“Remember,” said Charles Edward--he had run in for a minute on his way
home from the office where he has been clearing out his desk, “for good
and all,” he tells us--“remember, next week will see us out of this land
of the free and home of the talkative.” He meant our sailing. I shall be
glad to be with him and Lorraine. “And whatever you do. Peg, don't talk,
except to mother. Talk to her all you want to. Mother has the making of
a woman in her. If mother'd been a celibate, she'd have been, also, a
peach.”
“But I don't want to talk,” said I. “I don't want to talk to anybody.”
“Good for you,” said Charles Edward. “Now I'll run along.”
I sat there on the piazza watching him, thinking he'd been awfully good
to me, and feeling less bruised, somehow, than I do when the rest of the
family advise me--except mother! And I saw him stop, turn round as if he
were coming back, and then settle himself and plant his feet wide apart,
as he does when the family question him about business. Then I saw
somebody in light blue through the trees, and I knew it was Aunt
Elizabeth. Alice was down in the hammock reading and eating cookies, and
she saw her, too. Alice threw the book away and got her long legs out
of the hammock and ran. I thought she was coming into the house to hide
from Aunt Elizabeth. That's what we all do the first minute, and then
we recover ourselves and go down and meet her. But Alice dropped on her
knees by my chair and threw her arms round me.
“Forgive, Peggy,” she moaned. “Oh, forgive!”
I saw she had on my fraternity pin, and I thought she meant that. So I
said, “You can wear it today”; but she only hugged me the tighter and
ran on in a rigmarole I didn't understand.
“She's coming, and she'll get it out of Lorraine, and they'll all be
down on us.”
Charles Edward and Aunt Elizabeth stood talking together, and just then
I saw her put her hand on his shoulder.
“She's trying to come round him,” said Alice.
I began to see she was really in earnest now. “He's squirming. Oh,
Peggy, maybe she's found it out some way, and she's telling him, and
they'll tell you, and you'll think I am false as hell!”
I knew she didn't mean anything by that word, because whenever she says
such things they're always quotations. She began to cry real tears.
“It was Billy put it into my head,” said she, “and Lorraine put it
into his. Lorraine wanted him to write out exactly what he knew, and he
didn't know anything except about the telegram and how the letter got
wuzzled, and I told him I'd help him write it as it ought to be 'if life
were a banquet and beauty were wine'; but I told him we must make him
say in it how he'd got to conceal it from me, or they'd think we got it
up together. So I wrote it,” said Alice, “and Billy copied it.”
Perhaps I wasn't nice to the child, for I couldn't listen to her. I was
watching Charles Edward and Aunt Elizabeth, and saying to myself
that mother'd want me to sit still and meet Aunt Elizabeth when she
came--“like a good girl,” as she used to say to me when I was little and
begged to get out of hard things. Alice went on talking and gasping.
“Peg,” she said, “he's perfectly splendid--Dr. Denbigh is.”
“Yes, dear,” said I, “he's very nice.”
“I've adored him for years,” said Alice. “I could trust him with my
whole future. I could trust him with yours.”
Then I laughed. I couldn't help it. And Alice was hurt, for some reason,
and got up and held her head high and went into the house. And Aunt
Elizabeth came up the drive, and that is how she found me laughing. She
had on a lovely light-blue linen. Nobody wears such delicate shades as
Aunt Elizabeth. I remember, one day, when she came in an embroidered
pongee over Nile-green, father groaned, and grandmother said: “What is
it, Cyrus? Have you got a pain?” “Yes,” said father, “the pain I always
have when I see sheep dressed lamb fashion.” Grandmother laughed, but
mother said: “Sh!” Mother's dear.
This time Aunt Elizabeth had on a great picture-hat with light-blue
ostrich plumes; it was almost the shape of her lavender one that Charles
Edward said made her look like a coster's bride. When she bent over me
and put both arms around me the plumes tickled my ear. I think that was
why I was so cross. I wriggled away from her and said: “Don't!”
Aunt Elizabeth spoke quite solemnly. “Dear child!” she said, “you are
broken, indeed.”
And I began to feel again just as I had been feeling, as if I were in a
show for everybody to look at, and I found I was shaking all over, and
was angry with myself because of it. She had drawn up a chair, and she
held both my hands.
“Peggy,” said she, “haven't you been to the hospital to see that poor
dear boy?”
I didn't have to answer, for there was a whirl on the gravel, and Billy,
on his bicycle, came riding up with the mail. He threw himself off his
wheel and plunged up the steps as he always does, pretended to tickle
his nose with Aunt Elizabeth's feathers as he passed behind her, and
whispered to me: “Shoot the hat!” But he had heard Aunt Elizabeth asking
if I were not going to see that poor dear boy, and he said, as if he
couldn't help it:
“Huh! I guess if she did she wouldn't get in. His mother's walking up
and down front of the hospital when she ain't with him, and she's got
a hook nose and white hair done up over a roll and an eye-glass on a
stick, and I guess there won't be no nimps and shepherdesses get by
HER.”
Aunt Elizabeth stood and thought for a minute, and her eyes looked as
they do when she stares through you and doesn't see you at all. Alice
asked Charles Edward once if he thought she was sorrowing o'er the past
when she had that look, and he said: “Bless you, chile, no more than a
gentle industrious spider. She's spinning a web.” But in a minute mother
had stepped out on the piazza, and I felt as if she had come to my
rescue. It was the way she used to come when I broke my doll or tore my
skirt. But we didn't look at each other, mother and I. We didn't mean
Aunt Elizabeth should see there was anything to rescue me from. Aunt
Elizabeth turned to mother, and seemed to pounce upon her.
“Ada,” said she, “has my engagement been announced?”
“Not to my knowledge,” said mother. She spoke with a great deal
of dignity. “I understood that the name of the gentleman had been
withheld.”
“Withheld!” repeated Aunt Elizabeth. “What do you mean by 'withheld'?
Billy, whom are those letters for?”
In spite of ourselves mother and I started. Letters have begun to seem
rather tragic to us.
“One's the gas-bill,” said Billy, “and one's for you.” Aunt Elizabeth
took the large, square envelope and tore it open. Then she looked at
mother and smiled a little and tossed her head.
“This is from Lyman Wilde,” said she.
I thought I had never seen Aunt Elizabeth look so young. It must have
meant something more to mother than it did to me, for she stared at her
a minute very seriously.
“I am truly glad for you, Elizabeth,” she said. Then she turned to me.
“Daughter,” said she, “I shall need you about the salad.”
She smiled at me and went in. I knew what that meant. She was giving
me a chance to follow her, if I needed to escape. But there was hardly
time. I was at the door when Aunt Elizabeth rustled after so quickly
that it sounded like a flight. There on the piazza she put her arms
about me.
“Child!” she whispered. “Child! Verlassen! Verlassen!”
I drew away a little and looked at her. Then I thought: “Why, she is
old!” But I hadn't understood. I knew the word was German, and I hadn't
taken that in the elective course.
“What is it. Aunt Elizabeth?” I asked. I had a feeling I mustn't leave
her. She smiled a little--a queer, sad smile.
“Peggy,” said she, “I want you to read this letter.” She gave it to me.
It was written on very thick gray paper with rough edges, and there was
a margin of two inches at the left. The handwriting was beautiful, only
not very clear, and when I had puzzled over it for a minute she snatched
it back again.
“I'll read it to you,” said she.
Well, I thought it was a most beautiful letter. The gentleman said
she had always been the ideal of his life. He owed everything--and by
everything he meant chiefly his worship of beauty--to her. He asked
her to accept his undying devotion, and to believe that, however far
distance and time should part them, he was hers and hers only. He said
he looked back with ineffable contempt upon the days when he had hoped
to build a nest and see her beside him there. Now he had reached the
true empyrean, and he could only ask to know that she, too, was winging
her bright way into regions where he, in another life, might follow and
sing beside her in liquid, throbbing notes to pierce the stars. He
ended by saying that he was not very fit--the opera season had been
a monumental experience this year--and he was taking refuge with an
English brotherhood to lead, for a time, a cloistered life instinct
with beauty and its worship, but that there as everywhere he was hers
eternally. How glad I was of the verbal memory I have been so often
praised for! I knew almost every word of that lovely letter by heart
after the one reading. I shall never forget it.
“Well?” said Aunt Elizabeth. She was looking at me, and again I saw how
long it must have been since she was young. “Well, what do you think of
it?”