"Just as you like. You'd better hurry up a little, though, for I shouldn't wonder if it rained before sundown."

"Rain? Then I can't take this thing." Phebe paused, with the string half tied.

"Oh, I'll risk it. Besides if you don't take it, there's a man in Greenway that will."

Phebe looked at her hostess, shut her teeth, jerked the knot tight, and was silent; but there was a dangerous gleam in her eyes, as she mounted and rode away, with her three-dollar skeleton clattering on the handle-bars before her.

CHAPTER EIGHT

There is a certain inconvenience coupled with being called upon to pose as a genius at the comparatively early age of twenty-six. Popular theory to the contrary, notwithstanding, it is easier to plod slowly along on the path to fame. Greatness does not repeat itself, every day in the week. But fate had overtaken Gifford Barrett, and had hung a wreath of tender young laurels about his boyish brow. He deserved the wreath, if ever a boy did. Two years before, fresh from the inspiration of his years in Germany and of his German master, he had composed his _Alan Breck Overture_. It would have been well done, even for a man many years his senior, and it quickly won a place on the programmes of the leading orchestra's of the country. He had known what it was to be called out from his box at the Auditorium or Carnegie Hall to bow to the audience, while the orchestra thumped their approval on their music racks. He had been hailed even as the American Saint Saens, and it was small wonder that he began to feel the wreath too tight a fit for his brows.

His family was well known and, from the first, society had claimed him for her own. He had the gift of talking well, of dancing better; and he had found it easy to drift along from day to day, neglecting his music for the sake of the invitations that poured in upon him. In his more conscientious moments, he told himself that he would do all the better work as the result of seeing the life of his native city; but so far its influence had been only potent to move him to write a triplet of light songs and to dedicate them to three of the prettiest girls in his set, no one of whom was able to sing a note in tune.

At the end of the second season, a reaction set in. The public was clamorous for a new work from him; he was tired of being lionized by people who called his beloved overture pretty. The madness of the spring was upon him, the spirit of work had seized him, and the middle of May found him and his long-suffering piano installed in the "north chamber"

of the Sykes homestead at Bannock Bars.

He had chosen the place with some degree of care, in order to be sufficiently remote from society to work undisturbed, sufficiently near civilization to be able to buy more music paper in case of need. Ten miles of even a bad road is not an impa.s.sible barrier to an enthusiastic bicyclist; yet the place was as rustic and countrified as if it had been, not ten, but ten hundred miles from an electric light. His digestion was good enough to cope even with Eulaly Sykes's perennial doughnuts, and it was in a mood of supreme content that he settled into his quarters in the wilderness. It was years since he had watched the on-coming of the New England summer; he watched it now with the trained sense, the inherent quickness of perception of the true artist who realizes that the simplest facts of the day's routine by his touch can be trans.m.u.ted into glowing, vivid material for his work.

It must be confessed that Eulaly Sykes occasionally mourned to her friends over the irregularities of her boarder. His hours of work pa.s.sed her comprehension, his work itself filled her soul with wonder and disgust. In his moments of inspiration when he was evoking the stormy chords of the introduction to his symphonic poem, _Bisesa_ he never dreamed that his landlady was craning her head up from her pillows in a vain effort to discover the tune, or to reduce it to the known terms of short metre rhythm. His broken, irregular measures troubled her, as did also his broken, irregular hours of work. There were days when he rode far afield, or was seen lying on his back under the pines by the brookside, listening to the splash of the water, the hissing of the air through the boughs above him. After such days, his piano was wont to sound far into the night, and Eulaly, as she slept and waked and still heard her boarder's fingers crashing over the keys, reproached herself bitterly.

"Them last doughnuts was too rich," she used to say to her old-fashioned bolster, set up like a grim idol by the bedside; "and the poor feller can't sleep. I mustn't put so much shortenin' in the next ones. My, but that was an awful scrooch! I wish he'd shut his windows a little mite tighter, and not pester the whole neighborhood."

This state of things had endured for two weeks, and the symphonic poem was progressing as well as its composer had any reason to expect. Already it was bidding fair to rival the _Alan Overture_ and Mr. Barrett began to carry his nose tilted at an angle higher than ever, as if in imagination he already scented the fresh laurels in store for him. Pride goeth before destruction. A long day under the pines resulted not in inspiration, but in an uninspiring cold in his head; his temper suffered together with his nose, and Eulaly Sykes, below stairs, chafed her hands together at the sounds of musical and moral discord which floated down upon her ears. All the morning long, he smote his brows and his piano by turns. The new _motif_ he was seeking, refused to be found.

Later, fortified by Eulaly's fried chicken and rhubarb pie, he tried it again, invitingly playing over the preceding _motif_ in every possible key and tempo. It was of no use. He slammed down the top of his piano, tore across a half-finished page, caught up his cap, mounted his bicycle and rushed away up the road, quite regardless of the clouds lying low in the western sky.

Fifteen miles of scorching over country roads sufficed to bring him to a calmer mood, and he turned his wheel towards the Sykes homestead once more. The _motif_ was still as far beyond his grasp as ever; but there were other things in life besides elusive _motifs_. The increasing blackness above his head was one of them; his hunger was another, and he quickened his pace. His piano might be awaiting him in mute reproach; but then, so did Eulaly's doughnuts await him, and there was no reproach in those, at least, not until some time later. He fell to whistling a strain of his overture, as he rode swiftly along, quite unconscious of the fact that disaster, in the person of Miss Phebe McAlister, was riding quite as swiftly to meet him.

Three miles from his boarding-place, the storm overtook him with a rush which straight-way reduced the roads to the consistency of cream. He looked about for shelter; but no shelter was at hand, and the road meandered along before him uphill and down again with an easy nonchalance which appeared to take no account of the pelting rain. It was hard riding and dangerous, but he pushed on manfully, while the streams of water trickled down his neck and along the bridge of his nose. As he reached the crest of the hill, he saw before him, just crawling over the crest of the opposite hill, a figure on a bicycle coming swiftly towards him.

Even at that distance, he could make out a bedraggled white suit, a limp sailor hat and a vast pulpy bundle lashed to the handle-bars.

"Some country maiden, coming home from market," he said to himself. "I Hope she is enjoying the shower."

Then of a sudden, he braced himself for a shock, for a bell was clanging wildly, and a cry rang out upon his ears,--

"Oh, go away! Be careful! Get out of the way! Quick!"

He turned aside, out of the path of the flying wheel. It sounds a cowardly thing to have done, and doubtless the knights of old would have contrived a way of rescue. To the latter-day knight, however, there was something inevitable in the on-coming of the wheel, with its rider's feet kicking in a futile search for the pedals. It reminded him of his own futile search for his _motif_. Both searchers seemed equally helpless to attain their objects. Moreover, when a tall and muscular maiden sweeps down upon one, leaving behind her a train of shrieks and scattered phalanges, there is absolutely nothing for one to do but to get out of her way as expeditiously as possible. No use in breaking two necks, and--the critics were waiting for the symphonic poem.

He turned, then, to the right-hand edge of the road. Phebe was bouncing along over the stones dangerously near the other gutter, and he already was congratulating himself upon his escape. Then in a moment the situation was changed. The runaway wheel flashed into a mud puddle, veered and before his astonished eyes shed a rib or two and a clavicle from the swaying bundle, veered again and collided with his own wheel. In another instant, the right-hand gutter held two muddy bicycles, the greater portion of a human skeleton, Phebe McAlister and the composer of the _Alan Breck Overture_.

An experienced bicycle teacher once said that no woman ever picked herself up from a fall, without saying that she was not at all hurt. True to tradition, Phebe staggered to her feet, exclaiming,--

"Thank you; but I'm not hurt in the least. I'm so sorry--"

Then she paused abruptly and stared at the stranger in the gutter. He lay as he had fallen, his face half buried in the mud and his right arm twisted under him. More frightened than she had been in all her headlong descent of the hill, she bent over him and tried to turn him as he lay.

Gifford Barrett was an athlete as well as a musician, however, and it took all of Phebe's strength to stir him ever so slightly. As she did so, she disclosed a gash where his temple had struck upon a stone, and his right arm swung loosely out from his side. Phebe McAlister had suddenly found herself in the presence of her first case, and the presence was rather an appalling one.

In any crisis, the mind attacks a side issue. Phebe rose from her knees, took off the sodden thing which had been her hat, and carefully covered it over her saddle. Her face, underneath the streaks of mud, was very white, and her lips were unsteady. Then she pressed her hands over her eyes, bit her lips and gave her shoulders a little shake. That done, she knelt down in the mud once more and set herself to the task in hand, wondering meanwhile who and what her victim might be.

Obviously he was a gentleman. His firm, clean-cut lips alone would have settled that point to her satisfaction. Beyond that, she had no possible clue to his ident.i.ty. The situation was a trying one. The nearest house was a mile away; the rain was still pelting heavily down upon them, and she, Phebe McAlister, was alone in the storm with a perfect stranger whom she had knocked from his bicycle, stunned and perhaps injured for life.

To whom did he belong? What should she do with him? If he died, who would be responsible, not for the injury, but for making the funeral arrangements? For a moment, the unaccustomed tears rushed to her eyes, and, seen through their mist, her victim seemed to be expanding until he filled the whole landscape and surrounded her by dozens, all plastered with mud and begirt with whitened bones. Then she pulled herself together again. The stranger's arm was broken, his forehead b.l.o.o.d.y. She must see what she could do for him, then go for help.

There was a long interval when the noise of the rain was interrupted by little groans and exclamations from Phebe, while she tugged and shoved and pried at the man in the road. He was so very big, so very unconscious, so very determined to lie with his face buried in the mud and meet his end by suffocation. At last, she drew a long breath, mustered all her strength and gave him one pull which turned him completely over on his back. As she did so, his eyes opened dully and by degrees gathered expression. He looked up into her mud-stained face, down at his mud-stained clothes, around at the mud-stained skull which lay close to his side and grinned back at him encouragingly.

"What the deuce--" he faltered. Then once more he fainted away.

Twenty minutes later, Phebe was rushing away to the nearest house in search of help. There was but one house within reach, however, and fate willed that she should find that deserted. She hesitated whether she should ride on for two miles farther, or go back to her victim, and she decided upon the latter course. It seemed hours to her before she reached the top of the hill again. Then she stopped short, dismounted and stared down the slope in astonishment. Her victim had vanished from the scene.

Only the skull remained to mark the spot where he had lain, two deep tracks in the soft mud to show the way by which he had gone.

"Well, Babe?" Allyn's voice hailed her, as she rode wearily up the drive, the water squelching in her shoes and her soaked skirt flapping dismally about her pedals. "Were you out in all that shower?"

"Yes."

"Why didn't you go under cover?"

"There wasn't any cover to go under." Phebe's tone was not altogether amicable.

"But the mud? It's all over your face, and your wheel, and your hair."

"I fell off."

"Where?"

"Coming down Bannock Hill. I lost my pedals, and my wheel slipped in the mud."

"Bannock Hill? That's a bad place to fall. Break anything?"

"You can look and see."

But Allyn was not to be suppressed.

"Where's your hat?"

She started slightly and raised her hand to her head. It was bare.

"Oh, yes," she said unguardedly. "I remember now. I must have left it where I sat."

"Sat!" Allyn stared at his sister in amazement. "What did you do? Sit down to study the landscape?"

But Phebe stalked up the steps and into the house, and Allyn saw her no more until dinner-time.

Two days later, Allyn burst into the office where Phebe was bending over a book. In his hand was an unfolded newspaper which he flapped excitedly, as she looked up.