Part 14

But after that visit in July, the singing voice was heard ringing joyfully at all times of the day in the house and about the grounds of The Bow. Sometimes the breeze brought it to Octavius from across the lake waters--Luigi's was no longer with it--and he pitied the girl sincerely because the desire of her heart, the cultivation of such a voice, was denied her. Mrs. Champney, also, heard the clear voice, which, in this the girl's twentieth year, was increasing in volume and sweetness, carolling the many songs in Irish, English, French and Italian. She marvelled at the light-heartedness and, at the same time, wondered if, now that Romanzo Caukins could no longer hope, Aileen would show enough common sense to accept Luigi Poggi in due time, and through him make for herself an established place in Flamsted. Not that she was yet ready to part with her--far from it. She was too useful a member of the Champ-au-Haut household. Still, if it were to be Poggi in the end, she felt she could control matters to the benefit of all concerned, herself primarily. She was pleasing herself with the idea of such prospective control of Aileen's matrimonial interests one afternoon, just after Champney's flying visit in July, when she rose from her chair beneath the awning and, to try her strength, made her way slowly along the terrace to the library windows; they were French casements and one of them had swung outwards noiselessly in the breeze. She was about to step through, when she saw Aileen standing on the hearth before the portrait of Louis Champney. She was gazing up at it, her face illumined by the same lovely light that, a year before, had betrayed her secret to the faded but observant eyes of Louis Champney's widow.

This was enough; the mistress of Champ-au-Haut was again on her guard--and well she might be, for Aileen Armagh was in possession of the knowledge that Champney Googe loved her. In joyful anticipation she was waiting for the word which, spoken by him when he should be again in Flamsted, was to make her future both fair and blest.

VI

In entering on his business life in New York, Champney Googe, like many another man, failed to take into account the "minus quantities" in his personal equation. These he possessed in common with other men because he, too, was human: passions in common, ambitions in common, weaknesses in common, and last, but not least, the pursuance of a common end--the accumulation of riches.

The sum of these minus quantities added to the total of temperamental characteristics and inherited traits left, unfortunately, in balancing the personal equation a minus quantity. Not that he had any realization of such a result--what man has? On the contrary, he firmly believed that his inherited obstinate perseverance, his buoyant temperament, his fortunate business connection with the great financier, his position as the meeting-point of the hitherto divided family interests in Flamsted, his intimacy with the Van Ostends--the distant tie of blood confirming this at all points--plus his college education and cosmopolitan business training in the financial capitals of Europe, were potent factors in finding the value of _x_--this representing to him an, as yet, unknown quantity of accumulated wealth.

He had not yet asked himself how large a sum he wished to amass, but he said to himself almost daily, "I have shown my power along certain lines to-day," these lines converging in his consciousness always to monetary increment.

He worked with a will. His energy was tireless. He learned constantly and much from other men powerful in the world of affairs--of their methods of speculation, some legitimate, others quite the contrary; of their manipulation of stocks, weak and strong; of their strengthening the market when the strengthening was necessary to fill a threatened deficit in their treasury and of their weakening a line of investment to prevent over-loading and consequent depletion of the same. He was thoroughly interested in all he heard and saw of the development of mines and industries for the benefit of certain banking cliques and land syndicates. If now and then a mine proved to have no bottom and the small investor's insignificant sums dropped out of sight in this bottomless pit, that did not concern him--it was all in the game, and the game was an enticing one to be played to the end. The two facts that nothing is certain at all times, and that everything is uncertain at some time, added the excitement of chance to his business interest.

At times, for instance when walking up the Avenue on a bracing October day, he felt as if he owned all in sight--a condition of mind which those who know from experience the powerful electro-magnetic current generated by the rushing life of the New York metropolis can well understand. He struck out into the stream with the rest, and with overweening confidence in himself--in himself as master of circumstances which he intended to control in his own interests, in himself as the pivotal point of Flamsted affairs. The rapidity of the current acted as a continual stimulus to exertion. Like all bold swimmers, he knew in a general way that the channel might prove tortuous, the current threaten at times to overpower him; but, carried rapidly out into mid-stream with that gigantic propulsive force that is the resultant of the diverse onward-pressure of the metropolitan millions, he suddenly found himself one day in that mid-stream without its ever having occurred to him that he might not be able to breast it. Even had he thought enough about the matter to admit that certain untoward conditions might have to be met, he would have failed to realize that the shore towards which he was struggling might prove in the end a quicksand.

Another thing: he failed to take into account the influence of any cross current, until he was made to realize the necessity of stemming his strength against it. This influence was Aileen Armagh.

Whenever in walking up lower Broadway from the office he found himself passing Grace Church, he realized that, despite every effort of will, he was obliged to relive in thought the experience of that night seven years ago at the Vaudeville. Then for the first time he saw the little match girl crouching on the steps of the stage reproduction of this same marble church. The child's singing of her last song had induced in him then--wholly unawares, wholly unaccountably--a sudden mental nausea and a physical disgust at the course of his young life, the result being that the woman "who lay in wait for him at the corner" by appointment, watched that night in vain for his coming.

In reliving this experience, there was always present in his thought the Aileen Armagh as he knew her now--pure, loyal, high-spirited, helpful, womanly in all her household ways, entertaining in her originality, endowed with the gift of song. She was charming; this was patent to all who knew her. It was a pleasure to dwell on this thought of her, and, dwelling upon it too often at off-times in his business life, the desire grew irresistible to be with her again; to chat with her; to see the blue-gray eyes lifted to his; to find in them something he found in no others. At such times a telegram sped over the wires, to Aurora Googe, and her heart was rejoiced by a two days' visit from her son.

Champney Googe knew perfectly well that this cross current of influence was diametrically opposed to his own course of life as he had marked it out for himself; knew that this was a species of self-gratification in which he had no business to indulge; he knew, moreover, that from the moment he should make an earnest effort to win Alice Van Ostend and her accompanying millions, this self-gratification must cease. He told himself this over and over again; meanwhile he made excuse--a talk with the manager of the quarries, a new order of weekly payments to introduce and regulate with Romanzo Caukins, the satisfactory pay-master in the Flamsted office, a week-end with his mother, the consideration of contracts and the erection of a new shed on the lake shore--to visit Flamsted several times during the autumn, winter, and early spring.

At last, however, he called a halt.

Alice Van Ostend, young, immature, amusing in her girlish abandon to the delight of at last "coming out", was, nevertheless, rapidly growing up, a condition of affairs that Champney was forced rather unwillingly to admit just before her first large ball. As usual he made himself useful to Alice, who looked upon him as a part of her goods and chattels. It was in the selection of the favors for the german to be given in the stone house on the occasion of the coming-out reception for its heiress, that his eyes were suddenly opened to the value of time, so to say; for Alice was beginning to patronize him. By this sign he recognized that she was putting the ten years' difference in their ages at something like a generation. It was not pleasing to contemplate, because the winning of Alice Van Ostend was, to use his own expression, in a line coincident with his own life lines. Till now he believed he was the favored one; but certain signs of the times began to be provocative of distrust in this direction.

He asked boldly for the first dance, for the cotillon, and the privilege of giving her the flowers she was to wear that night. He assumed these favors to be within his rights; she was by no means of his way of thinking. It developed during their scrapping--Champney had often to scrap with Alice to keep on a level with her immaturity--that there was another rival for the cotillon, another, a younger man, who desired to give her the special flowers for this special affair. The final division of the young lady's favors was not wholly reassuring to Mr. Googe. As a result of this awakening, he decided to remain in New York without farther visits to Flamsted until the Van Ostends should have left the city for the summer.

But in the course of the spring and summer he found it one thing to call a halt and quite another to make one. The cross current of influence, which had its source in Flamsted, was proving, against his will and judgment, too strong for him. He knew this and deplored it, for it threatened to carry him away from the shore towards which he was pushing, unawares that this apparently firm ground of attainment might prove treacherous in the end.

"Every man has his weakness, and she's mine," he told himself more than once; yet in making this statement he was half aware that the word "weakness" was in no sense applicable to Aileen. It remained for the development of his growing passion for her to show him that he was wholly in the wrong--she was his strength, but he failed to realize this.

Champney Googe was not a man to mince matters with himself. He told himself that he was not infatuated; infatuation was a thing to which he had yielded but few times in his selfish life. He was ready to acknowledge that his interest in Aileen Armagh was something deeper, more lasting; something that, had he been willing to look the whole matter squarely in the face instead of glancing askance at its profile, he would have seen to be perilously like real love--that love which first binds through passionate attachment, then holds through congenial companionship to bless a man's life to its close.

"She suits me--suits me to a T;" such was his admission in what he called his weak moments. Then he called himself a fool; he cursed himself for yielding to the influence of her charming personality in so far as to encourage what he perceived to be on her part a deep and absorbing love for him. In yielding to his weakness, he knew he was deviating from the life lines he had laid with such forethought for his following. A rich marriage was the natural corollary of his determination to advance his own interests in his chosen career. This marriage he still intended to make, if possible with Alice Van Ostend; and the fact that young Ben Falkenburg, an old playmate of Alice's, just graduated from college, the "other man" of the cotillon favors, was the first invited guest for the prospective cruise on Mr. Van Ostend's yacht, did not dovetail with his intentions. It angered him to think of being thwarted at this point.

"Why must such a girl cross my path just as I was getting on my feet with Alice?" he asked himself, manlike illogically impatient with Aileen when he should have lost patience with himself. But in the next moment he found himself dwelling in thought on the lovely light in the eyes raised so frankly to his, on the promises of loyalty those same eyes would hold for him if only he were to speak the one word which she was waiting to hear--which she had a right to hear after his last visit in July to Flamsted.

If he had not kissed her that once! With a girl like Aileen there could be no trifling--what then?

He cursed himself for his heedless folly, yet--he knew well enough that he would not have denied himself that moment of bliss when the girl in response to his whispered words of love gave him her first kiss, and with it the unspoken pledge of her loving heart.

"I'm making another ass of myself!" he spoke aloud and continued to chew the end of a cold cigar.

The New York office was deserted in these last days of August except for two clerks who had just left to take an early train to the beach for a breath of air. The treasurer of the Flamsted Quarries Company was sitting idle at his desk. It was an off-time in business and he had leisure to assure himself that he was without doubt the quadruped alluded to above--"An ass that this time is in danger of choosing thistles for fodder when he can get something better."

Only the day before he had concluded on his own account a deal, that cost him much thought and required an extra amount of a certain kind of courage, with a Wall Street firm. Now that this was off his hands and there was nothing to do between Friday and Monday, when he was to start for Bar Harbor to join the Van Ostends and a large party of invited guests for a three weeks' cruise on the Labrador coast, he had plenty of time to convince himself that he possessed certain asinine qualities which did not redound to his credit as a man of sense. In his idle moments the thought of Aileen had a curious way of coming to the surface of consciousness. It came now. He whirled suddenly to face his desk squarely; tossed aside the cold cigar in disgust; touched the electric button to summon the office boy.

"I'll put an end to it--it's got to be done sometime or other--just as well now." He wrote a note to the head clerk to say that he was leaving two days earlier for his vacation than he intended; left his address for the next four days in case anything should turn up that might demand his presence before starting on the cruise; sent the office boy off with a telegram to his mother that she might expect him Saturday morning for two days in Flamsted; went to his apartment, packed grip and steamer trunk for the yacht, and left on the night express for the Maine coast.

VII

"I just saw Mr. Googe driving down from The Gore, Aileen, so he's in town again."

Octavius was passing the open library window where Aileen was sitting at her work, and stopped to tell her the news.

"Is he?"

The tone was indifferent, but had she not risen quickly to shake some threads of embroidery linen into the scrap-basket beneath the library table, Octavius might have seen the quick blood mount into her cheeks, the red lips quiver. It was welcome news for which she had been waiting already six weeks.

Octavius spoke again but in a low voice:

"You might mention it to Mrs. Champney when she comes down; it don't set well, you know, if she ain't told everything that's going on." He passed on without waiting for an answer.

The girl took her seat again by the window. Her work lay in her lap; her hands were folded above it; her face was turned to the Flamsted Hills. "Would he come soon? When and where could she see him again, and alone?" Her thoughts were busy with conjecture.

Octavius recrossing the terrace called out to her:

"You going up to Mrs. Caukins' later on this afternoon?"

"Yes; Mrs. Champney said she didn't need me."

"I'll take you up."

"Thank you, Tave, not to-day. I'm going to row up as far as the upper shed. I promised the twins to meet them there; they want to see the new travelling crane at work. We'll go up afterwards to The Gore together."

"It's pretty hot, but I guess you're all three seasoned by this time."

"Through and through, Tave; and I'm not coming home till after supper--it's lovely then--there's Mrs. Champney coming!"

She heard her step in the upper hall and ran upstairs to assist her in coming down.

"Will you go out on the terrace now?" she asked her on entering the library.

"I'll wait a while; it's too warm at this hour."

Aileen drew Mrs. Champney's arm chair to the other casement window. She resumed her seat and work.

"How are you getting on with the napkins?" the mistress of Champ-au-Haut inquired after a quarter of an hour's silence in which she was busied with some letters.

"Fine--see?" She held up a corner for her inspection. "This is the tenth; I shall soon be ready for the big table cloth."

"Bring them to me."

Aileen obeyed, and showed her the monogram, A C, wrought by her own deft fingers in the finest linen.

"There's no one like a Frenchwoman to teach embroidery; you've done them credit." Aileen dropped a mock courtesy. "Which one taught you?"

"Sister Ste. Croix."

"Is she the little wrinkled one?"

"Yes, but I've fallen in love with every wrinkle, she's a perfect dear--"

"I didn't imply she wasn't." Mrs. Champney was apt to snap out at Aileen when, according to her idea, she was "gushing" too much. The girl had ceased to mind this; she was used to it, especially during her three years of attendance on this invalid. "Who designed this monogram?"

"She did; she can draw beautifully."

Mrs. Champney put on her glasses to examine in detail the exquisite lettering, A C.

Aileen leaned above her, smiling to herself. How many loving thoughts were wrought into those same initials! How many times, while her fingers were busy fashioning them, she had planned to make just such for her very own! How often, as she wrought, she had laid her lips to the A C, murmuring to herself over and over again, "Aileen--Champney, Champney--Aileen," so filling and satisfying with the sound of this pleasing combination her every loving anticipation!

She was only waiting for the "word", schooling herself in these last six weeks to wait patiently for it--the "word" which should make these special letters her legitimate own!

The singing thoughts that ring in the consciousness of a girl who gives for the first time her whole heart to her lover; the chanted prayers to her Maker, that rise with every muted throb of the young wife's heart which is beating for two in anticipation of her first motherhood--who shall dare enumerate them?

The varied loving thoughts in this girl's quick brain, which was fed by her young pulsing heart--a heart single in its loyalty to one during all the years since her orphan childhood, were intensified and illumined by the inherent quickening power of a vivid imagination, and inwrought with these two letters that stood, at present, for their owner, Almeda Champney. Aileen's smile grew wonderfully tender, almost tremulous as she continued to lean above her work. Mrs. Champney looking up suddenly caught it and, in part, interpreted it. It angered her both unreasonably and unaccountably. This girl must be taught her place. She aspiring to Champney Googe! She handed her back the work.

"Ann said just now she heard Octavius telling you that my nephew, Champney Googe, is in town--when did he come?"

"I don't know--Tave didn't say."

"I wonder Alice Van Ostend didn't mention that he was coming here before going on the yachting cruise they've planned. I had a letter from her yesterday--I know you'd like to hear it."

"Of course I should! It's the first one she has written you, isn't it?--Where is it?" She spoke with her usual animated interest.

"I have it here."

She took up one of several letters in her lap, opened it, turned it over, adjusted her glasses and began to read a paragraph here and there. Aileen listened eagerly.

"I suppose I may as well read it all--Alice wouldn't mind you," said Mrs. Champney, and proceeded to give the full contents. It was filled with anticipations of the yachting cruise, of a later visit to Flamsted, of Champney and her friends. Champney's name occurred many times,--Alice's attitude towards the possessor of it seemed to be that of private ownership,--but everything was written with the frankness of an accepted publicity of the fact that Mr. Googe was one of her social appendages. Aileen was amused at the whole tone of the rather lengthy epistle; it gave her no uneasiness.

Mrs. Champney laid aside her glasses; she wanted to note the effect of the reading on the girl.

"You can see for yourself from this how matters stand between these two; it needn't be spoken of in Flamsted outside the family, but it's just as well for you to know of it--don't you think so?"

Aileen parried; she enjoyed a little bout with Champney Googe's aunt.

"Of course, it's plain enough to see that they're the best of friends--"

"Friends!" Mrs. Champney interrupted her; there was a scornful note in her voice which insensibly sharpened; "you haven't your usual common sense, Aileen, if you can't read between these lines well enough to see that Miss Van Ostend and my nephew are as good as engaged."

Aileen smiled, but made no reply.

"What are you laughing at?" The tone was peremptory and denoted extreme irritation. Aileen put down her work and looked across to her interrogator.

"I was only smiling at my thoughts."

"Will you be so good as to state what they are? They may prove decidedly interesting to me--at this juncture," she added emphatically.

Aileen's look of amusement changed swiftly to one of surprise.

"To be honest, I was thinking that what she writes about Mr. Googe doesn't sound much like love, that was all--"

"That was all!" Mrs. Champney echoed sarcastically; "well, what more do you need to convince you of facts I should like to know?"

Aileen laughed outright at this. "Oh, Mrs. Champney, what's the use of being a girl, if you can't know what other girls mean?"

"Please explain yourself."

"Won't you please read that part again where she mentions the people invited for the cruise."

Mrs. Champney found the paragraph and re-read it aloud.

"Falkenburg--that's the name--Ben Falkenburg."

"How did you ever hear of this Ben Falkenburg?"

"Oh, I heard of him years ago!" The mischief was in her voice and Mrs. Champney recognized it.

"Where?"