The sun was just pushing above a belt of low clouds in the east, spattering them with liquid gold, and Venus blanched as the light spread upward. But under the willows it was still dusk, a watery green dusk in which the secret murmurs of the night were caught.
“Treeshy—Treeshy!” the young man cried, kneeling beside her—and then, a moment later: “My angel, are you sure that no one guesses—?”
The girl gave a faint laugh which screwed up her funny nose. She leaned her head on his shoulder, her round forehead and rough braids pressed against his cheek, her hands in his, breathing quickly and joyfully.
“I thought I should never get here,” Lewis grumbled, “with that ridiculous bed-quilt—and it’ll be broad day soon! To think that I was of age yesterday, and must come to you in a boat rigged like a child’s toy on a duck-pond! If you knew how it humiliates me—”
“What does it matter, dear, since you’re of age now, and your own master?”
“But am I, though? He says so—but it’s only on his own terms; only while I do what he wants! You’ll see… I’ve a credit of ten thousand dollars… ten… thou… sand… d’you hear?…placed to my name in a London bank; and not a penny here to bless myself with meanwhile… Why, Treeshy darling, why, what’s the matter?”
She flung her arms about his neck, and through their innocent kisses he could taste her tears. “What IS it, Treeshy?” he implored her.
“I… oh, I’d forgotten it was to be our last day together till you spoke of London—cruel, cruel!” she reproached him; and through the green twilight of the willows her eyes blazed on him like two stormy stars. No other eyes he knew could express such elemental rage as Treeshy’s.
“You little spitfire, you!” he laughed back somewhat chokingly. “Yes, it’s our last day—but not for long; at our age two years are not so very long, after all, are they? And when I come back to you I’ll come as my own master, independent, free—come to claim you in face of everything and everybody! Think of that, darling, and be brave for my sake… brave and patient… as I mean to be!” he declared heroically.
“Oh, but you—you’ll see other girls; heaps and heaps of them; in those wicked old countries where they’re so lovely. My uncle Kent says the European countries are all wicked, even my own poor Italy…”
“But YOU, Treeshy; you’ll be seeing cousins Bill and Donald meanwhile—seeing them all day long and every day. And you know you’ve a weakness for that great hulk of a Bill. Ah, if only I stood six-foot-one in my stockings I’d go with an easier heart, you fickle child!” he tried to banter her.
“Fickle? Fickle? ME—oh, Lewis!”
He felt the premonitory sweep of sobs, and his untried courage failed him. It was delicious, in theory, to hold weeping beauty to one’s breast, but terribly alarming, he found, in practice. There came a responsive twitching in his throat.
“No, no; firm as adamant, true as steel; that’s what we both mean to be, isn’t it, cara?”
“Caro, yes,” she sighed, appeased.
“And you’ll write to me regularly, Treeshy—long long letters? I may count on that, mayn’t I, wherever I am? And they must all be numbered, every one of them, so that I shall know at once if I’ve missed one; remember!”
“And, Lewis, you’ll wear them here?” (She touched his breast.) “Oh, not ALL,” she added, laughing, “for they’d make such a big bundle that you’d soon have a hump in front like Pulcinella—but always at least the last one, just the last one. Promise!”
“Always, I promise—as long as they’re kind,” he said, still struggling to take a spirited line.
“Oh, Lewis, they will be, as long as yours are—and long long afterward…”
Venus failed and vanished in the sun’s uprising.
3.
THE crucial moment, Lewis had always known, would not be that of his farewell to Treeshy, but of his final interview with his father.
On that everything hung: his immediate future as well as his more distant prospects. As he stole home in the early sunlight, over the dew-drenched grass, he glanced up apprehensively at Mr. Raycie’s windows, and thanked his stars that they were still tightly shuttered.
There was no doubt, as Mrs. Raycie said, that her husband’s “using language” before ladies showed him to be in high good humour, relaxed and slippered, as it were—a state his family so seldom saw him in that Lewis had sometimes impertinently wondered to what awful descent from the clouds he and his two sisters owed their timorous being.
It was all very well to tell himself, as he often did, that the bulk of the money was his mother’s, and that he could turn her round his little finger. What difference did that make? Mr. Raycie, the day after his marriage, had quietly taken over the management of his wife’s property, and deducted, from the very moderate allowance he accorded her, all her little personal expenses, even to the postage-stamps she used, and the dollar she put in the plate every Sunday. He called the allowance her “pin-money,” since, as he often reminded her, he paid all the household bills himself, so that Mrs. Raycie’s quarterly pittance could be entirely devoted, if she chose, to frills and feathers.
“And will be, if you respect my wishes, my dear,” he always added. “I like to see a handsome figure well set-off, and not to have our friends imagine, when they come to dine, that Mrs. Raycie is sick above-stairs, and I’ve replaced her by a poor relation in allapacca.” In compliance with which Mrs. Raycie, at once flattered and terrified, spent her last penny in adorning herself and her daughters, and had to stint their bedroom fires, and the servants’ meals, in order to find a penny for any private necessity.
Mr. Raycie had long since convinced his wife that this method of dealing with her, if not lavish, was suitable, and in fact “handsome”; when she spoke of the subject to her relations it was with tears of gratitude for her husband’s kindness in assuming the management of her property. As he managed it exceedingly well, her hard-headed brothers (glad to have the responsibility off their hands, and convinced that, if left to herself, she would have muddled her money away in ill-advised charities) were disposed to share her approval of Mr. Raycie; though her old mother sometimes said helplessly: “When I think that Lucy Ann can’t as much as have a drop of gruel brought up to her without his weighing the oatmeal…” But even that was only whispered, lest Mr. Raycie’s mysterious faculty of hearing what was said behind his back should bring sudden reprisals on the venerable lady to whom he always alluded, with a tremor in his genial voice, as “my dear mother-in-law—unless indeed she will allow me to call her, more briefly but more truly, my dear mother.”
To Lewis, hitherto, Mr. Raycie had meted the same measure as to the females of the household. He had dressed him well, educated him expensively, lauded him to the skies—and counted every penny of his allowance. Yet there was a difference; and Lewis was as well aware of it as any one.
The dream, the ambition, the passion of Mr. Raycie’s life, was (as his son knew) to found a Family; and he had only Lewis to found it with. He believed in primogeniture, in heirlooms, in entailed estates, in all the ritual of the English “landed” tradition. No one was louder than he in praise of the democratic institutions under which he lived; but he never thought of them as affecting that more private but more important institution, the Family; and to the Family all his care and all his thoughts were given. The result, as Lewis dimly guessed, was, that upon his own shrinking and inadequate head was centred all the passion contained in the vast expanse of Mr. Raycie’s breast. Lewis was his very own, and Lewis represented what was most dear to him; and for both these reasons Mr. Raycie set an inordinate value on the boy (a quite different thing, Lewis thought from loving him).