The summer light lay so rightly on the lawn and trees of the Willows that Halo Tarrant understood more clearly than ever before the spell the place had cast on Vance Weston.
She had gone there to take a look, for the first time in months. The present owner, the old and infirm Miss Lorburn, sat in her house in Stuyvesant Square and fretted about her inability to keep an eye on the place; she always said what a pity it was that poor Tom hadn’t left it to poor Halo instead of to her. Miss Lorburn’s world was peopled with friends and relatives who seemed to her best described by the epithet “poor”; what with one thing or another, she thought them all objects of pity. It was only of herself, old, heavy, with blurred eyes, joints knotted by rheumatism, legs bloated by varicose veins, and her GOOD ear beginning to go, that she never spoke with compassion. She merely said it was a pity poor Halo would have to wait so long for the Willows . . . not that it would be much use to the poor child when she did get it, if the value of property at Paul’s Landing continued to decline at its present rate.
Since Mrs. Tracy’s departure for California the Willows, for the first time, had been entrusted to hands unconnected with its past, and as Miss Lorburn feared the new caretakers might not treat poor Elinor’s possessions with proper reverence it behoved Halo to see that everything was in order.
As she walked along the drive she was assailed by memories so remote that she felt like an old woman — as old as the Elinor Lorburn of the portrait above the mantel or the purblind cripple in Stuyvesant Square. “I almost wonder I’m not on crutches,” she mused; so heavily did the weight of the past hang on her feet and her mind.
The place wore its old look of having waited there quietly for her, with a sort of brooding certainty of her return — not changing, not impatient, not discouraged, but just standing there, house, turf, and trees, the house yearly losing more of its paint, the wistaria adding more clusters to the thousands mercifully veiling the angles and brackets it had been meant to adorn. As she looked about her she understood for the first time how, in what seemed the grotesqueness of discarded fashion, Vance’s impatient genius had caught the poetry of the past. For him the place had symbolized continuity, that great nutritive element of which no one had ever told him, of which neither Art nor Nature had been able to speak to him, since nothing in his training had prepared him for their teaching. Yet, blind puppy, groping embryo as he was, he had plunged instantly into that underlying deep when the Willows had given him a glimpse of it.
Halo had purposely avoided the new caretakers’ day. She wanted the place to herself; there were ghosts of her own there now. . . . She felt her way in among the familiar obscurities. That looming darkness on her right was the high Venetian cabinet in the hall; this spectral conclave on which a pale starlight twinkled down was the group of shrouded armchairs in confabulation under the prisms of the drawing room chandelier. Capricious rays, slanting through the shutters, seemed to pick out particular objects for her attention, like searchlights groping for landmarks over a night landscape. She fancied the inanimate things assisted in the search, beckoning to the light, and whispering: HERE, HERE! in their wistful striving for reanimation. There was no amount of psychic sensibility one could not read into the walls and furniture of an old empty house . . . .
Her own youth was in it everywhere, hanging in faded shreds like the worn silk of the curtains — her youth, already far-off and faded, though she was now only twenty-eight! As she stood in the library she recalled her first meeting with Vance Weston — how she had strolled in on one of her perfunctory visits and surprised an unknown youth in Elinor Lorburn’s armchair, his hair swept back untidily from a brooding forehead, his eyes bent on a book; and how, at her approach, he had lifted those eyes, without surprise or embarrassment, but with a deep inward look she was always to remember, and had asked eagerly: “Who wrote this?” How like Vance! It was always so with him. No time for preambles — always dashing straight to the vital matter, whether it were the authorship of “Kubla Khan,” or the desperate longing to kiss her. . . . She shut her eyes a moment, and listened to that cry: “You don’t understand — I want to kiss you!” He thought she didn’t understand — so much the better . . . .
In those early days, for all her maternal airs with him, she had been as young, as inexperienced as he was. She knew a good deal about art and literature, but next to nothing about life, though she thought herself a past mistress in its management. Her familiarity with pecuniary makeshifts, with the evasions and plausibilities of people muddling along on insufficient means, bluffing, borrowing, dodging their creditors, entertaining celebrities and neglecting to pay the milkman and the butcher — all these expedients had given her a precocious competence which she mistook for experience. They had also called forth a natural ardour for probity and fair dealing which she must have inherited from one of the straitlaced old Lorburns on the panelled walls at Eaglewood. Side by side with it burned an equally fierce ardour for living — for the beauty of the visible world, its sunrises and moon births, and the glories with which man’s labours have embellished it. Never was a girl more in love with the whole adventure of living, and less equipped to hold her own in it, than the Halo Spear who had come upon Vance Weston that afternoon.
In love in the human way too? Yes, that she had been equally ready for — only it seemed beset with difficulties. Hers was one of the undifferentiated natures which ask that all the faculties shall share in its adventures; she must love with eyes, ears, soul, imagination — must feel every sense and thought impregnated together. And either the young men who pleased her eye chilled her imagination, or else the responsive intelligences were inadequately housed. She wanted a companion on the flaming ramparts; and New York had so far failed to find her one.
Lewis Tarrant came the nearest. He was agreeable to look at; she liked his lounging height, the sharp thinness and delicate bony structure of his face, and she was impressed by the critical aloofness of mind, which unbent only for her. Her wavering impulses sought in him a rectitude on which she could lean. He had a real love of books, a calm cultivated interest in art; his mind was like a chilly moonlit reflection of her own. She nearly loved him — but not quite. And then, just as she had decided that he could never walk the ramparts with her, came the discovery that her family, certain of the marriage, had accepted one or two discreet loans — and the final shock of learning that it was Lewis who had found the missing Americana from the Willows and bought them back in time to avert a scandal . . . .
Well, what of all that? Hadn’t she always known what her family were like — long since suspected the worst of her brother? Why had she not washed her hands of them and gone her own way in the modern manner? She could not; partly from pride, but much more from attachment, from a sort of grateful tenderness. She had been happy, after all, in that muddling happy-go-lucky household. Her parents had a gipsylike charm, and they were always affectionate and responsive. The life of the mind, even the life of the spirit, had been enthusiastically cultivated in spite of minor moral shortcomings. If she loved poetry, if she knew more than most girls about history and art, about all the accumulated wonders peopling her eager intelligence, she owed it to daily intercourse with minds like her own, to............