The Adventures of a Modest Man

"Buy a doll, idiot!"

"Confound it, I've already bought ten! That doesn't give me the privilege of doing anything but buying ten more. She's busy; about five million people are crowding around her."

"Buy every doll she has! Put her out of business, man! Then if you can't fix it somehow you're a cuckoo. Is the Countess the dark-haired girl?"

"Certainly."

"How do you know?"

"Isn't she here selling dolls? Didn't the paper say she was going to?"

"Yes – but hadn't you better find out for certain before you – "

"I am certain; anyway, I don't care. Smith, she is the most radiantly – "

"All right; ring off – "

"Wait! I wanted to tell you that she has the prettiest way of smiling every time I buy a doll. And then, while she wraps up the infernal thing in ribbons and tissue we chat a little. I'd like to murder our Ambassador! Do you think that if I bought her entire stock – "

"Yes, I do!"

"What do you think?"

"What you do."

"But I don't think anything at all. I am asking you – "

"Try it, anyhow."

"All right. Hold the wire, Smith. I'll report progress – "

"What! Stand here and wait – "

"Don't be selfish. I'll return in a moment."

The "moment" stretched into a buzzing, crackling half hour, punctuated by impatient inquiries from Central. Suddenly an excited: "Hello, Smith!"

"Hello, you infernal – "

"I've done it! I've bought every doll! She's the sweetest thing; I told her I had a plan for endowing a ward in any old hospital she might name, and she thinks we ought to talk it over, so I'm going to sit out on the terrace with her – Smith!"

"What?"

"Oh, I thought you'd gone! I only wanted to say that she is far, far lovelier than I had supposed. I can't wait here talking with you any longer. Good-by!"

"Is she the Countess?" shouted Smith incredulously. But Kingsbury had rung off.

CHAPTER XXIII

ON THE WALL

Smith retired to his room to bathe, clothed himself in snowy linen and fresh tennis flannels, and descended again, book under his arm, to saunter forth through heavy tangles of cinnamon-tinted Flemish roses and great sweet-scented peonies, musing on love and fate.

"Kingsbury and his theories! The Countess of Semois will think him crazy. She'll think us both crazy! And I am not sure that we're not; youth is madness; half the world is lunatic! Take me, for example; I never did a more unexpected thing than kissing that shadow across the wall. I don't know why, I don't know how, but I did it; and I am out of jail yet. Certainly it must have been the cook. Oh, Heavens! If cooks kiss that way, what, what must the indiscretion of a Countess resemble?.. She did kiss back… At least there was a soft, tremulous, perfumed flutter – a hint of delicate counter-pressure – "

But he had arrived at the wall by that time.

"How like a woodland paradise!" he murmured sentimentally, youthful face upraised to the trees. "How sweet the zephyr! How softly sing the dicky-birds! I wonder – I wonder – " But what it was that perplexed him he did not say; he stood eying the top of the wall as the furtive turkey eyes its selected roost before coyly hopping thither.

"What's the use? If I see her I'll only take fright and skulk homeward. Why do I return again and again to the scene of guilt? Is it Countess or cook that draws me, or some one less exalted in the culinary confine? Why, why should love get busy with me? Is this the price I pay for that guileless kiss? Am I to be forever 'it' in love's gay game of tag?"

He ascended the steplike niche in the wall, peeped fearfully over into his neighbour's chasse. Tree and tangle slept in the golden light of afternoon; a cock-pheasant strutted out of a thicket, surveyed the solitude with brilliant eyes, and strutted back again; a baby rabbit frisked across the carrefour into the ferny warren beyond; and "Bubble, bubble, flowed the stream, like an old song through a dream."

Sprawling there flat on top of the sun-warmed stucco wall, white sunlight barring the pages of his book, he lifted his head to listen. There was a leafy stirring somewhere, perhaps the pheasant rustling in the underbrush. The sing-song of the stream threaded the silence; and as he listened it seemed to grow louder, filling the woods with low, harmonious sounds. In the shallows he heard laughter; in the pouring waterfalls, echoes like wind-blown voices calling. Small grey and saffron tinted birds, passing from twig to twig, peered at him fearlessly; a heavy green lizard vanished between the stones with an iridescent wriggle. Suddenly a branch snapped and the underbrush crackled.

"Probably a deer," thought Smith, turning to look. Close inspection of the thicket revealed nothing; he dropped his chin on his hands, crossed his legs, and opened his book.

The book was about one of those Americans who trouble the peace of mind of Princesses; and this was the place to read it, here in the enchanted stillness of the ancient Belgian forest, here where the sunshine spread its net on fretted waters, where lost pools glimmered with azure when the breeze stirred overhead – here where his neighbor was a Countess and some one in her household wore a mass of gold-red hair Greek fashion – and Aphrodite was not whiter of neck nor bluer eyed than she.

The romance that he read was designed to be thickly satisfying to American readers, for it described a typical American so accurately that Smith did not recognize the type. Until he had been enlightened by fiction he never imagined Americans were so attractive to exotic nobility. So he read on, gratified, cloyed, wondering how the Princess, although she happened to be encumbered with a husband, could stand for anything but ultimate surrender to the Stars and Stripes; and trustfully leaving it to another to see that it was done morally.

Hypnotized by the approaching crisis, he had begun already to finger the next page, when a slight crash in the bushes close by and the swish of parting foliage startled him from romance to reality.

But he had looked up too late; to slink away was impossible; to move was to reveal himself. It was she! And she was not ten feet distant.

One thing was certain: whether or not she was the shadowy partner of his kiss, she could not be the Countess, because she was fishing, unattended, hatless, the sleeves of her shirtwaist rolled up above her white elbows, a book and a short landing-net tucked under her left arm. Countesses don't go fishing unattended; gillies carry things. Besides, the Countess of Semois was in Semois-les-Bains selling dolls to Kingsbury.

The sun glowed on her splendid red hair; she switched the slender rod about rather awkwardly, and every time the cast of flies became entangled in a nodding willow she set her red lips tight and with an impatient "Mais, c'est trop bête! Mais, c'est vraiment trop– "

It was evident that she had not seen him where he lay on the wall; the chances were she would pass on – indeed her back was already toward him – when the unexpected happened: a trout leaped for a gnat and fell back into the pool with a resounding splash, sending ring on ring of sunny wavelets toward the shore.

"Ah! Te voilà!" she said aloud, swinging her line free for a cast.

Smith saw what was coming and tried to dodge, but the silk line whistled on the back-cast, and the next moment his cap was snatched from his head and deposited some twenty feet out in the centre of the pool.

The amazement of the fair angler was equal to his own as she looked hastily back over her shoulder and discovered him on the wall.

There is usually something undignified about a man whose hat has been knocked off; to laugh is as fatal as to show irritation; and Smith did neither, but quietly dropped over to her side of the wall, saying, "I'm awfully sorry I spoiled your cast. Don't mind the cap; that trout was a big one, and he may rise again."

He had spoken in English, and she answered in very pretty English: "I am so sorry – could I help you to recover your hat?"

"Thank you; if you would let me take your rod a moment."

"Willingly, monsieur."

She handed him the rod; he loosened the line, measured the distance with practiced eye, turned to look behind him, and, seeing there was scant room for a long back-cast, began sending loop after loop of silken line forward across the water, using the Spey method, of which none except an expert is master.

The first cast struck half-way, but in line; the next, still in line, slipped over the cap, but failed to hook. Then, as he recovered, there was a boiling rush in the water, a flash of pink and silver, and the rod staggered.