The Lovely Lady

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Transcriber's notes:

Four typographical errors have been corrected:
Page 88, "seemes" changed to "seems" (it seems such a wasteful way
to live somehow,)
Page 162, "Ellen" changed to "Ellen," ("I'm very glad you feel that way
about it, Ellen,")
Page 199, "accomodating" changed to "accommodating" (He felt his mind
accommodating to)
Page 252, "Weatherall" changed to "Weatheral" (Mr. Weatheral had some
papers)

THE LOVELY LADY

_By the same author_

A WOMAN OF GENIUS

THE ARROW MAKER

THE GREEN BOUGH

CHRIST IN ITALY

[Illustration: _"It was one thin web of rose and gold over lakes of
burnished light...."_]

THE LOVELY LADY

BY MARY AUSTIN

[Illustration: ]

_Frontispiece by Gordon Grant_

GARDEN CITY NEW YORK

DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY

1913

_Copyright, 1913, by_

DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY

_All rights reserved, including that of
translation into Foreign Languages,
including the Scandinavian._

To

J. AND E.

THE COMPANIONS OF THE GONDOLA

CONTENTS

PAGE

PART ONE

In which Peter meets a Dragon, and the Lovely
Lady makes her appearance. 3

PART TWO

In which Peter becomes invisible on the way to
growing rich. 37

PART THREE

In which Peter becomes a bachelor. 59

PART FOUR

In which the Lovely Lady makes a final appearance. 107

ILLUSTRATIONS

"It was one thin web of rose and gold over lakes of
burnished light...."

PART ONE

IN WHICH PETER
MEETS A DRAGON, AND
THE LOVELY LADY
MAKES HER APPEARANCE

PART ONE

IN WHICH PETER MEETS A DRAGON, AND THE
LOVELY LADY MAKES HER APPEARANCE

I

The walls of the Wonderful House rose up straight and shining, pale
greenish gold as the slant sunlight on the orchard grass under the apple
trees; the windows that sprang arching to the summer blueness let in the
scent of the cluster rose at the turn of the fence, beginning to rise
above the dusty smell of the country roads, and the evening clamour of
the birds in Bloombury wood. As it dimmed and withdrew, the shining of
the walls came out more clearly. Peter saw then that they were all of
coloured pictures wrought flat upon the gold, and as the glow of it
increased they began to swell and stir like a wood waking. They leaned
out from the walls, looking all one way toward the increasing light and
tap-tap of the Princess' feet along the halls.

"Peter, oh, Peter!"

The tap-tapping grew sharp and nearer like the sound of a crutch on a
wooden veranda, and the voice was Ellen's.

"Oh, Peter, you are always a-reading and a-reading!"

Peter rolled off the long settle where he had been stretched and put the
book in his pocket apologetically.

"I was just going to quit," he said; "did you want anything, Ellen?"

"The picnic is coming back; I thought we could go down to the turn to
meet them. Mrs. Sibley said she would save me some things from the
luncheon."

If there was a little sting to Peter in Ellen's eagerness, it was
evidence at least, how completely he and his mother had kept her from
realizing that it was chiefly because of their not being able to afford
the well-filled basket demanded by a Bloombury picnic that they had not
accepted the invitation. Ellen had thought it was because Bet, the mare,
could not be spared all day from the ploughing nor Peter from hoeing
the garden, and her mother was too busy with the plaid gingham dress she
was making for the minister's wife, to do any baking. It meant to Ellen,
the broken fragments of the luncheon, just so much of what a picnic
should mean: the ride in the dusty morning, swings under the trees, easy
games that she could play, lemonade, pails and pails of it, pink ham
sandwiches and frosted cake; and if Ellen could have any of these, she
was having a little piece of the picnic. What it would have meant
particularly to Peter over and above a day let loose, the arching elms,
the deep fern of Bloombury wood, might have been some passages, perhaps,
which could be taken home and made over into the groundwork of new and
interesting adventures in the House from which Ellen had recalled him.
There was a girl with June apple cheeks and bright brown eyes at that
picnic, who could have given points to princesses.

He followed the tapping of his sister's crutch along the thick, bitter
smelling dust of the road, rising more and more heavily as the dew
gathered, until they came to the turn by the cluster rose and heard
below them on the bridge, the din of the wheels and the gay laughter of
the picnickers.

"Hi, Peter!"

"Hello, Ellen!"

"Awful sorry you couldn't come ... had a bully time.... Killed a
copperhead and two water snakes."

"Here, Ellen, catch ahold of this!"

And while she was about it the June apple girl leaned over the end-board
of the wagon, and spoke softly to Peter.

"We're going over to Harvey's pasture next Wednesday afternoon,
berrying, in the Democrat wagon with our team; Jim Harvey's going to
drive. We made it up to-day. Surely you can get away for an afternoon?"
That was what the voice said. "To be with me," the eyes added.

"I don't know.... I'd like it...."

It was not altogether the calculation as to how much earlier he would
have to get up that morning to be able to take an hour off in the
afternoon, that made Peter hesitate, but the sudden swimming of his
senses about the point of meeting eyes. "I'll tell you what," he said,
"you come by for Ellen, and I'll walk over about four and ride home with
you."

"Oh," said the girl; she did not know quite whether to triumph at having
gained so much or to be disappointed at so little. "I'll be expecting
you."

The horses creaked forward in the harness, the dust puffed up from under
the wheels and drowned the smell of the wilding rose, it fell thick on
the petals and a little on Peter's spirit, too, as he followed Ellen
back to the house, though it never occurred to him to think any more of
it than that he had been working too long in the hot sun and was very
tired. It did not, however, prevent his eating his share of the picnic
dainties as he sat with his mother and Ellen on the veranda. Then as the
soft flitter of the bats' wings began in the dusk, he kissed them both
and went early up to bed.

Peter's room was close under the roof and that was close under the elm
boughs; all hours he could hear them finger it with soft rustling
touches. The bed was pulled to the window that gave upon the downslope
of the hill; at the foot of it one saw the white bloom-faces of the
alders lift and bow above the folded leaves, and the rising of the river
damp across the pastures. All the light reflected from the sky above
Bloombury wood was no more than enough to make a glimmer on the glass of
a picture that hung at the foot of Peter's bed. It served to show the
gilt of the narrow frame and the soft black of the print upon which
Peter had looked so many times that he thought now he was still seeing
it as he lay staring in the dusk--a picture of a young man in bright
armour with loosened hair, riding down a particularly lumpy and swollen
dragon. Flames came out of the creature's mouth in the immemorial
fashion of dragons, but the young man was not hurt by them. He sat there
lightly, his horse curvetting, his lance thrust down the dragon's throat
and coming out of the back of his head, doing a great deed easily, the
way people like to think of great things being done. It was a very
narrow picture, so narrow that you might think that it had something to
do with the dragon's doubling on himself and the charger's forefeet
being up in the air to keep within the limits of the frame, and the
exclusion from it of the Princess whom, as his father had told him the
story, the young knight George had rescued from those devouring jaws. It
came out now, quite clearly, that she must have had cheeks as red as
June apples and eyes like the pools of spring rain in Bloombury wood,
and her not being there in the picture was only a greater security for
her awaiting him at this moment in the House with the Shining Walls.

There was, for the boy still staring at it through the dusk, something
particularly personal in the picture, for ever since his father had
died, three years ago, Peter had had a dragon of his own to fight. Its
name was Mortgage. It had its lair in Lawyer Keplinger's office, from
which it threatened twice yearly to come out and eat up his mother and
Ellen and the little house and farm, and required to have its mouth
stopped with great wads of interest which took all Peter's laborious
days to scrape together. This year, however, he had hopes, if the garden
turned out well, of lopping off a limb or a claw of the dragon by way
of a payment on the principal, which somehow seemed to bring the
Princess so much nearer, that as Peter lay quite comfortably staring up
at the glimmer on the wall, the four gold lines of the frame began to
stretch up and out and the dark block of the picture to recede until it
became the great hall of a palace again, and there was the Princess
coming toward him in a golden shimmer.

There was just such another glow on the afternoon when Peter walked over
to the berrying and came up with the apple-cheeked girl whose name was
Ada, a good half mile from the others. As they climbed together over
uneven ground she gave him her hand to hold, and there was very little
to say and no need of saying it until they came to the hill overlooking
the pasture, yellowing toward the end of summer, full of late bloom and
misty colour passing insensibly into light. Threads of gossamer caught
on the ends of the scrub or floated free, glinting as they turned and
bellied in the windless air, to trick the imagination with the hint of
robed, invisible presences.

"Oh, Peter, don't you wish it would stay like this always?"

"Like this," Peter gave her hand the tiniest squeeze to show what there
was about this that he would like to keep. "It's just as good to look at
any season though," he insisted. "I was here hunting rabbits last
winter, in February, and you could find all sorts of things in the
runways where the brambles bent over and kept off the snow; bunches of
berries and coloured leaves, and little green fern, and birds hopping in
and out."

Ada spread her skirts as she sat on a flat boulder and began sticking
leaves into Peter's hat.

"Peter, what are you going to do this winter?"

"I don't know, I should like to go over to the high school at Harmony,
but I suppose I'll try to get a place to work near home."

"We've been getting up a dancing and singing school, to begin in
October. The teacher is coming from Dassonville. It will be once a week;
we sing for an hour and then have dancing. It will be cheap as
cheap--only two dollars a month. I hope you can come."

"I don't know; I'll think about it." He was thinking then that two
dollars did not sound much, but when you come to subtract it from the
interest it was a great deal, and then there would be Ellen to pay for,
and perhaps a dress for her, and dancing shoes for himself and singing
books. And no doubt at the dances there would be basket suppers.

"I should think you could come if you wanted to. Jim Harvey's getting it
up.... He wants to keep company with me this winter." Ada was a little
nervous about this, but as she stole a glance at Peter's face as he lay
biting at a stem of grass, she grew quite comfortable again. "But I
don't know as I will," she said. "I don't care very much for Jim
Harvey."

Peter picked up a stone and shied it joyously at a thrush in the bushes.

"And I don't know as I want you to," he declared boldly. "I'll come to
that dancing school if I possibly can, Ada, and if I can't you'll know
it isn't because I don't wish to."

"You must want to with all your might and that'll make it come true. You
can wish it on my amethyst ring."

"You won't take it off until October, Ada?"

"I truly won't." And it took Peter such a long time to get the ring on
and held in place while the wish was properly made, that it was
practically no time at all until the others found them on the way home
as they came laughing up the hill.

As it happened, however, Peter did not get to the dancing school once
that winter. The first of the cold spell Ellen had slipped on the ice,
to the further trying of her lame back, and there were things to be done
to it which the doctor said could not possibly be put off, so it
happened that the mortgage dragon did not get his payment and Peter gave
up the high school to get a place in Greenslet's grocery at Bloombury.
And since there were the books to be made up after supper, and as Bet,
the mare, after being driven in the delivery wagon all day, could not be
let stand half the night in the cold at the schoolhouse door, it turned
out that Peter had not been once to the dancing school. In the beginning
he had done something for himself in the way of a hall for dancing,
thrown out from the House of the Shining Walls, in which he and the
Princess Ada, to lovely, soundless strains, had whirled away, and found
occasion to say things to each other such as no ballroom could
afford;--bright star pointed occasions which broke and scattered before
the little hints of sound that crept up the stair to advise him that
Ellen was stifling back the pain for fear of waking him. They had moved
Ellen's bed downstairs as a way of getting on better with the
possibility of her being bedridden all that winter, and the tiny
whispered moan recalled him to the dread that as the half yearly term
came around, what with doctor's bills and delicacies, the mortgage
dragon would have not even his sop of interest, and remain whole and
threatening as before.

When Ellen was able to sit up in bed the mother moved her sewing in
beside it. Then Peter would sit on the other side of the lamp with a
book, and the walls of the House rose up from its pages gilded finely,
and the lights would come out and the dancing begin, but before he could
get more than a word with the Princess, he would hear Ellen:

"Peter, oh, Peter! I wish you wouldn't be always with your nose in a
book. I wish you would talk sometimes."

"What about, Ellen?"

"Oh, Peter, you are the _worst_. I should think you would take some
interest in things."

"What sort of things?" Peter wished to know.

"Why, who comes in the store, and what they say, and everything."

"Mrs. Sleason wanted us to open a kit of mackerel to see if she'd like
it," began Peter literally, "and we persuaded her to take two cans of
sardines instead. Does that interest you?"

"Have you sold any of the blue tartan yet?"

"Ada Brown bought seven yards of it."

"Oh, Peter! And trimmings?"

"Six yards of black velvet ribbon--yes, I forgot--Mrs. Blackman is to
make it up for her. I heard Mrs. Brown say she would call for the
linings."

"She's having it made up for Jim Harvey's birthday," Ellen guessed
shrewdly. "He's twenty-one, you know.... People say she's engaged to
him."

Peter felt the walls of the House which had stood out waiting for him
during this interlude, fall inward into the gulf of blackness. Nobody
said anything for two or three ticks of the large kitchen clock, and
then Ellen burst out:

"I think she's a nasty, flirty, stuck-up _thing_; that's what I think!"

"Shs--hss! Ellen," said her mother.

"Peter," demanded Ellen, "are you reading again?"

"I beg your pardon, Ellen." Peter did not know that he had turned a
page.

"Don't you ever wish for anything for yourself, Peter? Don't you wish
you were rich?"

"No, Ellen, I don't know that I ever do."

But as the winter got on and the news of Ada Brown's engagement was
confirmed, he must have wished it a great many times.

One evening late in January he was sitting with his mother very quietly
by the kitchen stove, the front of which was opened to throw out the
heat; there was the good smell of the supper in the room, for though he
had a meal with the Greenslets at six, his mother always made a point of
having something hot for him when he came in from bedding down the
mare, and the steam of it on the window-panes made dull smears of the
reflected light. The shade of the lamp was drawn down until the ceiling
of the room was all in shadow save for the bright escape from the
chimney which shone directly overhead, round and yellow as twenty
dollars, and as Peter leaned back in his chair, looking up, it might
have been that resemblance which gave a turn to his thoughts and led him
to say to his mother:

"Why did my father never get rich?"

"I hardly know, Peter. He used to say that he couldn't afford it. There
were so many other things he wished to do; and I wished them, too. When
we were young we did them together. Then your father was the sort of man
who always gave too much and took too little. I remember his saying once
that no one who loved his fellowman very much, _could_ get rich."

"Do you wish he had?"

"I don't know that either. No, not if he was happier the way he was. And
we _were_ happy. Things would have come out all right if it hadn't been
for the accident when the thresher broke, and his being ill so long
afterward. And my people weren't so kind as they might have been. You
see, they always thought him a little queer. Before we were married,
before we were even engaged, he had had a little money. It had been left
him, and instead of investing it as anybody in Bloombury would, he spent
it in travel. I remember his saying that his memories of Italy were the
best investment he could have made. But afterward, when he was in
trouble, they threw it up to him. We had never got in debt before ...
and then just as he was getting round, he took bronchitis and died."

She wiped her eyes quietly for a while, and the kettle on the stove
began to sing soothingly, and presently Peter ventured:

"Do you wish I would get rich?"

"Yes, Peter, I do. We are all like that, I suppose, we grown-ups. Things
we manage to get along without ourselves, we want for our children. I
hope you will be a rich man some day; but, Peter, I don't want you to
think it a reflection on your father that he wasn't. He had what he
thought was best. He might have left me with more money and fewer happy
memories--and that is what women value most, Peter;--the right sort of
women. There are some who can't get along without _things_: clothes, and
furniture, and carriages. Ada Brown is that kind; sometimes I'm afraid
Ellen is a little. She takes after my family."

"It is partly on account of Ellen that I want to get rich."

"You mustn't take it too hard, Peter; we've always got along somehow,
and nobody in Bloombury is very rich."

Peter turned that over in his mind the whole of a raw and sleety
February. And one day when nobody came into the store from ten till
four, and loose winds went in a pack about the village streets, casting
up dry, icy dust where now and then some sharp muzzle reared out of the
press as they turned the corners, he spoke to Mr. Greenslet about it. It
was so cold that day that neither the red apples in the barrels nor the
crimson cranberries nor the yellowing hams on the rafters could
contribute any appearance of warmth to the interior of the grocery. A
kind of icy varnish of cold overlaid the gay lables of the canned
goods; the remnants of red and blue tartan exposed for sale looked
coarse-grained with the cold, and cold slips of ribbons clung to the
glass of the cases like the tongues of children tipped to the frosted
panes. Even the super-heated stove took on a purplish tinge of
chilblains, roughed by the wind.

A kind of arctic stillness pervaded the place, out of which the two men
hailed each other at intervals as from immeasurable deeps of space.

"Mr. Greenslet," ventured Peter at last, "are you a rich man?"

"Not by a long sight."

"Why?" questioned Peter.

"Not built that way."

The grocer lapsed back into the silence and seemed to lean against it
meditatively. The wolf wind howled about the corners and cast snow like
powdered glass upon the windows contemptuously, and time went by with a
large deliberate movement like a fat man turning over, before Peter
hailed again.

"Did you ever want to be?"

Mr. Greenslet reached out for the damper of the stove ostensibly to
shake down the ashes, but really to pull himself up out of the soundless
spaces of thought.

"When I was your age, yes. Thought I was going to be." The shaking of
the damper seemed to loosen the springs of speech in him. "I was up in
the city working for Siegel Brothers; began as a bundle boy and meant to
be one of the partners. But by the time I worked up to fancy goods I
realized that I would have to be as old as Methuselah to make it at that
rate. And Mrs. Greenslet didn't like the city; she was a Bloombury girl.
It wasn't any place for the children."

"So you came back?"

"We had saved a little. I bought out this place and put in a few notions
I'd got from Siegel's. I'm comfortably off, but I'm not rich."

"Would you like to be?"

"I don' know, I don' know. I'd like to give the boys a better start than
I had, but I'm my own boss here and one of the leading men. That's
always something."

Peter went and looked out of the smudged windows while he considered
this. The long scrapes of the wind in the loose snow were like the
scratches of great claws. It was now about mail time and a few people
began to stir in the street; the clear light and the cold gave them a
poverty-bitten look.

"Does anybody ever get rich in Bloombury?"

"Not that I know of. There's Mr. Dassonville in Harmony--Dave
Dassonville, the richest man in these parts."

"I suppose he could tell me how to go about it?"

"I suppose he would if he knows. Mostly these things just happen."

Peter did not say anything more just then; he was watching a man and a
girl of about his own age who had come out of a frame house farther down
the street. The young man was walking so as to shield her from the wind,
her rosy cheek was at his shoulder, and she smiled up at him over her
muff, from dark, bright eyes.

"What's set you on to talk about riches? Thinking of doing something in
that line yourself?"

"Yes," said Peter, kicking at the baseboard with his toes. "I don't know
how it is to be done, but I've got to be rich. I've just simply got to."

II

It was along in the beginning of spring on a day full of wet cloud and
clearing wind, that Peter walked over to Harmony to inquire of Mr. David
Dassonville the way to grow rich. It was Sunday afternoon and the air
sweet with the sap adrip from the orchards lately pruned and the smell
of the country road dried to elasticity by the winds of March.

Between timidity and the conviction that a week day would have been
better suited to his business, he drew on to the place of his errand
very slowly, for he was sore with the raking of the dragon's claws, and
unrested. It had been a terrible scrape to get together the last
instalment of interest, and since Ellen had shattered it with the gossip
about Ada Brown's engagement, there had been no House with Shining Walls
for Peter to withdraw into out of the dragon's breath of poverty; above
all, no Princess.

He did not know where the House had come from any more than he knew now
where it had gone. It was a gift out of his childhood to his shy,
unfriended youth, but he understood that if ever its walls should waver
and rise again to enclose his dreams, there would be no Princess. Never
any more. Princesses were for fairy tales; girls wanted Things. There
was his mother too--he had wished so to get her a new dress this winter.
It was an ache to him to cut off yards and yards of handsome stuffs at
Mr. Greenslet's, and all the longing in the world had not availed to get
one of them for his mother. Plainly the mastery of Things was
accomplished by being rich; he was on his way to Mr. Dassonville to find
out how it was done.

It was quite four of the clock when he paused at the bottom of the
Dassonville lawn to look up at the lace curtains at the tall French
windows. Nobody in Bloombury was rich enough to have lace curtains at
all the windows, and the boy's spirit rose at the substantial evidence
of being at last fairly in the track of his desire.

He found Mr. Dassonville willing to receive him in quite a friendly way,
sitting in his library, keeping the place with his finger in the book he
had been reading to his wife. Peter also found himself a little at a
loss to know how to begin in the presence of this lady, for he
considered it a matter quite between men, but suddenly she looked up and
smiled. It came out on her face fresh and delicately as an apple orchard
breaking to bloom, and besides making it quite spring in the room,
discovered in herself a new evidence of the competency of Mr. David
Dassonville to advise the way of riches. She looked fragile and
expensive as she sat in her silken shawl, her dark hair lifted up in a
half moon from her brow, her hands lying in her lap half-covered with
the lace of her sleeves, white and perfect like twin flowers. He saw
rings flashing on the one she lifted to motion to the maid to bring a
chair.

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