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Page 50
"Don't you sometimes grow weary for an abiding place?" Laura pulled
off her gauntlets and laid her hot hands on the cool lichen-grown
stones of the field-wall. The bridle-rein hung over her arm.
Fitzgerald had drawn his through a stirrup. "Think of wandering here
and there, with never a place to come back to."
"I have thought of it often in the few days I have been here. I have a
home in New York, but I could not possibly afford to live in it; so I
rent it; and when I want to go fishing there's enough under hand to pay
the expenses. My poor old dad! He was always indorsing notes for his
friends, or carrying stock for them; and nothing ever came back. I am
afraid the disillusions broke his heart. And then, perhaps I was a
bitter disappointment. I was expelled from college in my junior year.
I had no head for figures other than that kind which inhabit the Louvre
and the Vatican."
Her face became momentarily mirthful.
"So I couldn't take hold of the firm for him," he continued. "And I
suppose the last straw was when I tried my hand at reporting on one of
the newspapers. He knew that the gathering of riches, so far as I was
concerned, was a closed door. But I found my level; the business was
and is the only one that ever interested me or fused my energy with
real work."
"But it is real work. You are one of those men who have done
something. Most men these days rest on their fathers' laurels."
"It's the line of the least resistance. I never knew that the Jersey
coast was so picturesque. What a sweep! Do you know, your house on
that pine-grown crest reminds me of the Villa Serbelloni, only yonder
is the sea instead of Como?"
"Como." Her eyes became dreamily half-shut. Recollection put on its
seven-league boots and annihilated the space between the wall under her
elbows and the gardens of Serbelloni. Fitzgerald half understood the
thought. "Isn't Mr. Breitmann just a bit of a mystery to you?" she
asked. The seven-league boots had returned at a bound.
"In some ways, yes." He rather resented the abrupt angle; it was not
in poetic touch with the time being.
"He is inclined to be too much reserved. But last night Mr. Ferraud
succeeded in tearing down some of it. If I could put in a book what
all you men have seen and taken part in! Mr. Breitmann would be almost
handsome but for those scars."
He kicked the turf at the foot of the wall. "In Germany they are
considered beauty-spots."
"I am not in sympathy with that custom."
"Still, it requires courage of a kind."
"The noblest wounds are those that are carried unseen. Student scars
are merely patches of vanity."
"He has others besides those. He was nearly killed in the Soudan."
Fitzgerald was compelled to offer some defense for the absent. That
Breitmann had lied to him, that his appearance here had been in the
regular order of things, did not take away the fact that the Bavarian
was a man and a brave one. Closely as he had watched, up to the
present he had learned absolutely nothing; and to have shown Breitmann
the telegram would have accomplished nothing further than to have put
him wholly on guard.
"Have you no scars?" mischief in her eyes.
"Not yet;" and the force of his gaze turned hers aside. "Yet I must
not forget my conscience; 'tis pretty well battered up."
She greeted this with laughter. She had heard men talk like this
before. "You have probably never done a mean or petty thing in all
your life."
"Mean and petty things never disturb a man's conscience. It's the big
things that scar."
"That's a platitude."
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