The restaurant was crowded with unfamiliar faces, terrified at what they
were to witness. Doctor Brearley had not known what to do. It seemed so
mean to stay away and so perilous to go. His daughter solved the
problem by telling him that she would say she had made him come. He went
so far as to let her drag him in. "But just for a moment," he
explained. "He really must leave immediately after Mr. and Mrs.
Hippisley's--er--exercises." He apparently apologized to the other
guests, but really to an outraged heaven.
He trembled with anxiety on the edge of his chair. The savagery of the
music alarmed him. When Prue walked out with her husband the old Doctor
was distressed by her beauty. Then they danced and his heart thumped;
but subtly it was persuaded to thump in the measure of that unholy
Maxixe. He did not know that outside in the street before the two
windows stood two exiled fathers watching in bitter loneliness.
He saw a little love drama displayed, and reminded himself that, after
all, some critics said that the Song of Solomon was a kind of wedding
drama or dance. After all, Mrs. Hippisley was squired by her perfectly
proper and very earnest young husband--though Orton in his black clothes
was hardly more than her shifting shadow.
The old preacher had been studying his Cruden, and bolstering himself
up, too, with the very Scriptural texts that Prue had written out for
her stiff-necked father. He had met other texts that she had not known
how to find. The idea came to the preacher that, in a sense, since God
made everything He must have made the dance, breathed its impulse into
the clay.
This daughter of Shiloh was an extraordinarily successful piece of
workmanship. There was nothing very wicked surely about that coquettish
bending of her head, those playful escapes from her husband's embrace,
that heel-and-toe tripping, that lithe elusiveness, that joyous psalmody
of youth.
Prue was so pretty and her ways so pretty that the old man felt the
pathos of beauty, so fleet, so fleeting, so lyrical, so full of--Alas!
The tears were in his eyes, and he almost applauded with the others when
the dance was finished. He bowed vaguely in the direction of the anxious
Prue and made his way out. She felt rebuked and condemned and would not
be comforted by the praise of others. She did not know that the old
preacher had encountered on the sidewalk Judge Hippisley. Doctor
Brearley had forgotten that the judge had not yet ordered his own
decision reversed, and he thought he was saying the unavoidable thing
when he murmured:
"Ah, Judge, how proud you must be of your dear son's dear wife. I fancy
that Miriam, the prophetess, must have danced something like that on the
banks of the Red Sea when the Egyptians were overthrown."
Then he put up the umbrella he always carried and stumbled back to his
parsonage under the star-light. His heart was dancing a trifle, and he
escaped the scene of wrath that broke out as soon as he was away.
For William Pepperall had a lump in his throat made up of equal parts of
desire to cry and desire to fight, and he said to Judge Hippisley with
all truculence:
"Look here, Judge! I understand you been jawin' round this town about my
daughter not being all she'd ought to be. Now I'm goin' to put a stop to
that jaw of yours if I have to slam it right through the top of your
head. If you want to send me to jail for contemp' of court, sentence me
for life, because that's the way I feel about you, you fat old--"
Judge Hippisley put up wide-open hands and protested:
"Why, Bill, I--I just been wonderin' how I could get your daughter to
make up with me. I been afraid to ask her for fear she'd just think I
was toadyin' to her. I think she's the finest girl ever came out of
Carthage. Do you suppose she'd make up and--and come over to our house
to dinner Sunday?"
"Let's ask her," said William, and they walked in at the door.