PRINCE CHARMING
I had not been asleep, but I had been in a dream; a dream from which I
had awakened to a state of greater unreality.
After the meal was over and the family had all left the dining-room I
was still in a dream as I rolled my sleeves up high and began giving
hasty dabs with the metal polish to the ancient silver on the
sideboard. How delightful it is to have heirloom silver! I failed even
to grow cross over the long, hot search for flannel cloths and the
gritty feeling which this distasteful task always leaves around my
finger-tips.
Still in a dream, I stood at the back kitchen door and watched Dilsey
decapitate the plumpest fowls the poultry yard boasted. I saw Lares
and Penates flying up and down the cellar steps, and to the garden,
orchard and vineyard--all at the same time. Later on in the afternoon
I was still dazed when I saw the ominous black signs of a
thunder-storm coming up darkly from the southwest; and I heard father
out in the hall using strong language at the telephone when he learned
that the liveryman had sent Bob Hall, the town idiot, to Bayville to
bring the lions back.
Now Bob Hall is a kind-hearted, narrow-eyed lad, whose mind has never
been right because his mother drove twenty miles to a circus just
before he was born, so the villagers explained; but, be that as it
may, Bob has never been able to learn much beyond when to say "Whoa"
and "Git up," but the joy of his life lies in saying these, so that
the liverymen of the town are glad to have him hang around the stables
and help with the horses at feeding and watering-time. Because the
regular driver was a little drunker than usual to-day Bob had been
sent to Bayville on that delicate commission!
"He's just as likely as not to dump 'em out in a mud-hole," father
said wrathfully, as he hung up the receiver when mother implored him
to leave off swearing over the telephone during an electrical storm.
"He'll make some kind of mess of it--you see if he doesn't."
I shuddered as I pictured that elegant gray overcoat all disfigured
with mud; then I shuddered again at being such an idiot as to imagine
he would have on an overcoat in August. And I wondered how he would
look without it, and decided that he would look grand, of course!
About five o'clock the storm burst in good earnest, the rain coming
down in heavy sheets at first and later settling into a lively drizzle
that promised to be good for all night.
With the rain came a noticeable effort on the part of father's
rheumatism to attract attention to itself; and Mammy Lou began
clapping her hand over her right side in an alarming manner.
Ever since an attack of gall-stones which she suffered over a year
ago, and through which she was safely steered by Alfred Morgan--which,
of course, placed him upon an Alfred-the-Great pinnacle in the
affections of the whole family--we have all turned in and helped Mammy
Lou with her work. Especially when company is coming we agitate our
minds over the actual meat and bread part of the entertainment, which
I abominate, for personally I am domesticated only so far as frothy
desserts and embroidered napkins go; and I am now able to understand
the decline of hospitality in the South.
Why, since mammy's spell I have actually learned how to "do up" my
best blouses, which is a joy so long as I am working on the front,
where the embroidery stands out in satisfying bas-relief, but I am
ready to weep and long for father's vocabulary by the time I reach the
gathers of the sleeves. I should certainly let these go unironed if
mammy did not always come to the rescue with a few deft strokes of the
Gothic-shaped end of the iron.
I must say, though, that she accepts our help with an exalted
indifference, for, since that awful pain in her side, things temporal
have been of small moment with her. She has turned to the comforts, or
discomforts, of a deeply Calvinistic religion, and is so keen-scented
after sin that when I darn stockings on Sunday morning I have to lock
my door and pull down the window-shades.
The only symptom of remaining worldliness which I have noted since her
belated conversion, besides her overwhelming desire to get me married
off to Alfred (my only rival in her affections) was exhibited early
this last spring, when her above-mentioned "boarder" was a new-comer
in our neighborhood and father had engaged his services to "break up"
the garden.
Sam, the homesick stranger, made strong appeal to mammy's hospitality,
quite aside, as we thought, from the natural susceptibility of her
affections. The man was big and _yellow_, mammy's favorite color in
husbands, and I scented danger one night soon after he came when I
happened to see her place before him on the table in the kitchen a
mighty dish of "greens" flanked on all sides with poached eggs.
He was busily plying her with questions, between mouthfuls, and when
he asked her point-blank "what aged 'oman she was" she threw her head
so coquettishly to one side that she splashed half a plateful of "pot
liquor" on the floor, as she responded airily: "Oh, I don't rickollect
exactly! I'm forty-five, or fifty-five, or sixty-five--somewhere in
the _fives_!"
We held our breath for the next few weeks, expecting at any moment to
hear that mammy had decided to out-Henry Henry Eighth, but her
religion was too fresh and too enjoyable for her to resign it and
marry the seventh time, which she realized would be a bad example for
her progeny. Still, there was Sam, in dangerous propinquity, three
times a day; and he was broad-shouldered and _enchantingly_ yellow!
She withstood, as long as it was in her poor, affectionate heart to
withstand; then she compromised and took him as a boarder! After
searching about for a means of easing her conscience for this
concession she lit upon Lares and Penates as brands to be snatched
from the burning; and she taught them such doleful facts about the
uncertainty of their salvation that the last time Alfred was down here
we persuaded him to threaten her with nervous prostration for Lares if
she persisted in her gloomy preachments.
"A boy or girl's responsible for they sins as soon as the bumps breaks
out on they faces," she was telling them this afternoon, when the
storm was at its worst, and the two sat huddled with Grapefruit behind
the stove, like poor little frightened chickens in a fence corner.
Mother, who had not seen the meaning gestures that mammy had been
making toward her volcanic right side, was inclined to make light of
the sins of the twins, and suggested that they come out from behind
the stove, so that the minute the rain held up a little they could run
on down to the ice-factory and tell the man to hurry with the ice. We
were going to have our favorite caramel cream that night.
But with mother's advent into the kitchen the pains in mammy's side
grew much worse, and she began suggestions that she didn't know but
what the Lord was going to strike her with another spell, "for the old
dominecker rooster had been crowin' sad all day!"
The rain kept on, and late in the afternoon the ice-man telephoned
that some of the machinery at the factory was broken, so there would
be no ice! Then father's rheumatism suddenly grew so bad that we had
to stop our preparations for the feast, and spent half an hour
searching for the stopper to the hot-water bag. He must have that bag
put to his shoulder, he declared, but after we gathered all the
essentials together and put it there he could not stand it on account
of the heat!
Upon going back to the kitchen to temper the water down a little I was
astounded at mammy's declaration that, if Dilsey would go down to the
cabin and bring up her easy chair, while I held an umbrella over it,
she would _try_ to stay up long enough to direct _us_ about finishing
that dinner! Did ever a girl have such dreams and such nightmares
mixed up together?
Night descended rapidly, as night has ever had a way of doing when you
are in a fearful hurry, and mother was distractedly searching through
her recipe book for a dessert that could be quickly made, yet when
finished would be grand enough to set before gubernatorial timber!
Her maternal love had caused her steadily to refuse my help with the
dessert, and she made me run on up-stairs for a final bath and a few
minutes of manicuring before time to dress. "Be sure to dress
carefully," she had bidden me, as she always does, for sometimes I am
inclined to be a little absent-minded in the matter of hooks and eyes;
but her warning was superfluous to-night.
"Make yourself beautiful--an' _skase_," is Mammy Lou's favorite slogan
in the campaign after masculine admiration, and I had prepared to
carry it out so far as nature and instinct would permit. I had
carefully pressed my prettiest white gown, a filmy, ruffled thing, and
spread it out on my bed, with a petticoat that was long enough, but
_not_ too long, lying conveniently near. Where is the woman who has
not shed tears and used feminine profanity because she could not find
exactly the right petticoat at an eleventh-hour dressing?
As I came into my room I glanced toward the bed with a feeling of
complacency, then I turned on the lights and looked more closely. My
hopes fell and I saw that the gown had shared in the general
determination of everything on the place to go wrong that afternoon
because we were so particularly anxious that all should go right. A
window near the bed had been left open, in the hurry and confusion,
and the dress had seemed to drink in every bit of dampness that it
could find lying around loose. It looked as limp and dejected as if it
had slept in an upper berth the night before. I had no other thin
dress that was available, with all its attachments, at that hour, so I
laid aside my ambition to look romantic and slipped on a
shirt-waist--with a collar so stiff that it scratched my neck until I
looked as if I bore the marks of the guillotine.
Toward eight o'clock, after it was inky dark, and mother had got her
dessert safely stored away in the refrigerator to cool, she and I were
taking a breathing spell in the dining-room, although we were holding
our breath every other minute, listening for the approach of wheels,
when the night began to be made hideous by the sounds of the most
violent calf distress down in the lot.
"Ba-a-a-h! _Ba-a-a-a-ah!_" came in hoarse, hollow bellows to our
already overstrained ears.
"It's that hateful little Jersey," mother said, starting up and going
toward the kitchen. "He has his head caught in the fence again!"
"You sit still," I said, drawing her back toward her chair, "I'll go
and send Penates to unfasten him."
There were savory odors in the kitchen, and mammy was so interested in
the final outcome of the meal that she had abandoned her temporary
throne and was stirring around the stove as usual. The three little
negroes were gathered at the window, looking out into the blackness
and listening with enjoyable horror at the turbulent sounds from the
cow-lot.
"Go and unfasten him, Penates," I said. "He'll kill himself and us,
too, with that noise!"
But Penates looked at me to see if I could be in earnest. When he saw
that I was he began to whine.
"I's a-skeered to!" he half whimpered.
"The idea! A great big boy like you! What are you afraid of?"
"Granny's done tol' us the devil's gwiner ketch us," he began, and, as
he saw mother coming in at the kitchen door, he looked appealingly
toward her; but the nerve-racking strain of the afternoon had done
its work with her--and the calf voice was something frightful!
"Your granny's an old idiot," she said forcefully, looking with wrath
toward the stove, where mammy was peering into the oven in an entirely
detached fashion. "You go straight and unfasten that calf!"
"Mis' Mary, I declare he'll ketch me ef I so much as step outside the
do' there in the dark! Granny's jus' now tol' us he's watchin' ever'
minute to ketch us--"
"Lou, you ought to be ashamed of yourself to stuff these children's
minds full of lies!" mother said, exasperated out of all semblance of
her gentle, even-tempered self by the piled-up mishaps of the
afternoon and the anguish of the present moment.
In case you have never heard a calf with his head caught in the fence
I will state, under oath, that the diabolical sounds of the Brocken
scene in Faust are dulcet music compared with the cry for help that
the terrified creature sends forth. It usually brings the neighbors
for miles around to find out the cause of the trouble, or rather _why_
the trouble is permitted to continue--for every one who has ever heard
it once knows its sound for ever. What an unlovely salute for Prince
Charming when he should drive up in the rainy, black night, I was
thinking in agony!
Mammy straightened up and looked at mother as steadfastly as she had
looked the day she announced her determination of marrying Bill
Williams, the "Yankee nigger."
"It's a _sin_ to teach children about the devil!" Mother's voice was a
challenge.
"_Sin?_ Why, Mis' Mary!" Mammy's tones were husky with horror. "An'
you been a church member for thirty years!"
"Well, the devil has never entered into my calculations in all those
thirty years," mother responded hotly, not observing that father had
slipped up close behind her and was listening to the theological
controversy with an amusement which had routed his rheumatism.
"Well--that's between you an' your Maker," mammy argued stoutly. "I'm
goin' to treat _my_ devil with some respeck, if white folks _don't_
mention theirs no mo' than if he was a po' relation that lived in
Arkansas!"
Father was smiling almost audibly, but mother was not looking in his
direction--and the little Jersey had evidently found no balm in Gilead
for his afflicted head!
"I don't believe there's any _such_ thing as a devil!" mother finally
broke out with vehemence; and she had turned quickly around as if she
would go to the cow-lot herself, when she beheld father standing
there, a look of amazement upon his face.
"_Mary!_ Have I lived to hear you deny the faith of your fathers?"
But mother was in no mood for banter.
"Don't _you_ talk to me about the devil, Dan Fielding!" she said,
facing him squarely, and reluctantly unfolding her daintiest linen
handkerchief to wipe the little beads of perspiration from across her
upper lip. "I've had enough to make me believe in him this day, with
three politicians coming, and a thunder-storm, and a broken
ice-factory, and rheumatism and gall-stones!"
"Well, you know _you_ were the one who suggested inviting them here,"
father defended himself, Adam-like.
"Well, maybe I was, but I should never have dreamed of such a thing if
you hadn't said, with that woebegone look of yours that you wished
you could see them and hear them talk about the latest phases of the
situation! Then, just to please you, I suggested that it was too bad
to let them go to that dreadful hotel for dinner, when it would be no
trouble for Mammy Lou to prepare one of her delightful meals!"
"Of course, neither one of us could know beforehand how deucedly
contrary everything was going to turn out to-day, else I should have
told you _not_ to invite them"--father was reiterating in what he
intended for a soothing tone, when all of a sudden I heard the tramp
of feet upon the front porch, for my ears all the time had been
straining in that direction, else I should never have heard them, far
away as the kitchen is, and with that hideous noise.
"_Hush!_" I implored, as the footfalls grew quite distinct and I
pulled down my cuffs, settled my belt, fluffed my hair out a little
more at the sides, and flicked a tiny feather off the toe of my shoe.
"They've come!"
"And Ann in a shirt-waist suit," mother sent after father as a final
shot when he started toward the front part of the house, "and that
bovine orchestra!"
She hurried into her bedroom and made a motion with her powder-puff
before she followed father, while I stopped in the dining-room and
gave a glance of satisfaction at the shaded lights, the old-fashioned
good taste of the furnishings, and the quantities of roses. The table
was perfect, and I knew mammy too well to doubt that the dinner, too,
would be everything that palate or eye could desire; then I glanced
into the great old gold-framed mirror hung above the mantelpiece.
"I believe he'll enjoy his dinner," I decided, nodding in a friendly
fashion toward the reflection in the glass; and, hearing the voices
still coming from the direction of the porch, I hurried on out there.
They had come! In truth they had come, but alas it was not Richard
Chalmers and satellites! It was Miss Delia Badger, Mrs. Sullivan and
Neva, drenched and bewildered, that Bob Hall, the fool, had brought
from Bayville!
"Oh, Mrs. Fielding," poor Mrs. Sullivan was saying beseechingly, as
she looked at mother's startled face, "_do_ you know what's happened
to Tim? We was to stay another week at maw's, but when Bob Hall drove
into Bayville at dinner-time to-day and said he'd come after somebody
that wanted to get took back here to Mr. Fielding's house, I knew it
must a-been Tim took sick and sent for me! So we all piled right in
without waitin' for me to belt down my Mother-Hubbard!"
"Jumping Jerusalem!" said father, and the calf bellowed dismally.
* * * * *
Investigation had shown the Sullivan cottage to be locked and barred,
and the supposition was that Tim, although not already sick, was in a
fair way to be so in the morning, as persistent telephoning on my part
finally located him at the drug store with a crowd of friends whose
company was both cheering and inebriating.
"I better git Bob to drive down there an' git 'im," Mrs. Sullivan
suggested forlornly, looking at Bob, who was leaning against one of
the big, white columns and twirling his cap around on one finger.
"For heaven's sake, _don't_," father objected. "He'll be just as
likely to drive up with the county undertaker as with Tim Sullivan!
I'll go myself."
"But who'll get the calf out of the fence corner?" mother asked
anxiously, as father walked to the hat-rack for an umbrella.
"_Me!_" cried Bob, speaking for the first time, but to so much purpose
that we all beamed gratitude upon him.
So, after being "much tossed about by land and on the deep," the calf
was finally loosed from his pillory, the Sullivans were settled in the
sanctuary of their own home, the lovely dinner was eaten in silence,
and our family went grumpily to bed.
Then this morning early the three belated dinner guests drove in from
Bayville. The two lesser lights caught the nine-o'clock car into the
city, but Mr. Chalmers drove on to the little hotel in the village and
later presented himself, in due calling season, at our house, with
apologies for the catastrophe of last evening. Mother said he had
spoken of it as catastrophe before I came into the room, but when he
mentioned the accident to me later on in the day, as we two sat quite
apart from the others, he referred to it as _calamity_.
Father and Rufe urged him to spend the day, an invitation which mother
warmly seconded after a moment's quick recollection of how many of the
dainties left over from last night's feast could be creamed and pâted
and souffled.
He said it was rather necessary for him to be in town that day, but he
stayed; and father and Rufe both remembered during the course of the
forenoon that they had some matters to attend to which, if he would
excuse them for half an hour or so, they would despatch with all
possible haste and rejoin him before the ladies had quite had time to
talk him to death!
Rufe really did have some telephoning to the city to get through with;
it is his regular morning duty; and father had to drive across part of
our place to give directions about some fences which had been washed
away last night. Of course, mother was needed about the dining-room,
but Cousin Eunice, bless her, unselfishly betook herself off up-stairs
out of pure kindness of heart!
Even the day was one of those golden days which come at the very end
of summer, when the cool morning air mounts to the head like old wine,
and the rich afternoon sunshine seems to hover lovingly over the earth
and rejoice in having fulfilled the summer's glorious promise. All
through the morning the birds caroled as happily as if they thought it
was winter instead of summer a-dying; then later, they settled down
like the rest of the world in the hushed silence of the hot afternoon,
when the heat causes a brilliant haze over the fields around; and it
seems as if all nature rests.
All my life this hour of summer afternoons has held a strange,
undefinable sadness. When I was a little girl and used to spend long
hours out under the trees reading, my book would always drop from my
hand as this period of stillness came on, and my eyes would wander
away to the intense blue of the sky and the dazzling whiteness of the
distant clouds, while a small but persistent voice seemed to keep
mocking my memory with the query: "_Can't_ you remember what used to
happen on days like this?"
And my memory would grope longingly away after the lead of that
tormenting voice, and it would visit all the far-away lands of
Romance, summer lands of sunshine always, Italy, India, Egypt--but it
never would remember exactly. "Where Tasso's spirit soars and sings,"
I used to repeat in a mystified wonder, for the beauties of his land
were as familiar to me as my own fields and meadows.
Then I grew older and learned about reincarnation of the spirit.
"That's it!" I cried exultantly, hugging the beautiful mysticism to my
heart. "That is _bound_ to be it!"
Life took on a new significance, and then for months I felt myself one
with the initiated! I was radiantly happy and achingly miserable with
this new, intangible philosophy; then Alfred Morgan came along and
told me that my vague memories were imagination; and that my restless
longings came from a perpetual idleness. And I believed him, because I
could not hear any statement from Alfred Morgan's lips without
believing it.
"I'd rather have tuberculosis than an imagination like yours, Ann," he
had said, and he advised me to learn to cook.
Perhaps it was the extraordinary beauty of the day and the
surroundings that led our talk into unusual channels as Richard
Chalmers and I walked out together through the golden afternoon haze.
Yes, we had our hour alone again, as in the morning; but not by
accident this time. He had graciously demanded it.
"Can't you rescue me from Clayborne's relentless newspaper spirit?" he
had asked in a low tone while we were at the table. I smiled assent,
whereupon he looked at me gratefully and a few minutes later announced
that I had promised to show him the orchard where those magnificent
peaches grew.
So it happened that when the rest of the family dispersed in different
directions, early in the afternoon, I pinned on a big, flat hat--a
white embroidered affair, with a great bow of black velvet
ribbon--and walked with him out into the glow. Down the avenue of
cedars we went and up the broad road, for the orchard can be reached
through a big gate opening off the pike, and the distance is much
longer around that way. We soon gained the desired shade of its
luxuriant leafiness, and I pointed out to him our most noteworthy
trees. He admired their beauty without looking at them.
After walking around the orchard a bit we finally sat down on a
fragment of stone wall, a prehistoric structure, which still protects
a portion of the grounds; and he took off his hat and began to fan
with it. His forehead was a little damp, and, as he wiped away the
perspiration, I observed again the exceeding fairness of his skin. His
hair, too, is so nearly light that the sprinkling of gray is almost
unnoticed, save by the closest scrutiny.
My survey of him, while at close range, was quite brief, for, after a
remark or two about the heat at this time of day, he turned to me
suddenly and asked with disconcerting straightforwardness:
"What were you doing that day at the gates of the little cemetery?"
"Oh! Why, I was walking around--trying to get warm."
I longed to ask him what he was doing there.
"I figured that day that you were a faithful little soul, going out to
visit some hallowed spot. You looked so strikingly dark and _vivid_
against the colorless background of the sky that I quite thought you
were Oriental. Then the next time I saw you, in the lobby of the city
hall--do you remember?--Well, you were with a tall, foreign-looking
woman, a Russian, I imagined; so that convinced me--"
"She is a Pole," I corrected, "but she's the wife of Doctor Gordon, a
great friend of ours."
"--and that convinced me," he went on, as if Ann Lisbeth's nationality
were of no more moment to him than one of the bits of stone which I
had gathered up from fragments scattered over the top of the wall, and
was making white marks upon the solid rock sides with these tiny
splinters, "that you were foreign." Then, in a lower tone, and with
little hesitation in his delightful, drawling voice, he added: "I
called you Rebecca--because I had to call you something."
"How disappointing to find me a plain American girl!"
"When I found this morning that you are an American girl--I deny the
'plain'--I gave a start which I know was noticed by everybody in the
room! It isn't often that I lose my self-possession, but I was
_amazed_ to find you here, in this little town--and my friend,
Clayborne's, niece."
"His wife's cousin," I explained, but again he paid no attention to my
interruption.
"I had haunted the theaters and shopping districts for weeks last
winter--looking for Rebecca," he finished up. "No wonder I was
surprised to find that you are _you_!"
He paused, waiting for me to say something, and, just because it was
the last thing I wished to say, and because I would not, for the
world, have had him suspect such a thing, I stammered out the truth!
"I--I wondered who _you_ were, too," I faltered. "You are so entirely
Anglo-Saxon-looking; and the place is Hebrew! Besides, it was such a
very cold day to visit a cemetery!"
He smiled a little, but politely caught at my bait.
"I had been to see old man Cohen, the sexton. He is interested in
politics."
Then we fell to talking about foreign types of faces, a subject which
he discussed extremely well, having traveled everywhere, as I felt
sure he had when I first laid eyes on him; and from the types of
beauty, we fell to discussing the various countries. He looked
surprised at what he termed the "wistful" note in my voice when I
asked him questions about my favorite lands; and he smiled when I
explained to him that I have never been anywhere.
"So much the better for your enthusiasm," he said with the provoking
air of a person who has been everywhere and done everything--and found
it all a bore. "I judge that you are a very enthusiastic young woman."
"My daily life is punctuated with exclamation points," I admitted, but
I longed to ask him how he knew I was enthusiastic. Still, it has
always seemed in bad taste to me for a girl to try to draw a man into
a long discussion of her personality--a new acquaintance, I mean.
Mammy Lou's slogan, "Make yourself beautiful, and _skase_," can be
applied in devious ways that she wotted not of when she handed it down
to me.
"I suppose that is partly on account of your age?" he said, still
looking at me with his amused smile.
My age! His tone and smile awoke a kind of resentment. He must feel
himself infinitely older and wiser, else he would never assume that
superior air.
"Age has nothing to do with it! It is entirely a matter of
temperament," I contradicted, with a little show of feeling. He smiled
more broadly, and a hot flush of shame spread over my face as I
recalled my dreams of this man. I had thought of him for months, had
imagined him in every great and heroic rôle; had made a hero of him.
Worse still, I fancied that he--perhaps--had thought of me; had stayed
here to-day because he had found me! And here he was smiling down at
me as he made playful remarks about my age!
"Why should you look distressed over a mention of your age?" he
suddenly broke in, so gently that I looked up in surprise and found
his face grave. He had been reading my thoughts--at least in part.
"Now, if you were as old as I--that would be something worth troubling
over."
"You? Yet the papers always speak of your youth. They will call you
the 'boy governor' when you're elected."
He was pleased at my words.
"Or the boy who also ran--perhaps! But age is only a relative
condition. My political friends call me a boy because I am only
thirty-seven years old. Yet, to _you_ that age may seem patriarchal.
Doesn't it?"
I thrilled at the look of earnestness in his eyes. He was the one now
who was concerned over what I thought of his age.
"Rufe is thirty-seven," I answered, trying to make my tone
non-committal.
"And yet you call him Rufe!"
"I've known him always. He's like my brother."
"Well, if you should some day grow to know me 'always,' could
you--even if I am thirty-seven--could you call me Richard?"
I made several violent white marks upon the old rock wall with the bit
of stone in my hand before I attempted to answer this, the most
intimate question ever put to me by a man in my life. Except for
Alfred I had never known any other man well, and had certainly never
cared about sitting with one upon an old stone wall while the glorious
summer afternoon slipped by. All I knew of even incipient love-making
I had read in books, so that I could not tell whether his question
meant much or little. I had told him earlier in the afternoon that I
was booked for a long visit in the city this fall, whereon he had
congratulated himself on his friendly footing with the Claybornes. It
was possible he meant--
"Could you?" he repeated softly.
I stopped making marks and threw away the bits of stone. I had opened
my lips to reply, although I do not know what I had intended saying,
when there was an Indian yell close behind us.
"Whoopee! Here he is again!" came an exultant voice, and, glancing
around, we beheld a freshly bathed and dressed Waterloo, digging his
white linen knees and elbows into the soft black earth, as he raised a
radiant face and announced his second discovery of the "little
tarrypin." Grapefruit followed him at a respectful distance, while
Lares and Penates lingered shyly in the background when they espied
us.
"And here's _Ann_," Waterloo explained, in great triumph, waving his
hand in my direction. "We can make her tote 'im back to the house for
us. She ain't skeered of 'em!"
"Quick! Tell me!" Richard Chalmers insisted, and his seriousness made
me flippant.
"Age has nothing to do with it! It is entirely a matter of
temperament!"
He laughed, quite like a boy, as he sprang down from the wall and
extended both hands to help me. I grasped only one of his hands, and
that very lightly, as I stepped to the ground.
We joined the little band of hunters and thus formed a funny
procession home. Mr. Chalmers and I were in the lead, his right hand
gingerly clutching a most disinterested-looking mud-turtle, while,
with the left, he attempted to help me over the rough places in the
road. Waterloo was close at our heels, while the three little negroes,
struggling with their giggles, tagged along behind.
The task of "toting" a mud-turtle fitted so ill with his immaculate
clothes and intense dignity that I laughed every time I looked up at
him. And he laughed. Perhaps we should have done this, even if nothing
funny had happened, for the late afternoon was so beautiful, and
everything seemed so happy. The birds were all making a cheerful fuss
over going to bed, and the tinklings that lulled the distant folds
seemed to me, for the first time in my life, joyous.
"I shall think of this scene the day you are inaugurated," I said,
still laughing, after the mud-turtle had been deposited in an empty
lard bucket and borne away by Waterloo and his retainers. We had
found ourselves alone for a moment in the shaded, deserted library.
"You'll be there?" he asked, turning toward me as I stood on the
hearth rug and leaned my elbow against the white marble mantelpiece.
As he had carefully wiped from his finger-tips the imaginary dust from
the mud-turtle I had been studying his profile in the mirror. It was
the most perfect face I had ever seen--unless--
My eyes quickly traveled to the little oval portrait of Lord Byron,
the old-time idol of my beauty-loving soul. I used to kiss his picture
good night when I was twelve years old!
I glanced back again to the living presence of beauty equally as
perfect. His gray eyes were upon me.
"You'll be there--if I am ever inaugurated?" he asked again.
"Of course. But you'll never see _me_."
Outside there was a glorious sunset, red and yellow and orange. It was
like a sea of blood and a sea of gold, with a wonderful blending of
the two. The radiance was trying to steal in at the shaded window, and
I started across the room to open the blinds to its flood of glory.
He put out his hand and stopped me.
"If you were there," he said slowly in his deep, rich voice--which is,
in itself, attraction enough for any _one_ man--"if you were there, I
should be far more conscious of _that_ than of the inauguration."
And the quick look which followed these words made a feeling of having
been born again run in little zigzag streaks of joy to my finger-tips.