/Chapter 15

was almost come, all tenderness and warm sunshine, making Boston town bright and happy as only a city can be that knows the rigors of a north Atlantic coast winter and from this emerges once again to springtide.

The snow had all vanished. Tulips were beginning to show their pied calyces in the Public Garden and hyacinths to brighten window boxes along the streets. Motor cars hummed past with a more vimful r-r-r-r-r-rip of tires on the asphalt. People breathed more deeply as they strolled. Some even basked on benches in the Common, feeling unwonted friendliness to one another, to the sparrows, the pigeons, the squirrels—these last frisking their tails with more joyful energy as they undulated across new-growing green. Sun, cloud, the sparkling gilded dome on the hill, small creatures, blossoms and buds, men and women, all in their own peculiar ways, were saying:

“Spring, spring is close at hand!”

Disney and Rodman Wyatt were saying it, too, after their fashion, which has been the fashion of young man and maid ever since there were any maids or young men at all—and that, God wot, has been a tremendous long time! Not in words, perhaps, were they saying it, but in the things they did not say, in a glance, a laugh, a sudden silence, as they walked along together on the broad-pathed Esplanade beside the Charles River Basin.

Mild air shimmered over that noble expanse of blue water, reflecting the blurred outlines of the Technology facades. Gulls teetered and volplaned, with querulous cries. Two long Harvard shells, with rowers rhythmically swaying as they pulled at spring practice, slit the silken surface, trailing long V's of sun-sparkled wake.

“Isn't it all just wonderful?” asked the girl, as she and Wyatt paused by the iron rail.

Her color was high. Wyatt thought light fawn the finest tint in the world for a girl's hat and coat. Hers happened to be light fawn. Under even brows she looked musingly across the basin. Sunlight, reflected in her eyes, made little golden points there.

“There's nothing like these slim, dark girls!” realized Wyatt. “Blondes simply aren't in it!”

She smiled with frank happiness.

“I'm so happy,” quoth she, “that it doesn't seem true. It can't possibly be true that all these wonderful things are happening to me!”

“Why shouldn't wonderful things happen to you? I don't know anybody more worthy to have wonderful things happen!”

“It's right nice of you to say that; but really it's just a little bit too much to be quite sure of—all these things are. My work at the Conservatory, and Boston, and everything—they're all so splendid!”

“I wish you could include me in that category!”

“Well, don't 1?” she laughed. “If I didn't, do you reckon I'd be out here walking with you, when I ought to be home with mother and grandfather? I'm a selfish creature, really I am. I'm doing just what I want to, when I ought to do what I ought to. That's a fine little platitude, isn't it? But you know what I mean. It's hard not to be a little bit selfish on a day like this. We don't have anything like this, in spring, at Cha'leston. It just makes me want to sing! Doesn't it you?”

“Yes, but Ill nobly repress it, and won't. The last time I sang was in the city room at the Messenger office, and a rewrite man swatted me with a paste brush—a wet one; so I don't sing any more. But if you want to, I second the motion, and it's unanimously carried.”

At that Disney laughed again, and began humming:

“Well,” he urged, as she broke the song, “go on!”

“I've forgotten the rest of it; but it's something about brooks and rivers wearing silver-sparkling new dresses. It's old, old French—away back from the fifteenth century.”

“Yes, I know. Charles d'Orléans wrote it, didn't he? But I've never heard it sung. Your French—it's the real thing. Where did you get it?”

“Oh, it's in the family. I'm a Huguenot, you know.”

“No, I didn't know; but I'm glad to know now. That's a splendid race to spring from!”

“My father's mother was descended from Admiral Coligny. There's a tablet to him in the Huguenot Church at Cha'leston. I unveiled it last year.”

“Fine! You're a Huguenot, eh? So—where you get the coloring, the eyes, the—'

“1 don't like to be analyzed!”

“How can I help it? Isn't it your own fault?” The way he looked at her proved at least one-third of the old Arabic proverb that a mountain, a man on a camel, and love cannot be hidden. “A girl that doesn't like to be analyzed oughtn't to be so uncommonly—”

“No flattery, please!”

“As if I could flatter you!” he ardently exclaimed. “As if anything I could say would be flattery!”

She laughed and turned away.

“Come on!” she bade. “I've really got to be getting home. You can come along and have a cup of tea with all of us, the same as yesterday, if you like; but I've got to be going. Mother'll be wondering where I am.”

“Can't mother wait just five minutes longer?”

Disney shook an emphatic head.

“No—she'll worry, and I mustn't worry her. It seems as if she had enough to make her unhappy, without my making it the least bit worse.”

“Unhappy?” asked Wyatt, as Disney moved away down the Esplanade, and he kept pace with her, toward Arlington Street.

He wasn't thinking much about her mother's unhappiness. He was thinking that he didn't at all want to sit in the drawing-room with Mrs. Forrester and old Lockwood, drinking tea. That company diluted Disney's conversation too much, and Wyatt wanted it in more concentrated form—for such is the selfishness of youth. He forced himself, however, to appear sympathetic.

“I'm sorry your mother's unhappy!” he murmured.

“How can she be?” the girl asked. “I don't know what to think of her. She doesn't seem like herself at all, these days; and when I ask her—”

“What seems to be the trouble?” he asked, though feeling himself a hypocrite, for well enough he knew!

“She's worried about something—I don't know what. She's brooding and grieving. Only yesterday I found her crying. She won't tell me what it is, though. She says it's nothing. You reckon she may be homesick?”

“Possibly,” he agreed, as they turned off toward Beacon Street. To himself he thought: “Gad! I wish that was all!”

As they walked on up Beacon Hill, it seemed to Rodman Wyatt that a shadow fell across the riant face of spring. An abyss, suddenly opening—an abyss black with irrevocable and tragic complications, yawned before his mental vision. His heart contracted with sudden pain.

He glanced at Disney, care-free and boyishly companionable as another Rosalind, and realized that fealty to her meant more than any story ever written. He felt a need of circling her with his arms, of protecting her, in the brave, foolish, glorious and absurd manner of all young men in love; and yet he knew that nothing in his power could avail to shield her, if the impending tragedy once reached a breaking point.

He no longer beheld the spring sunshine, buds, blossoms. A leaden prescience of disaster weighed him down.

“What's the matter?” She flashed a sudden smile on him, disclosing an even perfection of teeth below her rather short, full lip, no less perfect in its type. “Are you worrying, too? I don't guess you've got anything to worry about! If you have, what is it?”

“You!” he fired an unpremeditated, point-blank answer, as they came to the massive granite steps of Lockwood's house. “And no man worries about a girl unless he loves her. Good-by!”

He turned abruptly—for genuine emotion is often prone to verge on rudeness—and left her standing there, looking after him. With a sudden, strange little laugh, her cheeks ablaze, Disney ran up the granite steps and into the austere old mansion of the purple panes.