“ ‘A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw …’ ”
Vance leaned back and listened with deep-drawn breath and lowered lids. “Honeydew … honeydew …” he murmured as she ended, half consciously applying the epithet to her voice.
She dropped down into a chair beside him and looked at him thoughtfully. “It’s queer—your caring as much as that about poetry, and never having come across this.”
He flushed up, and for the first time looked at her with full awareness of her presence as a stranger, and an intruder on his dream. The look confirmed him in the impression that she was very young, though probably two or three years older than himself. But it might be only her tallness and self-assurance which made him think her older. She had dark gray eyes, deeply lashed, and features somewhat too long and thin in repose, but rounded and illumined by a smile which flashed across her face in sudden sympathy or amusement. Vance detected amusement now, and answered curtly: “I daresay if you knew me you’d think there was a whole lot of things I’d never come across.”
“I daresay,” she agreed complaisantly. “But I might also remember that you were probably too young even to have heard of ‘The Ancient Mariner.’ ”
“Coleridge? The ‘Ancient Mariner’ one? Was it the same who wrote this?”
She nodded. “You know ‘The Ancient Mariner,’ then? Sixth Reader, I suppose—or college course?” She laughed a little. “So culture comes.”
He interrupted angrily: “What have I said to make you laugh?”
“Nothing. I wasn’t laughing at you, but at the intelligence of our national educators—no, educationists, I think they call themselves nowadays—who manage to take the bloom off our greatest treasures by giving them to young savages to maul. I see, for instance, that they’ve spoilt ‘The Ancient Mariner’ for you.” She continued to scrutinize him thoughtfully. “You’re not one of the young savages—but the bloom has been rubbed off a good many things for you in that way, hasn’t it?”
“Well, yes—some.”
“Not that it matters—for you. You’ll get it back. But I do so hate to think of mutilated beauty.”
Mutilated beauty!
How rich the words sounded on her lips—as if she swept the rubbish of the centuries from some broken statue, noble in its ruin! Vance continued to look at her, absently yet intently. He had drawn her into his dream.
But she stood up and pushed her chair aside. “And now,” she said gaily, in a new voice, a light and humorous one, “perhaps you’ll tell me who you are and how you got here.”
The question seemed to come to him from so far off that he stared at her perplexedly before answering. “I—oh, I’m just the Tracys’ cousin. I’m staying at their house. They’re somewhere round dusting the other rooms.”
Her look became more friendly. “Oh, you’re the cousin from the West, who’s been ill and has come to Paul’s Landing for a change? Mrs. Tracy told me about you—only I can’t remember your name.”
“Vance Weston.”
“Mine’s Héloïse Spear. They call me Halo. The name and the nickname are both ridiculous.” She held out her hand. “And you’ve come to call on poor old Cousin Elinor? It’s an attention she doesn’t often receive from her own family.” She glanced about the room. “I haven’t been here in an age—I don’t know what made me come today. At least I didn’t—” she broke off with one of her fugitive smiles, letting her eyes rest on his and then turning away from him to inspect the books. “Some day,” she said, as if to herself, “I must have the courage to take these down and give them a good cleaning.”
Vance stood up also, beginning to speak eagerly. “Could I come and help you when you do—I mean with the books? I’d—I’d like it first-rate.”
She turned back to him, her eyes brimming with banter and coquetry. “On account of the books?”
But he was too deep in his own emotion to heed the challenge. He answered simply: “I don’t often get a chance at this kind.” His eyes followed hers about the crowded shelves. “I’ve never before been in a house with a library—a real library like this.”
She gave a little shrug. “Oh, it’s a funny library, antiquated, like the house. But Cousin Elinor does seem to have cared for good poetry. When other ladies were reading ‘Friendship’s Garland’ she chose Coleridge.”
His gaze returned perplexed to her face. “Why do you call it a funny library?”
“Well, it’s not exactly up-to-date. I suppose it’s a fairly good specimen of what used to be called a ‘gentleman’s library’ in my great-grandfather’s time. With additions, naturally, from each generation. Cousin Elinor must have bought a good many books herself.” She looked about her critically. “After all,” she concluded with a smile, “the Willows is getting to have an atmosphere.”
Vance listened, still perplexed. Her allusions escaped him—her smile was unintelligible—but he gathered that she attached no very great importance to the house, or to the books, and he dimly resented this air of taking for granted what to him was the revelation of an unknown world.
Involuntarily he lowered his voice. “It’s the first time I’ve ever been in a very old house,” he said, as if announcing something of importance.
“A very old house? The Willows?” The idea seemed a new one to her. “Well—after all, everything is relative, as what’s-his-name said.”
“Don’t you call it a very old house?”
She wrinkled her dark eyebrows in an effort of memory. “Let me see. Father’s great-uncle Ambrose Lorburn built it, I believe. When would that be?” She began to count on her fingers. “Say about 1830. Well, that does make it very nearly an old house for America, doesn’t it? Almost a hundred years!”
“And the same folks always lived in it?”
“Oh, of
