CHAPTER VII
UPON A CARPET
THINK of it!" Carron came bursting in on the peaceful scholar, who, on his knees, was searching in one of his lowest book-shelves. The young man was hot from his ride, and excited. He had left the door aswing behind him and the sweet odor of pines had followed him. "She wants it let alone!" he almost shouted the words.
Rader looked up startled, his large blue handkerchief that he had been using as a duster grasped in one hand. "Who? What?" he murmured. He seemed taken aback at seeing Carron so exasperated, looming so directly above him.
"Your daughter! the horse! that's what she wants of it—and that's all."
The quickness with which the scholar took his meaning suggested a mind that had been dwelling on the same subject. Perhaps, between readings and writings that morning, he had recalled the yesterday's talk and had speculated on Carron's luck to-day. He was as alert as if the subject had scarcely been dropped between them.
"Did she tell you that?" he asked.
"Didn't she, though! That, and a lot more!" The long-pent irritation broke forth. "Oh, she gave me her ideas, she didn't leave me a doubt on the matter! Said she would rather see it killed than caught; that breaking horses was not a sensible occupation; that if you tamed a wild horse, you lost it, but if you never went near it you had it for ever."
The scholar, drawn straight up on his knees, with his handkerchief in one hand and a tobacco jar—evidently the object of his searching—in the other, had the air of an astonished suppliant. "I don't understand that," he said slowly.
"Of course you don't! It's the most infernal nonsense! Woman-talk! A horse is no use until it's broken. That's sense, isn't it? Says that it's not, just an instinct that makes you feel that way, a great blind feeling, she calls it. A feeling—pshaw!"
It was evident Carron had one now. He had rushed about the little study at the risk of upsetting chairs and the scholar himself. "Doesn't want to have anything hurt, of course, can't bear to see anything suffer! To hear her talk you'd think the worst thing in the world was to scare a wild animal; and as for hurting it a little—! If she had seen men agonize as I have she wouldn't worry so much about a wild horse!"
Rader got up, set the tobacco jar on the table. "And she won't tell you where she saw it?"
"Tell! What do you think? She's got a will, that girl of yours!" Already he was teaching Rader about his daughter. "She would no more tell—" he tipped his head back, half closing his eyes, recalling her face under the shadow of the black cedars— "than if it were the sacred ibis and she its priest. Oh, I don't doubt she has seen something remarkable. I can believe that now. I can understand how she'd be jealous to keep it, if she wanted it for anything. To use it—but, man, that's the devil of it, she doesn't."
"The Ideal," Rader said gently. He looked down. and seemed to be speaking fragmentarily to himself. "Something that has never suffered and does not need to—something apart, unlike humanity." He addressed himself more directly to Carron, "I suppose there are no women in the world like the Venus of Melos, but we don't want to mar her because of that, do we?"
Carron brooded sulkily. "Yes, I can see the Ideal, fast enough; but your comparison is not quite true. The Venus of Melos is not a real woman."
"Isn't she?" The scholar thoughtfully rubbed the back of his hand against his long chin. "Do you know, to me, she has always been the most real one in the world."
Carron surveyed the elder man in some astonishment. "You do beat the Dutch! Well," suddenly breaking off, "make it a hypothetical case. Suppose we call her a real woman, the living Ideal, is that an argument for leaving her alone or for wanting her—eh?"
The scholar smiled. "Oh, no doubt, no doubt," he said, as if to his eye the alternative were clear. "Did you tell Blanche that?"
Carron looked shocked. "You can't talk like that to a woman!"
"Why not? The desire to capture is natural—it's in the blood. Why didn't you show her your side of the business? It would have been only fair to her, considering all she has told you. Besides, you might have persuaded her."
Carron was silent. Rader's idea of what had taken place between the girl and himself in their morning's interview was naïve certainly—straight question and reply, having the whole thing plainly out, as flat as you please. It was the idea he himself had started with, that morning; but, somehow, circumstances had altered the original conception. He could not tell whether he, himself, was wholly responsible, or whether the girl had had a hand in it. He knew he had questioned, listened to her replies, not contradicted, perhaps; though he could not remember he had agreed with her. His diplomacy had been aimed at not startling her out of her self-revelation; and then she had turned on him and transfixed him with her judgment. "You are different." Where had she got that idea—confound her!
"I don't like the way you seemed not to tell her anything," Rader said, a little wistfully. "You are very clever at it, my boy."
"Mr. Rader, if you like, you know you can tell her everything."
The color flamed under the scholar's thin skin. "You need have no fear of that. All I want is to keep completely out of this business. I have had nothing to do with it and I don't want to have."
It was on the tip of Carron's rather angry tongue to say that the scholar had had everything to do with it, whether he had intended to or not; but he shut his teeth in front of the unruly member. "I beg your pardon, I have been boring you with my affairs."
"Not a bit," the other protested hastily. "In fact, I've been very much interested—" He broke off, conscious, evidently, of an inconsistency between this remark and the one before it. "That story you told me of your Son of the Wind was most delightful, like—yes—very like an eclogue." The old fellow had saved himself. He had put the thing on an abstract basis. In the future, Carron saw, it was going to be easier for them to talk about it. "I will let you know as soon as there is anything more to tell," he said.
He had no doubts as he walked down the long, dividing passage but what there would be something more shortly, whence, he was not very clear, that girl so inverted his expectations. She had shown him, told him, vivified for him—all unaware of what she was doing—the splendor of the creature she had seen. No waif of the range, indeed, but Son of the Wind, or kin to him! Her words, her looks, her gestures, translated to him how well she knew the difference. Carron could see her yet, as she had turned to him in her apprehension of thegreat stallion, ready to cover his face with her hands, to roll him down hill, before she would let him see it. And, afterward, when her eye fell on the blackish horse, the difference of her look; the scorn of her accent upon a certain ajective. "He is too small!" How she had touched Carron's expectations with that! And there she had slipped away from him. Just recoiled when he thought she was coming forward, dodged the subject, eluded it, fled from it! Not wearied; no, startled; suddenly realizing how this veiled talk of hers had been on the edge of her darling secret. No amount of circumnavigation through disarming topics could lead her back to talk of her squirrels, her foxes, her wanderings at odd hours among the hills. All the way home she had not spoken a serious word. She had left him at the veranda steps, and gone into the house laughing.
He was far from supposing her to be an absolute obstacle, as, in the heat of vexation, he had represented her to Rader. But to come at her by indirection would occupy much time. As for coming at her plainly as to a man, stating his object and his convictions, trying to "persuade" her as Rader put it—Carron smiled. He was not going into an argument with a woman while there was any other means of pursuing his object. In his crowded life he had had little time for experience of women, but what had been his had been acute. Certain discoveries had stuck in his mind: one, what that thing called argument amounted to, when it was between a man and a woman; the pitting of logic against will, of expostulation against infinite iteration, of a dogged clinging to one's own level-headedness against every attraction and aggravation the unfair half of man can summon. He gave this girl the credit of being unaware in her provocativeness. She could not help it, but there she was! Talking with her, he had to look at her, listen to her. A blue eye might blunt the edge of logic, and resolution be seduced by the bend of a waist. Even now, hearing her voice calling to her mother, he loitered to listen, as if the timber of it had been a note in singing. No, he wanted to keep out of that blind path where mind and sense were mixed together. Stick to business and deal with men! Thus he told himself, and thinking it found himself involved with a household of women.
He had returned to find all the heavy batteries of house cleaning unmasked. It seemed natural that the scholar should shut himself in with the peace ofhis books, while the upheaval in the hotel went forward. He would have been helpless in such an emergency; and when he did venture out, summoned to lunch, he moved a dismayed spirit, and became involved in the furniture, armies of which occupied the halls. But Carron was born for the handling of objects, animate or inanimate. In the first days of his arrival, while operations had been limited to the more polite business of sweeping, he had kept his distance, but it was impossible to remain aloof when two women were struggling with ladders and hammers. He passed from a morning under open skies in the pursuance of his own business to an atmosphere of turmoil beside which the occupation of a city appeared a trivial matter, and, in spite of Mrs. Rader's objections, made himself aide-in-chief of the situation. She was most unanxious to accept him in this rôle. She had received his first offers of assistance almost with horror. In her faded gown and her large dingy apron, her face grayed with dust, she looked at him as if he were exclusively an ornament, and at best a suspicious ornament.
There was no argument for this attitude of mind, but to take off a coat and show this self-willed creature that, if she knew what she wanted, he knew how it ought to be done. It appeared there were wardrobes to move, fastenings of windows to be renewed, shelves put up in closets. Mrs. Rader betrayed a diffidence in the situation that spoke touchingly of a woman unaccustomed to be helped. She offered her directions timidly, and once or twice he caught her looking at him as if his dexterity and his kindness were the last things she had expected of him. For a little she clung to the remnant of her formality; but one can not regulate the fastenings of windows with a man and yet maintain a distant manner. The shellacing of the back stairs went far toward reconciling her, and by the time the shelves were going up in the bedroom with all the dissentions and agreements involved in such business, they knew each other well enough to argue important points.
He found she had a keen eye for necessities, for adjustments that were convenient. She displayed an enthusiasm for both that amounted to a passion. These things were beautiful to her, as her daughter had said. It was amusing to watch how the two women worked together. Evidently they understood each other to the flicker of an eyelash. It was Mrs. Rader who knew whether the windows were clean and if the woodwork needed washing, but it was Blanche who saw that the blue rugs went into the room with the blue furniture, that the mirrors were in the right light, that the curtains were even. She was as ready to blacken her hands and dive into dusty closets as Mrs. Rader, but the faculty for arrangement of effect was stronger in her. She did it better. She accepted his services with a promptitude and ordered him about with a grace that commended itself. Yet she waited on him too, at moments; she brought him his implements. She watched him.
He became to both women a person to be appealed to, called to from a distance, commanded on the instant. He grew used to seeing the girl's face with perhaps a smut on the lovely arch of her forehead, peering over the banister to him appealing a fresh difficulty. It might have been his house and his opinion the most valued one in it. He was carpenter and maid in one. Standing aloft, invoking the devils of dizziness, he swept cobwebs from high ceilings. He moved monumental masses of walnut; he drew endless tacks; and it was in his arms that the carpet of fabulous flowers made its exit from the drawing-room and was hung in the sun. A pillar of dust stood out around it and in the core of this, like a genius of blows, Carron wrought, tireless.
"What in the world do you do, when I am not here?" he demanded egotistically, as Blanche Rader, coming out with a lesser piece of carpet, paused within the smoke of his labor. She had changed her riding things to a blouse of white cotton stuff, and a skirt, striped red and white, like a market girl.
"O, we hang them out overnight," she said, "and in the morning Bert Ferrier gives them a beating, but nothing like this!" she added in admiration.
Carron lifted one eyebrow. That accomplishment was all there was left him of a scar which had brought him near to death. "So, I am standing in his shoes?"
"O, no, they would be much too small for you."
He looked hard at her. Had she intended that double meaning? "I would much rather have my own in any case," he declared. "They are better made. What do you want done with this?" And he took what she was carrying from her. Together they spread it on the ground, at a little distance from the house, just upon the edge of the pines.
They had handled a great many things together that afternoon, from the shellac for the dining-room floor to those marble statuettes, probably another relic of "Janfer's Folly," which startled out on one from niches in the wall, like miniature ghosts. They had seen each other repeatedly—taken instructions and given them. They had almost quarreled over the right tone for the floor stain. Evidences of character had expressed themselves in actions as well as in words. Nothing like work together to make enemies or friends! They had worked and certainly they were not enemies. Now, with the cessation of the turmoil, near the end of the day they paused. It seemed to him that he had come to know her with astonishing rapidity. She had grown from a strange to a familiar mystery—but mysterious still. Standing on the carpet she extended her arms above her head, stretching her whole body in a luxury of weariness. The absolute naturalness and unconsciousness of the gesture, the way she abandoned herself to it, relaxed to the finger-tips, was more moving than any deliberate glance. "Well, Badroulboudour, where does the magic carpet take you now?" he asked. "The city of Bagdad, or the enchanted gardens?"
She looked inquiringly. "I wish I knew what you were talking about."
"It is all written in a book of Mr. Rader's called The Arabian Nights. The prince had a magic carpet that took him to various extraordinary enchantments, as this one at present is threatening to transport me." He spoke, a little ironical, of his own feeling.
She looked sidelong at the trees. This time he thought she understood. "I wish it would float me up to my own room, and when I am dressed, down again to the kitchen," she remarked. "I would like to sit here a few minutes longer and see if the magic will begin to work."
"Why not? It is early, only five o'clock."
"Yes, but to-night we have dinner early. It is whist night, and Bert Ferrier comes up in the evening to play."
That name helped to bring him back to his senses.
"O," he said. He stood stiffly, wondering whether these two were engaged.
She made a step by which she worked herself a few inches nearer to where he stood. "Promise me one thing," she asked, tipping her head over to look directly into his face, "you won't go off up-stairs and leave me to get through with it alone? I am so tired, it seems to me if I have to play whist all the evening with Bert, I shall die! You will stay down and play too, and help me out?"
Carron had no wish to avoid Ferrier. He had, on the contrary, the greatest interest to see him. The change in his expression at mention of the fellow's name had led the girl astray, and he was not unwilling to make capital of her mistake.
"I'll tell you," he bargained, "I will if we can be partners."
"Oh, why not? Of course we can." The idea seemed far from displeasing to her. She swung around with a little pirouette. Under serious pines the carpet displayed large and extraordinarily pink roses at least two feet apart. "The joy of mother's heart," Blanche explained, and began to make little dancing steps from one to another. These assumed rhythm—then measure, the figure of a dance, and Carron joined it. One-two-three to the left, one-two-three to the right, forward, back, two, cross over—then ignoring the precedent of always stepping on flowers, he whirled her. She was light, but not diaphanous. They trod a wildish measure, quicksilver in her heels, the elixir of youth or something keener in his spirits. Her breath was quick 
"Where does the magic carpet take you now?"
their shadows mixed in one, darted like imps.
Quicker, wilder, until the fabric they danced on glimmered beneath their eyes a veritable ground of flowers and he had the feeling of moving with her as one person. They sensed the approaching end. They spun like dervishes. The moment had come, when, with any girl the play would have ended naturally, as Fragonarde would have wished, with a kiss on a flushed cheek; but here was not "any girl," and his impulse was of no middle quality. It was catch her closer, or fling her as far as he could. With a quick turn of the wrist he had whirled them apart. Circling still to keep balance, they swung to opposite ends of the carpet. Blanche Rader looked astonished, but by no means resentful at the summary handling. She caught step, curtsied deeply, making of this last impromptu, a figure in the dance, and panting, pressing her hand to her side, poised, seemed to entertain an idea of sitting down on the flowered surface—changed her mind. "I have to go; I hear mother starting dinner," she declared as if an unspoken agreement had been between them to stay out as long as the powers permitted.
"What shall I do with the carpet?" he called after her.
"Leave it till to-morrow, leave it in the sun," she chanted back at him as she flitted. She went off in the direction of the house buoyantly, as though the prospect of an evening of whist, far from tiring her, had abated her weariness.
But Carron felt by no means contented. He had the uneasy feeling of having wasted his time. Not that his afternoon's work had interfered with anything definite he could have done in his own affair, but that the impetus he had had for following his discovery of the morning seemed to have been halted. He had not had his own thoughts to himself. He feared he could scarcely have them to himself this evening. She had a way of absorbing a man—no, of making him be absorbed. If he had had his wits about him he would have protested that he would appear only if he could be the idle member of the company. Then he could have watched Ferrier without being himself watched. He could have got a perspective on him. But the girl's plea to him had been put so prettily! He had been flattered into making that stipulation, about their being partners.
Now the suspicion pulled him that she had managed this deliberately. Probably she wanted some one to play off against Ferrier. She had seemed to care not a pin for the fellow. The one time he had seen them together she had seemed fairly to dislike him, and this afternoon she had expressed the greatest indifference in her mention of the fellow's name.
But, later, at dinner, she appeared illuminated, talked animatedly, ate little, and evidently had her mind fixed on certain arrangements of which she spoke to her mother in lowered voice. Immediately afterward she began her flittings in and out of the living-room, skirmished with the furniture there, arranging curtains, or smoothing out of rugs—the behavior of any woman with a "party" on her hands, serious and intense as if a few people coming to sit on chairs was an event of the universe.
In this bustle, which did not include him, Carron wandered rather forlorn, catching now and then a glimpse of Blanche or Mrs. Rader, more often getting fragments of murmured discussions. "Why don't you have the lamp, as you always do?" Or "You always used the center-table before!" Then in a note of exasperation, "My dear Blanche, on a night like this, what do you want of a fire!"
"It looks so pretty, and we can have the windows. open if it is too hot."
The girl's voice had answered, from aloft, on the little stair which she was ascending, probably on her way to dress, and Mrs. Rader's had called from within the living-room. Entering he found her there alone. It was the room Blanche had been sweeping that morning, in the golden vapor of dust, but now it had become a place of low-set lights and long, pointed, radiating shadows. Thus the ceiling, which he recalled as hideously papered and the settees and what-nots around the wall were lost in a fringe of darkness. What one saw most clearly was the polished top of the card table, illuminated by its cluster of candles; the chairs drawn around it, the fireplace with its glow and in all the windows reflections of little pointed flames.
Mrs. Rader stood looking at these things, wistful and astonished. She seemed to doubt them, to admire them, to think that they would scarcely do, and Carron's suggestion that the arrangement would certainly promote conversation only turned her eyes upon him with the same expression, as if he had been the most important effect in the room, therefore a little more alien than the rest. What had become of their familiarity of the afternoon? If she had not quite resumed her old, distant manner, she seemed to be struggling to do so. He was uncomfortable, an interloping boarder who should not have appeared in this gathering of a family and its friend; but he was more amused than uncomfortable at Mrs. Rader's manner of waiting and listening apprehensively. He wondered whether it was Ferrier or her daughter she was so nervously expecting; but when they entered he could not tell. They entered simultaneously, Ferrier with Rader from the veranda, Blanche through the inner door.
She came in with the air of conscious triumph of women when they feel they have succeeded, either with themselves or with those mysterious manipulations of things which they carry on beneath the surface of events. She wore a dress, charming, not for what it was, but for what it showed her to be. The soft flow of the old, washed stuff conformed graciously to the lines of her body, and the beauties he had glimpsed and guessed at before, the sloping line of the neck and shoulder, and the long, lovely forms of the arms were uncovered. These and the way she carried her head, the brightness of her eyes, the look she had of rejoicing at being alive, made her shine in her candle-lighted, fire-lighted room.
"Well, what's happened?" Rader wanted to know, blinking at the dance of shadows around him. "Hermionie, what have you done to us?"
"I haven't. It is Blanche's doing." Mrs. Rader looked down. Carron perceived that she understood the reason of her daughter's transformation scene, but the two men who had just come in evidently found it an astonishment.
"Very pretty," the scholar determined, looking at his daughter, patting her arm.
"Rather dark, isn't it?" Ferrier inquired. His eyes, black and quick-moving as the little points of shadow, had been darting here and there, trying to discover the unessential that was meant to be hidden. "I suppose we will have the lamp when we begin to play?" He addressed Blanche directly, as if there was no one to be considered besides the two of them.
She sent a smiling look at Carron. "There's plenty of light to see the cards and one another's faces, and that is all we need to see," she said, giving Ferrier her hand.
He took it with an eagerness that was not hidden by his air of the would-be critic. He appeared a sallow, dark, slim young man, rather pretty, trimly built and buttoned into black, his look of lightness and alertness marred by the slight inward bend of the knees. Altogether a facile figure, smooth and easy and but for the small, hawklike nose, mild enough in appearance—a very different figure from the man on the road, a different figure, even, from the man on the drive. Could he have forgotten it all so quickly? His manner was altogether that of an old close friend of the family. Even his uneasiness at the change about him seemed a part of that familiarity.
"Mr. Rader," he asked, "are you going to have a chair by the fire?"
"For some reason," the scholar explained, "my daughter has asked me to take a hand."
"Oh," said Ferrier blankly, and for the first time he looked at Carron.
"Mr. Carron—Mr. Ferrier," Blanche said. The fact that they had met before had evidently slipped her mind in some greater absorption, and neither one or the other found words to remind her of it. They shook hands. Ferrier's was limp. Carron felt rather dazed when he thought of how naturally they had encountered first, how plainly they had discussed the facts of their greatest interest. They had seen each other angry, drunk; they had parted familiar antagonists; and here the woman had raised up the social barrier between them, making them strangers.
"You are to sit here, father, and Bert, you opposite," she said. So calmly she disposed of men, like fate! Ferrier gave her another mute glance. He looked as if he were about to assert some right that had always been his, but then he yielded and took the place appointed him.
The four sat down together, four fronting one another in a hollow square, for two hours to look only from the faces of the cards to one another's faces. Only people on very good terms, or the merest strangers, can face one another in such fashion and be at ease. Even Rader, though he lifted his gaze in his usual slow, direct fashion, did so with an effort and with a shy consciousness. Ferrier's manner was lively, and between games, in the pause, his talk flowed a thin and rapid stream. His eyes moved constantly, darting at every person, every object in the room, resting nowhere an instant; flitting over Carron's face, skimming him with glances that feared to stop; that seemed to refute, to deny, with every fresh excursion to repeat, "I don't know you; I don't see you; you are not there!"
No, he had not forgotten. It was not likely that he could have forgotten. That ugly little moment. on the drive was too hard to down. It kept rising in Carron's own mind, like an unexorcised ghost. He could fancy of what Ferrier was thinking; the same thing he was thinking of, Rader too, in his greater detachment, of the curious secret which was common among them, which made it hard for them to look at one another; the thing that each understood in the others, and, strangely enough, had no fear that any one of them would give it away.
To tell of what the women were thinking was a far different matter. There was no telling. Yet, they, too, seemed to have a secret. Without looking at each other, rather ignoring each other, some understanding was between them. They seemed able to attach meaning to every action, look or word the other spoke, as if each knew well enough what was the dominating thought in the other's mind. Mrs. Rader, silent in her corner, watched and more than watched Blanche Rader at the card table, bright with the mysterious elation that cards could never account for, nor candles, nor wood-fire. They were a background, and a background for mere enjoyment. In arranging the things and drawing people around the table she seemed to have accomplished her ambition. She looked at Ferrier and she smiled at him, but rather less than she looked and smiled at her father. Carron could not feel sure in what way she looked and smiled at himself. He had too keen a sense of her appearance, and his mind was distracted trying to discover why she was beautiful. He watched the movement of her arms and hands against the dark surface of the table, while her fingers let through the red and white and black stream of the cards; questioned her eyes, which laughed; the intonation of her voice when she spoke. The matter was past finding out. The explanation might lurk beyond visible things, in the heart of her mood. And there was a veil between her mood and theirs. At moments she seemed to draw him near it, but then the faces of the others would divide his thought. They were sitting among other people, looking at clubs and spades, handling hearts, hearing behind them the beating of insects against the window screens. If only they had been dancing upon a carpet!