“Walked!” In an instant she was leading me towards the gardens. I
_must_ be tired. I must come home with her at once and sit down. Indeed
it was near tea-time (the Stuarts had tea at the old-fashioned hour of
five). Every one would be _so_ surprised to see me. Fancy walking!
Fancy! But she supposed a man thought nothing of seventeen miles. When
_could_ I have started!
All the while, keeping me at a distance, without even the touch of her
hand.
“But, Nettie! I came over to talk to you!”
“My dear boy! Tea first, if you please! And besides—aren’t we talking?”
The “dear boy” was a new note, that sounded oddly to me.
She quickened her pace a little.
“I wanted to explain—” I began.
Whatever I wanted to explain I had no chance to do so. I said a few
discrepant things that she answered rather by her intonation than her
words.
When we were well past the shrubbery, she slackened a little in her
urgency, and so we came along the slope under the beeches to the
garden. She kept her bright, straightforward-looking girlish eyes on me
as we went; it seemed she did so all the time, but now I know, better
than I did then, that every now and then she glanced over me and behind
me towards the shrubbery. And all the while, behind her quick
breathless inconsecutive talk she was thinking.
Her dress marked the end of her transition.
Can I recall it?
Not, I am afraid, in the terms a woman would use. But her bright brown
hair, which had once flowed down her back in a jolly pig-tail tied with
a bit of scarlet ribbon, was now caught up into an intricacy of pretty
curves above her little ear and cheek, and the soft long lines of her
neck; her white dress had descended to her feet; her slender waist,
which had once been a mere geographical expression, an imaginary line
like the equator, was now a thing of flexible beauty. A year ago she
had been a pretty girl’s face sticking out from a little unimportant
frock that was carried upon an extremely active and efficient pair of
brown-stockinged legs. Now there was coming a strange new body that
flowed beneath her clothes with a sinuous insistence. Every movement,
and particularly the novel droop of her hand and arm to the
unaccustomed skirts she gathered about her, and a graceful forward
inclination that had come to her, called softly to my eyes. A very fine
scarf—I suppose you would call it a scarf—of green gossamer, that some
new wakened instinct had told her to fling about her shoulders, clung
now closely to the young undulations of her body, and now streamed
fluttering out for a moment in a breath of wind, and like some shy
independent tentacle with a secret to impart, came into momentary
contact with my arm.
She caught it back and reproved it.
We went through the green gate in the high garden wall. I held it open
for her to pass through, for this was one of my restricted stock of
stiff politenesses, and then for a second she was near touching me. So
we came to the trim array of flower-beds near the head gardener’s
cottage and the vistas of “glass” on our left. We walked between the
box edgings and beds of begonias and into the shadow of a yew hedge
within twenty yards of that very pond with the gold-fish, at whose brim
we had plighted our vows, and so we came to the wistaria-smothered
porch.
The door was wide open, and she walked in before me. “Guess who has
come to see us!” she cried.
Her father answered indistinctly from the parlor, and a chair creaked.
I judged he was disturbed in his nap.
“Mother!” she called in her clear young voice. “Puss!”
Puss was her sister.
She told them in a marveling key that I had walked all the way from
Clayton, and they gathered about me and echoed her notes of surprise.
“You’d better sit down, Willie,” said her father; “now you have got
here. How’s your mother?”
He looked at me curiously as he spoke.
He was dressed in his Sunday clothes, a sort of brownish tweeds, but
the waistcoat was unbuttoned for greater comfort in his slumbers. He
was a brown-eyed ruddy man, and I still have now in my mind the bright
effect of the red-golden hairs that started out from his cheek to flow
down into his beard. He was short but strongly built, and his beard and
mustache were the biggest things about him. She had taken all the
possibility of beauty he possessed, his clear skin, his bright
hazel-brown eyes, and wedded them to a certain quickness she got from
her mother. Her mother I remember as a sharp-eyed woman of great
activity; she seems to me now to have been perpetually bringing in or
taking out meals or doing some such service, and to me—for my mother’s
sake and my own—she was always welcoming and kind. Puss was a youngster
of fourteen perhaps, of whom a hard bright stare, and a pale skin like
her mother’s, are the chief traces on my memory. All these people were
very kind to me, and among them there was a common recognition,
sometimes very agreeably finding expression, that I was—“clever.” They
all stood about me as if they were a little at a loss.
“Sit down!” said her father. “Give him a chair, Puss.”
We talked a little stiffly—they were evidently surprised by my sudden
apparition, dusty, fatigued, and white faced; but Nettie did not remain
to keep the conversation going.
“There!” she cried suddenly, as if she were vexed. “I declare!” and she
darted out of the room.
“Lord! what a girl it is!” said Mrs. Stuart. “I don’t know what’s come
to her.”
It was half an hour before Nettie came back. It seemed a long time to
me, and yet she had been running, for when she came in again she was
out of breath. In the meantime, I had thrown out casually that I had
given up my place at Rawdon’s. “I can do better than that,” I said.
“I left my book in the dell,” she said, panting. “Is tea ready?” and
that was her apology. . .
We didn’t shake down into comfort even with the coming of the
tea-things. Tea at the gardener’s cottage was a serious meal, with a
big cake and little cakes, and preserves and fruit, a fine spread upon
a table. You must imagine me, sullen, awkward, and preoccupied,
perplexed by the something that was inexplicably unexpected in Nettie,
saying little, and glowering across the cake at her, and all the
eloquence I had been concentrating for the previous twenty-four hours,
miserably lost somewhere in the back of my mind. Nettie’s father tried
to set me talking; he had a liking for my gift of ready speech, for his
own ideas came with difficulty, and it pleased and astonished him to
hear me pouring out my views. Indeed, over there I was, I think, even
more talkative than with Parload, though to the world at large I was a
shy young lout. “You ought to write it out for the newspapers,” he used
to say. “That’s what you ought to do. _I_ never heard such nonsense.”
Or, “You’ve got the gift of the gab, young man. We ought to ha’ made a
lawyer of you.”
But that afternoon, even in his eyes, I didn’t shine. Failing any other
stimulus, he reverted to my search for a situation, but even that did
not engage me.
§ 5
For a long time I feared I should have to go back to Clayton without
another word to Nettie, she seemed insensible to the need I felt for a
talk with her, and I was thinking even of a sudden demand for that
before them all. It was a transparent manoeuver of her mother’s who had
been watching my face, that sent us out at last together to do
something—I forget now what—in one of the greenhouses. Whatever that
little mission may have been it was the merest, most barefaced excuse,
a door to shut, or a window to close, and I don’t think it got done.
Nettie hesitated and obeyed. She led the way through one of the
hot-houses. It was a low, steamy, brick-floored alley between staging
that bore a close crowd of pots and ferns, and behind big branching
plants that were spread and nailed overhead so as to make an impervious
cover of leaves, and in that close green privacy she stopped and turned
on me suddenly like a creature at bay.
“Isn’t the maidenhair fern lovely?” she said, and looked at me with
eyes that said, “_Now_.”
“Nettie,” I began, “I was a fool to write to you as I did.”
She startled me by the assent that flashed out upon her face. But she
said nothing, and stood waiting.
“Nettie,” I plunged, “I can’t do without you. I—I love you.”
“If you loved me,” she said trimly, watching the white fingers she
plunged among the green branches of a selaginella, “could you write the
things you do to me?”
“I don’t mean them,” I said. “At least not always.”
I thought really they were very good letters, and that Nettie was
stupid to think otherwise, but I was for the moment clearly aware of
the impossibility of conveying that to her.
“You wrote them.”
“But then I tramp seventeen miles to say I don’t mean them.”
“Yes. But perhaps you do.”