When the company had gone,--"I thought they never _would_ go!" Nannie
said--she rushed at her brother. "Blair!"
The boy flung up his head proudly. "She told you, did she?"
"You're engaged!" cried Nannie, ecstatically.
Blair started. "Why!" he said. "So I am! I never thought of it." And
when he got his breath, the radiant darkness of his eyes sparkled into
laughter. "Yes, _I'm engaged!_" He put his hands into his pockets and
strutted the length of the room; a minute later he stopped beside the
piano and struck a triumphant chord; then he sat down and began to play
uproariously, singing to a crashing accompaniment:
"'... lived a miner, a forty-niner,
With his daughter Clementine!
Oh my darling, oh my _darling_--'"
--the riotous, beautiful voice rang on, the sound overflowing through
the long rooms, across the hall, even into the dining-room. Harris,
wiping dishes in the pantry, stopped, tea-towel in hand, and listened;
Sarah Maitland, at her desk, lifted her head, and the pen slipped from
her fingers. Blair, spinning around on the piano-stool, caught his
sister about her waist in a hug that made her squeak. Then they both
shrieked with laughter.
"But Blair!" Nannie said, getting her breath; "shall you tell Mamma
to-night?"
Blair's face dropped. "I guess I won't tell anybody yet," he faltered;
"oh, that awful dinner!"
As the mortification of an hour ago surged back upon him, he added to
the fear of telling his mother a resentment that would retaliate by
secrecy. "I won't tell her at all," he decided; "and don't you, either."
"I!" said Nannie. "Well, I should think not. Gracious!"
But though Blair did not tell his mother, he could not keep the great
news to himself; he saw David the next afternoon, and overflowed.
David took it with a gasp of silence, as if he had been suddenly hit
below the belt; then in a low voice he said, "You--_kissed_ her. Did
she kiss you?"
Blair nodded. He held his head high, balancing it a little from side to
side; his lips were thrust out, his eyes shone. He was standing with
his feet well apart, his hands deep in his pockets; he laughed,
reddening to his forehead, but he was not embarrassed. For once David's
old look of silent, friendly admiration did not answer him; instead
there was half-bewildered dismay. David wanted to protest that it
wasn't--well, it wasn't _fair_. He did not say it; and in not saying it
he ceased to be a boy.
"I suppose it was when you and she went off after dinner? You needn't
have been so darned quiet about it! What's the good of being so--mum
about everything? Why didn't you come back and tell? You're not ashamed
of it, are you?"
"A man doesn't tell a thing like that," Blair said scornfully.
"Well!" David snorted, "I suppose some time you'll be married?"
Blair nodded again. "Right off."
"Huh!" said David; "your mother won't let you. You are only sixteen.
Don't be an ass."
"I'll be seventeen next May."
"Seventeen! What's seventeen? I'm pretty near eighteen, and I haven't
thought of being married;--at least to anybody in particular."
"You couldn't," Blair said coldly; "you haven't got the cash."
David chewed this bitter fact in silence; then he said, "I thought you
and Elizabeth were kind of off at dinner. You didn't talk to each other
at all. I thought you were both huffy; and instead of that--" David
paused.
"That damned dinner!" Blair said, dropping his love-affair for his
grievance. Blair's toga virilis, assumed in that hot moment in the
hall, was profanity of sorts. "David, I'm going to clear out. I can't
stand this sort of thing. I'll go and live at a hotel till I go to
college; I'll--"
"Thought you were going to get married?" David interrupted him
viciously.
Blair looked at him, and suddenly understood,--David was jealous!
"Gorry!" he said blankly. He was honestly dismayed. "Look here," he
began, "I didn't know that _you_--"
"I don't know what you're talking about," David broke in
contemptuously; "if you think _I_ care, one way or the other, you're
mistaken. It's nothing to me. 'By"; and he turned on his heel.
It was a hot July afternoon; the sun-baked street along which they had
been walking was deep with black dust and full of the clamor of
traffic. Four big gray Flemish horses, straining against their
breastplates, were hauling a dray loaded with clattering iron rods; the
sound, familiar enough to any Mercer boy, seemed to David at that
moment intolerable. "I'll get out of this cursed noise," he said to
himself, and turned down a narrow street toward the river. It occurred
to him that he would go over the covered bridge, and maybe stop and get
a tumbler of ice-cream at Mrs. Todd's. Then he would strike out into
the country and take a walk; he had nothing else to do. This vacation
business wasn't all it was cracked up to be; a man had better fun at
school; he was sick of Mercer, anyhow.
He had reached Mrs. Todd's saloon by that time, and through the white
palings of the fence he had glimpses of happy couples sitting at
marble-topped tables among the marigolds and coreopsis, taking slow,
delicious spoonfuls of ice-cream, and gazing at each other with
languishing eyes. David felt a qualm of disgust; for the first time in
his life he had no desire for ice-cream. A boy like Blair might find it
pleasant to eat ice-cream with a lot of fellows and girls out in the
garden of a toll-house, with people looking in through the palings; but
he had outgrown such things. The idea of Blair, at his age, talking
about being in love! Blair didn't know what _love_ meant. And as for
Elizabeth, how could she fall in love with Blair? He was two months
younger than she, to begin with. "No woman ought to marry a man younger
than she is," David said; he himself, he reflected, was much older than
Elizabeth. That was how it ought to be. The girl should always be
younger than the fellow. And anyway, Blair wasn't the kind of man for a
girl like Elizabeth to marry. "He wouldn't understand her. Elizabeth
goes off at half-cock sometimes, and Blair wouldn't know how to handle
her. I understand her, perfectly. Besides that, he's too selfish. A
woman ought not to marry a selfish man," said David. However, it made
no difference to him whom she married. If Elizabeth liked that sort of
thing, if she found Blair--who was only a baby anyhow--the kind of man
she could love, why then he was disappointed in Elizabeth. That was
all. He was not jealous, or anything like that; he was just
disappointed; he was sorry that Elizabeth was that kind of girl. "Very,
very sorry," David said to himself; and his eyes stung.... (Ah, well;
one may smile; but the pangs are real enough to the calf! The trouble
with us is we have forgotten our own pangs, so we doubt his.) ... Yes,
David was sorry; but the whole darned business was nothing to him,
because, unlike Blair, he was not a boy, and he could not waste time
over women; he had his future to think of. In fact, he felt that to
make the most of himself he must never marry.
Then suddenly these bitter forecastings ceased. He had come upon some
boys who were throwing stones at the dust-grimed windows of an unused
foundry shed. Along the roof of the big, gaunt building, dilapidated
and deserted, was a vast line of lights that had long been a target for
every boy who could pick up a pebble. Glass lay in splinters on the
slope of sheet-iron below the sashes, and one could look in through
yawning holes at silent, shadowy spaces that had once roared with light
from swinging ladles and flowing cupolas; but there were a few whole
panes left yet. At the sound of crashing glass, David, being a human
boy, stopped and looked on, at first with his hands in his pockets;
then he picked up a stone himself. A minute later he was yelling and
smashing with the rest of them; but when he had broken a couple of
lights, curiously enough, desire failed; he felt a sudden distaste for
breaking windows,--and for everything else! It was a sort of spiritual
nausea, and life was black and bitter on his tongue. He was conscious
of an actual sinking below his breast-bone. "I'm probably coming down
with brain fever," he told himself; and he had a happy moment of
thinking how wretched everybody would be when he died. Elizabeth would
be _very_ wretched! David felt a wave of comfort, and on the impulse of
expected death, he turned toward home again.... However, if he should
by any chance recover, marriage was not for him. It occurred to him
that this would be a bitter surprise to Elizabeth, whose engagement
would of course be broken as soon as she heard of his illness; and
again he felt happier. No, he would never marry. He would give his life
to his profession--it had long ago been decided that David was to be a
doctor. But it would be a lonely life. He looked ahead and saw himself
a great physician--no common doctor, like that old Doctor King who came
sometimes to see his mother; but a great man, dying nobly in some awful
epidemic. When Elizabeth heard of his magnificent courage, she'd feel
pretty badly. Rather different from Blair. How much finer than to be
merely looking forward to a lot of money that somebody else had made!
But perhaps that was why Elizabeth liked Blair; because he was going to
have money? And yet, how could she compare Blair with,--well, _any_
fellow who meant to work his own way? Here David touched bottom
abruptly. "How can a fellow take money he hasn't earned?" he said to
himself. David's feeling about independence was unusual in a boy of his
years, and it was not altogether admirable; it was, in fact, one of
those qualities that is a virtue, unless it becomes a vice.
When he was half-way across the bridge, he stopped to look down at the
slow, turbid river rolling below him. He stood there a long time,
leaning on the hand-rail. On the dun surface a sheen of oil gathered,
and spread, and gathered again. He could hear the wash of the current,
and in the railing under his hand he felt the old wooden structure
thrill and quiver in the constant surge of water against the pier below
him. The sun, a blood-red disk, was slipping into the deepening haze,
and on either side of the river the city was darkening into dusk. All
along the shore lights were pricking out of the twilight and sending
wavering shafts down into the water. The coiling smoke from furnace
chimneys lay level and almost motionless in the still air; sometimes it
was shot with sparks, or showed, on its bellying black curves, red
gleams from hidden fires below.
David, staring at the river with absent, angry eyes, stopped his
miserable thoughts to watch a steamboat coming down the current. Its
smoke-stacks were folded back for passing under the bridge, and its
great paddlewheel scarcely moved except to get steerageway. It was
pushing a dozen rafts, all lashed together into a spreading sheet. The
smell of the fresh planks pierced the acrid odor of soot that was
settling down with the night mists. On one of the rafts was a shanty of
newly sawed pine boards; it had no windows, but it was evidently a
home, for a stove-pipe came through its roof, and there was a woman
sitting in its little doorway, nursing her baby. David, looking down,
saw the downy head, and a little crumpled fist lying on the white, bare
breast. The woman, looking up as they floated below him, caught his
eye, and drew her blue cotton dress across her bosom. David suddenly
put his hand over his lips to hide their quiver. The abrupt tears were
on his cheeks. "Oh--_Elizabeth_!" he said. The revolt, the anger, the
jealousy, were all gone. He sobbed under his breath. He had forgotten
that he had said it made no difference to him,--"not the slightest
difference." It did make a difference! All the difference in the
world.... "Oh, Elizabeth!"... The barges had slid farther and farther
under the bridge; the woman and the child were out of sight; the
steamboat with its folded smoke-stacks slid after them, leaving a wake
of rocking, yellow foam; the water splashed loudly against the piers.
It was nearly dark there on the footpath, and quite deserted. David put
his head down on his arms on the railing and stood motionless for a
long moment.
When he reached home, he found his mother in the twilight, in the
little garden behind the house. David, standing behind her, said
carelessly, "I have some news for you, Materna."
"Yes?" she said, absorbed in pinching back her lemon verbena.
"Blair is--is spoony over Elizabeth. Here, I'll snip that thing for
you."
Mrs. Richie faced him in amazement. "What! Why, but they are both
children, and--" she stopped, and looked at him. "Oh--_David!_" she
said.
And the boy, forgetting the spying windows of the opposite houses,
dropped his head on her shoulder. "Materna--Materna," he said, in a
stifled voice.