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DIANE OF THE GREEN VAN

by

LEONA DALRYMPLE

Illustrations by Reginald Birch

Chicago
The Reilly & Britton Co.
Third printing

1914







"_In Arcadie, the Land of Hearte's Desire,
Lette us linger whiles with Luveres fond;
A sparklynge Comedie they playe--with Fire--
Unwyttynge Fate stands waytynge with hir Wande._"




Diane of the Green Van was awarded the $10,000.00 prize in a novel
contest in which over five hundred manuscripts were submitted.



[Frontispiece: "Excellency, as a gentleman who is not a coward, it
behooves you to explain!"]




CONTENTS

CHAPTER

I Of a Great White Bird Upon a Lake
II An Indoor Tempest
III A Whim
IV The Voice of the Open Country
V The Phantom that Rose from the Bottle
VI Baron Tregar
VII Themar
VIII After Sunset
IX In a Storm-Haunted Wood
X On the Ridge Road
XI In the Camp of the Gypsy Lady
XII A Bullet in Arcadia
XIII A Woodland Guest
XIV By the Backwater Pool
XV Jokai of Vienna
XVI The Young Man of the Sea
XVII In Which the Baron Pays
XVIII Nomads
XIX A Nomadic Minstrel
XX The Romance of Minstrelsy
XXI At the Gray of Dawn
XXII Sylvan Suitors
XXIII Letters
XXIV The Lonely Camper
XXV A December Snowstorm
XXVI An Accounting
XXVII The Song of the Pine-Wood Sparrow
XXVIII The Nomad of the Fire-Wheel
XXIX The Black Palmer
XXX The Unmasking
XXXI The Reckoning
XXXII Forest Friends
XXXIII By the Winding Creek
XXXIV The Moon Above the Marsh
XXXV The Wind of the Okeechobee
XXXVI Under the Live Oaks
XXXVII In the Glades
XXXVIII In Philip's Wigwam
XXXIX Under the Wild March Moon
XL The Victory
XLI In Mic-co's Lodge
XLII The Rain Upon the Wigwam
XLIII The Rival Campers
XLIV The Tale of a Candlestick
XLV The Gypsy Blood
XLVI In the Forest
XLVII "The Marshes of Glynn"
XLVIII On the Lake Shore
XLIX Mr. Dorrigan
L The Other Candlestick
LI In the Adirondacks
LII Extracts from the Letters of Norman Westfall
LIII By Mic-co's Pool
LIV On the Westfall Lake




ILLUSTRATIONS

"Excellency, as a gentleman who is not a coward it behooves you to
explain." . . . _Frontispiece_

Diane swung lightly up the forest path

White girl and Indian maid then clasped hands

"No, I may not take your hand."





CHAPTER I

OF A GREAT WHITE BIRD UPON A LAKE

Spring was stealing lightly over the Connecticut hills, a shy, tender
thing of delicate green winging its way with witch-rod over the wooded
ridges and the sylvan paths of Diane Westfall's farm. And with the
spring had come a great hammering by the sheepfold and the stables
where a smiling horde of metropolitan workmen, sheltered by night in
the rambling old farmhouse, built an ingenious house upon wheels and
flirted with the house-maids.

Radiantly the spring swept from delicate shyness into a bolder glow of
leaf and flower. Dogwood snowed along the ridges, Solomon's seal
flowered thickly in the bogs, and following the path to the lake one
morning with Rex, a favorite St. Bernard, at her heels, Diane felt with
a thrill that the summer itself had come in the night with a
wind-flutter of wild flower and the fluting of nesting birds.

The woodland was deliciously green and cool and alive with the piping
of robins. Over the lake which glimmered faintly through the trees
ahead came the whir and hum of a giant bird which skimmed the lake with
snowy wing and came to rest like a truant gull. Of the habits of this
extraordinary bird Rex, barking, frankly disapproved, but finding his
mistress's attention held unduly by a chirping, bright-winged caucus of
birds of inferior size and interest, he barked and galloped off ahead.

When presently Diane emerged from the lake path and halted on the
shore, he was greatly excited.

There was an aeroplane upon the water and in the aeroplane a tall young
man with considerable length of sinewy limb, lazily rolling a
cigarette. Diane unconsciously approved the clear bronze of his lean,
burned face and his eyes, blue, steady, calm as the waters of the lake
he rode.

The aviator met her astonished glance with one of laughing deference
even as she marveled at his genial air of staunch philosophy.

"I beg your pardon," stammered Diane, "but--but are you by any chance
waiting--to be rescued?"

"Why--I--I believe I am!" exclaimed the young man readily, apparently
greatly pleased at her common sense. "At your convenience, of course!"

"Are you--er--sinking or merely there?"

"Merely here!" nodded the young man with a charming smile of
reassurance. "This contraption is a--er--I--I think Dick calls it an
hydro-aeroplane. It has pontoons and things growing all over it for
duck stunts and if the water wasn't so infernally still, I'd be
floating and smoking and likely in time I'd make shore. That's a
delightful pastime for you now," he added with a lazy smile of the
utmost good humor, "to float and smoke on a summer day and grab at the
shore."

"I was under the impression," commented Diane critically, "that in an
hydro-aeroplane one could rise from the water like a bird. I've read
so recently."

"One can," smiled the shipwrecked philosopher readily, "provided his
motor isn't deaf and dumb and insanely indifferent to suggestion. When
it grows shy and silent, one swims eventually and drips home, unless a
dog barks and a rescuer emerges from the trees equipped with sympathy
and common sense. I've a mechanician back there," he added sociably.
"He--he's in a tree, I think. I--er--mislaid him in a very dangerous
air current."

"Are you aware," inquired the girl, biting her lip, "that you're
trespassing?"

"Lord, no!" exclaimed the aviator. "You don't mean it. Have you by
any chance a reputable rope anywhere about you?"

"No," said Diane maliciously, "I haven't. As a rule, I do go about
equipped with ropes and hooks and things to--rescue trespassing
hydroaviators, but--" she regarded him thoughtfully. "Do you like to
float about and smoke?"

The sun-browned skin of the young aviator reddened a trifle, but his
eyes laughed.

"I'm an incurable optimist," he lightly countered, "or I wouldn't have
tried to fly over a private lake in a borrowed aeroplane."

"I believe," said Diane disapprovingly, "that you were cutting giddy
circles over the water and dipping and skimming, weren't you?"

"I did cut a monkeyshine or two," admitted the young man. "I was
having a devil of a time until you--until the--er--catastrophe
occurred."

"And Miss Westfall, the owner," murmured Diane with sympathy, "is
addicted to firearms. Hadn't you heard? She _hunts_! The Westfalls
are all very erratic and quick-tempered. Didn't you know she was at
the farm?"

The young man looked exceedingly uncomfortable.

"Great guns, no!" he exclaimed. "I presumed she was safe in New
York. . . . And this is her lake and her water and her waves, when
there are any, and no matter how I engineer it, I've got to poach some
of her property. Some of it," he added conversationally, "is in my
shoe. Lord, I am in a pickle! Are you a guest of hers?"

"Yes," said Diane calmly.

"I'm staying over yonder on the hill there with Dick Sherrill," offered
the young man cordially. "They are opening their place with a party of
men, some crack amateur aviators--and myself. Do you know the
Sherrills?"

"Perhaps I do," said Diane discouragingly. "Why didn't you float about
and smoke on Mr. Sherrill's lake?" she added curiously. "It's ever so
much bigger than this."

"Circumstances," began the young man with dignity, and lighted another
cigarette. "My mechanician," he added volubly, after an uncomfortable
interval of silence, "is an exceedingly bold young man. He'll fly over
anything, even a cow. Isn't really mine either; he's borrowed, too.
Dick keeps a few extra mechanicians on hand, like extra cigars. It's
Dick's fault I'm out alone. He lent my mechanician to another chap and
nobody else would come with me."

"I thought," flashed Diane pointedly, "I thought your mechanician was
somewhere in a tree."

The aviator coughed and reddened uncomfortably.

"Doubtless he is," he said lamely. "He--he most always is. Do you
know, he spends a large part of his spare time in trees--and
swamps--and once, I believe, he was discovered in a chimney. I--I'd
like to tell you more about him," he went on affably. "Once--"

"Thank you," said Diane politely, "but you've really entertained me
more now than one could expect from a gentleman in your distressing
plight. Come, Rex." She turned back again at the hemlocks which
flanked the forest path. "I'll ask Miss Westfall to send some men,"
she added and halted.

For Diane had surprised a look of such keen regret in the young
aviator's face that they both colored hotly.

"Beastly luck!" stammered the young man lamely. "I _am_ disappointed.
I--I don't seem to have another match."

"Your cigarette is burning splendidly," hinted Diane coolly, "and
you've a match in your hand."

For a tense, magnetic instant the keen blue eyes flashed a curious
message of pleading and apology, then the aviator fell to whistling
softly, struck the match and finding no immediate function for it,
dropped it in the water.

"I don't in the least mind floating about," he stammered, his eyes
sparkling with silent laughter, "and possibly I'll make shore directly;
but Lord love us! don't send the sharp-shooteress--please! Better
abandon me to my fate."

Slim and straight as the silver birches by the water, Diane hurried
away up the lake-path.

"The young man," she flashed with a stamp of her foot, "is a very great
fool."

"Johnny," she said a little later to a little, bewhiskered man with
cheeks like hard red winter apples, "there's a sociable, happy-go-lucky
young man perched on an aeroplane in the middle of our lake. Better
take a rope and rescue him. I don't think he knows enough about
aeroplanes to be flying so promiscuously about the country."

Johnny Jutes collected a band of enthusiasts and departed.

"Nobody there, Miss Diane," reported young Allan Carmody upon
returning; "leastwise nobody that couldn't take care of himself. Only
a chap buzzin' almighty swift over the trees. Swooped down like a hawk
when he saw us an' waved his hand, laughin' fit to kill himself, an'
dropped Johnny a fiver an' gee! Miss Diane, but he could drive some!
Swift and cool-headed as a bird. He's whizzin' off like mad toward the
Sherrill place, with his motor a-hummin' an' a-purrin' like a cat.
Leanish, sunburnt chap with eyes that 'pear to be laughin' a lot."

Diane's eyes flashed resentfully and as she walked away to the house
her expression was distinctly thoughtful.




CHAPTER II

AN INDOOR TEMPEST

"If you're broke," said Starrett, leering, "why don't you marry your
cousin?"

Carl Granberry stared insolently across the table.

"Pass the buck," he reminded coolly. "And pour yourself some more
whiskey. You're only a gentleman when you're drunk, Starrett. You're
sober now."

Payson and Wherry laughed. Starrett, not yet in the wine-flush of his
heavy courtesy, passed the buck with a frown of annoyance.

A log blazed in the library fireplace, staining with warm, rich shadows
the square-paneled ceiling of oak and the huge war-beaten slab of
table-wood about which the men were gathered, both feudal relics
brought to the New York home of Carl Granberry's uncle from a ruined
castle in Spain.

"If you've gone through all your money," resumed Starrett offensively,
"I'd marry Diane."

"_Miss_ Westfall!" purred Carl correctively. "You've forgotten,
Starrett, my cousin's name is Westfall, _Miss_ Westfall."

"Diane!" persisted Starrett.

With one of his incomprehensible whims, Carl swept the cards into a
disorderly heap and shrugged.

"I'm through," he said curtly. "Wherry, take the pot. You need it."

"Damned irregular!" snapped Starrett sourly.

"So?" said Carl, and stared the recalcitrant into sullen silence.
Rising, he crossed to the fire, his dark, impudent eyes lingering
reflectively upon Starrett's moody face.

"Starrett," he mused, "I wonder what I ever saw in you anyway. You're
infernally shallow and alcoholic and your notions of poker are as
distorted as your morals. I'm not sure but I think you'd cheat." He
shrugged wearily. "Get out," he said collectively. "I'm tired."

Starrett rose, sneering. There had been a subtle change to-night in
his customary attitude of parasitic good-fellowship.

"I'm tired, too!" he exclaimed viciously. "Tired of your infernal
whims and insults. You're as full of inconsistencies as a lunatic.
When you ought to be insulted, you laugh, and when a fellow least
expects it, you blaze and rave and stare him out of countenance. And
I'm tired of drifting in here nights at your beck and call, to be sent
home like a kid when your mood changes. Mighty amusing for us! If
you're not vivisecting our lives and characters for us in that
impudent, philosophical way you have, you're preaching a sermon that
you couldn't--and wouldn't--follow yourself. And then you end by
messing everybody's cards in a heap and sending us home with the last
pot in Dick Wherry's pocket whether it belongs there or not. I tell
you, I'm tired of it."

Carl laughed, a singularly musical laugh with a note of mockery in it.

"Who," he demanded elaborately, "who ever heard of a treasonous
barnacle before? A barnacle, Starrett, adheres and adheres, parasite
to the end as long as there's liquid, even as you adhered while the
ship was keeled in gold. Nevertheless, you're right. I'm all of what
you say and more that you haven't brains enough to fathom. And some
that you can't fathom is to my credit--and some of it isn't. As, for
instance, my inexplicable poker _penchant_ for you."

To Starrett, hot of temper and impulse, his graceful mockery was
maddening. Cursing under his breath, he seized a glass and flung it
furiously at his host, who laughed and moved aside with the litheness
of a panther. The glass crashed into fragments upon the wall of the
marble fireplace. Payson and Wherry hurriedly pushed back their
chairs. Then, suddenly conscious of a rustle in the doorway, they all
turned.

Wide dark eyes flashing with contempt, Diane Westfall stood motionless
upon the threshold. The aesthete in Carl thrilled irresistibly to her
vivid beauty, intensified to-night by the angry flame in her cheeks and
the curling scarlet of her lips. There were no semi-tones in Diane's
dark beauty, Carl reflected. It was a thing of sable and scarlet, and
the gold-brown satin of her gypsy skin was warm with the tints of an
autumn forest. Carelessly at his ease, Carl noted how the bold eyes of
the painted Spanish grandee above the mantel, the mild eyes of the
saint in the Tintoretto panel across the room and the flashing eyes of
Diane seemed oddly to converge to a common center which was Starrett,
white and ill at ease. And of these the eyes of Diane were loveliest.

With the swift grace which to Carl's eyes always bore in it something
of the primitive, Diane swept away, and the staring tableau dissolved
into a trio of discomfited men of whom Carl seemed But an indifferent
onlooker.

"Well," fumed Starrett irritably, "why in thunder don't you say
something?"

"Permit me," drawled Carl impudently, with a lazy flicker of his
lashes, "to apologize for my cousin's untimely intrusion. I really
fancied she was safe at the farm. Unfortunately, the house belongs to
her. Besides, your crystal gymnastics, Starrett, were as unscheduled
as her arrival. As it is, you've nobly demonstrated an unalterable
scientific fact. The collision of marble and glass is unvaryingly
eventful."

Bellowing indignantly, Starrett charged into the hallway, followed by
Payson. Presently the outer door slammed violently behind them.
Wherry lingered.

Carl glanced curiously at his flushed and boyish face.

"Well?" he queried lightly.

Wherry colored.

"Carl," he stammered, "you've been talking a lot about parasites
to-night and I'd like you to know that--money hasn't made a jot of
difference to me." He met Carl's laughing glance with dogged
directness and for a second something flamed boyishly in his face from
which Carl, frowning, turned away.

"Why don't you break away from this sort of thing, Dick?" he demanded
irritably. "Starrett and myself and all the rest of it. You're
sapping the splendid fires of your youth and inherent decency in unholy
furnaces. Yes, I know Starrett drags you about with him and you
daren't offend him because he's your chief, but you're clever and you
can get another job. In ten years, as you're going now, you'll be an
alcoholic ash-heap of jaded passions. What's more, you have infernal
luck at cards and you haven't money enough to keep on losing so
heavily. Half of the poker sermons Starrett's been growling about were
preached for you."

Now there were mad, irreverent moments when Carl Granberry delivered
his poker sermons with the eloquent mannerisms of the pulpit, save, as
Payson held, they were infinitely more logical and eloquent, but
to-night, husking his logic of these externals, he fell flatly to
preaching an unadorned philosophy of continence acutely at variance
with his own habits.

Wherry stared wonderingly at the tall, lithe figure by the fire.

"Carl," he said at last, "tell me, are you honestly in earnest when you
rag the fellows so about work and decency and all that sort of thing?"

Carl yawned and lighted a cigar.

"I believe," said he, "in the eternal efficacy of good. I believe in
the telepathic potency of moral force. I believe in physical
conservation for the eugenic good of the race and mental dominance over
matter. But I'm infernally lazy myself, and it's easy to preach. It's
even easier to create a counter-philosophy of condonance and
individualism, and I'm alternately an ethical egoist, a Fabian
socialist and a cynic. Moreover, I'm a creature of whims and
inconsistencies and there are black nights in my temperament when John
Barleycorn lightens the gloom; and there are other nights when he
treacherously deepens it--but I'm peculiarly balanced and subject to
irresistible fits of moral atrophy. All of which has nothing at all to
do with the soundness of my impersonal philosophy. Wherefore," with a
flash of his easy impudence, "when I preach, I mean it--for the other
fellow."

Wherry glanced at the handsome face of his erratic friend with frank
allegiance in his eyes.

Carl flung his cigar into the fire, poured himself some whiskey and
pushed the decanter across the table.

"Have a drink," he said whimsically.

Dick obeyed. It was an inconsistent supplement to the sermon but
characteristic.

"Carl," he said, flushing under the ironical battery of the other's
eyes, "I don't think I understand you--"

Carl laughed.

"Nobody does," he said. "I don't myself."




CHAPTER III

A WHIM

The fire in the marble fireplace died down, leaping in fitful shadow
over the iron-bound doors riveted in nail-heads. They too were relics
from the Spanish castle which Norman Westfall had stripped of its
ancient appurtenances to fashion an appropriate setting for the
beautiful young Spanish wife whose death at the birth of Diane had
goaded him to suicide. That Norman Westfall had regarded the vital
spark within him as an indifferent thing to be snuffed out at the will
of the clay it dominated, was consistent with the Westfall intolerance
of custom and convention.

By the fire Carl smoked and stared at the dying embers. For all his
insolent habit of dominance and mockery he was keenly sensitive and
to-night the significant defection of Starrett and Payson after months
of sycophantic friendship, had made him quiver inwardly like a hurt
child. Only Wherry had stayed with him when his career of reckless
expenditure had arrived at its inevitable goal of ruin.

There remained, financially, what? Barely four thousand a year in
securities so iron-bound by his mother's will that he could not touch
them.

Black resentment flamed hotly up in his heart at the memory of the
Westfall custom of willing the bulk of the great estate to the oldest
son. It had left his mother with a patrimony which Carl, inheriting,
had chosen contemptuously to regard as a dwarfish thing of gold
sufficient only for the heedless purchase of one flaming, brilliant
hour of life. That husbanded it might purchase a lifetime of gray
hours tinged intermittently with rose or crimson, Carl had dismissed
with a cynical laugh, quoting Omar Khayyam.

Starrett had sneeringly suggested that, to remedy his fallen
fortunes--he might marry Diane! Carl laughed softly but recalling
suddenly how Diane had looked as she stood in the doorway, the flame of
her honest anger setting off her primitive grace, he frowned
thoughtfully at the fire, swayed by one of the mad, reckless whims
which frequently rocketed through his brain to heedless consummation.
Wherefore he presently dispatched a servant to Diane with a note
scribbled carelessly upon the face of the ace of diamonds.

"May I see you?" it ran. "I am still in the library. If you like,
I'll come up."

She came to the library, frankly surprised. Carl rarely saw fit to
apologize or seek advice.

With his ready gallantry, habitually colored by a subtle sex-mockery,
Carl rose, drew a chair for her and leaned against the mantel, smiling.

"I'm sorry," said he civilly, "I'm sorry Starrett so far forgot
himself."

"So am I," said Diane. "Bacchanalian tableaus are not at all to my
liking."

"Nor mine," admitted Carl. "As an aesthete I must own that Starrett is
too fat for a really graceful villain. I fancied you were indefinitely
domiciled at the farm. Aunt Agatha has been fussing--"

"I was," nodded Diane. "A whim of mine brought me home."

Carl dropped easily into a chair and glanced at his cousin's profile.
The delicate oval of her face was firelit; her night-black hair one
with the deeper shadows of the room. There was mystery in the lovely
dusk of Diane's eyes--and discontent--and something mute and wistful
crying for expression.

"I've a proposition to make," said Carl lightly. "It's partly
commercial, partly belated justice, partly eugenic and partly personal."

"Your money is quite gone, is it not?" asked Diane, raising finely
arched expressive eyebrows.

"It is," admitted Carl ruefully. "My career as a bibulous meteor is
over. Last night, after an exquisite shower of golden fire, I came
tumbling to earth in the fashion of meteors, a disillusioned stone. In
other words--stone broke. May I smoke?"

"Assuredly."

Carl lighted a cigarette.

"And the proposition which is at the same time commercial, eugenic
and--er--personal?" reminded Diane curiously. Carl ignored the
delicate note of sarcasm.

"It is merely," he said with a flash of impudence, "that you will marry
me."

Diane's eyes widened.

"How frankly commercial!" she murmured.

"Isn't it?" said Carl. "And an excellent opportunity for belated
justice as well. My mother, save for our infernal Salic law of
inheritance, was entitled to half the Westfall estate."

Diane stared curiously at the fire-rimmed hem of her satin skirt.
There was something of Carl's lazy impudence in the arch of her
eyebrows.

"There yet remains the eugenic inducement and, I believe, a personal
one!" she hinted.

"Thank heaven," exclaimed Carl devoutly, "that we're both logicians.
The eugenic consideration is that by birth and brains and breeding I am
your logical mate."

Diane's eyes flashed with swift contempt.

"Birth!" she repeated.

The black demon of ungovernable temper leaped brutally from Carl's
eyes. Leaning forward he caught the girl's hands in a vicious grip
that hurt her cruelly though for all her swift color she did not flinch.

"Listen, Diane," he said, his face very white; "if there is one thing
in this rotten world of custom and convention and immoral morality
which I honestly respect, it is the memory of my mother. Therefore you
will please abstain from contemptuous reference to her by look or word."

Diane met the clear, compelling rebuke of his fine eyes with unwavering
directness.

"My mother," said Carl steadily, "was a fine, big, splendid woman,
unconventional like all the Westfalls, and a century ahead of her time.
Moreover, she had a code of morality quite her own. If Aunt Agatha's
shocked sensibilities had not eliminated her from your life so early,
contact with her broad understanding of things would have tempered your
sex insularity." He glanced pityingly at Diane. "You've fire and
vision, Diane," he said bluntly, "but you're intolerant. It's a
Westfall trait." He laughed softly. "How scornfully you used to laugh
and jeer at boys, because you were swifter of foot and keener of vision
than any of them, because you could leap and run and swim like a wild
thing! Intolerance again, Diane, even as a youngster!"

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