Wild Wings by Margaret Rebecca Piper

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WILD WINGS

A ROMANCE OF YOUTH

BY MARGARET REBECCA PIPER

1921

CONTENTS

I MOSTLY TONY

II WITH ROSALIND IN ARDEN

III A GIRL WHO COULDN'T STOP BEING A PRINCESS

IV A BOY WHO WASN'T AN ASS BUT BEHAVED LIKE ONE

V WHEN YOUTH MEETS YOUTH

VI A SHADOW ON THE PATH

VII DEVELOPMENTS BY MAIL

VIII THE LITTLE LADY WHO FORGOT

IX TEDDY SEIZES THE DAY

X TONY DANCES INTO A DISCOVERY

XI THINGS THAT WERE NOT ALL ON THE CARD

XII AND THERE IS A FLAME

XIII BITTER FRUIT

XIV SHACKLES

XV ON THE EDGE OF THE PRECIPICE

XVI IN WHICH PHIL GETS HIS EYES OPENED

XVII A WEDDING RING IT WAS HARD TO REMEMBER

XVIII A YOUNG MAN IN LOVE

XIX TWO HOLIDAYS MAKE CONFESSION

XX A YOUNG MAN NOT FOR SALE

XXI HARRISON CRESSY REVERTS

XXII THE DUNBURY CURE

XXIII SEPTEMBER CHANGES

XXIV A PAST WHICH DID NOT STAY BURIED

XXV ALL THE WORLD'S A STAGE

XXVI THE KALEIDOSCOPE REVOLVES

XXVII TROUBLED WATERS

XXVIII IN DARK PLACES

XXIX THE PEDIGREE OF PEARLS

XXX THE FIERY FURNACE

XXXI THE MOVING FINGER CONTINUES TO WRITE

XXXII DWELLERS IN DREAMS

XXXIII WAITING FOR THE END OF THE STORY

XXXIV IN WHICH TWO MASSEYS MEET IN MEXICO

XXXV GEOFFREY ANNERSLEY ARRIVES

XXXVI THE PAST AND FUTURE MEET

XXXVII ALAN MASSEY LOSES HIMSELF

XXXVIII THE SONG IN THE NIGHT

XXXIX IN WHICH THE TALE ENDS IN THE HOUSE ON THE HILL

CHAPTER I

MOSTLY TONY

Among the voluble, excited, commencement-bound crowd that boarded the
Northampton train at Springfield two male passengers were conspicuous for
their silence as they sat absorbed in their respective newspapers which
each had hurriedly purchased in transit from train to train.

A striking enough contrast otherwise, however, the two presented. The
man next the aisle was well past sixty, rotund of abdomen, rubicund
of countenance, beetle-browed. He was elaborately well-groomed,
almost foppish in attire, and wore the obvious stamp of worldly
success, the air of one accustomed to giving orders and seeing them
obeyed before his eyes.

His companion and chance seat-mate was young, probably a scant five and
twenty, tall, lean, close-knit of frame with finely chiseled, almost
ascetic features, though the vigorous chin and generous sized mouth
forbade any hint of weakness or effeminacy. His deep-set, clear gray-blue
eyes were the eyes of youth; but they would have set a keen observer to
wondering what they had seen to leave that shadow of unyouthful gravity
upon them.

It happened that both men--the elderly and the young--had their papers
folded at identically the same page, and both were studying intently the
face of the lovely, dark-eyed young girl who smiled out of the duplicate
printed sheets impartially at both.

The legend beneath the cut explained that the dark-eyed young beauty
was Miss Antoinette Holiday, who would play Rosalind that night in the
Smith College annual senior dramatics. The interested reader was
further enlightened to the fact that Miss Holiday was the daughter of
the late Colonel Holiday and Laura LaRue, a well known actress of a
generation ago, and that the daughter inherited the gifts as well as
the beauty of her famous mother, and was said to be planning to follow
the stage herself, having made her debut as the charming heroine of "As
You Like It."

The man next the aisle frowned a little as he came to this last sentence
and went back to the perusal of the girl's face. So this was Laura's
daughter. Well, they had not lied in one respect at least. She was a
winner for looks. That was plain to be seen even from the crude newspaper
reproduction. The girl was pretty. But what else did she have beside
prettiness? That was the question. Did she have any of the rest of
it--Laura's wit, her inimitable charm, her fire, her genius? Pshaw! No,
of course she hadn't. Nature did not make two Laura LaRue's in one
century. It was too much to expect.

Lord, what a woman! And what a future she had had and thrown away for
love! Love! That wasn't it. She could have had love and still kept on
with her career. It was marriage that had been the catastrophe--the fatal
blunder. Marriage and domesticity for a woman like that! It was
asinine--worse--criminal! It ought to have been forbidden by law. And the
stubbornness of her! After all these years, remembering, Max Hempel could
have groaned aloud. Every stage manager in New York, including himself,
had been ready to bankrupt himself offering her what in those days were
almost incredible contracts to prevent her from the suicidal folly on
which she was bent. But to no avail. She had laughed at them all, laughed
and quit the stage at six and twenty, and a few years later her beauty
and genius were still--in death. What a waste! What a damnation waste!

At this point in his animadversions Max Hempel again looked at the girl
in the newspaper, the girl who was the product of the very marriage he
had been cursing, LaRue's only daughter. If there had been no marriage,
neither would there have been this glorious, radiant, vividly alive young
creature. Men called Laura LaRue dead. But was she? Was she not
tremendously alive in the life of her lovely young daughter? Was it not
he, and the other childless ones who had treated matrimony as the one
supreme mistake, that would soon be very much dead, dead past any
resurrection?

Pshaw! He was getting sentimental. He wasn't here for sentiment. He was
here for cold, hard business. He was taking this confounded journey to
witness an amateur performance of a Shakespeare play, when he loathed
traveling in hot weather, detested amateur performances of anything,
particularly of Shakespeare, on the millionth of a chance that
Antoinette Holiday might be possessed of a tithe of her mother's talent
and might eventually be starred as the new ingenue he was in need of,
afar off, so to speak. It was Carol Clay herself who had warned him.
Carol was wonderful--would always be wonderful. But time passes. There
would come a season when the public would begin to count back and
remember that Carol had been playing ingenue parts already for over a
decade. There must always be youth--fresh, flaming youth in the
offing. That was the stage and life.

As for this Antoinette Holiday girl, he had none too much hope. Max
Hempel never hoped much on general principles, so far as potential stars
were concerned. He had seen too many of them go off fizz bang into
nothingness, like rockets. It was more than likely he was on a false
trail, that people who had seen the girl act in amateur things had
exaggerated her ability. He trusted no judgment but his own, which was
perhaps one of the reasons why he was one of the greatest living stage
managers. It was more than likely she had nothing but a pretty, shallow
little talent for play acting and no notion under the sun of giving up
society or matrimony or what-not for the devilish hard work of a stage
career. Very likely there was some young galoot waiting even now, to
whisk Laura LaRue's daughter off the stage before she ever got on.

Moreover there was always her family to cope with, dyed in the wool New
Englanders at that, no doubt with the heavy Puritan mortmain upon them,
narrow as a shoe string, circumscribed as a duck pond, walled in by
ghastly respectability. Ten to one, if the girl had talent and ambition,
they would smother these things in her, balk her at every turn. They had
regarded Ned Holiday's marriage to Laura a misalliance, he recalled.
There had been quite a to-do about it at the time. Good God! It had been
a misalliance all right, but not as they reckoned it. It had not been
considered suitable for a Holiday to marry an actress. Probably it would
be considered more unsuitable for a Holiday to _be_ an actress. Suitable!
Bah! The question was not whether the career was fit for the girl, but
whether the girl could measure up to the career. And irascibly,
unreasonably indignant as if he had already been contending in argument
with legions of mythical, over-respectable Holidays, Max Hempel whipped
his paper open to another page, a page that told of a drive somewhere on
the western front that had failed miserably, for this was the year
nineteen hundred and sixteen and there was a war going on, "on the other
side." Oh, typically American phrase!

Meanwhile the young man, too, had stopped staring at Antoinette Holiday's
pictured face and was staring out of the window instead at the fast
flying landscape. He had really no need anyway to look at a picture of
Tony. His head and heart were full of them. He had been storing them up
for over eight years and it was a considerable collection by now and one
in which he took great joy in lonely hours in his dingy little lodging
room, or in odd moments as he went his way at his task as a reporter for
a great New York daily. The perspicuous reader will not need to be told
that the young man was in love with Tony Holiday--desperately in love.

Desperately was the word. Slight as Max Hempel's hope may have been that
Laura LaRue's daughter was to prove the ingenue he sought, infinitely
slighter was Dick Carson's hope of ever making Tony his wife. How could
it be otherwise? Tony Holiday was as far above him in his own eyes as the
top of Mount Tom was high above the onion beds of the valley. The very
name he used was his only because she had given it to him. Dick Nobody he
had been. Richard Carson he had become through grace of Tony.

Like his companion the young man went back into the past, though not so
far a journey. As vividly as if it were but yesterday he remembered the
misery of flesh and spirit which had been his as he stowed himself away
in the hay loft in the Holiday's barn, that long ago summer dawn, too
sick to take another step and caring little whether he lived or died,
conscious vaguely, however, that death would be infinitely preferable to
going back to the life of the circus and the man Jim's coarse brutality
from which he had made his escape at last.

And then he had opened his eyes, hours later, and there had been
Tony--and there had been chiefly Tony ever since, for him.

If ever he amounted to anything, and he meant to amount to something, it
would be all due to Tony and her Uncle Phil. The two of them had saved
him in more ways than one, had faith in him when he wasn't much but a
scarecrow, ignorant, profane, unmoral, miserable, a "gutter brat" as some
one had once called him, a phrase he had never forgotten. It had seemed
to brand him, set him apart from people like the Holidays forever. But
Tony and Doctor Phil had shown him a different way of looking at it,
proved to him that nothing could really disgrace him but himself. They
had given him his chance and he had taken it. Please God he would make
himself yet into something they could be proud of, and it would all be
their doing. He would never forget that, whatever happened.

A half hour later the train puffed and wheezed into the station at
Northampton. Dick Carson and Max Hempel, still close together, descended
into the swarming, chattering crowd which was delightfully if confusingly
congested with pretty girls, more pretty girls and still more pretty
girls. But Dick was not confused. Even before the train had come to a
full stop he had caught sight of Tony. He had a single track mind so far
as girls were concerned. From the moment his eyes discovered Tony Holiday
the rest simply did not exist for him. It is to be doubted whether he
knew they were there at all, in spite of their manifest ubiquity and
equally manifest pulchritude.

Tony saw him, too, as he loomed up, taller than the others, bearing
resistlessly down upon her. She waved a gay greeting and smiled her
welcome to him through the throng. Max Hempel, close behind, caught the
message, too, and recognized the face of the girl who smiled as the
original of the newspaper cut he had just been studying so assiduously.
Deliberately he dogged the young man's heels. He wanted to get a close-up
view of Laura LaRue's daughter. She was much prettier than the picture.
Even from a distance he had made that out, as she stood there among the
crowd, vivacious, vivid, clad all in white except for the loose
coral-hued sweater which set off her warm brunette beauty and the slim
but charmingly rounded curves of her supple young body. Yes, she was like
Laura, like her and yet different, with a quality which he fancied
belonged to herself and none other.

Almost jealously Hempel watched the meeting between the girl and the
youth who up to now had been negligible enough, but suddenly emerged into
significance as the possible young galoot already mentally warned off the
premises by the stage manager.

"Dick! O Dick! I'm _so_ glad to see you," cried the girl, holding out
both hands to the new arrival. Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes shining.
She looked quite as glad as she proclaimed.

As for the young man who had set down his suitcase and taken possession
of both the proffered hands, there wasn't the slightest doubt that he was
in the seventh heaven of bliss wherever that may be. Next door to Fool's
Paradise, Max Hempel hoped somewhat vindictively.

"Just you wait, young man," he muttered to himself. "Bet you'll have to,
anyway. That glorious young thing isn't going to settle down to the
shallows of matrimony without trying the deep waters first, unless I'm
mightily mistaken. In the meantime we shall see what we shall see
to-night." And the man of power trudged away in the direction of a
taxicab, leaving youth alone with itself.

"Everybody is here," bubbled Tony. "At least, nearly everybody. Larry
went to a horrid old medical convention at Chicago, and can't be here for
the play; but he's coming to commencement. Of course, Granny isn't able
to travel and Aunt Margery couldn't come because the kiddies have been
measling, but Ted is here, and Uncle Phil--bless him! He brought the
twins over from Dunbury in the car. Phil Lambert and everybody are
waiting down the street. Carlotta too! To think you haven't ever met her,
when she's been my roommate and best friend for two years! And, oh!
Dicky! I haven't seen you myself for most a year and I'm so glad." She
beamed up at him as she made this rather ambiguous statement. "And you
haven't said a word but just 'hello!' Aren't you glad to see me, Dicky?"
she reproached.

He grunted at that.

"About a thousand times gladder than if I were in Heaven, unless you
happened to be sitting beside me on the golden stairs. And if you think I
don't know how long it is since I've seen you, you are mightily mistaken.
It is precisely one million years in round numbers."

"Oh, it is?" Tony smiled, appeased. "Why didn't you say so before, and
not leave me to squeeze it out of you like tooth-paste?"

Dick grinned back happily.

"Because you brought me up not to interrupt a lady. You seemed to have
the floor, so to speak."

"So to speak, indeed," laughed Tony. "Carlotta says I exist for that
sole purpose. But come on. Everybody's crazy to see you and I've a
million things to do." And tucking her arm in his, Tony marshaled the
procession of two down the stairs to the street where the car and the old
Holiday Hill crowd waited to greet the newest comer to the ranks of the
commencement celebrants.

With the exception of Carlotta Cressy, Tony's roommate, the occupants of
the car are known already to those who followed the earlier tale of
Holiday Hill.[1]

[Footnote 1: The earlier experiences of the Holidays and their friends
are related in "The House on the Hill."]

First of all there was the owner of the car, Dr. Philip Holiday
himself, a married man now, with a small son and daughter of his own,
"Miss Margery's" children. A little thicker of build and thinner of
hair was the doctor, but possessed of the same genial friendliness of
manner and whimsical humor, the same steady hand held out to help
wherever and whenever help was needed. He was head of the House of
Holiday now for his father, the saintly old pastor, had gone on to
other fields and his soldier brother Ned, Tony's father, had also gone,
in the prime of life, two years before, victim of typhus, leaving his
beloved little daughter, and his two sons just verging into manhood, in
the care of the younger Holiday.

As Dick and the doctor exchanged cordial greetings, the latter's friendly
eyes challenged the young man's and were answered. Plainly as if words
had been spoken the doctor knew that Dick was keeping faith with the old
pact, living up to the name the little girl Tony had given him in her
impulsive generosity.

"Something not quite right, though," he thought. "The boy isn't all
happy. Wonder what the trouble is. Probably a girl. Usually is at
that age."

At the wheel beside the doctor was his namesake and neighbor, Philip
Lambert. Phil was graduating, himself, this year from the college across
the river, a sturdy athlete of some note and a Phi Beta Kappa man as
well. Out of a harum-scarum, willful boyhood he had emerged into a finely
tempered, steady young manhood. The Dunbury wiseacres who had been wont
to shake their heads over Phil's youthful escapades and prophesy a bad
end for such a devil-may-care youngster now patted themselves
complacently on the back, as wiseacres will, and declared they had always
known the boy would turn out a credit to his family and the town.

On the back seat were Phil's sisters, the pretty twins, Charley and
Clare, still astonishingly alike at twenty, as they had been at twelve,
and still full of the high spirits and ready laughter and wit that had
made them the life of the Hill in the old days. Neither looked a day over
sixteen, but Clare had already been teaching two years in a Dunbury
public school and Charley was to go into nurse's training in the fall.

Larry, the young doctor, as Dunbury had taken to calling him in
distinction from his uncle, was not yet arrived, as Tony had explained;
but Ted, her younger brother, was very much on the scene, arrayed in all
the extravagant niceties of modish attire affected by university
undergraduates. At twenty, Ted Holiday was as handsome as the traditional
young Greek god and possessed of a godlike propensity to do as he liked
and the devil take the consequences. Already Ned Holiday's younger son
had acquired something of a reputation as a high flier among his own sex,
and a heart breaker among the fairer one. Reckless, debonair, utterly
irresponsible, he was still "terrible Teddy" as his father had jocosely
dubbed him long ago. Yet he was quite as lovable as he was irrepressible,
and had a manifest grace to counterbalance every one of his many faults.
His soberer brother Larry worried uselessly over Ted's misdeeds, and took
him sharply to task for them; but even Larry admitted that there was
something rather magnificent about Ted and that possibly in the end he
would come out the soundest Holiday of them all.

There remains only Carlotta to be introduced. Carlotta was lovely to look
upon. A poet speaks somewhere of a face "made out of a rose." Carlotta
had that kind of a face and her eyes were of that deep, violet shade
which works mischief and magic in the hearts of men. As for her hair, it
might well have been the envy of any princess, in or out of the covers of
a book, so fine spun was it in texture, so pure gold in color, like the
warm, vivid shimmer of tropical sunshine. She lifted an inquiring gaze
now to Dick, as she held out her hand in acknowledgment of the
introduction, and Dick murmured something platitudinous, bowed politely
over the hand and never noticed what color her eyes were. A single track
mind is both a curse and a protection to a man.

"Carlotta _would_ come," Tony was explaining gaily, "though I told her
there wasn't room. Let me inform you all that Carlotta is the most
completely, magnificently, delightfully spoiled young person in these
United States of America."

"Barring you?" teased her uncle.

"Barring none. By comparison with Carlotta, I am all the noble army of
saints, martyrs and seraphim on record combined. Carlotta is preordained
to have her own way. Everybody unites to give it to her. We can't help
it. She hypnotizes us. Some night you will miss the moon in its
accustomed place and you will find that she wanted it for a few moments
to play with."

Philip Lambert had turned around in his seat and was surveying Carlotta
rather curiously during this teasing tirade of Tony's.

"Oh, well," murmured Carlotta. "Your old moon can be put up again when I
am through with it. I shan't do it a bit of harm. Anyway, Mr. Carson must
not be told such horrid things about me the very first time he meets me,
must he, Phil? He might think they were true." She suddenly lifted her
eyes and smiled straight up into the face of the young man on the front
seat who was watching her so intently.

"Well, aren't they?" returned the young man addressed, stooping to
examine the brake.

Carlotta did not appear in the least offended at his curt comment.
Indeed the smile on her lips lingered as if it had some inner reason for
being there.

"Hop in, Tony," ordered Ted with brotherly peremptoriness. "Carlotta, you
are one too many, my love. You will have to sit in my lap."

"I'm getting out," said Phil. "I'm due across the river. Want Ted to take
the wheel, Doctor?"

"I do not. I have a wife and children at home. I cannot afford to place
my life in jeopardy." The doctor's eyes twinkled as they rested a moment
on his youngest nephew.

"Now, Uncle Phil, that's mean of you. You ought to see me drive."

"I have," commented Dr. Holiday drily. "Come on over here, one of you
twinnies, if Phil must go. See you to-night, my boy?" he turned to his
namesake to ask as Charley accepted the invitation and clambered over the
back of the seat while the doctor took her brother's vacated post.

Phil shook his head.

"No. I was in on the dress rehearsal last night. I've had my share. But
you folks are going to see the jolliest Rosalind that ever grew in Arden
or out of it. That's one sure thing."

Phil smiled at Tony as he spoke, and Dick, settling himself in the small
seat beside Ted, felt a small barbed dart of jealousy prick into him.

Tony and Phil were obviously exceedingly good friends. They had, he
knew, seen much of each other during the past four years, with only a
river between. Phil was Tony's own kind, college-trained, with a
certified line of good old New England ancestry behind him. Moreover, he
was a darned fine fellow--one of the best, in fact. In spite of that
hateful little jabbing dart, Dick acknowledged that. Ah well, there was
more than a river between himself and Tony Holiday and there always
would be. Who was he, nameless as he was, to enter the lists against
Philip Lambert or any one else?

The car sped away, leaving Phil standing bareheaded in the sunshine,
staring after it. The mocking silver lilt of Carlotta Cressy's laughter
drifted back to him. He shrugged, jammed on his hat and strode off in the
direction of the trolley car.

Dick Carson might just as well have spared himself the pain of jealousy.
Phil had already forgotten Tony, was remembering only Carlotta, who would
never deliberately do a mite of harm to the moon, would merely want to
play with it at her fancy and leave it at her whim for somebody else to
replace, if anybody cared to take the pains. And what was a moon more or
less anyway?

CHAPTER II

WITH ROSALIND IN ARDEN

Of course it is understood that every graduating class rightfully
asserts, and is backed up in its belief by doting and nobly partisan
relatives and blindly devoted, hyperbolic friends, that _its_ particular,
unique and proper senior dramatics is the most glorious and unforgettable
performance in all the histrionic annals of the college, a thing to make
Will Shakespeare himself rise and applaud from his high and far off hills
of Paradise.

Certainly Tony's class knew, past any qualms of doubt, and made no bones
of proclaiming its conviction that there never had been such a wonderful
"As You Like It" and that never, so long as the stars kept their seats in
the heavens and senior classes produced Shakespeare--two practically
synonymous conditions--would there ever be such another Rosalind as Tony
Holiday, so fresh, so spontaneous, so happy in her acting, so
bewitchingly winsome to behold, so boyish, yet so exquisitely feminine in
her doublet and hose, so daring, so dainty, so full of wit and grace and
sparkle, so tender, so merry, so natural, so all-in-all and utterly as
Will himself would have liked his "right Rosalind" to be.

So the class maintained and so they chanted soon and late, in many keys,
"with a hey and a ho and a hey nonino." And who so bold or malicious, or
age cankered as to dispute the dictum? Is it not youth's privilege to
fling enthusiasm and superlatives to the wind and to deal in glorious
arrogance?

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