GITA was walking in her woods. She had had a canter on the beach and a swim and was full of exultant life. The mood of two mornings earlier was forgotten. It was glorious to be young and free from care and as healthy and lively as a puppy. In these days, thank heaven, the young were consciously young; no one could say they did not appreciate their youth till too late.
She had come into the wood because there was no one to see her if she looked as pagan as she felt, and she loved these beautiful silent pines more than any of her possessions. Occasionally she danced, and kicked the pine-needles and fallen cones about. Elsie had forbidden her to whistle and engrave lines about her mouth, but she answered the trills of the birds with sharp little cries almost as ecstatic. She wondered if she had been a dryad in a former incarnation, or (her self-analytical habit always kept pace with her imagination) if she were merely being young for the first time; she could not recall feeling young even in her childhood. She also wondered if she would ever have been unhappy, even under the shadow of Gerald Carteret, if they had lived in the country. “The Peninsula” below San Francisco had been far too decorated and populous to be real country and the desert was a region set aside for lost souls. But in these pine woods with their brooding but intimate silences, their pungent fragrance, and lovely solitudes, she had a sense of both space and friendliness, of stateliness and simplicity, vastly different, she imagined, from the mighty forests of California.
And they were hers! She had never taken even Elsie into them. She had a fancy that these straight slender trees had, perhaps a million years ago, lived as men and women, whose souls had passed finally into a form more beautiful than Nature had granted to mortals, and fortunately inarticulate; but that they recognized her as an old playmate and sheltered her jealously when she found her joy in their shade. She picked up a cone and flung it into the arbors above, resenting even the presence of a squirrel in her secret domain, and gave a whoop of delight as he scampered angrily across his branch into another tree.
And then she came face to face with Eustace Bylant.
“You look like a wood-nymph,” he said, lifting his hat and undisconcerted by the fierce blaze of her eyes. “For a moment I hesitated to break the spell.”
Gita was speechless with amazement and wrath. She felt an impulse to chase him out of her sacred wood as she would a stray cat from her bedroom. Then she remembered her manners and said with bitter politeness: “Good morning. You startled me, but this is the first time I have ever met anyone in my woods.”
“Are they yours? I beg your pardon. New Jersey is covered with woods and one gets into the habit of thinking of them—well, as just woods. And I happen to be very fond of woods. But I am really sorry,” he added contritely. “You looked so happy a moment ago—happier than any mere mortal has a right to look. . . . And I think I understand. I’ll go if you insist——” He broke off and looked about him at the sweet deep aisles of the wood with an expression of longing in his fine eyes that seemed to have eliminated herself.
The spell was broken and the creature was a friend of Elsie’s. “Oh, well, as you are here you may as well stay,” she said with no attempt at graciousness. “But I must go in presently. I have business letters to write.”
“Oh, please! Business letters! What a horrible thought. How could it enter your head in these woods? If they were mine I doubt if I should write a line except when they were dripping in winter: I have a holy horror of rheumatism.”
He strolled beside her, his hands in the pockets of his riding-coat, his hat pushed to the back of his head. He had come to the wood deliberately to meet her, casually if possible, and find her off guard, and he had been rewarded by a full glimpse of something he had half suspected two nights ago. She had haunting memories for him and he was determined to study her, possibly to marry her. He smiled to himself as he reflected that the first thought of another man no doubt would be to awaken the womanhood so perversely sleeping in this girl who seemed to be unconscious that sex ruled the world, but he was on a different track. He had extracted something of her history from Elsie Brewster after Gita had left them, and more from Polly Pleyden, with whom he had dined on the following night. But the information had been sought less out of sheer masculine curiosity than as a means for determining his tactics.
“May I smoke?”
Gita nodded sullenly. She had behaved uncommonly well, she told herself, but if he were unable to take a hint nothing further could be expected of her. A man in her woods! Men, individually, were not worth hating as long as they behaved themselves, but her indifference when they did was entire. This creature did not look predatory and his cool impersonal gaze aroused in her no sense of wary disquiet. She walked straight and silent beside him and he talked of the dinner at the Pleydens’.
“Polly was rather huffed when I told her I had met you at the Pelhams’,” he said. “It seems you have refused to dine with her.”
“My grandmother has only been dead three months. Polly knows quite well I don’t go out. Dining with Elsie is another matter.”
“Quite so. But I am delighted to hear that your period of mourning will end in the winter and you will visit the Pleydens in New York.” There was no emphasis in his cool quiet tones and he appeared merely to be making conversation. Gita wondered impatiently why he didn’t go.
“I suppose I shall have to visit them for a week or two.”
“Ah? Mrs. Pleyden said she expected you to spend the winter with them. It seems she had some understanding with your grandmother.”
“Oh, no!” Gita’s voice sounded such genuine alarm that he glanced about the woods once more with a smile of sympathy.
“I understand,” he said softly.
Gita warmed to him for a moment. “If I’ve got to be introduced to this Eastern Society I’ve got to, I suppose, but I shall live here and only go to New York occasionally. And I’ll not be invited to parties because I don’t dance. I don’t fancy I’ll be run after for dinners either. I wish I were rich enough to have an apartment in town to spend half the week in. I do want to go to the opera and all the new plays. But my lawyer says I must be careful for a year or two.”
“Why don’t you rent the manor? I fancy there are a good many of the backgroundless on the lookout for an incongruous setting. They would give you a fancy price.”
Gita shook her head vigorously. “I did think of it once but I never could do it now. It’s too much mine in too many ways. It seems to have a soul of its own, a distillation of all the Carterets, perhaps. I could as easily have rented out my grandmother.”
Bylant laughed heartily. He had a mellow laugh and it struck no false note in the wood. “I have heard a good deal of Mrs. Carteret and I fancy your old manor house would appreciate the compliment. I understand exactly what you mean, for I too have an old house—in Albany—and my mother would not live anywhere else. She insisted that old houses, particularly old family mansions, had a very real and complex personality, made up not only of those who had lived there—the direct inheritors and the diverse strains introduced by marriage—but because the windows, she said, were so many eyes looking out on history in the process of making; the family ghost, perhaps, recording it all in the invisible volumes that atmosphere shares with the subconsciousness of man. An old house must have an atmospheric library as extensive as the British Museum, and could hardly fail to have a personality. My mother—Bladina, I called her, for, although she was the consummate mother, she seemed little older than myself—used to say that if anything could convert her to spiritualism it would be the hope of making her old walls speak; the house was built by a Dutch ancestor when Albany was Fort Orange and she refused to leave it when she married.”
Gita was regarding him with interested eyes. “How odd!” she exclaimed. “I’ve been feeling just like that lately. Been reading a history of New Jersey; and my old manor must have accumulated tomes. Primeval wilderness and Indians. Dutch—West India Company. Swedes. English. Dutch once more. English again. Constant disputes between governors and between East and West New Jersey before they were reunited. Always on the verge of war with New England. Jealousies, heart-burnings, shattered careers. Governors who oppressed and provoked the people to rebellion, and one who ‘dressed himself in a woman’s habit and patrolled his fort.’ Quakers. Witches. Lords Proprietors. Negro risings, and negro slaves burned alive for assault. Then the American Revolution; there was a good deal of fighting around here. And all the rest. And the Carterets lived a wild life of their own. My baronial hall, as the historian calls it, has an aloof, brooding, almost intolerably self-satisfied air, as if it knew so much more than any mere mortal could ever learn. It is quite haughtily reserved and withdrawn and only condescends to me because I was born a Carteret. But it really makes me feel more at home than I ever felt anywhere else, and I’d starve before I’d have its atmosphere damaged by aliens.”
“I understand. I understand—perfectly.” He had turned a little pale, but he continued to regard her with eyes that evinced mere friendly interest. And as he had evidently been as devoted to his mother as she to poor Millicent, and as he had without conscious effort made her talk freely, and understood her at that, she decided—particularly as there seemed to be no prospect of getting rid of him—to tolerate him for the morning at least.
“I’m rather tired,” she said. “Let’s sit down.”
They had come to the edge of the pool, an oval sheet of water in the heart of the wood, so densely surrounded by pines that their branches were reflected in the water and there was hardly room to sit on the turf. She propped herself against a tree and he selected one close by.
“Now,” she said, “tell me more of your mother. What did she look like?”
“Very much like you,” said Bylant.