I AM a loathsome person at times,” she informed him; “and to-night I
was rather worse than usual.”
“I do dance like a--locomotive,” involuntarily.
“It doesn't matter how you dance,” she proceeded, “and you mustn't
repeat it, it isn't generous.” Suddenly she laughed uncontrollably.
“You looked so uncomfortable... your collar,” it was lost in a bubbling,
silvery peal. “Forgive me,” she gasped.
“I don't mind,” he assured her. All at once he didn't; the sting had
vanished from his pride; he smiled. He saw that she wore a honey-colored
dress, with a strand of pearls about her slim throat, and that her feet,
in satin, were even smaller than Ellie's. Her hair resembled more a
crown of light than the customary adornment. “I didn't want to come,” he
confided: “I hate, well--going out, dancing.”
“It doesn't suit you,” she admitted frankly; “you are so splendidly
bronzed and strong; you need,” she paused, “lots of room.”
For this Anthony had no adequate reply. “I have this with some one,”
she declared as the music recommenced, “but I hope they don't find me;
I hate it for the moment... I'll show you a place; it's very wicked of
me.” She rose and, waving him to follow, slipped over the grass. Beyond
the house she stopped in the shadowy vista of a pergola; vines shut out
the stars, walled them in a virid, still gloom. She sank on a low stone
bench, and he found the grass at her feet. A mantle of fine romance
descended upon his shoulders, of subtile adventure, prodigious daring.
Immaculate men, pearl-studded, were searching for her, and she
had hidden herself from them with him. A new and pleasant sense of
importance warmed him, flattered his self-esteem. He felt strangely at
ease, and sat in silent contentment. The faint sound of violins, a burst
of distant laughter, floated to him.
“It seems as if the world were rushing on, out there, without us,” Eliza
finally broke the silence, “as if they were keeping a furious pace,
while we sat in some everlasting, quiet wood, like Fontainebleau. Don't
you adore nature?”
“I knock about a lot outside,” he admitted cautiously, “often I stay out
all night, by the Wingohocking Creek. There's a sort of cave where
you can hear the falls, and the owls hunting about. I cook things in
clay--fish, chickens,” he paused abruptly at the latter item, recalling
the questionable source of his supply. “In winter I shoot rabbits with
Bert Woods, he's a barber, and Doctor Allhop, you know--the druggist.”
“I am sure that your friends are very nice,” she promptly assured him.
“Bert's crazy about girls,” he remarked, half contemptuously.
“And you... don't care for them?”
“I don't know anything about them,” he admitted with an abrupt,
unconscious honesty.
“But there must have been--there must be--one,” she persisted.
She leaned forward, and he met her gaze with unwavering candor. “Not
that many,” he returned.
“It would be wonderful to care for just one person, _always_,” she
continued intently: “I had a dream when I was quite young.... I dreamed
that a marvellous happiness would follow a constancy like that. Father
rather laughs at me, and quotes Shakespeare--the 'one foot on land and
one on shore' thing. Perhaps, but it's too bad.”
Anthony gravely considered this new idea in relation to his own,
hitherto lamented, lack of experience. It dawned upon him that the idea
of manly success he had cherished would appear distasteful to Eliza
Dreen. She had indirectly extolled the very thing of which he had been
secretly ashamed. He thought in conjunction with her of the familiar
group at the drugstore, and in this light the latter retreat suffered
a disconcerting change: Thomas Meredith appeared sly and trivial, and
unhealthy; Williams an empty braggard; Craik ineffectual, untidy. He
surveyed himself without enthusiasm.
“You are different from any one I ever knew,” he told her.
“Oh, there are millions of me,” she returned; “but you are different.
I didn't like you for a sou at first; but there is something about you
like--like a very clear spring of water. That's idiotic, but it's what
I mean. There is an early morning feeling about you. I am very sensitive
to people,” she informed him, “some make me uncomfortable directly they
come into the room. There was a curé at Etretat I perfectly detested,
and he turned out to be an awful person.”
Her name was called unmistakably across the lawn, and she rose. “They're
all furious,” she announced, without moving further. Her face was pale,
immaterial, in the gloom; her wide eyes dark, disturbing. A minute gold
watch on her wrist ticked faintly, and--it seemed to Anthony--in furious
haste. Something within him, struggling inarticulately for expression,
hurt; an oppressive emotion beat upon his heart. He uttered a period
about seeing her again.
“Some day you may show me the place where the fall sounds and the owls
hunt. No, don't come with me.” She turned and fled.
An unreasoning conviction seized Anthony that a momentous occasion had
overtaken him; he was unable to distinguish its features, discover it
grave or gay; but, wrapped in the impenetrable veil of the future,
it enveloped and permeated him, swept in the circle of his blood's
circulation, vibrated in the cords of his sensitive ganglia. He returned
slowly to the house: the brilliantly-lit, dancing figures seemed the
mere figments of a febrile dream; but the music apparently throbbed
within his brain.
Ellie's cool voice recreated his actual sphere. He found their hack,
the driver slumbering doubled on the seat. The latter rose stiffly,
and stirred his drowsing animal into a stumbling walk. Beyond the
illuminated entrance to Hydrangea House the countryside lay profoundly
dim to where the horizon flared with the pale reflection of distant
lightning.
“Eliza's a sweet,” Ellie pronounced. Anthony brooded without reply upon
his opinion. The iron-like collar had capitulated, and rested limply
upon his limp shirt; at the sacrifice of a second button his waistcoat
offered complete comfort. “I am going to get a new dress suit,” he
announced decisively. Ellie smiled with sisterly malice. “Eliza is a
sweet,” she reiterated.
“You go to thunder!” he retorted. But, “she's wonderful,” he admitted,
and--out of his conclusive experience, “there is not another girl like
her in all the world.”
“I'll agitate for the new suit,” Ellie promised.
X
THE following morning he reorganized his neckties, left a pair of white
flannels to be pressed at the tailor's; then, his shoulders swathed in a
crisp, sprigged muslin, sat circumspectly under the brisk shears of Bert
Woods. Bert hovered above him, and commented on yesterday's fiasco. “It
comes to the best of 'em,” Bert assured him: “'member how Ollie Stitcher
fell down in the world's series at Chicago.” He recited, for Anthony's
comfort, the names of eminent pitchers who had “fell down” when every
necessity demanded that they should have remained splendidly erect.
His defeat still rankled in Anthony's mind, but the bitterness had
vanished, the sting salved by that other memory of the impulsive charm
of Eliza Dreen. He recalled all that she had said to him; her words,
thoughtfully considered, were just those employed by humdrum individuals
in their commonplace discourses; but, spoken by her, they were a
thrill with an especial, a significant, importance and beauty. It was
inevitable that she should have dreamed things immaculate, rare; things
like... white flowers.
“Shampoo?” Bert inquired absent-mindedly.
“_And_ singed, and curled, and sprinkled with violets,” Anthony promptly
returned. With a flourish, Bert swept aside the muslin folds.
Then, in the pursuit of a neglected duty, he crossed the town to a
quiet corner, occupied by a small dwelling built of smooth, green stone,
crowned with a fantastic and dingy froth of wood. A shallow, untended
garden was choked with weeds and bushes, sprawling upward against
closely-shuttered windows. He had not been to see Mrs. Bosbyshell for
two weeks, he realized, with a stir of mild self-reproach. He was aware
that his visits to that solitary and eccentric old woman formed her
sole contact with a world she regarded with an increasing, unbalanced
suspicion.
A minute or more after his knock--the bell handle was missing--a shutter
shifted a fraction, upon which he was admitted to a narrow, dark hall,
and the door bolted sharply behind him. A short, stout woman, in
a formless wrap of grotesquely gorgeous design, faced him with a
quivering, apprehensive countenance and prodigiously bright eyes. Her
scant, yellowish-white hair was gathered aloft in a knot that slipped
oddly from side to side; and, as she walked, shabby Juliet slippers
loudly slapped the bare floor.
“Do you want some wood brought in?” Anthony inquired; “and how does the
washer I put on the hot water spigot work?”
“A little wood, if you please; and the spigot's good as new.” She sat on
a chair, lifting a harassed gaze to his serious solicitation. “I've
had a dreadful time since you were here last--an evilish-appearing man
knocked and knocked, at one door and again at another.”
Her voice sank to a shrill whisper, “he was after the money.” She nodded
so vigorously that the knot fell in a straggling whisp across her eyes.
“Cousin Alonzo sent him.”
“Your cousin Alonzo has been dead ten years,” he interposed patiently,
going once more over that familiar ground. “Probably it was a man
wanting to sell gas stoves.”
“You don't know Alonzo,” she persisted, unconvinced; “I should have to
see his corp'. He knows I've a comfortable sum put by, and's hard after
it for his wenching and such practices: small good, or bad, he'll get of
it when my time comes.”
He passed through the hall to the kitchen, and, unchaining the back
door, brought a basket of cut wood from a shed, and piled it beside the
stove. Mrs. Bosbyshell inspected with a critical eye the fastening of
the door. There was a swollen window sash to release above, a mattress
to turn, when he was waved ceremoniously into a formal, darkened
chamber. The musty spice of rose pot-pourri lingered in the flat air;
old mahogany--rush bottomed chairs, flute-legged table, a highboy and
Dutch clock--glimmered about the walls. A marble topped stand bore
orderly volumes in maroon and primrose morocco, the top one entitled,
“The Gentlewoman's Garland. A Gift Book.”
From a triangular cupboard, she produced a decanter with a carved design
of bees and cobalt clover, and a plate of crumbling currant cake. “A
sup of dandelion cordial,” she announced, “a bite of sweet. Growing boys
must be fed.”
She sat, and with patent satisfaction watched Anthony consume the ropy
syrup and cake.
“I met a girl last night,” he told her intimately; “she had hair
like--like a roman candle.”
“Did you burn your heart up in it?”
“She told me that I was like the early morning,” he confided with a
rush.
Mrs. Bosbyshell nodded her approval.
“An understandable remark; exactly what I should have said fifty years
ago; I didn't know the girls of to-day had it in 'em. You've got a good
heart, Anthony,” she enunciated. Anthony shuffled his feet. “A good
heart is a rare thing to find in the young. But I misdoubt, in a
world of mammon, you'll pay for it dear; I'm afraid you will never be
successful, so called. It's selling men that that success is got, and
buying women, and it's never in you to do those. _You_ wouldn't wish
an old woman gone for the sum she'd laid aside.” Her fancies had been
wilder than usual, he concluded, as the holt of the door at his hack
slid home. Alonzo and her money, one he considered as actual, as
imminent, as the other, occupied to the exclusion of all else her
dimming brain. He had hoped to converse with her more fully on the
inexhaustible subject of Eliza Dreen, but her vagaries had interrupted
him continuously. He decided that she was an antiquated bore, but made a
mental note to return before the store of wood was consumed.