"I wish we might have talked more--I'm sure--when are you leaving?"

"I shall leave to-morrow."

"And we're leaving for the country ourselves. Papa and mamma go to-morrow--and, Mr. Bines, I _should_ have liked another talk with you--I wish we were dining at the Oldakers' again."

He observed Shepler strolling toward them.

"I shall be staying with Aunt Cornelia a few days after to-morrow."

Shepler came up.

"And I shall be leaving to-morrow, Miss Milbrey."

"Ah, Bines, glad to see you!"

The accepted lover looked Miss Milbrey over with rather a complacent air--with the unruffled confidence of a.s.sured possession. Percival fancied there was a look almost of regret in the girl's eyes.

"I'm afraid," said Shepler, "your aunt doesn't want to be kept waiting.

And she's already in a fever for fear you won't prefer the necklace she insists you ought to prefer."

"Tell Aunt Cornelia, please, that I shall be along in just a moment."

"She's quite impatient, you know," urged Shepler.

Percival extended his hand.

"Good-bye, Miss Milbrey. Don't let me detain you. Sorry I shall not see you again."

She gave him her hand uncertainly, as if she had still something to say, but could find no words for it.

"Good-bye, Mr. Bines."

"Good-bye, young man," Shepler shook hands with him cordially, "and the best of luck to you out there. I shall hope to hear good reports from you. And mind, you're to look us up when you're in town again. We shall always be glad to see you. Good-bye!"

He led the girl back to the case where the largest diamonds reposed chastely on their couches of royal velvet.

Percival smiled as he resumed his walk--smiled with all that bitter cynicism which only youth may feel to its full poignance. Yet, heartless as she was, he recalled that while she talked to him he had imprinted an imaginary kiss deliberately upon her full scarlet lips.

And now, too, he was forced to confess that, in spite of his very certain knowledge about her, he would actually prefer to have communicated it through the recognised physical media. He laughed again, more cheerfully.

"The spring has gotten a strangle-hold on my judgment," he said to himself.

At dinner that night he had the company of that estimable German savant, the Herr Doctor von Herzlich. He did not seek to incur the experience, but the amiable doctor was so effusive and interested that he saw no way of avoiding it gracefully. Returned from his archaeological expedition to Central America, the doctor was now on his way back to Marburg.

"I pleasure much in your news," said the cheerful man over his first gla.s.s of Rhine wine with the olive in it. "You shall now, if I have misapprehended you not, develop a new strongness of the character."

Percival resigned himself to listen. He was not unfamiliar with the lot of one who dines with the learned Von Herzlich.

"Now he's off," he said to himself.

"Ach! It is but now that you shall begin to live. Is it not that while you planned the money-ama.s.sing you were deferring to live--ah, yes--until some day when you had so much more? Yes? A common thought-failure it is--a common failure of the to-take-thoughtedness of life--its capacities and the intentions of the scheme under which we survive. Ach! So few humans learn that this invitation to live specifies not the hours, like a five-o'clock. It says--so well as Father-Mother Nature has learned to write the words to our unseeing eyes--'at once,' but we ever put off the living we are invited to at once--until to-morrow-next day, next year--until this or that be done or won. So now you will find this out. Before, you would have waited for a time that never came--no matter the all-money you gathered.

"Nor yet, my young friend, shall you take this matter to be of a seriousness, to be sorrow-worthy. If you take of the courage, you shall find the world to smile to your face, and father-mother you. You recall what the English Huxley says--Ah! what fine, dear man, the good Huxley--he says, yes, in the 'Genealogy of the Beasts,' 'It is a probable hypothesis that what the world is to organisms in general, each organism is to the molecules of which it is composed.' So you laugh at the world, the world it laugh back 'ha! ha! ha!'--then--soly--all your little molecules obediently respond--you thrill with the happiness--with the power--the desire--the capacity--you out-go and achieve. Yes? So fret not. Ach! we fret so much of what it shall be unwise to fret of. It is funny to fret.

Why? Why fret? Yet but the month last, they have excavated at Nippur, from the pre-Sargonic strata, a lady and a gentleman of the House of Ptah. What you say in New York--'a d.a.m.ned fine old family,' yes, is it not? I am read their description, and seen of the photographs.

"They have now the expressions of indifference--of disinterest--without the prejudice--as if they say, 'Ach! those troubles of ours, three thousand eight hundred years in the B.C.--nearly come to six thousand years before now--Ach! those troubles,' say this philosophic-now lady and gentleman, of the House of Ptah of Babylonia--'such a silliness--those troubles and frets; it was not the while-worth that we should ever have sorrowed, because the scheme of time and creation is suchly big; had we grasped but its bigness, and the littleness of our span, should we have felt griefs? Nay, nay--_nit_,' like the street-youths say--would say the lady and gentleman now so pa.s.sionless as to have philosophers become. And you, it should mean to you much.

Humans are funniest when they weep and tremble before, like you say, 'the facts in the case.' Ha! I laugh to myself at them often when I observe. Their funniness of the beards and eyebrows, the bald head, of the dress, the solemnities of manner, as it were they were persons of weight. Ah, they are of their insignificance so loftily unconscious.

Was it not great skill--to compel the admiration of the love-worthiest scientist--to create a unit of a numberless ma.s.s of units and then to enable it to feel each one the importance of the whole, as if each part were big as the whole? So you shall not fret I say.

"If the fret invade you, you shall do well to lie out in the friendly s.p.a.ce, and look at this small topspinning of a world through the gla.s.s that reduces.

"Yes? You had thought it of such bigness--its concerns of a sublime tragicness? Yet see now, these funny little animals on the surface of the spinning-ball. How frantic, as if all things were about to eventuate, remembering not that nothing ends. So? Observe the marks of their silliness, their unworthiness. You have reduced the ball to so big as a melon, yes? Watch the insects run about in the craziness, laughing, crying, loving their loves, hating their hates, fearing, fretting--killing one the other in such funny little clothes, made for such funny little purpose precisely--falling sick over the money-losings--and the ball so small, but one of such many--as many stars under the earth, remember, as above it.

"So! you are back to earth; you are a human like the rest, so foolish, so funny as any--so you say, 'Well, I shall not be more troubled again yet. I play the same game, but it is only a game, a little game to last an afternoon--I play my part--yes--the laughing part, crying part--loving, hating, killing part--what matter if I say it is good?'

If the Maker there be to look down, what joys him most--the coward who fears and frets, and the whine makes for his soul or body? Ach! no, it is the one who say, it is _good_--I could not better have done myself--a great game, yes--'let her rip,' like you West-people remark--'let her rip--you cannot lose _me_,' like you say also. Ach, so! And then he say, the great Planner of it,' Ach! I am understood at last--good!--bright man that,' like you say, also--'bright man that--it is of a pleasure to see him do well!'

"So, my young friend, you shall pleasure yourself still much yet. It is of an excellence to pleasure one's self judiciously. The lotus is a leguminous plant--so excellent for the salad--not for the roast. You have of the salad overeaten--you shall learn of your successful capacity for it--you shall do well, then. You have been of the reckless deportment--you may still be of it. That is not the matter. You shall be reckless as you like--but without your stored energy surplus to harm you. Your environment from the now demands of you the faculties you will most pleasure yourself in developing. You shall produce what you consume. The G.o.ds love such. Ach, yes!"

CHAPTER x.x.xVIII.

Some Phenomena Peculiar to Spring

He awoke early, refreshed and intensely alive. With the work done he became conscious of a feeling of disa.s.sociation from the surroundings in which he had so long been at home. Many words of the talkative German were running in his mind from the night before. He was glad the business was off his mind. He would now go the pleasant journey, and think on the way.

His trunks were ready for the car; and before he went down-stairs his hand-bag was packed, and the preparations for the start completed.

When, after his breakfast, he read the telegram announcing that the car had been delayed twenty-four hours in Chicago, he was bored by the thought that he must pa.s.s another day in New York. He was eager now to be off, and the time would hang heavily.

He tried to recall some forgotten detail of the business that might serve to occupy him. But the finishing had been thorough.

He ran over in his mind the friends with whom he could spend the time agreeably. He could recall no one he cared to see. He had no longer an interest in the town or its people.

He went aimlessly out on to Broadway in the full flood of a spring morning, breathing the fresh air hungrily. It turned his thought to places out of the grime and clamour of the city; to woods and fields where he might rest and feel the stimulus of his new plans. He felt aloof and sufficient unto himself.

He swung on to an open car bound north, and watched without interest the early quick-moving workers thronging south on the street, and crowding the cars that pa.s.sed him. At Forty-second Street, he changed to a Boulevard car that took him to the Fort Lee Ferry at One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street.

Out on the shining blue river he expanded his lungs to the clean, sweet air. Excursion boats, fluttering gay streamers, worked st.u.r.dily up the stream. Little yachts, in fresh-laundered suits of canvas, darted across their bows or slanted in their wakes, looking like white b.u.t.terflies. The vivid blue of the sky was flecked with bits of broken fleece, scurrying like the yachts below. Across the river was a high-towering bank of green inviting him over its summit to the languorous freshness beyond.

He walked off the boat on the farther side and climbed a series of steep wooden stairways, past a tiny cataract that foamed its way down to the river. When he reached the top he walked through a stretch of woods and turned off to the right, down a cool shaded road that wound away to the north through the fresh greens of oak and chestnut.

He was entranced at once by the royal abandon of spring, this wondrous time of secret beginnings made visible. The old earth was become as a young wife from the arms of an ardent spouse, blushing into new life and beauty for the very joy of love. He breathed the dewy freshness, and presently he whistled the "Spring Song" of Mendelssohn, that bubbling, half-joyous, half-plaintive little prayer in melody.

He was well into the spirit of the time and place. His soul sang. The rested muscles of his body and mind craved the resistance of obstacles.

He rejoiced. He had been wise to leave the city for the fresh, unspoiled country--the city with all its mean little fears, its petty immoralities, and its very trifling great concerns. He did not a.n.a.lyse, more than to remember, once, that the not reticent German would approve his mood. He had sought the soothing quiet with the unfailing instinct of the wounded animal.

The mysterious green life in the woods at either side allured him with its furtive pulsing. But he kept to the road and pa.s.sed on. He was not yet far enough from the town.

Some words from a little song ran in his mind as he walked: