THE WALTZ.
When Paul parted with Clarice that night he was conscious of a feeling
of disquiet unusual to him. He had been angry with Clarice and made her
cry. This of itself was enough to disturb him, but added to it was
another feeling, novel and bewildering. Clarice was jealous of Elithe,
and not altogether without cause, although until she put it into words
it had never occurred to him that possibly he was too attentive to her.
He had thought of her a great deal and called upon her every day. He
could not help his thoughts, but he could keep from calling, and he did
for four days, three of which he spent in Boston. At the close of the
fourth he could stand it no longer, and on his way to the tennis court
stopped at the cottage, finding only Miss Hansford, a little grim and
off color as she asked where he had kept himself. He told her, and then
inquired for Elithe.
“Gone to the tennis court with Ralph Tracy, the Governor’s son,” Miss
Hansford answered, with a good deal of elation in her voice.
“Gone to the tennis court with Ralph Tracy!” Paul repeated. “I didn’t
know that she knew him.”
“Well, she does. He was here day before yesterday with one or two more
high bucks. To-day he came with his sister to ask her to go to the court
and to tell her she had been made a member.”
Here was news. Paul had not been near the tennis court since he took
Elithe there and quarreled with Clarice, but he started for it rapidly
now, finding Elithe there playing with Ralph Tracy. Clarice had not
black-balled her. She had shut her lips together when her name was
proposed, but had dropped her Yes into the box with the rest and shaken
hands with her as a new member when she appeared on the grounds with
Ralph Tracy. Some people are long in reaching the top of society’s
ladder; others get there with a bound. Elithe was of the latter class.
The fashionable young men of Oak City had taken her up, attracted by her
beauty, her freshness and the absence of anything conventional and
stiff. She said what she thought, she laughed when she wanted to laugh.
She confessed her ignorance of many things, and with her frank Western
ways was altogether charming. Others besides Paul Ralston called to see
her. There were invitations to clam bakes and blue fishing, and
excursions on the boat, and concerts, and the skating rink, and to a
ball at the Harbor Hotel.
It was Paul who gave the last invitation. Clarice was in New York for a
few days, and he didn’t want to go alone, he said to Miss Hansford, to
whom he preferred his request, knowing that by so doing he was surer to
have it granted. Miss Hansford had given in to a good deal which she
once held heterodox, but she looked on dancing as something flavored
with brimstone. For her niece and the daughter of a clergyman to dance
would be a deadly sin. She presumed Roger would not object, she said, as
the ’Piscopals were always kicking up their heels. She used to kick hers
up till she learned the folly of it.
“I want awfully to learn the folly of it, too,” Elithe said, as she
stood anxiously waiting her aunt’s decision.
“Poor foolish child. You’ll know more when you are older,” Miss Hansford
said, feeling herself giving way under the entreaty in Elithe’s eyes and
Paul’s persuasive tongue.
Finally a compromise was effected. Elithe could go and look on, but not
dance, and was to leave at eleven sharp.
“Not one little dance with me?” Paul said, taking Miss Hansford by the
arm and whirling her round until she unconsciously fell into a step once
familiar to her, but buried years ago when she laid aside her white
dress and red ribbons and burned her long curls.
“Stop—stop,” she cried. “There’s Miss Dunton looking at us. I shall be
churched. I know I shall.”
“Hardly,” Paul answered with a laugh as he released her and again asked
permission for one dance with Elithe.
Miss Hansford was firm. She had given her ultimatum, and Paul and Elithe
were obliged to accept it. It was after nine when they entered the
ball-room at the hotel, where Elithe was at once besieged with suitors.
“I am not going to dance. I’m here to look on,” she said to them all,
and then took a seat where she had a full view of the gay scene.
It was harder to look on than she had imagined, for she was fond of
dancing, and nothing could be more inspiriting than the music hired for
the occasion, as it was the ball of the season. She had joined in the
grand march with Paul, who, at her request, tried a waltz or two and
then sat down beside her, while with her head and hands and feet she
kept time to the lively strains and studied carefully the step of a
waltz she had never seen before. Every few minutes she asked Paul what
time it was, saying: “I mustn’t be a minute late, you know.”
At last Paul laid his open watch in her lap, telling her to keep the
time herself, which she did religiously, and at exactly eleven o’clock
she left the ball-room with Paul. It was a bright moonlight night, and
when they were on the broad avenue at a little distance from the hotel
Elithe stopped suddenly and exclaimed: “This is glorious, and I feel as
if I could fly. I did not promise not to dance outdoors with nobody in
sight but the moon. I can do that step. I know I can. Look!”
Striking an attitude, she began a series of pirouettes and evolutions,
and turnings and twistings, now with her head on one side, now on the
other, her hands sometimes thrown up and sometimes grasping her dress,
while she whistled the accompaniment in notes clear and shrill as a
boy’s. Paul was entranced as he watched the little whirling figure whose
white skirts brushed against him and then went sweeping off in front,
making in the moonlight fantastic but graceful shadows on the smooth
pavement.
“Can you do it?” she said at last, stopping in front of him and looking
at him with a face which would have moved any man had he been twenty
times engaged, and twenty times more in love with his betrothed than
Paul was.
“Yes, I can do it,” he replied, putting his arm around her, not stiffly
and gingerly, but holding her so close that his face at times almost
touched hers, and he felt her breath stir his hair during the mad waltz
across the causeway.
“I should like to go on this way forever,” Elithe said when they stopped
at last by the path which led up to her aunt’s cottage. “I have not
danced before since I came, and you don’t know how I like it.”
“Shall we try it again?” Paul asked, holding out his arms, into which
Elithe went with the eagerness of a child.
There was another turn across the causeway and back, and then, flushed
and panting, Elithe said she was satisfied and must go in.
“I hope auntie is asleep,” she continued, “and you’d better not come up
the gravel walk. Your boots will make a scrunching and waken her.”
She bade him good-night, and ran lightly on the grass to the side door
of the cottage. Miss Hansford was awake, and had been since she heard
the clock strike eleven. Elithe would soon be there, she thought, and,
getting out of bed, she looked out to see if she were coming. On the
causeway at the farther side was some white object moving rapidly, but
without her far-see-ers she could not make out what it was.
“Two fools on a tandem wheel, I guess,” she thought, returning to her
bed and listening until she heard the key turn in the lock and knew
Elithe had come. There was the scratching of a match as Elithe glanced
at the clock and then stole noiselessly up the stairs, her heart
thumping wildly, when, as she passed her aunt’s door, a voice called
out, “Is that you, Elithe?”
“Yes-m,” was the answer, demurely given.
“What time is it?”
“Half-past eleven.”
“Half-past eleven!” Miss Hansford repeated. “Has it taken you half an
hour to come home?”
“No, ma’am,” and Elithe stepped into her aunt’s room, and, standing in
the centre of a broad patch of moonlight, which fell upon the floor from
an uncurtained window, she continued: “We left the hotel at exactly
eleven, but——” she hesitated, and her aunt asked:
“But what? What have you been doing since?”
“Whistling and waltzing on the causeway,” Elithe said, not defiantly,
but as if she meant to tell the truth if the heavens fell.
“Whistling and waltzing!” Miss Hansford exclaimed, sitting up straight
in bed like a Nemesis confronting the little girl standing in the
moonlight wiping her wet face and pushing the damp hair from her
forehead. “Do you know how wicked it is to waltz, and what is said of
whistling girls and crowing hens?”
“Yes’m:
“Girls that whistle,
And hens that crow,
Make their way
Where’er they go,”
Elithe replied.
Miss Hansford fell back upon her pillow vanquished and silent, while
Elithe continued: “I didn’t dance a step at the hotel, because I told
you I wouldn’t. Almost everybody asked me, and I wanted to so badly. I
didn’t think it wicked to waltz outdoors. The music got into my brain
and I had to!”
“More likely the Old Harry got into your brain,” Miss Hansford said, and
Elithe replied: “Perhaps it was the Old Harry. Any way, I had a good
time, and,—and,—I don’t care!”
Here was rebellion,—the first she had seen in her niece, and Miss
Hansford knew she ought to check it, but for some reason she didn’t feel
like it, and, greatly to Elithe’s astonishment, she said: “Neither do I
care. Go to bed. It must be nearly midnight. You are sure you locked the
door?”
Ten minutes later Elithe was asleep, dreaming of music and waltzing and
two-steps and Paul Ralston’s arm around her, as they whirled on and
on,—they two alone,—on into a vast sea of moonlight, where she became
lost in a dreamless slumber, which lasted until breakfast was over the
next morning, the work done up and her aunt sewing on the rear porch.
Paul, too, had his dreams of skirts whirling in circles round him, of
fairy feet dancing on their toes and coming nearer and nearer to him,
and of a face so close to his that he kissed it, then with a start he
awoke to find that it was Elithe he had kissed and not Clarice.