There had naturally been some discussion at the Convent as to the most
desirable setting for proposals, the consensus of opinion being in favor
of Miss Alcott's little water-scene between Amy and the faithless
Laurie. Laurie, the reader will remember, is rowing Amy about in the
romantic region of Chillon (still with regretful memories of Jo hovering
in the background, however), when she catches him eyeing her with an
expression which
"makes her say hastily, merely for the sake of saying
something:
"'You must be tired; rest a little and let me row,' etc.
"'I'm not tired, but you may take an oar if you like,' etc.
"Feeling that she had not mended matters much, Amy took the
offered third of a seat, shook her hair over her face" (Joan
personally suspected that Amy belonged also to the order of the
Brazen Hussies) "and accepted an oar.
"'How well we pull together, don't we?' said Amy, who objected
to silence just then.
"'So well that I wish we might always pull together in the same
boat. Will you, Amy?' very tenderly.
"'Yes, Laurie,' very low.
"Then they both stopped rowing, and unconsciously added a
pretty little tableau of human love and happiness to the
dissolving views reflected in the lake."
This classic scene was not absent from Joan's mind as she seated herself
and her blue chiffon recklessly in the prow of Eduard's canoe; though
the details of stage-management troubled her somewhat. Suppose the
proposer chose to kneel at the feet of the proposee--since there was no
seat to share with her? And suppose the proposer lost his head (as might
properly be expected of him) and embraced the proposee madly--what was
to prevent so precarious a thing as a canoe from tipping over! It seemed
to call for great presence of mind on the part of the proposee. Joan
felt rather nervous.
Mr. Desmond, however, let the opportunity pass. Perhaps he had not read
"Little Women."
Amid talk so casual that it might as well have been silence, they
slipped along between the wide gray of earth and sky, afloat on a stream
of silver. They came presently to an overhanging willow, where he tied
the boat, and helped Joan ashore. He led her, with an air of one
performing a ceremony, up a slight rise of land topped by a great
beech-tree, whose widespread roots made a sort of armchair, after the
hospitable fashion of beech-trees.
"Queen Joan on her throne, viewing her domain," he murmured.
He had not brought her to this place before, and she realized that he
had been saving it for a special occasion. There was a view before her
of shadowy, dreaming country, with a hint of stars to come, and
sheep-bells tinkling in a distant field, and lights gleaming here and
there from half-hidden houses.
Eduard began to murmur softly:
"When the quiet-colored end of evening smiles,
Miles on miles
O'er our many-tinkling meadows where the sheep
Half asleep,
Wander homeward through the twilight, browse and crop
As they stop--"
A sudden impatience seized Joan. How like him to arrange this setting,
to bring things carefully to a climax, and then--to spout Browning at
her!
But she said, as he paused, "Beautiful! 'Love among the Ruins,' isn't
it?"
"Yes--And I," he sighed, tapping himself on the chest, "I am the Ruins!"
Despite the bombast of his tone, there was something in his sigh that
struck her as genuine.
She said consolingly, "At least you're a well-preserved ruin, very
popular with tourists.... I wonder what makes you feel so particularly
ruinous to-night?"
"The fact that you're so damnably young," he muttered.
She made a little face at him. "I'm not, really. I'm one of those
persons who are born grown-up, you know. Besides, it's a fault that will
disappear in time."
"Exactly! And before you know it, my dear.
"'The nightingale that in the branches sang--ah, whence and
whither flown again, who knows!'
"You oughtn't to be here with me," he said abruptly. "You ought to be
back there, playing with the little boys and girls."
"But if the boys and girls bore me--?"
"Do they?" he demanded. "Those chaps you dance and flirt with--?"
Joan made him the present of a very special smile. "Perhaps that was to
make other people--jealous."
"You darling!" he said under his breath; but still he did not touch her.
"'Love among the Ruins' really isn't very beautiful," he said after a
moment, "or very natural, either--as my sister-in-law was very good to
point out to me only this morning!"
Joan flushed. So Mrs. Desmond was taking not only a passive but an
active interest in her affairs!
"Your sister-in-law is needlessly solicitous. I'm not a child like
Betty. I know exactly what I am doing."
He leaned toward her. "Do you? Do you, I wonder? Joan! Look at me! _Do_
you know what you are doing--to me?"
The darkness left only the white outline of their faces visible to each
other. He struck a match, in order to see her better.
For a moment she tried to meet his eyes. They frightened her even while
they drew her. The blood began to sing in her ears, as it had when he
touched her hand. She wanted him to take her in his arms, to hold
her--and at the same time she wanted to run away and hide. Their long
gaze seemed to let down some barrier within her, to loosen curious
impulses.... Why did he not take her, and have done with it?
"No," he muttered, as if she had spoken, "Come!"
Her body made a helpless movement toward him....
Then the match burnt his fingers and he dropped it.
"I--I thought you said you had a present for me," she quavered, with a
little breathless laugh. She suspected what the present was, and she
wanted to get this queerly painful scene over.
But the velvet case he drew out of his pocket was too large for a ring.
It contained a flexible chain of platinum for her wrist, set with jewels
which glittered in the dusk.
"Oh!--oh, how lovely!" she exclaimed. Even Stefan Nikolai had never
given her anything as splendid as this.
"May I put it on?" asked Desmond quietly.
She held out her hand in delight; and suddenly he had seized it and
pushing her sleeve out of the way, was pressing his lips to her inner
arm above the elbow, kissing it hungrily, fiercely, as if he could never
have done.
She gasped and shrank a little. Getting engaged was not at all as she
had pictured it.
"Wh--what a funny place to kiss me," she heard herself quavering, "when
I've got a perfectly good mouth!"
After that she ceased for once to analyze her sensations....
A gibbous harvest-moon was gazing down at them with its wry face when
the two awoke to the fact that the hour was late and cold, particularly
for a girl dressed airily in chiffon. Joan gazed ruefully at the wreck
of her prettiest gown, limp with dew and crushed beyond recognition. She
felt rather limp and crushed herself, though withal triumphant. One does
not get engaged every night, and it was fitting that certain sacrifices
honor the event.
The lovers had little to say to each other, as the canoe slipped back
down the whispering river under that gibbous moon. For once Eduard found
no poetry to suit the occasion. Joan, busy with her tumbled hair, hoped
and even prayed that she might be able to slip into her room unobserved.
She hurried nervously out of the dark boathouse, despite entreaties to
wait, and was half way to the house before he caught up with her.
"Oh, hurry!" she whispered. "They've all gone--every light in the house
is out! It must be after midnight. Ned, what if they've locked the
door?"
"They haven't. My sister knows we're still out--trust her for that!"
"But suppose she's waiting up for us?--Oh, Ned, whatever shall I say?"
"You might tell her, Beautiful," he teased, "that I've had you up under
the beech-tree, kissing roses into your cheeks and stars into your
eyes!--though I think any one who saw you just now might suspect that
without being told."
She turned suddenly and clung to him. Something of Joan's independence
had already slipped away from her, now that she had some one to cling
to. "Ned, she doesn't like me! How am I ever going to win her over?"
"Kiss her," he suggested promptly. "Kiss her as you've been kissing me.
It couldn't fail!"
"Don't tease!" She lifted serious, wide eyes to his, and he saw that
they were wet. "Don't you know that I shall never, never in all my life,
kiss anybody else as I have kissed you?"
Touched, he drew her closer. She looked just then singularly childish
and confiding. "Dear little girl, that thought herself so grown-up!" he
whispered, his cheek on her tumbled hair.
When she stirred in his arms he still held her. "What's the use of
hurrying now, Beautiful? The fat's in the fire--and who knows when we
shall have another night like this, all to ourselves?"
But she would not stay. She felt, obscurely, that they had been engaged
enough for one evening.
She found herself at last safe in her room--'safe' was the word in her
mind--sitting on the edge of her bed, staring down at her ruined finery
with eyes which did not see it. Her knees felt queerly weak under her,
her lips were bruised, her cheeks and throat and arms burned still with
remembered kisses--She said to herself, like the old woman with a shorn
petticoat, "Can this be I?"
What had become of her powers of observation, her cool intelligence, her
impersonal decision that it was wiser not to love the man you marry lest
he be given power to hurt you? There was nothing impersonal left in her
feeling for Eduard Desmond! The change had come as suddenly as a summer
thunderstorm. At one moment she was waiting, nervous, a little afraid,
for the event that she had brought to pass. The next, he and she seemed
to have been thrown into a sort of vortex, where they clung to each
other madly, desperately, as if to escape destruction. And she had been
quite as frantic about it as the man....
She thought, dazedly, that there was a good deal she would be able to
tell the girls at the Convent now on the subject of proposals--yes, and
Miss Louisa M. Alcott, too! Except that school-girls and literary old
maids were not exactly the people with whom one would discuss such
phenomena--
They had fancied, she and Betty and the rest, that some sort of formula
was necessary to the occasion, a definite question asked and answered, a
more or less formal, "Will you, Amy?" and "Yes, Laurie." Foolish
innocents! She and Ned had not exchanged a sensible word from the moment
they found themselves in each other's arms. Yet the understanding
between them was unmistakable. They were completely engaged--almost,
Joan thought with a shiver, as good as married!
This, then, was love. A very different thing from what she had expected!
A beautiful, rather terrible thing.... The touch of Puritan in the girl
made her wonder whether anything so beautiful and terrible could be
quite nice.
She slipped to her knees; not to pray, but simply to remember her
mother. The vision of her mother always came better when she was on her
knees--perhaps because of the old-time association of prayers with
bedtime--and Joan felt a desperate need of her just then. She wanted to
be assured that her mother understood, and had been through it all
herself, and had come out of it--just her mother. She held out her
jeweled bracelet childishly in the dark, as if for somebody to see. She
knelt there tense, every nerve and fibre straining, whispering under her
breath, "Mamma, are you here? Do you know?"
But the vision failed her. She had instead the warmth of a man's breath
on her closed eyes, the roughness of his cheek on her throat....
She dropped her head in her arms and began to sob. She was very happy.