Embittered by this experience I kept out of trouble for two years, and my next affair was with a widow, two years my senior, whom I met at a house in Scotland where I was staying for the shooting. She was a bit mournful, and lavender became her well. I forgot the grouse after my first day, and gave myself up to consoling her. She had, as no other woman I have known has had, a genius—it was nothing less—for graceful attitudes. To surprise her before an open fire, her prettily curved chin resting on her pink little palm, her eyes bright with lurking tears, and to see her lips twitch with the effort to restrain a sob when one came suddenly upon her—but the picture is not for my clumsy hand! I have never known whether she suffered me to make love to her merely as a distraction, or whether she was briefly amused by my ardor and entertained by the new phrases of adoration I contrived for her. I loved her quite sincerely; I am glad to have experienced the tumult she stirred in me—glad that the folding of her little hands upon her knees, as she bent toward the lighted hearth in that old Scotch manor, and her low, murmuring, mournful voice, made my heart jump. I told her—and recall it without shame—that her eyes were adorable islands aswim in brimming seas, and that her hands were fluttering white doves of peace. I found that I could maintain that sort of thing without much trouble for an hour at a time.
I did not know it was the last good-by when I packed my bags and gun-cases and left one frosty morning. I regret nothing, but am glad it all happened just so. Her marriage to a clergyman in the Establishment—a duke's second son in holy orders who enjoyed considerable reputation as a cricketer—followed quickly, and I have never seen her since. I was in love with that girl for at least a month. It did me no harm, and I think she liked it herself.
I next went down before the slang of an American girl with teasing eyes and amazing skill at tennis, whom I met at Oxford when she was a student in Lady Margaret. Her name was Iris and she was possessed by the spirit of Mischief. If you know aught of the English, you know that the average peaches-and-cream English girl is not, to put it squarely, exciting. Iris understood this perfectly and delighted in doing things no girl had ever done before in that venerable town. She lived at home—her family had taken a house out beyond Magdalen; and she went to and from the classic halls of Lady Margaret in a dog-cart, sometimes with a groom, sometimes without. When alone she dashed through the High at a gait which caused sedate matrons to stare and sober-minded fellows of the university to swear, and admiring undergraduates to chuckle with delight. I had gone to Oxford to consult a certain book in the Bodleian—a day's business only; but it fell about that in the post-office, where I had gone on an errand, I came upon Iris struggling for a cable-blank, and found one for her. As she stood at the receiving counter, impatiently waiting to file her message, she remarked, for the benefit, I believed, of a gaitered bishop at her elbow: "How perfectly rotten this place is!"—and winked at me. She was seventeen, and I was old enough to know better, but we had some talk, and the next day she bowed to me in front of St. Mary's and, the day after, picked me up out near Keble and drove me all over town, and past Lady Margaret, and dropped me quite boldly at the door of the Mitre. Shameful! It was; but at the end of a week I knew all her family, including her father, who was bored to death, and her mother, who had thought it a fine thing to move from Zanesville, Ohio, to live in a noble old academic center like Oxford—that was what too much home-study and literary club had done for her.
Iris kept the cables hot with orders for clothes, caramels and shoes, while I lingered and hung upon her lightest slang and encouraged her in the idea that education in her case was a sinful waste of time; and I comforted her father for the loss of his native buckwheat cakes and consoled her mother, who found that seven of the perfect English servants of the story-books did less than the three she had maintained at Zanesville. I lingered in Oxford two months, and helped them get out of town when Iris was dropped from college for telling the principal that the Zanesville High School had Lady Margaret over the ropes for general educational efficiency, and that, moreover, she would not go to the Established Church because the litany bored her. Whereupon—their dependence on me having steadily increased—I got them out of Oxford and over to Dresden, and Iris and I became engaged. Then I went to Ireland on a matter of business, made an incendiary speech in Galway, smashed a couple of policemen and landed in jail. Before my father, with, I fear, some reluctance, bailed me out, Iris had eloped with a lieutenant in the German army and her family had gone sadly back to Zanesville.
This is the truth, and the whole truth, and I plead guilty to every count of the indictment. Thereafter my pulses cooled and I sought the peace of jungles; and the eyes of woman charmed me no more. When I landed at Annandale and opened my portfolio to write Russian Rivers my last affair was half a dozen years behind me.
Sobered by these reflections, I left the terrace shortly after eleven and walked through the strip of wood that lay between the house and the lake to the Glenarm pier; and at once matters took a turn that put the love of woman quite out of the reckoning.
CHAPTER III
I MEET MR. REGINALD GILLESPIE
There was a man in our town,
And he was wondrous wise,
He jump'd into a bramble-bush,
And scratch'd out both his eyes;
But when he saw his eyes were out,
With all his might and main
He jump'd into another bush,
And scratch'd them in again.
—Old Ballad.
As I neared the boat-house I saw a dark figure sprawled on the veranda and my Japanese boy spoke to me softly. The moon was at full and I drew up in the shadow of the house and waited. Ijima had been with me for several years and was a boy of unusual intelligence. He spoke both English and French admirably, was deft of hand and wise of mind, and I was greatly attached to him. His courage, fidelity and discretion I had tested more than once. He lay quite still on the pier, gazing out upon the lake, and I knew that something unusual had attracted his attention. He spoke to me in a moment, but without turning his head.
"A man has been rowing up and down the shore for an hour. When he came in close here I asked him what he wanted and he rowed away without answering. He is now off there by the school."
"Probably a summer boarder from across the lake."
"Hardly, sir. He came from the direction of the village and acts queerly."
I flung myself down on the pier and crawled out to where Ijima lay. Every pier on the lake had its distinctive lights; the Glenarm sea-mark was—and remains—red, white and green. We lay by the post that bore the three lanterns, and watched the slow movement of a rowboat along the margin of the school grounds. The boat was about a thousand yards from us in a straight line, though farther by the shore; but the moonlight threw the oarsman and his craft into sharp relief against the overhanging bank. St. Agatha's maintains a boathouse for the use of students, and the pier lights—red, white and red—lay beyond the boatman, and he seemed to be drawing slowly toward them. The fussy little steamers that run the errands of the cottagers had made their last rounds and sought their berths for the